Nikki Owen - The Girl Who Ran (The Project Trilogy)

He drops his head for a second. ‘Thank you. You’re…’ He stops, though it’s not clear why. When he speaks again, his voice is low and a bit wobbly. ‘I’ll do all I can to help you find your mom, okay? I… I still miss my mom every day and it’s been years since she died.’

I feel a strange need to reach out and touch him, hug him, even, but instead, not knowing what the right action is at all, I have a go at arranging my lips into what I think is a sympathetic smile, then, picking up my pen, I channel my feelings into facts.

We work together on the Project file timeline. The carriage is quiet. Every three seconds or so, one of the small boys whoops at some card game they are playing, and when the father looks at them, I notice crinkles by his eyes. When he ruffles their hair with a gentle hand, the pang that stabs me inside comes on so unexpectedly that I have to stop writing and try hard to prevent my thoughts from wandering to Balthus and Papa.

‘Do you remember in my house in Montserrat where we found that kind of countdown thing?’ Chris says after we’ve been working for a few minutes. ‘You know, the one with your age on it, counting it down?’

My pen hovers in the air as I look over to him and trip off the exact date, location and time of the occasion he is referring to.

He turns his tablet to me. ‘Well, d’you remember the timer thing? This?’

I study the screen. Dates, numbers, the tick of a clock. ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘That is the same one as before.’

‘I know, right? I kept a link of it on file along with all that Black September terrorist stuff from 1973 that kick-started the whole Project in the first place. I thought, while we’re looking for connections while the train’s in the station, I’d go through all the stuff we’ve found since being at my place. But, the thing is, this clock definitely seems to be linked to something else other than what we found, only, I don’t know what.’

I look again at the screen and try to fit what I see to anything from the Project facility in Hamburg, but the only aspect that piques my curiosity is my allocated subject number that sits in the yellow square next to the countdown file. I point to it. ‘It states my subject number here.’

Chris nods. ‘375.’

The fir trees outside ripple. I watch the leaves bend from one branch to another until they merge into a single sea of pale mint green. A thought begins to form.

I turn. ‘Click on there,’ I instruct Chris, unsure why, but cogs turning.

‘You’ve got an idea?’

Following my finger where it brushes the screen, Chris takes the cursor and hovers it over what appears to be a tiny grey square that sits in the corner by the age countdown flash at the very bottom of the laptop. He clicks on it once, twice, but nothing appears. The carriage sways a little as people alight and ascend, bustling in with them the smell of toffee popcorn and burnt sugar. Alarmed at the scents, I cover my nose with my hand and watch as the boys with their father pull at his coat and beg him for food.

‘You alright?’ Chris says.

I nod. Only my eyes peek out. ‘My brother, Ramon, fed popcorn to me in the cellar at Mama’s house in Madrid where he had me imprisoned.’

‘Ah.’

Once the smell fades, nothing is still appearing on the grey square on the screen. I check my watch. Patricia has been away three minutes and one second now. I peer to the window. She is tapping her phone as, two paces from her, a woman wearing a plain navy baseball cap, blue sneakers and tight black jeans steps out from inside the bric-a-brac shop and halts. Why, I think to myself, is Patricia using her phone? It is for emergencies only. I drop my hand and press my face to the window to get a better view when Chris calls out my name.

‘Maria, you have to see this.’

I turn to see, on the tablet screen, numbers. Hundreds and hundreds of numbers.

Chris scans them all. ‘They just sprang through when I clicked the grey box again. Why’s there a line through every single one?’

‘They are subject numbers,’ I say, immediately, almost to myself as in my brain I am photographing each one and cross referencing it with the pre-sorted data in my head until I am 100 per cent certain. ‘Yes. I can confirm they are all subject numbers.’

‘How do you know?’

My eyes speed over each line again, but there is no mistake in the match. ‘They are the same numbers as on the file we found in Hamburg. Then, 2,005 out of 2,113 were marked deceased.’

‘So why are they crossed out? They weren’t crossed out before.’ His eyes narrow. ‘It’s as if someone’s put a line through them all. I mean, you don’t do that on a computer file, so why have they done it? It’s like they want to make a point. Like the numbers, the people have ceased existing or something.’

‘As if they are all dead,’ I say.

‘Shit.’ He blows out some air. ‘That Black Eyes guy, the one that came up on the screen, d’you remember? On my computer in Montserrat? Do you think he’s behind this again? D’you think this thing is programmed, maybe, to match remotely, like, real life events? You know, people dying and stuff? The Hamburg files said they were their subject numbers, right? So, are the rest now dying, too?’

I am about to answer when Patricia returns. My eyes track her every move as she rushes towards us clutching two worn books with cracked spines and tea-stained pages, catching, as she passes, the eye of the woman with the dough ball chin and stomach.

‘Doc,’ she says, breathless, slipping her cell in to her pocket and plaiting her legs and arms into the seat, ‘you have to see this!’

She shrugs off her coat, confetti flakes of snow floating from the sleeves and vanishing into the carpeted floor below.

Chris looks over. ‘What is it?’

‘There was a woman…’ Patricia gulps some air and slides onto the table a worn, old book. ‘She…’ Another swallow. ‘She gave this to me by the book store.’

It is a copy of 1984 by George Orwell.

Taking the novel in my hands, I smell its pages. Coffee, mothballs, mint and lavender, each stain and rip and pencilled etching depicting the tracks of the readers who have lived in these words, all of their movements documented and preserved in the multi-coloured cover and spine that now sit in my hand. I leaf the old, yellow courier typeface.

‘Who gave this to you?’

‘A woman on the platform.’ She pauses. ‘Doc, she said you have to read page 97.’

‘Okay.’

‘No, Doc. You – she said your name.’ She looks between Chris and I. ‘She knew who you were.’

Goldenpass railway line, The Alps, Switzerland .

Time remaining to Project re-initiation: 25 hours and 25 minutes

A tsunami of fear hits.

‘Where is she?’ I say.

Patricia scans the platform. ‘There. Doc, that’s her! That’s the woman who gave me the book!’

We all dart up. The train is beginning to pull away from the platform. We sprint to the door, watched by the father and his sons and by the dough ball woman pressed into her seat.

‘There, Doc. Look! Do you know her?’

I scan where Patricia is pointing, but all I see are books and assorted junk and bric-a-brac. ‘There is no one.’

She thrusts her hand ninety degrees west. ‘There!’

The train shudders to a temporary halt and I see her. The woman. She has buttermilk skin, a navy baseball cap with tiny wisps of chestnut hair peeking from underneath, black jeans, blue sneakers, chocolate brown eyes and a face I recognise. A gasp slips from my lips. There is a flash of memory inside my head: of Kurt, the Project intelligence officer whose real name was Daniel, passing as my therapist after prison, of the spiked coffee with the Versed drug that the Project used on me to transport me to their facility.