Beatrice stiffens beside me. Her hand, which had been resting on my arm with the easy warmth of our shared silence, clamps down. I follow her gaze upward.
The red light we'd seen in the distance is no longer distant. It hovers fifty feet above us, a malevolent star that has shed its astronomical disguise. The drone is sleek and matte-black, its four rotors a blur of controlled violence against the indigo sky. The camera lens beneath its belly catches the starlight and throws it back at us, a cyclopean gleam that feels impossibly intimate.
'Get down,' Beatrice says. Her voice has shed every trace of the softness from moments ago. It is hard now, a blade drawn in the dark.
She pulls me behind the Mustang before I can form a question. The metal of the door is cool against my back. I can smell the hot oil from the engine, the dust we've kicked up from a hundred miles of highway, the faint citrus of Beatrice's shampoo. My heart is hammering so hard I can feel it in my temples.
'How did he find us?' I ask.
Beatrice doesn't answer. She is peering around the rear bumper, her profile sharp against the darkness. The drone has descended another ten feet. Its camera pivots with a tiny servo-whine, scanning, calculating. I can see the red recording light pulsing with the steady rhythm of a heartbeat.
'He always had surveillance,' she says, and her voice cracks on the word. 'My flat. The car. The studio. He knew when I woke up, when I ate, when I couldn't sleep. He'd mention things casually—"you tossed and turned last night"—as if it were concern. As if it were care.'
The drone shifts laterally, and I watch its shadow skate across the moonlit sand. It's searching for a clear angle. The Mustang is blocking its line of sight, but that won't last. These things can circle. They can wait.
'Can it hear us?' I ask.
'Some models can. I don't know which one this is.' She turns to face me, and I see something in her eyes I haven't seen since the party in San Francisco: the raw, animal edge of fear. 'Marcus doesn't do things by halves. If he's sent a drone, there'll be more. There'll be a team. There'll be—'
She stops. The word hangs between us, unspoken. Police. The kidnapping narrative Marcus has been feeding the media. The public that now believes I am a predator and she is my victim.
I look at the drone and feel a surge of something hot and unfamiliar. Not fear. Not quite anger. It's the same thing I felt in the garage when Silas told me the Mustang was bleeding oil and I decided to drive it anyway. A refusal to be stopped. A refusal to let the machinery of someone else's design dictate the shape of my life.
'We need to move,' I say. 'Now.'
Beatrice shakes her head. 'We can't outrun a drone in a fifty-year-old car. It'll track us for miles. It'll call in our position. We'll be boxed in before we hit the highway.'
'Then we don't hit the highway.'
She stares at me. 'What?'
'We go off-road. Into the desert. The terrain out here is broken—arroyos, rock formations, dry washes. The drone has to maintain line of sight. If we can break that, even for a few minutes, we can lose it.'
'Arthur, this car isn't built for off-road. The suspension will—'
'I know what the suspension will do.' I'm already moving, pulling open the driver's door, sliding behind the wheel. 'But I also know what happens if we stay here. Marcus gets his footage. The news runs it. "Kidnapper cornered in desert standoff." And everything we've done, everything you destroyed your phone for, it's over.'
She hesitates for half a second. Then she's in the passenger seat, slamming the door, her eyes fixed on the drone through the windscreen.
'Head east,' she says. 'There's a dry riverbed about half a mile out. The banks are high enough to block its angle.'
I turn the key. The engine catches with a roar that feels defiant, a mechanical shout into the silence. The drone's camera swivels toward the sound. I can see the lens refocusing, adjusting, drinking us in.
'Hold on.'
I wrench the wheel hard right and stamp on the accelerator. The Mustang bucks and slews, its rear tyres scrabbling for purchase on the loose sand. For a sickening moment I think we're going to bog down, but then the tread catches and we lurch forward, crashing through a stand of creosote bush with a sound like fingernails on a chalkboard.
The drone follows. Of course it does.
I can see it in the rearview mirror, a dark shape against the stars, its red light pulsing. It's faster than we are—Beatrice was right about that—but it's also having to adjust its flight path to keep us in frame. Every time I swerve, it corrects. Every correction costs it a fraction of a second.
'Left,' Beatrice says. 'There's a wash ahead. Go left.'
I don't ask how she knows. I just turn. The Mustang plunges down a shallow embankment, its suspension groaning, and suddenly we're in the riverbed, walls of packed earth rising on either side. The drone's whir fades, muffled by the terrain. I risk a glance upward and see it circling, trying to reacquire us, its camera searching the darkness.
'Kill the lights,' Beatrice says.
I do. The world vanishes into monochrome—silver moonlight on sand, the black silhouettes of mesquite, the pale ribbon of the dry wash stretching ahead. I'm driving blind, or close to it, navigating by instinct and the faint glow of the stars. The Mustang's oil pressure gauge flickers. I ignore it.
'He used to watch me sleep,' Beatrice says quietly. Her voice is strange in the darkness, unmoored from her body. 'There were cameras in my bedroom. I found one once, behind the smoke detector. When I confronted him, he said it was for my safety. That he needed to know I was all right. That it was part of his job.'
I don't say anything. I don't know what to say. The intimacy of what she's telling me feels too fragile for words, a soap bubble that would burst at the slightest touch.
'I believed him,' she continues. 'For years, I believed him. He was the only person who'd ever made me feel like I mattered. Like I was worth protecting. And the whole time, he was just... collecting me. Cataloguing me. Like I was a rare specimen he'd acquired.'
The riverbed curves, and I follow it, the Mustang's tyres crunching over stones. The drone's whine is distant now, a mosquito hum somewhere to the west. We've bought ourselves a few minutes. Maybe less.
'This is what he does,' I say. 'He controls the narrative. He controls the cameras. He controls what people see and what they believe. That's his whole playbook.'
Beatrice turns to look at me. In the darkness, her face is a study in silver and shadow. 'You understand that, don't you? You understand what it means to want to be seen so badly you'll let someone else decide what they're looking at.'
The words land like a stone in my chest. Because she's right. Of course she's right. I spent two years in London filming myself eating sandwiches and reviewing gadgets and talking into a lens about nothing at all, convinced that if I could just get enough people to watch, I would finally be real. Finally be someone. And Marcus—Marcus is just the dark mirror of that same hunger. He's what happens when the need for an audience metastasises into the need to control the stage.
'I understand it,' I say. 'That's what terrifies me.'
The riverbed opens onto a flat expanse of desert, and I can see the drone again, a red pinprick in the distance. It's found us. Or it's guessing. Either way, it's coming.
'We need to go deeper,' Beatrice says. 'There's a formation of rock pillars about three miles east. If we can reach them before it gets close enough to transmit a clear image, we can lose it in the shadows.'
I press the accelerator. The Mustang shudders and complains, but it moves. The terrain is rougher now, studded with rocks and the skeletal remains of long-dead cacti. I weave between obstacles, my hands white-knuckled on the wheel, my eyes straining to read the landscape in monochrome.
The drone is closing. I can hear it now, that mechanical whir growing louder, more insistent. It's a sound I'm going to hear in my nightmares for the rest of my life. The sound of being hunted by something that doesn't sleep, doesn't tire, doesn't care.
'There,' Beatrice says, pointing. 'The pillars. See them?'
I see them. They rise from the desert floor like the ribs of some ancient beast, wind-carved sandstone glowing pale in the moonlight. I angle the Mustang toward them, and the drone adjusts its course to intercept. It's going to beat us there. I can see the geometry of it playing out in my head, the vectors converging, the inevitable moment when we'll be caught in its gaze again.
Unless.
'When I say now,' I tell Beatrice, 'I need you to trust me.'
She looks at me. Her eyes are wide, but her jaw is set. 'I trust you.'
The pillars are a hundred yards ahead. The drone is fifty yards behind and closing. I can see its camera lens glinting, hungry, ready. I wait until the last possible second, until the sandstone looms so close I can see the grain of the rock, and then I wrench the wheel hard left and slam the brakes.
The Mustang spins. It's not a controlled manoeuvre—it's a desperate, physics-defying gamble that sends us slewing sideways across the sand, dust billowing in a great pale cloud. The drone overshoots, its camera still focused on the point where we should have been, and for three or four seconds we are hidden in our own dust storm, invisible, untouchable.
'Now,' I say.
I kill the engine. The sudden silence is deafening. Through the windscreen, I watch the drone circle back, its camera scanning the dust cloud. It hovers for a long moment, searching, and then it rises and banks east, toward the pillars. It thinks we made it to cover. It thinks we're hiding in the rocks.
We sit in the darkness, breathing hard, as the red light recedes into the night. The dust settles around us like a shroud. The drone's whine fades to a whisper, then to nothing.
'That was either brilliant or insane,' Beatrice says.
'I'm not sure there's a difference anymore.'
She laughs, a short, breathless sound that's half relief and half hysteria. Then she reaches across the console and takes my hand. Her fingers are cold. Mine are shaking.
'He's not going to stop,' she says. 'You understand that, don't you? This isn't a one-time thing. He's going to keep coming. Drones, private investigators, police. He's going to throw everything he has at us until he gets what he wants.'
I look at her hand in mine. At the way her knuckles are white against my palm. At the way the moonlight catches the curve of her wrist.
'Then we stop reacting,' I say. 'We stop running and hiding and hoping he'll lose interest. We go completely off-grid. No roads. No towns. No credit cards. Nothing he can track.'
'Arthur, we can't live in the desert forever.'
'We don't have to. We just have to stay ahead of him long enough to figure out how to fight back. He's controlling the narrative right now because he's the only one with a camera. But what if we had our own? What if we could show people what he's really doing?'
Beatrice is quiet for a moment. Then she says, 'You're talking about exposing him. Publicly.'
'I'm talking about telling the truth. The whole truth. Not just about the kidnapping, but about everything. The surveillance. The control. The way he's been running your life like a script he wrote.'
She pulls her hand away. 'You don't understand what you're suggesting. If I go public with this, it's not just Marcus I'm exposing. It's me. Every humiliating detail. Every moment I let him control. Every decision I pretended was mine when it wasn't. The world will see me as a victim, Arthur. A weak, pathetic—'
'No.' I cut her off, my voice sharper than I intended. 'The world will see you as someone who fought back. Someone who refused to be a puppet anymore. That's not weakness. That's the opposite of weakness.'
She stares at me. In the darkness, I can't read her expression, but I can feel the weight of her gaze. It's the same weight I felt in the motel diner, when she asked me why I'd really come to America and I told her the truth. The weight of someone deciding whether to trust you with something that could break them.
'We should keep moving,' she says finally. 'The drone might come back. Or it might have already transmitted our last known position.'
I nod and turn the key. The engine catches on the second try, and I pull the Mustang out of its improvised hiding spot, pointing us east toward the deeper desert. The pillars recede in the rearview mirror, pale sentinels against the stars.
Behind us, somewhere in the darkness, Marcus's relentless pursuit continues. I can feel it like a pressure in the air, a storm gathering on the horizon. But beside me, Beatrice is still here. Still beside me. Still choosing, against every instinct that must be screaming at her to run, to trust me.
I don't know what we're going to do. I don't know how we're going to fight a man with unlimited resources and a media machine at his disposal. But I know that whatever comes next, I'm not facing it alone.
And for the first time since I left London, that feels like enough.
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