Driving through Night Vale in the early evening was peaceful. There weren’t many cars out on the roads, mostly just the agents from a vague yet menacing government agency starting their slow-cruising night patrol of the town. It wasn’t late enough for the hooded figures to be prowling the sidewalks, looking for lone pedestrians to take and do whatever it was they did (almost no encounters were witnessed, and, if they were, the witness was wise to cover the witnessing part of their sensory systems until the whole thing, whatever it was, was over).

The lights were on in the various places of business along Route 800. The neon of the Moonlite All-Nite stood out as the day turned to night. A slab of mint light in the warm desert darkness, as the radio had once described it. She considered eating there, hunger being one problem that was simple enough to solve, but the thought of returning and seeing that man—the blond man in the kitchen—smiling at her made her nervous. Was he the same blond man she’d seen outside the mayor’s office?

She shook her head, but the thought wouldn’t leave.

The blond man, it said.

“KING CITY,” the paper said.

A man in her mother’s backyard. Blond hair. A smile. That was where she had known him from. Her heart was beating in her wrist, which was where it rarely beat.

Dots of light studded the hazy purple of the twilight horizon: red taillights, yellow porch lights, orange streetlights, the strange greenish white pulse of light hundreds of feet above the Arby’s. In the distance a jagged line of soft blue light, like a crack in the sky. Above all of that was the clean, white brightness of the stars and the moon and the searchlights of surveillance helicopters.

Children in Night Vale grow up hearing the Dopplered whir of helicopters above, recording or monitoring or whatever it is that helicopters do. It’s a comforting sound, knowing that you’re well taken care of by unimpeachable judges of what is good and what is evil.

Jackie did not feel comforted, only inured. She was not thinking, only doing. Unaware of her car’s speed, she turned off Route 800 onto an unnamed street that led, eventually, into the Sandwastes and the shantytown that was the barista district. Before all that, though, the unnamed road went right by Jerry’s Tacos.

The light of Jerry’s Tacos was the most inviting thing she’d seen all day. It was a small stand, only recently reopened after an ugly incident a few years back involving a time traveler, but already word was around that the food was worth the years of waiting and silence that had preceded it.