The Ferrogate decommissioned Line 7 in 2184 after the Midtown collapse made the eastern tunnel structurally unsound. The tracks are still there. The power has been off for sixteen years. But at 3:14 AM on nights when the fog rolls in off the lake, you can hear a train running on those tracks. Not the ghost of a sound — the actual, physical vibration of steel wheels on steel rails, the pressure wave of displaced air, the Doppler shift of something massive moving at speed through a tunnel that has no power, no signal, and no scheduled traffic.

Shelter workers in the adjacent maintenance tunnels report feeling the train pass. The walls shake. Dust falls from the ceiling. One woman, Keiko Abimbola-Roux, who sleeps in the decommissioned station at the end of Line 7, swears the train stops. She says the doors open. She says there are passengers inside, sitting in their seats, facing forward, not moving. She says the lights inside the train are a color she cannot name — not blue, not white, not green, something her eyes refuse to categorize. She says it waits for exactly ninety seconds, and then the doors close and it leaves.

Two Ferrogate engineers were dispatched to investigate after a cluster of reports in 2198. They found the tracks polished to a mirror shine — the friction-wear pattern of a train that runs regularly on rails that are supposed to be abandoned. They also found that their recording equipment malfunctioned the moment they entered the station. Every device. Simultaneously. Ferrogate closed the investigation and sealed the station entrance. The shelter workers found another way in within a week.

Keiko says the train has never tried to hurt anyone. She says it just runs its route, the way it always did. She says the passengers never look at her. She says she tried to board once, and the doors would not let her through — not locked, not blocked, but the air inside the doorway was solid, like glass you could not see. She says this is not her train. It belongs to whoever is riding it, and they are going somewhere she cannot follow.