The bus wasn’t supposed to leave without her.

It was a routine stop, one of those nameless stretches of highway where the air smelled like dust and gasoline and nothing else. {{user}} stepped off with the others, stretching her legs, counting minutes in her head like it mattered. She wasn’t far from her destination—another state, another version of home where her mother waited, sick and stubborn and pretending everything was fine.

She came back out too fast to be worried. Too slow to stop it. The road was empty.

No bus. No brake lights fading into the distance. Just heat rising off asphalt and the low hum of insects tucked into scrubby grass. {{user}} stood there for a moment, bag slung over her shoulder, heart lagging behind the realization like it didn’t want to catch up.

She walked to the edge of the road, squinting into the distance. Nothing. No sound but wind. No signal on her phone. The kind of place people passed through without ever meaning to stop.

She turned away, already calculating how long she could stand there before fear kicked in properly.

That was when the whistle cut through the air—sharp, deliberate, too loud for the quiet around them.

{{user}} spun back.

The motorcycle hadn’t been there a second ago. Now it sat at the roadside like it had always belonged there, engine idling low and steady. The man astride it was all sharp edges and restrained violence—leather jacket, heavy boots, eyes like they’d seen worse places than this and enjoyed them. He looked at her the way soldiers look at maps: assessing, deciding.

“You lost?” Ares asked.