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Sure, it was the fifth rewind, but they’d get him this time — the front door of the library represented the sole escape route, and Connie covered it, ready with her net. Alan MacCain could hide, but he couldn't run. After several minutes, however, Faust emerged from the building shaking his head. He looked pissed off, and the double-edged sword worked wonders for his personal space, effortlessly parting the crowd around him.

They sat by a fountain in the square for the fourth time, where the air smelled relatively fresh.

Faust sighed, squinting at the laptop screen under the sun. "For fuck’s sake. Not in the library at 11, not in the stock exchange at 10, not dropping off his kids at 9. It's almost like people can just lie on the internet. Or, you know, set up a script to lie for them."

She leaned over to look. "Come on, man, nobody said it'd be easy. Let’s try a different angle — what about his wife? Where's she at?"

"Let's see," he said, uselessly hitting the brightness button, "At 9, she was... at the Fruit and Wool Exchange, because of course she was. That's a place that normal people visit. At 10, she went to feed the ducks in the park, presumably to fatten them up, because by 11 she was chowing down on their brethren in a restaurant. Have fun on your wild goose chase, Connie, but I think I'd rather stay here and watch paint dry."

"Well meow to you too," she said, holding up the remote. "Suit yourself. I'll contact you on the tile when I've—"

"Don't you think we've done enough rewinding?" he spat.

She glared at him, and he glared back. The fountain trickled down behind them, while an endless throng of people streamed by, oblivious to the intensity of their staring contest.

She straightened out her blazer. "It's almost like you don't want to find him."

He smoothed over his beard. "It's almost like you're procrastinating getting on with the day because you're terrified of finding out the truth."

"Excuse me?" She shivered, then put her hands on her hips to imitate justified anger.

"Tarquin insisted I quell my self-loathing until I knew for certain — well regard thyself, mistress! If we just kept going, we'd bump into MacCain eventually, wouldn't we?"

"But the information's right there," she said, her smile wavering. "If we find him before I kill him, then I can save him and come to terms with it! I can do the right thing! Isn't that the point of all this?"

Connie broke eye contact — she couldn't match his intense gaze. All she needed to do was get MacCain to cancel his booking. That was her win condition. How could something so simple be so difficult to achieve?

Faust shook his head. "How can you come to terms with the truth if you don't know what it is? You think me gallivanting around with you here is helping me figure out why I took a swan dive from a chair?"

"If you want to go, then go." She trembled, ready to smash that rewind button.

He grabbed her thumb to stop her, making it look like her viper tattoo was biting him. His fingers were soft in a way that made her very self-conscious, and she couldn’t ignore how they felt.

"Please," he said. "Do the right thing. If you keep running away like this — they'll kill you. And if I walked away, that'd just be another fucking thing I could torment myself with."

Connie yanked her hand back and threw the remote into the fountain. It bubbled under the surface.

"Do you guilt trip everybody in your life?" she stormed off, circling the fountain. "Why do you care so much about what happens to a stranger, huh?"

He sighed, deeply, and looked her up and down, gritting his teeth, oblivious to everything that was going on around him.

And he said, "...Because you're happy."

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

She had to do a double take. "Because I'm what?"

"Losing yourself, finding yourself, remember all that? You've cracked the code somehow, you've actually made something of yourself, you're living the life you want to live, and I resent you for that! But if you have all of that wisdom and you still want to throw everything away, then why should I even try clawing my own life back? Can you tell me that?"

"Oh yeah," said Connie, regret mounting in her stomach towards that particular monologue. She'd probably gotten a little carried away.

"So what's it to be?" he asked, streaming furious tears. "Seek the truth, or render me twice dead upon the blade of your avoidance?"

"The truth," she said, beaming out a little more of the strained resource that was her happiness.

—

Barden Fleet's headquarters lurched above the road, propped up by a couple of pillars to form a makeshift garage. Taxis idled there, pulling in throughout the day, painting the roof black with their fumes. You had to sign a waiver if you wanted to stand under there for more than 20 minutes. Connie's throat cracked, as if somebody had poured a layer of fresh tarmac down it, and she regretted that if she kept working here, her healed angelic voice would turn monstrous.

She led Faust through the peeling front door, passed an operetta of office administrators who were noting down new bookings, and walked straight into Gazzer's office. The office appeared to have been copy-pasted from a mansion's living room, with a couple of long, plush sofas that wouldn't have looked out of place on a porn set. Gazzer always kept a fire going under the mantlepiece, 'for the ambience'.

Her boss arose like built-up grime.

"Gazzer!" she said.

"Alright, Connie," he wheezed. "How's the endocriocitis treating you?"

"You think I'd be here if it was flaring up, man?"

Gazzer sized Faust up in the same way that a rugby player looks at a mathematician. But whatever cutting remark he was preparing died on his lips when he caught sight of the sword, and instead he sloshed his head down in a respectful nod.

"New boyfriend o' yours?" he said, extending his greasy hand for Faust to shake. "Doesn't look your type."

"He isn't," said Connie. "Faust is gonna be shadowing me today, because he wants to find out the meaning of life and the secret to happiness. Is that alright?"

At this, Gazzer wheezed uncontrollably, steadying himself on the chair as he laughed. He looked in pain.

"Course it is," he said. "Look, lad, I can't get you to nirvana or nothing, but I can help you make bank as a taxi driver, and then you might actually meet shorty here's criteria! Ahahaha!"

Faust stepped closer to Connie and mumbled, "I thought you said you were a chauffeur."

"A CHAUFFEUR?" cried Gazzer. "Jesus H. Christ!"

Being a sixty-something unscrupulous businessman, Gazzer lacked the self-consciousness to not roll on the floor with laughter. He thudded onto the carpet and proceeded to have a heart attack. Faust rushed over, flitting around him like a panicked butterfly, trying to build up the resolve to actually touch the fatberg of a man.

"Leave him, he's alright," said Connie. "Greasy fucker does this every day."

"A chauffeur!" Gazzer wailed. "Ahahaahaha!"

Faust glared at her, angry.

"It was a joke, man," she said, holding out her arms as if to say 'that's life'. "You know, referencing all those job titles out there that inflate what they really are, like a cleaner that calls himself a 'sanitation engineer'... just a little bit of self-deprecation."

He seemed to buy it, but it didn't get a smile out of him. They waited for Gazzer to stop having a heart attack, whereupon he stood up and lit a cigarette.

"These days I'm running out of extra lives," he explained. "Anyway, Connie, you're on Newchurch—"

"From 12-6," she beamed. "And then I've got bookings for the rest of the day. And you ain't never seen me so popular, and one of them is a Scottish bloke who said all his words funny, and he’ll be at a pub. Can I have the keys, now?"

Gazzer had another heart attack.

—

It was a quiet day for the transportation industry.

Rain poured out the sky, hammering down onto Connie's windscreen only to be slapped away by the wipers. The fans pumped hot recycled air onto her face. They sat stationary outside the Newchurch station, a line of brake lights piercing the gloom in front of them as a queue of taxis extended across the car park. Occasionally, someone would get in the front car, that taxi would drive off, and the whole line would trundle forward like a funeral procession; Connie rode the clutch for a couple meters before hitting the brakes.

Faust drummed his fingers on the door. He'd propped the laptop on top of the glovebox.

"So this is chauffeuring," he said. "Fine way to pass the time."

"Heh," she said. "Nice reference to the joke I made earlier. Which was a joke."

"Alan MacCain's on the move again. Now he's in Croatia... are you gonna take your hands off the wheel? You’ll get a heart attack yourself if you keep that up."

She kept a firm grip on it. "Nah. People get pissed off if you're not ready to move up as soon as the guy in front's pulled out. It is what it is."

"I can't help but notice that it's been half an hour and you haven't actually made any money yet," he said.

"You get good and bad days," she said. "This is a particularly bad day. Nobody wants to come to the city when it's raining."

Income-wise it was, all things considered, a particularly normal day.

She said, "Anyway, you can't be happy if you sweat the small stuff like that. Try and be a little optimistic. Even without tips, Gazzer's paying me a little just to sit here."

"Must get lonely," he said. "And kinda boring, to just sit around until you're needed."

"...That's not optimistic."

He hung his head. "I suppose. And you make enough out of this to afford a penthouse suite how?"

“Oh, bookings.” She lifted up the armrest, got out her box of cassettes, and handed it to him. "Not so boring when you got these bad boys. Go ahead, take your pick."

He leafed through them, and picked out the song she'd been playing earlier in the flat.

"This one's a jam," he said. “So, how did you know the Scottish man had booked you outside a pub?”