Excerpt: The Clockwork Experiment

I didn’t say goodbye to anyone. There was no one to say goodbye to. The aunts were all at work. So were the uncles. It was just me waiting at the train station on the platform. The train came, I stepped on, and that was that. I was alone. I could have been anyone, doing anything. I was insignificant, in everyone else’s minds. I was just the short, conservatively-dressed girl who sat in her seat and stared out the window. Eyes brushed over me without another glance.
But that was fine.
That was the way I wanted it to be: me, alone, and travelling. I was on my way; on my way to a new place, a new life, and new people. This train ride was the first step in the transformative process that would result in a new me. I didn’t want to be known by any of these people. I wasn’t anyone, at that moment. I was in an in-between place: neither my old self nor the new.
Trains, by their very nature, are an in-between place. They’re where you sit as you traverse the land between one place and another. Trains exist only in the Twilight Band: the strip of land going around the planet in which there was neither light nor darkness. The Band was filled with farms, roads, and waste depositories. No one lived there, and no one cared about it. It too, was an in-between place: the place between the Light side and the Dark Side.
I was going to the Dark Side.
My fifteenth birthday had fallen exactly five weeks prior to the day I left; the birthday that marks a person’s right, no, obligation to begin living a part of their lives on the other side of the planet: the side where there is no sun.
All across the planet, there were other people like me, my same age, which were also on trains. Some of them were alone, and others, by chance, happened to have travelling companions. We were all headed toward the same destination. Our lives were all about to be radically changed forever.
I smiled, and leaned my head against the cold glass of the window. I stayed like that for some time, neither awake nor asleep—just drifting aimlessly through the mists of my thoughts. I was in yet another in-between place, but then the train stopped. It lurched to a stop, and I was thrown back into the conscious world.
The whistle blew and the chugging sound of the engine slowed to a stop. I stood up and yanked open the door. No one followed me. I was the only one getting off at this stop. Glancing back at the last oasis of my past, I stepped off the train into the mysterious new world that was my future for the next month.
The train started up again and pulled away. Some of the other passengers were on their way to staying in the Dark Side as well, but I was different. This would be my first time. They’d done it before. They were going to a place they were familiar with, since they had been assigned their cities when they were my age. I was here; I was in a place that I had never been before, miles upon miles away from anyone I knew. They did that on purpose. No one is supposed to know anyone when they first come to the Shadow. That’s the point: to give you a completely clean slate.
And so I was born for the second time; a newborn baby in a strange and frightening world.