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What's
happening?”
    “ This is normal, we’re
transitioning to the next station.”
    “ This is how it
happens?”
    “ It's different every
time,” he says, shrugging. The two, and the things around them
return fairly quickly to their proper shapes. Their physical senses
resurface over the seconds after. The wheels screech and shriek as
the amber rail becomes the scratched steel of another
Alto.
    “ We're getting off
here.”
    “ Where's here?”
    “ I don't know
yet.”
    “ We're lost?”
    “ Usually, but that’s a
state of mind, I think so anyway.”
    “ Are we lost or
not?”
    “ No worries, I know the
way. Were just making a quick stop.”
    “ Why‘re we getting off
here?”
    “ It's just a place, and
it's night time. To me anyway, you’re not tired? we should find a
place to rest.”
    “ Don't get any idea's,” she
says.
    “ Not until you spread
them,” he answers.
    A throbbing sensation
emanates from well within Anna's chest as they enter the station.
Her bones are reverberating through her vertebrae, her skin is
sliding over pulsating flesh. Seeing resonance in primary colors as
her sight, in strobes of flashes that grow to overlap and form into
vague shapes. At first seen as though she'd just woken up, then
slowly becoming defined and refined into a lucid physical
realism. The waaaaaa-ing in her ears
lowers to a bearable hum as the wheels screech then shriek,
spraying molten metal in coming to a complete stop. Just as they
and the trains interior becomes recognizable to her senses, and
rendered to definitive shapes, the doors slid open to the station.
She’s unsure, anxious of what she'll see , or be, in this Alto.
Again in the grips of gravity, she stands from sleeping limbs,
shedding vertigo with each step off the train. Merging into the morning swarms of coffee clad fists and
clean shaven faces. All with frightened eyes, awoken for
responsibility, are echoing the moonlit morning sunrise under a
band of crowding thunderclouds. She follows him, weaving in and out
of their flocks of peacoats while jostling through the in rushing
tide of shoulders and briefcases. He grabs for her hand, but gets
her sleeve, and tugs her through the clicking of heels and
shuffling of shoes.
    “ Keep your head down
through the crowd,” he says and she does. The sense of being
smothered by the slaloms of shoulders reminds her of swimming,
though actually drowning in racing thoughts of a new place. A new
play at life, a new plain, a new picture to live.
    “ Where to?”
    “ The path to anywhere,
everywhere and often nowhere in particular, your perception of it I
guess,” he says, then noticing the grimly grimacing faces floating
against the currents of the crowd. They start waving quartz and
brass badges, and shouting inaudibly while quickening their
approach toward the two. Pushing themselves through the strap
hangers swarming to their daily graves.
    “ Why so rough?” she says
“are they after us?”
    “ We've got to get out of
here.”
    “ We just got here,” she
says, counting three in pursuit, a fourth swipes at her head,
missing. Instead getting tangled with a pedestrian and falling
under the sleepily stampeding feet of the crowd. Giving Anna a look
of worry before being swept from sight. A gust of wind wipes a
newspaper stand into the air clouds of spreading sheets blot out
the sky with the morning's stories. A page of the InterAlto
timeless, a main InterAlto rag, shows a glimpse of a picture in
passing. Of a face and a passage and large letters reading “Wanted”
“alive or not so much, either way two thousand gallons silver”
“Apples ‘Cider’ Cider of the notorious juice box gang.” The face in
the picture is holding an expressionless gaze, unsettling her soul
and contradicting the boyish charm of the man leading her to
supposed safety.
    The two spill from the morning swarm
into the streets of a four story sleepy village the size of a small
city. They flee to the side streets, tucking