Action at a Distance - Full Short Story
Beyond the Chase
The safest place I know is one where neither silence nor the sound of a motorcycle scares me. At that point, I was clinging to the underside of a train.
I went back over the day to see where events had turned sideways. The pivotal error seemed to have happened somewhere between leaving our home and stepping into the train station.
“I shouldn’t have,” I said into my wristpad.
“Shouldn’t have what?” Nena’s voice came through my helmet, clear and calm. Her telemetry showed a steady pulse. Above me, she sat among the passengers, pretending to be one of them.
“Subscribed to the museum’s yearly plan,” I said.
I loved the bullet train’s carefully crafted interiors. The indirect lighting made everything feel like a cloudy spring afternoon.
The museum gallery at its center was the crown jewel.
The way I was entering it was not in the brochure. My crawl towards the center was taking a toll on my elbows. I thought about the architecture above I was missing, which often stole the spotlight from the exhibitions.
The train picked up speed. We were halfway there and only ten more minutes to go.
“Time is finite. Unless there’s a time warp hidden in your purse, subscribing to everything just means not having enough time to read anything,” I said.
“Elegance is important,” Nena said. Then she went full football fan. “Why don’t you look where you’re going, huh? They should take your ticket away, you brute!”
She knew exactly what I needed. While she kept everyone’s attention on herself, I pressed the drill against the gallery floor and started cutting.
I heard murmurs and the weight of several footsteps above me.
“Is everything okay, lady?”
Security had entered her train car.
“Being angry makes your writing seventy-nine percent slower. I know. I’ve measured it. A few times. Several times. Frequently,” I said.
The drill and the vibration of the small lower compartment roared through the comms.
“I didn’t even bump into her. I was just walking to my seat,” someone said.
“Oh, you are not talking about me. You’re the one with the quick fuse. Sending everyone to la concha de su madre,” Nena said.
“What does that even mean?” someone above said.
“I often read other people’s texts in multiple ways. Thank you for putting all these cool people in one room. It would’ve taken me ages to hunt them down,” she said.
My laugh crackled through the comms. I looked at my wristpad. Her pulse climbed ten beats.
The drill released a high-pitched hiss. A section of the gallery floor gave way and struck my helmet hard enough to crack the visor.
“I’m inside,” I said.
“Oh, you are absolutely not,” Nena said.
“Is that for me or them?”
“What do you think?”
I smiled. That feeling had kept me safe before, even while looking into the barrel of a gun as we surrendered everything we had. With you beside me, even the roar of motorcycles warning of thieves and guns was just noise.
“I’m coming out,” I said.
“I knew it!” Nena’s voice buzzed through my helmet with some static.
“Well, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your concern. I’ll be taking my belongings and some extra luggage with me at the next stop.”
“Next stop?” I said.
“I thought you were ready.” Her words reached me without any static.
“You know I am.”
I placed my helmet, tools, and new precious cargo inside a waste cart. Behind me, a janitor’s uniform hung over the edge of an unoccupied seat.
The corridor was crowded with passengers waiting for the train to stop at the station. I kept my head down and avoided eye contact. Not that I needed to. Who looked twice at a train janitor anyway?
“Using stereotypes again, are we?”
“Hey, if they work, they work.” I danced to the rhythm of the train applying its brakes, nodding along to music only I could hear.
There was only one corridor. It was wide enough for passengers to gather without getting in each other’s way. Every train car ended with a pair of metallic sliding doors, one red and one yellow.
EXIT 02 was our meeting point. We had agreed it was better to go down together.
“Rendezvous?” she said over the comms.
“Absolutely not. Meeting point.”
“Punto de encuentro,” She said.
“I don’t want to have another Santiago situation.”
“What? It took us just four days to find a place to crash. I’ll call that an absolute victory.” she said.
I looked up and saw her in the distance, walking toward me through a sea of blurred faces. She smiled before looking away to avoid blowing our cover.
The hazel lights began to flicker, and the train started to shake. I saw Nena grab one of the overhead hangers to keep herself from falling.
“There are still four minutes to go. We can’t be there yet,” I said.
The train came to a violent stop. People pushed through one another and screamed from deep into the corridor. A lady behind me pushed me against the cart and it turned sideways.
Every light went out. A red glow pulsed from the waste cart in front of me like an alarm.
I pulled off my jacket and covered it as fast as I could.
The emergency lights flickered on.
All eyes were on me.
Three figures stepped out from the crowd. One approached from my right, two from my left.
“Don’t move,” one of them said.
“Stay where you are,” another voice echoed down the corridor.
The bullet train’s interiors didn’t look the same under flickering blue and red lights.
One took my left arm, another my right. They paraded me through a corridor lined with passengers, their murmurs following us every step of the way.
“Nena,” I said.
“They’re taking me to EXIT 01,” she said.
“Your communicator, please.”
They took my earpiece and we kept pressing forward until we reached the center. I finally entered the museum gallery the way the brochure intended.
Four guards stood in the corners. Two in front of me. Two behind.
“Do you know what this is?” a man said.
“It’s a nice museum. Not loving the new decor, quite unfavorable lighting.”
“I wonder if you know what it was, before deciding to steal it,” he said.
“A long distance communicator. Hopefully with an unlimited plan.”
“Long distance, indeed. Distance is the one thing it has never cared about.”
“It cared?” I asked. “Look, I see you’re doing the whole mysterious bad cop thing, but I have a reservation at ten.”
“Take this one away. Bring the other one.”
“No, no. Wait.” I raised my hands. “I’ll talk.”
“I just want to ask some questions,” he said.
“Ask away. Ask me anything. The thing started glowing red, then pulsating. Everyone panicked, and now we’re here. Oh, and someone broke the floor over there in the corner. You should probably look into that.”
“Interesting,” he said.
“Me? Sure.” I lowered my hands. “So where’s Nena?”
He ignored the question. He just kept looking at me.
“Now, you are creeping me out,” I said.
“The mirror is astonishing,” he said. “I don’t need to bring her here. I only need you to know what she said.”
He turned around and walked behind one of the exhibits, pushing my waste cart slowly into view.
“This. It doesn’t communicate.” He pointed at my jacket covering the cart. A pulsating red glow bled through the fabric. “It observes.”
“Have you ever wondered why you have been together for so long?” he said.
“Good communication and immeasurable amounts of wit?”
“I’ll put it simply. Do you know why you found each other?”
“Look, I’ll keep talking, but only with Nena here.”
Her voice came clean without any static or interference.
“I’m here.”
“Ah, there you are.”
I reached for my earpiece. It wasn’t there.
“Ah, they took it.”
“They took mine too,” she said.
The man stepped into my personal space.
“You are talking to her. Don’t you?”
I lifted my head and met his green eyes.
“Look, I just don’t see you that way.”
“Bummer. He gave it his best shot,” she said.
The red glow pulsed faster and brighter until it stopped. The entire museum turned red. Every guard abandoned their post and moved toward the center.
“I guess the striptease is about to start.” I reached for my jacket and the cargo.
I turned and ran toward EXIT 02. All the passengers sat on the floor.
“What’s the stereotype now? A thief running off with a purse?” she said.
“How are you doing this? I have no earpiece,” I said.
“I still have my mind. Do you?”
“I don’t.”
I stopped. The guards behind me were catching up.
“I can still hear you,” I said.
“I’m here.”
They tackled me. My head hit the floor hard.
Everything went dark.
My eyes were still shut. Voices came from somewhere over my right shoulder. I felt a table in front of me and the cold metal against my back.
A bright light blinded me. I turned my head away from it. When my eyes adjusted, I saw people gathered around the table. They talked among themselves and pointed at me.
“Where is…” I looked ahead. There she was.
“Nena, are you…”
“Nothing we haven’t gone through before. Remember Santiago?” she said.
“I need you two to focus,” the same man talked from the shadows.
“I need you to fly a kite.”
“But hey, we don’t always get what we want,” she completed my sentence.
“It’s remarkable to witness,” the man said.
“What, that we’re not…”
“…on each other’s throats after twenty-two years?” I completed her sentence.
“You are living proof of a mathematical prediction, and you are too careless to even realize it,” he said.
“It’s all been fun. Thank you for your hospitality. Mars has been lovely but we have a rocket to Earth to catch at ten,” I said.
“So that’s where you were taking it. I don’t think you quite understand your position.”
“Sitting?” I asked.
“You have been caught red-handed stealing from the Mars Museum.”
“That’s a double red. Tarjeta roja.” she said.
“You are both going away for a very long time.”
“Whoa, pump the brakes, monologue man,” I said.
“If I had it my way, I’d keep you separated permanently.”
“Separation would tell us more. It’s the only way to test your quantum entanglement.”
A door slid open behind me, the light illuminated Nena’s face in a way that made her silky skin shine.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“We have been through enough not to be ourselves,” she said.
Nobody moved.
It felt like this was going to be the way we’re going to spend our next twenty years.
“I won’t let them take you,” I said.
“They won’t.”
The man stepped out of the shadows and into view. His green eyes studied every movement I made.
“Don’t you understand? It’s not love. It’s physics.”
The red glow flickered.
“Enough. Take them to their cells.”
A few more men entered the room. They pulled us from our chairs and into the corridor. They took me one way and her the other.
I looked back. Every step put more distance between us.
The corridor was completely empty. No passengers to be seen anywhere.
I looked up. EXIT 02 was written in dark blue across the yellow door.
I looked down. A circular door in the floor slid open.
“Watch your head,” one of the guards said.
The corridor started to vibrate, and the roar shook everyone standing.
The train started moving again.
The guards made me move.
The underside of the train had rusty walls, leaky pipes, and eroded metal. A maintenance corridor, never meant to be seen by passengers.
They walked me through the empty corridor. A man waited at the end. He pressed a large red button and two doors slid open.
“Get inside,” he said.
“Thanks for the tutorial,” I said.
I stepped inside. The door shut behind me.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“There’s a door and a light. Can’t complain.”
“I’ll get us out,” I said.
Silence.
“Have I told you that baby crocodiles are my spirit animal today?”
“You have.”
“Sometimes when I see you, I see that little kid with a half-melted ice cream crying. I want to find a new cone for you.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Because I don’t care why it melted. Just that it has.”
“I don’t need protection,” she said.
“I know you don’t. But you’ll have me until the day I die.”
“Don’t bring death into this,” her voice lowered.
“It had been whispering to you long before we met. You fought it and won. You don’t need me to protect you.”
I opened my eyes. The cell was still empty.
A dim hazel light barely reached the corners of the room.
“One day it will come for me, and I will lose.”
“Don’t,” she said.
“I don’t care what he said.”
“Can I speak?” she asked.
I closed my eyes and remembered her dark brown eyes.
“Depende.”
“Can I?”
I smiled.
“What if he has a point? If nothing we have done was our choice.”
Silence.
“Nena…”
“No. Answer me.” She exhaled slowly. “I need a concept in life. It has to mean something. If I have no choice, then what’s the point?”
I looked at that dim hazel light.
“I can’t read your mind, I don’t know what’s going to come out of your mouth next.”
“And I love you for it.”
“You always understand. I ask too much of you.”
The silence took over our cells. I sat down and faced the wall.
“We have three options,” I said. “Stay here and rot.”
“Go out there and rot together,” she said. “And?”
“Can I speak?” I asked.
“Go out there our own separate ways.”
Silence.
“You know I don’t like to go out without a list,” she said. “I don’t know what day it is, but I know you do.”
“Based on the time it took them to get us here and the time we’ve spent in this lovely cell, we probably have twenty minutes to get out and catch that rocket before ten.”
“Guard, guard!” She started screaming.
“There’s one tiny thing. I don’t know how long I was out.”
“Five minutes.”
“Guard!”
“I hear you improved your Cockatoo impression.”
“I can’t breathe! Please! Somebody!”
“Guard!”
I rolled over, closed my eyes, and waited. Running footsteps outside my cell shook the floor.
I heard the door slide open. Light bled through my closed eyes. They grabbed my arms.
“Another parade?” I rushed toward the light, their hands scratched my body. I stumbled outside. The doors shut behind me. I started running in the same direction they brought me.
Only a few steps later, I heard the doors behind me slide open.
“The circular mole door!”
“Way ahead of you,” she said.
“Hey! Can you look at this line below? There’s a line, let me read it for you.”
“Culiaos todos.”
“It’s Latin for boundaries.”
I saw her running. Each step brought us closer.
EXIT 02 was on my left.
“Brace for impact,” I said.
I grabbed the small hammer beside the door. I broke the glass and pulled the emergency brake.
The train started to shake and lights began to flicker. Nena braced herself against the wall.
“We still have fifteen minutes,” I said.
The train came to a stop.
Lights out.
“I’m here,” I said.
“Door on your left.”
The doors hissed. We took two blind steps forward and landed on the floor hard.
A red hue illuminated the tunnel. A pulsing glow came from behind me.
“Oh no, you did not.”
“I wasn’t going to leave it with Monologue Diva,” she said.
It was my jacket, glowing a pulsing red.
“It looks like a...”
“Oh, that’s terrible. I love it.”
We didn’t stop running until the train disappeared behind a curve.
“Back to Earth? We might have missed it.” I said.
“We have no money, no suitcase, and a stolen Martian thing,” she said. “It’s the Santiago situation all over again.”
“The safest place I know,” I said.
I looked down at our joined hands, then up at her eyes. For a brief moment, I thought about his words.
“If the entanglement disappeared tomorrow, would you still choose me?”
Nena smiled.
“What do you think?”
Action at a Distance by Cale Lares.
Cale’s Note
Thank you for supporting Outlier Short Stories. Because of you, this space remains completely independent.
Paid subscribers get unrestricted access to every new story and the full archive.
You are an Outlier.