No Safe Choice Part 2

—David’s hand.

The café froze. Boyink’s jaw tightened, his calm splintering into something darker. Jess didn’t breathe; she couldn’t. David’s fingers closed around hers, and in the next heartbeat, they were moving — not running yet, but close enough that every step felt stolen. Chairs scraped. Someone shouted. Rainlight flared in the windows. Then they were outside, swallowed by the downpour.

The rain hit like needles. Jess barely registered the cold before David pulled her down an alley slick with puddles. “You shouldn’t have done that,” she gasped.

He shot her a look — half gratitude, half disbelief. “You still don’t get it, do you? You didn’t choose me. You chose the truth.”

They ran until the café was only a smear of light behind them. When David finally stopped, they were in a narrow service lane behind a shuttered costume shop. Jess bent over, catching her breath, staring at the fogged-up glass display- a parade of faded Halloween relics — vampires, jesters, an astronaut whose helmet had cracked clean in two.

David’s hand was trembling again. He looked back toward the street. “We need to hide.”

Jess blinked rain from her lashes. “In a costume shop?”

He grinned, that same old reckless spark igniting again. “Got a better idea?”

Inside, the shop was dark and musty, reeking faintly of dust and old fabric dye. The owner, a small woman in a wool cardigan, barely glanced up from her crossword as they slipped in. David tossed a few bills on the counter. “Emergency party,” he said. “Last-minute.”

The woman grunted approval and went back to her puzzle.

Jess stared at the rows of costumes. “You’re insane.”

“Insane keeps me alive.” He grabbed a bundle from the rack and tossed it to her. “Put that on.”

She caught it — a head-to-toe cat costume, glossy black with ridiculous felt ears and a tail. “You cannot be serious.”

“I’m dead serious,” he said, pulling on something orange and bulbous.

A moment later, she realized — he was inside a giant pumpkin suit.

She blinked. “You’re hiding from federal agents dressed as produce?”

“Seasonal produce,” he corrected. “They’ll be looking for two people, not a cat and her gourd.”

For a moment — absurd, breathless — she almost laughed. But the flicker of humor died when she saw his reflection in the mirror- the pumpkin wobbling slightly, but his eyes hard and alert.

He turned toward her. “We walk out slow. If they’re nearby, they’ll be scanning for faces. Not… feline silhouettes.”

Jess zipped the costume reluctantly. “You owe me for this.”

“You have no idea how much.”

They stepped back into the rain — a pumpkin and a black cat emerging into the neon night. No one looked twice. The absurdity made them invisible.

Across the street, two men in gray coats moved past, scanning the crowd. Jess’s heart hammered. She clutched David’s arm, her claws (padded, thankfully) digging into the foam of his costume.

“See?” he whispered. “Sometimes the stupidest idea is the only one that works.”

“Where are we going?”

He didn’t answer right away. They turned down another street, rain hissing off the pumpkin’s vinyl shell. “There’s someone we need to see,” he said finally. “Someone who knows what really happened that night.”

Jess frowned. “You said that before. What night, David? The bridge?”

He looked at her then — the absurd costume couldn’t soften his expression. “Not just the bridge. The train. The one that never reached the station.”

Jess stopped cold. “That was an accident.”

David’s eyes darkened. “No. It was a test. And we were part of it.”

Lightning flashed, catching the wet pavement in white light. The reflection in the puddle showed a pumpkin and a cat standing in a storm, but something about the image made Jess’s stomach drop.

Because behind them, in the mirror of the water, a third figure appeared — gray coat, motionless.

Boyink.

Jess’s breath caught. “David.”

He didn’t need to turn around to know. His voice went low. “He’s faster than I thought.”

The agent’s voice carried over the rain. “You can’t hide forever, David. Not even under a fruit costume.”

David smiled without humor. “It’s technically a berry.”

Boyink’s tone hardened. “Step away from her.”

Jess glanced between them — a pumpkin, a cat, and a man in gray. It would have been ridiculous if not for the pulse of dread running under it.

David’s hand tightened around hers again. “Last chance, Jess. Still want safety?”

She hesitated — rain soaking the fake fur, heart thrumming like a trapped bird. Safety suddenly seemed like the most dangerous thing in the world.

Then, quietly but firmly, she said, “No.”

David’s smile returned, sharp and full of fire. “Good.”

He squeezed her hand, turned — and the two of them vanished into the storm, a cat and a pumpkin swallowed by rain and night, while the agent shouted into his radio, too late.

The absurdity of it would haunt him — and her — for a long, long time.

But for now, Jess only felt the strange, wild truth of it all- sometimes the only way to disappear is to become someone no one would ever believe.

And no one would ever believe the cat and the pumpkin.

Rainwater streamed down the alley as Jess and David ducked beneath a rusted fire escape, breathing hard. Her fur costume clung like wet velvet; his pumpkin suit sagged pitifully, deflating in places. It should have been funny. It wasn’t.

David’s face was drawn and pale, eyes darting toward every sound. He peeled the foam headpiece off, revealing hair plastered to his skull. “We have to keep moving,” he said, voice raw. “They’ll sweep the area.”

The sirens were distant now, muffled by rain and brick. Jess pressed her back to the wall, breath still shaking. “Not until you tell me what that meant,” she said. “The train. What are you talking about?”

David didn’t answer at first. He pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes like the question itself hurt. Water ran down his cheeks, rain or sweat or tears — there was no telling.

“You remember the bridge,” he said finally. His voice was quieter now, thinner. “The lights. The noise. The way the air felt wrong.”

Jess nodded slowly. “I remember you jumped.”

“I didn’t jump to escape,” he whispered. “I jumped because something… opened. I didn’t understand it then. I still don’t.”

She blinked at him. “David—”

“The train wasn’t an accident,” he said. The words came out like he was forcing them through his teeth. “They were moving something. Or trying to. And part of it—” He shook his head, jaw clenching. “Part of it didn’t come back the way it left.”

Jess stared. “You’re not making sense.”

“I know,” he snapped — not angry at her, but himself. He raked a shaking hand through his wet hair. “I’ve been trying to make sense of it for twelve years and it still feels like trying to remember a dream you wake up crying from.”

He looked at the tunnel — the faint pulse of that impossible light reflecting in his eyes.

“There were people on that train,” he said. “And when the cars went… wherever they went… I could hear them. Not screaming. Just—” His breath hitched. “Asking where they were.”

Jess’s blood ran cold.

“How would you even know that?” she whispered.

His voice dropped to something raw and terrified. “Because something looked back at me, Jess. On that bridge. When I jumped. Something looked back. And it remembered me.”

Silence swallowed them both, rain ticking soft against asphalt.

Jess felt her own heart stutter. “Why come back now?”

David laughed — a small, fractured sound. “Because I think it found the way home. And if it did… it’ll be looking for the pieces of itself that were left behind.”

He looked at her then.

Not dramatic. Not heroic.

Just a man exhausted by the truth he never wanted.

For a moment neither spoke. Somewhere behind them, tires splashed through puddles — slow, deliberate. Boyink’s voice echoed faintly- “You can’t run from physics, David.”

David grabbed her arm. “We have to go.”

She hesitated, glancing back toward the street. The cat mask hung loose in her other hand, dripping water. “If this is real,” she whispered, “why me?”

“Because you were there,” David said, eyes fierce. “You saw the lights on the bridge before anyone else did. You were the first one who noticed the time skip.”

Jess froze. The words hit like a punch. “What?”

He stepped closer. “That night — you said it was three in the morning when we got to the bridge. But when the cops came, their logs said it was only 12:47. You lost more than two hours, Jess. You were in the slip, just for a second.”

She stared at him, memory unraveling like wet thread. The lights, the sirens, the hollow ringing in her ears — and yes, the clock on her phone, blinking nonsense. She’d buried that detail years ago.

Her breath came shallow. “What happens if the train comes back?”

David’s expression hardened. “Then everything it took comes back too.”

The air trembled — a low, humming vibration that rolled under their feet. Jess turned toward the tunnel. A faint sound drifted through the rain- metal grinding against metal, distant but growing.

She whispered, “Is that—?”

He nodded once. “It’s early.”

Light bloomed in the tunnel mouth — not yellow, not white, but something between, pulsing like a heartbeat. Jess’s pulse matched it. She dropped the cat mask without realizing it.

David’s voice was low, almost reverent. “Twelve years. It found its way back.”

Something moved in the light. Shapes, distorted by fog and motion. Too slow for machines, too deliberate for ghosts.

Jess’s voice was barely audible. “David… what’s on that train?”

He didn’t answer right away. Then, quietly-

“Us.”

And from deep within the tunnel, a whistle rose — warped, mournful, impossibly human.

The whistle faded into the mist as if swallowed. Jess stood frozen, the sound still reverberating somewhere behind her ribs. The tunnel glowed faintly, a trick of the fog or something else — she couldn’t tell anymore.

David was watching it, jaw clenched, water dripping from his hair. “It’s starting,” he said.

“No,” she whispered, more to herself than to him. “This isn’t happening.”

Jess’s pulse was still climbing. The street was too quiet now — no sirens, no engines, just the rain whispering over metal.

“You said I was in it,” she said. “The slip. Whatever that means. Prove it.”

David didn’t answer. Not immediately. His throat worked, like the request had lodged there.

“I don’t want to,” he said.

Jess blinked. “Since when do you get to not want to?”

He flinched. Not from her tone — from memory.

He reached slowly inside his coat and pulled out something wrapped in a scrap of shirt fabric, torn at the seam. His hands shook as he unwrapped it.

A silver pocket watch lay in his palm. Old.

Dented. The chain tangled like it had been torn free from something.

Jess frowned. “That’s just—”

“It stopped,” David said quietly. “The second the train disappeared.”

He didn’t offer it to her. He held it like something alive. Like something that scared him.

“I’ve had it twelve years,” he said. “I kept thinking I’d wake up one morning and it would be ticking again and I’d realize I made all of it up. That none of it was real. That I was just—”

His breath broke, just for a moment.

“But it never started again. Not once. Not until—” His eyes lifted to hers. “Not until I saw you today.”

Jess’s chest tightened. “David…”

He looked away, like he couldn’t look at her and stay standing. Then, with a kind of exhausted resignation, he held the watch out.

“You don’t have to take it,” he said. “You can walk away. You can pretend this is just trauma and time and… and grief.” A beat. “I’d like that, actually.”

But she reached anyway.

Her fingertips brushed metal.

The second hand twitched.

Jess froze. The ticking was soft — barely real — but she felt it. Felt it in her ribs, under her skin, like something waking up inside her.

David closed his eyes. Not triumphant.

Wrecked.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

Jess dropped the watch. It hit the puddle with a muted splash. The ticking died instantly.

Jess stumbled back from the puddle, chest tight, breath too fast. “No. No, that — that doesn’t prove anything. You could have—”

Her voice cut off.

The sound of the rain shifted. Not louder — just closer.

David’s eyes flicked to her hair, and Jess saw the moment he recognized something wrong. Not horror. Not surprise. Recognition. As if he’d seen this before, somewhere he didn’t want to remember.

“Jess,” he whispered. “Don’t touch your—”

She did.

Wet strands slid between her fingers.

Silver.

Not all of it — just a streak. Thin. Precise.

Like a scar made of time.

Jess’s pulse thrashed. “No. No, that — I didn’t — that’s—”

A faint hum rolled under the pavement. Not thunder. Something mechanical and far below.

David stepped back from the tunnel, not toward it. “We need to move.”

Jess couldn’t. Her body wasn’t listening.

The streak of silver shimmered like frost under streetlight.

The hum deepened, vibrating the brick behind her spine.

Her breath faltered. “David.”

He didn’t look at her.

“It’s early,” he said.

And then the light returned.

Not all at once. A flicker. A pulse. A heartbeat.

And Jess understood- the world wasn’t waiting for her to catch up.