Czech Republic - Lida
Slovakia - Pavol

Ravis sat wedged in between Toris and Eduard on the train. Opposite them sat Feliks, Lida and Pavol, also squashed into the double seats they'd booked. There had been a confusion, a double booked seat somewhere, and Toris, being Toris, had stood up and said they wouldn't mind giving up a couple of their seats, which was fine to begin with, before they realised how small the seats actually were - barely large enough to accommodate one person, let alone another half. Admitably, it could have been worse. He got on well with Toris and Eduard. Opposite, Lida was busy shouting at Pavol for something that sounded slightly trivial. Pavol looked slightly zoned out, as though he'd given up listening to her a long time ago. Feliks was leaning against the window, his head rattling against the glass, talking with Toris over the table and every so often giving Lida a shove as she accidentally elbowed him.

Ravis shuffled uncomfortably and glanced up at Eduard who looked like he was falling asleep, head lolled back, glasses half falling off, mouth open and catching flies. He nudged him softly, careful not to wake him too suddenly. Eduard jumped a little and pushed his glasses back on his nose before glancing down at him.

"How long do we have left?" Ravis whispered.

Eduard checked his watch and sighed. "Two hours and forty-three minutes."

Toris glanced over at him and gave a tired look. Feliks blinked, confused looking and then turned to Lida. "Hey" he snapped. "Like, shut up."

Lida stopped talking for a second, giving Pavol a second for a sigh of relief. "It's not my fault" she huffed, folding her arms and leaning back in the seat as far as she could.

"Who's fault is it then?" Feliks raised an eyebrow at her and leant further against the window than he already was doing.

Lida shrugged. "He's left his bag in the meeting hall again. It's obviously his fault. He always leaves it, and it's always his fault."

"Hey" Pavol shouted in protest. "What about that time when you nearly set the kitchen on fire? That wasn't my fault."

"You were distracting me" Lida huffed. "But anyway, you're an idiot."

"And now that we've summed that up" Feliks said. "You can both shut up." Unbelievably, they both did. He smirked triumphantly and turned to Ravis. "Better?" Ravis nodded, and for a second it was: a normal train journey despite the cramped conditions, but the shouting was over and he could almost fall asleep like he normally did on long journeys.

That was, until the train grinded to a halt and the lights flickered off.

"What now?" Feliks sighed and peered out of the window. It wasn't dark out, so the train carriage itself wasn't cast into pitch black, but the sun was low in the sky, casting long shadows over the German countryside.

There was a faint click from above. "We are sorry for the disruption" a voice said from the intercom. "We are experiencing some minor rail faults at the present, but they will shortly be resolved and then we will..." the person was cut short and there was a sort of squelching sound on the other end before it was turned of.

"That can't be good" Eduard muttered.

"What if the counterparts have found us?" Pavol whispered as though keeping his voice down could hide them.

"You're not important enough to have a counterpart" Lida hissed.

"That was uncalled for" Feliks said blankly, not moving his gaze from the window. "Something's moving out there."

"They've found us" Pavol shivered and shuffled further down into his seat. "We're all going to die."

"No we're not" Lida huffed. "Stop being such a scaredy cat," but she didn't look to confident about the situation herself. "Everything's just fine." She patted his shoulder comfortingly and peered past Feliks' to see out of the window herself.

"I'll go up to the cabin and see what the problem is" Eduard slowly started to stand up. "It could just be a... a branch on the track or something."

"No!" Pavol grabbed his arm as he passed, earning strange looks from the people opposite. "What if they find you? What if they get you?"

"We're probably just all being paranoid" Eduard peeled his arm away from the other's grasp and stepped out of his reach. "It's probably nothing."

Ravis leaned out into the aisle to watch him go, watching until he'd disappeared through one of the carriage connecting doors.

"He'll be fine" Toris smiled. "As he said, we're just all getting worried about nothing. We've just been in a meeting, of course we're not very happy ourselves, but I assure you, everything will be just fine."

For the time being, that seemed to soothe everyone. Pavol loosened his grip on the arm of his seat, his knuckles white, Lida loosening her grip on him. Feliks stopped obsessively checking the window and outside as much as he had been doing and Ravis settled more into the seat, enjoying the perks of personal space for the first time in the entire journey. But as time drew on, the train stayed stationary, and as the hand on Toris' watch drew closer to the hour, Eduard didn't return.

"He's probably gone out to help them remove the branch?" Toris suggested, less certain of his own comfort words. It was now just over half an hour, closer to three-quarters, since Eduard had left. Ravis had given up on taking up the seat while he could and was burrowed into Toris' coat. It was at about that time that the door slid open and he shuffled over to peer down the aisle, hoping for a familiar face. What he saw though, wasn't exactly familiar, but wasn't unfamiliar. The person was pushing a cart in between the seats, apologising for the delay and handing out complimentary plastic cups of fruit juice. They had eyes of an icy colour, the pupils shaped into convex curves like a cat's eyes, which made Ravis instinctively think they must be contacts of some sort. It wasn't like he could really see them that well anyway; a heavy, white-blonde fringe hung down, covering up most of them and half a long, livid scar that ran down the length of their rather square-shaped face. They weren't exactly the type of person that you'd want working with customers. To be honest, Ravis' instinct told him to be scared of the person with the trolley, whom he could now identify as male. Maybe if he smiled a little, he wouldn't have looked as scary, but his face was cold, flat, dark and looking as though it hadn't seen the light of a smile for many years.

"Who is it?" Pavol shakily leaned out into the aisle, took one look at the person headed their way and let out a short shriek. "It's one of them. They've come for us."

"Shut up" Lida snapped, leaning over him to see for herself. She paled. "It actually is as well. What do we do?"

"Nothing" Feliks glanced over the seats and slouched. "We do nothing. They'll expect us to do something, so we do nothing, act normal, talk, chat, accept the drink he's offering and let him go on his way. If we all get up now and run, or make our way down the train he'll notice. If we do nothing, he may gloss over us."

"Why do we accept the drink?" Toris hissed. "He's probably poisoned it or something."

"More attention is drawn to someone who refuses something if you're a sales person like they're pretending to be" Feliks hissed back. "You want to get them to buy your product, drink your drink, and if they refuse, you talk to them, try to get them to buy your product, drink your drink. They accept, and you move on straight away, because there's more people out there you can sell or give to."

Toris blinked and peered over the seats. "He's getting closer. Who is it?"

"I don't know" Ravis peered out a little again. "I don't think I recognise him yet. Maybe... I don't know."

"We'll know sooner or later" Toris muttered.

Lida pursed her lips and sniggered. "That sounded dark. Some sort of future prediction type thing it sounded like."

"Are you Toris?" Pavol stared at him, wide eyed. "Have they switched you with someone else?"

Now, Lida burst out laughing, Toris chuckling too. "You're being too paranoid now" she laughed. "Of course it's him."

"I can assure you, it is me" Toris smiled.

Feliks turned around and peered over the seats one last time, making a small squeaking noise in the back of his throat and shuffled down so far his nose was touching the table. "He's here."

"Get up" Lida huffed, hauling him up by his arm as the trolley glided to a stop next to them. Pavol bit his lip and started drumming his fingers on the seat.

"Hello, sorry for the disruption" the man with cat eyes said with no empathy in his voice, or indication that he actually was sorry. "Have some grape juice." He held up one of the plastic cups and placed it on the table.

"Thank you" Toris stretched out a hand to take it giving the others an urging look to take cups of their own.

"You haven't be chance seen our friend have you?" Ravis said, looking shocked and horrified at the fact that he'd spoken himself. Lida pulled a face at him that made her look as if she was sucking a lemon.

He blinked. "I think I might have actually. Are you Toris and Ravis?" Ravis nodded, then mentally slapped himself for responding. "Yes, Eduard right?" Another nod, another mental slap and a glance across the table at Lida, who looked like she could kill him right there, and Pavol, who looked like he was about to collapse. "Yes, he actually asked for you. He's up in the cabin with the driver trying to get the train started again. Technological default. You can go up if you want."

Ravis glanced at Toris who nodded and they slipped out from behind the table, shuffling down the aisle. Feliks, Lida and the man with the cat eyes watched them go. Lida waited for them to go through the door at the end of the carriage before turning to Pavol to speak, faltering.

"Are you okay?"

***

Toris and Ravis wandered through the next two carriages, being ignored by everyone else, and noticing the lack of empty juice cups. No one seemed interested in them. They got to the end of the aisle in the last carriage and went through to a thin, short, horizontal corridor with a door at each end that separated the compartments from the driver's cabin, and provided them with an exit point when the train stopped. Toris opened the door slowly, peering around.

"Hey, Eduard?" he asked. Out of the front, he could see dark clouds swarming, and the sun slowly sinking behind the horizon. Inside the cabin though, it was bright, the yellow bulb hanging from the ceiling throwing out armfuls of light. He could see a couple of figures in the chairs just in front of him, both leaned back as though deep in thought. "How are you doing?" He reached forwards the tap Eduard's shoulder, and his hand came away wet, sticky and red. "Wh..." He grabbed the back of the chair and spun it around, met with the dull, lifeless eyes of his friend, the bloodied handprint on the left side of his face, and a neat pile of guts in his lap, coiled carefully around each other like a basket. 

Toris screamed.

"Toris?" Ravis poked his head around the door. "What's going on?"

"Just... I..." he took a step backwards and whipped around, yelping when he came face to face with Ravis. "Get out, get out, get out."

"What's happened?" Ravis tried to peer around him, his view being blocked.

"Just get out" Toris yelled, shoving him towards the door and twisting the handle. It was locked. "Hey" he shouted, banging on the glass window. The face that appeared on the other side was unmistakeably his own, but with darker hair and eyes, wearing a black suit.

"What's wrong?" they said, a smirk falling across their face. "Don't you like the improvements I made to him? I think he looks a lot better this way. Dead cute."

***

Lida didn't know what to do. Pavol was seized up in front of her, clutching at his throat with one hand, the other holding hers, and choking with a short, sharp wheezing noise. This had happened before obviously - for someone like Pavol, asthma attacks weren't exactly a rare thing, but with the counterpart she'd now recognised as Eduard's faffing about in front of him, making a fuss of pouring a drink and handing it to him, she wasn't a million percent positive on what the next best move would be. For all she knew, the contents of the drink that Pavol was trying to hold in a shaky grasp could kill him, or make everything worse.

It wasn't really helped that he'd left his inhaler in his bag, which he'd left in the meeting hall, but for once, she knew that shouting was not going to improve the situation.

"Any luck?" she glanced over the seats at Feliks, who was frantically asking around for spares, or anything of use. He shook his head. 

"Do you know what brought it on?" Eduard's counterpart still sounded emotionless. Lida shook her head. He sighed and glanced at Pavol, who was still holding the still full cup. "Liquid can often help. Drink it." It was a snappy demand that sent Lida on edge, but Pavol, who was already in a state, simply downed the entire thing and shakily placed the cup on the table. "I'll go and see in other compartments."

Lida was tempted to shout out to Feliks to 'stop him' as other Eduard sped walked down the aisle past the other, but didn't think she could do so in a steady voice, so left it, giving Pavol's hand a reassuring squeeze, knowing words wouldn't work. She watched Feliks make his way up to the top of the compartment, then turn and charge back down the other way to check at the other end. For a disease that killed over two hundred and fifty thousand people a year, there was a deficiency of people with it here. There was a hopeful moment where someone started checking their handbag, rummaging around and taking things out, but it was followed by a shake of the head.

Part of her wanted to run into another carriage to check there, to help Feliks, but another part was scared to leave Pavol. It was then that she felt his hand go limp and was suddenly aware of his silence.

"Hey, come on Pav, wake up, we'll fine something yeah?" Lida grabbed his face and tilted it upright, staring into his dull, half lidded eyes. "Come on, it'll all be okay." Even as the words left her mouth, she knew it wouldn't be. Even if he was still choking, finding an inhaler wouldn't do anything. Besides, it wasn't the asthma that killed him, she didn't need to be a fool to know that. The bloodshot around eye white and pale yellow coloured foam leaking out of the side of his mouth confirmed that.

"Nothing. There's..." Feliks trailed off, eyes wide. "But..."

"The drinks" Lida muttered. "There's something in the drinks."

A shadow crossed Feliks' face. "That idiot." He glanced up at the door that Eduard's counterpart had left through and ran for it.

"Wait" Lida whispered, holding Pavol like a rag doll.

Feliks didn't hear her. He shot through the compartments ahead, taking in every face along the way, reaching the driver's cabin before he'd seen anything. The doors either side of the corridor were wide open, swinging back on metal hinges that threatened to snap.

"Gówno" he cursed, leaning against the wall and burying his head in his hands. He sighed and then turned to the driver's cabin, opening the door and going inside. "Toris..."

Instead, he was met with Eduard and his guts, spilling off the chair he was in, piled messily on the floor.