Wilfredo tries the radio. Static. Then, briefly, a voice — a traffic report, calm and professional, naming a highway. The number it names is not ours. The city it references is not one any of us can place. Then static again.
Odette says, quietly, “I think we need to try leaving the car.”
Sigrid is already shaking her head. “And walk where? It’s desert.”
“At least we’d know if the road is the problem or if we are.”
That lands badly because it is the question none of us have said aloud. Whether the loop is in the geography or in the four of us. Whether something is wrong with the world out there or whether we are the variable.
I think about the photos again. The identical ones. The crack in the cup.
I think about how none of us have been hungry, even though it’s been hours since the gas station sandwich I ate before Reno. Not thirsty either. I think about that.
Wilfredo stops the car.
He doesn’t say why. He just stops it in the middle of the road and turns off the engine, and we all sit in the sudden quiet, and I notice that the wind has stopped. The scrubland is perfectly still. Even the light seems to have paused, holding its amber angle like something in a photograph.
Like the photographs.
“I’m going to walk east,” Odette says. “Off the road. Straight east. If I come back to this spot I’ll know.”
“Know what?” Sigrid asks.
Odette opens the door. The air that comes in is warm and flat and smells like nothing. “Whether the road is the edge of it.”
She walks. We watch her go. She gets small against the scrubland, then smaller, then she crests a low ridge and disappears.
We wait.
Five minutes. Ten. The light does not change.
Then Odette appears at the top of the ridge. She walks back down toward the car. Her face, when she gets close enough to read, is careful and closed in the way of someone who has decided what they are and are not going to say.
She gets in. She pulls the door shut.
She looks straight ahead through the windshield.
“Drive,” she says.
“What did you see?” Sigrid asks.
“Drive, Wilfredo.”
He drives. The road unfolds ahead of us, straight and pale and absolutely familiar. I watch the right side of the highway. I watch for the water tower.
Odette hasn’t spoken again. She is looking at her hands in her lap, and I notice, though I do not say this out loud, that the small scar on her left knuckle — the one she got from a broken mug years ago, the one she’s mentioned twice on this drive as a landmark on her own skin — is on her right hand now.
The water tower appears on our left.
Wilfredo keeps driving.
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