Velveteen by Daniel Marks Page A

looked down the track. Realizing it could be several feet away, barreling toward her, and she wouldn’t even know it through the curtain of darkness, Velvet jumped up and scrambled back onto the platform.
    “Is it comin’?” Logan searched her face for the answer. Sometimes he was so dense.
    “Well, duh!” Velvet snapped. “I just jumped out of the way, didn’t I?”
    He planted his hands on his hips and looked from her to the thick gray mist and back to her, then back to where the railcar should be, a sneer spreading. “Yeah. Like you were about to get splattered, then … uh. Nothing.”
    Velvet waited a moment, wishing for the wooden train to appear, and then acquiesced. “Sorry! I meant to say, ‘Yeah, it’s coming.’ ”
    A squeal pierced the night as the heavy bronze plow of the railcar cut through the shadows and into the station. The contraption was packed with souls. Gray powdered arms thrust from glassless windows set in the doors—each row of seats had its own—and behind those, faces twisted into masks of terror floated in the dark depths of the carriage. The shouts began almost instantly.
    “We got no room!”
    “Don’t even try to get on!”
    Velvet stepped forward and yanked the nearest door open. A small woman in a pillbox hat, nose pinched and upturned, held the soul of a plump baby in her lap. She hadn’t bothered to make it gray with ash, and it glowed eye-achinglybright. Velvet raised her hand to shield against the glare of its firing synapses. Clearly she couldn’t ask this woman to vacate her spot—that would be terrible. Not to mention rude. She leaned inside the cab and assessed the other passengers; most couldn’t look away fast enough. Velvet spotted a pair of young men in ratty baseball caps pulled down over their eyes, one fidgeting with his bill.
    “You two!” she shouted, and when neither glanced her way, Velvet motioned for an elderly woman sitting in the row beside them to get their attention.
    One peered up from his spot, his shoulders wilted, shamed, and rightly so.
    “Salvage business!” Velvet yelled menacingly. “Make room or suffer the consequences, dingleberry!”
    She ducked out of the cab and slammed the door. Then she stomped to their section, tore open their door, and jerked them out by their worn hoodies. They fell into the benches on the platform and scowled.
    “No worries, gentleman,” Luisa said as she strutted past. “I’m sure there’ll be another car along in no time.”
    As if to punctuate the joke, a wooden roof tile from a nearby building shook loose and slapped one of the guys in the back of the head.
    “Yeah!” Logan chuckled. “You’ll be perfectly safe here. What are you worried about? Dyin’?”
    “Dying!” Quentin howled with laughter as he slunk past the pair. “That’s a good one, Logan. ’Cause they’re already—”
    “Yep.” Logan stopped him with a hand on his chest. “That’s why it’s funny.”
    Quentin clammed up and slid in after an old woman. Logan followed. Velvet followed Luisa into the row vacated by the two boys and slammed the door behind them.
    She thought about the faces in the crowd—so many her age, some younger and some a bit older. It seemed that purgatory was built for the young, those who died far before their time and with so much left to learn. They’d be there forever. But youth is resilient, as the station agent was so fond of saying. That’s why Velvet had been enlisted—and Logan, Luisa, and Quentin—to track down souls that should have made it here but didn’t for whatever reason. She just wished there were more accidental causes and fewer nefarious ones.
    She reached for the cord that ran down the center of the ceiling in limp droopy scallops and yanked it. A series of bells started to chime, and moments later the railcar jerked into motion. Swift movement caught Velvet’s eye. Outside, the extricated slacker boys were already hanging limply at the ends of a pair of plump shadowy