Idyll's public subway system is a rotting corpse in all but name. The industrial aspirations of the city are its natural predator. When the mining drills and ichor rigs stir from their distant mountain citadels their decrees are echoed in the ground beneath the city's feet; the subway tunnels fight an endless war of attrition against them, the routes buried and unearthed and rewritten around new fault lines and collapsed segments and mineral veins so often that the entrances to defunct stations populate Idyll nearly as much as the people do. For ChorTek Tower, the city's sterile steel heart, there is always at least one functional station among its graveyard of dead underground gateways. It is into this stairwell that the priest and the horse flee from their crime into the humid belly of the desert.
A passerby holds open the broken emergency door for them and they pass fare-free to the platform where an aluminum boxcar bakes on the tracks. The priest and horse enter and have their pick of seats. Only the most desperate of Idyll's citizens use the subway; almost all trips are delayed by tunnel collapse and many result in death. Down here the abnormal is of no surprise to the people of Idyll. The horse they barely register; the only reason they look at the priest at all is because of the siren call of gold at his shoulder, and the only reason they do not act on their impulse is the gun in his hand. The priest presses his boiling forehead to the foggy boxcar window as it howls past half-opened wounds in the earth, glimpses of active excavation and the stolen snatches of shouting laborers flashing up on the glass like stills in a zoetrope. People leave and enter the boxcar as it leaps down the line, stuttering and shivering in fits and starts like a skittish racing dog, until it stops at the end of its unfinished track at the very edge of Idyll where its paved sewer-tunnel station gives way to an open maw of earth and refuses to go any further. Here the priest exits and slips down onto the line and walks into the barren darkness westward, and the horse canters clumsily after him. The trailing tail of the steel track turns to hard grit under their feet as they walk with the silence and solemnity of a funerary procession through a stillness like the inside of a coffin. The heat crushes their breath so the only sound is their six-footed step thumping into the ground. They walk for hours that feel like minutes and minutes that feel like hours until an ambient light introduces itself and breaks the darkness and they surface from a wedged slope, blinking in the brightness of Arizona's red-capped night.
They emerge as if from a grave back into the desert. Behind them Idyll still rages, blazing violently and blaring with its violet song once more. Before them the desert's darkness unfurls to the horizon, the red eyes of the mining rigs flashing intermittently down from the rust-fog like the angry eyes of monstrous gods, illuminating the dull columns of their steel throats as they pulse with ichor like bursting metal seams against the dark night. The priest puts his revolver into his briefcase, shifts it to his left hand, and with his right unearths a clay-rimed shovel from the abandoned tunnel construction. He mounts the horse a final time. The desert welcomes them back into its barren embrace and they are engulfed into it as if diving into a boundless ocean, plunging through its murky depths like a sinking stone.
Here at the apex of the night the familiar landscape of the desert takes on an alien and alluring quality. The supine curve of the distant horizon line blurs into the archaic geometry of the earth, the black mountains monstrous and ancient as exhumed fossil. The drone of the gates is the suspension of a beating heart. Though the horse has led the priest all night it allows itself to be spurred into a gallop across the wilderness. The night is cold and friendlier than the day, and at their fast clip it strokes his cheek like a familiar friend. The horse huffs as its limbs work, cutting a path straight and true over the land. The priest leans forward and aligns himself with the shape of the horse, his dark chest pressed intimately to its shining coat. On this last leg of his journey, he allows himself to close his eyes.
