Chapter Fourteen
Ben had drawn a dotted line across the country, each dot representing some iteration of a ratty, dank, and dust-ridden motel. His pickup started billowing chugs of smoke if he spent more than ten minutes above sixty miles an hour, so it had taken Ben just under four days to get to Phoenix. He’d had countless hours of dry blinding white and endless black to think, his deepest wonderings surfacing on those long, post-midnight stretches between barren farmland and shuttered roadside gas stations. Where there was nothing beyond the emptiness that your headlights showed you. His mind primarily bounced between two powerful poles. Alistair and the Six. It was easy to think of them as existing only on-page. The lot of every writer, worrying yourself dead over invisible people who
