“AL!”
I cupped my hands around my mouth, but my voice was swallowed by the road nearby. “Al…”
“He isn’t coming back.”
The voice did not come from any direction I could trace; it did not move through the air the way sound should have. It sounded in my head.
“Behind you.”
I turned.
Three rows over, angled slightly toward me, sat a white 1970s Dodge Challenger. His body was intact, almost pristine compared to everything around him, but that was not what drew my attention. It was the presence within him, clear, solid, undeniable.
He was aware.
Not dim. Not fading.
Present, like me. A large, powerful shadow that matched the size of the car, sitting on his own hood, pitying me in the dark.
“What did you say?” I asked, watching his faintly glowing eyes, which mimicked his headlights, focus on me.
“He isn’t coming back,” the Challenger repeated, without any shift in tone or hesitation. The certainty struck harderthan the words themselves. I shook my head, hands covering my ears, but I couldn’t block him out.
“I’m a theft recovery vehicle,” he continued, as though my response held no weight in the conversation. “They didn’t take much. My tires are gone. My Ignition was cut when they tried to hotwire me. It was poorly done; they were amateurs.” He climbed up onto his roof, closer to me.
“I was with him for thirty years,” he said. “I was there for him through thick and thin. I took his first girlfriend to Necking Point, looked after them as they made out. I drove him to his wedding, carried him when his hands wouldn’t stop shaking on the wheel. I brought his child home from the hospital.” The Dodge sighed bitterly. “And when everything fell apart, I drove him through that, too—protected him on nights when he shouldn’t have been on the road at all. Nights where he didn’t care if he made it back. I saved his life when he wanted to drive into a river, stalled until help arrived. And then?”
I knew what was going to follow.
“And then,” he continued, “he took the insurance payout.”
I felt it, his pain, his hurt, but I couldn’t say anything that would bring the old muscle car any comfort.
“It was easier to buy a new car with cheaper parts than it was to fix me.” The Challenger looked me over, studying me, valuing me. I knew my worth, and so did he.
“No.” I hugged my shoulders, looking around. “No, that’s not what this is. It’s not like that. Al is coming back, and I’m perfectly fine. We just had a chase. Nothing else.”
“So he’s in jail?”
I opened my mouth to answer. Nothing came out, because I didn’t know the answer. Humans were still mysterious to me; I didn’t understand their systems and rules.
“Look,” the Challenger called to me. “I don’t want you draining your circuits for nothing. If cars aren’t picked up from the impound lot within a day or so, they rarely get picked up at all. The only other way out of here is an auctionif you’re lucky, new, or valuable. Everyone else is being sold to the scrap yard.”
“No!”
He only shrugged, motioning to the other cars around us. “Look at them. Look where they’ve parked you. This is the condemned area.”
The pattern I’d been stubbornly ignoring became uncomfortably clear. The vehicles closest to the lot’s entrance were intact, had been recently taken, and were likely to be claimed. Parking violations at worst, judging by their window stickers. Further in, though, the conditions worsened and damage accumulated. Age showed more clearly. And here, where I had been placed, there was a finality to everything that surrounded me.
My eyes darted from roof to roof, desperate to see anyone salvageable.
Old, broken, old, old, broken. The Ranger beside me wasn’t a theft; she had an electrical fault that cost too much to fix. A little further out, a Chrysler PT Cruiser had a tiny ruined circuit in her motherboard, a part so specific that she would never be salvageable. Such a small fault, but for a car like her? Fatal.
I raised a hand to my face without thinking, and it came away wet. The sensation was unfamiliar enough that I stared at my fingers for a moment before understanding what I was seeing.
Tears.
Something tight and painful had taken hold deep within me, and it was not easing.
