117: Chapter 117 The End of the Carriage

After the carriage doors closed, the sounds from outside vanished.

What Wu heard first was the sound of windshield wipers scraping against glass.

But this bus had no driver, and there was no rain outside the windshield.

The wipers moved back and forth, as if wiping away something invisible.

With every stroke, the overhead lights in the carriage dimmed by one level.

Wu stood in the aisle, the Temporary Fire Seal on his wrist still glowing, yet it was only bright enough to illuminate the ground within half a step of him.

The people in the seats were no longer looking at him.

They had all turned their heads, gazing out of their respective windows.

Outside the windows was not Jiangbei.

For some, outside the window was the downstairs of an old residential building; for others, it was a hospital corridor; some stood before a dining table laden with food.

The windows seemed to be playing back a segment of the life each passenger was most reluctant to leave behind.

As Wu passed a little girl clutching a schoolbag, he saw a man standing outside her window, crouching down and opening his arms toward her.

The little girl's lips moved.

Wu could not hear who she wanted to call out to.

But he knew that as soon as she spoke the name, there would be one more position in the carriage that was written to death.

He continued walking toward the back.

On the back of every row of seats was a yellowed ticket; there was no passenger name on the ticket, only the words "Unverified."

Until the thirteenth row, where he saw a ticket with red lines seeping from its edge, as if someone had just pressed a fingerprint onto it.

Wu did not touch it.

"You are much smarter than you were three years ago."

Someone said from the end of the carriage.

Wu looked up.

A man wearing an old uniform stood by the rear door, his cap brim pulled very low, fiddling with a pair of ticket nippers in his hands.

This person was not the blurry station attendant Zhao Ye had seen on the post road, but rather seemed more like a real person.

His shoes were polished clean, but there were large, indelible oil stains on his cuffs.

"The Ticket Inspector?" Wu asked.

The man smiled.

"Passengers should not ask for a staff member's name."

"I am not a passenger."

"Everyone who steps through these doors is."

Wu stared at him, not responding to this.

The Ticket Inspector approached slowly, spinning the ticket nippers in his palm.

"People like you are the most troublesome," he said. "Others at least have names to lose. You have almost forgotten where you came from, yet you still insist on acting as if you refuse to board."

Wu's palms were sweating.

He remembered the old photograph in the observation room and the position in the middle of the photo that had been erased.

It wasn't that he wanted to forget; it was that every time someone wrote him into a list, reality would retain a little less of his trace.

"What about you?" Wu suddenly asked. "Do you have a name?"

The Ticket Inspector's movements paused for an instant.

Very short.

So short it was almost an illusion.

Yet Wu saw the eyes beneath his cap brim turn cold.

"I am responsible for verifying tickets."

"So you are also just a position."

The ticket nippers snapped shut with a click.

Wu dodged to the side, and the nippers clipped off a corner of the seat armrest.

There were no wood shavings inside the armrest; what fell out was a piece of a black ticket stub.

The lights in the carriage dimmed by another level.

Wu did not clash with him again.

He continued moving backward along the aisle, the Temporary Fire Seal pressing the faint guidance cast by the Grey Net into his palm.

Shen Qinghe was listening for rules outside the bus, Chen Shi was remotely synchronizing time, and Bai Ya was feeding the images of every seat he could see into the Grey Net.

In the eighteenth row, a man wearing glasses kept his head lowered, with a handwritten record spread out on his knees.

Wu stopped.

Han Yue.

That notebook was too familiar; the corners were curled, and there was a patch of blue ink on the cover that had been blurred by rain.

Han Yue sat there as if he were still flipping through those disappearance records from three years ago that no one wanted to read.

Wu did not call out to him.

Han Yue did not look up either.

It wasn't until Wu passed by him that Han Yue said in an extremely low voice, "Don't look back."

Wu's heart gave a violent jolt.

This was not the name he had called out at the very beginning.

This sentence had no inducement, no sweet, cloying echo like that of the station broadcast.

It was like the warning Han Yue had left in the underground interlayer before he left.

Wu's footsteps did not stop.

But in his peripheral vision, he saw a person shrouded in black shadow sitting in the window seat of the last row.

In front of that person lay a blank ticket, and words were slowly emerging on its surface.

[Fire Keeper]

Wu's breath hitched.

the first bus did not just randomly find thirty-six people who had lost their loved ones.

It was reserving seats for every Torch node.

Jiangbei Safe House, Liu Bridge Second Anchor, the community Lamp-Keeping Zone, Qinghe No. 1 Safe House... These places were not just being targeted; they were being treated by this bus as waiting points for the next stop.

The station broadcast suddenly sounded from the roof of the carriage.

The female voice was very gentle, so gentle it sounded like it was reciting a normal route.

"The final stop for this train is Qinghe No. 1 Safe House."

The Ticket Inspector stood by the rear door and bowed slightly to Wu.

"You have lit the lamps too brightly," he said. "So bright that every lamp seems to be holding up a station sign for us."

Wu pressed his hand against the Temporary Fire Seal, sending the image of the carriage's seating chart and the blank ticket into the Grey Net.

The edges of the Fire Seal immediately began to turn black.

He knew he had been exposed.

The Ticket Inspector raised his ticket nippers, and the black shadow in the last row of the carriage slowly stood up.

The ticket with "Fire Keeper" written on it drifted forward by an inch.

The seats in the back half of the carriage were older than those in the front, and the backrests were covered in fine scratches made by fingernails.

As Wu wove between the seats, he discovered that behind every "Unverified" ticket was a real-world object: an undelivered ring, a medical record stuck on a certain day, a broken children's toy, a work badge stained with oil.

Liuxia Passenger Station did not just collect people.

It collected the last little piece of something those people refused to let go of.

Wu picked up one of the toys, and black water immediately flowed from the toy's eyes.

He did not touch it again, only silently noting down the location and ticket number.

The Ticket Inspector stood in the distance watching, as if intentionally letting him understand.

"You claim to save people," the Ticket Inspector said, "but you cannot bring back a single person they want to see."

Wu did not turn back.

"Even if you can't bring them back, you cannot use living people as substitutes."

The Ticket Inspector's laugh was very soft.

"As if you didn't leave anyone behind."

Wu's footsteps paused.

Han Yue's residual shadow was still sitting in the eighteenth row, the notebook open to a blank page.

Wu knew who the other party was talking about, and he also knew that the cruelest part of this statement was not the provocation, but the fact.

Torch could not save Han Yue.

But just then, the pen tip of Han Yue's residual shadow suddenly moved across the paper.

A crooked arrow appeared on the blank page, pointing toward the inspection hatch at the bottom of the carriage.

Wu did not ask why.

He looked in the direction the arrow pointed and discovered a route map with half torn off stuck to the edge of the inspection hatch.

On the map, there was a route between Jiangbei and Qinghe circled in black ink.

The final destination was indeed Qinghe No. 1 Safe House.

Wu memorized the location of the route map; he did not attempt to tear it off.

The paper was inside the bus, but a corner of the path had already been seen by the Grey Net.

The characters for Qinghe in the distance were illuminated very brightly by the light, like a station sign waiting for the bus to run over it.

The Ticket Inspector did not stop him from memorizing the route.

The man even stepped aside half a step, as if intentionally letting him see it clearly.

Wu immediately realized that this route might be a trap.

But since the trap was laid out here, it meant the other party was afraid that Torch might not see something else.