Elena Rostova kept one hand on the aluminum rail of Clara’s incubator.
Her titanium trauma crowbar swung from her scrub pants loop, tapping her knee with every vibration of the bus’s floorboards. She adjusted the clear plastic oxygen cannula running into Clara’s nose.
The air in the hangar was freezing. It smelled of stale transmission oil, damp river gravel, and sixty years of soot.
“Look at the stalls, Elena,” Mac Cole called out softly from the driver’s seat.
Elena looked through the side passenger windows.
Thirty decommissioned transit coaches sat parked in deep herringbone bays circling the central floor. They were relics from every decade of the city’s transit history: flat-front 1974 Flxibles with split windshields, boxy 1982 Grumman 870s, and long 1991 New Flyer artics coated in greasy grime.
Every single bus had its amber destination marquee illuminated.
ROUTE 12 — RIVER CAUSEWAY.
