[ Tessa is silent a moment before she begins. In the quiet, she fidgets with her hands, bending her fingers back and forth, hooking a fingernail under another and making them click when they part. She runs her tongue over her teeth and purses her lips. ]

In that shitty town with the mines and the sickness, there was this door. Said under construction on it or something. Me and a couple others went through it, ya know, just to check it out, and on the other side it was just another train car. Apparently a normal one, but the people were all ghost-like, not solid at all, and we all got messages on our phones from the conductor or whoever because we weren’t supposed to be there, right? But then the messages just started turning to gibberish, and there was some guy who was checking these paper slips that were in our pockets, and then suddenly we all fell asleep.