Part One
Present Day
Dallas’ lungs burn.
She runs across the path carved into the dusty desert around a little residential area in Blythe, California, and her heartbeat pounding in her throat masks the sound of a feral animal howling somewhere in the distant desert.
It’s sometime late and very dark, headlights from semi-trucks sparking over and over in an irregular rhythm out on the highway while a few streetlights flicker at the other end of the block.
Eventually Dallas slows and comes to a stop, rests her hands on her knees as she gasps for breath. She goes a little dizzy and waits it out before she checks the metrics from her run on her watch, scrolls through and saves the workout.
She dismisses the app and the clock face appears on the watch, tells her it’s way too late to be out and running.
Dallas is sure that when she was little, she hated running.
Mostly sure.
Pinching the bridge of her nose, Dallas shakes her head, forces the shaky memories away, “Crabgrass, streetlamp, empty water bottle, glass shards, hub cap,” she mumbles, counting ten things she sees here and now on the mostly-dark street.
She twists from one side to her other until her back cracks, bends down and tugs that the laces on her left shoe before she takes off again, a slow jog replacing her earlier sprint.
Her path is lit by the full moon that hangs heavily off to one side, dipping ever closer to the horizon as sunrise nears, and finally a tiny bungalow appears through the dust, lights blazing through the curtain-clad windows.
They weren’t on when she left.
Well, not all of them, and Dallas hoped that meant her housemate was finally getting some rest.
With a roll of her eyes, Dallas vaults over the fence that surrounds the scattered pieces of metal and discarded machinery outside the property, goes inside through the back. She grabs a towel from the basket next to the door, dabs at the skin not covered by her neon tank and running shorts.
“That you, Dallas?”
She snorts, frees her hair from its high ponytail and lets it fall in stringy sections over her shoulders, crosses into the hallway, “Who else would it be, Giselle?” She’s in the living room where a petite redhead sits at the table surrounded by neat piles of paperwork that were not so neat when they were trying to find space to eat dinner last night.
“Where have you been?” Giselle brushes a hand through her hair, disheveling it worse and sending strands in every direction.
“Uh, running,” she waves a hand at her outfit and walks over to one of the standing fans they have spaced around the room to keep the house cool in the height of desert summer. “You should be sleeping.”
Giselle narrows her eyes at Dallas like she only just realized what all the neon lycra means, but then waves a dismissive hand, “I was going through the mail and there’s work to be done. I have something to tell you.”
While Giselle seems ‘with it’ right now, she fits the stereotype of scatterbrained scientist for 23 hours of the day, so Dallas settles against the back of the couch, because she’ll probably fall asleep standing up if she doesn’t, “What, did you disprove the Theory of Relativity?”
It’s not like that’s impossible.
After all, Giselle is a theoretical physicist.
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