‘This isn’t a track,’ I say. ‘This is a scar.’
She doesn’t answer. Her eyes are fixed on the rearview mirror, scanning the dust cloud we’ve kicked up behind us. The morning light pours into the canyon, bleaching the sandstone to bone, and the heat already presses against the windows like a living thing trying to get in. I downshift, and the transmission protests with a grinding clunk that travels up through the gearstick and into my forearm.
The oil pressure gauge flickers again. I’ve learned to read its twitches like a nervous tic. We’ve been nursing this car since Nevada, since the drone first found us, and every mile since has felt borrowed. The Mustang’s suspension groans as we lurch over another rut, and I think about Silas back in that California garage, his patient hands, his quiet warning about the rear main seal. Three to four days, he’d said. We’ve driven three times that.
‘Arthur.’ Beatrice’s voice cuts through my fretting. ‘Look.’
I follow her gaze through the windscreen. The track ahead doesn’t narrow so much as it vanishes. A wall of rock rises before us, sheer and streaked with mineral deposits, maybe forty feet high and utterly impassable. The canyon floor spreads wide here, a natural amphitheatre of red stone and scrub, and we are the only players on its stage. I brake, and the Mustang shudders to a halt, dust settling around us like a veil dropping.
‘Dead end,’ I say. The words taste of dust and failure.
Beatrice is already out of the car before I’ve killed the engine. The door clangs shut behind her, and I watch her pace the perimeter of the rock face, her silhouette sharp against the bleached stone. She’s wearing the same clothes she escaped in—a silk blouse now creased beyond any dry-cleaner’s salvation, tailored trousers scuffed at the knees—and somehow she still carries herself like she’s walking onto a soundstage. But there’s something different in her stride now, a coiled tension that wasn’t there two days ago.
I join her, my trainers crunching on the gravel. The heat bounces off the canyon walls in waves. ‘We’ll have to reverse out. Find another route.’
‘There isn’t one.’ She points back the way we came. ‘The fork we took—it was the only branch. Everything else dead-ends into private land or washes out.’
I open my mouth to argue, and that’s when I hear it.
A whir. High and insectile, growing louder.
My stomach drops before my brain catches up. I know that sound. We both do. It’s been the soundtrack to our last four hundred miles—the mechanical mosquito that means Marcus hasn’t lost the scent. I spin, scanning the sky, and there it is: a black speck against the brilliant blue, descending into the canyon mouth like a bead of oil sliding down a pane of glass.
‘He found us,’ I say.
Beatrice’s face goes very still. Not frightened—I’ve seen her frightened, the raw animal edge of it back in the desert when the drone first appeared—but something harder. Resolve, maybe, or the calcification of fear into action. ‘We knew he would.’
The drone hovers, its camera eye glinting. Behind it, I hear another sound: the low rumble of engines, more than one, approaching fast. The Mustang sits useless in the centre of the canyon, its grille pointed at the dead-end wall like an accusation. My camera bag is on the passenger seat. I can see it through the window, the strap dangling, and for one sick moment I imagine pulling it out, filming this, capturing the moment Marcus’s hired muscle rounds that bend and—
‘Arthur.’ Beatrice grabs my arm. Her grip is surprisingly strong. ‘There.’
She’s pointing past the Mustang, toward the eastern wall of the canyon. I squint against the glare and make out a small structure I’d missed in my panic: a hut, barely more than a shed, its timber walls bleached grey by the sun. And beside it, parked in the shade of a cottonwood tree, sits a truck. Forest Service green, with a light bar on the roof and official markings on the door.
‘It’s unattended,’ she says. ‘Keys might be inside the hut, or—’
‘Or I hot-wire it.’ The words leave my mouth before I’ve fully processed them. Two days ago I was a failed YouTuber from London who couldn’t change a tyre without watching a tutorial. Now I’m contemplating grand theft auto in a Utah canyon. The absurdity of it would make me laugh if I weren’t about to be sick.
The drone circles lower. The engine sounds are closer now, distinct—at least two vehicles, maybe three. Beatrice looks at me, and her eyes are clear and urgent and entirely without melodrama. ‘We don’t have time for hesitation.’
She’s right. I know she’s right. But my feet won’t move. The Mustang sits there, its flanks coated in dust, its engine still ticking as it cools, and abandoning it feels like abandoning the last tangible piece of the escape I’d imagined. The open road. The freedom. The footage I was going to shoot, the story I was going to tell. My camera is still on the passenger seat. Forty-seven subscribers. Eighty-three views. Twenty-three likes. The numbers flash through my mind like a ticker tape, and I realise with a jolt that I haven’t thought about them in hours. Days, maybe.
‘Arthur.’ Beatrice’s voice is sharper now. ‘Now.’
I grab the camera bag from the Mustang. Not to film, I tell myself it’s because I can’t leave it, because it’s expensive, because it’s mine, but my fingers brush the record button as I yank it free, and I feel the old hunger stir. I crush it down. I pocket the camera and I don’t look back at the car.
We run.
The ground is uneven, littered with loose stones that skid underfoot. Beatrice moves fast despite her impractical shoes, her breath coming in controlled bursts. I’m less graceful, my gangly frame wasn’t built for sprinting, but adrenaline papers over the cracks. The hut is maybe fifty metres away. Forty. Thirty. Behind us, the drone buzzes lower, and I hear a shout echo through the canyon, a voice I recognise from news clips and red-carpet interviews, smooth and commanding even when raised in anger.
‘Beatrice!’
I glance back despite myself. A black SUV has rounded the bend, its paintwork immaculate despite the dust, and standing beside the open passenger door is Marcus. He’s wearing a linen suit, cream-coloured, and his shoes are polished to a mirror shine. He looks like he’s stepped out of a magazine spread, not a high-speed pursuit through the Utah backcountry. Two men flank him, broad, neckless, their suits straining at the shoulders, and they’re already moving toward us.
‘Beatrice, this is absurd,’ Marcus calls. His voice carries the practiced warmth of a man accustomed to being obeyed. ‘Get in the car. We’ll sort this out.’
She doesn’t answer. She doesn’t even slow. Her hand finds mine as we reach the hut, and the contact is electric, not romantic, but vital, a circuit closing. I try the door. Locked. Of course it’s locked. I circle to the truck instead, yank the driver’s door handle, and by some miracle it opens. The interior smells of pine air freshener and stale coffee.
‘Can you do it?’ Beatrice asks. She’s positioned herself between me and the approaching men, her chin lifted, her stance wide. Defiant. I’ve seen her play a queen in one of her films, but that performance had nothing on this.
I duck under the dashboard, my fingers finding the ignition wiring. I’ve watched tutorials on this, not for any practical reason, just because I once thought it might make good content for a video about survival skills, and the knowledge surfaces now like a life raft. Strip the insulation. Cross the wires. The truck’s engine turns over once, twice, catches. The rumble is deep and reassuring.
‘Get in,’ I shout.
Beatrice scrambles into the passenger seat. Through the windscreen, I see Marcus’s expression shift from command to fury. He takes a step forward, and one of his men reaches inside his jacket. I don’t wait to find out what he’s reaching for. I slam the truck into gear and stamp on the accelerator.
The truck lurches forward, its tyres scrabbling for purchase on the loose stone. We bounce over a rut, and Beatrice’s shoulder slams into mine. I wrench the wheel, pointing us back toward the canyon entrance, and the SUV looms in our path. Marcus’s driver is still behind the wheel, and for a frozen moment I think he’s going to block us, but at the last second he swerves aside, self-preservation winning out over orders, and we barrel past with inches to spare.
In the rearview mirror, I see the Mustang. It sits alone in the canyon’s heart, its doors still hanging open, and as I watch, one of Marcus’s men approaches it. He peers inside, then turns and gestures to his boss. The car is being claimed. Impounded. Absorbed into the machinery of Marcus’s control. I feel the loss like a physical thing, a hollowing in my chest. That car was my escape, my fantasy, my Route 66 daydream made metal and rubber. Now it’s evidence. Evidence of what, exactly, depends on who’s telling the story.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. The words are inadequate. Everything I have to offer feels inadequate.
Beatrice looks at me. Her face is flushed, her hair coming loose from its knot, and there’s a smear of dust across her cheekbone. She’s never looked less like a movie star. She’s never looked more alive. ‘Don’t apologise for choosing.’
The canyon walls blur past us. The drone is still up there somewhere, but it’s falling behind now, its range limited. The SUV hasn’t turned around yet, Marcus is probably still standing in the dust, composing himself, planning his next move. We have a head start. Not much of one, but enough.
‘We just stole a government vehicle,’ I say. The reality of it settles over me like a cold blanket. ‘That’s a federal offence. On top of the kidnapping charge. On top of—’
‘I know.’ Beatrice’s voice is steady. ‘We’ll deal with it.’
‘How? We can’t exactly pull into a police station and explain that we borrowed it to escape the man who’s been surveilling you for years.’
She’s quiet for a moment. The truck’s engine hums, and the canyon opens out into a wider valley, the walls retreating, the sky expanding. ‘We find somewhere to ditch it. Somewhere it’ll be found quickly. Then we find another car.’
‘And then?’
‘And then we keep going.’ She turns to face me fully, and I see it now, the new resolve I noticed earlier, hardened into something almost fierce. ‘Freedom isn’t free, Arthur. Sometimes, it costs everything.’
I want to argue. I want to point out that we’re haemorrhaging options, that every mile we drive adds another layer of legal peril, that Marcus will absolutely use this theft to escalate his narrative. The kidnapping story was already plausible; now we’ve handed him footage of us fleeing in a stolen truck, and that footage will play beautifully on every news channel from here to New York. We’re not just fugitives now. We’re criminals in fact as well as in fiction.
But I look at Beatrice, really look at her, and I see something that stops the words in my throat. She’s not panicking. She’s not crumbling. She’s sitting in the passenger seat of a stolen truck with a kidnapper and a federal charge hanging over her head, and she looks more certain of herself than I’ve ever seen her. The suffocating woman from the Beverly Hills flat, the one who couldn’t leave without permission, who couldn’t choose her own restaurants or her own dates or her own life, that woman is still in there somewhere, but she’s being eclipsed by someone new. Someone who’d rather be a fugitive than a prisoner.
My camera bag sits at my feet. I can feel its weight through the canvas, the lens pressing against my ankle. I could still document this. I could still capture the story, the chase, the escape, the improbable romance of two people hurtling through the American West with nothing but each other and a stolen truck. It would make brilliant content. It would get more than eighty-three views.
But I don’t reach for it. I don’t even look at it. Because somewhere between the canyon dead-end and this open road, something shifted in me, a gear engaging, a circuit closing. The hunger for validation is still there, a familiar ache, but it’s been joined by something else. Something quieter. Something that feels, against all logic, like peace.
The road stretches ahead, empty and sun-bleached. Behind us, the dust settles. And we drive.
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