Everyone has their preordained position, and everyone is in their place except me
Seventeen years of circling the dead world taught the tail one law before any other: a train this long does not run on coal. It runs on the people it can afford to forget.
I spent the first weeks of the new year counting rivets. Not from boredom — there is no boredom back here, only the long arithmetic of survival — but because the rivets are the only honest thing in the tail car. They do not lie about what holds this place together: cold steel, hammered cold, riveted in the dark.
The protein blocks arrive at the same hour each day, slid through a hatch by hands we never see. Last winter a man named Edgar pried one open and found, beneath the gelatin, the thing none of us wanted to name. We ate them anyway. That is the first lesson of the rear: you learn the shape of the engine by the shape of what it denies you.