Steph is squinting, at her, at the room, at the clock.

"Chloe, does that say 5?"

"Sorry, Steph. Gotta make them count. You have a map?"

"A map? On... my phone… Don't you?"

"Yeah, but I can't see shit on this little ass screen."

I'll trade your father for Rachel.

I need her to be a star.

My star.

The messages flash on the little ass screen in question, before winking out.

"What are you trying to see?" Steph asks.

"Uh... Oh yeah," she says, shaking her head to snap out of it. "So I want to look at this railroad going north, to see if I can see any sort of… thing along the track."

"A what?"

"I don't know. A creepy train cemetery, an abandoned theme park, a secret government lab. Something."

"Why?"

"I had this dream about her. And in the dream I heard the train."

"Oh," Steph says, after realizing there was not going to be more of it. "You heard the train. In the dream."

"Yeah! At first, I thought it was a whale."

Steph nods encouragingly, but her eyebrows are a little high, and she is glancing at the clock.

"But... are you sure you didn't just hear it while sleeping from outside the dream?"

"Yeah. Because outside the dream, in the real world, I heard it like half an hour later, when the train got here. That when I realized that it wasn't a whale. So I'm thinking maybe Rachel is north of here, somewhere near the tracks."

At this point Steph's face is doing that thing Joyce was doing earlier at the diner.

"Half an hour by train?" she says. "That could be pretty far…"

"Nah. This train here, it crawls. It probably took Rachel and I half an hour or more to get to the Overlook from here…"

"OK, but also, Chloe, the train horn? You don't have to be near the tracks to hear it. You can be miles away."

"Damn, Steph. What's with the Debbie Downer shit? There was a reason that horn was in my dream, OK? And then I see and hear that same goddamn train in the real world within the hour, right? I mean, maybe? Please say yes?"

"You're right. Sorry. I'm just… not awake yet. Give me a second."

Steph spends the temporal currency splashing water on her face and reemerges a bit more alert and with a towel, though only slightly less skeptical. The sound of water reminds Chloe that she needs a shower, but a flashback of one will have to do for now.

Pirate towel.

"We can go get a big ass map at the gas station," she says.

"That's not going to show creepy buildings…" Steph replies, thinking. Without the beanie she looks younger. "What we need is satellite images. We can try Rachel's laptop. That's got a decent screen and you can zoom in."

"Hell yes."

Steph respectfully lets Chloe do the honors. Chloe punches in the password after a pause.

Welcome, Rachel Amber.

"Excitement ages quickly, and I fear, if we set out in search of new...uh, fun, you'll tire of me and then I'll be alone."

She hears the staff hitting the boards, the sound echoing through the courtyard full of people holding their breaths.

She opens Maps and dives in, but it becomes obvious pretty quickly that satellites won't do them much good.

The railroad is easy to see while it's in Arcadia Bay, and it runs along the Coastal Highway for a short time after leaving town, but then it abandons the coast and starts following the Nehalem river and zigzagging among the hills, where it's pretty heavily obscured by trees, which also presumably obscure any suspicious structures near the tracks, should they exist. You can see the burned-down mill right before the rails cross the river, but everything else is just woods. Eventually, the track comes into the clear at the Overlook Park, only to disappears almost immediately again beyond Culmination.

She pushes the computer away.

"Shit. You can't see anything on this, either. I feel like we should get down there in person."

"Down where, though?"

"The train tracks. It's just a couple of hours' hike out to the Overlook. Nah, that might be too slow. Hey! We can hop the train."

Steph is so focused on the laptop suddenly, that Chloe begins to suspect she sounds crazy.

"Listen, Steph," she says quickly. "Let's do this. You go to the diner and get breakfast. I'll hop the next train or just hike along the tracks for a bit, then you take my car and meet me at the Overlook…"

"Shitballs. Ok, " Chloe Price says. "Here's the plan. I go to the diner and distract Frank by telling him I got his money, but he needs to come with me. Then you come in and..."

"Chloe, check this out."

"Hmm?"

Steph is in the "Recently Visited" section of "Your Places."

Rachel's recently visited places include Kathmandu, Tokyo, Ushuaia, and 3 Oregon entries: Mt. Hood, Seaside, and Hamlet.

"Wish you were here. Love, Rach." A postcard from Seaside, Oregon, dated August 24, 2011.

Max finds that in a drawer in Chloe's room, but she knows she does not own a postcard like that in real life. So why was it there? Why Seaside? Why that date? What is her mind trying to tell her?

It probably means fuck all, something she used to know and forgot, but she does remember a Mt. Hood camping trip she and Rachel went on the year before. Actually summited the fucker. Slept in a tent for two days. It makes her smile.

"What?" Steph asks, making her blush.

"Nah, just… I know these two, but I never heard of Hamlet. Except the one by old Willie."

"Huh? Oh, Shakespeare? Well, that would suit Rachel. Let's see… Hamlet, Oregon… Founded blah, blah… Post office closed, moved to Seaside… Oh, abandoned entirely sometime in the late 70's, several years after the land was given back to the Salishan and the logging ceased."

"Creepy abandoned town Rachel was mapping? How far is it?"

"Maybe 20 miles? Give or take? I don't see any roads to it on this map, though."

"Shit, there's gotta be a road."

"There may have been one before…"

"Let me see that… Try the directions. What the fuck? It tells you to park at Culmination and walk from there. Like 7 miles. That's insane."

"Maybe there's a dirt road or something, that's not on the map."

"The railroad passes pretty close to it, too, see?"

"OK, so do you think this Hamlet is worth checking out? Not Seaside or Mt. Hood?"

"Ugh, Steph, you're asking me like I have any idea what I'm doing here. Mostly what's happening right now is: the homeless lady is still missing, the city hall is still closed, and all we got in the way of clues is my crazy dream and this. Of the three, this Hamlet is the closest and the weirdest, so I say we start there... Right after I check out the rails. But if I'm honest, I'm starting to feel like I'm doing it wrong. We're running all over the place chasing our tails, but 48 hours later we're closer to busting the Prescott drug cartel than finding Rachel. If this was a movie, we would have a crystal lead by now. This would be a scene of you strapping grenades onto a skin-tight outfit."

"You're not doing it wrong, Chloe. You're doing the best you can. And we'll keep checking your crazy leads until we find her."

"Thanks, Steph."

"And for the record, grenades are for apes. My scene would be me sitting in the captain's chair, dramatic music playing and a planet swinging into view. Fleet for life!"

"I want a grenade..."

"So... are we going to walk up the tracks?"

"Just me. You take the truck, get breakfast, then drive up to Culmination and look for that dirt road. I'll meet you there."

"You need food too, Chloe."

"Just grab something for me to go. I'll eat later."

"Splitting up doesn't sound like a good idea to me. Or walking through the woods for two hours by yourself. We can eat, drive to Culmination, park, and then explore both ways from there."

"One: that'll take too much time. Two: these woods are mine. Nothing's gonna happen to me in these woods. Three: I was at the diner earlier, and I'd rather gouge my left eye with a rusty fork than talk to mom again so quickly."

"We can go somewhere else to eat."

"Yeah, but there's still one and two!"

It's reluctantly agreed on in the end, on the condition that the communication lines remain open at all times, and the understanding that in the event of Chloe not picking up her phone for any reason, Steph is going straight to the sheriff.

Leaving Steph to shower and pack for her trip, Chloe crosses the parking lot and the street, heading north.

The sun is just over the hills. The birds are chirping. The squirrels are chittering. The rails are shining, stretching into the distance. It's warm and idyllic as fuck.

She remembers walking these tracks with Rachel, and with Max, and alone. She remembers riding the train with Rachel and being run over by the same train multiple times, as Max tried to save her, though the memory of her death is fuzzy every time, as if the universe stops half an instance before she is splattered all over the cowcatcher.

How the hell did she even get stuck in the points like that? Couldn't she like pull her foot out of the boot at least? And how about those trains passing by the junkyard literally every two minutes, like it's the fucking Union Station instead of the butt-end of the world. Eh, whatever. Crazy dream. What did it mean, though? Probably a clue not to fuck around on the tracks. But then another dream sends her a fucking train horn. Which, I guess, could actually mean the same thing…

"Ugh. Just fuck off," she says out loud.

The points in question show up pretty soon. The line from the north splits into two branches, one continuing along the coast and the other peeling off inland. The water tower is on one side, a pile of old railroad ties on the other.

She sees Max messing with the switch box, breaking into the shack, pushing the huge cable reel, all of which are in their right places, and rewinding, rewinding, rewinding.

Also and again, it's the same spot she and Rachel boarded the train that day.

Life needs a little mystery, Chloe. And… Don't be surprised if one day, I'm just outta here…

Then it'll be the junkyard and the wooded hills, the train track snaking back and forth along the road, sometimes crossing it, sometimes veering off into the deeper woods, until it hits the mill and the bridge over the river, and starts snaking along the river instead, to Overlook park and Culmination station and deeper inland from there, towards Portland or Seattle, or both. Who the fuck knows.

When she gets to it, the junkyard looks strangely alien, quiet, its American rust wet with the morning dew.

Did something change?

Is it hiding something?

She feels an urge to sift through it, piece by discarded piece, maybe dig again, but she pushes it away.

She gets up on the rail instead and outstretches her arms to the sides for balance. It's fun, but it'll take all day walking like that. And she doesn't have all day. Walking to Overlook might have been a bad idea already. Well, fuck, nobody's sharing any good ones. Should she wait, like the cops? No. Rachel is waiting for her somewhere. And this fucking railroad is some sort of clue.

"I don't know why, but train tracks always make me feel good," Chloe Price says about a minute before getting her foot caught in the points. Some kind of lesson there. A metaphor, probably.

Thank you, o wise motherfucking spirits, for your cryptic clues and visions, but if you by any chance decide to just tell me in plain English where she is, I'll sacrifice a goat to your honor. Or a deer.

It's quiet, except for her boots crunching the gravel, and her thoughts. By the time she hits the next set of points and the half-rotten sign "Tumnus Lumber", the sun is high in the sky, and her thoughts are louder than the gravel. One of those shouts to go and check the abandoned mill again, but she's wasted too much time on this Breaking Bad nonsense already. If it turns out in the end that Nathan had Rachel all along, she'll just murder everybody. For now, though, she'll leave his business alone.

Steph calls and confirms that the mill should be left alone for now. She's at the Whales, and Joyce was asking about their adventures and advising against them.

Whatever.

The bridge is as rusted as anything she's ever seen. Nehalem flows silently and almost imperceptibly under it, with only occasional swirls on the surface betraying movement. The swirls remind her of Max's rewind and of the Cosmic Snail from the comics they used to draw. It also reminds her of that night, the night of her first Firewalk show, when she stood on the tracks, watching the train cross this bridge, smoking, pondering if she should keep standing there until it hits her, or go watch the concert first.

Funny how things can change.

Funny how they can come back around.

After the bridge, the track swings right and starts following the riverbank. Fire never got here, so the woods on the slope to her left are deep, dark, and dense. The forest rustles and creaks and snaps as she walks by, as if the trees know that it was her lighter that set their brothers on the other bank ablaze three years ago. There are streams every hundred yards, and rock outcroppings. The first structure she sees is about two miles later. It's another abandoned mill, sitting on the bank and protruding into the river. It must have been used to process driftwood that was sent from logging grounds upstream. There is another set of points here, but not even a switchbox for it. The manual lever has been removed, too, to make sure no idiot kid fucks with it and sends a train careening into the drink.

By now it's getting hot, and she still hasn't see a train since that first one at the crack of dawn. Her legs are getting heavy. Her jeans are sticking to them. She checks what's left of the building. It seems like it's been abandoned for a hundred years at least. One wall is missing, and through the opening she can see the river and the other bridge in the distance, the one on the border of the Overlook park. She can hear the water sloshing around under the rotted floor boards. No secret bunkers here. Nothing here but hazard. As if to agree, the building creaks and leans towards the water. She retreats the fuck out of there.

Whose brilliant idea was it to hike all the way to fucking Culmination again? What the actual fuck?

Returning to the tracks, she spots another building across the way. It looks like an actual house. One of those log cabins settlers built before they realized a house could have more than one room in it. The guy who ran the mill probably used to live there, with his wife and 11 children. Hamish, or Heathcliff, or both. The hut looks very abandoned, just like the mill, and maybe it's the lighting, but for some odd reason, sitting here, tucked between the wooded hillside and a boggy swath of riverside woods, it gives her the heebie-jeebies. It must be the drunken cut of its windows, which makes the hut seem slanted in a weird way, like that Oregon Vortex place down in Gold Hill. Her dad took her down there once, back when she still liked science. Took an entire weekend to get down there and back again, and the place wasn't even that fun. At least Max was there. The best part of the whole trip was her and Max drinking sodas and flipping TV channels all night, while William snored on the other bed.

No Max here now, and the house looks like nothing worth seeing. Like she should really push on towards Culmination and Steph and Hamlet, the prince of the fucking Danes. Like something she really doesn't want to go and examine from up close. So of course, after several groans and curses she's dragging her ass towards it through an overgrown vegetable garden. It's all tall weeds and burdock, until she steps on a empty beer can. The sound of it cracks through the silence, making all the other garbage perk up out of the landscape like meerkats. Crushed pack of smokes. Empty bag of chips. Candy wrappers. Cans of beans. Plastic. In other words signs of recent human habitation. A very slobby human habitation, as in, "not Rachel," unless it was a very angry Rachel. But then this place would have been on fire.

Rachel screams at the white oak as it goes up in flames.

Maybe it's because she hasn't had a flashback in like an hour, or maybe it's because the place is spooky as fuck, but the feeling of a scream in the air lingers, raising the hairs on her neck and sending her mind racing. Was there a scream here, in the real life, too, just now?

"R-Rachel?"

She gets nothing but a gust of wind in response, which hits her from behind and rushes through the hut's gaping, doorless doorway and out the back window, dying in the twisted trees beyond. Inside there's nothing to see except more garbage, which - she realizes - looks almost like the mess she and Rachel used to commonly leave in the junkshack, except here the garbage and the shack both seem somehow dirtier, meaner. There's no homely feeling to it. No attempt to decorate or clean the place up at all.

A thought comes that maybe an escaped fugitive, or a serial killer made the hut his secret lair, and she checks her pocket for the gun, in case he's still around. Though there's nothing overtly creepy inside: no candled altar, blood or human bones. Just a low wooden table that may have doubled as a bed once, and garbage. Maybe DB Cooper stayed here with the suitcase full of money after he jumped out of that plane. Maybe he buried some of that cash in the yard…

That's when she sees, through the back window, the tent.

Frozen, she looks at it for about half a day.

It's neon green and one half of it is hanging limply off its metal ribs. It's sitting next to a ruined chicken coop, in a small area ringed with remnants of a wooden fence. There's more trash on the ground around it. There's no movement or sound.

She takes the gun out and goes and circles the hut, stepping slowly and trying to avoid any more beer cans, until she's standing in front of it. The tent is empty. She can tell, even though it's zipped up, because one of the side walls is split down the middle and she can see inside through the flaps. There's mud and water and an old sleeping bag, not unlike the one she has in back of the truck. She squats down to get a closer look, but there's nothing else inside. What's weird though, is that the hole in the wall looks like it's been cut with a knife. Maybe the zipper got stuck? Somehow, she's satisfied with the thought and does not try it. Instead, she walks around the tent, then around the backyard, looking for footprints. There aren't any. She goes towards the woods and looks for signs on the hillside and the bog, but there's nothing there either, not even garbage.

She looks for more to see or do there, even though the place is so fucking creepy, it makes her skin crawl, but really, there's nothing. Nothing. Just fucking go, Price.

Looking back over her shoulder every two seconds, she stomps towards the train tracks. Getting on one rail to make herself feel better - because they always do! - she resumes her hike towards Overlook and Culmination. The rail does work, the bastard. The shivering eases up and her lungs open, asking for a smoke. About twenty yards on, there's another set of points where the track from the mill connects back to the main one. Here too, there is no manual lever, but there is, weirdly, a switch box, though it's not a standing one with a little door, but just a squat steel box mounted next to the track.

She considers it while lighting a smoke, when suddenly something makes her snap her face back towards the little house. In the process, she slips off the rail, almost falling on her face. She scans the area frantically and sees nothing moving.

"What the fuck?"

What was there? She knows she heard no sound. Just this weird feeling. Someone or something closing in at crazy speed. An arrow, maybe, loosed silently at her back. Something that makes you want to duck without thinking.

Fear.

Then, a second later, she hears it. The train horn. And the clang of thick metal immediately after it. And pain, as the points switch and catch her foot.