"Okay, mom," she answered, without turning around, without lifting her forehead from where it had been pressed against the window for the past several hours watching the outside terrain roll by.
At first, she had been awed by the sight of grass - the first grass she had seen in her whole life - but after the first hour realized that she hadn't seen a single sign of the old United States during the whole trip. Growing up in the Texan Blight Zone, she had spent many a day wandering the Great Blight, which had so many old burnt-out buildings, cars, tanks, and fighter jet wreckage speckled through it, her father had once likened the ruins to the chips in a massive chocolate chip cookie. (Her father always got sad and refused to answer whenever Quinn asked what, exactly, a cookie was).
After thinking about it for a few minutes, Quinn decided that maybe all the wreckage that had cluttered the landscape had been cleared away for the benefits of immigrants coming in from the Great Blight, to give them the impression of good-lookingness. It was...masked rover or something, one of the words that Daria had tried to teach her in the days of her carefree youth. Before Daria...
Quinn suddenly bit down on the inside of her lip, hard enough to ward off the tears she could feel coming. She ruefully ran her tongue along the torn flesh, the taste of copper reminding her yet again that she could never cry again, or else.
For the first time since leaving Texas, buildings came into sight, and - wonder of wonders - they all looked intact. Some of them even reminded Quinn of old pictures from before she or Daria (another bite to the lip) had been born. Soon, the train's speed noticeably slowed, until finally they pulled into the station and stopped altogether.
Before Helen could prompt her, Quinn stood up and brushed past her mother to the aisle. "Quinn, wait for the signal!" her mother protested, but none of the other passengers seemed interested in waiting, so Helen shrugged and stood up. Quinn grabbed her bags from the overhead compartment, while Helen placed a gentle hand on her husband's shoulder. "Jakey, it's time to get off the train now," she told him.
"Oh, is it?" he answered, mellow. "I suppose we should get off, then." Quinn quickly glanced into his eyes - his unfocused, almost unseeing eyes - and just as quickly snapped her gaze anywhere else.
The train car slowly emptied, and the first thing Quinn saw were the cameras. She could see five, which meant from experience that there were probably another eight (or perhaps eighty) that she wasn't seeing.
The second thing she saw was the fifty-foot-tall video display mounted high up on the wall of the station. On it was the image of Timothy O'Neill, First Citizen of the Reconstituted States of America. "Welcome!" his image greeted. "Welcome...to the Lawndale Residential District. It's...pleasant here." He gave an affable smile.