The conductor barely glanced at the visas and invitation letters I’d carried so carefully across Estonia.

“Passports,” was all she said.

A hand outstretched.

She compared our faces against a handwritten ledger, nodded once, and stepped aside.

Inside, lace curtains hung in the windows. Instrumental music drifted through the speakers—dramatic enough to contrast the aging diesel train.

We found our seats and watched the last passengers climb aboard while another melody began.

The train lurched forward.

Three hours later it stopped again.

No announcement. Just silence.

A guard carrying a rifle walked down the aisle collecting passports. Another followed with a German shepherd whose attention settled almost entirely on the bananas Dani had bought in Tallinn.

The passports disappeared.

So did the train.

For the next few hours we moved in hundred-foot increments, stopped, waited, then moved again.

Somewhere beneath us workers lifted each carriage from its wheels so they could replace the European wheelsets with wider Russian ones.

We never saw it happen.

We only felt the car rise, shudder, and settle back onto the new rails.

~

Earlier I’d walked toward the restroom and found a man smoking between the cars.

He wore black from head to toe. Tattoos covered his knuckles.

He said something as I passed.

I stammered.

“Sorry. English.”

He smiled, reached for his phone, and dropped it. The battery skittered one direction, the cover another.

For a moment we both stared at the pieces.

Then I picked them up and handed them back.

He nodded, and I took my seat.

~

Hours later, our passports returned. The woman who checked them, now dressed in civilian clothes, took a seat beside us.

Behind us, darkness set between the trees.

Ahead of us, the tracks multiplied into a forest of rails beneath steel canopies.

~

Everyone crowded the vestibules before the train had stopped.

We joined them.

Then doors opened, and we moved into the cold.