Chapter 6

The Cranial Ferrywoman

From the Ossuary Transit Authority Training Codex, Edition 7 (Redacted)

Before cranial drift was regulated, souls were known to float loose from their skulls during transit between hemispheres.

The Ferrywoman was never officially assigned. She arrived at Platform 13, Sector Maxilla, during a mid-cycle audit. She brought no credentials, no badge, no socket-form. Only a satchel full of jawbone tokens and a sternum whistle made from translucent ivory.

“They’ve begun drifting laterally,” she said. “It’s not safe for the face to sleep anymore.”

Her job was to escort the unanchored. She sat at the front of every cranial vessel, humming subsonic glyphs through the occipital veil. Passengers wept in their sleep but arrived intact. Some forgot their surnames. One awoke with two tongues.

Every seventh journey, she would collect a fare not in coin, but in echo. “Your cleft was heavy,” she’d whisper. “I’ve kept the burden in my pouch.”

Then came the rupture: a failed transit, twelve skulls unoccupied, twelve bodies still walking. The station was sealed. Boneflow rerouted. Nobody spoke of it.

But the Ferrywoman stayed. She carried the twelve skulls into the deepline — that ossified tunnel they had paved over in denial. She left no note. Only a scrap of vertebral ribbon etched with coordinates to a place that exists only during cranial dusk.

Moral:

All movement leaves memory behind — unless accompanied by bone.
The most valuable passengers never know they’re riding.
Never sleep face-forward on a marrowline without exact change.