Breakthrough: Chapter 3

The first steps

Footsteps. From somewhere outside. Slow. Deliberate.

Marcus looked up and saw a shape detach from the darkness. Short, wrapped in layers of patched fabric, moving with the ease of someone who belonged out here. In her hand, something long and curved caught the faint starlight.

She walked to the front of his car, looked at the shredded tire, looked at the wire trailing from it. Then she looked at him. "Huh," she said. "You're not a truck."

Marcus tried to say something. His voice came out as a croak.

She walked around to his window, crouched down so they were eye level. Her face was weathered, younger than he'd expected, with eyes that were already calculating something.

"City plates," she said. "You lost?"

"There's a rave." His voice sounded foreign to him. "By the dry lake."

"Lake's twenty miles south." She looked at him the way you'd look at a kid who'd wandered into traffic. "You're not even close."

"My phone—"

"Yeah. Phones don't work out here." She stood, brushed the dust off her knees. "That's sort of the point."

Marcus fumbled for the door handle, got it open, stumbled out onto the dirt. His legs weren't steady. The beer, the adrenaline, the heat that still radiated off the ground even at night.

"Stupid people die around here," she said. Still not cruel. Just stating a fact. "No water, no shade. And you've been making a lot of noise. Things out here notice noise."

"Things?"

She sighed, looking back the way she'd come. "I'm headed to my place. It's on the way to where you were trying to go, more or less. You can come or you can wait here for whatever finds you first."

"Who are you?"

"Auto."

She didn't offer a hand. She was already walking. Marcus looked back at his car—crumpled, useless, a piece of city junk dying in the desert—and then followed the only person within miles who knew where she was going.

Auto didn't talk. She walked, and Marcus followed, and that was the arrangement.

The ground was uneven, littered with rocks and scrub that grabbed at his ankles. His shoes—city shoes, leather soles, chosen because they looked good—were already falling apart. He could feel blisters forming, hot spots on his heels and the balls of his feet.

He wanted to ask how far. He wanted to ask what she'd been doing out there, waiting for a truck in the middle of nowhere with a tire slasher. He wanted to ask what "things" she'd meant, the ones that noticed noise.

But every time he opened his mouth, she was already ten feet ahead. Her distance was an answer.

The sky was enormous out here. No light pollution, no haze. Just stars, more than he'd ever seen, arranged in patterns that meant nothing to him. He'd grown up in the city. The sky had always been a ceiling, not a landscape.

His phone was dead weight in his pocket. His watch still worked but the numbers didn't mean anything anymore. Time moved differently out here. Slower. Or maybe it just felt that way because every step hurt.

After what might have been an hour, Auto stopped.

"There," she said.

Marcus looked up. Ahead, barely visible against the dark horizon, shapes. Low structures, irregular, built from materials he couldn't identify at this distance. No lights. No sound.

"What is this place?"

"Home," Auto said. And then, quieter, as if to herself: "For now."

She started walking again. Marcus followed.