Fear erodes trust.
Arthur Pembroke did not do well without control. Control was the air he breathed, the currency he traded in. He controlled markets, mergers, and the lives of the hundreds of people who worked for him. He controlled his diet, his schedule, his public image with ruthless precision. This entire situation—the fire, the trapped train, the murder—was an affront to his entire being. It was chaos. And Arthur Pembroke hated chaos.
He had been mentally drafting a scathing letter to the Northstar Express board of directors, outlining the catastrophic failure of their safety protocols and the immense liability they now faced. He was calculating potential settlements, the devaluation of OmniCorp stock, and the PR narrative he would spin the second he got a signal. This was how he coped. By converting panic into spreadsheets, terror into litigation strategies.
Then the kid had started screaming about demons.
At first, Arthur had dismissed it as the predictable unraveling of a weak-minded, over-tattooed art-school dropout. Hysteria was a variable he'd accounted for. But then the cop, Liam, had confirmed the one variable he had not accounted for: the body was actually gone.
The shock had been a physical blow. It wasn't possible. He'd been watching. They'd all been watching. His sharp, analytical mind, which could dissect a quarterly report in seconds, scrabbled for purchase and found none. The foundation of reality itself seemed to crack.
And into that crack poured the kid's insane babbling. Horns. Fire eyes. It pointed at him.
Arthur's eyes, cold and flinty, had snapped from the hysterical artist to the pale, sweating form of Conductor Evans. The kid was pointing at him. Accusing him.
It was nonsense, of course. Demons weren't real. But people were. And people could be manipulated.
A new calculation began to form in Arthur's mind. The body was gone. That was an immutable fact. The how and the why were currently unquantifiable. But the who… the who was suddenly back on the table. The kid's hallucination was just that—a hallucination. But what if the stress had caused him to misinterpret something real? What if he'd seen not a demon, but the killer himself? A man dressed in dark clothing, perhaps kneeling to check the body, his face shadowed? And in his terrified state, the kid's mind had transformed him into a monster.
And this killer, this man, had pointed at Evans. Why would he do that? To frame him? Or because Evans was an accomplice?
It didn't matter. The narrative was what mattered. The chaos needed a focus, a single point of failure he could isolate and blame. Evans was perfect. He was weak, he was in a position of nominal authority, and he was right there.
Arthur stood up, smoothing the wrinkles from his expensive, though now rumpled, suit jacket. He addressed the car, his voice cutting through the panicked chatter with the practiced authority of a man used to commanding boardrooms.
"Everyone. Quiet," he said, not shouting, but projecting. The voices died down. All eyes turned to him. This was better. This was control.
He pointed a well-manicured finger at Leo. "The boy is clearly having a breakdown." He stated it as fact, not insult. "Demons? Please. We don't have time for fairy tales."
He turned his gaze on Evans, who flinched under the intensity of it. "But he saw something. And that something pointed at you, Conductor." He let the word hang in the air, lacing it with accusation. "The body is gone. That is a fact. How do you explain that?"
Evans's mouth opened and closed like a fish out of water. "I… I don't… I was just standing here! I didn't see anything! I didn't do anything!"
"That's exactly what someone who did something would say," Arthur countered, his voice dripping with cold logic. "You have access to this train. You know its systems. Is there some kind of… disposal chute? A maintenance hatch we don't know about? Did you make the body disappear to cover for the killer? Or are you the killer?"
The accusation landed like a bomb. A collective gasp went through the car. Passengers who moments before had seen Evans as a fellow victim now stared at him with dawning horror and suspicion.
"That's insane!" Evans cried, his voice cracking. "Why would I? I'm just a conductor!"
"A conductor on a train that's lying to us," Arthur fired back, turning to include the whole group. "A conductor who works for the company that just told us our lives are 'classified'! You're part of this! You're one of them!"
He was weaving the threads masterfully—the company's deception, the missing body, the kid's delusion—into a simple, powerful story: Evans was the enemy within.
James Liam stepped between them, his face hard. "Pembroke, that's enough. You're making accusations with no evidence."
"The missing body is the evidence, Officer," Arthur spat the title like a curse. "And we have a witness who places him at the scene." He jerked his thumb at Leo, who was staring, wide-eyed and horrified, as his vision was being twisted into a weapon.
"I didn't say it was him!" Leo protested, finding his voice. "I said the thing pointed at him!"
"You're confused, son," Arthur said, his tone shifting to a patronizing dismissal. "You're in shock. But your eyes didn't lie about everything. You saw someone. And that someone implicated him." He turned his predatory gaze back to Evans. "I think for everyone's safety, he needs to be restrained. Contained."
A murmur of agreement rippled through some of the passengers. Fear made people crave simple solutions. Arthur was offering one: a villain they could see and isolate.
Arthur Pembroke wasn't afraid of a demon. He was afraid of the chaos that the demon's idea represented. By channeling that fear into a hatred for Evans, he was doing what he did best: managing assets and liabilities. Evans was a liability. He was being removed from the equation.
The real horror, for Arthur, wasn't the supernatural. It was the threat of a world where his money, his power, his control, meant absolutely nothing. And that was a horror he would fight with every cynical, ruthless bone in his body. He would rather have a human monster to blame than face a universe that truly contained monsters.