The bus shouldn't have been there.
Alex stood at the edge of the crosswalk, breath ghosting white in the late-winter air, plastic grocery bag biting into his fingers. The light at Wabash and Monroe bled from green to yellow to red. Cars rolled to a grudging stop. Someone beside him cursed under their breath at the cold.
And there, at the curb, where a 147 should have been, was…nothing he recognized.
The bus waited, engine purring softly.
No route number. No CTA logo. Just a long, dull-gray shape shouldered up against the curb, its sides smooth and unmarked, as if it had never belonged to any city or company at all. Its windows were so dark he couldn't see even the hint of a reflection in them.
He hadn't seen it pull up.
One moment the street had been empty except for the usual rush-hour traffic; the next, this bus sat idle, doors yawning open, exhaling a slow breath of warm air into the cold.
A few people had already boarded. He couldn't remember watching them get on, either.
"Hey, does that thing even go downtown?" a man behind him muttered, voice threaded with skepticism and annoyance.
Alex didn't answer. The hairs on his arms prickled beneath his coat. Something about the bus was wrong in a way he couldn't define. It wasn't just the lack of markings or the blacked-out windows.
It felt…patient.
As if it were waiting not for passengers, but for *him*.
He swallowed, throat suddenly dry. Maybe it was just the late shift messing with his head. He'd pulled a double at the warehouse, then spent half an hour in line at the twenty-four-hour grocery store. His body ached. His mind hummed with that scraped-out, jittery exhaustion that made everything feel slightly unreal.
He tightened his grip on the plastic bag, fingers going numb against the cheap handles.
The crosswalk light changed. White WALK figure glowing.
He could turn right. Cut across to State, catch the 146 like he always did. Go home to his tiny apartment, his lukewarm leftovers, the comforting glow of a crappy TV show. Fall asleep fully clothed on the couch like he did most nights.
Instead, his feet moved left.
One step off the curb. Two. Toward the gray bus with no route and no destination.
He didn't remember deciding.
As he approached, the air near the open door changed. The city's familiar cocktail of exhaust, wet concrete, and stale fryer oil thinned, replaced by something flat and neutral. The bus smelled like nothing at all. No diesel, no old vinyl, no trace of other people ever having been inside.
His skin crawled.
Turn around, a small voice in the back of his head urged. *This is stupid. This is how horror movies start. Wrong bus, wrong neighborhood, you wake up missing a kidney.*
He kept walking.
The steps up into the bus were slightly too steep, as if made for longer legs than his. He grabbed the metal pole beside the door, expecting the familiar chill of steel in winter.
It was room temperature. Smooth. Almost soft, like bone polished by many hands.
No driver.
The seat where the driver should have been was occupied by a…shape. It had the general outline of a person in a bulky coat, head turned forward, hands resting on an invisible wheel. But its features were swallowed by shadow, edges too blunted to resolve into anything specific. No face. No skin. Just an absence in the shape of a human being.
"Uh," Alex said automatically, the syllable half-formed.
His voice died in his throat.
Not metaphorically; it simply refused to cross from thought to sound. His mouth moved, lips shaping the word, lungs pushing air, but nothing emerged. Not even the rasp of breath.
His ears filled instead with a soft, high ringing, like the after-note of a struck crystal.
The shape in the driver's seat did not turn.
Behind him, on the sidewalk, a car alarm whooped once, distant and thin.
The bus's interior was nearly empty. Rows of seats. Gray. Clean. Too clean. No gum ground into the floor, no stray wrappers, no graffiti etched into plastic backs. A fluorescent light strip ran the length of the ceiling, flickering with a slow, arrhythmic pulse.
Five other people sat scattered throughout the bus.
A woman in her fifties with a heavy down coat and a bright knitted hat clutched a purse in her lap, knuckles white. A teenage boy in a school uniform hunched over a backpack, eyes wide and unfocused. A man in a business suit sat rigidly upright near the middle, hands folded so tightly on his knees that the tendons stood out like cords.
Two others near the back: a young woman with headphones around her neck—no music playing; the wire dangled limp—and another man about Alex's age in a leather jacket, one foot tapping soundlessly against the floor.
None of them spoke.
They watched him with the wary, brittle attention of animals that had already been startled once and were waiting for the next shock.
Alex hesitated at the top of the stairs.
He should leave. Just pivot, step backward, let gravity take him down onto the sidewalk and into the comfortingly grimy arms of Chicago. Tell himself later that he'd narrowly avoided getting shanked or trafficked or whatever his imagination could justify.
He turned his head to look out through the bus door.
Chicago was gone.
The sidewalk, the intersection, the grocery store, the cars—all of it had faded, replaced by a lightless pane of gray that pressed right up against the bus's double doors. Not fog. Not dark. Just *nothing*. A wall of absence so complete his brain refused to admit it had depth.
The doors hissed shut with a final, hydraulic sigh.
The sound echoed like the closing of a vault.
Panic scalded up his spine.
He spun back toward the driver's seat. His hands grabbed for the rail, for the door mechanism, for *something*.
"Hey!" he tried to shout, and again—nothing. His voice was a stone thrown into a void. No splash. No ripples.
The shadow-shape in the driver's seat lifted one hand.
It pressed something that might have been a button.
The world lurched.
The bus moved.
Not forward, not in any direction he could feel. There was no sense of acceleration, no sway, no rumble of tires. The environment outside—if there was an outside—remained a blank gray. But his body recognized motion on some level deeper than balance.
His stomach dropped, the way it did in fast elevators. His ears popped once, painfully.
He grabbed the nearest pole with both hands, knuckles straining.
Across from him, the man in the suit spoke.
"What is this?" The words came out ragged, too loud in the muffled air. Sharp with brittle authority that sounded like it worked on interns and customer service reps.
Everyone on the bus flinched.
Including Alex.
The man's voice was the first real sound he'd heard since stepping up the stairs. It cut through the soft, oppressive silence like a razor, too bright, too defined. Wrong.
A beat of stillness followed.
The fluorescent light overhead flickered.
The ringing in Alex's ears jumped up a pitch, instant headache. The air seemed to thicken, turning syrupy in his lungs. The world pressed inward, every surface leaning just slightly toward the man in the suit, as if the bus itself had taken offense.
The man didn't seem to notice.
"I asked you a question," he snapped, twisting in his seat to glare at the shadow in the driver's place. "What is this? Some kind of—of prank? You can't just lock the doors and—"
"Don't," the older woman hissed, the word barely more than a ghost of breath.
Her eyes were huge, pupils blown, fixed unblinkingly on the man's moving mouth.
He ignored her.
Silence fell again, thick and waiting.
The bus shuddered once.
The fluorescent Lights hummed with a low, hungry buzz.
Alex's fingers dug into the pole until they hurt. Every instinct screamed that something was about to happen, something bad, but he couldn't look away.
The man in the suit took a deep, furious breath.
"This is illegal. You can't just—"
He vanished.
There was no flash. No dramatic puff of smoke. One moment he was there, voice snapping through the air, hands slicing in emphasis. The next, the space he occupied was empty.
His coat remained for a fraction of a second, slumping inward without the body to hold it, then collapsed flat on the seat. His briefcase thumped to the floor with a dull, final sound.
Alex's brain tried to pretend he had simply moved very fast—stood up, ducked into the aisle, dropped to the floor—but there was nowhere for him to have gone. No blur of motion. No displaced air.
Just existence, and then non-existence.
An erasure.
The word slid into his mind with an awful, icy familiarity.
His stomach flipped. His grip on the rail loosened just enough that his knees went watery.
The older woman clapped a hand over her mouth, shoulders shaking. The teenager squeezed his eyes shut, lips moving in a rapid, silent prayer. The girl with the headphones curled in on herself, fingers pressed hard against the sides of her neck, as if feeling for proof that her pulse still existed.
No one screamed.
No one *could*.
Alex's throat worked. Hysterical laughter bubbled just under his tongue, blocked by the same invisible wall that had swallowed his attempts to speak.
The bus took another shuddering, directionless step through nothing.
The shadow in the driver's seat did not move. Did not flinch. Did not acknowledge what had happened at all.
A soft chime rang from somewhere above the windshield. A tiny digital display flickered to life near the front, where route numbers normally glowed.
No numbers. Just three words, in harsh, blocky, too-perfect letters:
DO NOT SPEAK.
The message burned there for three slow pulses of the fluorescent lights.
Then the words winked out, leaving only the blank panel and the humming silence.
Alex stared at the empty seat where the suited man had been.
He could still see the indentation his body had made in the cushion, spring foam slow to recover from the weight. The coat, crumpled and abandoned. The briefcase, its latch half-open, a corner of paperwork peeking out.
Could he touch it? Would that make a difference?
He didn't move.
The others didn't either.
They were five now. Five people in a bus that belonged to nowhere, moving through nothing toward a destination none of them had chosen.
The plastic grocery bag handle bit deeper into his palm. His fingers had gone numb.
He tried to think.
The System's presence was gone; he felt that clearly, like the sudden absence of a pressure he hadn't consciously noticed. It had shoved him onto this path and then withdrawn, letting the track carry him.
His thoughts scattered and re-formed around one dull, insistent point: The man had spoken and then he was gone.
DO NOT SPEAK.
Fine, Alex thought, swallowing hard. *Fine. I won't.*
Minutes passed. Or maybe seconds. Time had gone unreliable. There were no landmarks, no scenery, no rhythm of stopping and going to mark distance. Just the soft hum of the overhead lights and the low, steady purr of the engine that might not have been an engine at all.
Gradually, the grip of raw panic lessened, giving way to something colder, more functional. His breathing slowed. His hands stopped shaking.
He wasn't in control. But that didn't mean he had to roll over and stop thinking.
He counted the other passengers. Five, including him. He memorized their faces without intending to: the deep grooves bracketed around the older woman's mouth; the acne scars on the teenager's cheeks; the chipped black nail polish on the young woman; the faint stubble shadowing the jaw of the guy in the leather jacket.
If there were rules at work here—and there *were*, there had to be—he'd need allies. Or at least someone else to push into the fire if it came to that.
The thought came unbidden and ugly. He didn't like it. But he didn't swat it away, either.
Outside the windows, the gray shifted.
Not much. Not dramatically. Just a faint lightening, like dawn behind a particularly impenetrable fog. Shapes hinted at themselves; angles, verticals, shadows.
His ears popped again, a sharp, painful crackle.
The bus slowed.
He could feel it *this* time, a ghost of drag against momentum. The hum under his feet dropped pitch, then faded.
The engine—that illusion of an engine—fell silent.
The fluorescent lights buzzed quietly.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then the bus doors sighed open.
Cold air knifed in, carrying with it the faintest traces of a new world: dry, sharp, clean. No exhaust. No city rot. No human density. Just a blank, crisp emptiness that tasted like untouched snow.
Alex's fingers tightened on the pole.
No one moved.
The open doorway framed the outside like a picture.
He saw an expanse of paved square, its surface dusted with thin, undisturbed snow. Low buildings ringed the space, all of them two stories high, all of them the same bland shade of pale, their windows shuttered or curtained. A clock tower rose at the far end of the square, narrow and old-fashioned, its face a white circle with black hands frozen at twelve.
No footprints marred the snow in the square. Not a single one.
The sky above was a hard, cloudless gray.
Pinned to a wooden board a few steps from the bus sat a sheet of paper, corners fluttering in a wind Alex couldn't feel from here. The text was large enough to read even from inside the bus.
WELCOME TO THE TOWN OF SILENCE
RULES FOR CONTINUED EXISTENCE
His skin crawled again, the sensation crawling up from spine to scalp.
Behind him, the older woman whispered, "Oh God," voicelessly. He saw the shape of the words on her lips, but the sound never reached the air.
The young guy in the leather jacket looked around, eyes widening, as if just realizing the same thing.
The teenager's backpack zipper trembled in his fingers.
The girl with the headphones hunched deeper into her oversized hoodie, shoulders near her ears.
Alex swallowed. His mouth tasted like metal.
The driver-shadow did not turn. Did not gesture. But something about its posture communicated a single, inevitable command:
Disembark.
He let go of the pole slowly, flexing his fingers to work some blood back into them.
"If I stay here?" he thought. The question went nowhere. No response rose from the empty space where the System's attention had been.
He stepped down.
The air outside hit him like a wall. Not cold—well, yes, cold, but not the damp, busy cold of Chicago winter. This was a dry, still chill that felt *empty*. No people. No cars. No heaters. Just the raw, unmodified temperature of a place that did not have to share its atmosphere with anyone.
The snow beneath his shoes squeaked faintly. Too faintly. The sound cut off after the first crunch, swallowed by the same invisible pressure that had devoured his attempts to speak.
He turned back.
The others filed out behind him: the older woman, the teenager, the headphone girl, the leather jacket guy. They moved with the cautious, shell-shocked care of people who weren't sure which misstep would drop them through the world.
As soon as the last foot left the bus's floor, the doors closed.
The bus didn't pull away. It didn't drive off. It simply…was no longer there.
One blink, it loomed dead and gray at the edge of the square. The next, the space it had occupied was empty pavement, a thin layer of snow, and no sign of tracks.
The group turned in a slow, collective circle.
The town square watched them with shuttered eyes.
Buildings faced inward on all four sides, identical down to the tilt of their roofs. No signs. No shop names. No street numbers. Just blank windows and doors that did not look like they wanted to be opened.
The only thing that moved was the paper on the wooden board, its edges flickering in the windless air.
Alex stepped toward it.
Each step felt like walking onto the stage of a play he hadn't rehearsed for.
The heading remained the same:
WELCOME TO THE TOWN OF SILENCE
RULES FOR CONTINUED EXISTENCE
Beneath that, in crisp, dark letters, four rules.
He read them once, then again, his brain refusing to accept them as real instructions and instead trying, absurdly, to find the punchline.
They didn't change.
1. AFTER MIDNIGHT, YOU MUST NOT SPEAK.
2. DO NOT HUM. DO NOT SING.
3. IF YOU HEAR KNOCKING ON YOUR DOOR AFTER 3 A.M., DO NOT OPEN IT.
4. ALWAYS KEEP A CANDLE LIT BETWEEN DUSK AND DAWN.
His heart thudded painfully against his ribs.
They weren't suggestions. They weren't quaint local ordinances. They were teeth.
The older woman moved to his side, scarf brushing his sleeve. She read over his shoulder, lips forming the words. He watched her face slacken, then tighten, as the meaning sank in.
The teenager hovered a few feet back, eyes darting between the board and the blank facades of the houses, as if expecting something to lunge from the nearest doorway.
The girl with the headphones stayed further away, arms wrapped around herself, headphones resting uselessly at her collarbone. Her gaze snagged on the word *candle* and didn't move.
The guy in the leather jacket stepped up to Alex's other side, his jaw set. He glanced at Alex, then back at the board, then at Alex again, eyes asking a question neither of them could voice.
Alex stared at the rules until the letters blurred.
AFTER MIDNIGHT, YOU MUST NOT SPEAK.
He didn't need the memory of the bus's display—or the absence where the suited man had been—to understand that this wasn't a metaphor. Midnight. Not a minute before. Not a second after.
DO NOT HUM. DO NOT SING.
It felt oddly specific. Arbitrary. Like the fine print on a contract no one read until it was too late. Why humming? Why singing? What did it call? What did it *invite*?
IF YOU HEAR KNOCKING ON YOUR DOOR AFTER 3 A.M., DO NOT OPEN IT.
His mind supplied the image unbidden: a door in the dark, thin wood rattling under insistent knuckles. The temptation to check. The human reflex that hated unanswered doors, unanswered calls.
Whatever was outside at three in the morning in this place, it wasn't needing help.
ALWAYS KEEP A CANDLE LIT BETWEEN DUSK AND DAWN.
He looked up at the sky. It was impossible to tell what time of day it was here; the light was a flat, source-less gray, offering no clear direction, no warmth. But dusk would come. Night would fall. And there would be no streetlights, no city glow, no comforting hum of modern infrastructure.
Just candles.
"If we can't speak after midnight," the leather jacket guy mouthed slowly, silently, his lips over-enunciating each word, "what happens if we do?"
Alex flicked his gaze from the guy's lips to his eyes, then back to the board.
He didn't know.
But he had seen what happened when someone broke a rule on the bus.
A faint indentation in an empty seat.
A coat slumped on a cushion.
A briefcase still on the floor.
Erasure.
He shaved a breath in and out through his nose, forcing his brain to organize.
Four rules. That was it, for now. Four clear instructions that might keep them alive long enough to learn the hidden ones. Because there would be more. The System had said as much: written, implied, hidden. Not all true.
He stared at the printed lines, half-expecting them to rearrange themselves into something more comforting. They didn't.
"Okay," he thought, directing the word at the blank sky, at the hushed square, at the absence where the System's voice had been.
The town did not answer.
The silence here was deeper than the quiet of an early morning street or an empty hallway. It was an active thing, heavy and deliberate, pressing the air flat. It swallowed potential sound as greedily as the bus had swallowed the man's words.
Behind him, footsteps crunched faintly in the snow. He turned.
The other four survivors looked to him—not quite consciously, not with any expectation that he had answers—but with the desperate, human habit of seeking a focal point. Someone to move first. Someone to tell them this was all going to be fine, or at least survivable.
He lifted his gaze back to the board, reading the first rule one more time.
AFTER MIDNIGHT, YOU MUST NOT SPEAK.
He pressed his lips together.
The invitation had been delivered: a silent bus to a silent town, with four rules pinned up like a welcome mat soaked in warning.
He hadn't accepted this game. He hadn't signed up. But he was here, breath steaming in the still air, heart pounding in his chest, every nerve lit.
The only way forward was through the rules.
At his back, the Town of Silence waited, doors shut, windows dark, candles unlit.
Alex Parker, Participant 3279, took his first step into World 1.