[story] if you see something, say something
author: humphrina appleby
//Welcome to the Washington D.C Metro! Is this your first time? Please take the time to familiarise yourself with the Washington DC Metrorail system. As a reminder, it is illegal to eat, drink, smoke, or play music inside a Metro car.//
"First and last," Sarah Bhayani snarled to herself for the millionth time as she felt the weight of thirty-some angry glares at her as her enormous duffel bag got caught in the sliding doors as she tried to exit.
This being DC, and not New York, it was a minor miracle that instead of leaving her and her bag to their suddenly-divergent fates, the Metro car doors only chimed without opening. A rather passive-aggressive announcement played over the speakers.
//Stand clear of the closing doors, please!//
If was Friday. She had been up since five AM, trying desperately to meet paperwork deadlines to avoid being screamed at in the month-end meeting coming up on Monday. And due to a shortage of equipment (as always), her supervisor at OPM -- aka the Human Resources Department of the entire federal government of the United States -- had also asked her to run over to DOT to pick up some surplus equipment: two old laptops, a number of paper logbooks, plastic binders for hardcopy. At 3 PM. And that wasn't even the best part. No, that would be the unfortunate fact that some clueless intern had failed to log two lousy miles on one of the department's fleet of shitty-ass cars, which discrepency was then captured by the gleeful bean-counters who had no power to stop senators from partying, but could order the entire department to arrange their own transportation.
Sarah, being a good urbanite, did not own a car. Thus, she had walked to Farragut West, gotten on a New Carrolton-bound Orange Line train, transferred at Gallery Place to a Branch Ave-bound Green Line train, exited at Navy Yard, gone into DOT, picked up the surplus equipment, and had nearly finished the trip back. Except of course, now the Metro car was eating her bag as she tried to exit the train. Honestly. The Metro had run smoothly on her first trip, but the second she stepped on the train on the way back from DOT, everything had gone to hell - doors getting stuck, electrical failures, escalators halting.
And now those really annoying pre-recorded PSAs were driving her mad.
//Excuse me, is that your bag? Such small words can mean so much. Report all suspicious items to Metro police. Remember, if you see something, say something!//
"Excuse me, is that your bag?"
The words came from a little old man behind Sarah on the platform. The entire station seemed to freeze and stare at Sarah, as if some kind of spell had been cast. Sarah wanted to shriek in indignation, but she seemed frozen to the floor.
That was when a tall, beautiful woman swooped in. Her Louboutins gleamed, her Kelly bag was a rich burgundy leather, and her suit probably cost a year of Sarah's pay.
"Sir, are you bothering this young lady?" She said in a wondrously charming voice, like silk velvet. Her hands moved in incredulous gestures. "If you'd been watching, you would have seen that it is indeed her bag, and the doors simply closed on it, through no fault of hers."
A hobo in the corner of the station, idly scratching his balls as he sprawled on the hexagonal-tiled floor, pointed at the woman and said, "Fuck off, douche lobbyist."
"Sir," Ms. Power Suit continued, ignoring the hobo, "and ma'am, I'll thank you not to bring your prejudices into a Metro station, being as it is a public area, where this young lady has every right to be."
"Thank you!" Sarah said, finally unfrozen, and pointed a finger victoriously at the old man, who was scowling over his cane. "So you, sir, can just take your prejudices and shove them up your --"
"Uh, Lady?" The hobo said. "That douche? She, like, just stole your bag."
Sarah whirled around. The train was gone, as was her bag.
"Fuck!"
"So, like," said the hobo, "it's just a bag. What's in it, your stash?"
Sarah's mouth fell open in outrage. "No, asshole," she said, "I need it for work. I don't even know what some rich lady wants with it anyway. There's nothing in it worth stealing, just some garbage laptops that should have been thrown out with the trash last year."
The hobo's pimply forehead wrinkled. Sarah was afraid some of the pimples would burst. "Then why do you care?"
"Because I am a civil servant," Sarah said, "and in this government, we carefully monitor the trash because we have nothing better to do."
"Hm," the hobo said with a thoughtful look. "Yeah, well, look, maybe I can, like, help you, lady."
"I doubt that very much," Sarah said. "How can you possibly help me?"
He scratched his head. "I, like, know who that fucker is and where she's going."
"How?"
"Cause I told ya, she's a lobbyist. For the worst special-interest group in the entire United States."
Sarah didn't spend a lot of time with lobbyists -- they and their money were far too elevated above the world of the office drones that inhabited -- but she tried to recall some of the most hated companies. "Who? Exxon? Aetna? The entire military industrial complex?"
"Worse," said the hobo. "That was Claire Eddington. She's the lead lobbyist for the CCC."
"Who?"
"The Countrywide Commission for Cars. It's, like, the throwing-hundred-dollar-bills-at-lawmakers contingent of the Highwaymen."
Sarah blinked. "What, you mean like ... the robbers in ... Regency England?"
"Modern day robbers is more like it," the hobo said. "The Highwaymen are sorcerers of the open roads. Their domain's mostly the highways and freeways, but don't think they don't got Dupont Circle in their asphalt pantheon. They're the patron magicians of long-distance truckers, families in camper vans, suckers like that. And of course the more cars on the road, the more power they've got, those assholes. They lobby for more highways, more cars, and of course," he spat on the ground even though it was expressly against the rules, "they hate us."
"They hate --" she almost said hobos, and spent a moment trying to remember whether HUD had put out any memos on the proper term nowaways "-- the, um, socially ... disenfranchised?"
"Lady, do I look homeless to you?" The hobo went fire-engine-red with indignation. "I'm a Trainspotter!"
"Uh," she said. "You ... do ... a lot of heroin in Scotland?"
"You watch too many movies, Lady! No, Trainspotters are the magicians of rail, and the eternal sworn enemies of the Highwaymen! We ride ghost trains, we live in abandoned Underground Stations, we crawl through the catacombs under the Metro, we worship the spirit of Casey Jones and John Henry and ... where are you going?"
"I think you're very confused, sir," Sarah said.
"For shit's sakes," the hobo said with an eyeroll. "Would you believe me if I told you that ... hmm ... your SmarTrip balance is exactly 13.55?"
Sarah stopped walking away. "How did you know that?"
"Magic," the hobo said. "Now do you believe me?"
"Fine, help me," she said.
"First, you gotta buy me a SmarTrip," he said. "It's the soul of a Trainspotter -- can't do anything without it."
"If you're so magic, why can't you buy your own?"
"Ain't it obvious?" He flicked a glance at the colorfully lit up ticket/card machines. "I got cursed. No ticket machine will work for me. Why do you think I'm stuck in here? It may be home, but it sure gets boring after the first month."
"You could just jump the gates when the guard's not looking, I'm sure," she said.
"Can't," he said. "It's in the rules."
"Rules?"
"Look, lady--"
"As long as I'm going crazy with you," Sarah said, "my name is Sarah."
"Nice to meetcha, Sarah. I'm Jeff. Look, Sarah, you obey the laws of physics, dontcha? You slip, you fall. No way around it. Me, a Trainspotter, I obey slightly different rules. I can walk through walls sometimes, I can change time and space. But you know what I can't do? I can't disobey the rules of the train system I'm in. The rule is that you need a ticket to leave, and I can't disobey that any more than you can not fall on your ass if you walk off a ledge."
"Right, sure, whatever." She went to a machine, tapped on the buttons, and fed the slot a wrinkled twenty. Thank god she'd kept her purse out of her work bag.
She was rewarded with a blue-and-green plastic card with a stylized illustration of the most recognizable landmarks of Washington DC. She handed it over to the man, who jumped up with an enormous whoop.
"HELS YEAH!" He waved it around. "All right, lady, I'll help you, no problem! But first things first -- I haven't been outside this place in six months! Feeding off the energy of riders is okay, but I need something I can really sink my teeth into."
He swiped his card on the turnstile and ran out of the station, cackling. Sarah sprinted after him.
One trip to Five Guys later, they were sitting on a bench.
"Right," Jeff said, as he unwrapped his burger. "So tell me, why did that woman want your bag anyway?"
"Beats me," she said. "I was taking some surplus out of DOT for OPM. There's just two ancient laptops and some old file folders. I mean, nobody's touched them in ages. They were all covered in dust, and they haven't even been emptied out. I mean, there were still names on them. Benjamin White, Dawn Larson, Manuel Zunz, and what was that really crazy name ... oh yes! Henry Throckmorton. He died, like, in the nineties but because of a paperwork snafu nobody ever--"
"THROCKMORTON?" Jeff's burger fell out of his hands and landed on the sidewalk, where three seagulls immediately begain fighting over it. "You--had--the--One--it--exists--ohgodimnotworthy!"
"Uh," Sarah said.
"Henry Throckmorton," Jeff said, "was in possession of the One SmarTrip."
"You're going to have to explain."
Henry Throckmorton, it turned out, had been a DOT temp doing a series of surprise WMATA inspections. One of his jobs had been to test the then-new Metro system - checking all the gates, the turnstiles, the machines. He was there when the entire system was put online, and when the then-new SmarTrip cards were rolled out, he had bought one to test. Being an exacting sort, he had methodically tested every single station in operation, becoming the first person to do so.
"That card took on mythic powers," Jeff proclaimed. "Trainspotters everywhere felt that power! But by the time someone got to Henry Throckmorton, he claimed to have thrown the card away."
"I think I read that file," Sarah said. "He remarked that when he used the card at the last station, it 'discharged an electrical arc' and took down the entire Greenbelt station's circuit'. He declared the card as a malfunction and filed it away. WMATA ignored him and sent the file back to DOT, where it was just gathering dust."
"That was the power imbuing itself into the card!" Jeff shrieked. "We all assumed the card was lost! But it must have been in his files, inside your bag! Dunno how Claire figured this out, but she probably has spies! Spies everywhere!"
Jeff stood up, dumping the Five Guys fries all over the sidewalk. "We need to get that card back! He's probably going to do something nefarious with it!"
"Couldn't you have asked me earlier?" Sarah demanded. "We might be too late!"
"No worries, man, in this traffic, she's gonna have to race us."
"Where do you think she's taking it to?"
"Good question," Jeff said. "I'd guess back to the DOT, they've got an enclave inside the basement."
"Right, fine," Sarah said. "All right then, let's get on the next Green Line back to Greenbelt."
And just as they walked up to the Metro entrance, the big helvetica "M" on the sign went off, followed by the sound of a violent crash inside.
"Of course," Sarah said.
It turned out, which Jeff confirmed with a quick scry, to be a completely normal -- in the worst way -- structural failure. A concrete tunnel that had simply gone for too many years without the recommended repairs had cracked, leading to a collapsed tunnel that, while it had led to no fatalities, completely blocked off Union Station, the busiest station of the entire system -- and a via point on their way.
"The card's been sucking power out of the Metro all these years, just by existing," Jeff said. "No wonder everything is deterioating."
"The Metro's been shitty for years. I thought that was just, you know, general incompetence and fail."
"Yeah, sure, that's the source. The Card, when there isn't someone competent to wield it, it gets unstable. Like ice in a crack ... that amplifies the fail. It's been doing that ever since the entire system started running, so, yeah, that's exactly what you'd expect to see. That, or ... actually, I think Claire figured out that we're coming. It wouldn't be hard for her to make the road crack."
"How would she know we're coming?"
"She's a Highwayman. She's probably got, like, a million eyes."
"What?"
"There's got to be, like, a million traffic cams in the DC Metro area, at least. A Highwayman can see through any or all of them. As long as we're on the screen of any CCTV camera on the roadside, she can monitor our every move."
"She can just do that?"
"Of course. They wouldn't be half so scary if they couldn't. Why do you think I wanted to get us into WMATA territory so quickly? This is my ground. These are my cameras. Claire can't access them."
"I think it's time," Sarah said, "that you explain to me how this ... magic ... works."
"Yeah, sure," he said, "but first, we gotta get on a train. Talk when we're aboard."
"How? All the trains are down."
"Magic," he said. "Like, duh."
Metro stations, Sarah had read in a book, had been designed with the slogan 'The Great Society Subway' in mind. It had been meant to be an enlightened, grandiose, human project. Among the genuinely well-thought-out elements in this was that the stations had absolutely no blind angles. This was meant to deter crime, and it worked quite well.
Unfortuantely, Jeff wanted them to commit a crime at this moment.
"Into the tunnels? Are you trying to get us both arrested?" Sarah hissed as Jeff sauntered down the platform casually towards the dark mouth that was the tunnels.
"Chillax," he said. "I'm a part of the entire Metro system, 'member? Cameras don't show me to security -- beacuse I'm just a part of the station to the cameras. All you gotta do is make sure to let me always block your line of light to the cameras."
"I was never very good at WoW," Sarah sighed, and tagged closely behind.
She had, in the past, occasionally stared at the concrete bubbles that was the Metro tunnels, their flicking white fluorescent lights, the coiled cables affixed to the walls, the mysterious control boxes inset every hundred yards. Now she was walking on the narrow ledge in the darkness, with a presumably live third rail just one slip away. She breathed a sigh of relief when they arrived at the next station.
"All righty then," Jeff said, and he cleared his throat. "You just gotta trust me on this one, okay?"
"Okay," she said.
"Close your eyes," he said. "You look like the hardworking type, I can tell. So imagine it's four AM and you've had too much coffee and you've just ignored me and every other rough sleeper on your way to work, I know you do, and you're staggering up to the platform and it's pitch dark and what do you want more than anything else to come down that tunnel?"
She didn't have to imagine. She remembered every miserable winter morning, shivering violently on the open-air platform, feet aching from walking two miles from her apartment in too-thin loafers worn down without any support, just-washed hair freezing into icicles, yesterdays's troubles adding to today's anxieties, shaking from too much caffeine and too thin a coat and what is wrong with Metro today fuck WMATA where is the ...
A roar of hot stale air came out from the black tunnel, followed by a sickly light. Sarah looked around; the other people waiting on the platform, and the security guards, seemed not to have noticed.
The train's line identification was a blur of colors, like that out of a dream, and Sarah couldn't focus on that. But the sides read NO PASSENGERS NO STOPS SPECIAL TRAIN!!! and it stopped at the station, pulling up with a head-splitting screech.
Inside it was packed. There were men and women in faded cheap suits like hers, in military uniforms, in jumpsuits and hats, in khaki and white and five-fingers, hauling backpacks and briefcases and plastic shopping bags and purses and laptop bags. All were bleary-eyed, swaying on their feet as the train doors slid open.
Jeff shoved his way in, and Sarah followed. They squeezed themselves onto the sticky gray floor, covered with the ghosts of breadcrumbs, wads of gum, and discarded newspapers from three different decades. Sarah tripped over a dozing dog and landed in the mess. She got up from her aching knees, brushed off her thrift store Ann Taylor suit, and staggered over to Jeff.
"What the fuck," she said, which the other passengers ignored. "What is going on?"
He shrugged and stretched out in his molded plastic seat. "Yeah, well, the physical trains are gone, so we had to get on the, you know, spiritual train." He gestured around them. "Welcome to the First Train."
"Explain everything," she said with a glare. "Quickly."
"Oh, don't worry, this train exists outside of time," Jeff said.
"Explain magic. Now."
Jeff nodded. "Magic is like ... patterns, man. Patterns and thoughts. It's just belief, you know? Enough people believe in it, you can make it happen. Thoughts have, like, energy."
"Bullshit," Sarah said. "Do you know how many times I've wished for the train to be on time and it wasn't?"
Jeff tucked his hands behind his head. "Didja do, like, finger painting ever?"
"You mean like in ... kindergarten?" Sarah raised her eyebrows. "Yeah, sure."
"Did it look anything like what you were trying to paint?"
"No."
"Fuckin' A. You see my point? Magic is like painting with your mind. Reaching out and making things different. But it's gotta look right, or it's not gonna fool the universe. It's gotta be perfect, in all three dimensions, and in time, and in all colors and sounds and shapes and shit. And it's gotta follow all the physical and metaphysical rules, too. Takes a fuckload of patience and time to learn, yanno?"
"What do you mean you have to fool the universe with metaphysical rules?"
Jeff said, "Remember what I told you earlier - that I couldn't leave the station without a ticket? It's like that. If you cast an apple spell, you have to give it all the right mass and energy and shit, I don't know it all. But that's what you'd have to do. That's what wizards do, how they manipulate matter. By becoming f = ma. Don't look at me like that, I went to college yanno. Anyway, shit like that is too hard for most people to internalize, plus that explains why wizards are totally crazy and you should never ever do weed with one, by the way. Anyway, me, I know the rules of the train system. Shit like: there's always got to be a first train and a last train, you need to pay to enter, you need to pay to leave, you ain't allowed to eat, drink, smoke, litter, at all that on the train. And human rules, unspoken rules, those can be even stronger, because they're in the consciousness of all the riders, and like I said, the thoughts, that's what makes magic work, that's what gives it power."
"Human ... rules? You mean, like ..."
"Like this," he said, and gestured to the teeming crowd of ghosts they were riding with. "By, like, definition, there's always a first train. That's what we're riding on now. A manifestation of a couple million people all beliving in it."
"What's so special about the first train?"
"Don't you get it yet?" Jeff grinned. "Wherever it is that you're needin' to be, it will always get you there early."
The crackling voice of an announcement came on.
//Please stand back. Doors closing.//
The train jerked forward and began moving.
Sarah picked a seat by the window and stared through the scratched-up plastic window panels, trying to catch flashes of the dimension they were in--or whatever it really was called; she had, perhaps alarmingly, stopped caring about the technicalities of the system. (The way she looked at it, either she would die in a dimensional collapse here, or she had gone completely insane; either way, the outcome would be the same.)
A strangely heavy stupor came over her; she recognized, subconsciously, that this was part of the First Train's spell -- if this was the earliest train in the world, then it stood to reason that she would be as mindlessly exhausted as all the other passengers.
She was half-asleep when Jeff kicked her in the shin. "Wakey wakey, we're here."
She jumped up. The train had pulled into--she couldn't tell, actually. It was darkness here, half-lit, the coffin-shaped depressions of the tunnel stark and ghastly in the lighting. The door jerked open and Sarah threw herself through. She landed in a station that, to her complete lack of surprise, looked like a composite of all Metro stations, with crazy M.C. Escher-like geometries. Passengers, station personnel, janitors, engineers, and repairmen wandered around freely, towards some destination that only they could see. There were so many that even though they were not completely substantial, Sarah was finding it hard to move through them. Jeff had vanished, to her alarm.
Sarah looked around wildly and looked for the way out. She spotted any number of EXIT signs, pointing in every possible direction, and she groaned.
Until she realized that for all the passengers to remain in the station, they must not be exiting the station; therefore, all she had to do was go where they weren't.
As soon as she made that realization, she looked around for a place they weren't going. It was quick to find: there was an enormous down escalator descending from some invisible mezzanine, without an up escalator in sight. It was filled with riders standing still, vacant-eyed, barely upright. Sarah pushed through the platform crowds until she came to the one-way escalator.
There were too many riders, and zombie-like, as they reached the bottom of the escalator, they shoved her mindlessly out of their way and she fell to the ground. They ran over her, which felt rather like being trampled by a small herd of cats. She got to her feet and stared up the shuffling crowd, and she wished that Jeff were still here. He'd know what to do. He'd know how to cast a spell that would get her out.
Maybe she could do that too, she thought wildly. She knew the Metro system in and out. She knew where to stand on the platform such that her train door would be right next to the escalator at every transfer point. She knew the schedules, weekday and weekend. She also knew the etiquette of the Metro station: let people out first, then get in. Swipe your SmarTrip before the gate closes; it'll read your card. And then, of course, there was the greatest rule of all, probably the one that more people obeyed than any piddly actually-on-the-books law ... and as she thought of this, Sarah stared up the down escalator and she got an idea.
She gathered up all the rage she had ever felt at tourists crowding up ticket machines and card gates and platforms and most importantly, escalators, and she opened her mouth and she screamed:
"I HATE TOURISTS! WALK ON THE LEFT, STAND ON THE RIGHT!"
And they did. They shuffled, slowly, to their right, leaving a path on Sarah's right, just big enough for one person to get through.
Sarah took the steps two at a time, fighting the direction of the escalator.
She climbed for a very, very long time. More and more people were always coming down--where from?--and she kept climbing. This was harder than any exercise machine had ever been, harder than climbing the floors when the escalators or elevators were down, and her legs began to cramp up. She felt herself starting to go down with the escalator, losing her fight.
Just one more step, she whispered to herself, and she made a final push.
And then she tripped and fell into, then through, the darkness at the top of the escalator.
She landed on her hands and knees on the familiar red hexagonal floor tiles, and she was so relieved that she came very close to kissing the probably disgusting ground. She looked around frantically until she saw a sign with a green dot and white text on a black sign: NAVY YARD - BALLPARK. All around, the electronic displays were talking about major delays and disruptions and promising free bus rides and transfers to replace the non-functioning train service.
"Are you all right, miss?" A station security woman, hair braided back in cornrows, asked with some concern and alarm.
"Yes!" Sarah shouted. "I'm great! Never better! I fucking love this place!" She jumped to her feet and ran to the escalators.
They were, of course, not working.
She took the stairs and ran up, outside, taking street. She knew the DOT building's address from having just been there: 1200 New Jersey Ave Southeast.
The DOT building was, by accident or design, literally just down the street from the Navy Yard. It was a tall building of concrete, glass, and steel, designed to project a grave impression of "fuck off". That was, however, merely the outside. The inside was, like every Federal building in the history of ever, a grid-based labyrinth full of depressing corridors, bulletin boards with decades' worth of ignored memos, and a card reader at every door plus the bonus metal detector up front.
And right down the street Claire Eddington came out of a black car, carrying Sarah's bag, and began sauntering down the sidewalk in her power suit. After hanging around with Jeff long enough, she could detect what he had talked about -- an aura of power bearing down on her from inside the bag, like a train about to run everyone over.
She was wondering where Jeff was, when that problem solved itself. Jeff leaped out of one of the bushes just as Claire passed by, tackled her, and the two went rolling onto the DOT lawn in a tangle of filthy flannel and expensive silk. Sarah ran at both of them, shouting at them to stop, and then all three found themselves swamped by security guards.
"Oh for --" said Claire.
"Oh c'mon, dudes, be cool --" said Jeff.
And then Claire and Jeff turned to each other, nodded, and simultaneously turned towards the guards. Jeff drew a circle in the air and it glowed with the brightness of a steam train lantern shining through a thunderstorm. The guards, blinded, turned away. Claire opened her Kelly bag and took out, of all things, a can of red spray paint. She sprayed a red circle around herself and Jess, and then a series of runes that Sarah had never seen before. Sarah was pondering their meaning when the asphalt around them melted, warped, and then ate them up like a giant amoeba.
"Fuck you all!" said Sarah, and ran for the front entrance of the DOT. She flashed her visitor's badge from her trip just earlier in the day, which now seemed like an eternity ago. The guards, bored and longing for 5 PM, let her through.
Sarah did not have to think very hard to guess where Claire had sent herself and Jeff. She made immediately for the basement area, where she only had to follow the sounds of shouting. Soon enough the sounds led her to a deserted office, where Claire and Jeff were wrestling each other for her duffel bag.
"All right," Sarah said, "that belongs to me."
"You were merely transporting it," Claire said. "I'm sure you can report it stolen. I'll even corroborate your witness statement."
"Bullshit," Sarah said. "And if you think you can just get away with this, you've got another think coming."
"Oh yeah? Little bureaucrat, what are you going to do? Bury me in paper? Tie me up in red tape?"
"No," she said. "I'm going to do what bureaucrats do best: waste time." She grinned and pointed behind Claire. "Jeff just got your case."
Claire whirled around. Jeff was dancing in his sandals, holding up the bag. "It's mine! It's mine!"
"Hey!" Sarah shouted. "You said you were going to help me get it back!"
"And you're an idiot if you believed me!" Jeff chortled. "I'm gonna be the most powerful Trainspotter in the world! And the first thing I'll do, is I'll destroy the entire Freeway system! Gas-guzzling cars can just suck it!"
"You will do no such thing!" Claire snarled. "I will take it from you, and I will make sure that your precious train systems turn to rust! I will restore the glory of Automobiles in this world, just you watch!"
"BOTH OF YOU ARE ASSHOLES!" Sarah screamed. "You'll destroy each other! Don't you understand? Jeff, Metrobuses run on roads too! Claire, railroads carry automobiles and car parts! There is no world where you can only have the one system!"
They both stared at Sarah like she'd sprouted a second head, then went back to fighting over the bag.
"Oh for fuck's sake," Sarah said, disgusted. "You two deserve each other. But you don't deserve the One SmarTrip or whatever. What happens if it's destroyed?"
"The power will just go back out of it," Claire said.
"Like, such a total waste," Jeff said.
"Sounds perfect," Sarah said.
"Oh yeah?" Claire said.
"What are you gonna do?" Jeff said. "You aren't even a magician!"
"No, I'm not, that's right," Sarah said. "But I don't need magic to deal with you two right now."
She pulled out her cell phone. She glanced at one of the omnipresent security posters and dialed. "Hello? Yes. I'd like to report a suspicious package. I'm so sorry, I know it's so late in the day, but you know what they taught me in training ... if you see something, say something." She described her duffel bag and their location. "And I think I heard something metallic inside. Could you please hurry? Thank you, officer!"
She hung up and glared at Claire and Jeff.
"In about one minute, there will be two security guards with firearms down here," she said. "And out of the three of us here, I'm the only one with legal access to this building. I suggest that the both of you not be here when they arrive."
Both magicians glared at her.
"Why are you doing this?" Claire finally said, as she stepped away, hands held up. "If you don't support me, why don't you support him?"
"Why?" Sarah threw her hands up in the air. "Do you not see my badge? I work for the United State government. I at least try to work for the people. Of course I have my own goddamn thoughts about cars and trains! But you know what? I think that the decision isn't up to you, or you, or me. However people want to travel ... it should be a conclusion that every single person gets to arrive at for themselves."
And then there came the sounds of feet in boots hurrying down the stairs.
"So uh," Jeff said as he set the bag on the floor, backing away from the erstwhile suspicious package, "weren't you, like, wanting that for your work or something?"
"Ah fuck," Sarah groaned, as both magicians vanished. "I knew I forgot something."
"So they'd already surplused it to someone else?" Gloria Brown, Sarah's immediate supervisor, sighed. "Figures. Fucking bureucrats, can't trust them for anything. Present company excused, of course. Sorry about the wasted trip."
"Don't worry about it," Sarah said. "Have a good weekend, boss."
"You too. Got any plans? Drive out to Ocean City? Amtrak trip up to New York?"
Sarah paled.
the end
//Welcome to the Washington D.C Metro! Is this your first time? Please take the time to familiarise yourself with the Washington DC Metrorail system. As a reminder, it is illegal to eat, drink, smoke, or play music inside a Metro car.//
"First and last," Sarah Bhayani snarled to herself for the millionth time as she felt the weight of thirty-some angry glares at her as her enormous duffel bag got caught in the sliding doors as she tried to exit.
This being DC, and not New York, it was a minor miracle that instead of leaving her and her bag to their suddenly-divergent fates, the Metro car doors only chimed without opening. A rather passive-aggressive announcement played over the speakers.
//Stand clear of the closing doors, please!//
If was Friday. She had been up since five AM, trying desperately to meet paperwork deadlines to avoid being screamed at in the month-end meeting coming up on Monday. And due to a shortage of equipment (as always), her supervisor at OPM -- aka the Human Resources Department of the entire federal government of the United States -- had also asked her to run over to DOT to pick up some surplus equipment: two old laptops, a number of paper logbooks, plastic binders for hardcopy. At 3 PM. And that wasn't even the best part. No, that would be the unfortunate fact that some clueless intern had failed to log two lousy miles on one of the department's fleet of shitty-ass cars, which discrepency was then captured by the gleeful bean-counters who had no power to stop senators from partying, but could order the entire department to arrange their own transportation.
Sarah, being a good urbanite, did not own a car. Thus, she had walked to Farragut West, gotten on a New Carrolton-bound Orange Line train, transferred at Gallery Place to a Branch Ave-bound Green Line train, exited at Navy Yard, gone into DOT, picked up the surplus equipment, and had nearly finished the trip back. Except of course, now the Metro car was eating her bag as she tried to exit the train. Honestly. The Metro had run smoothly on her first trip, but the second she stepped on the train on the way back from DOT, everything had gone to hell - doors getting stuck, electrical failures, escalators halting.
And now those really annoying pre-recorded PSAs were driving her mad.
//Excuse me, is that your bag? Such small words can mean so much. Report all suspicious items to Metro police. Remember, if you see something, say something!//
"Excuse me, is that your bag?"
The words came from a little old man behind Sarah on the platform. The entire station seemed to freeze and stare at Sarah, as if some kind of spell had been cast. Sarah wanted to shriek in indignation, but she seemed frozen to the floor.
That was when a tall, beautiful woman swooped in. Her Louboutins gleamed, her Kelly bag was a rich burgundy leather, and her suit probably cost a year of Sarah's pay.
"Sir, are you bothering this young lady?" She said in a wondrously charming voice, like silk velvet. Her hands moved in incredulous gestures. "If you'd been watching, you would have seen that it is indeed her bag, and the doors simply closed on it, through no fault of hers."
A hobo in the corner of the station, idly scratching his balls as he sprawled on the hexagonal-tiled floor, pointed at the woman and said, "Fuck off, douche lobbyist."
"Sir," Ms. Power Suit continued, ignoring the hobo, "and ma'am, I'll thank you not to bring your prejudices into a Metro station, being as it is a public area, where this young lady has every right to be."
"Thank you!" Sarah said, finally unfrozen, and pointed a finger victoriously at the old man, who was scowling over his cane. "So you, sir, can just take your prejudices and shove them up your --"
"Uh, Lady?" The hobo said. "That douche? She, like, just stole your bag."
Sarah whirled around. The train was gone, as was her bag.
"Fuck!"
"So, like," said the hobo, "it's just a bag. What's in it, your stash?"
Sarah's mouth fell open in outrage. "No, asshole," she said, "I need it for work. I don't even know what some rich lady wants with it anyway. There's nothing in it worth stealing, just some garbage laptops that should have been thrown out with the trash last year."
The hobo's pimply forehead wrinkled. Sarah was afraid some of the pimples would burst. "Then why do you care?"
"Because I am a civil servant," Sarah said, "and in this government, we carefully monitor the trash because we have nothing better to do."
"Hm," the hobo said with a thoughtful look. "Yeah, well, look, maybe I can, like, help you, lady."
"I doubt that very much," Sarah said. "How can you possibly help me?"
He scratched his head. "I, like, know who that fucker is and where she's going."
"How?"
"Cause I told ya, she's a lobbyist. For the worst special-interest group in the entire United States."
Sarah didn't spend a lot of time with lobbyists -- they and their money were far too elevated above the world of the office drones that inhabited -- but she tried to recall some of the most hated companies. "Who? Exxon? Aetna? The entire military industrial complex?"
"Worse," said the hobo. "That was Claire Eddington. She's the lead lobbyist for the CCC."
"Who?"
"The Countrywide Commission for Cars. It's, like, the throwing-hundred-dollar-bills-at-lawmakers contingent of the Highwaymen."
Sarah blinked. "What, you mean like ... the robbers in ... Regency England?"
"Modern day robbers is more like it," the hobo said. "The Highwaymen are sorcerers of the open roads. Their domain's mostly the highways and freeways, but don't think they don't got Dupont Circle in their asphalt pantheon. They're the patron magicians of long-distance truckers, families in camper vans, suckers like that. And of course the more cars on the road, the more power they've got, those assholes. They lobby for more highways, more cars, and of course," he spat on the ground even though it was expressly against the rules, "they hate us."
"They hate --" she almost said hobos, and spent a moment trying to remember whether HUD had put out any memos on the proper term nowaways "-- the, um, socially ... disenfranchised?"
"Lady, do I look homeless to you?" The hobo went fire-engine-red with indignation. "I'm a Trainspotter!"
"Uh," she said. "You ... do ... a lot of heroin in Scotland?"
"You watch too many movies, Lady! No, Trainspotters are the magicians of rail, and the eternal sworn enemies of the Highwaymen! We ride ghost trains, we live in abandoned Underground Stations, we crawl through the catacombs under the Metro, we worship the spirit of Casey Jones and John Henry and ... where are you going?"
"I think you're very confused, sir," Sarah said.
"For shit's sakes," the hobo said with an eyeroll. "Would you believe me if I told you that ... hmm ... your SmarTrip balance is exactly 13.55?"
Sarah stopped walking away. "How did you know that?"
"Magic," the hobo said. "Now do you believe me?"
"Fine, help me," she said.
"First, you gotta buy me a SmarTrip," he said. "It's the soul of a Trainspotter -- can't do anything without it."
"If you're so magic, why can't you buy your own?"
"Ain't it obvious?" He flicked a glance at the colorfully lit up ticket/card machines. "I got cursed. No ticket machine will work for me. Why do you think I'm stuck in here? It may be home, but it sure gets boring after the first month."
"You could just jump the gates when the guard's not looking, I'm sure," she said.
"Can't," he said. "It's in the rules."
"Rules?"
"Look, lady--"
"As long as I'm going crazy with you," Sarah said, "my name is Sarah."
"Nice to meetcha, Sarah. I'm Jeff. Look, Sarah, you obey the laws of physics, dontcha? You slip, you fall. No way around it. Me, a Trainspotter, I obey slightly different rules. I can walk through walls sometimes, I can change time and space. But you know what I can't do? I can't disobey the rules of the train system I'm in. The rule is that you need a ticket to leave, and I can't disobey that any more than you can not fall on your ass if you walk off a ledge."
"Right, sure, whatever." She went to a machine, tapped on the buttons, and fed the slot a wrinkled twenty. Thank god she'd kept her purse out of her work bag.
She was rewarded with a blue-and-green plastic card with a stylized illustration of the most recognizable landmarks of Washington DC. She handed it over to the man, who jumped up with an enormous whoop.
"HELS YEAH!" He waved it around. "All right, lady, I'll help you, no problem! But first things first -- I haven't been outside this place in six months! Feeding off the energy of riders is okay, but I need something I can really sink my teeth into."
He swiped his card on the turnstile and ran out of the station, cackling. Sarah sprinted after him.
One trip to Five Guys later, they were sitting on a bench.
"Right," Jeff said, as he unwrapped his burger. "So tell me, why did that woman want your bag anyway?"
"Beats me," she said. "I was taking some surplus out of DOT for OPM. There's just two ancient laptops and some old file folders. I mean, nobody's touched them in ages. They were all covered in dust, and they haven't even been emptied out. I mean, there were still names on them. Benjamin White, Dawn Larson, Manuel Zunz, and what was that really crazy name ... oh yes! Henry Throckmorton. He died, like, in the nineties but because of a paperwork snafu nobody ever--"
"THROCKMORTON?" Jeff's burger fell out of his hands and landed on the sidewalk, where three seagulls immediately begain fighting over it. "You--had--the--One--it--exists--ohgodimnotworthy!"
"Uh," Sarah said.
"Henry Throckmorton," Jeff said, "was in possession of the One SmarTrip."
"You're going to have to explain."
Henry Throckmorton, it turned out, had been a DOT temp doing a series of surprise WMATA inspections. One of his jobs had been to test the then-new Metro system - checking all the gates, the turnstiles, the machines. He was there when the entire system was put online, and when the then-new SmarTrip cards were rolled out, he had bought one to test. Being an exacting sort, he had methodically tested every single station in operation, becoming the first person to do so.
"That card took on mythic powers," Jeff proclaimed. "Trainspotters everywhere felt that power! But by the time someone got to Henry Throckmorton, he claimed to have thrown the card away."
"I think I read that file," Sarah said. "He remarked that when he used the card at the last station, it 'discharged an electrical arc' and took down the entire Greenbelt station's circuit'. He declared the card as a malfunction and filed it away. WMATA ignored him and sent the file back to DOT, where it was just gathering dust."
"That was the power imbuing itself into the card!" Jeff shrieked. "We all assumed the card was lost! But it must have been in his files, inside your bag! Dunno how Claire figured this out, but she probably has spies! Spies everywhere!"
Jeff stood up, dumping the Five Guys fries all over the sidewalk. "We need to get that card back! He's probably going to do something nefarious with it!"
"Couldn't you have asked me earlier?" Sarah demanded. "We might be too late!"
"No worries, man, in this traffic, she's gonna have to race us."
"Where do you think she's taking it to?"
"Good question," Jeff said. "I'd guess back to the DOT, they've got an enclave inside the basement."
"Right, fine," Sarah said. "All right then, let's get on the next Green Line back to Greenbelt."
And just as they walked up to the Metro entrance, the big helvetica "M" on the sign went off, followed by the sound of a violent crash inside.
"Of course," Sarah said.
It turned out, which Jeff confirmed with a quick scry, to be a completely normal -- in the worst way -- structural failure. A concrete tunnel that had simply gone for too many years without the recommended repairs had cracked, leading to a collapsed tunnel that, while it had led to no fatalities, completely blocked off Union Station, the busiest station of the entire system -- and a via point on their way.
"The card's been sucking power out of the Metro all these years, just by existing," Jeff said. "No wonder everything is deterioating."
"The Metro's been shitty for years. I thought that was just, you know, general incompetence and fail."
"Yeah, sure, that's the source. The Card, when there isn't someone competent to wield it, it gets unstable. Like ice in a crack ... that amplifies the fail. It's been doing that ever since the entire system started running, so, yeah, that's exactly what you'd expect to see. That, or ... actually, I think Claire figured out that we're coming. It wouldn't be hard for her to make the road crack."
"How would she know we're coming?"
"She's a Highwayman. She's probably got, like, a million eyes."
"What?"
"There's got to be, like, a million traffic cams in the DC Metro area, at least. A Highwayman can see through any or all of them. As long as we're on the screen of any CCTV camera on the roadside, she can monitor our every move."
"She can just do that?"
"Of course. They wouldn't be half so scary if they couldn't. Why do you think I wanted to get us into WMATA territory so quickly? This is my ground. These are my cameras. Claire can't access them."
"I think it's time," Sarah said, "that you explain to me how this ... magic ... works."
"Yeah, sure," he said, "but first, we gotta get on a train. Talk when we're aboard."
"How? All the trains are down."
"Magic," he said. "Like, duh."
Metro stations, Sarah had read in a book, had been designed with the slogan 'The Great Society Subway' in mind. It had been meant to be an enlightened, grandiose, human project. Among the genuinely well-thought-out elements in this was that the stations had absolutely no blind angles. This was meant to deter crime, and it worked quite well.
Unfortuantely, Jeff wanted them to commit a crime at this moment.
"Into the tunnels? Are you trying to get us both arrested?" Sarah hissed as Jeff sauntered down the platform casually towards the dark mouth that was the tunnels.
"Chillax," he said. "I'm a part of the entire Metro system, 'member? Cameras don't show me to security -- beacuse I'm just a part of the station to the cameras. All you gotta do is make sure to let me always block your line of light to the cameras."
"I was never very good at WoW," Sarah sighed, and tagged closely behind.
She had, in the past, occasionally stared at the concrete bubbles that was the Metro tunnels, their flicking white fluorescent lights, the coiled cables affixed to the walls, the mysterious control boxes inset every hundred yards. Now she was walking on the narrow ledge in the darkness, with a presumably live third rail just one slip away. She breathed a sigh of relief when they arrived at the next station.
"All righty then," Jeff said, and he cleared his throat. "You just gotta trust me on this one, okay?"
"Okay," she said.
"Close your eyes," he said. "You look like the hardworking type, I can tell. So imagine it's four AM and you've had too much coffee and you've just ignored me and every other rough sleeper on your way to work, I know you do, and you're staggering up to the platform and it's pitch dark and what do you want more than anything else to come down that tunnel?"
She didn't have to imagine. She remembered every miserable winter morning, shivering violently on the open-air platform, feet aching from walking two miles from her apartment in too-thin loafers worn down without any support, just-washed hair freezing into icicles, yesterdays's troubles adding to today's anxieties, shaking from too much caffeine and too thin a coat and what is wrong with Metro today fuck WMATA where is the ...
A roar of hot stale air came out from the black tunnel, followed by a sickly light. Sarah looked around; the other people waiting on the platform, and the security guards, seemed not to have noticed.
The train's line identification was a blur of colors, like that out of a dream, and Sarah couldn't focus on that. But the sides read NO PASSENGERS NO STOPS SPECIAL TRAIN!!! and it stopped at the station, pulling up with a head-splitting screech.
Inside it was packed. There were men and women in faded cheap suits like hers, in military uniforms, in jumpsuits and hats, in khaki and white and five-fingers, hauling backpacks and briefcases and plastic shopping bags and purses and laptop bags. All were bleary-eyed, swaying on their feet as the train doors slid open.
Jeff shoved his way in, and Sarah followed. They squeezed themselves onto the sticky gray floor, covered with the ghosts of breadcrumbs, wads of gum, and discarded newspapers from three different decades. Sarah tripped over a dozing dog and landed in the mess. She got up from her aching knees, brushed off her thrift store Ann Taylor suit, and staggered over to Jeff.
"What the fuck," she said, which the other passengers ignored. "What is going on?"
He shrugged and stretched out in his molded plastic seat. "Yeah, well, the physical trains are gone, so we had to get on the, you know, spiritual train." He gestured around them. "Welcome to the First Train."
"Explain everything," she said with a glare. "Quickly."
"Oh, don't worry, this train exists outside of time," Jeff said.
"Explain magic. Now."
Jeff nodded. "Magic is like ... patterns, man. Patterns and thoughts. It's just belief, you know? Enough people believe in it, you can make it happen. Thoughts have, like, energy."
"Bullshit," Sarah said. "Do you know how many times I've wished for the train to be on time and it wasn't?"
Jeff tucked his hands behind his head. "Didja do, like, finger painting ever?"
"You mean like in ... kindergarten?" Sarah raised her eyebrows. "Yeah, sure."
"Did it look anything like what you were trying to paint?"
"No."
"Fuckin' A. You see my point? Magic is like painting with your mind. Reaching out and making things different. But it's gotta look right, or it's not gonna fool the universe. It's gotta be perfect, in all three dimensions, and in time, and in all colors and sounds and shapes and shit. And it's gotta follow all the physical and metaphysical rules, too. Takes a fuckload of patience and time to learn, yanno?"
"What do you mean you have to fool the universe with metaphysical rules?"
Jeff said, "Remember what I told you earlier - that I couldn't leave the station without a ticket? It's like that. If you cast an apple spell, you have to give it all the right mass and energy and shit, I don't know it all. But that's what you'd have to do. That's what wizards do, how they manipulate matter. By becoming f = ma. Don't look at me like that, I went to college yanno. Anyway, shit like that is too hard for most people to internalize, plus that explains why wizards are totally crazy and you should never ever do weed with one, by the way. Anyway, me, I know the rules of the train system. Shit like: there's always got to be a first train and a last train, you need to pay to enter, you need to pay to leave, you ain't allowed to eat, drink, smoke, litter, at all that on the train. And human rules, unspoken rules, those can be even stronger, because they're in the consciousness of all the riders, and like I said, the thoughts, that's what makes magic work, that's what gives it power."
"Human ... rules? You mean, like ..."
"Like this," he said, and gestured to the teeming crowd of ghosts they were riding with. "By, like, definition, there's always a first train. That's what we're riding on now. A manifestation of a couple million people all beliving in it."
"What's so special about the first train?"
"Don't you get it yet?" Jeff grinned. "Wherever it is that you're needin' to be, it will always get you there early."
The crackling voice of an announcement came on.
//Please stand back. Doors closing.//
The train jerked forward and began moving.
Sarah picked a seat by the window and stared through the scratched-up plastic window panels, trying to catch flashes of the dimension they were in--or whatever it really was called; she had, perhaps alarmingly, stopped caring about the technicalities of the system. (The way she looked at it, either she would die in a dimensional collapse here, or she had gone completely insane; either way, the outcome would be the same.)
A strangely heavy stupor came over her; she recognized, subconsciously, that this was part of the First Train's spell -- if this was the earliest train in the world, then it stood to reason that she would be as mindlessly exhausted as all the other passengers.
She was half-asleep when Jeff kicked her in the shin. "Wakey wakey, we're here."
She jumped up. The train had pulled into--she couldn't tell, actually. It was darkness here, half-lit, the coffin-shaped depressions of the tunnel stark and ghastly in the lighting. The door jerked open and Sarah threw herself through. She landed in a station that, to her complete lack of surprise, looked like a composite of all Metro stations, with crazy M.C. Escher-like geometries. Passengers, station personnel, janitors, engineers, and repairmen wandered around freely, towards some destination that only they could see. There were so many that even though they were not completely substantial, Sarah was finding it hard to move through them. Jeff had vanished, to her alarm.
Sarah looked around wildly and looked for the way out. She spotted any number of EXIT signs, pointing in every possible direction, and she groaned.
Until she realized that for all the passengers to remain in the station, they must not be exiting the station; therefore, all she had to do was go where they weren't.
As soon as she made that realization, she looked around for a place they weren't going. It was quick to find: there was an enormous down escalator descending from some invisible mezzanine, without an up escalator in sight. It was filled with riders standing still, vacant-eyed, barely upright. Sarah pushed through the platform crowds until she came to the one-way escalator.
There were too many riders, and zombie-like, as they reached the bottom of the escalator, they shoved her mindlessly out of their way and she fell to the ground. They ran over her, which felt rather like being trampled by a small herd of cats. She got to her feet and stared up the shuffling crowd, and she wished that Jeff were still here. He'd know what to do. He'd know how to cast a spell that would get her out.
Maybe she could do that too, she thought wildly. She knew the Metro system in and out. She knew where to stand on the platform such that her train door would be right next to the escalator at every transfer point. She knew the schedules, weekday and weekend. She also knew the etiquette of the Metro station: let people out first, then get in. Swipe your SmarTrip before the gate closes; it'll read your card. And then, of course, there was the greatest rule of all, probably the one that more people obeyed than any piddly actually-on-the-books law ... and as she thought of this, Sarah stared up the down escalator and she got an idea.
She gathered up all the rage she had ever felt at tourists crowding up ticket machines and card gates and platforms and most importantly, escalators, and she opened her mouth and she screamed:
"I HATE TOURISTS! WALK ON THE LEFT, STAND ON THE RIGHT!"
And they did. They shuffled, slowly, to their right, leaving a path on Sarah's right, just big enough for one person to get through.
Sarah took the steps two at a time, fighting the direction of the escalator.
She climbed for a very, very long time. More and more people were always coming down--where from?--and she kept climbing. This was harder than any exercise machine had ever been, harder than climbing the floors when the escalators or elevators were down, and her legs began to cramp up. She felt herself starting to go down with the escalator, losing her fight.
Just one more step, she whispered to herself, and she made a final push.
And then she tripped and fell into, then through, the darkness at the top of the escalator.
She landed on her hands and knees on the familiar red hexagonal floor tiles, and she was so relieved that she came very close to kissing the probably disgusting ground. She looked around frantically until she saw a sign with a green dot and white text on a black sign: NAVY YARD - BALLPARK. All around, the electronic displays were talking about major delays and disruptions and promising free bus rides and transfers to replace the non-functioning train service.
"Are you all right, miss?" A station security woman, hair braided back in cornrows, asked with some concern and alarm.
"Yes!" Sarah shouted. "I'm great! Never better! I fucking love this place!" She jumped to her feet and ran to the escalators.
They were, of course, not working.
She took the stairs and ran up, outside, taking street. She knew the DOT building's address from having just been there: 1200 New Jersey Ave Southeast.
The DOT building was, by accident or design, literally just down the street from the Navy Yard. It was a tall building of concrete, glass, and steel, designed to project a grave impression of "fuck off". That was, however, merely the outside. The inside was, like every Federal building in the history of ever, a grid-based labyrinth full of depressing corridors, bulletin boards with decades' worth of ignored memos, and a card reader at every door plus the bonus metal detector up front.
And right down the street Claire Eddington came out of a black car, carrying Sarah's bag, and began sauntering down the sidewalk in her power suit. After hanging around with Jeff long enough, she could detect what he had talked about -- an aura of power bearing down on her from inside the bag, like a train about to run everyone over.
She was wondering where Jeff was, when that problem solved itself. Jeff leaped out of one of the bushes just as Claire passed by, tackled her, and the two went rolling onto the DOT lawn in a tangle of filthy flannel and expensive silk. Sarah ran at both of them, shouting at them to stop, and then all three found themselves swamped by security guards.
"Oh for --" said Claire.
"Oh c'mon, dudes, be cool --" said Jeff.
And then Claire and Jeff turned to each other, nodded, and simultaneously turned towards the guards. Jeff drew a circle in the air and it glowed with the brightness of a steam train lantern shining through a thunderstorm. The guards, blinded, turned away. Claire opened her Kelly bag and took out, of all things, a can of red spray paint. She sprayed a red circle around herself and Jess, and then a series of runes that Sarah had never seen before. Sarah was pondering their meaning when the asphalt around them melted, warped, and then ate them up like a giant amoeba.
"Fuck you all!" said Sarah, and ran for the front entrance of the DOT. She flashed her visitor's badge from her trip just earlier in the day, which now seemed like an eternity ago. The guards, bored and longing for 5 PM, let her through.
Sarah did not have to think very hard to guess where Claire had sent herself and Jeff. She made immediately for the basement area, where she only had to follow the sounds of shouting. Soon enough the sounds led her to a deserted office, where Claire and Jeff were wrestling each other for her duffel bag.
"All right," Sarah said, "that belongs to me."
"You were merely transporting it," Claire said. "I'm sure you can report it stolen. I'll even corroborate your witness statement."
"Bullshit," Sarah said. "And if you think you can just get away with this, you've got another think coming."
"Oh yeah? Little bureaucrat, what are you going to do? Bury me in paper? Tie me up in red tape?"
"No," she said. "I'm going to do what bureaucrats do best: waste time." She grinned and pointed behind Claire. "Jeff just got your case."
Claire whirled around. Jeff was dancing in his sandals, holding up the bag. "It's mine! It's mine!"
"Hey!" Sarah shouted. "You said you were going to help me get it back!"
"And you're an idiot if you believed me!" Jeff chortled. "I'm gonna be the most powerful Trainspotter in the world! And the first thing I'll do, is I'll destroy the entire Freeway system! Gas-guzzling cars can just suck it!"
"You will do no such thing!" Claire snarled. "I will take it from you, and I will make sure that your precious train systems turn to rust! I will restore the glory of Automobiles in this world, just you watch!"
"BOTH OF YOU ARE ASSHOLES!" Sarah screamed. "You'll destroy each other! Don't you understand? Jeff, Metrobuses run on roads too! Claire, railroads carry automobiles and car parts! There is no world where you can only have the one system!"
They both stared at Sarah like she'd sprouted a second head, then went back to fighting over the bag.
"Oh for fuck's sake," Sarah said, disgusted. "You two deserve each other. But you don't deserve the One SmarTrip or whatever. What happens if it's destroyed?"
"The power will just go back out of it," Claire said.
"Like, such a total waste," Jeff said.
"Sounds perfect," Sarah said.
"Oh yeah?" Claire said.
"What are you gonna do?" Jeff said. "You aren't even a magician!"
"No, I'm not, that's right," Sarah said. "But I don't need magic to deal with you two right now."
She pulled out her cell phone. She glanced at one of the omnipresent security posters and dialed. "Hello? Yes. I'd like to report a suspicious package. I'm so sorry, I know it's so late in the day, but you know what they taught me in training ... if you see something, say something." She described her duffel bag and their location. "And I think I heard something metallic inside. Could you please hurry? Thank you, officer!"
She hung up and glared at Claire and Jeff.
"In about one minute, there will be two security guards with firearms down here," she said. "And out of the three of us here, I'm the only one with legal access to this building. I suggest that the both of you not be here when they arrive."
Both magicians glared at her.
"Why are you doing this?" Claire finally said, as she stepped away, hands held up. "If you don't support me, why don't you support him?"
"Why?" Sarah threw her hands up in the air. "Do you not see my badge? I work for the United State government. I at least try to work for the people. Of course I have my own goddamn thoughts about cars and trains! But you know what? I think that the decision isn't up to you, or you, or me. However people want to travel ... it should be a conclusion that every single person gets to arrive at for themselves."
And then there came the sounds of feet in boots hurrying down the stairs.
"So uh," Jeff said as he set the bag on the floor, backing away from the erstwhile suspicious package, "weren't you, like, wanting that for your work or something?"
"Ah fuck," Sarah groaned, as both magicians vanished. "I knew I forgot something."
"So they'd already surplused it to someone else?" Gloria Brown, Sarah's immediate supervisor, sighed. "Figures. Fucking bureucrats, can't trust them for anything. Present company excused, of course. Sorry about the wasted trip."
"Don't worry about it," Sarah said. "Have a good weekend, boss."
"You too. Got any plans? Drive out to Ocean City? Amtrak trip up to New York?"
Sarah paled.
the end