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He climbed the bank and retraced his steps back to where he’d left his sweatpants, and where Sienna had left his T-shirt. Being that a hoodie helped to hide his striated hair and skin coloring, it was his clothing of choice, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. He’d take what clothing options he could get.
It wasn’t until he was dressed and striding away from the river and toward the railway tracks that the click-clack notes of an incoming train caught his ear. His whole body tensed.Holy shit.Was it possible Sienna would return to what she knew and take the train again? It wasn’t like she could swim in the river forever.
He sprinted toward the station, instinct telling him he needed to catch the very next train. A sedan on a road running parallel to the tracks slowed, the driver gawking at Gray as he raced at full speed, faster than an Olympic sprinter. He only hoped the driver didn’t think to record him on his cellphone. At least his markings would be blurred.
Either way, he couldn’t worry about any of that now. He crossed the tracks, just ten yards in front of the incoming train. The driver blasted the air horn but Gray didn’t break stride. He jumped a small security fence along with some shrubbery, then raced toward the distant steps that led up to the concrete platform.
He made the platform with seconds to spare, the train slowing to a crawl until its carriages finally stopped. He glanced at the passengers on the platform, only then noticing Sienna as she alighted from the very last carriage with some other commuters.
Adrenaline rejuvenated him, flushing his entire body. He broke into a sprint, pushing people out the way as he raced after her. She turned back and looked at him through the crowd, her eyes wide. Then she pivoted and ran from him, dropping onto the stony ballast and sleepers behind the carriage, where she soon disappeared.
His pulse surged. Thanks to the safety feature of the platform there was a wall opposite. There was nowhere she could go...except up the same ladder he’d climbed earlier when he’d defeated the two Dronians.
Did she know how dangerous it was up on the roof once the train got going?
The train hissed as it released its brakes, the carriages rolling forward. He dropped onto the stony ground and lunged for the ladder, his hands gripping the bars, just as Sienna disappeared onto the carriage roof.
He scowled. Was she crazy? She’d get herself killed!
The train was building up real speed by the time he hoisted himself up and over, crouching low on the roof of the carriage even as he watched in horror as she stayed upright while balancing against the steadily increasing force of the wind.
At the overpass coming into sight ahead, he screamed at her, “Sienna, get down!”
She turned to face him, her hair whipping around her face. He threw himself onto his belly, but it was too late to do anything for Sienna except watch in stunned horror as the steel beam whacked her head. Bits of brain and blood splattered him and the roof, her decapitated body toppling off the edge of the carriage and disappearing out of sight.
“No!” he roared, even as the trained rolled under the overpass and continued on, as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened. As though the Earth hadn’t just stopped rotating and his entire life hadn’t just ceased to have meaning.
He howled like the beast he wanted to become, his soul shattering and his heart imploding. Sienna couldn’t possibly be gone? She was his reason for being here, the motive for him taking the job in the first place.
He might have fooled himself into believing his world and his people were all he cared about, and of course that was more than enough reason to be here, but it’d been his obsession with Sienna’s holo-image and then seeing her in person that had made him accept the mission.
His shoulders curled inward, his spine bending even as he shook his head and muttered, “No. No, it can’t be, she can’t be gone.”
But the bloody splatters on his skin and all over the roof confirmed the truth. The Sienna he knew was no longer alive.
It’s your fault. She’s dead now because of you.
He looked at the townhouses whizzing past him either side as the train accelerated toward its next destination, and for a moment he contemplated joining Sienna in the spiritual plane and rolling off the side and giving into oblivion.
Then he saw a group of kids on skateboards at a park next to the tracks, a young teenage boy pointing at him in disbelief. A couple of the other boys glanced at Gray with wide stares. In a blink the skate park and kids were gone, more townhouses whizzing past before the train began to slow.
He was numb by that point, selfishly careless of what might now happen to his world, his people. How could he care when he felt nothing but deep, aching despair and loss?
Making his way back to the ladder, he climbed down it as the train decelerated and the platform came into view. It had all but stopped when he jumped off, scaled a fence, then walked despondently up some stairs and onto the platform, only absently noting the passengers exiting the carriages.
His lungs were too raw, too compressed to draw in air, his whole body trembling and his skin cold and clammy. He was going into shock. An aftereffect of losing the one woman in the world who’d been everything to him.
He was lost and alone.
Something made him look into the train windows, an uncanny sixth sense that somehow functioned despite his shutdown emotions. He froze as a familiar face stared back at him.
Sienna?
No, impossible.
He blinked, his brain operating like sludge and unable to accept the likelihood of her being alive. He shook his head. He’d damn well seen her die on the roof of the train!
Seenherdie, or her duplicate?
