The Otherworld Taxi Driver

Miles Calderwood drives a night cab in a river city because his father left him one, and because a man who cannot sleep might as well be paid for it. Four years on the dark shift have taught him the city the way other men know their own hands: which light runs green for eleven seconds, which dock road floods, which street the drunks stagger down at three.

Then, at 4:44 on a wet morning, a woman in a grey coat steps into his headlights and vanishes when the brass meter over his dash reaches zero. The meter is not a meter. It ticks down her remaining life, and when the night folds back on itself and she climbs in a second time, Miles understands that he is not driving fares. He is carrying refugees out of a collapsing world, and the clock will not let him keep one he fails to deliver.

Every crossing costs him something the meter calls service charge: a year here, a memory there, the least important first. The car will not run by daylight. He cannot lie to a passenger, or the cab stalls and strands them both in the seam. And the people he saves are erased so completely that only he remembers them, which means the cost of a kind night is a lonely morning.

Somebody else has found the leak. A freight company called Crandall has been harvesting it for eleven years, refining otherworld time into canisters and selling it to the dying, and its routing director keeps a private schedule of which seams are open on which night. The reset was never a curse. It is a term of a hedge agreement with two signatures on it, and Miles has read neither, and one of them is his own.

There is a diner at the corner of Relay and Third where a woman flips a cup face-down when a man lies to her. There is a garage dispatcher with a list of rides that never happened. There is a voice on the cab radio that calls Miles by an old call sign, keeps the meter honest, and will not say why it knows his mother's kitchen. And there is a passenger with a chipped green bead who hums a tune Miles has known all his life, who should not exist, and who is the reason he cannot stop.

Miles has one advantage and it is a cruel one. He knows the schedule the way a driver knows a route: which road jams, which passenger lies, which door closes on which night. He can save them. He can also spend himself doing it, and the meter never asks which he prefers.

The last night of the cycle is nine weeks out, and on that night every seam in the city opens at once, and a man with one cab and a brass case can carry a whole line through a single door. The price is the driver's own account, and the account is nearly empty.

The Otherworld Taxi Driver is a story about the last shift of the night: about loneliness that has a route, kindness that has a meter, and the fare a man pays to keep one stranger from becoming weather.