We killed monsters until they stopped coming, then we tried banging on the door to the engine car and calling for the engineer to come help us. Carl had me do it because he thought that a woman's voice was more likely to get a response. I wasn't sure whether to be annoyed at the sexism or happy at the opportunity to be helpful. Regardless, I tended to agree with him so I couldn't be that upset.

When there was no response we ranged back down the train, looking for more monsters. We cleared out cars three and four and then stopped; car #5 was different on my map, both in shape and in the fact that I couldn't see what was inside it and the label was just ???. Last time we'd seen that it had been the home of a stronger group of monsters than what we'd been facing thus far.

"Phantom Kangaroo coming up," came over the public address system. "That'll be station number 84. After that is stop number 85, which is an exit-only cavern stop. Thanks for riding the Tangle."

"Probably going to get a bunch of mobs getting on here," Carl said. "Let's fort up." He stepped onto the gangway with car #3, pulled a big chunk of metal out of his inventory, and jammed it in so that it blocked the door. He pounded in wedges at the top and bottom, fixing the thing in place so that the door to car #3 could not be opened.

"What's that?" I asked.

"Gangway chock," he said. "Help me do the side doors." He pulled another barrier out of his inventory and leaned it against the port/aft door, handed me a couple of metal poles, and turned to handle the starboard/aft door himself.

These barriers were different, wedges instead of flat chunks, and apparently made from weight benches, leaving me to wonder where Carl got all this stuff. They stood up in front of the door and the crossbars went through the handholds on the sides of the door at top, middle, and bottom.

The wedges were not big enough. They would stop something the size of a Bonker but the Drek would barely be slowed and the Shock Chompers could wiggle through with only a little effort.

"You need to be more careful, Carl," Donut said. "You did a terrible job with those. They don't fit at all."

"Nope," he grunted. "I'll get the dimensions and make something better later."

The train was slowing down; a sense of relief went through me when I saw that the monsters on the platform were too large to get through easily.

Pollyslog. Level 22.

Of all the monsters from prehistoric Kua-tin mythology, the Pollyslogs are some of the most fearsome. They are strong, intelligent, and gigantic. At least compared to the Kua-tin. So what I'm really saying is they're moderately durable, dumb as a sack of pickled turnips, and, well, they are pretty big. They also secrete acid from their fingers, so you might want to watch out for that.

They looked like the fishpeople that were carved into the doors, except they were nearly as tall as I was and they had heavier arms and milky-white eyes. They had been lounging when the train entered the station and as we slowed to a halt they started lethargically pulling themselves to their feet and lining up in front of the doors.

Then the doors opened and the ones lined up at our car realized they couldn't get on. They went berserk, yanking on the door chocks with all their might and trying to stuff themselves through the too-small spaces around the edges. All the while they were emitting high-pitched, desperate howls.

The doors closed. Unlike real subways, these did not have 'stop when obstructed' safeties.

"Don't eat that!" Donut yelled at Mongo before the dinosaur could slurp down the two severed arms lying in the vestibule. It was good advice; the floor beneath the arms was starting to smoke as the acidic secretions worked on it. Carl pulled the arms into his inventory, much to Mongo's disgruntlement.

The electronic display said that we had ten minutes to the next station, so we cleared up the chocks and went for the unknown car #5.

The door was thicker and heavier, as had been the one to car #15 on the red line when we first arrived. There was a sign saying Do Not Enter. Tangle Employees Only. Before I could say anything or offer to go first since my Constitution was four times his, Carl slid the door open and stepped inside.

Entering Employee Break Room.

It was a bar car, comfortable seats on one wall and a long bar on the other side with polished wood surface and gleaming brass fittings. Halfway down was a small room labeled Conductor's Quarters. The conductor in question was sitting at the bar, slumped on his elbows and looking into his stein, which seemed to be filled with something stronger than beer.

Vernon. Yellow Line Train Conductor. Dwarf. Level 32.

"Employees only," Vernon said, not bothering to look up from his drink. "Passengers aren't allowed in here. If you want to get to the other cars you gotta get out and go around at the next stop."

"That doesn't seem very efficient," Donut said.

"Conductor?" Carl said. He thumbed towards the previous car. "Shouldn't you be up in the front car?"

"That's the engineer," Vernon said, looking up at last. "I don't go in there, and he don't come in here. Look, folks, I can't let you through. The monsters follow the rules and don't come in here. If they can do it, so can you."

"So what do you do, then?" Donut asked, ignoring his demands for us to leave.

The dwarf took a long pull of his drink. "I'm supposed to take care of the train and be in charge of all the employees. Supposed to. In reality, the engineer won't talk to me, the janitors try to eat me, and the porters just stare through me. So instead I sit here until the end of the line and then I go back and do it again."

"You go back to the start of the line?" Carl asked, suddenly interested. "How? Is there a down train?"

"Porters?" Donut said, ignoring Carl. "On a subway?"

Vernon finally looked up and saw the tiara-wearing cat sitting on the bar three meters away. His eyes went wide and he lurched to his feet, spilling his drink in the process. "Your Majesty! I'm sorry, I didn't realize we had royalty aboard!"

Or that the proper form of address for a princess was 'Your Highness', but we'd let that one go.

"It's quite all right," Donut said, waving a paw in regal dismissal of the issue. "I know your job must be difficult dealing with all this filthy riffraff."

"It is, Your Majesty. What may I do for you, ma'am?"

The door to car six slid open and a pair of Jikininki janitors stepped in, carrying brooms and dustpans. They saw us and bared their fangs.

I stepped in front of Carl, hefting my axe, but he caught my shoulder and pulled me back against the wall.

"Get out of the way," he said. "Let them through. The description said they wouldn't attack if you didn't bother them."

I checked its properties quickly. Of all the types of ghouls one may find in the Iron Tangle Rail System, the Jikininki is the most common, the most well-behaved, and the most insatiable. Their voracious appetite for flesh makes them the perfect janitors. They'll generally leave you alone as long as you're not bleeding, as long as you don't litter, and as long as you don't trespass into their personal space. It's rude.

Both Carl and I were covered in blood from all the monsters we'd been killing. Especially Mr 'I stamp on your head' Carl, who was soaked up to the knees and leaving bloody footprints behind himself.

They were only two meters away at this point, in handshake range given their knuckle-dragging arms. The one on the left lunged for me and I punched it in the chest with the head of my axe. It outmassed me, so all I ended up doing was slow it down and send myself stumbling backwards. Fortunately, Carl was there and he blocked the sickle-like claws with his gauntlet, then snap-kicked the monster in the belly. Somehow, that opened its front like a zipper so that all its guts tumbled out on the floor.

"Huh," he muttered. "That never activates."

I had my feet under me again and the other one janitor was on the ground, its face crushed in by a pair of Magic Missiles.

"Damnit!" Vernon yelled. "The carpets were new!"

"Sorry not sorry," Carl said. "They attacked us."

"You must excuse Our bodyguard, Vernon," Donut said, leaning hard into the royal accent. "He can be uncouth but he is essential when it comes to Our safety."

"Yes, of course," he said, touching his forehead in a sloppy salute. "Of course, Your Majesty."

Still not the term for a princess.

"Hey, you were saying that the train loops back around?" Carl said, stepping through the blood and guts so he could slide onto the stool next to Vernon.

"Uh..." The dwarf eyed him uncertainly, his gaze flicking to the mess on the floor. "No. Passengers have to get off at 433, staff get off at 435. End of the line."

"There's a station 436," Carl said. "What's there?"

"Um...look, you get off at 433. Terminus Station. It's a big transfer hub, you can get lots of places. 434 is out of service and 435 is staff-only. That's it."

"Vernon," Donut said. "Answer the question."

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

He looked mulish for a moment, but then he deflated. He took a big slug from his stein, emptying half of it in one pull, and wiped his mouth. "Look, Your Majesty...I don't actually know. I get out at 435, everything gets fuzzy, and then suddenly I'm standing on the platform at the trainyard back at station 10. I get on the train and it starts over."

"That's weird," Carl said.

The dwarf nodded and emptied his stein, then leaned forward over the bar until his feet were higher than his head. He came back up with a grunt and a brown jug of Rev-Up Moonshine, with which he refilled the stein. He took another pull and once more wiped his mouth on his sleeve. "Sometimes I talk to the other staff on the platform," he said. "They don't know anything more than I do. We're at 435, things get wobbly, then we're at 10. People speculate but we don't know."

"What do you speculate?" Carl asked.

Vernon shrugged. "Time loop? The train resets itself each time. Bodies are gone without a trace, anything that got damaged or destroyed is back the way it was. Plus..." He looked around, then pulled a heavy pouch out of his pants. "There's this." He opened the pouch and tilted it so that we could see it; it was full of gold coins, dozens of them. "I had ten gold on the nightstand the first time around. I always put the money in my pouch when I leave the train, but when I get on again it's there on the nightstand again. And this." He pulled a sheaf of papers from his jacket and showed them to us. They were identical copies of a (presumably female) dwarf looking over her shoulder in a come-hither way.

"It's m'wife," he said. "It was on the nightstand with the gold and it's always there when I reset. These are ones I carried with me in my jacket."

Carl and I exchanged glances. A time loop? Was that actually possible?

"Except it's not a time loop," Vernon said, tucking the gold and the drawings away. "The passengers are different, the monsters are different, and if I'm hungry when I get off the train then I'm still hungry when I get on again, but if not then not."

"Huh," Carl said. "So they reset the train each time. Who is on the platform with you? The engineer?"

He shook his head. "He's already on the train when I get there. It's just me and the porters there. The janitors, they get on at station 12."

A tingle of excitement shivered my spine. Station 12 had a staircase and therefore a path to survival.

"The engineer, is he another dwarf?" I asked.

Vernon shook his head. "Don't think so. I've never seen him, but based on his voice I think he's human. After the first couple runs I've taken to turning off the speakers in this car so I don't have to listen. You humans got voices like spikes to the forehead."

"Preach," Donut said, dropping her royal persona for a moment so that she could hold out a paw to fist-bump Vernon.

"Why don't you leave?" Carl asked. "Take the money, go home?"

Vernon shrugged. "I will, but not yet. I want a few more runs to collect coins. Twelve more runs and I'll have enough to buy me and Glimii—that's my wife—buy us a new house, a nicer one. Then I'll quit."

"Where is home?" I asked.

"Station 60. It's where all the staff live—us conductors, the porters, management, everybody. Well, not the ghouls. Those guys are at 12."

That was interesting. I'd been wondering about the gap in the numbering...there were stairwells at 12, 24, 36, 48, and 72. Why not put the last stairwell at 60 and the employee housing at 72? Doing it this way made it more likely that crawlers who didn't know what to expect would aim for 60. Maybe that was the goal? Did Borant want to set up a massacre where a bunch of crawlers showed up and instinctively killed and looted all the off-duty personnel? That would certainly make us look bad for the cameras.

"Do you have a more extensive map?" Carl asked. "Like, a map of the entire Tangle?"

Vernon was in the middle of taking a drink when Carl asked. He choked on a laugh and spurted moonshine up his nose, then spent several seconds cursing and swiping at it with a fistful of bar napkins. "A map of the entire Tangle? Ain't no such thing. Way too complicated. There are hundreds of lines, maybe thousands, and they all twist around each other."

Okay, I was going to make myself interpret that as a positive thing. More train lines meant more opportunities to move around and therefore more chances to get where we needed to go. It was a good thing, right? Right?

The pitch of the engine slowed down, making Vernon look up. "We're coming into 85," he said. "The monsters will all get off here. We'll get Snakeheads at 86 and 87; two different kinds and they fight each other so it thins the numbers. At 88 we'll get Skinned Mollies, then 89 is a transfer station. You lot can get off there safely. Yellow line and purple line."

An idea flashed into mind and hope rose in my heart. "Does this train connect to the indigo line anywhere? That's the line that Hekla and the Daughters are on."

"Sure," Vernon said. "Station 263. Yellow, indigo, and obsidian."

"We could join them," I said. "Hekla really wants to meet you guys and we'd be a lot safer together."

"It's an option," Carl said after a moment. "Let's see what happens when we get closer."

Katia: Hekla, we're coming! We're at station 85 on the yellow line. Station 263 is yellow, indigo, and obsidian. Meet us there!

There was no response, but she was still marked as alive in my contacts list. Maybe she was asleep.

"I left her a message, but I think she's asleep right now."

Carl looked uncomfortable. "Let's leave that soft for now," he said. "There's more I want to figure out about this line. Vernon, is it true that the mobs always get off and on every five stations?"

The dwarf nodded. "Sure. And the zeroes and fives are one-way. On at the zeroes, off at the fives. They're always real excited at the fives, too. Hopping around, pushing and shoving. They get on at some other stations too, but it's always off at the fives."

"Do they ever miss their stop?" Carl asked.

"Once in a while. We got some crawlers on, the Blooddrinker Mothmen were too busy fighting to get off at 325. They freaked out and hopped off at the next stop, screaming at each other." He laughed. "Another time, this Goateo from station 212 tried to loop around. He stayed on all the way to the end of the line. When I got back on at station 10 his bones were still there. Not an ounce of skin or meat or hair on 'em. Just the bones."

Carl raised his eyebrows but let it go. "How do you talk to the engineer?"

Vernon waved towards the middle of the car. "There's a horn in my quarters, but he never answers. Too good for that, I guess." He sniffed dramatically and took another drink. His eyes and cheeks were noticeably redder than they had been when we walked in.

"Do you ever just go into the engine and talk?"

"Can't. Locked up tight. You need an engineer's key to get in and the bastard don't come out."

"He never comes out? Is it just this guy? Have you ever heard about any engineer leaving his engine?"

Vernon smiled grimly. "Just once."

"Yeah? Why?"

"Train crashed."

o-o-o-o

We spent another hour talking to Vernon as the stops flashed by. There was no pattern I could see to the stops; sometimes it was a minute from one stop to the next, sometimes it was twenty. According to Vernon the trip from 10 to 435 took three full days. That was worrisome, since we only had nine-and-change days left before the level collapsed.

All the monsters got off at 115 and it was ten minutes to station 116, so Carl and Donut left me to keep pulling information out of Vernon while they went exploring up the train. Which...sure, I guess. Someone had to sit and do the boring work of listening to the dwarf list off the details of all 425 stops on the yellow line, then transcribe it into chat and send it to Mordecai. And someone had to smooth over Mordecai's feathers when they got ruffled about having to be the team secretary. Sure, it would have been trivial for Donut with her faux royalty and ridiculous Charisma stat and the way Mordecai doted on her, but that would have meant that Carl was off risking his life alone or, worse, stuck with me as his backup. Still, at least I was being useful. That made it less likely that they would abandon me.

"Ten years I've been working this job," Vernon slurred. His accent had been getting thicker and thicker for the last twenty minutes. I had made a couple of abortive attempts to get the mug away from him but had no success. "You hear me, Clarice?"

"I hear you, Vernon," I said, smiling and patting his shoulder. At some point he had started calling me Clarice and I had no idea why. "Hey, you were telling me about stop 226. What's there?"

"Ten years. Ask me how many vacation days. Go on, ask me!"

I forced myself to keep smiling. "How many vacation days do you have, Vernon?"

"None! They canceled them all!"

"Gosh, that sounds really hard. They shouldn't have done that."

"Damn straight! Damn straight." He took another gulp of his moonshine. "You're a nice girl, Clarice."

"Thank you, Vernon. Hey, you know a lot about the train, right?"

"A lot? I know everything about this train!"

"Oh yeah? I bet you don't know what's at station 226."

"Don't I? Ha! Of course I do. That's the Gaik. Snake head, scorpion body, legs of a lion. Only about as long as y'r arm but they travels in packs. All about level 30."

I smiled and shook my head in amazement. "You're amazing, Vernon. You know everything. What's at 227? That's another transfer station, right? Yellow and red, I think?"

"Pshh! Yellow and red." He snorted into his mug and took another drink. "You kids these days, think you know things. That's the yellow, brown sugar, and rose lines. It's always three lines per transfer station."

"Dang, right you are. What about 228? What's there?"

"Two-twenny-eight is more Gaik. Then y'got the yellow and cobalt lines at 229, plus the Flayer Special. Two-thirty 'n' 231, that's your basic Venom Wasp hive. Nasty little buggers and the two hives hate each other so they're usually all dead by the time we pull in to 232 and the Zemoti get on. Weird things, the Zemoti. Like somebody raided a morgue and threw all the parts together randomly. None of them look the same, just arms coming out of ears and big balls of tongues." He shuddered, then noticed that he was holding a mug full of alcohol so he knocked it back. I didn't bother trying to stop him from pouring another mugful; that would just lead to another time-consuming argument. According to the digital display we were only ninety seconds from the station and it was going to be hard to keep him on task once we pulled in.

"How about—" I looked up as the door slid open and Carl and Donut returned at a run. Carl had a suitcase in his left hand and a black roller bag in his right. He kicked the door closed behind himself and leaned against it for a moment, catching his breath.

"Having fun?" I asked.

"It was so neat!" Donut said, leaping from Carl's shoulder to the bar and weaving her way through an obstacle course of peanuts, pretzels, and abandoned shot glasses. "The tenth car is the porters! When you go there they ask you for the number of your luggage and you give them a number from one to two hundred and they give you that suitcase and it's a prize! We got prizes!" She saw the look on my face. "We asked for one for you but they said you had to come get it yourself. Carl and I will open ours and then we'll take you right up and get you something and I'm sure it's going to be amazing." She looked over her shoulder to where Carl was hoisting the suitcases up onto the bar. "Carl, Carl, open them! We need to go get Katia's prize."

Carl caught my slight frown. "It won't let me put it in my inventory until I open it," he explained. He unzipped the elegant black roller bag and threw the top back as we all crowded in to see...

Lingerie. Red lingerie. And red high heels, and a bunch of brochures about things to do in Delaware.

"That...is not a prize," Carl said.

"What's that?" Donut said, poking one paw towards a bulge in one of the pockets.

Carl unzipped it and reached in. He smiled and pulled out three potion bottles.

Mana potion. Mana potion. Invisibility potion.

"Hell yeah," he said, grinning. Apparently the 'no inventory' rule was canceled now that he had opened the suitcase because it and its feminine apparel vanished. At the same time, the train sighed and the sound of the tracks shifted as we started to slow down for the station.

"Do mine, do mine!" Donut said, bouncing up and down.

"Sure." Carl stepped up and put his hand on the zipper, opened it tiny bit, and then stepped back in alarm.

"What's wr—" I started to ask.

Carl had only unzipped the bag a few centimeters but that was enough. Red flaming ants poured forth, torching the drawings of Vernon's wife as they surged towards us.

Literal Fire Ants. Level 1.

This is a trap monster.

Like regular fire ants, but with more enthusiasm. Plus they hate you and want you to die. They're pretty good at making that happen.

We all scrambled backwards away from the flaming tide. They kept coming and coming, more of them than could possibly have fit in the suitcase, crawling up the walls and across the ceiling. Vernon stumbled and fell to the ground with a startled cry, clutching his jug of moonshine to his chest. The train came to a stop and the door dinged open as the ants engulfed Vernon.

"Outside!" Carl shouted, throwing himself at the door. I scrambled after him.

"Help! I'm on fire! Help!" Donut shouted.

The three of us tumbled out the doors and Carl jumped on a panicked Donut, wrapping her in his jacket and beating at her tail until the flames were out.

There was a fwump! from inside the train as the mostly-empty jug of moonshine went up. A pillow of hot air lanced out of the train door and knocked me back. By the time I stopped rolling, the doors had closed and the train was calmly pulling away as though nothing had happened.

"That was a terrible prize," Donut griped.