The altitude hit her before they even left the airport.
Not badly — not the nausea she had vaguely worried about — just a subtle recalibration, the body saying quietly: *different rules up here.* The air was thinner and colder and tasted like something she did not have a word for yet.
Nathan had said: I want to show you what the air tastes like.
She understood now.
They drove from the airport in a rented car through a landscape that looked nothing like Texas — the flatness replaced by the specific drama of mountains that arrived without warning, enormous and indifferent, the kind of scale that makes human problems feel accurately sized for the first time. She sat in the passenger seat and looked at them through the glass and did not speak for twenty minutes, which Nathan had been prepa
