The phone was still face down, vibrating every few minutes with the ghosts of the world outside.
I told myself I didn’t care. I told myself it was just adrenaline, just a misfire in the chemistry.
But the longer I sat, the less I believed it.
I wondered if she was awake, two miles away and just as wrecked, or if she’d moved on, erased the last twenty-four hours from her hard drive. I wondered if I’d ever get another shot to save her. Or if, next time, I’d fuck it up for real.
I lay back on the cot, eyes wide open, and waited for the next dream to take its shot.
I didn’t have to wait long.
7
Seraphina
The stoplight at Trinity and Canyon Road lasted three hundred seconds, but in Los Alamos, time was a snake—slow, venomous, and always ready to coil around your throat. My Accord idled at the intersection, the dashboard clock shedding its half-dead glow across the letters on my knuckles. They spelled out the same thing every night, that I was running out of time, places, and excuses. The sun had long since knifed itself on the horizon, leaving the sky a bruise of purple and copper. The mesa’s silhouette watched, black and blank, as if hoping I’d screw up the exit this time.
A Harley idled in the lane beside me, exhaust rumbling through my car’s firewall with the persistence of a cardiac arrhythmia. The rider leaned into his own gravity, posture aggressive even at rest, helmet dangling from the bars because what’s life without another variable? I recognized the shape of him—the burn-scarred jaw, the military-short cut, the bouncer’sneck. Seager “Nitro” Culberson, as inevitable as a relapse. In a town of specters, he was the only ghost that ever haunted back.
I hadn’t seen him since the night with the van, the shots, the aftermath that felt more like a beginning than a resolution. I was supposed to keep my head down, let the Bureau handle it. Instead, I’d spent the days since crafting hypotheticals. Who hired the hitters? Why go after me? Why let me go? Every simulation ended with a coin flip—either I ended up dead, or the world got a new kind of bomb. The vanishing in-between was what really gnawed.
My hands gripped the wheel, wrists raw from the anxiety rash I’d cultivated since childhood. I thought about rolling the window down. I thought about what I’d say if I did. He stared straight ahead, jaw locked, the profile cut from a war memorial. The red of the light reflected off the chrome and up into his eyes, making him look demonic or maybe just tired.
At 00:02 on the countdown, I cracked the window.
He didn’t look over, but I spoke anyway. “Why didn’t you ever call me back?”
The engine noise made it hard to tell if he’d heard, but his grip on the throttle flexed, knuckles whitening. I tried again, louder, the way you raise your voice for the deaf or the willfully stubborn. “After you pulled me out. You just vanished.”
He turned his head slow, like an owl locking onto prey. His gaze met mine, dark and bottomless, and he smiled the way some people flinch. “You made it clear you don’t want my help.” His voice was even, but it scraped the air like steel on a sidewalk.
“That’s not what I meant,” I said, then hated myself for how quick the words came. “I just—” I had no ending to the sentence, so I let it dangle.
The light went green. Neither of us moved. A chorus of horns erupted from behind, more startled than angry, like a flock ofgeese flushed by a coyote. The Harley’s pipes drowned them out, but still neither of us crossed.
I licked my lips. “Let’s talk somewhere else,” I said. My voice was soft, almost drowned by the engine, but he caught it.
He nodded up the block, toward The Atomic. The neon above the door flickered, the bar’s sign a ring of isotopes orbiting a dead sun. It was a place you went if you had no fear of disease, or if you had a particular thirst for decay.
I nodded, and he broke left into the turn lane, boot scraping the curb. I followed, the Accord rattling in his wake. As we pulled away, the horns faded, but the pressure in my chest did not.
We drove in tandem, predator and prey, or maybe just two animals too exhausted to maintain the fiction of the chase. The sky went darker with every block, the headlights behind us thinning as we left the populated part of town. The Atomic’s parking lot was half-full, the rest of the street deserted, save for a parked squad car two blocks down, engine off, windows fogged with the breath of its idling cop.
He took the best spot, nearest the door, and killed the Harley with a flick of his gloved hand. I parked beside him, rolling the window down all the way this time.
He got off the bike with the economy of a man who’d been shot at more times than he’d eaten a home-cooked meal. His eyes never left the bar’s entrance, but his voice looped back to me.
“You sure about this, Doc?” he asked. The nickname landed soft, but with an edge.
I wanted to say no. I wanted to say, “Drive until you hit the river and never come back.” But my own inertia had already doomed me. “It’s fine,” I said. “I just need to know what you know.”
He nodded. “Inside, then.”
The Atomic had a double entry—vestibule to slow the winter, or maybe to screen the drunks from the real drinkers. I followedhim in, the space between us measured in microns, not feet. The bar’s interior was a haze of amber light, fake smoke, and the low mutter of conversation. Atomic-symbol murals crawled up the walls, and a TV above the bar showed a college basketball game, but nobody watched.
He took a booth in the corner, back to the padded wall, scanning the room with the hypervigilance of someone who’d spent too much time in rooms like this, waiting for the wrong person to walk in. I slid into the seat across from him, my hands folded tight around a cocktail menu.
The waitress approached, already rolling her eyes at the sight of him. “What’ll it be?”
