No time for that now, though. I looked out across the Edinburgh neighborhoods around me, and realized that this was probably going to have to be the time to dismount, much as it sucked. It was probably somewhere between four and five in the morning, and the longer I waited for this train to chug me on into the station—or the train yard—the more likely I was to be seen.
So I hopped off, landing heavily on an embankment made of big pieces of grey rock where they’d built the tracks up off the ground. The dismount might have broken my leg if I hadn’t been a meta and thus already pre-conditioned to be a little tougher than a normal human, because YEOUCH! That landing stung. My palms hit the ground too, as my legs bent, helping take the impact for me.
I popped back up and immediately ran to a nearby clump of bushes. I’m sure that didn’t look suspicious at all, a dark-haired, squat lady jumping off a train and hiding in the bushes. Well, what were my other options? Stroll through town like nothing was happening? That was probably going to have to be my play when it came to my next move, because darting back and forth between shrubberies in eastern Edinburgh wasn’t likely to work all that well.
What I really needed was access to a map, or better still, a phone. With a mobile phone I could look up routes to York via train, figure out the quickest path, even figure out the likely train tracks where such trains would pass. I mean, I was heading on a westerly course now, but who knew where Edinburgh’s southern spur line was? It could have been behind me for all I knew.
This was information I needed, and I needed it urgently. There wasn’t anything for it; I was going to have to steal a phone, and quickly.
The mere thought of that caused the nervous buzz in my stomach to heat up to a bubbling boil. The last time I’d been in Edinburgh, it was like the city itself had turned against me, delivering Frankie—Rose’s catspaw—right to me on several occasions. Looking back, it could entirely have been Rose, using a GPS in her phone to constantly send her location to him.
Buuuuut, enough other weird stuff had happened around here to make me wary of accepting the easy explanation, the one that would essentially make Edinburgh slightly more friendly to me now (not that it would be friendly friendly, given that the cops were still looking for me, but…relatively less hostile, I guess).
All I needed right now was a bunch of Edinburghers dialing up 999 or calling Rose directly if she somehow did control them through Siren powers. And that was a fear that was circulating in the back of my mind, moving closer to the front all the time.
I emerged from my clump of bushes and found myself behind a few businesses. There was a McDonald’s in front of me, and also an optician's office in a couple low-slung, one-floor commercial buildings. They were situated on a two-lane with some nice shoulder margin on the side road, and I could see cars coming in either direction, but sparingly, maybe one every minute or so.
The McDonald’s was open twenty-four hours, which I regarded as an unfavorable sign. If there was good news in all this, it was that I had perhaps a few customers to blend in with, maybe one of whose cell phones I could steal if they were being very unattentive and I was feeling particularly sneaky. I didn’t love the element of chance in all this, but what the hell else could I do? I needed access to Google, and now.
I sauntered up to the door of the McD’s like I owned the place, and surveyed the inside before opening the door. I was in luck, but I couldn’t decide whether it was good or bad.
There wasn’t a soul in the place except for the employees, and that gave me an idea.
Walking in, I found myself in a very standard-ish McDonald’s. Long counter up front, an electronic ordering kiosk (!—That was new, or at least new to me) back from the counter about ten, fifteen feet. The menu looked a few degrees off what I would have seen in an American location, but that was fine. My stomach was rumbling again, and I was determined to get whatever I could get here, and be quite content with it. I could already smell the fries, and they smelled…mmm…good.
I slid on up to the counter after making sure there truly was no one here out in the main restaurant. I didn’t want to pretend I had very long, because a customer could have been beelining toward me right now, heading for their normal morning coffee and inevitable rendezvous with troublesome destiny (i.e., my fist if they were unlucky).
Looking around like my head was on a swivel, I sauntered up to the counter. There was definitely someone back there, but I had a feeling that with the ordering kiosk, they were maybe just making food or taking drive-thru orders. I heard them humming a happy song, and it sounded a little like Taylor Swift’s Shake it Off. It was a good choice, unlike deciding to come to work this morning.
I jumped the counter and suddenly I was in the Employees Only area of the McD’s. I didn’t have time to reflect on my rulebreaking though, because I hurried back behind the equipment—fryers and whatnot—to find an employee working with their back turned and oblivious to my approach.
Drawing a deep breath, I fell on them immediately, seizing hold of them by the neck. I realized a little late that the employee in question was a dude, albeit a shorter one. I didn’t let him turn around, clutching him firmly by the back of the neck the way you might grab hold of a particularly disobedient and struggling cat. My hand was squarely on his skin, and I held him tight as he screamed for the next few seconds until my power kicked in.
There was no nice way to do what I was doing, or at least no nice way that didn’t involve me being a stereotypical succubus seductress, and that just wasn’t going to happen, so I woman’d up. It didn’t take more than a few seconds for me to brainhack him, removing his memory of this encounter as I lifted him and positioned him back toward the front of the service area. That done, I gave him a little shove forward and he toppled over, missing the memory of why he’d fallen—it was a pretty traumatic thing, being assaulted from behind, after all—as well as his memory of what had happened to his cell phone and his favorite hoodie, both of which I now knew were in the employee break-room just between the kitchen and building’s rear exit.
Sweeping out of the kitchen as I heard the guy I’d assaulted swearing at his unexpected fall, I tried to creep as quietly as I could, snatching a sandwich off the rack as I went. I hit up his locker and “borrowed” his cell phone and hoodie, slipping on the latter and unlocking the former with the passcode I’d stolen from his mind. I felt some mild discomfort at my act of Robin Hooding his stuff, but unfortunately his life wasn’t in danger from lacking a cell phone and a disguise, while mine very much was.
I headed out to the road, and started walking along the sidewalk, pretending I was just another modern day zombie, my face stuck in my phone, a McD’s bacon, egg and cheese—British bacon, so basically ham—bagel in hand, and my hood up high to block anyone from seeing my now-ratty hair. I stared at the screen as I punched up a map of Edinburgh first. The GPS locked onto me, and boom! Now I knew where I was.
Then I got to work on the secondary problem, my feet tapping along the city sidewalk, the green row of hedges across the street slowly lighting up in the dawn. I pulled up a train schedule for Scotrail, trying to figure out how the service worked from Edinburgh to York as I munched on my sandwich, which was the first thing of reasonable healthful benefit I’d eaten in quite a while. Which was sad to say.