Passenger Manifest
Hiraya Sia
The First Raya
Q didn’t scream or flail. If Raya trusted her eyes and ears, she would have called it a peaceful death. But not all silence is calm. Q had said goodbye with two words that would live forever in all of Raya’s quiet places, moths in a dark closet, consuming the fabric of her peace.
“Let him go, Ms. Sia.” Rasmus pried the sake bottle from Raya’s hands and set the train’s back door on top of one of the Lotus’s tables.
How? Raya wanted to scream. It was Q who held her soul in a chokehold and not the other way around.
“Mr. Philips is gone.” Rasmus pressed a silver key into Raya’s hand. “Congratulations,” he said, speaking as though he was offering her his condolences. “The compartment is yours.”
Raya flung the key to the floor. “I don’t want it.”
“You didn’t want your train ticket either, but here you are.” Rasmus picked the key up.
“A ticket paid for by my brother and Q. People who mattered and who would have made a difference. I’m a monster, Rasmus.” She grabbed the sake bottle and stared into the darkness beyond its mouth. “I don’t belong here.”
“You think that hurling yourself after Q will fix things?”
“No, but it will make the pain stop.” Tears streamed down her cheeks and slid down the bottle’s neck.
Rasmus took a vial containing Mr. Goh’s serum from his satchel and gave it to Raya. “There are other ways.”
Remember me. It was all Q had asked of her, Raya thought, and she couldn’t even give him that. Forgetting Q was the only way she would not let the eternity he had bought for her go to waste. She swallowed the serum. It flowed inside her, washing her past away.
But Mr. Goh made his serums in single doses and Rasmus had given it to Raya without realizing that she required two: one for Jace, the other for Q.
One dose was not enough for all the blame she hoarded.
The blue serum flooded her locked rooms and drawers but could not banish the grief and guilt that called them home.
They grew wings to keep themselves from being swept away and took flight to higher ground.
A black moth circled the train’s back door.
Mary Beth, the nurse on the night shift whose finger Raya had once clung to tightly, had been right about the strength of her grip.