29th January 2019

  The stairwell was, not to put too fine a point on it, filthy. Rubbish was strewn across the floor, and someone seemed to have once lit a fire in one corner that had taken out a small section of the emergency stairs. The smell of old smoke was mostly overpowered by the scent of some unnamed horror rotting in one of the bags. Water pooled on the floor near the door, but up above them there was the glow from a functioning ‘Exit’ sign. And ahead of them, the door to the corridor still had intact frosted gss. Charlie and Noah walked cautiously down the corridor, their feet crunching over who-knows-what in the darkness.

  Noah pced a gloved hand on the door handle. She gnced at Charlie, who nodded, and swung open the door. They stepped into the startlingly clean reception area. The pce still had the lingering odour of potent cleaner, although, on close inspection, the grey carpet showed signs of past abuse. At first gnce it seemed fairly normal. The main stairs were simirly clean and, peering behind the reception desk, the visitor book was still sitting there. In barely legible scrawl, Charlie Jones / Charlie’s Couriers / Eadmont Services was the st name written across the page. Flicking back a few pages revealed the truth - someone had written the date in full. JK Scheinberg / Anniversary Events / Simms and Brody / 28-3-13 stared back at them.

  Gncing at the paperwork on the desk, it slowly became apparent that it was ser printed pages from the internet, and the computer was just a monitor. Together they walked over to the door with the rge ‘UK Star Electronics’ logo embzoned on the wall beside it. It swung open to reveal an empty office space, a few overturned desks and broken cubicle walls staring back at them. Someone seemed to have taken out their anger on some of the partitions, leaving holes and ripped fabric. The back of the space showed filthy pools of water below the boarded up, shattered windows. Behind the door sat piles and piles of rubbish bags sat along with multiple empty containers of industrial cleaner.

  Charlie and Noah looked nervously at each other.

  “Shall we, err, go upstairs?” Charlie wondered aloud.

  They turned and walked up the stairs, both taking in the early aught’s decor. Noah stopped mid-step and turned to Charlie, “You know how you said this pce felt odd? I can see why. It’s like the naughties never fuckin’ ended here.”

  Charlie nodded slowly in agreement.

  They continued upward to the second floor. Charlie optimistically opened the door for the Solicitor’s office and found a simir story. At some point the pce had been subdivided. Bare, peeling floor tiles in an otherwise empty space with just some smaller offices on the far side of the division. Someone’d set a small fire in the middle of the floor, and there she could see through the false floor to the water stained ceiling below.

  “Well, not going in there then.” She muttered.

  Charlie stood staring for several moments before Noah prompted her to continue upwards. They ascended the final flight of stairs. Looking up Charlie noticed that quite a few of the ceiling tiles were new, but the remaining ones showed distinct signs of water damage. “Why do you think they risked getting me up to the third floor?” she asked Noah as they opened the office door.

  Inside, she realised.

  The lower two floors had clearly been emptied and somewhat trashed. This one appeared to have rgely survived. Ahead of them a low carpeted wall stood. The Eadmont Services logo was intact on another wall behind a second reception desk. Passing through the double doors into the main office space revealed ranks of desks, but only extending as far as you could see from reception. The rest of the space was filled with low cubicles which were clearly empty. They walked gingerly across the floor, avoiding the evidence of water damage near the middle of the building.

  “What the fuck?” Charlie’s puzzled expression rapidly gave way to a despondent gre at the reception desk. “I am not worth this much effort!” She took a slow, broken breath, “Noah, tell me there is something we can get from coming here.”

  Noah sighed. “I doubt it. They set you up to come here. Timed it when our office was otherwise empty – nearly closing time. I had an appointment I had to go to – which probably means it’s at least being surveilled and maybe they even have cameras in our office, ‘cos why else get us all out. Dunno why they didn’t just wait for the night though.” She paused, thinking, her fingers tapping against the desk. “Unless it was you they wanted. It feels like they were pnning to get you out here more than once.”

  She gestured at the heap of rubbish stuffed into the corner behind that same partition that made up the reception wall. “They got it so that at first gnce it’d look fine. Maybe something Jess got spooked them? Maybe they ran out of time”. Again, she tapped her fingers against the desk for a second. “But yeah, it’s pretty fucking cunning. There’s no-one here, not even on the rest of the estate, to ask. The paperwork for the pce - for the whole fucking estate - I bet it’s a shitshow. There’s probably nothing to look up or trace. What’re you going to do - go to the cops and say ‘oh, someone took me to an abandoned office and gave me some money?’”

  Charlie watched as a look of concern washed briefly over Noah’s face.

  “What?”

  “Oh, uhm, nothing.” Noah distractedly picked up a stapler and switched to tapping it against the desk.

  “No. What was that look?”

  “Shit. Okay.” Noah looked away, staring intently at something. “The one other thing I can think is that they could have been setting up a pce they could get you used to. A pce that you’d come to without being too worried. A pce they could grab you. Or trap you. If I wanted to do that, this is exactly the kind of pce I’d choose. No one hangs out around here. No one’s going to notice anything amiss for days, weeks even. Hell, you could probably just burn the damn building down.”

  “Fuck.” Charlie paused and opened the drawer of the nearest desk. Inside, curling papers mingled with a rotting cigarette packet. She smmed the drawer shut and swore. “Fuck. Okay, let’s get out of here. This is not going to help.”

  Outside they stopped to shut the door and Noah clicked the lock back into pce. “That’s a neat trick, Noah,” Charlie’s taut smile betrayed the stress she felt.

  “Yeah, we weren’t all girl-scouts, hon.” Noah smiled weakly.

  “Uh-huh. You’ll have to tell me what you were doing instead.”

  As they wandered dejectedly back to the van, they peered at each of the buildings. Nearly all of them cked any signs of power, suggesting little to no hope of functioning cameras or anyone to ask. A few streets away they finally found a live office. At least one of the grime streaked CCTV cameras was pointed so it covered a little of the street corner.

  Noah set the pace heading into the office. The security guard behind the desk looked startled. “Hiya,” Noah began, “One of our friends was attacked a couple of weeks back. Uh, it was a Thursday evening. I saw you guys have CCTV. I don’t suppose we could get a copy of the tapes?”

  The guard’s disinterested expression filled in the bnk space before he spoke. “We don’t give out copies of the security tapes,” he said, before turning back to his magazine. Noah persisted and eventually he revealed that the system was so old that it really was run on actual tapes, thus eliminating any sort of computer-hacking as an option to obtain them. Then he muttered that it should’ve been overwritten by now. Finally he revealed that the main objection seemed to be the effort involved. With a little more coaxing, and some hard cash, he meandered into the adjoining office and, with a look of surprise on his face, came out bearing a tape.

  “Your lucky day, dies. Looks like someone’s been a bit zy. These all got missed in the wipe.” He waved the tapes at them for a few seconds, grinning, before handing them over.

  They walked slowly back to the van, which miraculously had not been cmped. As they drove back Noah finally stated, “Look, I love you like a sister, but what the hell have you and Jess got involved in here?”

  Charlie stared out at the passing cityscape for a few minutes before she quietly mumbled “I promise, I really wasn’t involved.”

  “Sorry hon, I know. I know.”

  Stopping at a junk shop, they managed to dig up a VHS video recorder. “I assume it’ll work. It’s probably timepse though, being that old,” Noah said. “Also, I’ve no idea what we’re actually going to watch it on.” They found a dubious looking computer parts store and grabbed a video capture stick, before making their way back by a circuitous route to the cabin. On the way, Noah had texted Michael with what she informed Charlie was her version of a canary. He would text her regurly unless something untoward cropped up. As Noah put it, “I think we’re in some deep shit. You and me both – and I know you told me not to help. I’m not bming you, just... I don’t want Michael involved.”

  Noah stuck the van back under the canopy of the barn and, looking around, Charlie realised that several of the other heaps of car stored under there were probably mobile. Noah looked at her and said, “I like fixing the mechanicals. Making them pretty’s a bit much like effort, but the puzzle of the broken engines? It’s too much fun to not solve.” Charlie’s expression said it all and Noah just grinned happily.

  They slid across the now defrosted field and into the cabin where the fire was slowly smouldering. “You hook that up. I’ll fix drinks,” Noah decimed.

  Hooking up the video recorder didn’t take long and, as they’d surmised, the tapes were timepse leading to much hirity as they watched people speed walk through the shots. That kept them going for the first couple of recordings.

  “These tapes are shite,” Noah muttered, stuffing another tape into the video recorder and watching the grainy pictures flicker on screen. “At least the days are going by fast.”

  “Yeah.” Charlie said, sounding dispirited. Several days of footage had run by with just the occasional blurry van. “I think we need something better quality for those,” She gnced at her scribbled notes, “Couple of vans that look like possibilities.”

  “Well, I suppose we go back, then. There must be some other buildings with CCTV.”

  As the second day of searching rolled to a close, both Noah and Charlie were starting to consider that maybe it would be a bust - especially as they’d got further and further from the estate itself. But persistence paid off. Several streets away a small shop had installed a brand new multi-camera system. The owner, initially suspicious, had succumbed to Noah’s now utterly refined tale of her friend’s woe. Charlie was impressed and unnerved by how well her friend kept the lies straight, at least for as long as it took to get to the footage and back out.

  The owner had produced, for the cost of a DVD, a copy of all of the footage from that week - at least from the cameras outside the store. They slipped into the van, and slid the disk into the ptop. Twenty minutes ter they all but sprinted back to the shop and begged the owner for a copy of the in-store front desk and cash machine cameras. Charlie all but screamed, “The people in the van, they came into the store!” It took some more persuasion, the owner being somewhat reluctant to give up the position of the notionally hidden video cameras. But once Charlie gestured to each of the cameras in turn, grumbled that they had no interest in robbing a corner shop, and expined some better locations to hide them, he gave up and handed over a disk.

  The expensive new cameras paid off, at least for Charlie and Noah, with clear and good quality shots of the blonde haired man that Charlie virtually shrieked, “It’s him!” at. The footage also revealed another man with brown hair who just quietly stood outside.

  “And the pte from the van, you can see it clearly there!” She nearly bounced from the seat. “Oh my God! We’ve got it.”

  “Woah there, hon.” Noah’s steady voice cut through the excitement. “How do you pn to get from there to actually finding the van, assuming the pte is real.”

  Charlie looked at her friend and back at the screen “Look, there, see that?” she pointed at a small sequence of letters and numbers on the sliding door and an illegible sticker next to the number pte.

  “Uh hu.” Noah said noncommittally.

  “That’s a van hire pce. And that there,” she waved at the whole van, “is a Quick Hire van, no matter what the decals on the side might say. I should bloody know. I used to work for them.”

  Noah looked at her oddly. “I don’t exactly want to bring this up at this moment, but it’s going to fucking grate at me if I don’t ask you right now. So I know this is a weird thing to say, but… Charlie, honey, Quick Hire wasn’t on the list of references you gave me. And I remember that, because it was a short list. And I knew everyone on it.”

  Charlie turned away and nodded, quietly mumbling, “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” A few seconds ter she was lost to staring into the middle distance. She breathed slowly, steeling herself, before quietly whispering, “It’s not a big thing, really. I just used to be someone else.”

  Noah stole a gnce across at Charlie who was chewing hard on her lip. The engine noise filled the cabin for a solid five minutes before Charlie finally uncsped her hand from her own wrist where her nails had been digging in.

  “Look, I –” she stopped again, returning her hand to her wrist and running a nail down it. “Shit, I never expected to have to share this. I. Oh fuck me, I covered my tracks really well and I never thought...” she trailed off again.

  Noah anxiously gnced at her friend. “Whatever you did, or didn’t do, you’re still my friend. If this is something I need to know for your - or maybe our - safety, then okay. Otherwise you don’t need to tell me.”

  Charlie had gone back to attempting to gnaw through her own lip, and Noah waited, concentrating on making sure they weren’t being followed and listening to the rattles from the van’s tired interior. Town turned into sprawl. Sprawl turned into countryside. As the van whipped past hedges and farmnd, finally Charlie seemed to have reached a decision.

  Noah risked leaning across and pcing a hand on hers, steadying her.

  “This is going to sound like a weird pce to start,” Charlie began, “But have you heard of Section 28?”

  Noah produced a mirthless noise before uttering, “That fucking bollocks anti-gay w? Yeah, yeah, I’m familiar with it.”

  Charlie gnced at her before continuing. “Okay, so… you’re going to need to bear with me a bit, but,” Charlie hesitated and took another long inhale, “I never expected to tell anyone this, so it might be a bit of a mess. So, uh, forgive me if I fuck it up. Anyway, uh, you’ll see, I guess.” Charlie gnced nervously at Noah. “So when I was at school - and yeah - I think I need to go back to then to expin why this is such a fucking mess.” At this, she banged her head against the back wall of the cab. “Fuck! Okay. So. WhenIwasatschool,” she ran the words together as if trying to get past the sentence. “One of the other kids in the css – one of their…uh, parental figures? Came out as trans. She suddenly had two dads. And I remember, we were in social studies, and one of the kids asked about them. And that teacher, Mr Jones, he looked across the whole cssroom. Like. He paused. He paused and made sure he actually had our attention. And he said ‘We don’t talk about pretended family retionships at school.’ And that was it. There was no more discussion. And Francesca? It was her whose… well, who had two dads now. She got such shit for it for ages. She transferred to another school after the bullying.”

  Noah quietly muttered, “Fucking Conservatives.”

  “Yeah…fucking Conservatives,” Charlie echoed, “But…that kinda drove some things I did.” She gnced over at Noah before finally spitting out, “I’m trans.”

  Noah stole another gnce at Charlie, “Before I say, uh, anything, can I just check? And this is going to sound really fucking stupid, but I just want to be really fucking clear. Are you saying you’re…wanting to transition? Or that you did at some point in the past? Not that I give a shit either way, but I want to check I’ve not been fucking dense.”

  Charlie stared at Noah for a moment before finally saying, “Um, I was…assigned male at birth, if that’s what you’re asking. I transitioned. A while ago.”

  “Oh, okay,” Noah paused for a second, clearly formuting a sentence. All the while Charlie stared at her, anxiety pouring off in waves. Noah finally continued, “Now look, I don’t want to pretend this is nothing, because it’s not, but it doesn’t make a fucking difference to me. But… Oh, and I’m not going to make with the ‘Oh gosh, I didn’t know’ shit, because that’s pretty fucking obvious and kinda insulting, but to be clear, I didn’t.” She paused again momentarily, her face betraying that she was trying to puzzle something out. Finally, she settled on a question.

  “Okay, but why is you being trans a problem right now? Other than we don’t want you thrown in prison because they’ll be fucking stupid about it?” Noah swung the van into a convenient opening to a field, killed the engine and looked confused.

  “Well, I dunno if you know this,” Charlie finally seemed to be a little more rexed. “But there’s this whole stupid process you have to go through to get treatment and ID and stuff. I mean, if you can even get bloody treatment.” Noah nodded her understanding. “Well, uh, because of that whole thing in school? I decided fuck that. I wasn’t going to do that bollocks. And I could hack. You know I used to be…less, um” Charlie cast about for an adjective. After a ridiculous pause she settled on, “Good”, the lifting of her voice making it sound more like a question.

  Noah suppressed a ugh and smiled gently ,“Okay, you fucking tart, what did you do?”

  Charlie paused and gnced around. “Let’s walk? Leave phones here?” she said, a slight pleading in her voice. The two of them hopped out and started tramping into the field.

  “So, I made a person. Like, wholesale. Starting when I was a teenager.”

  “So you faked some fucking ID documents? But I’ve registered your NI number and shit for taxes? So – ” Noah looked confused.

  “No. I could’ve just forged IDs way more easily. But this needed to…be a life. I didn’t exactly realise when I started out how far I’d go. I hadn’t really understood that. But – oh fuck me I can’t believe I’m telling you this – I… starting from school I registered a new student. I added reports. Well, copied bits mainly. I faked a university attendance, I…” she paused and looked around before taking a shaky inhale and continuing, “Fuck. Fuckety fuck fuck. Okay. Okay. Fuck. I…I…I gotmyselfabirthcertificateandanNInumberandallthatshit.” She sucked in another breath. “They’re real. But…if someone digs. If someone really digs…” tears leaked from the corners of her eyes, “Fuck – if someone really really digs it could all come apart.”

  Noah offered to wrap her arms around Charlie, but Charlie shook her off and just stood shivering, staring at her.

  “Well then, I guess we best fucking fix this mess.”

  As they stood in the field, Noah id bare some of her past, and expined at least in part why she had intimate knowledge of, it turned out, more than just opening your basic padlock. Just a bit of a deal with Jim, a very nice, very lovely, very polite, Indian-British minor demon. “When I was a kid it was nabbing the odd car, maybe a little bit of breaking and entering. I’d got in some trouble with the w, more than once, and Jim sorted it. He’d also covered with my parents about some of my extracurricur activities, and the fights I’d get into. He’s got a lot of deals with a lot of people. Some are pretty powerful, so I owe him a ton. He used some of that goodwill to get me off when I got in trouble.” She paused for a moment. “Then my parents kicked me out. And, after they found out about Michael they properly disowned me. He kept me off the street. Jim helped me set up Charlie’s.”

  –

  After dinner, as Noah stoked the fire, Charlie sat and pondered for a while. Finally she grabbed the ptop and pulled up an old backup of a long-gone computer from a server she’d set up ‘just in case’. There, in the morass of old files, were some notes she’d taken on the back doors she’d built into Quick Hire’s systems.

  “I’ll log in to their systems after closing. The sys-admin they hired after me – she’s good, but unless she’s improved a lot, she’s not as good as me. Still, it’s easier if she’s not around to notice any unusual logins until tomorrow.”

  Later, as Noah watched the sunset, Charlie set to work. Noah peeked in occasionally and finally muttered, “Y’know, this isn’t very fucking Hollywood,” as she watched Charlie’s fingers flit across the keyboard and the odd line of some kind of code scroll across a terminal screen. Finally, Charlie made a sound something like a small dog yipping.

  “Jesus!” she swore vigorously. “She’s not updated it in ages! Goddamnit, it was beautiful when I left.” She switched to muttering darkly and performing a number of what Noah considered to be indecipherable incantations. The swearing continued unabated. “What the hell are they paying her for?” Then, a few minutes ter she sighed, “Oh ah, they’re not paying her. That’s why it’s not been updated. They seem to be running on a mixture of luck and good fortune. There’s no one employed as a sys-admin at the moment. They really trust their luck. Handy for us though.”

  Charlie pulled up some address details on screen, along with a credit card receipt and, much to her obvious satisfaction, a blurry photo of the brown haired man from the security footage. “Score one to us, Chris.” She muttered, staring back at the image on screen. Printed across the bottom of the image were his licence details and, as she smugly pointed out, his name: Christopher Alden.

  “Well, that’s pretty impressive, hon. Y’wanna run down that address on the card now or ter?”

  Charlie looked at the bacon sandwich Noah had rustled up and said, “How about, I eat my dinner and we check whether the card and ID details match? If they do, perhaps we should take a wander.” Noah nodded, grabbed her pte and sat down on the couch.

  Whilst it may have seemed to Charlie like a good pn, after a couple of mouthfuls, the ptop was back in her hand and, as she often seemed to, she’d disappeared into the computer. Noah initially watched, but seemed to tune out after a while.

  As the setting sun dipped below the horizon and darkened the cabin, Noah stood and lit the gas mp. In Charlie’s peripheral vision she saw her cleaning up, then curling up by the fire and staring at the succession of messages, presumably from her boyfriend. Eventually, just as she was drifting into the verges of sleep, Charlie wandered over and nudged her.

  “I’m pretty certain I’ve got him,” she said. Then she cmbered into her own hammock, this time managing to get in with only a little filing and in a manner that suggested she was going to at least try to get used to the temporary sleeping arrangements. She watched as Noah padded across the room and peered at the piece of scrap paper next to the closed ptop. Scribbled there in Charlie’s barely legible scrawl was an address. She stood staring at the paper for several minutes before finally shutting up the cabin for the night, turning off the gas mp, and finally slipping into her own hammock.