Day one on the road was chaos with a steering wheel. The cat screamed for the first eighty miles, then fell into a silence so intense I kept checking to make sure he hadn’t ascended to another plane out of spite. I drove with the windows cracked, the truck loaded heavy, and every practical fear I owned riding shotgun. What if the job was a mistake? What if Santa Fe hated me? What if I hated Santa Fe? What if relocation assistance took too long to arrive and I ended up sleeping in my truck with an angry street cat and a master’s degree?
I stopped at a gas station and ate a protein bar that tasted like compressed mulch. The cat refused water, refused food, then accepted exactly one piece of turkey with the suspicious caution of someone negotiating with a war criminal. I bought a cheapdisposable litter box, a bag of kibble, and a travel bowl shaped like a fish because it was the least depressing option on the shelf.
By day two, he had stopped trying to murder me. Mostly. I rigged the backseat with towels and a fleece blanket I’d stolen from my own couch. I moved him into the cab when the heat climbed and put him back in the crate when I stopped for food. We developed a complex system of water refills, gas station turkey, and apologies he refused to acknowledge. Somewhere in Oklahoma, he allowed me to scratch the top of his head through the crate door for exactly four seconds before swatting at me with murder in his eyes.
“Progress,” I told him.
He turned his back.
I played podcasts until I got sick of other people’s voices, then switched to old playlists from grad school. Fleetwood Mac. Hozier. A little Dolly Parton because I believed in emotional infrastructure. The farther west I drove, the more the land began to change. The trees thinned. The sky widened. The horizon stopped feeling like a boundary and started feeling like a dare.
At a gas station outside Amarillo, a trucker in a faded cap peered into my cab while I was trying to convince the cat not to wedge himself under the passenger seat.
“That cat yours?” he asked.
I looked at the gray menace currently chewing the corner of his crate like he intended to tunnel through state lines. “Against both our wills.”
The trucker laughed. “What’s his name?”
I froze. Somehow, through all the planning, packing, quitting, driving, and questionable feline abduction, I had not thought that far. The cat stopped chewing long enough to glare at me. Mean. Suspicious. Survived on scraps. Trusted nobody. Stole turkey with the confidence of a career criminal.
I smiled. “Bandit.”
Bandit hissed.
“See?” I said. “He likes it.”
Back on the road, the land grew wider with every mile. The green fell away. The sky stretched hard and blue. Heat shimmered above the pavement, turning the highway into a silver ribbon that seemed to dissolve at the edges. Semis roared past like metal beasts. Every gas station smelled like diesel, dust, and burnt coffee. My left arm developed a trucker tan. My hair lived in a knot at the base of my neck. Bandit finally wore himself out and curled in the passenger seat, one paw tucked under his chin, his bent ear twitching every time the tires hit uneven road.
I had expected fear to get louder as I drove. Instead, it thinned. Not vanished, exactly. Fear didn’t do clean exits. It just stopped steering. The farther I got from my old apartment, the less real it felt. The fluorescent lights, the cubicle walls, Everett’s guilty face, the ceiling stain shaped like South America—all of it shrank in the rearview until it became data instead of destiny.
By the time I crossed into the desert, the sun was dropping low and red, throwing long shadows across the terrain. The world looked stripped down to its essential elements: rock, heat, sky, distance. No excess. No pretending. Just land that had survived by becoming exactly what it was.
I understood that in a way I didn’t have language for.
The truck hummed beneath me, old but loyal, the wheel warm under my palms. Bandit slept beside me like he hadn’t spent two days threatening my bloodline. I drove toward Santa Fe with my offer letter tucked in the glove compartment, my coffee maker wrapped in a towel behind the seat, and my entire life tied down under tarps.
For the first time in years, the future didn’t feel like something happening while I stood still.
It felt like something I was chasing down with both hands on the wheel.
I didn’t know yet that the desert had teeth. I didn’t know a scorching detour waited ahead, or that one wrong turn could strand a scientist with more stubbornness than survival supplies in the middle of the Mojave. I didn’t know about the biker carved out of scars, heat, and trouble, or the way his rough voice would get under my skin long before I trusted the man attached to it.
I didn’t know that rain could fall in the driest places.
Or that sometimes the storm didn’t come to destroy you.
Sometimes it came to wake you up.
CHAPTER 2
MASON
Duststuck to everything after a long run.
It got in the seams of my boots, ground itself into denim, clung to the sweat at the back of my neck, and settled in the lines of my hands like it had paid rent. I’d been riding since sunrise with the Royal Bastards stretched out behind me and the desert unrolling ahead, nothing but heat, road, engines, and the kind of silence a man didn’t have to explain.
Three state lines. One delivery. No trouble.
