DAKOTA

THE RUST & REST MOTEL HAS a neon cactus on its sign with a blinking halo that makes it look like a saint having a seizure. Two letters are burned out. RU T & RE T. Which feels about right.

Jesse parks in front of room 6. We haven't spoken since the spirals. Two hours. I know because I checked my phone when I saw the marks and I checked it again pulling into this parking lot, and in those two hours neither of us has said a single word about the matching burns on our wrists or the symbol scratched into a car door that, according to Jesse, wasn't there this morning.

We are handling this very poorly.

I wanted to keep driving. Five hours to LA, maybe less. Leave now, arrive by ten, sleep in a motel near the Medtronic campus, wake up fresh, nail the interview. That was the plan. That was a good plan.

But Jesse's been driving since five in the morning. Not five AM Arizona time. Five AM Chicago time. That's seventeen hours behind the wheel. His eyes are bloodshot. His hands haven't been steady since the light. And the last time something unexpected happened on this highway, we spun into the desert at seventy-three miles an hour.

I'm the one who said stop. He didn't argue. I think that scared me more than the marks.

The motel office is a wood-paneled room the size of a closet. A woman behind the counter, sixties, reading glasses on a chain, doesn't look up from her crossword when we walk in. A TV on the wall plays the local news at a volume that suggests she's either hard of hearing or doesn't care.

"Two rooms," I say.

She looks up. Looks at me. Looks at Jesse. Looks at me again.

"Got one."

"One room?"

"One room. Two beds. The Lutheran Women's Fellowship is in town. Booked out everything from here to the Super 8." She tilts her glasses down. "Take it or leave it. There's a rest stop twelve miles back if you want to sleep in your car."

I look at Jesse. He's standing two steps behind me, hands in his pockets, scanning the office the way, I assume, he scans everything: quick, thorough, probably cataloguing exits. He shrugs.

"We'll take it," I say.

Sixty-five dollars. Cash only. She pushes a key across the counter, an actual metal key on a plastic diamond keychain with the number 6 stamped on it.

Outside, a man is sitting in a lawn chair by the ice machine. Fifties, maybe. Sunburned arms and a sleeveless shirt and a cigarette between his fingers that's burned down to the filter. He's watching us, the way people in small desert towns watch everyone... not threatening, just observant. Like we're the most interesting thing to happen since the ice machine broke last Tuesday.

"Evening," he says.

Jesse nods. I walk faster.

Room 6 has a green carpet that may have been blue at some point. Two beds with thin brown comforters. A painting of a desert sunset that's bolted to the wall, which is either an aesthetic choice or a theft prevention measure. The A/C unit under the window rattles to life when I flip the switch and produces a sound like a dog trying to pass a kidney stone.

The room smells like every motel room I've ever been in: cigarettes from the last decade, industrial cleaner from this one, and something underneath that's just carpet being carpet for too long.

I sit on the bed closest to the door. Jesse takes the one by the window. The mattress sags under him.

We sit on opposite beds. Three feet apart. Staring at the space between us.

I should say something. I'm the one with a degree in how things work at the cellular level. I should be forming a hypothesis. I should be Googling matching unexplained marks on skin or shared burn pattern two people or violet light Arizona highway what the fuck.

But my brain is doing the thing it does after a panic attack: running at half speed, all the processing power eaten up by the effort of appearing normal. I've been appearing normal since Flagstaff. I'm exhausted.

Jesse stands up. "Bathroom."

He disappears behind the door. I hear the toilet flush. Then the faucet running for a long time. He's washing his face. Or standing there with the water going, staring at himself in the mirror, which is what I'd be doing.

"Hey, uh." His voice comes through the door, muffled. "You feel weird?"

I pull my legs up onto the bed. Cross them. "Define weird."

The door opens. He's drying his face with a rag he took from the car... not the motel towel, his own rag, oil-stained and soft from a thousand washes. He drapes it over his shoulder.

"I don't know. Like there's a... hum. In my chest. Like when you stand too close to a power line and you can't hear it but you can feel it buzzing in your teeth."

I open my mouth to say no.

But he's right. There is a hum. I've been ignoring it since the highway, filing it under residual panic attack symptoms because that's what I do with things my body does that I can't explain. I label them. I file them. I move on.

This doesn't file.

"Yeah," I say. "I feel it."

He sits on his bed. Leans forward, elbows on knees. Looks at his wrist. The spiral is darker than it was in the car.

I check mine. Same.

"Okay," he says. "So we both got hit by some kind of... light. On the highway. And now we both have matching marks. And we both feel a hum."

"That's an accurate summary."

"You got any theories? You said you're a scientist."

"I said I'm a researcher."

"Same thing."

"It is very much not the same..." I stop myself. This is not the time. "No. I don't have a theory. Theories require data. I have two data points and a headache."

He almost smiles. I see it happen, the corner of his mouth lifts for a tenth of a second before he catches it and puts it back.

"We should go to a hospital," I say.

He doesn't even look at me. "And tell them what?"

"That we were exposed to an unknown light source and we're experiencing unexplained dermatological markings and..."

"They'll think we're on meth."

"We have a documented incident. A car that spun out. We have physical markings that appeared without explanation. That's a legitimate..."

"In Kingman, Arizona. Two strangers. Matching marks. Walk into an ER looking like this." He shakes his head. "They'll separate us, call the cops, and I'll be answering questions until Thursday."

He doesn't say and I'm a Black man in a town I don't know. He doesn't have to.

I close my mouth.

We sit there. The A/C rattles. The neon cactus blinks through the curtain, throwing green-red-green across the ceiling.

Jesse cracks his knuckles. I bite my thumbnail. We're two strangers in a motel room and neither of us has a single useful idea.

"So what do we do?" I ask.

"Sleep. Drive in the morning. Get to LA. You do your interview. I do my thing. We go our separate ways and pretend this didn't happen."

"And the marks?"

"Wear a long sleeve."

"Jesse."

"What do you want me to say? I fix cars. I don't fix whatever this is."

I want to push. I want to lay out a research protocol, identify variables, establish controls. I want to do what I always do when something scares me: turn it into a problem with a solution.

But my brain keeps snagging on the interview. 9 AM. Medtronic. Fourteen hours from now. I've prepped for six weeks. I have notes on my phone, organized by interviewer: Dr. Lee's published work on scaffold geometry, Marcus Webb's keynote from the BMES conference in October. I've rehearsed my responses to seventeen common questions and four uncommon ones. I know what I'm wearing, navy blazer, white blouse, the earrings my mother gave me when I got into Stanford.

If I blow this, I'm finished. Not just the job. The plan. The entire architecture of the life I've been building since I was fourteen and my mother sat me down and said You will be a doctor or you will explain to your grandchildren why you wasted every sacrifice this family made.

I didn't become a doctor. I became a researcher. And every day since, I've been trying to prove that was worth it.

My chest tightens. My mother's voice in my head: We didn't come to this country so you could fail.

Jesse flinches.

I see it. A full-body flinch, like someone touched a nerve. His hands ball up. His jaw clenches. He presses his fists into the mattress.

"What?" I say.

"Nothing."

"You just..."

"I said nothing." His voice is harder now. He's staring at the floor. "I just got... scared. For no reason. Out of nowhere."

I was just scared. I was just thinking about the interview, about my mother, about failing, and the fear was so sharp I could taste it, metal and adrenaline, the same flavor as the airport. And now he's sitting three feet away, fists on the mattress, telling me he felt scared for no reason at the exact same second.

"Jesse."

"Don't."

"Think about something. Something specific."

"Why?"

"Because I need to know if I'm going crazy or if... just do it. Please."

He stares at me for a long time. Then he closes his eyes.

I wait.

Five seconds. Ten.

I feel sad.

That's not the right word. I feel something open in my chest like a trapdoor, and what falls through is heavy and dark and endless. It's not my sadness. My sadness is sharp, anxious, specific. This is oceanic. This is a person-shaped hole in the center of someone's life.

"Your dad," I whisper.

His eyes snap open. "What did you just say?"

"You're thinking about your dad."

He stands up. The mattress springs creak. "How do you know that?"

"I... I think I can feel it. It's... I don't know how to describe it. It's like someone dropped a weight in my chest."

"Stop."

"I'm not doing anything. I'm just..."

"Stop feeling it."

"I don't know how..."

"Think about something else. Think about your interview. Think about anything."

I try. I think about the Krebs cycle. Citric acid. Acetyl-CoA. The familiar ladder of biochemistry that's gotten me through every panic attack since undergrad.

It doesn't work. His grief doesn't know biochemistry.

"Okay," I say. My voice is shaking. "Okay. Your turn. Think about something. Something neutral. Something small."

He closes his eyes. Pinches the bridge of his nose.

My stomach growls.

And it's not a small growl. It's a loud, embarrassing, biological growl, as if I haven't eaten in twelve hours, which I haven't, but that's not why. I wasn't hungry three seconds ago.

"You're hungry," I say.

He opens his eyes. "What?"

"You were thinking about food."

"I was thinking about a sandwich I ate in New Mexico."

"I can feel it. My stomach just..."

He holds up his hand. "No. We're done."

"We're not done. We can't be done. Something is..."

"I said we're done!"

Not only is his voice louder than I've heard it, the words hit like a slap. Not just my ears... my chest. His anger is in me now too.

Before I register it, he's on his feet.

"You don't get to be in my head," he says. "I didn't ask for this. I didn't ask for some stranger to feel my..." He stops. Breathes. "I'm driving you to LA. That's it. Whatever this is..." He pauses. "No."

"It's literally on your wrist."

"I don't care."

"You can't just ignore..."

"Watch me."

He grabs his keys from the nightstand and heads for the door.

"Where are you going?"

"Out."

"It's dark out in the middle of..."

"I know where I am."

The door slams. The bolt rattles. The painting of the desert sunset swings on its nail.

I sit on the bed. My hands are in my lap. My heart is pounding. And underneath my heartbeat, like a bass note under a melody, I can feel his. Moving away from me. Across the parking lot. Twenty feet. Thirty. Then stopping.

He's at the car. I know this the way you know something in a dream... without evidence, without reason. He's leaning against the hood. His hand is on the metal. He's talking.

Talking to someone who isn't there.

The grief floods back in. Heavy, tidal, inescapable. It fills the space behind my sternum like pressure equalizing in a sealed chamber. I press my hands against my chest, pushing back against something that has no body, no shape, no source.

This is not mine. This sadness is not mine. I have my own sadness. This is his, and it's so much bigger than mine, so much heavier, and I don't know how he carries it every day. I don't know how he drives and eats and talks and breathes with this thing sitting in his chest.

I pick up my phone. Call my mother.

Four rings. Voicemail. The real estate voice.

"Hi, Mom. It's me. I'm... I'm fine. The trip is fine. I'll call you tomorrow. Love you."

I hang up. Stare at the mark on my wrist.

It's darker. Definitely darker. The spiral is tighter, the red is deeper, and the skin around it is warm. Like something underneath is growing.

I lie down. The pillow smells like bleach. The ceiling has a water stain shaped like a hand.

Outside, through the wall, I can feel him. Leaning against the car. Talking to his dead father in a motel parking lot in Kingman, Arizona, under a neon cactus with a broken halo.

I don't know this man. I don't know who he lost. I don't know what the car means or who he's talking to or why his grief has a shape I can feel in the dark from thirty feet away.

But I'm crying. Eyes closed, face in a stranger's pillow, crying for a man I never met and a loss I didn't earn and a son who slammed a door because a woman he's known for a few hours could feel the worst thing inside him.

The A/C rattles. The cactus blinks.

The room is quiet. But the grief isn't. It sits behind my ribs... heavy, misplaced, wrong.

Bù rán tā huì sànkāi. Or it falls apart.

It's not mine.

But it's sill here.