“Tell you what,” she told him. “You think of an answer to your question. Tell me why it was me. I’ll think about an answer to your question. A place you can go.”

“Okay,” he said. “I know it’s not easy.”

“It’s an interesting puzzle. It might depend on your answer, though.”

“I mean… what my predecessor did to you. That I have memories of associating with Jacob. With Jack Slash. I know you don’t trust me fully, yet.”

“I just traveled across a dangerous landscape with you, Five. Do you really think I don’t trust you?”

“In the last twenty minutes, you perched up high, out of my immediate reach. You used the word ‘deviate’.”

“Because I like high places, Five. Because I’m trying to find common ground, and I know you were born from a test tube, just like my body came from a vial. I’m… if you wanted to do something to me, you would have done it a long time ago.”

He frowned.

“I’ll tell you a secret. I already have an idea of where you might go. And I wouldn’t send you there if I didn’t trust you.”

He frowned. He didn’t like not knowing the answers.

“I’ll tell you whenever you want, but if it motivates you, you can try to come up with your answer for me first.”

“Why it was you that struck a chord in me.”

Sveta smiled. “The truck is just over the hill. But you know that. You knew the GPS coordinates.”

Counting the measure and degree of every step I take. As I’ve been doing for thirty-three years.

Now with no idea of where I’m going to end up.

⊙

He’d dozed off, and in the midst of his doze, his mind wandered, freely associating.

Sveta was driving, her hands steady at the wheel. She wasn’t very good, but it seemed to make her happy. The windows were open, and her hair flew this way and that. The radio was cranked up, and it was a genre he wasn’t familiar with. Every time he asked or tried to pin down the genres, she rattled off something new. A casualty of her ex-boyfriend’s taste in music, she’d said.

It was harmonic, borderline abrasive synth tones, with more emphasis on where the notes weren’t than anything. Sveta’s head bobbed with the staccato breaks in the music.

“You like this?” he asked. He indicated the music player.

“You’re awake! It’s interesting.”

“It’s not good.”

“But it’s new. It’s a change of pace.”

“You’re creative. I don’t understand that stuff.”

“You can learn it.”

He nodded. He turned his face toward the window, letting the wind blow at his hair. “It’s the furthest thing from my realm of experience, and you wear it easily. I don’t understand you.”

“Again, you can learn it.”

“I know,” he said. “Kurt left the Slaughterhouse Nine when King was killed, because he wanted to broaden his horizons. He wanted to understand the way the world worked and help it. I think that mindset was part of why I wanted to help you. Someone I don’t understand.”