The red dust didn't just chase us; it seemed to breathe, a colossal, shifting lung of grit and heat that devoured the horizon. Behind the wheel, Julian was a statue of white-knuckled panic, the station wagon’s engine screaming as we pushed eighty over a road that was more suggestion than stone.
In the back, Ethan was a map of contradictions—his body a broken, sweating mess of human pain, while the blue pilot light at his temple pulsed with a terrifying, rhythmic intensity.
"Silas!" I screamed at the dashboard, my voice cracking over the roar of the wind. "Silas, if you can hear me, how did she get a body? We saw her dissolve!"
The radio crackled, the interference sounding like a swarm of metallic locusts. “The mill, Grace... the physical weave," Silas’s voice rasped through the static.
