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Edith steps toward her. “No, Schatzi, I—”

“Stop calling me that!” Anna snaps. “Don’t you ever call me that again.”

“You have every right to be angry. You have suffered terribly.” Edith shakes her head, as if she wasn’t one of the causes of that suffering. “But what happened, it was not personal. You must understand that.”

Anna recoils in disbelief, astonished Edith could say such a thing.

Her brother wasn’t just killed, he was erased, leaving no trace, as if he never existed.

Her father was murdered so violently that Anna still can’t comprehend it.

Her mother chose to join them in death rather than stay alive with Anna.

All because of something Edith was a part of. That made it very personal.

“My entire family is gone,” she says.

Edith gives a curt nod. “As is mine.”

“But I didn’t cause that. No one in my family did. Yet they’re dead. Because of you.”

It takes Anna every ounce of self-control to not wrap her hands around Edith’s neck. She keeps them clenched at her sides, aching to experience the sensation a second time. A finger twitches when she notices a slight bob in Edith’s throat as she says, “I never wanted to hurt you or your family.”

“But you did.”

“Because there was a war going on,” Edith says, as if that excuses it. “That’s the cruelty of war. It makes good people do terrible things for their country.”

“But you weren’t in Germany. You were here. In America. With us.”

“Just because someone leaves their home doesn’t mean they no longer love it. Nor does it mean they won’t do anything to help it.”

“That’s what you thought you were doing?” Anna says as she absently touches the tiny silver locomotive pinned to her chest, reminding her of everything she has lost. “Helping your homeland?”

“Of course that’s what I was doing.”

Anna’s entire body goes rigid when she realizes what’s just happened.

Edith has confessed.

Not that Anna had any doubt she was involved. Aunt Retta’s boxes of proof made sure of that. But it’s more shocking when coming from Edith herself. More painful, too. Especially the part about why Edith had betrayed her family.

“You testified under oath that you thought my father was a German sympathizer.” Anna’s hands continue to clench, all but begging her to reach out, encircle Edith’s neck, squeeze. “But it turns out you were merely talking about yourself.”

“I refuse to apologize for my beliefs,” Edith says.

“But you’re still going to pay for them. And you should be afraid of what’s coming.”

“Perhaps,” Edith says with a resigned sigh. “But when you reach my age, you find that things you once feared don’t scare you anymore.”

“Not even death?”

Edith fixes Anna with an enigmatic smile and says, “There’s no reason to fear what’s inevitable.”

To Anna, that cryptic grin seems like an invitation. As if Edith, knowing what’s coming, wants to be put out of her misery just like Judd Dodge was. And Anna’s tempted to oblige her. So very tempted that she thrusts her still-twitching hands behind her, fingers intertwined.

She needs to leave.

Right now.

Before she loses all control again.

“Killing my brother and framing my father helped nothing, ” she says.

“I hope you eventually understand that. In the last moments of your life, I hope you realize it was a mistake. That everything you did was a waste. And when you take your final breath, I hope the only things you feel are pain, fear, and regret. Because that’s all you deserve. ”

Anna turns and hurries out of the observation car before Edith can respond. She refuses to give her the last word.

In Car 13, the light fixture that had been flickering across from Room C has gone out, casting that end of the corridor in thick shadow. Standing in the gloom, Anna sees someone exiting through the door at the front of the car.

A man. All she catches is the back of his head and the breadth of his shoulders. Enough for her to think that his frame doesn’t match anyone else on the train. Seamus, Lapsford, and Herb Pulaski are broader, Dante and Reggie narrower.

Now it’s too late to see more. Whoever it was is gone.

Worried by the prospect of someone else roaming the train, Anna surges through the otherwise silent hall. The door to Room A opens a crack as she passes, giving Anna a glimpse of Herb Pulaski peering nervously into the corridor.

“Stay in your room,” she tells him. “Keep your door locked.”

She keeps moving, pleased to see that no doors are open in Car 12. Hopefully everyone is where they should be.

Locked in their rooms.

Alone.

Safe.

When Anna enters Car 11, she again sees the door at the opposite end just beginning to shut. This time, she runs through the car, trying to catch up to the man in the lounge.

It turns out to be completely empty. Yet the car feels only recently vacated. As if someone had just been there seconds earlier. So Anna moves on, into the dining car, which despite being fully lit contains a similar shiver of another person’s recent presence.

It goes on like this as Anna progresses to the front of the train, pushing through car after car.

Galley. Club car. Coach lounge. Each one is empty.

By the time she reaches the coach cars, all hope that she might be following someone is gone.

No one is here, a fact Anna realizes when she reaches the cavernous luggage car.

She even tries the door to the locomotive, thinking the person she saw might have been Burt Chapman, the engineer.

It wasn’t. The door is still locked.

And whoever it was has completely vanished.

Anna backtracks, returning to the second half of the train.

When she enters the dining car, she comes to a stop just beyond the door.

The car, which had been lit when she passed through minutes earlier, is now pitch dark.

And while she considers the idea of an electrical malfunction of some sort, Anna knows in her gut that someone turned the lights off on purpose.

Someone just now moving through the door at the back of the car. Through the quickly closing gap, Anna spots the same person she half saw leaving Car 13. It’s only a partial glimpse. A sliver of a second in which the man looks to the side, revealing his profile before slipping from view.

Anna stops in her tracks, overcome by a sudden, startling chill.

She recognizes the man, even though his presence on the train is impossible.

He’s been dead for a dozen years.

And while she knows it could be a trick of the light or exhaustion clouding her vision or even a lingering scrap of nightmare, Anna can’t shake the feeling that—despite all logic and reason and laws of nature—she’s just seen her brother.