stay low, stay low, stay low

by apocalyvse

(snowpiercer, 2020) the first days on the train

Bodies, bodies, bodies. Pushing, pulling, hot blood against the cold steel floor. Snow billows through the gaping maw of the carriage door, the floodlights outside flash against the blades of axes as they rise into the air, against the bared teeth of the men that flood through the doors ahead of them.

A screech cuts through the screaming, the sharp crack of ice as the train shudders to life, and then they are moving. Moving, rattling along the rails, slow and slow but picking up speed with every moment. They are moving, they are on the train.

"Push them back!" a voice bellows from behind the line of black armour and bristling weapons (jackboots, he will hear from the other side of that door one day, and he will almost laugh at the irony they coat themselves in). The men advance. A hatchet swings, bone crunches, screams echo, a body hits the ground. The people around him scramble for weapons, for footing, for their courage. Zarah's hand curls in the sleeve of his jacket.

Layton watches the body fall and knows what has to come next.

Layton is the first one to press forwards, raise his fists, and fight.

The hits flash by, second by second. Push, duck, grab, defend, push, step further into the fray, try not to hit the people around you that are fighting for the same thing. Bones cracking, teeth rattling. A hatchet springs into his hands and the blood splatters his face, hot and heavy compared to the sharp cold that stings the air. He blinks against it and swings again, and again and again and again and he's seen dead bodies before but not by his hands and he's never been an advocate for violence but he can't hesitate so he doesn't, just hacks and hacks and lets himself get lost in the mayhem, the chaos that fills their new fifty three foot wide world.

The jackboots fall back to the next carriage. "Close the doors!" someone to Layton's left cries, and he drops the axe, throwing his weight into the doors, into the only wall they have that will protect them. Someone smashes the access panel as the doors slam closed, rips at the wires until there's nothing left but a smoking, sparking hole in the wall.

In the silence, nothing can be heard but the draw of their breaths and the hum of the train carrying them away from Chicago and into a new world.

Layton turns around and leans against the doors. He is exhausted, sick to his stomach and filled with an eerie sense of dread at what might come for them the next time those doors open. His eyes roll across the bodies scattered across the floor. In a minute, in an hour, he will think about what to do with them. They lie like a river between him and the ones who hadn't fought, between him and-

And Zarah, pale and shaking, half-hidden behind two other women, so dangerously close to the front lines that even now he shudders in fear for her life, in fear of the dead men on the floor springing up and slaughtering her where she stands.

Slaughter. Blood coats his hands, drips down his cheek. He slides to the floor. She picks her way through the bodies to him.

"Andre?" she whispers, and it sounds like she's speaking through water, even as she crouches in front of him, as she grips at his hands like they are lifelines. He wants to touch her, to kiss her, to pull her close and be assured that they are real, that they are alive; that this isn't some fever dream while he crouches in the snow outside. But he sees the blood on his hands smeared across her skin and he realises that it is everywhere – on his face, in his hair, soaking into his clothes-

"Are you okay?" she asks, her breath washing warm across his face. "Are you hurt? Did they-?"

"I'm fine," he rasps, his throat like sandpaper. Is he bleeding? He can't tell – did he escape the fight with nothing but bruises, or has he just not noticed he is bleeding out yet? There's a man sitting against a shelf several feet away, moaning quietly as he clutches at his stomach, blood dripping between his fingers. No one moves to help. No one can do anything for him anyway.

He shakes off Zarah's grip and staggers to his feet, filled with the sudden urge to prove to himself that he can still stand. Zarah clutches his arm anyway, like she's afraid he'll fall over – but his legs are steady and his head is clear. There's not even an ache in his limbs, though there will be later (he knows he took a few good hits, he knows he did not take so many lives without receiving something in return).

"We made it," he whispers, to keep the thought of the jackboots from his mind (slaughter, hack and slash and duck and kick their bodies aside and more and more will come). "We're on the train."

"We made it," Zarah echoes, and she tries to lift her mouth into the shape of a smile, she really does. Her face is frozen though, grim, shell-shocked. The look witnesses give him when he asks them about a case, the fear radiating off of them. He never wanted her to look at him like that. He hopes she never will again.

"Until them soldiers come back to finish the job," a bitter voice spits to their right, causing several people to pause. The man looks around like he's surprised at the looks he's receiving. "What? It's pretty obvious they're coming back to kill us."

Silence follows. The train rattles over a bump in the track and throws them all sideways. People stagger and struggle to find their feet again, packed in like sardines between the long, narrow storage shelves.

"Of course they're going to come back." An old man steps from between the crowd, into the small section of clear space between the two crowds. "We all knew the moment we got to the station that they weren't going to let us on board. We all fought the men outside just to make it here."

"We were always going to have to fight," a woman's voice rings out, calm and clear. She stands by the shelves, arms crossed. Her head is ducked low against the weight of all the eyes that turn towards her, but her jaw is set in grim determination. "A ticket for this train cost millions of dollars; it was built to save Wilford's rich friends and the people lucky enough to know them. They were never going to let us just walk on."

The first man shifts where he stands, his boots scuffing against the floor. "How do you know so much?" he asks suspiciously, staring at the woman with narrowed eyes.

She meets his gaze, unblinking, and fixes him with a withering glare. "It's not a coincidence that the train and all of its passengers were in Chicago at the same time everything started to freeze," she points out. "Or that the railroad started construction the same day the CW-7 project was announced, two years ago. Besides, Wilford was known for being a conspiracy theorist."

Layton looks up sharply. "You think he knew what was coming?" he asks.

Her gaze barely softens as her eyes shift to him, soft brown but full of steel, keeping a careful watch on her surroundings. Nothing is safe, they say, as the tension coiled in her shoulders promises a fight. Nothing is guaranteed. "Maybe," she answers, and shrugs. "I think he believed something would go wrong. Why else would he build a train that's completely self-reliant?"

"Wilford's a madman," another woman says, half-hidden behind two other people. "He didn't know anything, he just made it up in his head that something would go wrong and he happened to get it right."

"The point," the first woman says (Josie, she will introduce herself later, when she can trust him, when she has taken his measure – but not yet), "is that Wilford was never going to try to save the best people, or the most likely to survive, or give everyone in the world a fair shot at living through this. He saw the apocalypse coming and he decided that the people who deserved to live were the people who killed enough of the planet to put billions of dollars in his pocket. Normal people like us never stood a chance."

Layton stares at her in surprise. Slowly, a murmur of agreement ripples through the carriage. "That's…horrible," Zarah whispers, barely audible.

"Unfair, is what it is," the man next to them spits. His voice is loud enough to carry to the back of the carriage, despite the noise of the train building speed and the people that fill it. "What are we supposed to do? Die?"

Several people turn to stare at him in various stages of disbelief. "I think that was the plan," Layton says dryly in the lull that follows. Nearby, someone laughs.

"We will have to fight," the old man says slowly, like he's aware of the precedent he is building for this new, blood-soaked community they are soon to build.

"He's right," another agrees. "They're obviously not going to willingly accept us. We'll have to force them to if we want to live."

"So, what? We go out there and fight them, push towards the front of the train?" The man who speaks looks sceptical, but there's a light to his eyes and a lift of his shoulders that suggests the opposite; that he would be more than happy to fight and die for the train. "We're going to fight through a thousand cars? That's-"

"That's insane," Josie finishes for him.

"It's the only option we've got," a new voice speaks up; someone in the back, out of Layton's sight.

Josie scowls. "No it isn't," she argues. All eyes turn to her. "We could stay here, hold this part of the train. Make them bargain with us. There must be something back here they want."

The man next to them scoffs, right to her face. "We're right at the back of the train," he points out. "What if they drop these cars?"

Layton doesn't see who asks, but he hears the deafening silence that follows, the question voiced far too loudly. Only Josie moves, standing ram-rod straight, her face settling in grim determination.

"Then we die," she says, loud enough for everyone to hear her. "We just have to hope the cars are too valuable to lose."

"Or," the man next to them says, insistent. "We can not take that risk, and push forwards before they have the chance to kill us all."

Josie looks murderous, so frustrated that she doesn't even have the words to express it. Around them, a murmur of agreement ripples through the people gathered, a decision made. Josie shakes her head and half-turns away, giving up.

The old man clears his throat, like he's seeking the attention of the room. "We'll need weapons," he says.

"We can take the armour and weapons from these men," the man next to them says, gesturing to the bodies scattered across the floor. "Use their own force against them."

"We should strip them of their clothes too," Josie puts in. "It's cold back here, and it's only going to get colder. We're going to need everything we can get."

The old man looks at her appraisingly. "And the bodies?" he asks. "Where do we put those?"

For the first time since she started talking, she has to stop to think before she speaks, out of ideas. "Throw them outside," Layton suggests before she can get there. He points to the door they had climbed through, that had let in the snow that is slowly melting into puddles on the floor.

"It's too cold out there," someone argues with him. "It's too dangerous to open the doors."

"It will be when the train gets up to speed," he replies. "It's still moving slow, hasn't built up the momentum yet. If we're quick, we'll be fine."

There's a shuffling of feet, a nervous exchange of glances around them. "We'd better move quickly then," Josie says when it becomes clear no one else is going to make a decision. "As many people as we can, come on."

The crowd stirs at her words, not even bothering to argue. Layton steps forwards too, intending to help; a hand on his arm pulls him back just as quickly.

"Andre-" Zarah says, and then stops just as abruptly as she begins, unsure of what to say. He reaches out and squeezes her hand, ignoring the shuffling of many people around them.

"Go to the back of the carriage, Zarah," he tells her softly. "It'll be safe there. I'll find you later."

"Are you sure?" she asks. "Do you have to stay?"

His eyes trail to the bodies on the floor, the axe at his feet – his victims, his mess, his responsibility to clean it up. He hadn't even considered not helping until she'd said it.

He nods.

"Go, Zarah," he insists. "I'll be there soon. I promise."

She eyes him like she doesn't believe him, like she can't possibly understand why the thought of leaving this job unfinished, leaving the guilt to rot in his stomach, is so unbearable, but she goes. He watches until she disappears into the tight-knit crowd, pausing only to shrink back against a row of shelves as another body is dragged up from further down the train.

He tries not to worry about her. He throws himself into the work instead, putting his focus into the repetitive lift and tug of stripping armour from still-warm bodies. It's nasty work – blood soaks the skin and the clothes and the floor, and the smell of it hangs heavy in the already-stale air, metallic and cloying as he breathes it in. He strips three men in quick succession, assisting other people as they struggle with the limp forms and gruesome wounds.

Somewhere to the left, as they rattle over a bump in the track, the door to the outside world hisses and slides open, admitting a blast of cold air that reaches right down into his bones and bites, hard. The door screeches and grinds to a halt before it can even open halfway, wedged closed with a metal bar someone has scavenged from the car. The remaining gap is just wide enough to fit a body through.

Layton grits his teeth against their chattering and the grim reality of what they are doing, and turns to the next body.

Josie is crouched over the man in question, picking at the knots of his boots with stiff fingers. Layton wonders if her hands are shaking from fear or from the cold (the cold, it must be; she doesn't seem like she's ever been afraid of anything).

She looks up as he crouches by the man's head, prying open the icy buckles and zippers on his body armour. "I hope you're right about opening that door," she says in lieu of a greeting, her voice stiff and uncomfortably stilted. Her eyes stray to the door and the men hauling bodies out of it for a moment, and then return to the shoelaces she can't get her cold fingers to unravel.

Layton glances towards the door too, watching as a woman's thin, lifeless form slides out to rest in the snowbanks that line the tracks. "So do I," he replies, an admission that only echoes as dangerous after he has made it. He feels nauseous at the thought that he could still be wrong, that the temperature could drop at any moment and kill them all (they'd seen it already in New York; the flash freeze, the uncounted thousands dead). That these bodies would be strewn along the side of the track forever, the train forced to pass them every year (again and again and again and again).

"You seem to know a lot about Wilford," he says before she can respond, to distract himself as much as her. "And the train."

She shrugs, her eyes fixed firmly on her work this time. "I just follow the news," she explains. "The train interested me when it was first announced." One final tug loosens the lace she's been working on; as Layton lifts the man to strip him of a vest and jacket, she pulls his boot off and turns to the other foot.

"You seem to know a lot about fighting," she adds when she is ready, the words snapping like the teeth of a cornered animal. He looks at her in surprise, and she levels her gaze in return.

"You shut the doors, didn't you?" she presses, pointing at the sealed bridge between train cars, the sparking wires that used to connect an access panel. "I saw you fighting them. You were-"

"I'm a cop," he tells her, before she can elaborate. He doesn't want to think about it, doesn't want to know what he looked like, what he did. "A homicide detective, but we all have to do basic training."

Her face twists, her expression incomprehensible. "A cop," she repeats, and huffs a breath that almost sounds like a laugh. "That's lucky. That's…useful." A tug, and the other boot comes off; she sits back for a moment, staring at the body contemplatively, and then shifts closer to help him with the rest of the man's layers.

"I was a waitress," she tells him bitterly as they lift the man's shirt over his head.

Layton's mouth twists into a frown. "Was?" he repeats slowly.

She pauses long enough to look him dead in the eye, her gaze withering. "Was," she confirms. "Do you think we're all just going to go back to work on Monday?" She shakes her head. "We're stuck on this train for good now. And a train doesn't need waitresses."

Layton pauses. "I guess I never thought about it like that," he admits.

"There's not a lot of thinking going on around here, apparently."

"What do you mean?"

She stops, lifting her head to look pointedly at the men that had argued against her earlier. "They all seem so surprised that they weren't…welcomed onto the train with open arms," she says. Layton stops too, watching the men and women at work clearing the bodies, and further back, poking through the things stored on the shelves..

"They didn't think about what it would cost to illegally board the train," Josie continues as he looks, aware that she has caught his attention. "None of them would have thought to strip the bodies for anything other than the weapons. And their only plan for the future is to try and push forwards through ten miles of train and a hand-picked security force."

Bad plan, his mind echoes, the unspoken message in her words. But still… "The only way we have is forwards," he argues. "There's no food or water back ehre, and it's getting colder. The only way for us to live is to go forwards."

"It just sounds like a faster way to die," she bites back. "How many of these people know how to fight? How many are actually going to, when those soldiers come back prepared to kill us?"

Death, slaughter, blood. Layton can see it in his mind's eye, the jackboots driving through whatever defences they might be able to construct back here, civilians dressed in dead men's armour fleeing at the sight of them, all these people falling at the hands of merciless men. "What do you think we should do instead?" he asks, and there's a glimmer of satisfaction in her eye at the question.

"We should hold the cars we already have," she says. "The train was built to be self-sufficient - every carriage must have something important in it. We figure out what we've got, and we use it to bargain with them."

"And if we have nothing?"

She shrugs and stands, pulling her jackets tighter around her. "There's already a lot of ways that we all die," she replies. "I'm just trying to pick the one that buys us the most time."

ooo

The hours that follow are loud, and then they are quiet.

It starts with the slam of the outer door closing, for good this time, with the hissing and spitting of someone destroying the electrical systems that open those doors. Josie oversees it, insisting that they need to take control of the space they've got before someone takes control of it for them.

The other fighters, the men and women from the front lines, listen to her with varying degrees of contempt. Layton watches from Zarah's side, and only dares raise his voice in support of her once. The look she gives him, tired and angry, sends him back to where he came from. She can fight her own battles.

There is an argument about weapons and armour, and who deserves which pieces. It turns quickly from raised voices to exchanged blows, but no one dies. Layton doesn't claim anything, but Josie creeps down the long rows of shelves later and hands him a knife, steadfastly ignoring the weight of Zarah's eyes on her.

The lights dim to almost nothing as Josie walks away, throwing them into darkness. Layton tucks the knife into his jacket and pulls Zarah closer, shivering against the cold.

"A knife?" she whispers, her breath warm on the soft skin of his neck. "Why?"

He swallows down the guilt, the bodies scattered in the snow behind them. "You know why," he replies, unable to voice the truth of it out loud. He's not Josie, iron willed, already hardened against the inevitability of the end of the world. Not yet.

"I wish we didn't have to fight," Zarah mumbles and wraps her arms around him, careful of his ribs and the skin that blooms purple and black there. His face is bruised too, his jaw stiff and a graze still oozing blood next to his ear. He hurts all over, now that he has stopped moving, and he will only hurt more after the fight that is to come, the push forwards up the train that has caught people's imaginations.

"It's only one more fight," he promises, and the lie slips off his tongue easier than any of the truths he's swallowed so far. "Once we're up-train, we won't need to fight again."

"Maybe we should have just gone home," she says, surprising him. Her voice is distant, half-asleep and barely there as she drifts off into a dream that is somewhere far away from him and the tail end of this cold, dark train.

"We'd be dead if we went home," he reminds her.

"We'd be with our family though," she insists, sighing. "We'd be together. We'd be safe."

Layton doesn't say anything more; she is asleep now anyway, her breath deep and slow, her body warm against his side. He remains awake, listening to the sounds of six hundred people sitting around him, and the rattle of the train surrounding them all.

Sleep won't come, no matter how long he sits or how tightly he shuts his eyes. The dim red of the lights pulses, the train rattles and sways, and he counts the minutes as the hours wear away, like a silent vigil for the dead men that he can't get out of his mind.

Somewhere in the darkness, in the coldest part of the night, a child begins to sob. No one rouses to settle him, not for hours. Laytons its and listens, and lets the guilt of his own inaction settle in his stomach like a stone.

ooo

He can't tell if he wakes from the nightmare or sinks into it.

The different places fade in and out, like the lights flickering on and off above him, like the rattle of the train as it passes over section after section of track (is he on the train? Or is that just a dream too?) Sometimes, he thinks he is at home with Zarah, just sitting in the sunshine. Sometimes, he is standing in the snow, a world of chaos blurring around him. Sometimes he is nowhere at all, but it never seems to bother him that he is lost in the darkness, in a blur of colour and noise that never quite clears.

Sometimes, he opens his eyes and he is still on the train, sandwiched between crowds of people and waiting for a fight that never comes. Waiting to waste away, one of six hundred, left to starve instead of ever being given a chance to fight.

He is cold and stiff, on the train, like he hasn't moved in years. His lips are cracked and his throat is dry and his stomach tears at the rest of his insides in protest every moment he is awake. Zarah sleeps beside him, curled into him - he hasn't spoken to her in days. He doesn't think any words would come out of his mouth if he tried.

She is alive, at least. Still and silent, breath shallow and eyes shut, but alive. That's more than he can say for the others. There's screaming sometimes, or sobbing, the shuffle of half-dead feet trying to drag the body away from the living. The scent of death hangs in the air, the cold rot of corpses sinking into every corner of their narrow hall, unfettered even by the dry chill that creeps in from outside.

And they were scared the jackboots would come in and tear them all to pieces. That they would be let free from the train and left on some deserted piece of track for the frost to take. Layton wants to laugh, but his throat is like sandpaper, and in the next moment he is gone again anyway, the world sliding out of focus.

There are only two things he will remember from these cold days:

The first is Josie, seen only as a shadow falling over him and an arm looped around a little boy. "Layton," she says, and he struggles upright, tries to blink awake. "Layton, I need your help."

Her voice is dry and rasping; the cough that wracks her lungs afterwards is worse. His eyes slide down to the boy, trying to hide himself behind her. "Who's…?" he asks, the rest of the words disappearing before he can spit them out.

"Miles," she answers, squeezing the boy's shoulders. "Layton, if...if anything happens, will you…" She shakes her head. "He's all alone, he-"

He can't understand what she's saying, but her eyes are desperate, pleading with him. Help him, they beg, and so he mumbles an agreement, a half-remembered promise, and she whispers something to the boy, and the boy stares at him with eyes that are too wide and too innocent, and he can't remember what happens after that. Maybe she stays, but he's fairly sure she leaves and doesn't make it back again.

The second thing he remembers he is sure is a dream, at first, a fantasy driven by his empty stomach and the fog that fills his head. For a minute, somewhere in the red glow of the train's night, he thinks he smells smoke, and the sharp sear of meat slowly roasting.

Five days pass, but he'll never know that exact figure.

Nor will he ever know that it is a Wednesday morning when the jackboots pry the doors open to find out what remains of them, or that, as the soldiers cover their noses and curse at the results of their own actions, uptrain the first rumour of people hiding in the tail is spreading through third class.

Layton barely notices them as they spread out and pick their way through the crowd, ghosts in a living graveyard. He watches their silhouettes through half-closed eyes until one crouches in front of him and presses two warm fingers to the cold skin of his neck, searching for a pulse. He flinches away and the woman taps his cheek sharply with the flat of her palm until he opens his eyes and glares at her.

His vision remains blurred, but he can make out some of her features; black clothes, a tight bun, and the sort of frown that looks like it's permanently etched into her face. "Alive!" she calls to the train at large, her voice ringing in his ears long after it's gone, and turns to Zarah, the next person in the line. Don't touch her, he thinks, but the words don't come out of his mouth. He can't even pick up his head to watch; just fixes his eyes on the woman and waits until she declares Zarah alive as well.

He almost passes out again before the verdict is passed.

Everything's a blur. The jackboots shift up and down their narrow alleys like ghosts. A cup of water is shoved into his hand - every now and then, someone lifts it to his lips, their hand warm against his frozen fingers, and then pulls it away again when he's barely taken enough to fill his mouth. THey mutter angrily to each other over his head, but he can't make out the words they spit. He can't do anything; can't even find Zarah's hand to hold, can't even wrap his fingers around the cup properly. He should be dead.

The hours drag by, bloodstained and stinking of rod and bile and the ashy aftertaste of smoke from a fire just recently put out. The cup refills itself between blinks of his eyes, a thick bar of something black and gelatinous appears in his lap. He can't remember who leaves it there. It smells disgusting and tastes even worse, but he barely notices, that first time eating one. He eats as much as he can, bite after bite, throws up, and eats again, desperate to feel anything but this gnawing hunger. Desperate to live.

In the morning, they start taking people away.

Layton doesn't know what's going on, at first. There's a scuffle at the front, a roar of unintelligible noise in protest, a scream as a woman is dragged bodily from the crowd. One car back, still slumped on the floor, Layton can't see what happens. He can't stand up, can't spot Josie in the crowd, the person out of the dozens he's met so far that seems to be the quickest at putting the facts together. They're surrounded by jackboots anyway, the majority of their number too weak to fight - all he can do is sit and wait for whatever is coming.

Zarah's hand curls tightly around his. "This is hell," she mutters by his ear, her voice hoarse and bitter. He turns to look at her, and finds nothing but cold fury hidden in her eyes and a savage twist to her lips. "They saved us, and now they want to...want to kill us?"

"They're not going to kill us," Layton promises, and he wishes he could make himself believe it. "They wouldn't have wasted the water just to kill us anyway."

They have limited resources, he feels like he can hear Josie whispering from the back of the train, the little boy in her arms. They can't afford to waste anything.

"What are they doing then?" Zarah asks, echoing every murmured conversation around them.

Layton looks towards the front, at the people being removed one by one. A cold shiver runs down his back. "I don't know," he says, and ducks his head away from a glaring jackboot as she walks by.

From somewhere near the front, a speaker squeals, loud enough that Layton flinches and Zarah tries to cover her ears. They turn towards the noise; a woman stands there now, her shiny set of heels planted firmly on a box so that she can be seen by the whole crowd. She's scowling at someone as she readjusts the thick fur coat that's hung about her shoulders, her lip curled in disgust.

"Tail!" she says, drawing even more eyes, her amplified voice reaching even the very end of the train. "By the mercy of Mr Wilford, the creator of this great train, you have been allowed to live."

She pauses, as if expecting some kind of applause, but none comes; only stunned silence, a shared sort of disbelief between them all. She clears her throat. "Now, let me make some things clear.

"As unticketed passengers, you are afforded no rights. You are not permitted to leave the tail except when summoned by Mr Wilford. You get the rations we provide you, you are afforded the power that the rest of the train doesn't use, and in return for Mr Wilford's kindness, you will provide him with labour when required."

There's an uproar. "This is unfair!" a voice rises above the crowd, somewhere far away. A man, loud and almost gasping with fury at this perceived slight. "We can't live like this! We just want to live!"

"There will be no arguing!" the woman shouts over the top of all the noise. "No protesting, no fighting and no more attempts to escape uptrain. If you are so desperate to live, then you will do it here; otherwise, I am sure Mr Grey and his men will be happy to deliver you to agriculture as fertiliser. Are we clear?"

The train falls silent. "Good," the woman says and smiles, a tight twist of her lips that does nothing to hide her displeasure at being here. "I'm glad that we could come to a reasonable resolution."

"Resolution?" Zarah whispers. "All she did was threaten to kill us."

"They're keeping us alive," Layton mutters in response, still watching the woman as she steps down off the box. "We can figure the rest out later."

"Yeah, keeping us alive to do their dirty work," a stranger snaps, sitting opposite him in the narrow walkway. "Allowed to live. By the mercy of Mr Wilford, we've been allowed to become slaves, more like."

"Better than being dead in the ice," Layton says, and then Zarah tugs on his sleeve, shaking her head before he can get into an argument.

"Is it?" he can hear someone questioning behind him anyway. "Is it?"

"They're taking for people," Zarah says instead, drawing his attention back to the doors. A small group of people are filing through one by one, half dead and stumbling on weak and unsteady legs.

"Maybe they're killing us after all," the woman across from them suggests, persistent even when she's being ignored. "One by one, where we can't see them doing it."

"That makes no sense," Layton replies despite himself, and fixes her with a withering look. "They gave us food and water; why wastes all of that just to kill us?"

"Maybe it's a trick," Zarah mumbles, and recoils when he shoots her a look, her nose scrunched up in disgust.

"It makes no sense for them to kill us now," he insists, feeling more and more like he's talking to a brick wall.

"What are they doing, then?" the woman opposite them asks and glares, like a challenge.

"They're cataloguing us," a man says and squeezes between two people to slide closer. Layton recognises him from the first day on the train - Jacob, he'd introduced himself then, soaked in blood and bone-weary, and then he'd turned himself to the bodies waiting to be tossed out into the snow.

"How do you know that?" Layton asks before the woman can put an unsavoury word in between them.

Jacob twists and points behind him, to a child in a woman's arms, barely visible from where they are sitting. "She's good at hiding in a crowd," he explains. "Went up to the front looking for her brother. They're just looking for information - names, ages, jobs, stuff like that." He glances towards the front of the car, eyeing the jackboots with an unreadable expression. "They said they wanted us to work. I guess they've got a few positions to fill since we thinned out the herd."

Layton's eyes turn towards the jackboots too, his mind turning. Jacob reaches a conclusion at the same time he does, adding, "Lucky day for anyone who used to work for the police or something like that."

Zarah's hand wraps around Layton's wrist, her grip so tight it hurts. He meets her eyes silently - I won't leave you, his gaze promises, but he can't risk saying it out loud. HE has to be careful now, that no one knows. That no one will find out.

Josie knows.

He twists his arm carefully from Zarah's grip and winds their fingers together instead, squeezing her hand. Josie would be smart enough not to tell them where to find more trained bodies for their security force, surely. She'd figured out everything else by now - every one of her plans had been right, even if no one had followed them. Surely she would see now, that giving anyone away to the jackboots would only hurt them.

There's no way to be sure though, no way to send a message to her now. He is still dizzy and weak, and all-too-close to the eyes of the jackboots. Even if he asks Jacob to risk sending the child, he has no idea where Josie is, if she's behind them or already been taken out of sight, too far to reach.

There's nothing, then, that he can do, except wait and pray; if there could even be a god in this frozen hell to pray to.

ooo

The bright lights set his head pounding to the rhythm of his heart almost the very moment he steps through the open doorway. He squeezes his eyes shut and sways uncertainly on his feet, one hand raised in defence against them. Someone shoves him from behind, unkind and uncaring, and he stumbles two steps before forcing his eyes open again, unwilling to risk falling on his face when surrounded by these men he doesn't trust.

Somewhere behind him, Zarah makes a noise in protest - there's a growl from someone else, twice as loud, and her voice peters out as fast as it had sounded. Layton tries to stop and look back to see if she is okay, but he is all but blind, his eyes stinging under the bright lights, and before he can even turn, he is shoved forwards again, an impatient hand planted square between his shoulders.

He stumbles and staggers across the room to a metal chair, a sweet relief to muscles that are stiff from sleeping on the floor for days and days. He's never felt so weak in his life, dropping half-dead into that cold and unforgiving chair. The walk across one section of one carriage has rendered him jelly-legged and shaking from exertion, barely able to sit up straight, or to squint at the blurred form of the woman in the fur coat, sitting behind a desk in front of him.

"Name," she demands, in a voice that belies her boredom. If she looks up, the movement is imperceptible to his watering eyes.

"Andre Layton," he rasps, in a voice like sandpaper. The man seated next to her scratches his name down on a piece of paper, the sound of the pen moving across the paper strangely aggravating. Layton wonders how much paper is left in the world, and if they could really afford to waste it like this.

Now you're thinking like Josie. The thought didn't fill him with disgust, or dread. And maybe someone would have to start thinking like Josie, if she was numbered among the dead.

"Age," the woman says, more of a statement than a question.

"Thirty one."

"Profession?"

"Unemployed."

He answers too fast, lets the lie slip with his heart hammering along like a jackrabbit's and not a whisper of breath in his lungs. He knows immediately, from the way she stops and stares at him, her eyes piercing and her mouth turned downwards, that she doesn't believe him for a second.

"Really?" she asks, catty, judgemental. "Thirty one years old, and you've never had a job?"

He forces himself to breathe, to let his shoulders slump loosely, and shrugs. "Only odd jobs. Manual labour, helping out friends, whatever's paying."

Her lips twist as she considers it, her eyes raking him for evidence of his lie. "What about schooling?" she presses. "College credits, formal training, licensed skills?"

He forces his best approximation of a smile onto his face. "High school dropout," he tells her.

There's a moment of silence, a slow passing of seconds in which he could cringe under the weight of her scrutiny, and then she sighs and nods to the man beside her. The pen scratches against the paper again.

"I hope for your sake, Mr Layton, you are telling me the truth," she says, her eyes flicking down to the paper to recall his name. "Lying will cost you dearly in the future."

"I've got no reason to lie," he claims (lie, it is all a lie, and the longer he sits in this cold, hard chair, the higher they stack up against him).

"Very well," the woman says, though it is obvious from the look in her eyes and the tension held in her shoulders that she doesn't believe him. "You are free to go."

It is by sheer willpower that he stands on his own two feet, that he turns and walks away without falling. He can't find Zarah in the line, or at the desks lined up across the length of the train car. He doesn't get time to look; the moment that he slows and tries to look back, there is always a jackboot there waiting to drive him forwards, back towards their prison.

Josie's child is waiting for him when he returns to the spot he and Zarah have occupied since they got here (home now, he guesses, or as close to home as he could claim to have now). "Miles," he sighs, and lets himself down ungracefully to sit next to the boy, half-coaxing him out of his hiding place squeezed between two shelves.

The boy seems surprised that he knows his name. "Where's your mum?" Layton asks, when it becomes clear the boy - shy and skittish even when he has come here of his own volition - is going to remain silent.

"M-mum?" Miles echoes, something akin to fear flashing through his eyes.

"Josie," Layton prompts. "Your mum. Where is she? What are you doing here?"

"Josie's not...mum," the boy informs him, and relaxes just a fraction, creeping an inch further out into the open.

"Where is she?" Layton asks again. His eyes almost drift closed at the effort of asking so many times.

Miles bites his lip, and then points to the back of the train. "She's sick," he says.

Layton jerks awake again. "Sick?" he questions. Miles nods. "What kind of sick?"

"I don't know," Miles admits, his voice shaking and his eyes starting to water. "She said you'd help…"

Layton remembers, vaguely, making a promise along those lines sometime in the past. His eyes turn up and out, towards the back of the train, and he groans inwardly at the thought of having to walk another car down when just half a carriage has exhausted him.

"Are you coming?" Miles asks hurriedly, hovering crouched on his toes like he's caught between staying and going.

Layton waves him away. "In a minute," he assures him. "Just give me a minute."

"No!" The boy grabs his arm, desperate, tears sparkling at the corners of his eyes. "Come, please...please, please…"

Layton hesitates, his eyes drifting towards the front of the car. Zarh isn't' back yet, could run into trouble with the jackboots, could disappear before he even knows what's going on...and he is tired, so tired, he needs to rest…

But the boy looks at him with wide eyes, innocent and helpless, and he remembers Josie saying, he's all alone, and he can't just ignore him…

"Okay," he relents, shaking the exhaustion from his limbs, the aches and the bruises and the weight of the things that have happened in the past week. "Okay, I'll come. I'm coming."

The boy lets go of him so that he can haul himself to his feet. "This way," he says when he thinks Layton is ready, eyes wide and voice trembling, and darts off through the crowd, always several steps ahead (this will be a common theme in his life now, watching Miles' coattails disappear ahead of him. He is only lucky now that most people are sitting down, and it is easy to spot the boy).

"Andre?" a voice says behind him before he can take more than two steps; Zarah, finally, safe, free from the clutches of rich men and their ideals about humanity. He stops short, whips around to meet her as she struggles back through the packed walkway.

"Where are you going?" she asks, craning her neck to see past him and down the train.

"Miles needs help," he explains, pointing to the boy, who is waiting impatiently just within sight, chewing nervously at his lip. "I'll be back soon."

She looks down at the boy, and then back at him, conflicted, just as he had been. "Okay," she says eventually, her voice as tired as he is. "Just...don't leave me-"

"Never," he promises, and presses a kiss to her forehead. "Stay here and rest. I'll be back soon."

She nods and sinks to the ground, and he follows the boy, with just a single glance backwards to ensure she is alright.

Josie is at the very end of the train, just like Miles had said, close enough to the end that he can almost touch the back wall. She's laid out on one of the shelves, like a narrow bunk, a jacket bundled beneath her head for a pillow. Miles shakes her shoulder when he reaches her, speaking softly into her ear, but she doesn't stir, just sleeps on like the dead, the rise and fall of her chest shallow and rapid.

"Help her," Miles whispers and tugs at his sleeve, his fingers trembling.

"She has a fever." It's the old man that speaks, seated at the edge of the shelf next door. Layton's surprised to see him; he's seen the bodies of much younger people who weren't quite able to stand the days deprived of food or water, and the fighting that had come before.

"Are you a doctor?" he asks, turning his eyes back to Josie. He presses a hand to her forehead; doctor or not, the old man isn't wrong. She's burning up.

"No," the old man admits. "Just a musician. My name's Ivan."

"Layton," he replies. They shake hands. It seems like an odd gestures, for this foreign world.

"She drank too much of the water, too quickly," Ivan continues. "And the food. She was already sick; this just made it worse."

"Help," Miles insists in a whisper.

Layton glances down at him with heavy eyes. "I'm not a doctor, kid," he tells him, as gently as he can, and winces when the tears well up again.

"I told you, Miles," Ivan adds, in a voice suited to a scolding teacher. "There's nothing to be done. We just have to wait for her to get better."

Miles sniffles, and buries his face unhappily in Layton's coat. "She will get better," Ivan says to Layton instead, sighing. "I think. It will just take time, and we have plenty of that."

Layton nods, and pries the boy from his jacket. "You hear that, Miles?" he says, crouching down to get a better look at him. "You just have to wait. She'll be okay."

The boy sniffs again, the tears falling whether he wills it or not. "Will you s-stay?" he asks between sniffles, staring up at him.

"Stay here?" The boy nods. Layton looks around; it is no worse here than where he already was, and these are all the people he knows on the train. Safety was in numbers, after all.

It doesn't take much convincing. "Okay," he agrees. "But we have to bring Zarah too."

"Okay," Miles agrees, and Layton stands. To his surprise, the boy takes his hand as he sets off, stepping with him through the crowd of nameless people.

"How long will we be on the train?" Miles asks as they walk, so young and so innocent that Layton reels at the sound of his voice. "I want to see my dad."

Layton doesn't ask where his dad is. He doesn't need to - there's no need to press the boy for details when he already knows the answer will be outside (that one day, the boy will realise the answer is dead). "I don't know, Miles," he says instead, soft and deliberately vague.

There's silence, and then Miles asks. "Do you think it will be for always?"

Layton doesn't know how to answer, or how to look the boy in the eye when anything he says is going to be a lie. So he says nothing, and he does nothing, and Miles falls silent for good, and the question hangs in the air around them for days and days and days.

Around them, the train rattles on, the lights of Chicago and everything they have ever known dying behind them.