Title: Salt
Fandom: All-New Ghost Rider (comics)
Rating: T (light cursing)
Length: 11k
Notes: Set in a Fullmetal Alchemist fusion AU, in which Gabe Reyes lost both his legs to an inexplicable alchemy accident and Robbie Reyes is a 1969 Dodge Charger and Lisa from high school is taking a gap year off college to jumpstart her singer-songwriter career by hitchhiking to as many different country music festivals as possible.
Summary: When you've been turned into a car, you've got to go to the Bonneville Salt Flats.

The night was clear and sharp in Salt Lake City, and the streets quieted after ten. (“Hey, Bixby, what time is it?” Robbie could ask his new phone, rubber-banded to the back of his driver's seat, and Bixby, the actual artificial intelligence, would answer. “Hey, Bixby, play Union-13 music.” “Hey, Bixby, what is the driving distance from Salt Lake City to Boise?”) Dawn broke pale greenish-yellow, shoving aside the blue of twilight, and cars began to roll by, beyond the motel parking lot where Robbie stared at Gabe's room and waited for him to come out.

He watched a man in a rumpled suit leave a second-floor room behind him, two men in canvas chore coats with safety stripes leave another room beside him. And he saw Lisa creep out of her own room, on the opposite end of the motel from Gabe, guitar case in her hand and rucksack slung over her back.

It shouldn't surprise him that she was leaving; Gabe was way friendlier than most people, and they'd paid for her dinner and her room for no obvious reason, and Robbie was a sketchy AI. It was only natural to take her chances with somebody less weird.

She looked at him, and her shoulders seemed to slump. He watched her make her way to the rock garden under the motel sign and sit down, leaning against the steel pole. She tipped her head back and lowered her hat over her eyes like the Marlboro man. Robbie aimed his mirrors at her, so he could keep an eye out. Every time someone new packed up and left the motel, she'd pick her head up, alarmed, and then find him and relax again. He realized she wasn't disappointed that he was still here; maybe she'd been worried that he and Gabe would be gone.

Robbie wished he had a normal-sounding horn to beep, instead of agonized screaming. He rolled down his windows, turned on his electricals, and did the drumbeat she'd taught him yesterday, thump-rick, thump-rick, and then the bass line he'd sort-of mastered, dum da dee da dee da deedly-dum. She looked up at him again, and he activated his brakelights. She carried her bag and guitar across the parking lot to him and peered in through the window. “You can sit if you like,” he said.

“Gabe won't mind?”

Robbie crackled. Gabe? Make a nice girl nap outside on a pile of rocks? “Claro que no. Of course not.” Only as Lisa opened his door and flipped down his passenger seat so she could stuff her things in the back did Robbie realize that she thought Gabe owned him. Which, Gabe did. He'd bought him from a drug dealer for ten thousand counterfeit dollars.

She got in and laid his seat back and went back to napping. That is, she tried. Her back felt a little tense and she kept shuffling her boots on his carpet. At last she took her hat off and hugged it to her chest. “Are you, like, on? All the time?”

“Yeah,” Robbie admitted. This was not typical ECU behavior, but how else would he explain how he'd been watching her? “It's a...security feature.”

“You just invited a hitchhiker to sit in you.”

Robbie didn't have a good answer to that.

Lisa half-slitted her eyes and her shoulders relaxed, but she kept glancing at his rearview mirror until he turned it away toward the driver's seat. He could still see her with the side mirror; she watched the sky lighten, and finally seemed to doze off just before Gabe's door opened and Gabe rolled out. Gabe looked exhausted, shoulders bowed as he shoved himself over the sidewalk toward the wheelchair cut, but he gave Robbie a grin and a wave. Robbie opened his driver's side door for him, and Lisa startled upright. His seat was cold where her back had been.

“Hey, you two,” Gabe said, slinging his backpack into Robbie's footwell, where it bumped against the brake pedal. “Sleep well?”

Oh, god. If his engine were running, Robbie knew he'd feel mortified. “She looked uncomfortable.”

“I slept fine,” Lisa corrected, at Gabe's puzzled look. “Just getting a head start, is all.”

“Sweet!” Gabe hauled himself into the driver's seat and thumped in, scooted himself around until he faced front, then buckled up. Robbie watched him in his rear-view mirror and felt the shifts of his weight on the springs as he unlocked and spun the chair around. He clenched the shoulder belt spool to give Gabe something to brace against as he leaned out.

“Can I help you with that?” Lisa offered.

“Please.”

She got out and helped Gabe fold his chair and stuff it in the back seat, which took about as long as usual, and looked twice as awkward but much less difficult for Gabe. When they were seated and stowed and buckled, he started up and let Gabe direct him to a McDonald's drive-thru for breakfast and an Arco for gas, then out on the main drag toward the highway.

A left-turn at the light led him from the cramped and pockmarked city streets to a smooth, broad, curving onramp. His engine was warm and ready, and he opened his throttle, revved up until his torque converter finally locked on to his transmission, and accelerated, tires flexing, front bumper rising, blower shrieking as it packed air and fuel into his engine. The road raced by beneath him faster and faster, the onramp straightened as it blended with the highway, and he watched in his left-hand mirrors and windows for other cars ahead of him as his lane began to narrow.

He was going way too fast. He blew past a pick-up truck, merged, and braked, keeping about five hundred feet behind the Excursion blocking his view ahead of him. Normally, when he was driving, his point of view was two or three feet higher than it was now. A big SUV was hard to see around in the best of circumstances, but now even a sedan gave him problems, especially if it was wide. He wobbled from side to side in his lane now and then, peeking around the cars in front of him with one headlight at a time, feathered down his throttle to hold himself steady within the flow of traffic, and settled in to the now-familiar routine of driving, ceaselessly, from one gas station to the next.

Except it wasn't really driving, was it.

It was more like running, since he was moving under his own power, or maybe luge, since he was going so fast and so low. Sports had been more Gabe's thing, but Robbie had always applied himself as best he could in all his classes, PE included, boxing team in Junior Year especially, and the closest experience he could remember to what he was feeling now was those times Coach Lukashenko CHECK had made the team circle the Lincoln High campus five times for aerobic training, one foot in front of the other, panting for air lap after lap, until something broke through and Robbie felt his legs and his heart and his lungs all moving on their own, automatic, and all he had to do was watch the sidewalk underfoot and point himself in the right direction and his body took care of the rest.

He didn't have legs that moved step-by-step anymore, he had wheels, and he didn't have lungs that breathed in and out, he had the Roots blower pulling air into his intake manifold, and he didn't have a heartbeat, he had RPMs. As complex a machine as the Charger was, it was so much simpler than a human body. Fewer parts, fewer functions. He could draw out the gears that separated his heart from his drive wheels on a napkin.

Well. Maybe Bixby could.

The point was, Robbie's heartbeat was what propelled the three of them over the road, and driving was the closest he ever felt to being alive since the accident, and it was exhilarating and frustrating and alien to his human experience. He vastly preferred it to parking.

“Uh, Gabe?” Lisa asked, twenty miles into the wasteland of gray rocks and hardy evergreen shrubs beyond the Great Salt Lake. “Why are we going west?”

They were going west, weren't they. The sun was behind them, and the signs had said Westbound I-80. Robbie had assumed it was just a weird signage thing. “Gabe?”

“Scenic detour!” Gabe announced, patting Robbie's door.

“Detour?” Robbie and Lisa's questions overlapped each-other.

“We'll get to Boise. It's just a few hours out of our way.”

“Hours?” Robbie asked. “Gabe. You can't just spring that on people, Lisa's got to—what was it, that music festival thing—”

“It's okay,” Lisa said, smiling. Her legs felt tense on his seat, and her ribs heaved with a deep, slow breath. “That's not for another three days. You guys are so generous! Road trip! Scenic detour!”

Gabe frowned. “Sorry, I guess I should have told you. But this is gonna be great! It's a destination! You're gonna love it.”

“Where are we going?” Robbie asked.

Gabe checked his phone. “Uh, in about fifteen miles it's gonna get real obvious.”

The road took a gradual downward slope between sterile stone outcrops and fencing that contained nothing but sagebrush and gravel. Lisa played more Country songs and Robbie practiced humming the bass lines she'd taught him yesterday while Gabe patted his door to do the drumbeat. They took a break and Lisa talked about college. “So, my dad wants me to major in business. I was like, what is business? Which business? Like, that's not a real thing, like, music is a thing. Astronomy is a thing. And he got me the guitar, which was super sweet, but I think he's regretting it now, because I think he meant it as, like, a toy, you know, something to do on study breaks. I wanted to go into journalism, but that's, um. Not the best industry to get into right now, you know? All these newspapers folding all the time, and the Sinclair Broadcasting thing. But music, um. Music makes me happy, but if you want to do it for a living, you got to treat it like a business, or the business is gonna chew you up. I could go on and on about all the talented singer-songwriters who lost the rights to their music and the shirt off their back with the same contract. So.” She hummed. “You ever hear Devil Went Down To Georgia? It's funny, 'cause you can supposedly get one over on the Devil by being the best fiddler who's ever been, but to get a good recording contract, you have to be a business major.”

Gabe slid the cassette adapter into Robbie's tape deck, and Lisa plugged in her phone and played the background music for her Devil cover that would be part of her set when she got to Coeur D'Alene, strumming and singing along, and then she moved into an original song, the one about riding a horse through the woods.

When she finished, Robbie had Gabe put on one of Almas Perdidas' tamer albums that the band had recorded in their bass player's garage two years ago. Robbie had helped them staple newspapers and blankets to the walls and ceiling for sound deadening. In exchange, they'd given him half a pizza and an old lawnmower that he'd eventually managed to get running and sold on Craigslist for a hundred bucks.

“They're local,” Robbie explained, trying to synthesize his voice with just one speaker so as not to interrupt Jesús's guitar licks. It was sort-of working. “There's no high-paying gigs in Hillrock Heights where they're from, but they work their asses off every weekend and now they play all over the Los Angeles metro area. You want their music, you can download it direct from their website, the top tracks are free, and the rest is five dollars. No record company, no middleman.”

“I'm sorry, did you say Hillrock Heights?” Lisa cut in.

“Yeah, sorry, it's a little neighborhood in East Los,” Robbie said. The worst one. “Punk scene's pretty much all we got going on, besides, uh. Oh, this is the best part.” He fell silent while Jesús and Eduardo did their dueling guitar-solo/shouting rap coda to 770 Metro. It was a struggle to keep the butterfly valve in his throttle body at a steady angle; when he was human he'd always wanted to stomp his feet to this part, and now he was a car, he wanted to speed up. Which would probably total the vintage Ford Ranger in front of him.

“Weird,” Lisa said.

Gabe stopped bouncing in his seat in time to the music. “What's weird?”

“Oh, just a weird coincidence. Never mind.”

The slope of the highway bottomed out into an endless straight-away to the west, and the brightest mirage Robbie had yet seen on this trip, beating out the heat waves on the road through Arizona. The hills and shrubs ended sharply at a broad, white, rock-strewn expanse of...

Salt Lake City. Salt. Robbie squealed and almost rear-ended the Ford Ranger. He had to brake harder than he wanted, and Gabe and Lisa lurched forward into the shoulderbelts. He downshifted to second gear and his engine roared, valvetrain fluttering, blower whistling as he held his speed, then when he felt ready to calm down, he relaxed his transmission and let himself shift back to third. “Ssorry,” he buzzed.

Welcome to the Bonneville Salt Flats, read a big brown sign beside the highway.

Gabe cackled. “Told you you'd like it!”

Robbie struggled to hold a steady following distance as they descended to the bottom of the rocky basin, into the ancient briny lakebed.

The lake sparkled white and cream, and tiny round bushes studded the shoreline. The road became a narrow straight causeway, cutting the vast salt pan in two. They passed a sunken truck, probably a 1960's Ford farm truck, and a 90's Blazer, abandoned to rust away long ago after sinking in the wet seasons' mud. Right now the salt on either side of the raised highway looked hard and dry. The highway Robbie ran along seemed so narrow, just forty feet of asphalt strip under his wheels, while on either side of him—after a five-foot drop—lay the glorious white canvas onto which decades of drivers and mechanics and machines had carved their triumphs.

“The Speedway's another forty miles,” Gabe announced, rolling his window down a crack. Lisa copied him. They'd set out early that morning, but they'd been on the road for forty miles already, the air was starting to warm, and the salt pan bounced the heat and light right back up at them. “See, there's still rocks out here, the salt's too thin.”

“That's where they do all those car experiments, right?” Lisa said. “No, wait, wait. The world records.”

“Land speed rrecords,” Robbie explained. “Every year the Southern California Timing Association runs Speed Week at Bonneville Speedway. Teams come from all over the world to set new mile times. This year, uh.” This year, Speed Week had passed while Robbie had been dissociating in the police impound lot, or maybe on blocks in Grumpy's front yard. “This year I don't know if they broke any big ones.”

“I'll check,” Gabe offered, pulling out his phone. “Um. Here, um. Wait, I think this might be it. No...”

“You like racing?” Lisa asked. “Wait, what am I talking about. You're a racing computer. I don't know why I'm surprised.”

“Robbie likes lots of things,” Gabe said. “He's well-rounded.”

That was nice, but Robbie as a human being had devoted himself to Gabe, cars, and local music in that order. He didn't think that qualified as well-rounded.

They roared across the road through the salt pan, hills rising up in the distance all around them. Robbie tried to explain the Bonneville Speedway to Lisa so she could properly appreciate the experience. “It's the biggest racing arena in the world. There's nothing to hit, there's no turns, there's no lanes. Traction's not so good, but once a car gets moving, it can just go all out, full throttle. This is where all the land speed records happen. Teams come from all over the world to set new mile times, and it's a flying mile, they can take a mile or two to get up to speed. It's all about horsepower; teams don't have to worry about torque or handling like for drag or autocross racing, so there's really cool, specialized builds that come here. The fastest wheel-driven car ever is the Vesco Turbinator, four hundred twenty-seven miles per hour. That record's stood since the 90's. It's insane, it looks like that airplane, the long skinny spy plane thing—like a rocket. Designed for the salt flats. There's no other race you'll see a build like that. Knocking down world records is all it does. But there's so many classes, they break it down by engine displacement and body style, so somebody sets a new record every year with something. There's a class for mini pick-up trucks; last I checked the record-holder is a Volkswagen called the White Goose, a Rabbit platform. There's classes for steam-engines. Electric. Motorcycles.”

“Okay, I got this year's records,” Gabe said. “You want me to, uh.” He licked his lips and scrolled up and down on his phone. “I mean, there's a lot.”

Robbie wished he had hands. Maybe he could have Bixby read the race results to him tonight. “Did Turbinator come back?”

“Turbinator II,” Gabe read. “Hey, didn't you say the record was four twenty-something? This one did four fifty-five.”

Robbie squealed and crackled. “Wow. Wow! What's the upgrade, what's the engine displacement?”

Gabe squinted. “It says a '3' engine and a 'T' body.”

“No, that's got to be a typo. Engine classes are letters.”

“I dunno what to tell you.”

Robbie crackled and sped up a little, slowed when he got too close to the Ranger again. “Four fifty-five. Wow.”

“Some funky names on these cars,” Gabe remarked. “Wagon A Go-Go.”

“What's that?” Lisa asked.

“It's a 'G' 'CGC' that went a hundred and eighteen miles an hour, apparently.”

Robbie focused on the road as he tried to recall the meaning behind the letter codes. “Uh, small-displacement, maybe a hundred cubic inch engine, and I think 'Classic Gas Coupe.' So, a classic car with a small engine, and I think the builders can only use period-correct parts. Makes it harder.”

“Most of these guys just name their cars after their teams,” Gabe said. “Lame.” He scrolled down the list some more. “Wait, wait, some car's got three different records, it's just called 'The Big Red Camaro.'”

Robbie gasped with his butterfly valve and lunged forward involuntarily along the road. “Brzzzrry. Sorry. BikRed? Big Red!” This year's salt crust had Big Red's tiretracks carved into it!

“What's Big Red?” Lisa asked. “Besides a Camaro.”

What was Big Red. “Bick Red is anytheen it wantz to bve,” Robbie said, which wasn't technically true, but it was as close as he could articulate. “They took a '69 Camaro platfrrm, and they bveen re-tooleen it for thirrty years. It founded ze unnlimted pro-toureen clazz in the Zilver Ztate Clazzic. Dey hadda make a whole new clazz for that car. It runs two-hundred milez an hour on a roadrace. They use like three diffnnnt enginz for diffrrrnt race applicationz. For lann-speed I read they run methanol, with nitrous, blown. Eighteen 'unndrrrd 'orsepowrr!” He took a moment to collect himself. “It's a very famous muscle car,” he summarized.

“Its fastest run was two-fifty-eight this year,” Gabe read.

Two-hundred fifty eight miles an hour. Robbie pictured the iconic red Camaro with its bold cream racing stripes, gorgeous as the day it was made and breaking records fifty years later. What he wouldn't give to look under that bulging hood, watch them swap out its engine and suspension components from one race trim to another, talk to its driver RJ Gottlieb for thirty seconds. If they let him sit behind the wheel, he'd probably die on the spot.

They passed the ugliest statue any of them had ever seen, a hundred-foot-tall concrete pole with big green globes sticking out of crude branches near the top. “Is that grapes?” Gabe asked, leaning across Robbie's center console and squinting.

“It's probably supposed to be a tree,” Lisa said.

“Looks like grapes. Or a bunch of kick-balls strapped to a light pole.”

Robbie agreed.

They rolled along. Gabe read off names and classification codes and speeds of this year's record-setters, and Robbie offered all the explanation and commentary he could remember from the SCTA website and his favorite racing forums. The dry lake opened up all around them, and Robbie found that if he focused his attention on the desert hills rising in the distance instead of the bumper of the Ranger right in front of him, he could see the individual boulders of the lakeshore miles away, flashing in and out of focus in the rippling heat waves.

Forty miles later, they saw a sign for the Bonneville Speedway exit, and Robbie stopped himself from another unnecessary burst of speed. As he concentrated on his body, he noticed an unpleasant and familiar lightness in his gas tank. “Uh, Gabe, how's my gas?”

Gabe leaned forward and squinted at his console for him. “A little less than a quarter tank.”

Robbie hummed over the road, his good mood fading. Fuel efficiency had never been a priority for the creators of the Charger, not for Chrysler and obviously not for Tio, but seven miles to the gallon was inconvenient when it wasn't downright nerve-wracking. He'd replaced the twenty-year-old fuel filter that summer when he'd brought it back to life, but Tio's garage hadn't had the lifts he'd needed to drop the tank and clean it out. Who knew how much sludge was in there. “I think we need to keep going, get to town.”

Gabe wrestled his phone out of his pants pocket and prodded the screen urgently. “But we're almost there.” He squinted. “We can turn right around and come back—no, wait, Robbie, take the exit! There's a gas station right here! To your right!”

Robbie turned his attention to the view in front of him and to the north, and saw a low slope-roofed building and a Sinclair station. He turned off, skidding a bit as he powered through the off-ramp. “You really want to do this?” he asked, keeping his tone calm.

“Claro,” Gabe assured him. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime destination. All this salt, it's the perfect place to do some, uh, chemistry.”

Robbie whistled softly.

“And, and Lisa! You need album art! Where else are you gonna get scenery like this? We'll do a photo shoot! If that's okay.”

“No, that's, that would be amazing,” Lisa said, tipping her hat back up. “I totally didn't think of that. I'll do my hair and makeup in the gas station. Don't leave without me, okay?”

“Of course not,” Robbie said, slowing and pulling into the parking lot. It was huge, with enough space between pumps to accommodate a dozen semi-trailers at once. At a smaller gas station, Robbie might worry about banging his mirror on a guard pole or popping off a hubcap against a curb; the Charger turned like a truck, and he felt clumsy in small spaces. Not here. He pulled smoothly around to the pump nearest the station door. He waited while Gabe rolled inside with Lisa to pay for the gas. Lisa jogged back out, unlatched and unscrewed his fuel cap, and stuck the nozzle down the throat of his gas tank. Cold premium rushed in; he could feel it rising up the sides of the sheet metal, the weight compressing the springs of his rear suspension. He thought about asking Lisa to pull it out half-way through, save a little weight, but decided against it. He wasn't exactly racing for money, here.

Lisa opened his door to grab her bag, and Robbie folded the seat forward out of her way. She jumped a little. “Oh! Thanks.” She pawed around in her rucksack and retrieved a little pink sparkly bag, and jogged into the gas station, pausing to flash a peace sign at him.

Gabe rolled out, wearing a pair of dark sunglasses with the price tag dangling in front of his ear and balancing a plastic bag on his lap. He swung himself back inside, holding on by Robbie's seat cushion and headrest, and folded the chair up and heaved it into the back, banging it on Lisa's guitar case. “¿Cómo te sientes?”

“Bueno. I should be asking you that. Are you sleeping okay?”

Gabe shrugged. “It's been a rough couple months, strange beds. Don't worry so much. How do you like Lisa? Es linda?”

Robbie cocked his rearview mirror and stared at him. Gabe wouldn't quite meet his, well, his glass. The gas pump beside them finally shut off and the rush of fuel in his tank slowed and stopped. The shut-off latch in the handle clicked shut, vibrating against his filler neck. “Si...” Robbie said.

Gabe nodded, rolled his hand through the air. “...You like her?”

“Are you tryeen to set me up?” Robbie demanded. “Gabe. I'm. I.” Brrzzk. He snapped the door locks up and down. “Look at me! I'm. Dizz'z not 'n app-rop-riate time to thinnk abvout stuff like that.”

“Ugh! No.” Gabe crossed his arms and tapped his fingers on his elbows. “I mean, later, when...after we figure this out—”

There was no figuring this out. Robbie didn't have a human body anymore. People weren't like Big Red, they couldn't be rebuilt from scratch after being destroyed in an accident; you got one human body, and once it's gone, that's it for you—unless you were willing to explore the deeply unethical and wildly unsuccessful side of military-grade alchemy, the kind that called for “enemy combatants” as ingredients. Robbie was beyond lucky to still be around.

“She reminds me of this girl in high-school who kept staring at me during class,” Robbie said, trying to head off that discussion. “She seems nice, though.” Legs...a leg wasn't the same as a whole person, right? The brain was the really complicated part, but a leg was just bones and muscles. There had to be a way to give Gabe his legs back.

“Did you ever ask her out?” Gabe asked slowly.

“Who, Lisa? Of course not. I'm, uh. And she's hitching with us, she's got to get to Coeur-whatever.”

“No! That girl who kept mooning over you in English class.”

“I don't think she liked me,” Robbie admitted. “She was popular or something.”

“Santo cielo.” Gabe flopped back against Robbie's driver's seat, clapping his hands to his face. “You suck. You suck so much! Of course she liked you, she was staring at you because she liked you.”

“You don't know that—”

“Every girl likes you!” Gabe snapped. “It was traumatizing! Every time a girl wanted to talk to me, they always just wanted to ask me if you were single, and I always had to say yes! I never had a girlfriend until you graduated! And you had some girl your own age, right there. And you never asked her!”

“I was busy,” Robbie protested. “What about Nita? She was always coming over to our place.”

“Nita had a crush on you, too. That's the reason she learned D&D, so she had an excuse to come stare at you.”

Robbie ran the numbers in his head, came to a horrifying conclusion. “She was fourteen!”

“I know! That's what was so horrible!” Gabe sighed. “She's dating Ty now.”

“Good for them.” Robbie recalled Nita's small round face watching him across the kitchen table while he laid out frozen french fries on a baking sheet so Gabe's friends would have something to snack on during their endless D&D sessions. “I really wish you hadn't told me that.”

“Welcome to my world.”

Lisa returned from the gas station, her hair crammed under her cowboy hat, her pink bag swinging. “Ready, guys! Thanks for waiting.” She put the gas nozzle away and buckled in. With her makeup done—eyeliner, and her face looked mysteriously sharper somehow—she really looked like that red-haired girl from English class. Weird.

Robbie started his engine back up and idled for a moment, trying to shake off the horror of learning he'd had an unseen fanclub among Gabe's classmates all through high-school. When he felt steady, he nosed out of the parking lot, and at the main road he revved up until he felt his the torque converter lock, and lunged forward, burning his rear tires as he swung North onto the narrow, sunbleached two-lane road that would take him to the fabled Speedway.

Bonneville Speedway Road extended north from I-80 for about a mile, then east about twice as far. The speed limit was fifty. Robbie took it in second gear, trying to keep calm, engine loping along near the bottom of its rev range, but Gabe still had to watch the speedometer for him—“Seventy.” “Seventy again.” “Forty-five, I think you can speed up a little—shit! Seventy!”—until they reached the End of the Road.

A big round asphalt pad, streaked with gritty white tire tracks, lay before him, and beyond its gentle slope, gleaming white salt stretched out in all directions. Robbie saw an SUV, looked like a RAV-4, parked East of them, a gang of kids playing tag nearby. They were so small in his view, they had to be a mile off. He could make out the rainbows on the smallest girl's shoes. In the corner of his vision, he saw something moving, dark, fast, distorted. He could almost hear the engine note if he concentrated very hard, feeling the vibrations on his right-hand body panels. He couldn't look without turning his entire body, but once he got down on the salt...

He rolled down.

The salt below him was crushed into a gray powder and lumped up into ridges by the trailers and push-cars and spectators that had crowded the flats for this year's Speed Week; the trailer that had held Turbinator II had passed here, and Big Red, and every vehicle from the spectators to the tow-cars to the tourists drawn to the novelty of a driveable landscape, and now it was his turn to join them. The crust was cool and yielding under his tires, and he had a jolt of terror that he would sink right through and they'd be stranded, but the bottom layers held firm, salt and mud hardened like concrete. He crept forward, and as his rear wheels descended onto the lakebed, his field of view rose level again, and he could see the blue sky that stooped startlingly low, the dark rocks and jagged hills in the distance, the broad white lakebed laid out before him, no lanes, no markers, no pedestrians except the family with the SUV. He moved and turned impulsively, trying to look at the unknown vehicle on his right, and his rear end skidded around. Right, traction was terrible. But he could see the moving blob now: it was a motorcycle. The rider was clinging to the handlebars like it was going flat out. The bike seemed to crawl across the endless white.

Lisa and Gabe shifted inside his cabin, twisting against his seat-backs and brushing their hands over the inside of his doors. “This is so crazy,” Lisa breathed. She had her hat pushed back so she could look down as they rolled further out into the lake, away from the tire tracks. The crystals on the surface rose into a pure sparkling crust like rock candy, over a smooth, strong substrate of hard blond mud.

“Where should we go?” Robbie asked them. It was only polite, they couldn't exactly get far without him, but he was hoping, very much, someone would say—

“Speedway,” Gabe announced, and Robbie revved by accident, rear tires spinning and throwing up salt to rattle against his underside like gravel. “North and then Northeast.”

Robbie opened his throttle more carefully, concentrating to keep the torque at his wheels just below the frictional breakpoint his summer tires could maintain on the gritty surface. He thought of a backroads race he'd tried with the Neon last year: one of the guys from the local Subaru club had a cousin with property out in the hills, and everyone who hadn't decided to lower their cars and wasn't afraid of a few rocks had driven out one Saturday afternoon to run two miles of private sand-and-gravel road. The front-wheel-drive Neon had barely kept up with the WRX's, but considering the mismatch of car to terrain, Robbie was pretty pleased with its performance. You just had to pay attention to the curves, and not ask the car for more braking or acceleration than the dirt under the tires could give back.

He took a wide sweeping turn until he faced the northern horizon, endless and inviting, blue sky and fleecy clouds as clear before him as though he was lying on his back in the grass of a city park on a spring day. The salt before him grew crisp and clean as the tire tracks grew further and further apart, until he rolled over a soft crackly crust that wrinkled now and then in faint seams. He accelerated, cautious of the limits of traction under his rear wheels, feeling the suspension flex and vibrate as his shocks fought to accommodate the rough surface. A tall orange marker flag rose out of the void ahead, a genuine SCTA mile-marker.

He headed toward it, exploring the texture and grip of the salt flats, tried some experimental turns—not too wide, so as not to lose sight of the little flag. Salt mounded up under the outside tires front tires, heavy with the weight of the engine, and the rear tires skidded easily over the surface. Speed was what the flats were known for, but drifting may well be what they were made for.

He felt Lisa grab his door handle hard, and kept his acrobatics tame.

Up close, the flag turned out to be about ten feet tall. The salt lost its natural geometric ridges as he passed on to the true Speedway, the path of automotive legend, smoothed before competition each summer by heavy steel sledges and then rutted by vehicles passing over it full speed, each driver and builder and vehicle striving to shatter the limits of possibility. And now he was driving that very path. (Big Red's eighteen-hundred horsepower methanol-gulping nitrous-huffing motor had roared down this same road!) He took his time, attuned to the vibrations from the rough surface, watching for potholes that could have emerged from six days of non-stop competition, easing the throttle open gradually as he got a feel for driving on salt. The shift to second gear surprised him. He ignored the whirling planetary gears inside his transmission and focused on the path ahead, coaxed out more speed, felt the salt skipping under his wheels, tested his control. Third gear came, and the transmission locked, direct drive from engine to wheels. He was moving at the speed of gasoline now. Every air-fuel explosion in the big-block V8 might as well be beating against the ground behind him, driving him forward. He let the throttle out, careful, careful. The wheels over the salt droned with vibration. The engine wasn't even straining; this was just a practice run. Just a quick jaunt out to the rocks, get a feel for the track, learn the area.

The speedway stretched north for five miles, five flags in a row between the gray hills. Beyond the last flag, the salt flats stretched on, endless, as though he could drive forever and disappear into those bright low clouds, but the ground was rising beneath them, rocks and ridges peeking out of the salt, and Robbie realized they were reaching the end of the driveable surface.

He braked gently. His front wheels dug in and his rear wheels swung out thirty degrees. Shit. This was why legit racers used parachutes. He let the brakes off instantly, turning into the direction of travel, and as he straightened, he braked more gently, calipers squeezing brake rotors in short, measured pulses. His transmission dropped back to first, and he slowed to a lumpy idle, crawling along the salt. He turned West toward the stony shore.

“That was so fast,” Lisa exclaimed, sounding a little shaky. Robbie regretted skidding on that stop; he'd gotten it under control, but, well. If you didn't know what you were doing, that was a great way to spin out, roll over, and die. “How fast was that?”

“About one-ten,” said Gabe, casually.

That's my brother, Robbie thought, proud. He'd never driven the Charger so fast since the day of the accident, racing Gabe to the hospital. Today, with nothing to panic about, it felt good: steady power, the high-flow cams breathing well at the high rev rates. He wished he could have brought the Charger to a tuning shop, hitched it up to the dynamometer, put the pedal to the floor, and watched the torque and horsepower curves race up the screen.

He probably ought to let Lisa out somewhere, she and Gabe were going to shoot an album cover. He focused his attention back inside his cabin: Gabe in the driver's seat, facing forward, a wistful smile on his face. Lisa in the passenger seat, hazy out the corner of his rear-view mirror, hidden from the view of his side mirror by the white glare of the salt against his window. He braked to a stop, rolled his windows down. Took a moment to feel for his wires and speakers, decide what he wanted to say. “Where do you want pictures?” No buzzing, no lag.

His passengers peered out seriously at the flats. Surreal gleaming plains and forbidding rocky hills dotted with sagebrush stretched out in every direction. Robbie waited, enjoying the throb of the Charger's performance cams at idle. His vision shuddered continually from the vibration.

“There,” Gabe said at last, pointing to a little island jutting out from the western hills. “The rocks are lots of different sizes, and there's that huge boulder that'll probably look cool. What do you think?”

Lisa followed his gaze. “Nice. It looks like we can walk all the way around it. Try out different angles of light.”

“Point me to it,” Robbie said, wiggling his front wheels so his steering wheel turned. Gabe grabbed hold gently and Robbie followed the pressure toward their chosen desert island, stopping four car-lengths away when he started to feel stones poking up beneath the salt crust.

“I can't believe I ran into a photographer on my Great American Road Trip,” Lisa remarked as she piled her rucksack and her guitar case on the salt.

“Uh,” Gabe said.

“He's really good, when he was a kid he used to make these comics with his action figures, he'd take pictures with them all over the house and photoshop speech bvubbles and stuff,” Robbie said.

“I was thirteen, I wasn't a kid!” Gabe protested. “And they were collectibles. I mean, I got them used, but if they were new, they'd be collectibles.”

“Ninja Wolf was new. You took him out of the box.”

“Oh my god, Robbie. Stop!”

Robbie got the suspicion Gabe didn't appreciate this line of reminiscence, but it was a beautiful day and his heart was warm and they were here at the Bonneville Speedway, the real Speedway, and he was about to use the Charger's entire speedometer. “You were so excited. I mean, I thought it'd be the iPhone, but when you opened him up you couldn't talk for two minutes.”

“Stop,” Gabe growled. “I had to—when they—”

Ninja Wolf was gone, wasn't he. Health and Human Services had taken Gabe after the accident, and Gabe had left with nothing but his backpack when he'd found Robbie.

“Danny Batista convinced everyone at school that I was a furry,” Gabe yelled.

Robbie crackled. Lisa covered her mouth.

“It's not funny.”

“No, not funny,” Robbie agreed. Lisa wheeled Gabe's chair around and Gabe transferred out to it. “You want me to hang out here?”

“No, let's test out your phone,” Gabe said. He pulled out his iPhone and called Robbie's Samsung, which began to vibrate against the plastic of Robbie's center console. “C'mon, answer.”

“Hey Bixby, uh. ¿Qué debo decir?”

“Creo que la frase es accept call,” Gabe said. The vibration stopped suddenly. “Go on, say something.”

“Uh, testing, check, one, two,” Robbie said. He strained to angle his driver's side mirror outward, so he could see Gabe properly.

“It's a little hard to hear you with the engine noise, but it's working,” Gabe said, listening to his phone.

“Testing, check, one, two,” Robbie repeated, louder. Gabe gave him a thumbs-up. “Hey, Bixby, end call.”

“Genial.” Gabe backed himself away from Robbie's door, leaned forward and swung it shut. Robbie rolled his window down so he could still hear him. “You go have fun.”

“Seguro?”

“Claro. This is your thing.”

“Alright,” Robbie said. “Call me when you need a ride.”

“Don't drive off the edge.”

Robbie backed away from Gabe and Lisa, turned, and stared down the five-mile course. Five orange flags, smaller and smaller in the distance. The road to the speedway, the minivan and the kids, the hummocks and fingers of stone intruding onto the salt from the west, an orange tent with the mosquito net rolled up against its roof, a camper van with mismatched hubcaps, a little stonehenge marking an old campsite, hardy shrubs breaking through the gravel and puffing up through the salt at the very edges of the shore, rows of jagged gray hills that faded one by one into the faint haze of the dry clean desert air, soft white clouds that seemed to skim the ground: worlds and worlds ahead of him. He breathed in, awestruck, and his idle smoothed out.

The jump in engine rotations reminded him what he'd come here for: to hit the Charger's top speed on salt.

Robbie gazed at the orange flags that marked the racecourse before him. At Bonneville, you got a whole mile to accelerate as carefully as you liked; two miles for the high-displacement vehicles. The Charger was a high-displacement vehicle, but it should be able to hit its speed in less than a quarter mile, on hot clean asphalt. Salt was different; Robbie would have to keep his wits about him for this, like last year when he'd run the Neon down that hard, curving dirt track, half-blinded by flying dust, and felt proud to have reached the end without skidding off and rolling down the dry grassy hills. Different course, same mental skill. He'd had to map the sensations of his body onto their source on the car, let the plastic bucket seat jolting against his tailbone become in his mind the imperfections of the road beneath them, let the twist and shudder of the seatback cupping his shoulders become the faintest beginnings of a skid as the tires fought for speed at the limits of traction, let the view through the mirrors and windshield become his whole world and his body just the control mechanism that let him move through it.

He moved through the world now.

He breathed in, slowly opening his throttle, letting his torque converter gentle the force of his drive wheels on the gritty lakebed as he accelerated steadily. To his right, the blurred forms of rocks and hills drifted past, while before him, the low sky and far-off mountains and nigh-infinite white lakebed stood still, immutable, inviting. He rolled on, drive wheels pushing, pushing him faster, as the blower began to sing and the engine raced, cams rolling so fast he could feel the rocker covers hum with the snap and click of levers and springs, the V8 climbing toward the peak of its horsepower. And...shift. An uneasy lurch as the drivewheels sped up and skidded on the grit; by reflex he snapped back the throttle and felt the tires grip again, breathed, breathed. A time trial was a negotiation between the car and the track it ran on; the flats could never pay back all the torque the Charger could give, but they offered time and space to accommodate all its horsepower.

He hit third gear at half a mile. Cruising gear, as the engineers intended it, but Robbie pushed forward, leaning into that bright blue horizon, breathing, breathing, the rough salt humming beneath him, air buffeting him, drive wheels flinging him toward that first mile marker as his engine roared, shaking his whole body, faster and faster.

There were no higher gears. At first or second, whenever he approached the redline, his transmission would shift up and his RPM would drop, but now he would hit his top speed when his engine couldn't take it anymore, when his valves couldn't close fast enough to keep the fire out of his intake manifold, when he'd crested the peak of his power curve and was left with the upper limits of speed he could sustain.

Valve float started just before the first mile, boom-pain-backfire. Robbie eased back the throttle and turned his attention to the combustion array scratched into the hub of his steering wheel, that let him slip into the familiar waking trance of Alchemy. Combustible gasses filled his intake manifold, oxygen and gasoline vapor waiting to flow into empty cylinders, and intake valves struggled to close fast enough to shield the fuel-air mix from the explosions below. He split his mind between the onrushing world and the inner chambers of his engine, became the vapor, commanded the fires to wait their turn. He gasped for more air again, pushed his revs higher, higher, impossibly high, until he felt a warning ache deep within him: piston rods, maybe, or the pistons themselves. He didn't know what modifications the Charger's engine held, forged rods and pistons or, god forbid, stock internals, but he felt the metal straining, and he knew, unshakable, that this was it, this was the limit. He had pushed the Charger to its full potential, without damage. He'd raced the hell out of it. Let all its horses run.

He passed the second mile, the third, lost in speed and fire. His heart powered him forward into the infinite void, and his soul guarded his heart, and his body flew.

After the fourth mile marker, he began to close his throttle, stifle his air. His valvetrain caught up with his pistons and fire stopped trying to erupt backward out his cylinders. The desert wind pushed against him, he glided over the salt, shifted down, down, slowed, turned east and then north, away from the raised hump of the road to the south of him. He stopped and stared again into the vast distance, clouds upon clouds in that low, touchable blue sky. Salt stretched away in every direction, no painted lines, no guardrails, no traffic, no one to hit. He could go anywhere, any direction, as fast or as slow as he wanted.

His heart jumped and he moved, rumbling forward to the Northeast over fresh natural salt, broken here and there by tire tracks. He inhaled and skidded and turned, whipping his back end around, making the clouds and hills spin around him. He rolled off, picked up speed, shifted to second, and then poured on power, broke traction, and skated over the salt in long, smooth, S-shaped arcs, then he eased up and raced off again, more gradually, breathe, breathe, breathe, until he lost his grip on the un-ploughed surface and had to ease back down. He could do anything he could imagine doing with a car here. He'd never felt so free.

I've got to take the Neon up here someday, he thought, and then he remembered.

The Neon belonged to Robbie Reyes, and Robbie Reyes was presumed dead. It had probably been sold for scrap: stripes, racing seats, turbo, and all. The Neon was gone. And even if the Neon wasn't gone, Robbie would never sit behind the wheel again, never put his feet on the pedals or his hand on the shifter, upgrade its transmission, or lower the suspension, because Robbie's body was gone. The Charger was the only car he would ever drive, for as long as his soul remained in this world.

Robbie idled, suddenly, intimately aware of his body, the hiss of coolant in his radiator, the slosh of liquid in his gas tank, the weight of his frame on his springs. He'd learned long ago how to imagine a car as an extension of himself—to attune himself to the abilities of the car, help it reach its potential on the quarter-mile, or bomb along a twisting road at twice or three times the posted speed limit. He loved machines. He loved learning how they worked, and fixing them, and seeing what they could do. And now the Charger was the only machine he would ever know.

He still had alchemy, fire. The salt flats were the perfect place to see how big a fireball he could make, and he focused on his combustion array, called out to the water vapor and CO2 in the air, the unburned hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides escaping his tailpipe, reached through the earth for the limitless energy of the San Andreas fault and the magma pushing up beneath the rising Rockies, and ripped the molecules above him into their component atoms. He held held the volatile cloud he'd made in as tight a ball as he could keep it, invisible potential hovering in the air, drifting on the wind over his roof and in front of his nose. Just as it passed beyond him and before he lost his grip on the gasses, he snapped an arc from his spark plug wires and lit the whole thing up.

That was a fifty-foot fireball. It whited-out the sky in front of him, boomed against his body panels, and vanished, inert, into the atmosphere. If Robbie was a firebug, he'd have come from watching it. If he was a chemist, he'd be mad with power and go around ripping oxygen atoms out of water molecules everywhere he went for the dizzy joy of it. But he wasn't. He'd just wanted a cheap way to help the Neon go fast. And now, ripping atoms apart with his alchemy to watch them slam explosively back together was the only positive proof he had that he wasn't, actually, a poorly-programmed racing computer.

He realized he'd lost sight of Gabe.

His engine raced as he searched the flats ahead of him, his drive wheels spun, he could see every cloud for a hundred miles but not his brother—no, he was facing Northeast, and he'd left Gabe and Lisa past the northern-most marker flag near the Western shore. It was hard to remember how narrow his distance vision was when he could see so many miles of landscape with it. He had to turn West. He slowed his engine and let his wheels catch, rolled off in an easy arc to the Northwest, saw the flags, saw the shore, accelerated. Second, third. He swept his attention from rock to rocky island on the northwest shore, the rocks growing larger as he ate up the miles, until he spotted a standing human form, Lisa with her hat and guitar, her silhouette concealed by an outcrop rising behind her. Gabe was twenty feet away, in front of those same rocks. They were watching him.

Relief. His engine raced on hot and fast as ever, but the rhythm he perceived in it changed completely, from thrash-metal hammering to a toe-tapping ska beat. He'd found them. He wasn't alone, this wasn't a dream. He slowed as he approached. Gabe waved, Lisa dipped her guitar at him. Robbie rolled down his windows and lifted his wiper blades.

“Good idea, right?” Gabe asked, smug.

Robbie nosed closer, closer, until his front bumper stopped just two feet from Gabe's chair. He had a microscopic view of the knotted-up legs of Gabe's jeans. He idled, vibrating on his springs, almost within Gabe's reach, then backed up until he could see Gabe's face and parked.

“You looked great out there,” Lisa called, as though he'd been skateboarding. She'd let her hair down from where she'd crammed it under her hat at the gas station, and it brushed her shoulders in chunky waves.

“Thanks,” Robbie said, still idling. He didn't want to shut his engine down, not until he'd had the chance to calm himself, and appreciate what he had today, right here, and would probably never have again.

He could use his body to its fullest potential, here, today.

He could move anywhere he wanted, whenever he wanted, in any direction he wanted, here, today.

He could be with Gabe—not carrying him to some ten-story building, not crawling up into the grass beside a picnic bench at a rest stop to watch Gabe eat lunch, not standing in a parking lot while Gabe, also, sat in the lot in his very vulnerable and inconspicuous chair while other cars lurched back and forth behind him, their careless drivers on the hunt for parking spaces—they could just hang out together, side by side, sharing the same space. The salt flats welcomed both of them.

This was the best day Robbie may ever have again.

He shut his engine off. Whatever emotion had been about to hit him, didn't.

“This was a great idea,” he told Gabe, calm. “I got to shake-down the Charger. You get good pictures?”

“Mas o menos.” Gabe held out an unfamiliar cell phone in front of Robbie's left headlight and flicked through a gallery: pictures of Lisa, some with the flats and sky for backdrop, some with the rocks behind her, various poses with the guitar. One had captured her in mid-air, clicking the heels of her boots together, the brim of her hat hiding her face.

“How'd you get those angles?” Robbie asked, noticing some of the shots seemed to have come from above.

“Selfie stick.”

Lisa approached them, tilted her hat up. “Uh, what was that explosion back there?”

Unlicensed military alchemy. Robbie caught the panicked look on Gabe's face. “Brzzz—Flamethrower,” he said.

Lisa raised her eyebrow. “What? Why?”

“It's experimental,” Robbie said primly.

“So you can cook your competition?”

That was the most ridiculous thing Robbie had ever heard. “It's for the fans,” he explained, in a bolt of inspiration. “It looks awesome. It has to be big so they can see it at the end of the drag strip.”

“It does look awesome,” Lisa admitted. “Say, hoss,” —that ear-scorching Country accent again— “any chance you'd like to be on the cover of my upcoming album?”

Gabe frowned for some reason. “Only if Robbie's okay with it.”

Robbie remembered those weeks back home, practicing alchemy and reviving the Charger back at Tio's abandoned garage, toting in fifty gallons of water so he could detail it out on the driveway on one of LA's rare cloudy days. He remembered how its black flanks had gleamed after he'd buffed off the wax, how the blower and trim had sparkled from the chrome polish. On a sunny day, against Bonneville's perfect white backdrop, it must be rolling art. He pictured the Charger in the background of one of Gabe's photos of Lisa. “I bet I could do a donut and a fireball at the same time,” he offered.

Lisa clutched her hands under her chin. “Ohmigod. Wait, wait. I don't know—that might be a bit too rock'n'roll for my brand—”

If Robbie's engine were on, he was pretty sure he'd be feeling disappointed and vaguely insulted.

“Who am I kidding, I don't have a brand,” Lisa finished. “That'd be so amazing if you'd do that.”

Robbie started back up, engine rocking him with stored melancholy. He waited to settle down a bit before releasing his parking brake. “Wait. How are you gonna explain why there's no driver?”

“Photoshop.”

Lisa used her phone as a mirror to check her hair and makeup, then waved for Robbie to roll off onto the flats behind her. His phone buzzed when he got about a hundred feet away.

“Hey, Bixby, accept call.”

It was Gabe. “Okay, good distance, now head off a bit to your right—no, sorry, your left. Keep going, keep going—good. Okay, do your thing, try to throw up lots of salt, do your fireball whenever. Lisa's gonna hold the pose. Ready?”

“Ready,” Robbie said, and he breathed in and skidded over the salt, his heart roaring, carving his tiretracks into the wasteland. This may be the best day of the rest of his life. He was going to make the most of it.

 

It was hot, the sun was high in the sky, and Gabe and Lisa had almost drank all the water they'd bought at the gas station by the time Robbie carried them down Bonneville Speeday Road back toward the Sinclair station and Interstate 80: long straight ribbons of asphalt bounded with paint; concrete and parking lots--the liminal spaces that were Robbie's entire world.

Robbie wanted another fill-up; the highway north past Wendover would be long and empty, and he'd managed to burn up half his tank. “Can I see the picture?” he asked.

Gabe, dozing in his driver's seat, pointed Lisa toward Robbie's rear-view mirror. “Hold it up so he can see.”

Lisa displayed her phone obligingly, scrolling the last few images up and down the screen. Lisa's face was shadowed by her hat, but the sun bouncing up from below revealed her features: soft jaw, stern mouth, eyes studying the distance. The shining white landscape behind her threw her into contrast, and to the side, just below the upturned neck of her guitar, Robbie saw the Charger in a hard spin, a rooster-tail of salt obscuring its rear license-plate. Above them both, like a sun or a halo, bloomed a great curling cloud of yellow flame. He wasn't sure what genre of music the photo evoked, but it was the only image he could imagine that might persuade him to buy a Country album.

That's me, he thought, staring at the Charger, frozen in mid-spin. That's what I look like now. “Nice,” he said to Lisa and Gabe. In the photo, white salt caked his black flanks where his wheels had flung it up at himself. He could feel it now that he was paying attention; it itched inside his wheel wells and roughened the wind gliding over his sides. “Uh, I hate to ask this, but. This is a really pristine restomod, and the salt, if it sits on the steel...Lisa, would you...hose me off?”

“I was wondering about that,” she said. “No probs.”

“There's a car wash in Wendover,” Gabe assured him. “Coin-op. Perfect.”

He rolled into the gas station, parked at the same pump nearest the front door, and shut down. Gabe handed Lisa some cash so she could pay.

“Can you get a spicy pickle?” Gabe asked as she got out. “I forgot I wanted to try one of those pickles.”

“Let me know how it tastes,” Robbie added.

“Sure thing.” Lisa shut the door, then stopped. Robbie watched her in the hazy view of his side windows. She circled around behind him, unlatched and unscrewed his gas cap, and inserted the nozzle. Robbie couldn't drive off without ripping the hose out of the pump. She flashed them a peace sign again, and trotted into the station, leaving them with half a tank, her guitar, and her rucksack.

Robbie turned his rear-view mirror toward his driver's seat. Gabe's hair was stringy with sweat, and he massaged his thighs, one by one, as he leaned hard into Robbie's seatback. His lips were thin. The chair set him much more upright than the driver's seat did, and he still hadn't shaken off the exhaustion he'd worn this morning. “Gabe,” Robbie said, and stopped himself. You shouldn't have. We didn't need to. We could have pushed on, we could be half-way to Boise now. Instead he said, “Thanks.”

Gabe smiled, shy. “Thought you'd like it.”

“Claro. This was a dream come true.” He watched Gabe, at the same time as he stared North, out toward the Speedway, one hundred square miles of absolute freedom, at least in the dry season. “Thanks. And.” Had he told Gabe this? “Thanks for saving me. I'm glad I'm...still here.”

Gabe looked away, out the window, then down at his lap. He covered his face with his elbow and nodded jerkily.

Oh no. How to make this better. “If someone had offered me,” he sent a higher frequency to his speaker wires, “Hey, how'd you like to be a car for a week, or, I don't know, a month. Or two—might be a little boring, but. You know. I'd jump at the chance. I'm learning so much. I could be a better mechanic, I'm already a better driver. I wish I could tell the guys at work what this is like. It's an experience.”

“Robbie,” Gabe said shakily. “You don't have to—I'm sorry—”

“Really.” Robbie crackled, tilted his passenger side mirror out toward the gas station. He could just barely make out the corner of the building. Lisa could return at any moment, he had to finish, and give Gabe time to collect himself. “I'll be okay if we can't fix this,” he said, to Gabe and to himself, “but I'll help you, anything I can do to help you figure this out. I mean, I don't know as much theory as you, I pretty much fell down the flame alchemy rabbit-hole while you were still trying to master every single field, but I've got Bixby now and I don't sleep. I'll research, I'll read, I'll do the boring shit. If we can find a way, I'll do it, whatever I can. Not just getting your legs back: everything. You can count on me.”

Gabe flattened his palm against the plastic panel of Robbie's left door and squeezed. Robbie wished he could squeeze back; tightening Gabe's shoulder-belt would strangle him at this angle. With effort, he wiggled his shocks slightly, rocking his chassis. “I kind of thought,” Gabe said, his voice low and choked, “you might be punishing yourself. Because I got hurt. Even though you got hurt a lot worse.”

“I'm not hurt,” Robbie insisted. “But. This is seriously starting to get old. I. If it's possible, and I'm okay if it isn't—I'd really like to be a person again.”

“You are a person,” Gabe snarled, raising his face from the crook of his elbow. “You'll always be a person.”

“Right.” He was, a ghost was a person, an artificial intelligence was a person; whatever Robbie was now, he just wasn't generally recognized as a person by other people. “Thanks. But your legs come first.”

“Santos, Robbie, I'm fine!” Gabe snapped.

Robbie made a low, doubtful whistle.

“It's hard to do everything, and—I have to watch for doors, and ramps, and cracks, and I can't go on the grass, and I can't reach shit, and—and bathrooms, and stupid stuff, like, that gas station in there, the sunglass tower didn't have any mirrors down low so I don't know if my glasses look dorky on me. I had to ask Lisa. And my legs hurt and it always feels like my toes are curled and I can't straighten them and it's driving me crazy. But I can live my life. I can talk to people, I can eat and sleep, nobody's gonna...park me on their front lawn under a tarp, shit, Robbie!”

“It's not a contest,” Robbie said. “We're both pretty fucked up, though.”

Gabe stared up at Robbie's mirror, blinking hard, then shook his head and looked out the window. “Thanks for being honest.”

“I'd never lie to you.”

Gabe snorted. “Sure you wouldn't.”

Robbie watched a livestock truck pass behind them on the Interstate, followed by a long procession of pick-up trucks of various makes and ages. Lisa crossed into his side mirror's field of view; she must have been stuck in line—no, Robbie realized, she'd been washing off her makeup. She started the pump for Robbie's premium, then climbed back in to the passenger seat and fished a bagged pickle and a pre-wrapped sandwich out of a plastic bag.

Gabe scrubbed his face on his shirt and grabbed the pickle, opened it carefully. He stretched it out the window and poured half the pickle juice out onto the concrete by the pump, then took a bite. “Thas diffrnt,” he muttered.

“Te gusta?”

Gabe swallowed. “No sé.” He took another bite, frowning and tilting his head back and forth. “It's really tangy.”

Lisa handed Gabe a paper towel from the bag. “Um, Robbie. I've been wondering...stop me if I'm out of line here, but you and Gabe, some of the things you say—”

Mierda. He was the least-convincing artificial intelligence ever. Robbie braced himself.

“Did you used to be a Roomba or something?”

Gabe coughed. Gasped, choked, coughed harder, hacked something up into the paper towel.

Lisa winced. “Sorry, it just...the things you know, and the way you guys are with each-other...it sounds like you used to live inside Gabe's house.”

Robbie watched Gabe with his mirror, waiting for some sort of cue. Gabe just stared back at him, clearing his throat over and over and clutching his pickle bag. “Yeah,” Robbie said at last. “I used to be a Roomba.”

.