Chapter 7: Avalanche — The Train Stops Moving

The avalanche came from both directions at once.

Celestine felt it before she heard it — a shift in the train's sound, the particular quality of the mountain silence changing, thickening, becoming something with weight. She had been in the dining car for twenty minutes, sitting across from Solano without speaking, both of them holding tea they were not drinking, when the first vibration moved through the floor like a word spoken too low to interpret. Then the second. Then the sound arrived: not a crash but a compression, the air itself pressing inward from both ends of the train simultaneously, and the windows went white.

The Celestial Arrow did not shake. It simply stopped.