"Hold it," Razor hissed from the upper bunk. "Did you read Rule 6? Red light means you don’t go near it. Hold it or burst, I don’t care."

  The teenager—David still didn’t know his name, and at this point was assigning him the variable name Kid in his head—was beyond reason. The combination of extreme fear, physical discomfort, and the sound of the entity above David chewing on a human limb had overloaded whatever psychological load-bearing capacity a teenager possessed.

  "I can’t—I can’t—" Kid threw off his blanket, scrambled to the cabin door, wrenched it open, and ran.

  Razor lunged for him and missed. "Idiot! You’ll get us all killed!"

  David sat up. He didn’t try to stop Kid. The boy’s trajectory was already committed—he was in the corridor, running toward the bathroom with the desperation of someone whose bladder had overridden his survival instinct.

  Instead, David moved to the cabin door and looked down the corridor through the narrow gap.

  The hallway was lit by intermittent wall sconces that cast more shadow than light. At the far end, the bathroom door. Above it, the indicator: a circle of deep, arterial red.

  Red. Occupied. Do not enter. Do not look inside if the door is ajar.

  The door was ajar. A sliver of darkness visible through the gap, absolute and lightless, like a wound in the geometry of the train.

  Kid reached the bathroom. David watched the boy’s body language collapse in real time—the panicked sprint degrading to a stumbling halt as the red light registered in whatever remained of his conscious decision-making. He stood in front of the door, swaying, his bladder screaming at him, the red light screaming at him, every impulse in his body contradicting every other impulse.

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  And then—because the human brain, under sufficient stress, will always default to the action that resolves the most immediate source of discomfort—Kid leaned forward and peered through the crack.

  The hand came out so fast David’s True Sight barely tracked it. Pale, waterlogged, the fingers ending in nails that curved like fishhooks—it shot through the gap and into Kid’s right eye socket with the surgical precision of a system executing a predetermined kill sequence.

  Kid screamed. The sound was short, high, and terminated abruptly by the wet crunch of his skull being compressed by a force that should not have fit through a ten-centimeter gap. His two-hundred-pound body was pulled through the crack like cloth being fed through a wringer—bones breaking in sequence, from the skull down, each fracture a distinct acoustic event.

  Then silence. The red light pulsed once, brighter, and resumed its steady glow.

  Razor had collapsed against the cabin wall, his knife hand shaking so badly the blade was a silver blur. "Just... just like that," he whispered. "Gone."

  David watched the empty corridor for another five seconds, then pulled the cabin door mostly shut, leaving a two-finger gap for observation.

  His analysis was already running: Kid had violated Rule 6’s second clause by looking through the crack. The entity inside had executed a standard breach-and-kill—ambush predation triggered by a specific input (visual contact through the gap). The response was binary: either you looked or you didn’t. No partial credit. No warning shot.

  But Kid’s death had given David a data point he needed. The red-light entity was aggressive, yes—but it was also bound to the bathroom. It hadn’t pursued Kid into the corridor before he looked. It hadn’t reached through the gap preemptively. It was a reactive defense system, not a roaming threat.

  Which meant the bathroom was a territory with its own rules, its own ecosystem, and—if the pattern from the haunted house held—its own hidden clues.

  He just needed the light to turn green.

  And then, from the far end of the corridor, a new sound. Not the entity above them chewing. Something else entirely. Heavy, irregular footsteps. The sound of a body in which the structural integrity of the skeleton had been compromised at multiple points, dragging itself forward through sheer force of will or rage or hunger.

  Razor’s face went white. "Oh no. No, no, no—"

  He’d heard this sound before.