Last Light on Platform 4

The board said ON TIME at 00:12, which felt like a dare.

Mira Solt had the last shift on platform 4 because she had asked for mornings once and the rota had laughed.

A man slept on the bench with a bag of oranges as a pillow. Mira knew the bag. The city was smaller than its maps.

She did not wake him. Sleeping was not loitering if you had a ticket. He had a ticket. She checked without being a cop about it.

Two workshop workers compared burn marks and then stopped talking when they remembered she could hear. She let them have the quiet.

Coda Vale came down the stairs with the look of someone whose café had closed and whose trains had not.

“You’re late,” Mira said.

“The café was on time. That’s the problem.”

Coda sat. She did not wake the orange man either.

The automated voice apologized for the inconvenience of there being none.

“I hate when they’re punctual,” Mira said.

“It removes the enemy.”

A kid—Bee, Harbor Reach salt still on her shoes—asked if this was the train to the quay.

“Next one is morning.”

“Uncle said water doesn’t read rotas.”

“Your uncle is employed.”

Bee sat on the official waiting line and did not complain. Mira gave her a cup of machine tea that tasted like a policy.

The orange man woke.

“Train?”

“Two minutes. You used fruit as furniture.”

“They’re for someone who won’t eat them.”

“Then they’re doing a second job.”

He smiled with one side, like a family resemblance Mira did not have a right to name.

The train arrived on time, insultingly.

People boarded like civilians.

Coda stayed.

“Next is morning,” Mira said.

“I know. I’m walking. I wanted to see it leave without me. For practice.”

Mira understood that more than the dashboard would.

The train took the orange man, the workshop pair, Bee with her tea.

Platform 4 became a rectangle of light.

Mira swept nothing because nothing had been dropped except a sugar packet, which she put in her pocket for the child who ordered sugars beside the cup.

Coda went up the stairs.

Mira turned the platform lights down one notch, the legal night setting.

Glassmere Central did not become mystical.

It became closed enough.

She clocked out past a Forge Mutual advert with a moustache still on the model.

YOUR CHASSIS CAN BE REPLACED.

Someone had added, in pen: YOUR LAST TRAIN CANNOT.

Mira left it.

Some annotations were civic infrastructure.