How did he know about King City? Diane pulled her purse off her shoulder and threw it against the wall. She smacked the desktop with her palms. She cursed. She stomped. Nothing helped.

She looked at her purse, lying open near the doorway. She remembered the paper Evan had given her. She had gone to throw it away behind the Moonlite All-Nite but put it in her purse after seeing Troy. She rifled through the purse. And just like her car keys, the paper was not there.

“No,” Diane said again and again on the floor of Josh’s empty room.

“KING CITY,” the paper said again and again in Jackie’s hand and probably now in Josh’s hand as well.

Diane grabbed her phone and tried calling him one more time. She could feel the phone burning her ear. She could smell it burning her hair. She let it ring and ring, until the pain was searing, until her hair caught on fire, until she could not physically hold the phone to her head a moment longer, and then she let it ring a moment past that.

35

Jackie leaned back, her feet on the counter. It was the first time she had been in the pawnshop in days.

When she left the hospital, she wasn’t sure where else to go. She didn’t love being at the shop, but it was home, and she just wanted to go home.

In most ways it felt like it always did. But now her entire body hurt. And she knew the paper was curled up in her cast like the hidden centipede nests that sometimes appear overnight in people’s beds.

The leaning, her usual position at the counter, was killing her back, and so she got off the stool and stood. She had never done that before. She looked out the window, where, not that long ago, she had watched a man in a tan jacket run away.

There were bubbles of light, low to the ground, out in the desert, and a tall building, and voices. As she watched, more buildings appeared, a forest of tall buildings, all glowing, their bulk wisping away to nothing as they approached the sand below them. Bubbles of light. And voices. A crowd of voices.

It was King City. She knew it now. Somehow, from all this distance, the city was calling to her. She spat at the lights but only hit her window.