Two blocks.
The interior of the car looked like a foam party thrown by some eccentric billionaire. She was waist-deep in emojis. Daniel, Christina, and William were lost in the storm. She touched the side of her cheek and understood that Otto had just given her a peek into the future of symbol-based chatting: icons pregnant with feelings, pollinating people like bees.
One block.
The door at her back swung open, and she fell out, screaming. She braced herself for a tumble into traffic, screeching tires, punishing impact. Instead the RenderLux spun her around and she felt her feet hit concrete. Visions of road rash propelled her away from the moving car…except it wasn’t really moving at all. Otto was simulating engine hum. He had pulled over to the sidewalk and stopped to let her out.
The door slid closed behind her. Otto headed up Windmere and disappeared around the corner.
Melissa Faber was alone. Ash Granger was waiting.
She walked beneath intermittent streetlights with her eyes on her phone, reviewing Ash’s and Serena’s résumés, trying to hold their achievements in her head so she could deploy them as conversational tools in the meeting.
She was vaguely aware of dark shapes set back from the street, suburban homes with well-kept lawns punctuated by fixer-uppers and foreclosures in disrepair. It was the perfect up-and-coming neighborhood in which to flip a house. Ash Granger knew what he was doing.
The nighttime desert air leeched the moisture from her skin in an oddly pleasant way, like some revolutionary new spa treatment. At least she wasn’t worried about showing up sweaty. The lack of humidity was breathtaking after the swampy oppression of New Orleans and Texas.
A porch light welcomed her to 1843 Windmere, a low-slung ranch-style house with a trellised patio and stucco walls. She wondered if Ash had already redone the exterior. As she walked up the single step to the door, she wrinkled her nose at a sharp smell. Cat pee, she thought, or ammonia. She glanced around for signs of a stray, worried that she’d stepped in something or the smell had migrated to her clothes. She slipped her phone into her purse and fussed with her bangs.
Before she pressed the lighted bell, the door swung open, and a potent wave of stench hit her. She recoiled as a wiry arm shot out. Fingers dug into her skin, and she wrenched her body away, but a hand clamped around her wrist. A man’s gaunt pockmarked face was there in the doorway, wolfish eyes drinking her in as he pulled her inside with ungentle carelessness, as if he were dragging old furniture to the curb.
Daniel was soberish. He hadn’t popped a Roxy in hundreds of miles. He’d even abandoned daily Adderall maintenance. If not for the five (or was it seven?) beers he’d pounded as Texas bled into New Mexico, he would be sober like how normal people and law enforcement meant sober.
He was doing it for William. When he looked back on all this, he wanted to be able to tell himself that he’d done his part to honor his friend’s impossible dream of the perfect road trip. So he vowed to spend the last days of the journey letting the Dread Army torture him with impunity. Making a private sacrifice that he could never truly explain to anyone was exhilarating, rendered even more potent by its timing—right after a breakup, when he ought to be tasting the Skittles Rainbow of pills to help burn the Dread Army’s bridges, topple siege towers, and drown whole regiments in the moat.
Anyway, it was smart to test himself with a tolerance break, just to prove that he could stop at any time if substances really got their claws in.
Physical withdrawal didn’t seem to be an issue. He’d always carefully calibrated his intake, being especially careful with Roxies. Never more than 30 milligrams a day, never more than a few times a week. But now that he thought about it—and it was pretty much all he could think about, pills dancing among the emojis that streamed before his eyes—his math had been a little fuzzy lately.
There was no cramping or nausea. Well, maybe a little, but that was because he’d just eaten an entire bag of Turmeric Doritos. He wasn’t vomiting—although he did feel like he could puke pretty easily, but that was just the Miller Lites he’d been chugging. His eyes were tearing up and his nose was running, but that was because he was holding a bag of frozen peas to his jacked-up face. And he didn’t have insomnia—he’d slept all the way through Texas!
And yet the craving was weaponized time, each passing soberish second rattling around in his head, taking an eternity to tick away. The craving gathered the folds of reality around him like a privacy shroud. Beer did nothing to dull it. Miller Lite might as well have been Pedialyte for all the good it did in that department. He was surprised to find that the craving had nothing to do with getting high. The high was already out there waiting for him—he recognized its shape, all sexy curves and comfy nooks—and he craved merging with it and being welcomed back. Getting high wasn’t a journey or a trip, it was simply arriving at home where you belonged and not remembering or caring how you got there.
The cocaine had been a special treat from Jamie Lynn, a secret weapon to decimate the Dread Army. He had a vision of an entire eight ball shooting out of his face with luminous velocity and bouncing off the
