Chapter 1
TARTARUS
The line stretched toward the only working ticket window like a tired intestine.
A window where people were being handed their right to travel in all four directions. I pushed my bag across the granite floor with my foot and slowly moved toward the target. People yawned in line, full-body yawns, the kind that make your bones participate. They covered their mouths, smacked their lips, shifted from one leg to the other — until, finally, a freshly printed ticket crackled in their hands.
“Next.”
Ant colony, basically.
“Next.”
Or fast food, only instead of fries and a burger, they gave you permission to enter a bus.
Fastbus.
“Next.”
Somebody stepped on my heel. I turned and glared at a tall guy with the blank face of a department-store mannequin.
A tall manne-jerk.
Not my best work, but it was half past two in the morning. Standards were asleep.
“Next.”
The woman in front of me had enough perfume on her to disinfect a hospital wing. “Next...” A man nearby was digging into his ear with a pinky nail so long it deserved its own passport. “Next.” The back in front of me moved left.
My turn.
“Hi. I’d like, please...” A cheeseburger, mustard, and two pickles, I almost said.
The woman behind the glass looked at me with eyes that contained exactly three words:
Take it. Leave.
Fine. Technically three.
I swallowed the joke and asked for a ticket to Nowhere.
She printed it. I paid. I looked at her grown-out roots, at her manicure in the style of “I did this myself and you can’t stop me,” at her fingers clicking across the keyboard.
I said goodbye.
She didn’t.
Fair.
I put the ticket in my pocket and headed outside. The strap of my bag dragged on my shoulder. Damp night air licked my face. I checked the time. 2:30 a.m. Fifteen minutes until departure. Platform three.
The station smelled of fried pastries, wet asphalt, and the talcum powder in the hair of women hugging their children before the road took them away.
It smelled like change.
I should’ve suspected something. Felt, somehow, that this trip would be different. But everything looked painfully ordinary. The asphalt shone with dew. The moon hung in the sky like a dull pancake somebody had slapped onto black glass. Smokers stood with one foot on the bus step, taking quick final drags before boarding.
I delayed the moment. The moment when the battle for the armrest begins. For the sacred right to spread your knees an extra inch. The windows would fog. The cabin would fill with garlic breath from sleeping open mouths. Somebody would snore. Somebody would cough. Somebody would definitely smell like boiled sausage and regret.
But all that came later.
The driver started the engine. A black clot of smoke coughed from the exhaust pipe.
I stepped aboard.
And everything went to Tartarus.
