POV: Aria
The engine was dead but the car was not, and that was the only thing working in my favour right then.
I had a slope. Slight, maybe three degrees, enough to roll if I released the brake, and the road curved left two hundred meters ahead and whatever was behind us hadn't appeared yet, which meant I had maybe ninety seconds before whoever Luca was calling arrived or whoever shot up the highway figured out where we stopped.
I released the brake.
The car began to move. Slow, too slow, but moving, and I used the slope and let it build and kept my hands steady and watched the curve come toward me in the dark.
Luca ended his call. "What are you doing."
"Driving," I said.
"The engine is dead."
"The car is moving. That's not the same thing."
He looked at the speedometer. Twelve miles per hour. Climbing slightly as the slope evened out. Not enough. Nowhere near enough for what I needed, but I had the hill ahead of us and I needed to get there before we stopped.
"There's a hill on the north side of this stretch," I said. "Quarter mile."
"I know," he said.
"If I can get to the top of it with enough speed I can coast down the other side to the interchange. There are people at the interchange. Cabs, night trucks, enough traffic that whoever is behind us won't follow."
He looked at me. "You're going to coast a dead car a quarter mile uphill."
"I'm going to use the downslope we're on now to build enough speed to carry the hill," I said. "Probably."
"Probably."
"Get out if you want."
He didn't get out. He put his phone away and put one hand on the dash and said nothing, which I was starting to understand was his version of trust.
The car hit twenty-two on the downslope and I held it steady and the hill came up fast and I felt the momentum shift the second we started climbing, the roll bleeding off, and I did the thing you weren't supposed to do on a dead engine which was nothing, just held the wheel and let physics decide.
We crossed the crest at nine miles per hour. The grade tipped the other way and the car found itself again.
Luca breathed. I breathed. Neither of us mentioned it.
The interchange was a quarter mile down and I could see the lights of it and the shape of two trucks and a cab rank and I was going to make it, I knew I was going to make it, and that was exactly when I saw the other car.
It wasn't the one from the highway. It was newer, darker, positioned sideways across the bottom of the ramp like it had been placed there, not chasing but waiting, and there were two figures standing beside it and one of them had something across their arm that I didn't need to see clearly to identify.
I hit the brake.
The car slowed. Eleven miles per hour. Seven. Five. Stopped.
Sixty meters from the car at the bottom and no engine and no exits on either side and the two figures were already moving toward us and Luca was very still beside me and his stillness then was different from before, it had a shape to it, the shape of someone who was not surprised.
I looked at him.
He looked at the windshield.
"You knew this was here," I said.
"Aria."
"The call you made," I said. "You weren't calling for help."
He didn't answer and the answer was in the not answering, and something in my chest went cold and quiet, the way it did when a thing you were half expecting finally arrived and the half that wasn't had to catch up.
He had been telling them where we stopped. He had been giving them time to get ahead of us.
I looked at the figures coming up the ramp. Forty meters. Thirty-five. Slow walk, no rush, because they knew the car was dead and they knew we weren't going anywhere.
They were wrong about that.
I looked at the road to my left. There was a junction, narrow and unsigned, the kind of maintenance track that ran beside infrastructure and went nowhere useful except away. I knew it because I had mapped every road within five miles of that interchange two years ago after a job went wrong there and I swore I'd never be caught with nowhere to go again.
I restarted the engine.
It turned. Caught. Held for one second and then shuddered and I pushed through the shudder and felt it find itself and I dropped it into gear before it could change its mind.
Luca grabbed the dash.
I didn't take the maintenance track.
The two figures were twenty meters away and spreading to cover the road and I pointed the car at the gap between them and pushed the accelerator to the floor and they scattered and I was through and the interchange ramp was ahead and the ramp had a problem, which was that the far end was under construction and ended in a gap where the new section hadn't been connected, a drop of maybe six feet to the lower road with no way around it and a barrier across the lane with two orange lights blinking and a sign that said ROAD CLOSED and I saw all of it in the last three seconds before I would have needed to brake.
I did not brake.
I hit the gap at fifty-four miles per hour.
The car left the ramp.
One second of nothing. No road, no engine sound, just air and the city below and Luca's hand white on the dash and my hands on the wheel doing nothing useful.
Then the front wheels found the lower road and the impact came up through my spine and the back end landed and the car skidded and I caught it before it went sideways and we were moving, we were through.
And the engine, which should have died again, was still running.
I drove for a full ten seconds before I could make myself look over at Luca.
He was looking at me with an expression I had never seen on any person in any situation, and I couldn't name it, and I found I didn't want to, and that was a problem I was adding to the list.
"You need to tell me who you called," I said.
His mouth opened.
His phone rang first.
It was Matteo's name on the screen.