Past me had been very committed to atmosphere.
I couldn't find any inspiring words. Nothing arrived. My brain, which had been producing coherent survival logic for the last four stations, appeared to have looked at the blood platform and quietly submitted its resignation.
I wished, with a fervency that surprised me, that someone would just tell me we didn't have to go. Please. Anyone.
"Excuse me." Go Nari's voice. Firm and slightly raised. "I still think we should get off."
Huh?
I looked at her.
"You're the only one who's been certain about any of this. Everyone else has been scared but you've stayed calm the entire time." She said it like she was filing a report. Factual. No flattery in it. "That man earlier made a selfish decision and caused chaos. I would rather follow someone decent. I'm getting off."
And then Go Nari, with the energy of someone who has made a decision and is going to execute it before her nerve fails, stepped through the door and onto the blood-covered platform.
The liquid came up around her shoes. She made a sound. Not a scream. The compressed, involuntary exhale of someone experiencing something deeply unpleasant and choosing not to give it the satisfaction of a bigger reaction.
Blood dripped from the pipe above and landed on her shoulder.
Ha. Ha.
"Kase-san?"
"..."
"Don't worry about me. I believe in you. Let's go!"
The injured man I was helping took that as his cue and stepped forward, which moved me forward with him, and then I was through the door and standing in the blood and the cold of it was going through my shoes immediately and I was thinking about every choice that had led me to this exact moment, specifically the choice to write a horror world with maximally visceral environmental design, specifically specifically the blood platform sequence, specifically the note I had left myself in the Archive that said 'make it feel inescapable, make it feel like the world itself is saturated' and I had really committed to that note.
I had committed so hard.
The others followed. Still hesitating, but the math had shifted. More people outside than inside. The doors were moving. They came through one after another, each of them making approximately the same sound Go Nari had made when the blood reached their feet, and then we were all on the platform and moving.
At least I wasn't the last one through. That was something. Being last felt like the scariest position and I was grateful in a way that was completely disproportionate to the stakes.
'Ha. I just want to lie down and stop existing for a while.'
"Should we head for the stairs?"
"Yes."
Even here, knee-deep in what was objectively a horror scenario, Go Nari turned toward the other train cars and raised her voice. "Hey! Get off! This is the right station! Get off now!"
I watched her do it and felt something I did not have a clean name for. She didn't know if anyone in those other cars could hear her. She didn't know if it would work. She was doing it anyway, in a blood-covered platform in a ghost story, because the possibility that one more person might hear and survive was enough reason.
'If even one more person gets off because of that, we've saved them.' I have to admire her.
No really, I was going to focus exclusively on admiring her right now, with great concentration, because admiring her gave my attention somewhere to be that was not the walls of this platform or the pipes above or the quality of the liquid currently soaking through my socks. Helping the injured man had been the right call for exactly the same reason. When my focus started to waver, having something to do with my hands stopped the panic from finding a foothold.
I recommend it to all cowards.
Though I sincerely doubted many cowards had ever been in a situation this specific and ridiculous.
"Ugh."
"Keep moving."
I kept my eyes ahead. Deliberately. The stairs were visible at the end of the platform and I fixed my attention on them and did not let it drift to the walls, to the ceiling, to the things that were dripping, to the particular quality of the dark in the corners of this space that suggested the dark had texture and the texture was not empty.
I saw the stairs.
'Ward symbols. They're completely covered in ward symbols.'
Every surface of the staircase was plastered with them. Layered, overlapping, written in something I was not going to identify. The kind of coverage that meant whoever had put them there had not been making a casual gesture. That had been a serious, sustained, frightened effort to seal something.
The stairs looked far from normal. My spine registered this before my brain finished processing it.
'I'll just focus on the feeling of going up.'
One step.
Another step.
I walked quietly, my hand still steadying the injured man beside me, the sound of the group moving together behind us a small and specific comfort. The ward symbols pressed in from the walls on both sides. I looked at the step in front of me. The next step. The one after that.
Up was the direction. Up was the only direction. That was all I needed to know about this staircase.
Soon my vision blurred at the edges, softly, like a camera losing its depth of field, and then the texture of the stairs changed under my feet, and the cold of the blood platform fell away, and the smell of rust and iron thinned and was replaced by something climate-controlled and modern and clean, and then:
[Congratulations, new employees!]
We were back in the orientation hall.
"...!!"
Bright lights. High ceiling. The large projection screen at the front of the room displaying bold text, the chairs arranged in their clean rows, the modern and spacious and completely impossible normalcy of an indoor space that had no business being this comfortable after what we had just walked through.
The people who had made it through with me collapsed into chairs as their legs decided they were done. One person sat down on the floor because the floor was closer and that was fine, the floor was a completely valid choice, no one had any notes.
"Ha..."
"Ahh!!"
I turned my head and counted.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven.
Everyone who had been in our car.
All seven of us.
'We made it.'
Seven out of the ten people who had originally been placed in our section of the Voidline Transit car. The other three had made different decisions at different stations and those decisions had not worked out, and I was holding that fact at a slight distance right now because there was a screen in front of me with text on it and I needed to read the text.
: Congratulations. You have been officially inducted into the Field Acquisition Division of Vantablack Holdings.
"Ha..."
I read it twice. Then I sat down.
From the ghost story, seven out of ten from our car had survived the induction sequence.
[Now, it's time for the gift awarding ceremony!]
I looked at the screen.
The gift awarding ceremony.
Right. That was next. I remembered writing this part too. I just needed a moment. One moment, alone with the fact that I had just walked through a blood platform in a ghost train that I had invented and made it to the other side, to sit with that very quietly before whatever came next arrived.
The hall was bright. The air was temperature-controlled. Somewhere in this building, in a different part of the induction sequence, Seo Ijun had already been through his own version of whatever gift ceremony this was going to be.
I filed that thought into the folder I was not opening.
The screen waited.