Fire. I've always loved fire. The flame glistened in front of me. I have always had an obsession with fire yet I still feel fear when near it. As I am admiring the flame I see the motion of a hand clasping and the flame is extinguished.

“You get the vid?” Cayden asks, shaking off his hand.

“Oh…my bad” I mutter.

“Chris!” he says with his voice raised “If I am going to light my hand on fire you gotta at least be ready to record.” He passes me the bottle of hand sanitizer, “Wanna try?” he asks as he lights his lighter.

“Maybe we should stop,” This is already bad enough it would be worse if someone finds us down here we can only get in more trouble.

“Fine, my hand stings anyway” he replies. “Let's find Geo” he says before exiting the tunnel where we hang out.

“Okay” I say as I follow him out.

The morning sun's rays hit my face and I put my hood up doing my best to block them. It is not long before we reach the front doors of the school and I can see the crowd of people inside. I let out a sigh before following Cayden in.

Cayden is shorter than me. I am 5’10”. He has dark brown hair that he dyes often and he's wearing tattered clothes like usual. He has the same red sneakers that I bought for him because his keep falling apart.

We walk into the school and scour the halls until we see Geo on the floor by the brick pillar. I walk to him and smack him across the side of the head, making sure to avoid his headphones and not accidentally breaking them.

Geo is shorter than Cayden, and rounder. He always wears the same red hoodie and jeans. His hair is also brown like me and Cayden’s.

“Are we still goin tonight?” Cayden asks us.

I respond “Yup, see y'all there.” This can only end in us getting in trouble, yet the thought of the thrill makes me only yearn for it more.

The trainyard sat at the edge of town where the streetlights thinned and the road gave up, a sprawl of rusted rails and idle freight cars stitched together by weeds and shadow. During the day it looked abandoned in a boring way. At night, it felt like something that had simply chosen not to leave.

Cayden was the one who suggested it. He said it casually, like the idea had just wandered into his head.

“Let’s go see it at night,” he said. “Bet it’s different.”

Chris snorted, hands jammed into his jacket pockets. “Everything’s different at night. That’s the whole problem.”

Geo didn’t say anything at first. He was looking past them, toward the dark line where the trainyard waited. He had grown up near it, close enough to hear the trains back when they still ran through regularly. He knew the sounds they should make.

“Fine,” Geo said, eventually. “But we don’t stay long.”

They went just after midnight, when the town emptied out, like someone had pressed pause. The chain-link fence had a gap they didn’t talk about. None of them wanted to admit they’d noticed it before.

Inside, the air smelled wrong—metallic and cold, even though it was late summer. Their footsteps sounded too loud on the gravel, echoes jumping between the cars and coming back… not quite right. Delayed, maybe. Or rearranged.

Chris shined his flashlight down the length of a boxcar. The beam seemed to bend oddly, like it didn’t want to touch the far end.

“Okay,” he muttered. “That’s new.”

They walked deeper, rails crisscrossing under their feet like a map that refused to make sense. Cayden kept grinning, but it was tight, performative. Geo noticed he kept glancing behind them.

That was when they heard it.

Not a train. Not footsteps. A sound like metal being counted—slow, deliberate taps moving along the cars. One. Two. Three. Always stopping just out of sight.

Chris froze. “You hear that too, right?”

Another tap. Closer.

Geo swallowed. “Yeah.”

They turned a corner between two tankers, and the sound stopped.

The silence that replaced it was worse. It pressed in, thick enough that Geo became aware of his own breathing, his heartbeat, the way his name felt in his head when he thought it. He had the sudden, irrational certainty that if he forgot it—even for a second—something else would decide what he was called instead.

Cayden laughed, sharp and brittle. “You guys are freaking yourselves out.”

Then the writing appeared.

It wasn’t graffiti. It was too neat, too precise. Letters etched into the side of a car as if the metal had been softened and scratched like butter.

CAYDEN

He stared at it, the grin gone. “That’s not funny.”

Another word formed beside it, metal quietly warping with a sound like distant thunder.

CHRIS

Chris backed away. “Geo. Geo, I don’t like this.”

The flashlight flickered. For a split second, Geo thought he saw something reflected in the dull curve of the tanker—not a face, not a body, but a shape made of angles that didn’t agree on how many sides they had.

The last name didn’t appear right away.

The tapping resumed. Slower now. Expectant.

Geo felt a pull, subtle but insistent, like the moment before you remember a word you’ve forgotten. He realized, with cold clarity, that the thing didn’t know him yet. Not properly.

“Don’t,” he said, though he wasn’t sure to whom.

The metal screamed.

GEO carved itself into the car, deeper than the others. Too deep. The rail beneath their feet shuddered, and the tapping stopped.

For a moment, nothing happened.

Then Cayden gasped.

“I can’t—” He pressed a hand to his chest. “I can’t remember why we came here.”

Chris blinked rapidly. “What do you mean? We just—”

He stopped. His expression went blank, like a thought had been erased mid-sentence.

Geo felt it then, the thing moving away, satisfied. Not hungry—complete. It had taken something small, something precise. Not memories, exactly. Context. The threads that told a story who it belonged to.

They ran.

They didn’t look back, didn’t stop until they were through the fence and halfway home, lungs burning. Streetlights returned. Sound returned. The world stitched itself back together.

Cayden laughed weakly. “That was… wow. That was messed up.”

Chris nodded, though his eyes were unfocused. “Yeah. Totally.”

Geo watched them, dread pooling in his stomach.

Because when Cayden spoke, he didn’t say Chris’s name.

And Chris didn’t say Cayden’s.

Sometimes, when Geo walks past the edge of town, he hears tapping in the distance. Counting. Careful and patient.

He no longer goes near the tracks.

He is very careful to remember his name.