Samantha Sotto Yambao’s novel The Elsewhere Express (2026) is a work of speculative fiction that blends fabulism with fantasy. Yambao is the author of several other novels, including Before Ever After and Love and Gravity. The Elsewhere Express follows two protagonists, Raya and Q, who are separately grappling with deep loss. Raya is a medical student haunted by guilt over her brother’s death, while Q is a celebrated artist losing his sight to a degenerative disease. Both find themselves mysteriously transported to the Elsewhere Express, a magical train built from the waking thoughts and daydreams of people in the world. The train is a liminal space for those who have lost their purpose, offering a second chance at life at the cost of erasing their memories.

The novel uses its fantastical world building to explore deep psychological states, literalizing abstract emotions as tangible realities. The theme of Unresolved Trauma as a Psychological Trap is central, manifesting as a monstrous entity of rot and decay born from unprocessed trauma that threatens to destroy the train from within. The journey forces the characters to recognize The Importance of Self-Determination, challenging them to find meaning outside the roles assigned by tragedy and family. Furthermore, the novel champions Creative Expression as a Mechanism for Healing, as Raya’s songs and Q’s paintings become tangible forces with the power to physically mend the train, confront inner demons, and forge connections that transcend time and loss.

This guide refers to the 2026 Del Rey edition.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of illness, death, death by suicide, suicidal ideation, mental illness, child abuse, physical abuse, and ableism.

Plot Summary

Hiraya “Raya” Sia boards a subway train on the 10th anniversary of her brother Jace’s death. Conceived as a bone-marrow donor for Jace, who had a rare blood disorder, she feels adrift and purposeless without him. He died in a car crash while driving to see one of her musical performances, and she therefore blames herself for his death. She has given up on her dream of a career in music and is now a medical student—living out Jace’s dream instead of her own. On another part of the line, Quentin “Q” Chen Philips Jr., a celebrated portraitist who’s losing his sight to a degenerative eye disease, despairs and throws his last painting onto the tracks. Both are mysteriously transported from their mundane lives to the Elsewhere Express, a magical train built from the waking thoughts of people in the world. Raya finds herself in a lavish vintage carriage where she meets the conductor, who’s using the face and name of a woman named Lily—a form borrowed from the daydream of a man on Raya’s subway. Lily explains that passengers are people who have “floated away” from their lives by losing their purpose. Raya receives a ticket that dissolves into her palm, leaving a shimmering golden “eternal knot,” her bond to the train. Lily warns that to stay anchored, passengers must find their assigned compartment and shed their “excess baggage”—memories of their past lives—by drinking a special serum. Failure to do so will cause the knot to unravel, and the passenger will fall from the train, becoming one of the spectral Echoes that haunt its exterior.

As Raya explores the train’s fantastical cars, which are constructed from collected daydreams, Q appears, having boarded through an unauthorized back door. His sight has been fully restored, and he believes that he’s in an elaborate dream. After Lily issues him a ticket, she leads them to an orientation. The interiors of the train’s cars appear as entire, magical worlds, and the orientation takes place on what appears to be the deck of a ship. A sudden, malevolent storm gathers, which Lily identifies as the presence of a dangerous stowaway, an entity that spreads rot and decay. A lightning strike destroys their exit, forcing them to escape through an emergency doorway inside a large clay pot. They land in an art studio in the sky, where the artist Astrid explains that the train discards passengers’ night dreams. Q realizes that a recurring dream from his childhood—a beach with glowing spheres—is a discarded dream from a passenger. He uses his artistic talent to paint a star out of thin air, creating a slide for them to descend to an island below. There, they meet Dev, a maintenance worker who collects discarded songs, which manifest as the glowing spheres from Q’s dream, to repair the train. Raya discovers that she has a natural talent for identifying the right songs for repairs, and Dev mentions that, years ago, he saw a woman on the train whose face looked exactly like Raya’s.

Lily summons them to the Dragonfly dining car to meet Rasmus, the former conductor. They also meet Olly, who doesn’t speak and appears nearly catatonic as he stirs pots. Rasmus explains that Olly went through a locked door and ended up in the Missed and Misplaced Department, where he was trapped for an indeterminate length of time—possibly decades in the world outside the train—before being found and rescued. To defeat the stowaway, Lily and Rasmus drink a serum to restore their memory of a past similar incident, recalling how the stowaway destroyed a car called the Lake before they trapped it. Rasmus then takes Raya and Q to the Archive to get a map, which is a living network of thoughts they inhale. In doing so, they become tethered, a bond that connects their emotions and allows them to share the map’s weight. They then board a tiny crystal train built by Rasmus, which they will use to navigate the larger train.

Their hunt for the stowaway leads them to the gallery’s reflection pool, an exhibit of Raya’s deepest secrets. A living watercolor portrait pulls Raya into the water, forcing her and Q to relive the night of Jace’s death, including Raya’s first paid music gig, which she lied about her age to get, and Jace’s fatal car accident while driving to see her perform. It’s here that the stowaway reveals its form as a swarm of black moths. They escape after Q paints a hatch on the ceiling of a painted memory. They crash-land, shattering the crystal train, in the Missed and Misplaced Department, a valley of lost and longed-for objects. There, they meet a spectral version of Olly comprised of his forgotten thoughts. Thought-Olly reveals a shocking truth: The Echoes are not fallen passengers but discarded memories, flushed out through a great drain in the valley that looks like a whirlpool. Lily’s story—that the Echoes are passengers pulled overboard by the weight of their painful memories—is a lie to ensure that passengers drink the memory-erasing serum. Raya finds her old guitar, which she thought she had destroyed, and writes a song that magically repairs their broken crystal train. Their journey takes them to a secret perfumery run by a woman named Manon, who has kept her memories to practice her craft, proving that the threat of the unraveling knot is another deception to enforce compliance. In exchange for the scent of rain from his encounter with the stowaway, Q obtains a perfume that can restore lost memories.

They use the perfume on Rasmus, who was attacked by Echoes and left in a catatonic state. The fragrance revives him but also restores his full, unedited memory of the first stowaway. He reveals that years ago, a sad song, in an attempt to “heal” the moth monster, transformed it into a comatose, bandaged figure—a prison for the stowaway. Fearing it, they built a secret room behind Raya and Q’s shared compartment to hide it. Q realizes that the second stowaway was drawn to the first. Using his ability to paint with dark thoughts, Q summons a swarm of his signature “burnt moths,” which consume the first stowaway, destroying it for good. The second stowaway, however, remains at large. During an attempt to trap it in the Missed and Misplaced Department, the creature, now wearing Q’s face, attacks Raya and is seemingly vanquished. However, it returns, abducting Raya and pulling her into a void. Q learns from Rasmus that Lily believes Q is the stowaway, as his arrival coincided with the rot, and that she’s setting a trap for him.

In the boarding car, the stowaway holds Raya captive. Lily confronts Q, declaring that he’s the source of the train’s darkness and must jump from the train to save everyone; the stowaway, she claims, will follow him. Doubting her, Q plunges his hand into the stowaway’s moth form and learns its secret. The moths aren’t his darkness but are manifestations of Lily’s own repressed guilt. He realizes that in a past timeline he doesn’t remember, he sacrificed himself for the first version of Raya, who then became Lily. Her guilt over his apparent death created the first stowaway. Now, every time a new version of Q and Raya boards, her guilt reawakens and creates the monster anew. To break the cycle and save Raya, Q accepts the blame and leaps from the train, taking the secret with him. The stowaway vanishes. Lily tells everyone that Q was the monster. Raya, left with their shared compartment, is given the serum to forget him but refuses. Rasmus reveals to her that this cycle has repeated countless times and gives her the missing part of the train’s records, a song embroidered on a scarf, which reveals the full truth about Lily being the first Raya and the origin of her guilt.

Raya confronts Lily, who, consumed by the revelation, passes on her conductor’s cap and prepares to throw herself from the train to end the cycle. Years later, Raya is the new conductor. She has found peace, writing songs to help maintain the train. One evening, a new passenger boards: another version of herself. This new Raya carries an invitation to an art exhibit by Q Chen Philips Jr. titled “HERE,” with a note that reads, “On the count of three. Jump” (397). Realizing that it’s a message, Raya uses the train’s back door and jumps. The novel presents two endings. In the first, Raya lands back in the “real” world and attends Q’s art exhibition, hoping to meet him there. The exhibition is a full-scale replica of the Elsewhere Express that attendees can walk through and explore. A docent leads her to a secret room set aside for her alone, where she listens to a recording from Q, who explains that he’s dead and that the exhibition is posthumous. He had hoped to wait for her, but his stop and hers were too far apart in time, and he created this artwork as a message to her, which he hoped she would receive in the future. In a second, alternate ending, Q lands back on the subway platform moments before he first boarded. He chooses not to get on the Elsewhere Express, breaking the time loop. A voice calls his name. It’s Raya, who has successfully followed his invitation. They’re reunited in a grand, sunlit train station, their shared journey finally at its true destination.