The Girl Who Ran

by Nikki Owen

  I dab my face and see blood smeared on my fingertips.

  Patricia leans forward. ‘Oh, my God, Doc. He’s right.’

  ‘It is okay. It is simply a nosebleed,’ I say, except, when the words come out, I doubt them. I have never before in my life had a nosebleed, even when, at fifteen, I walked into a glass door because I was too preoccupied with reading a book about Mozart.

  ‘Here. Take this.’

  I look at Chris and accept the ball of table-dispenser tissues he is thrusting at me. I hold out my fingers – they are trembling slightly.

  ‘Press the tissues in hard,’ Patricia says.

  I want to say that I am a doctor and so I know what to do, but the blood is rushing out too fast. I pinch my nose just above my nostrils, leaning forward, trying to regulate my breathing to drain the blood so it won’t hit the back of my throat, reeling at the taste of metal in my mouth. I count until it stops. An unusual headache is forming at the base of my skull; I decide not to say anything about it.

  Chris watches me. His face is drained white, even though it’s me who had the bleed. ‘D’you want to lie down or something?’

  ‘No. Remaining upright reduces the blood pressure in the blood vessels and will therefore stem any further bleeding.’

  ‘Oh. Right. Good… Good.’ He blows out a long breath. ‘Jeez, you had me – sorry – you had us a bit worried there for a sec.’

  Patricia helps me wipe away the last of the blood. ‘Doc, this isn’t right. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘It is nothing.’

  ‘Nothing? No way is this nothing. Has this happened before?’

  I hesitate. ‘Why do you want to know?’

  She throws up her hands. ‘Because I worry about you!’ Then, sitting back, she shakes her head and bites down hard on her bottom lip.

  I glance to the black box device, touch my nose where the blood is already drying in small lines around the edge, and I start to think. ‘Your mechanism,’ I say to Chris. ‘I reassembled it very quickly. The codes I have decrypted recently have been at great speed.’ I glance to Patricia. ‘Could the nosebleed and my ability to think faster be… be related?’

  Patricia looks at me but says nothing.

  ‘They gave you drugs, right?’ Chris says, shrugging. ‘You know, all your life? Maybe they’re making you ill.’

  Patricia stares at me, at Chris. She is still biting down on her lip and when I look to her fingers, I see her clutching her cell phone. With her right hand, she picks up her glass, drains it then stands. Her head almost skims the ceiling and she has to stoop to avoid brushing the fake vines that twist and turn around the pine roof rafters.

  ‘I need a drink,’ she says. ‘Anyone else want one?’

  Chris shakes his head. I say no, but as the word comes out, I hear a crack, a crackle, because of what? Because of worry? Patricia begins to walk away and I start to tap my foot.

  ‘I… I am sorry,’ I say after her, not sure why, but somehow knowing that it’s the right thing to do. ‘I am sorry I do not always say… always say the things you wish to hear.’

  She turns her body to mine and even from here I get lilacs and linen and freshly laundered cotton sheets. For the first time in the light where she stands, I notice dark shadows under her eyes, a drawn-in pinch to her skin. This, I tell myself, is what worry looks like.

  Her eyelids flutter shut, briefly for one, two seconds of time only as behind her three women, an assortment of ages, hair colours and heights, step up onto a small wooden stage, each of them clutching an acoustic guitar slung in soft leather straps over checked shirted shoulders.

  ‘I’m your friend,’ Patricia says finally, opening her eyes once more.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I… I’m tired, Doc. I just get tired sometimes with it all. If you know you’re my friend then you have to act like it. You have to act like you know what a friend is. I know it’s hard for you but…’

  I open my mouth to speak then halt, stunted, mute at what to say. What does a friend act like? Where is the blueprint for the role? Where is the manual and the instruction book?

  Patricia slips her lips into a thin smile and I notice that her cell phone is still in her hand. Unsure what to do, I hold out my five fingers and, to my relief, Patricia reciprocates. ‘Are you sure you don’t want a drink.’

  ‘No.’ I pause. ‘Thank you.’

  She keeps her smile on me for a second longer then, dropping her arm and slipping her phone into her pocket, she turns and heads towards the bar.

  Chris fiddles with the signal blocking device, eyeing the band ahead as they set up. ‘Electric guitars do belt out some wattage. I should know – I play myself.’

  Wanting to avoid the odd lump in my throat, avoid the confusion I feel, I watch Patricia take her phone from her pocket and switch it on. I turn to Chris and, keen to try my habit at conversation, I pluck some facts from my brain. ‘Electric guitars rely on a ratio between wattage and decibels. Wattage is the power developed from current and voltage. For example, using the equation—’

  Chris holds his palms aloft. ‘Okay, okay.’ He sighs. ‘I get it. I understand.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Yup.’

  We sit in silence. Chris fiddles with the black box, I leaf through the copy of 1984 from the train, tracking any pattern I can find, tracing over the words, imprinting them to my brain. My fingers linger on the worn edges, old, weary.

  After a minute passes, Chris lifts his head, eyes flickering briefly to Patricia. He shifts his body forwards and I smell on him bread, spiced cologne, warm wine. ‘Maria?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about the Weisshorn database.’ He clicks the button on the black device and a green light glows. The soft, silent rhythm of the beat.

  ‘You have now blocked our signal?’

  ‘Yep. No one should be able to hack into my system this time.’ He gulps his wine and shivers. ‘But I think there’s a problem.’

  ‘What problem?’

  ‘Okay, so, you remember on my laptop on the train when I was in the Weisshorn database and I thought they’d sent me a virus and that’s how they found me – us?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Again he shoots a glance to Patricia at the bar. ‘Well—’ a shift in his seat, a slight shake to his normally steady fingers— ‘you see, once you fixed my blocker thing here, it gave me a chance to quickly look into exactly what had happened, you know, safely check the virus origin and everything so I could make sure it didn’t happen again.’

  A strange ball of nerves builds in my stomach. ‘What is your point?’

  ‘Well, I thought they might have known it was me on their database.’

  ‘That was an unsubstantiated assumption. An automatically set virus can penetrate any computer.’

  He shakes his head. ‘No. No, see that’s the thing.’ He takes another, bigger, mouthful of his drink, winces then sets it down and when he speaks again his voice and his head are lowered. ‘That’s the thing. Sure, there was a virus, but… there was something else, too.’

  A glass falls and shatters at the bar. We both jump.

  Chris slaps his hand to his chest, swallows hard, and watching for a second the tired bearded barman waddle to the front and sweep up the broken glass while muttering in French under his breath, he continues. ‘Okay… God, that made me jump. Okay, so… ah, yeah, the box. Right, well the box, even though it couldn’t block anything until you fixed it, it could still pick up signals. And now I’ve been able to access the data on it…’

  He pauses. My palms sweat, but I don’t know why. It’s warm in here, but there’s something else, something intangible that I’m strangely too scared to touch.

  ‘Maria, there was also a separate signal transmitting to us from an actual device.’

  ‘Separate?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  The room feels as if it’s standing still while my brain does a rapid assessment of what the separate signal me
ans. In the bar, the rustle, the guitars, the chatter – all of it falls away to just white noise as I begin to realise the implications of the transmitter.

  ‘It is…’ I falter, scared at the conclusion. ‘The signal is caused by another tracker.’

  Chris shuts his eyes. ‘Yes.’

  My breathing accelerates, pulse quickens. A tracker. Another tracker. Words, codes, numbers and sounds. They all collide, one, two, three, bang, bang. Tracker. Tracker, tracker, tracker, tracker. When I finally part my lips and form words, my voice is scratched and torn and filled with fear.

  ‘Are there cell numbers on—’

  ‘Are there cell numbers showing up on the device?’ A beat, a drop of his shoulders. ‘Yes.’ He throws a glance to where Patricia is now tapping her phone.

  I direct my eyeline to my friend, to where she is staring at the band who are getting set up to play. ‘Why… Why are you looking at Patricia so much?’

  He rakes a hand through his hair, once, twice. I tap my thumb, catch the plaster on the edge of the table, a sting of pain shooting up my arm. Time feels suspended, a loud clock. Tick tock, tick tock.

  Chris shakes his head, and when he finally speaks, even though I’m prepared for it, it shocks me to the core.

  ‘One of our phones has a tracker on it.’ A beat, a pulse of time. ‘I’m sorry, Maria, but Patricia’s phone could be it.’

  Chapter 13

  Deep cover Project facility.

  Present day

  Air like thick black ink oozes around me in the chamber.

  ‘Hello?’ I shout. Nothing. I try shouting again, louder this time, but still no one answers. The only vibration in the air is the rasp of my own breath.

  Panic rises. Am I being imprisoned? Have I been tricked and this, now, is where I am to stay, like before at Goldmouth in London with the guards and the hands and the sweat and the screams? I start to count to keep myself steady, up to ten then back down again, over and over, but it doesn’t work and my heart rate rockets in a cascade of sticky perspiration.

  I close my eyes and try to focus on something, but the air seems to press in around me, on to my skin and face, up through the canals of my nostrils, and my voice shrieks out, yet it doesn’t resemble my own, and I find myself thinking, why? Why is this happening to me? What have I done? My shoulders drop, exhaustion, resignation, the complete silence and blackness seeming to conjure in my head the faces of my family, dead, shrieking past me, and I am overcome by an almost overwhelming sensation that I’ll never really have the energy to fight anyone or anything anymore. Adoption, Papa, the Project, the years of lies and exploitation. It all just seems too much. I am only one person in a sea of strangers.

  My eyes open, but all I see is black. Heart rate shooting up again, I count: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. This is supposed to calm me here, now, this type of environment. I am finally free from sensory assaults and having to deal with them, and yet why do I feel more threatened than ever?

  I don’t know how much time passes, the chamber utterly disorientating with only my thoughts to fill the void. I think of Mama, of Papa and Ramon, then of Balthus, and though it pains me to see their faces, they appear normal as they always used to. But then my thoughts begin to change. I grip the edge of the seat, nails digging in, recite the Project’s mantra, Order and routine are everything. The Project is your only friend. Yet still they come, the images – odd, a river of colours and shapes.

  At first, it is just Black Eyes I see. His face, his tree branch frame, appear in my mind as if they are real, as if here, now, I could reach out and touch him and feel the coarse sandpaper of his skin. But he is not looking at me. Instead, he stoops over a reclined leather surgeon’s chair and in it lies a woman: the same woman from the pictures in his office. But her hair, instead of waterfalling down her back, is tied up in a ball high on her head, loose cotton tendrils falling down her neck to the caramel skin where her shoulder meets her arms. She is sweating. Her breath, when I listen, appears in short, sharp bursts and when I study her arm, I see a tourniquet, thick and brown, tied tight around the nook of her elbow.

  Black Eyes stands and wipes his face, tears streaking in tiny columns of grey down his cheeks, and when he turns, the woman looks towards him with sleepy eyes and a complexion of wax and ash. Black Eyes flips open a folder and scratches out some notes then returns his attention to the woman.

  ‘Samuel?’ the woman’s voice suddenly says, floating into the air like a smooth petal. I listen, silent, dark, feeling as if I’m eavesdropping on a conversation I should never hear.

  ‘Samuel, is it working?’

  Black Eyes. Dr Carr.

  He is Samuel.

  Black Eyes swallows and his Adams’ apple protrudes then sinks back in.

  ‘Sarah,’ he begins, then trails off. He dabs sweat from his brow with a cornflower blue handkerchief, hemmed with gold-coloured thread. The woman’s hand reaches out, forefinger and thumb landing onto the corner of the fabric. ‘Aisha gave you that.’

  He smiles, weak, thin, then slips the silk away into a pocket.

  The woman’s hand drops, arm falling, drifting down to her side. ‘Our daughter,’ she says. ‘They killed her, Samuel. This has to work. We have to stop it all happening.’

  ‘My love, you are not well.’

  She swallows a sip of water that he now holds to her cracked, dry lips. Done, her head flops back. ‘I am thirty-three. No one has ever made it to…’

  Her words falter. I lean in, although, in the cavernous dark, there is nothing to lean in towards. No one has ever made it to what?

  ‘Rest now,’ Black Eyes says, stroking the woman’s brow. ‘We will run some more tests. There may be something that…’ He clears his throat, smears dry his face. ‘There may be something we can do. Something the Project can do.’

  She smiles, but there is a sallowness to her cheeks, a slack weight to her chin and jaw. ‘My darling, there’s nothing left to do. We’ve seen…’ She coughs. Tiny specks of blood pepper her hand and when she tips back her skull, the rim of her nose is red. ‘I haven’t got Asperger’s, that’s why it’s not working on me… the drugs.’ She takes one more drop of water. ‘Aisha – she was the one it worked on.’ She was like… like you.’

  ‘But she was not Basque, not fully.’

  ‘Exactly, my darling, exactly. That’s why we have to keep moving forward. The girl, the one the Ines woman gave to us.’

  ‘Maria.’

  ‘Yes. She is it, my darling, the test child.’

  ‘It was you,’ he says now, his head tilted so it suspends in the air; I think of a child’s balloon floating in the sky, a lone head bobbing above water. ‘You were the one who predicted that people like Maria would be the key. Your blood – our blood, me, you. Basque people.’ His vision moves to a photograph nearby of a young girl. ‘She only saw the death.’ He smooths his fingers around the frame. ‘Our daughter’s death.’

  ‘Help us all,’ the woman says.

  He smiles, tears trickling. ‘I promise I will get the girl to the age we need her to be.’

  ‘Thirty years of age, Samuel – we need to get her past that. Treat her like… like the daughter you – we – lost.’ She coughs but when he goes to help, she bats him away. ‘In one breath we lose, and in another, we gain.’ Her shoulders drop and a breath, deep, pungent, expels from her chest. ‘We gain.’

  He cries now, Black Eyes, openly, tears rolling down his cheeks in small, glass balls that look as if they were blown with gold and silver foil.

  ‘Don’t cry,’ the woman says now, her voice weaker, more distant. ‘Make it work. I know you can. I married you because you are amazing.’

  ‘But you’re the brains, my love. You helped set it all up— the Project.’

  ‘And you will continue it, Samuel. I know you will. Turn the Project into what we know it can be. Work with MI5, but watch them.’

  ‘I will.’

  They smile weakly at each other, Bl
ack Eyes reaching down, his calloused skin touching her satin sheen palm one fingertip at a time until all five touch. I squint, bend in. Are they…? I inspect their fingers, the way the five of them are close, laid out to communicate a silent message, just like the way… just like the way…

  ‘Patricia,’ my voice says, and as it rings out, the image of Black Eyes and his wife wobbles in my subconscious, flies and flits until it fades entirely to be replaced by a thick black screen of nothing.

  My breathing becomes heavy, its rise and fall the only sound in the gloom.

  ‘Patricia,’ I say. ‘Patricia.’ And I see her face, her lily skin, her broken beaten body, and her head turns to mine on a cool tiled floor and whispers, ‘Nothing’s ever what you think,’ as her fingers uncurl and from them floats a photograph. The same photograph on Black Eyes’ desk. Of the woman and the girl.

  Of his wife and daughter.

  Unknown village, The Alps, Switzerland.

  Time remaining to Project re-initiation: 21 hours and 35 minutes

  Chris begins immediately to rip apart our phones, but I simply sit there, numb. I cannot unpeel my eyes from Patricia. She is still at the bar. Her face, her skin, her hair and her nails. Elements separate that join together to form one person visible from the outside and a hidden other within. The world continues around me, the smells, the sounds, spinning on its axis, day turning to night, sun rising, moon fading, yet still I sit and think and worry.

  ‘It could be her phone,’ I hear myself say amid the guitar music that now whispers through the air. ‘It could be her phone.’

  Chris briefly glances up to me, holding the torn phone items in his hand, then gets back to work. By the time he has pulled apart every section he can, I feel numb. My eyes stumble down to the metal pieces in front of me and I instinctively count every item, murmuring the numbers of each small section, creating a rapid in-brain itinerary, but no matter how hard I search, no matter how many times I check and recheck the mechanical and electrical elements that create the cell mechanism, I cannot locate anything that indicates a clandestine transmitter. Our two phones are clear.