As the man helped him to the passenger’s side of the car, basically carrying him, Tyler focused on the hemp bracelet the man wore on his wrist, the central bead patterned with a shape like a lidded eye, and this one detail seemed totally out of place against the shifting fields behind him, the cascading sheaves of wheat in their—what was the lyric—in their turbulent soil, high in this season, almost ready for harvest. The bracelet quickly shifted out of his view and he forgot about it. The car was faded maroon, and though he only saw the side of it he recognized that it was a Taurus, he knew this with certainty, and he prized this fact, this secret knowledge, stowed it away like treasure. Tyler fell inside when the door opened, the man shut it gently beside him and returned to the driver’s side. He felt the vague rumbling of the engine beneath him. He slumped automatically in the seat, his head settling against the window. The car was old, the window had a crank. His gaze flicked upward to the windshield and stayed there.

They had driven for twenty minutes or so in that direction, Tyler hovering just at the edge of sleep, his sight pinholed into a surface of plummeting blue through the windshield—this infinitesimally changing color like a reel of film endlessly unwinding—before Tyler realized that he hadn’t spoken, neither of them had spoken. He didn’t know where he was going, or where he was being taken. His vision pulsed at the perimeter of that patch of blue sky, tinged dark at its edges, like the rhythm of his own blood. He wondered how long he had lived with it inside of him, that arc, that space, if it had really been forever, just waiting for the right time and place to activate and define itself. He thought of Rhea and Typhus, together as far as he knew. The girl who lay in the basement, the bloody marker he’d left at the top of the steps. Claire, jogging among mansions. Would they be better? he asked himself again. If they had it in them, too? Would he? The sky gradually shifted colors, to pale yellow with a trace of orange. He didn’t know how long they had been driving, where this road led. It didn’t matter to him.