16

Part 2

A roar away to their right. Ella set off at a sprint. Conor knew better than to let her get a head start. He was straight on her heels, straight into the brush. They were so good at this. She was bounding up over fallen branches. Vaults and leaps and dashes. They were crouching, sliding. Running, really running. She would glance back, and whenever she did, Conor would nearly smash his head into a branch or slam his body off some unseen trunk. He only watched her. Before he knew it, he completely trusted her again. He could hear the sound, louder, crashing through the brush towards them. A moment passed, and he was beside her. He cried out -

“Don’t let me win, Ella!”

She threw her head back and laughed before shifting gears. Conor was breathing heavily now as she pulled away. But he wasn’t done. They crashed through the edge of the forest in unison and onto bright salt sands. He closed his eyes as he watched the train careen out from the woods and onto the tracks ahead. He closed his eyes for a quiet second, willed his heart to slow, filled his lungs. Switched to breaths through his nose before opening his eyes again. She was still just ahead. She looked back at him. He couldn’t believe how fast they were running. His feet were hardly touching the cracked earth before they were up again, striding forwards. He looked at the train. He laughed again at the shallowness of his own inward journeys and quietly thanked Ella. The siding of the car nearest them rattled open. Conor sensed they were running from something - the law or a raiding band of Apaches, perhaps a jaguar. It didn’t matter; it was anything and everything all at once. Ella leapt and grabbed a ladder rail before pulling her legs up and on. She looped around into the car and left her arm out for him. He knew he didn’t need it. He closed his eyes again. A single breath through the nose. Felt his heart slow a beat. He opened them and leapt for it, grabbed the ladder bar but not well, Ella leant round and grabbed him by the fat below the armpit and dragged him in. They tumbled into the car, screaming laughing. He rolled into her as she held him. Felt his head land on her chest as they came to a stop against the back wall of the train car.

“This? This is how you choose to travel around down here?!” He laughed up at her.

She laughed back as she kissed him on the forehead. Here was his Ella.

“Of course it is,” continued Conor.

She sang a line then.

“Knew a man, Bojangles, and he’d dance for you.”

Conor was amazed at this flash of cruelty. Many songs had been mutilated that day, along with his father. This one might top the list. He saw in his mind Ella and their father singing it together. He twisted out of her arms and scuttled away from her, across the train car. Looking out, he watched the rains approach from the distant mountains. A sheer wall of water racing across the plain. More water than he had ever seen in his life. It was beyond a storm. For a moment, the rift between them had closed, now she’d ripped it open again. The water ripped through the salt. He watched as the ground melted. The wound before him culled all pretence.

“What the fuck is wrong with you, Ella? You really are sick,” he cried, “don’t you dare fucking sing that”. She looked at him and saw his eyes were cold. He continued, “Where is this train taking us?”

“God, Conor, even when I make it fun, you have such an attitude,” replied Ella. “I left something at the station that we’re going to need.”

Much time passed, the rain pounding deep into the earth. As they neared it, he saw just how deep the canyon was that the impossible downpour had created. It was as though a sea had emptied above and created this new river below. Suddenly, the earth fell away in a perfect line, and this new tributary fell headlong to meet a deeper body of water. He watched it as they now ran atop a vast suspension bridge. Conor watched as the salt plain river crashed deeper still. The body it ran into reminded him of flying over the English Channel, though its sides were not beaches or cliffs but walls that looked more like steel or iron than rock or sand.

“Bet you’re glad I didn’t make you climb out here.” Said Ella.

Their terminus was just over the bridge. It was somewhat like his viaduct bus station, only far larger and busier - what felt like a thousand trains passing in and out in the ten minutes they spent there. There were ten platforms Conor could see. One gangway spanned them. No guard rails, no ticket barriers, no walls, no ceilings. It was either open-plan and minimalistic or unfinished. Conor decided it was the latter. The trains themselves had no identifiers or destinations, but he knew they were all late. Ella had jumped off while the train was still slowing, knowing they had to be fast in alighting before it set off again with them still on before turning to her brother with a gentle sternness he’d only ever known in her that said, ‘Come here, now’.

The train they’d travelled on was the type you would see carrying gold and oil and vagrants between frontier towns - Legend of Zorro trains. There were trains from all the metros of the world, trams, steam trains, bullet trains and everything in between. Conor turned and saw Ella at the far end of the upper concourse. He ran after her. She’d arrived at the only structure, a stall, like a WHSmiths. Reaching over, she slammed on the till, denting it slightly. She walked back towards the stairs of the concourse and rattled the handle of the little maintenance closet. Tried the handle, no luck. She stepped back and kicked, slightly southeast of the handle itself. Conor thought about how she must have read to do that in the little book of random facts in the downstairs toilet of their house. That’s where he’d read it. The door snapped the lock from the rotten wood around the hinges. She tried to pull it towards her, but it had jammed, so she opted to kick more and force the entire door to retreat further into the cupboard. Her hand went rooting around behind it, emerging with a claw hammer.

Back at the till, she jammed the claws in at the top of the till and pulled down as the entire top of the till wrenched open. She reached in.