The Tram That Fogged a Terminal

The tram left the quay with a sound like a kettle deciding.

Bee sat by the window until the window became weather. Her father’s terminal refused a fare as if the sea had followed them inland. The conductor, who had seen this religion, took paper and did not sermonize.

Joss was not on the tram. He was a crate height behind them. That was the deal.

Sila Ren stood in the aisle with the broom-hand still in her muscles. She did not sit. Sitting made her a passenger. She was still a pit, slightly.

A Spireward man tried to put a bag on a seat that had a person in it, conceptually. The person was a Harbor coat. The coat won.

Glassmere Central arrived like a brighter argument. Boards. On time, then not. Mira Solt’s platform was a different shift. Coda Vale did not appear; even Coda had to be elsewhere sometimes, or she would become a key, and she refused.

Bee’s father said, “This is a city.”

Bee said, “The other one is also.”

He had no reply that was not Exchange.

They changed for the interior line. Terminals unfogged, arrogant. Civic Network offered Bee a junior survey on belonging. She typed TIDE and thought of an usher she had never met.

Sila got off at a water building that did not look like a pit. She paused.

“If he frames the table I wrote, I’ll deny it.”

Bee said, “I’ll hide it in a recipe book.”

That was the Old Circuit solution, leaking.

The tram took the rest of them into numbers.

Harbor Reach receded without becoming picturesque.

It stayed work.

Bee, at school later, did not tell the Search Engine Wars seminar about the pit. She told it about a conductor who still knew paper.

Oren Beck wrote paper fare in the complication column and did not ask her to publish.

The tram, somewhere, fogged another terminal.

That was not a metaphor.

That was salt.