Chapter 1: Breakdown

The rental car made a sound like someone dropping a drawer full of silverware inside a dishwasher. Then the engine died.

Sarah coasted to the shoulder and sat in the sudden silence. No traffic. No wind. Just heat rising off the asphalt in waves that made the desert look like it was breathing.

Her phone said No Service in the top corner. Of course it did.

She'd left San Francisco eight hours ago for a pitch meeting in Phoenix that her boss Marcus swore would "revolutionize our Q4 projections," which was Marcus-speak for "justify your salary." The highway stretched in both directions like a graph of her career trajectory—flat, endless, going nowhere interesting.

Sarah tried the ignition. The car clicked like disapproval.

She got out. The heat hit her like opening an oven to check on something burning. Ninety-seven degrees according to her phone, which was now just an expensive rectangle.

Mile marker 31. The road ahead disappeared into shimmer and emptiness.

Rental Car Optimism: The belief that a vehicle's newness will protect you from the fundamental entropy of the universe.

Sarah popped the hood because that's what people did in movies. The engine might as well have been a sculpture. Everything was beige and hot and vaguely hostile.

Her bottle of Dasani was already body-temperature. She drank half anyway.

The desert was an algorithm running on indifference.

A car appeared in the distance, coming from behind. Sarah's relief was so intense it felt like a drug.

She stepped into the road and waved both arms. The car—a white pickup—slowed as it approached. The driver was a woman in aviator sunglasses and a Dodgers cap. She stopped ten feet away, window cracked two inches.

"Car trouble?" The woman's voice was flat, diagnostic.

"Engine died. No phone service." Sarah was already rationing words.

The woman looked at Sarah's rental, at Sarah, at the empty road.

"I don't pick up hitchhikers," the woman said.

"I'm not—I just need you to call someone when you get service. A tow truck. AAA. Anyone."

"Where you headed?"

"Phoenix."

The woman seemed to think about this for longer than the question required. "There's a rest stop about forty miles up. They'll have a phone."

"Could you call from there? Please?"

Another pause. The truck's engine idled with the confidence of machinery that had no intention of dying on this road or any other.

"I'll see what I can do," the woman said, which was not yes but also not no. She rolled up the window and drove away, and Sarah watched until the truck became a white dot, then a shimmer, then a memory she wasn't sure she could trust.

She got back in the car, door open. The steering wheel was too hot to touch. Everything was too hot to touch.

Sarah checked her email. No service. Her last message was from Marcus: "Knock em dead today. We need this."

The sun was directly overhead. Six hours before sunset. Six hours to figure out if the woman in the truck would actually call someone.

She looked at her phone again. Still no service. Still 97 degrees. Still 11:23 AM, which meant time was moving but nothing else was.

In the distance, something moved. Not a car. Something smaller, closer to the ground. Sarah squinted but the heat made everything uncertain.

Probably nothing. Probably her eyes inventing company.

She closed the car door and watched the road and tried not to think about the fact that her last conversation with another human being had been with a woman who maybe, possibly, might make a phone call forty miles from now.

The thing in the distance was getting closer.