Run 8

The first thing that comes back is the rumble. A deep resonance that shakes Cillian’s whole body - no, that’s not it. The floor beneath him is actually vibrating, moving in concert with the sound, a deep, trembling snare punctuated by the occasional percussive jolt.

Next is the throb. Unlike the rumble, it comes not from outside, but from within — specifically a hot point on the back of his head. He groans, reaching up to probe it with cold fingers.

‘He’s awake!’

‘About bloody time - we’re T-minus seventeen minutes out from the border interchange.’

Cillian knows the first voice, but it’s a relief nonetheless to see Ani’s face peering over him when he opens his eyes at last. The fluorescent light overhead is diffused by her halo of curls, but he winces nonetheless.

‘Ani? Wassgoinon?’ he mumbles. Next to Ani stands an impeccably-coiffed man in an impeccably-kept suit, who regards him less like a kind stranger who has witnessed an accident, and more like someone who has spotted a cockroach on their bathroom floor. ‘Whossat?’

‘Funny,’ says the Suit in a boarding-school clip. ‘C’mon Cillian, up you get.’

‘Give him a second!’ Ani insists. ‘He took a knock going down.’

‘Well, he was pokin’ around where he shouldn’t’ve’ comes a third voice, deeper, stonier than the Suit’s. Cillian cranes his head just in time to catch a hulking figure, all in black, depart through a set of sliding doors. He shivers - the cabin is freezing.

‘Cillian? How many fingers am I holding up?’ asks Ani.

‘Three?’

‘See, Ani? He’s fine!’

‘Where are we?’ Cillian asks.

‘Ah,’ says the Suit.

‘Come off it, Cilli, we’re now… T-minus sixteen minutes to the final interchange. We need you on deck.’

Cillian pushes himself up to sitting - the world tilts woozily for a second, then rights again. The rumble, he realises, is the sound of wheels on rails below. The three of them are packed into what looks to be the driver’s carriage of a train, which - though it’s too dark outside to really tell - is racing along the track, heading to…

‘Ani,’ he says, prodding at the back of his head. There’s an egg the size of an orange forming at the base of his skull. ‘I… Please, can you just tell me what we’re doing here?’

Ani stares at him for a moment, reading him, trying to find the trick in his eyes and coming up short.

‘Fuck,’ she says.

‘My thoughts exactly,’ says the Suit. ‘Cillian, what’s the last thing you remember?’

‘Er…’ Cillian’s memories coalesce slowly. ‘I was… grabbing Ani a coffee? We’re on a late job for this building society that had a malware attack, and they paid extra for us to-’

‘A year?’ Ani interjects, sounding almost angry with him. ‘You’ve lost a year?’

‘To be fair, it was the Handler who sent him flying halfway down the train.’

‘We were told not to go near her, but you know our Cilli. Fucking fuck!’

‘Can one of you please—’

‘We cannot,’ Ani glances at the door, then lowers her voice, ignoring Cillian. ‘We cannot let the Handler twig, Racker.’

‘Yeah, no shit, Ani,’ the Suit - Racker - replies, the coarse language sounding smoother in his accent. ‘But, what? We catch him up, in… fourteen minutes?’

‘We can try,’ Ani plants herself on the floor, directly in front of Cillian. ‘ Look, Cilli. Things have changed a bit. Our portfolio has become a bit more…’

‘Illegal?’ Racker offers.

‘Diversified,’ she says, with a dirty look to boot. ‘Right now, we are on a huge job - seriously, more money than I thought the two of us would take in five years - being paid to ensure this runaway train keeps going on its merry, out-of-control way, no matter the cost.’

Cillian lets this settle in, the words landing in a jumble before his mind parses out their meaning. ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘“Runaway train”?’

‘He says, like he didn’t cut its leash and kick it out the gate,’ mutters Racker.

‘And who are you, Racker?’ Cillian demands.

‘Funny, you still say my name like that,’ Racker muses. ‘I’m your man on the inside, with men on the inside.’

‘Meaning?’

‘I have made a lot of kind requests of engineers and railway staff to kindly fuck up any attempt made at stopping our little enterprise. Or else.’

Cillian stares at him a moment, then whips his head back to Ani - it hurts. ‘Ani, what are we doing?’

She reaches up over the dashboard - is it called a dashboard on a train? Fuck if Cillian knows - and plucks a notebook from its surface. The notebook is unfamiliar, but the handwriting is Cillian’s own. She hands it to him with a wry smile.

‘Big picture? Crime. Small picture? I’ve bypassed the safeguards on board to ensure this baby can’t be shut off remotely, while you’ve been hacking the signals and switches along the route as we come to them so that our good friends from the authorities don’t have time to override.’

‘But why?’

‘Not for us to ask,’ Racker says firmly. ‘As the Handler so capably demonstrated when you made your ill-advised approach to the Cargo.’

‘I still don’t think we should call her “the Cargo”,’ says Ani, with a wrinkle of her nose. ‘It’s dehumanising.’

Panic rises in Cillian’s throat, a fizzing, acid thing that claws its way up into his mouth.

‘We’re not - she’s not being trafficked? We’re not—’

‘Heavens, no, what do you think we are?’ Racker asks him, then, clocking Cillian’s expression, adds, ‘Don’t answer that.’

‘She’s made no signs of a struggle, and she’s dressed… fancy,’ Ani explains. ‘And she just… sits there in the carriage. Quiet as anything. Not reading, not listening to a podcast, nothing. Doesn’t even look out the window, though I guess there’s fuck-all to see at this hour... Still. Creepy.’

Something jostles in the back of Cillian’s muddled mind. Or maybe it’s just a bump in the tracks.

‘Ten minutes, Ani,’ Racker warns.

‘Right, okay - here’s the thing. The Handler is absolutely terrifying, and can make good on that terror, as we’ve all just seen.’

‘Except me,’ Cillian says, a bit petulantly.

‘Because you lived it.’

‘Racker, shut up. Anyway, he’s here to chaperone the Cargo, and make sure we do our jobs—’

‘I’d go so far as to add ‘on pain of death’, actually,’ adds Racker.

‘— And if he works out that you have no idea why you’re here, or what you’re doing…’

Ani shudders, giving Cillian a dark look that he’s never seen before. Not from her.

‘But — but he knocked me out!’ Cillian hisses. ‘It’s his fault!’

‘Oh, did you hear that, Ani? It’s the Handler’s fault that Cillian can’t finish the job, and will probably get us all arrested or shot! Shall I pop in and give him that little tidbit of info, or shall I?’

Cillian looks down at the unfamiliar notes, written by a version of himself he hasn’t been yet, from a future he hasn’t lived yet. There are all sorts of scribblings-out, and a couple of rough diagrams that he’s sure he’d be able to decipher if he could just remember drawing them.

‘How did we get ourselves into this?’ he asks Ani. This wasn’t part of the plan.

‘T-minus nine minutes til the Handler puts bullets through our heads for fucking up the job, and you want backstory?’

‘Fair point,’ Cillian concedes. ‘Give me a minute - signals, you say?’

A flicker of hope passes across Ani’s face - or it could be one of the unidentifiable whizzing lights from outside. Over her shoulder, Racker’s façade of boredom hardens into something more intense.

Cillian’s laptop sits open on the dashboard - with only a slight stagger, he manages to get himself in front of it, slapping the notebook onto the cool, painted metal surface next to it. The code on the screen swims a little, his head gives an unhelpful throb, but slowly, he starts to pick out the logic, the story in the lines. The rumble fades away.

It’s what he’s always loved, what made him so excited to start this job. Ani was second-to-none as far as hardware went, but code sang to Cillian. He supposed it came down to his gift for languages - what was another tongue to a polyglot who already had six? Once he knew the rules, the grammar, the conjugation rules, it was easy enough to piece together the slang… and the poetry.

There was a sound like a sigh and a whir as the sliding doors opened once again; in the dark glass of the driver’s window, Cillian watched the reflection of the Handler enter the carriage, and stop, feet planted apart and enormous arms folded across his barrel chest.

‘Well?’

‘T-minus six minutes to the final interchange,’ Racker’s slippery tone was suddenly businesslike. ‘Cillian will have them offline in five and a half.’

Will he, now? Cillian thought. Sure, the code was starting to make sense, but the version of himself who had made these notes, who had opened these windows, who had started this job - that Cillian knew which signals to trip, which switches to jam. And he hadn’t deigned to write that knowledge down.

He hazarded a glance upwards; in the window, Cillian watched the Handler slowly unfold his arms, and drift one hand to rest on a conspicuous holster that hung from his hip.

He’s just muscle, though, he thought. He’s probably no wiser to the endgame of this job than we are. It wasn’t hugely comforting.

‘So long’s he stays where he bloody belongs,’ the Handler intoned in that bass-and-gravel voice. ‘No sneakin’ into the carriage again, right, boy?’

Cillian half-turned, and gave a short nod. ‘Right,’ he said.

As he turned back, he clocked Ani’s expression in his periphery. She looked… confused. But of course, the Cillian she probably knew would be beside himself in this situation, and terrified of the Handler to boot.

He didn’t have the time to be that Cillian. Or, for that matter, the inclination.

‘Five minutes to shutdown,’ said Ani, not quite managing to keep her voice totally steady. The rumble is louder now, the cabin lights brighter - possibly the adrenaline hurtling through Cillian’s system, but probably the concussion.

Slowly, because it only ever comes slowly at first, Cillian gets a handle on the switch controls. The signals, chances are, they can get through without. Hopefully there isn’t another train barrelling along in the opposite direction, about to turn them all into cyber-criminal crêpes.

‘Two minutes,’ Racker says

He flicks to a diagram labelled FINAL, a poorly-sketched aerial view of a railway interchange, labelled with numbers and bisected by a dotted line. The border. It wouldn’t make sense to anyone else. As he decodes, Cillian allows a smile and a silent thanks to the self that got lost when he took that knock to the head.

‘Sixty seconds’. Ani’s tone is all warning now. Cillian, however, is calm as he matches the numbers to the screen; the drawing, the code, they harmonise at last.

‘Cilli, thirty seconds, do it now!’

He keys in his own melody, checking it once more to be safe.

‘Cilli!’

The Handler’s gun leaves its holster with a whisper.

Cillian hits ENTER.

Nothing happens. At least, not in the cabin. But a few seconds of track away, the switches click over, compelled by Cillian’s siren song.

Ten, nine…

They’d been preconfigured to put the train on a loop track that would have sent it right back to the city - someone knew they were coming.

Six, five…

The Cillian from the notes had been leaving thirty seconds of time between hacking the tracks and the train’s ETA at the switchpoint. And whoever it was, they’d prepared for those thirty seconds, would have been ready to switch the configuration back in that time.

Three, two…

Cillian had left them just ten.

The cabin is illuminated in a sudden brilliance from outside as the train thunders through the floodlit interchange; Cillian winces, still sensitive, as the light catches swirling eddies of falling snow, and shines all the brighter for it.

Ani pulls him down to where she crouches on the floor.

Whatever she had anticipated - bullet spray, explosives - it never comes. Instead, the windows are washed in black again as the train clears the border.

The four of them rise. It’s silent, apart from the ever-present rumble.

‘You fucking did it,’ Racker breathes at last, making some approximation of a religious sign - or maybe a combination of a few. ‘You brilliant bastard.’

That sparks something. ‘Have you called me that before?’ Cillian asks him.

‘Not that I’m willing to admit.’

Cillian snorts. ‘Figures,’ he says. ‘Feel better now, Ani?’

But Ani isn’t listening. Her eyes are trained on the Handler, who is cocking and disarming his gun like it’s some kind of fidget toy.

‘It’s nothin’ personal, y’see?’ he says idly. ‘Boilerplate for a job like this, really.’

Racker gulps audibly; a sheen has appeared on his smooth brow. ‘Now, my good fellow, I’m sure it doesn’t have to come to—’

The gun emits a resonant click as the Handler cocks it. He doesn’t disarm it this time.

‘It does. Shame, but orders is orders,’ he says, not sounding like he thinks it’s a shame at all.

Orders is orders. It has crossed Cillian’s mind, in the few idle seconds it had been allowed in between trying to figure out how to speak the switches’ language. Why would he have agreed to a job like this, let Ani agree to a job like this? Of course the Handler — or the powers-that-be — weren’t going to let them live to tell the tale.

As he’d said. Boilerplate.

The Handler raises the gun, points it at Racker but looks at Cillian. ‘I’m saving you for last,’ the Handler tells him. Then, he gurgles.

Cillian is genuinely confused for a moment, as the Handler lets out another gurgle, lowering the gun, dropping it, before he himself drops, first to his knees then keeling right over like a toppled statue.

Behind him stands Rosa. In fingers tipped with scarlet, claw-like acrylics, she holds a syringe like it’s a cigarette.

‘Cutting it a bit close, don’t you think?’ Cillian asks her.

‘Could say the same to you,’ she replies, with that Hollywood-bright grin of hers. ‘Ten seconds?’

‘It worked, didn’t it?’

‘Sorry,’ Ani interjects, her eyes even bigger than usual as she looks between the two of them like she’s watching a very fast tennis match. ‘Cillian, you know the Cargo?’

Racker makes a noise that sounds a lot like well, fuck me.

‘Of course you’re the Cargo,’ Cillian says, then turns to Ani. ‘Ani, this is Rosa. Rosa, my business partner, Ani.’

‘I think we’ve moved beyond the cover story, no?’ Rosa asks him, pulling her plush fur coat more tightly around herself with a shudder. ‘Is there no heating up here?’

Ani goes very still. Her eyes, normally inquisitive and bright, are like cold, dark stones in her face. ‘Cover story?’ she asks, dangerous-soft.

'You didn't think that organisations like mine just approach little outfits like yours when they need a job done?' Rosa says, a shade over the line between explanatory and condescending. Ani's hackles rise accordingly, as Cillian's have done dozens of times, in response to that tone.

'Cillian—?'

'Oh, “Cillian” this time!' Rosa cries, delighted. 'You took my suggestion at last!'

'Because it was actually good this time,' Not-Cillian replies with a roll of his eyes. 'Ani, I'm sorry to have lied to you. Rosa and I are a part of the same… team. I needed to go into deep cover for a while—'

'A while?'

'Two years,' he says. 'And in that time, find someone with a set of… particular skills.'

There are tears in Ani's big eyes now. That tugs - even if he doesn't remember half the time he's known her, he obviously cares for her somewhere. When she speaks, her voice is high and accusing. 'What's your real name, Cillian? Who the fuck are you?'

'Jasper will do,' he replies, with a sidelong look at Rosa. They don't even know each other's real names, and he's worked with her for over a decade. 'And please believe me, Ani, I never meant for you to—'

'You expect me to trust anything you say?' Ani's voice is shrill now, sharp with fury. 'You don't even remember the last year!'

Jasper doesn't know what to say to that. She's right. She shouldn't believe him, and he doesn't remember. Not fully, anyway.

'You don't?' Rosa asks, her usual poker-face slipping a little.

'Yeah, you can thank your mate there for that,' Jasper grumbles, prodding at the Handler with the toe of his sneaker.

'As illuminating as this has been,' Racker pipes up, raising a pointer finger like he's at school. 'We're T-minus three minutes from the drop point, and need to work out what the fuck we're doing. Especially with him,' he adds, pointing at the Handler.

Jasper looks at Rosa, who shrugs. 'Leave him here. He's too hot-headed to keep around.'

The back of Jasper’s head gives a throb, and he silently concurs.

'And us?' Ani demands, glaring at Jasper. 'Will you leave us, too?'

'Of course not,' the words are out of Jasper's mouth before he can even consider them. To punctuate, he turns to the controls, and after a quick inspection, pulls the throttle back to bring the locomotive to a crawl.

'You've proven useful,' Rosa adds, not even faltering in the wake of Jasper's snap decision. 'And Jasper seems fond of you.'

Racker snorts, but Ani merely narrows her eyes at Rosa.

'What are you?' she asks.

'Just a part in a machine… a part which, occasionally, takes other parts out.'

'Jesus,' Racker breathes. He scrubs a hand down his face. 'Jesus, Cillian - Jasper, whoever the hell you are.'

'If it makes you feel any better,' says Jasper. 'I'm more on the admin side of things.'

'It doesn't.'

The rumble has quieted, more of a gentle hum, the floor undulating in a soft, slow rock. Jasper looks at Rosa.

'We're almost there,' she says, peeking out the front window; in the distance, a pair of green signal-lights twinkle in the endless dark. Not rail signals. Jasper knows these ones. The drop point.

'You have to admit, it was fun, wasn't it?' he asks Ani, tucking his laptop and notebook safely into his battered old backpack. 'You wouldn't be here if you didn't have it.'

'Have what?' she asks, warily.

'The thing we have,' Jasper straightens, waving between himself and Rosa. 'The thing that gets that thrill from danger, life-or-death pressure, etcetera etcetera.'

Ani scowls, but says nothing. It was a stab in the dark - he still doesn't quite remember it all - but it had struck true. She did enjoy it. Even if he'd lied to get her here.

'It'll be a pretty easy jump,' Rosa continues, pulling on a pair of fine, red leather gloves. 'Snow's not as soft as you'd think, but it's better than concrete by miles.'

Jasper doesn't look at her. He looks at Ani.

'Well? What do you say?'

Ani looks at Racker, who gives a noncommittal shrug. 'I'm easy,' he says, like she's asked him what he wants for dinner.

She looks back at Jasper. The rumble-hum of the train feels thick between them, something that fills the little space like honey, heavy and thick. It will take time to claw through it, time Jasper can never be sure he has in this line of work.

They’re coming up on the drop point. Rosa crosses the cabin, delicately presses the door-release button with a gloved finger. Snow and icy wind barrel into the cabin like a wave that engulfs everything within. The rumble is loud again, raw and metallic, muffled only slightly by the rushing air. She shivers, nose curling with distaste as she gestures to Racker.

‘Shall we?’

Racker joins her by the door, then glances back at Ani and Jasper, eyebrows raised. ‘See you both out there, I hope,’ he says, then leaps with the grace of a man half his age. Rosa says nothing, merely cocks her head toward the signal and steps off like she’s expecting solid platform to materialise beneath her feet.

She’s right. They don’t have long to decide. Those green lights are coming up fast, even going at minimum speed.

Jasper holds his hand out to Ani. ‘Well?’

Her eyes are still blazing, still hurt and confused and furious.

‘I don’t trust you.’

‘That’s fair.’

‘Or her.’

‘Fair, and also wise.’

The look in her eyes doesn’t fade. Not as she watches the green lights approach. Not as she makes for the door. And definitely not as she holds out her hand to Jasper.

He takes it. And together, they jump.