She thinks of Rafe’s words on the roof, that Mo would want her to accept. It felt like a presumptuous thing to say, but now Dez remembers showing Mo her final cut ofGlimpse. It was just a few days ago, Saturday afternoon. She’d jerked his pillow out from under his head to wake him up, flopped onto the bed beside him, and pressed Play. She watched his eyes the whole time he watched her film. He made no outward expression, but she could tell he was impressed. When it was over, when the credits rolled, he closed her laptop and turned to her. He looked … what? Was he angry?
He said, “When you get your chance, Dez? Whenever it comes? Don’t miss it. Not for anyone or anything here.”
This is her chance. She missed the AFI deadline, and Rafe was clear Acheron wouldn’t ask again. Would Mo really want her to go, even now?
She tells herself she can come back anytime to see him. She cancome this weekend even. With her tuition covered, money would be, for the first time in Dez’s life, not an all-consuming worry. And when the police come around with more questions, she’ll have Acheron’s lawyers in her corner. Dez hasn’t told her family that part yet; as far as they’re concerned, it might be the most important piece of all.
She looks up the address Rafe gave her. It’s a private airplane hangar and landing strip, fifteen miles away. Seeing it on the map sends a flutter through Dez’s chest. This is how someone gets to the Colorado Rockies to start classes tomorrow. This is how Rafe might be for real.
She looks down the long, fluorescent-lit hospital hallway, where somewhere on the other side of walls and surgeons and lifesaving machinery lies her brother in crisis.
Mo, is this okay?
But he can’t tell her that it is. No one can. Dez will have to decide for herself.
If she’s ever going to seize her destiny, she’s got to seize it now. By midnight.
Forty minutes until midnight, Dez takes a rideshare to the landing strip. She’d taken so long to make the decision that there’s barely time to swing by home and grab her things. She stuffs a duffel bag with clothes, a toothbrush, her camera equipment, and computer. She hasn’t showered or changed since last night.
She can change clothes on the plane. If this is real.
At first, the road out of town is empty. Nothing but the occasional coyote’s eyes. But once she reaches the sign on Highway 50 that raises the speed limit to sixty-five, Dez feels them behind her—headlights on a following car.
She turns and confirms the feeling. A car is keeping a safe and steady distance of about a hundred yards.
Dez’s driver—a middle-aged desert rat with an unkempt beard—locks eyes with her in the rearview mirror. “You need to lose them?”
What is it about the desert that attracts the criminally inclined?
“Yeah,” Dez says.
The driver turns off his headlights, turns off all the lights inside his compact car. He stares into the rearview mirror, watching the car behind them.
Sirens sound, and red flashing lights appear on the following car, which now draws rapidly closer.
“Hold on,” Dez’s driver says as he jerks the steering wheel sharply left, causing their car to U-turn so quickly they go briefly onto the passenger side’s two wheels.
The police car slams on its brakes, spinning out onto the highway shoulder so that the cop car sits diagonally, its white hood jutting into the desert.
“What I’m about to do … it’ll help if you relax,” her driver says.
“What?”
“Get as loose in your neck and shoulders as you can. Now.”
Dez grips her thighs, takes a breath, and tries to comply as her driver speeds up and uses the nose of his car to glance the edge of the police car’s rear bumper, spinning the cop car completely into the desert sand, too deep for its spinning wheels to grip.
Now Dez’s driver does a hundred down the dark and empty road. They reach the address Rafe gave her in under a minute and come to a stop outside an iron gate.
“You okay?” her driver asks. “I think that worked.”
She nods. “Thank you.”
As Dez rolls down the window, sirens sound in the distance.
She reaches for the button on a call box by the gate. Before she can press the button, the gate opens just enough for the car to drive through.
They enter through a hangar, dark and empty, lined with crop dusters and old Cessnas. The car slows to a stop as they come out the other side, at an airstrip. Dez thinks she sees a narrow-bodied jet on the tarmac, facing west. It’s obsidian black, the color of night, so dark she can barely make it out, but she senses it’s nicer than anything in this hangar, and possibly in this state.
