"Who said I needed one?" Thomas asked, though inwardly he was heaving a massive, silent sigh of relief. He had just found a man who claimed to be part of the same "superhero" ecosystem mentioned in his scroll—and he was offering a free ride to a man with an empty wallet.
Yet, Thomas couldn't help but feel a lingering sense of awkwardness. He was a professional, a man who prided himself on his "poker face," and yet this stranger had read his financial desperation as easily as a headline.
"Come on now! A piece of advice for the road, cub: never try to play a trick on your seniors. We can smell the sweat of a lie from a mile away."
"Senior?" Thomas repeated, testing the weight of the word.
"You are just a new cub, barely out of the nursery, and I'm a killer," the man said, offering a wink. With the strange, mechanical patch covering half of his face and the whirring oculus tracking Thomas's every twitch, the gesture felt less friendly and more like the twitch of a predatory insect.
"Let's go. The train is about to arrive, and unless you plan on walking through the Isolation Zones on foot, you don't want to miss it."
Left with no other viable choice, Thomas fell into step behind him. The man moved to the very edge of the stone platform, joining a small cluster of other travellers who stood with a peculiar, rigid patience.
"Do you want to kill villains?" the stranger asked suddenly. He didn't turn his head; he simply stared down the iron tracks, his voice a low, gravelly hum.
"Well…" Thomas hesitated. The word 'villain' was a black-and-white label he had spent his life avoiding. In the NYMPD, things were rarely that simple; there were suspects, victims, and the broken people caught in between.
But he remembered Oliver using the term with a casual, almost religious certainty. If he acted on his old reflexes, his sense of justice would have shouted yes. But here, in a world where "sectors" were born of fog, he didn't know the rules. He didn't know what a villain truly was.
"They are the villains," the man said, lifting his wooden cane and using it as a pointer. He levelled the tip at the green board where the grotesque bounty posters hung like drying meat.
"They are the ones who committed those grave crimes—the butchers, the traitors, the chaotic. So, I ask you again, cub: do you want to take them down?"
Thomas looked back at the board, recalling the missing flesh and the ferocious, unpained eyes of the fugitives. "I don't have the power to do so," he said finally, opting for the most logical, defensive answer.
"Won't you even dream about doing it?" The man turned then, giving Thomas a deep, penetrating gaze with his one good eye.
"I only dream about things I can actually do," Thomas shrugged, drawing on thirty years of cynical Earth experience. "Dreaming about the impossible is a waste of time. It's childish."
"Hmm…" The man let out a sound that was half-grunt, half-chuckle. He turned away, his gaze shifting toward the east where the horizon was beginning to blur.
Thomas followed his line of sight. Far in the distance, a silver and green shape was screaming across the landscape. It was moving at a terrifying speed, trailing thick, roiling bellows of black smoke that stained the orange sky.
To Thomas, it looked like a nightmare version of a 19th-century steam engine—a coal-fired beast coming to claim the station.
"Our fat ride has arrived at last," the stranger noted.
He wasn't exaggerating. As the machine pulled closer, Thomas realised that Becky was a toy compared to this. It was a colossal metallic beast, an ugly, shivering mountain of iron that made "Becky" look like a masterpiece of engineering.
"Are the people here so short on metal that they have to use industrial scraps for everything?" Thomas muttered under his breath. The man beside him shot him a sharp, silent glance.
"You do realise that without the divine intervention of the Great Monarch, things like this wouldn't even exist, right?" the man said as the train began to hiss, its speed dropping as it glided alongside the platform.
"As if inventions simply stopped with him!" Thomas rolled his eyes, his internal "modern man" scoffing at the cult of personality.
"That's actually quite true," the stranger replied, and to Thomas's surprise, there was a touch of genuine melancholy in his voice.
"The brilliant minds of our age are all focused on one singular goal: how to kill other superheroes—sorry, I mean villains—faster. They don't have the luxury of thinking about 'normal' people or the public well-being. Innovation died with the Great Monarch. I doubt we'll ever see a golden era like his again."
Thomas swallowed his next retort, his mind racing. This world was in a state of perpetual, high-stakes war—a technological stalemate where every ounce of genius was funnelled into weaponry.
He watched as the train came to a final, screeching halt. The front of the train—the engine—was a disorganised box of metal plates ten times the size of Oliver's vehicle. It was a diamond-shaped monstrosity of riveted scraps, its surface rough and pitted.
Unlike any train Thomas knew, there was no enclosed cabin for the driver at the very front. Instead, the lead engine dragged a secondary, smaller car where a team of five men stood exposed to the elements, frantically wrestling with levers and steering wheels to bring the beast to a stop.
"Let's go," the man commanded, leading the way toward one of the passenger trucks.
Thomas followed him up the narrow steps and into the belly of the beast. He expected a grand, open carriage, but he was met with a surprisingly cramped interior.