"Hey, sweetie." These words are sunshine, bright and blinding and a little painful in the sharp star-rained night.
She grimaces down at the keys held loosely in her metal-hard hands.
"You know I hate when you do that."
She walks through streaked dust devils to the truck, the grainy powder filling every crevice of her shadow-black clothes with the remnants of what she's leaving behind. She stands, a captain plotting a midnight course for her dust-logged pickup through the windy wasteland , proud and tall on the running board. She ducks into the truck, ignoring the grit of pebbles and earth that she brings with her to smear across cracked leather seats. It's not her truck, anyway.
"Where am I headed?"
A sweet, lilting voice reels off disjointed numbers and cardinal directions into her right ear.
"And how do I get there?" The rounded patience of her voice breaks off and leaves a razor's-edge warning.
"Pull over to the right."
She shakes her head adamantly at her absent partner and her eyes glint over the wheel.
"Off the road? Really?"
"Trust me."
The upgrades have made transmissions as clear and sharp as laser-cut glass. If she studiously directs her eyes away from the passenger seat as she reaches for the gear shift, it is as if a familiar figure leers her irksome refrain from the other side of the center console.
Though the truck rumbles and rolls over broken land in the dark, the cab sits bathed in eerie silence. Where to go, how to drive in the dark; questions long ago asked, answered, and snugly stowed in the foot-wells to accompany her on her drive.
She closes her eyes.
Minutes later, her constant companion interrupts again.
"Twenty degrees to the left. Then adjust. You'll feel it."
And she does. The wracked shudders of the wheel give way to smooth consistency, leaving her palms numb as she guides the truck into ghost-tracks and along the back road.
"Where am I going? A town, road, anything with a name." This tired demand lacks even annoyance.
"Trust me."
She grits her teeth against the stinging glimmer of anger slashing its way to the surface.
"Why should I?" Her ground-out words play vanguard to a stolid foot resting on the brake pedal.
That voice holds back, for once, but her foot does not fall. Instead, her mind falls into a familiar maze to run its usual useless path into oblivion.
This makes nearly a year since the whole thing went all to hell and shattered there. By the time she had finished picking up the pieces, cutting herself to strained ribbons in the process, months had passed. Nearly a full year prickles behind her eyelids, but it disappears for that fleeting moment before the sleep clears her smudged eyes every morning, as if it could be a dream.
"Stop here."
She obeys. The engine bows out to allow the wind to whistle a spectral counterpoint to her mission.
She slips down and creaks open the rear door, then leans forward to scoop up the final reminder of a howling, empty canyon of a year.
There's something fitting about the way that they're dust now, and the way that they stick in the grooves and hidden spots of her elephant's memory for her to stumble over every time she climbs back to seek something else. They fit into a simple metal canister though, and that does not sit well. They lie too looming and heavy in her mind to fit cramped like that.
The lid rattles and sticks as it opens, and then it is over quickly. The wind skims off the top before she has even tipped her weighted hands, and the rest follows with gravity.
Somewhere near Harold's childhood home, as requested in his will. John's said nothing of remains; it is possible he never expected anything to be left. The jagged edges of these two disparate men fit together, to her mind at least, and they will leave together.
For a pinned moment, she stands with the wind tugging at her clothes like a parent with an errant child, fitting dusty pieces of the two mixed-together men into the tired creases of her clothes. The silence erases the barrier between her skin and the air; she is dissipating into the wide maw of the star-stabbed midnight.
"Goodbye, John. Harold." These simple words fall out and around her, lashing her to the surface of the world, intent on forcing her to hold it all up. Alone.
She trudges back to the truck and sinks into the seat. She does not make a move for the keys, not yet.
"Sameen?" The concern used to lace prettily along the edges of other emotions, but now the words are ripe with it.
"Don't." Her teeth are tight; this is what she needs, pain to hold her in reality.
"... Sameen, are you all right?" No, not this kind of pain, not the kind that slips and cuts sideways at her weaknesses when she stops looking for an instant.
"I said don't."
"Don't what? I don't understand." All humor is gone, and the hurt left behind tears slow wounds behind her eyes.
"Don't call me that!" She slams her fists onto the steering wheel and pants with wide animal eyes.
Her voice drops as if falling into a constricting noose.
"And don't use her voice anymore."
The silence gathers around again to peck at her, checking to see if she's given up yet.
"Analogue interface identified."
Her breath slows as the mechanical voice generates its jarring rhythm. She reaches for the ignition.
"Loading GPS coordinates."
That voice, so unlike the one she thrills and dreads to hear, drones on in a low, comforting hum until Shaw's forbearing whisper interrupts.
"Do you miss her?"
She accepts hissing static as Her answer with a bowed head. Light as a soul and quiet as the dark, she whispers again.
"Me too."
Black wind blows for eons in all directions without obstacle, save for a single pickup truck rolling over dust and gravel; its lone passenger, accompanied only by the voice in her head, trails ghosts behind her in a procession that lists out past a dawnless horizon.