As the second chorus started to build, she looked back at their table, expecting to see Finn singing along, but she wasn’t there. Thinking she might have looked at the wrong table, she scanned the bar, holding up her hand to block out the glare of the stage lights, but saw no sign of her sister.

In an instant, the high Zadie had been riding was gone and panic had set in. If Finn wasn’t in the bar, where was she? The bathroom was behind the stage. She would have noticed if she’d gotten up to use it. Zadie stopped singing while the instrumental continued to play. “Finn? You there?” she said into the mic. More heads turned in her direction, but none of them were Finn’s. She hastily shoved the mic back into its stand and ran off the stage.

Zadie burst through the front door into the parking lot. The moonlit outlines of cars were all that Zadie could see as her eyes adjusted to the darkness. She scanned her surroundings but saw no people, no Finn. Beyond the parking lot were more cars moving at blurring speeds. Zadie hurried to the edge of the highway. “Finn!” she called out. A truck shot past, its wheels spitting dirt at her: a warning. She thought she might find her sister wandering along the shoulder sticking out her thumb, lost in the memory of some aimless hitchhiker, but all she saw was a tumbleweed caught in a piece of construction fencing. As she watched it struggle to break free, her mind went to a darker place. She shifted her gaze from the side of the road to the road itself.

She didn’t see any sign of Finn between the bright orbs of white and red, although, without streetlights to see by, there was no way to know for sure. Zadie shouted her sister’s name again, but the drivers of the speeding cars couldn’t hear her. No one did.

Pulse hammering, she turned back toward the bar. That’s when she saw her; still in one piece, astride a parked motorcycle. “Finn!” Zadie cried as she sprinted over to her. “What the hell are you doing?”

But as Zadie drew close, she realized her sister couldn’t hear her. With every involuntary twitch of her body stilled, Finn looked as though she had been turned to stone. On her face was a wrenched expression, encapsulated in marble and polished until her eyes glistened so much they appeared wet. Zadie recognized the expression. She’d seen it on their mother.

She grabbed her sister by the shoulder and shook her hard. “Hey! Wake up!”

Finn snapped out of her hypnosis as if someone had just thrown water on her. She looked at Zadie, confused, then down at the bike. “Whoa!” Finn vaulted off the motorcycle and backed away. “Holy shit,” she muttered, threading her fingers behind her head.