At least HRT is going tolerably well.

The end of the workweek comes, and with it, an exhausted Hailey eating takeout before playing a shooter through the evening.

Eventually, she goes to sleep.

The dreams continue.

And then she wakes up with a splash!

What the fuck!

It's dawn, and she's in a fucking ocean! This is not where they went to sleep!

Girls, Sable starts to interject, leading into some question, but Hailey cuts her off and focuses on swimming and canvassing the area.

Where the fuck are they? Where's land?

Land? There isn't much of that here.

Only the vast and fathomless depths can be seen. There might be a brief flash of a big fin a long ways off? Hard to say, though.

Okay, what is there, if there's no land?

Would she like an internal compass pointing at a synaesthetic sense of Electric Train-crossed Cityscape, roughly that way? They have one of those.

They'll take it. Hailey starts swimming where the compass points.

She's really not dressed for this.

It's not a short swim, either. She keeps at it, though.

Eventually she reaches a patch of waves that feel inexplicably like... train tracks? How can water feel like train tracks?

Their internal compass is pointing here, though, and it feels like their dreams.

There's a sense that if she pulls herself in this direction — which didn't feel like a valid direction yesterday — she'll wind up in the city.

She tries it.

There's a sense of indescribable motion, crossing through swirling non-space, and then Hailey finds herself in the water of a dock in an industrial district. A set of train tracks leads directly into the water, right where she's swimming.

This was definitely not here a moment ago. At all. Portals? Maybe portals. Definitely feels like Not The Same Place.

She swims up to the dock, and climbs out onto the tracks.

After some time catching her breath, she consults her internal compass again.

There's something important, something theirs, over this way.

That feels promising, and the internal compass led her to this place, so it's worth a start.

She walks alongside the tracks.

A courier vaults overhead, leaping from one building to another, package tube clutched in a stone hand. Another two runners dance in a graffiti-covered square, trying to out-do each other in turns as their friends and rivals look on with cheers and jeers. Trains rumble past on other nearby tracks.

Woooooooooow

Yeah, this sure as fuck ain't Earth. Sweet.

The tracks they're following lead to a darkened garage, locked tight. Abandoned train cars rest atop connected tracks, cargo and sleeper and galley and more.

Why does that locked garage stand out? Why is there a sequence of numbers in her head?

She walks up to the garage door, where a battered-but-functional electromechanical lock holds it closed.

2, 8, 3, 5, 9, 2, 0, 6, 1...

On and on it goes through forty-seven digits, rattling out of her fingers like muscle memory.

When she completes the sequence, the lock falls from the door in pieces. Clearly it was only holding together from the latch, and it finally gave up.

What.

Well, no point arguing with it. She grabs the bottom of the door and lifts.

It rolls up, clattering into the threshold on ill-maintained hinges.

Behind is a rugged-looking electric locomotive, still in good repair. 

Oh this will do nicely. They have transportation, and it resembles their dreams. For that matter...

She steps aboard, finding the controls with the ease of unnatural familiarity, and examines one lever in particular. Labeled with a trio of icons depicting an arrow crossing beneath waves, an arrow along tracks, or an arrow crossing above clouds, it reminds Maya of a feature they utilized in their dreams to traverse a wider variety of terrain.

"This will let us explore that ocean safely, girls. As well as here, but something about those waves call to me."

She carefully starts the locomotive up, rolls it out of the garage, and starts hooking up cars.

And then she drives back to the water, and back to the portal they crossed previously.

The train rolls smoothly onto the water, and through they go.