Chapter Text
Prologue: Northbound
The fluorescent lights in JojaMart hummed with a frequency that made Cedar's teeth ache.
He'd been stocking shelves for six hours — technically his shift had ended forty-five minutes ago, but Stephanie, the shift supervisor, had "forgotten" to process his timecard again, which meant he either stayed and finished the cereal aisle or got written up for "incomplete work duties." Never mind that the cereal aisle was a disaster because the day shift had left it trashed. Never mind that he'd already restocked the entire canned goods section, reorganized the pharmacy supplies, and cleaned up what appeared to be an entire jar of pickles someone had dropped and not reported in aisle four.
The store's sound system played the same twelve songs on an infinite loop. Right now, it was some aggressively cheerful pop song about summer and beaches and freedom — concepts that felt like they existed on another planet, one Cedar would never visit.
His hands moved on autopilot: grab box, check label, find correct slot, stock from back to front so the oldest product rotated out first. Grab box. Check the label. Stock. Repeat. The boxes were heavy — 40-pound cases of store-brand corn flakes that Joja bought in bulk because it was cheap and they could mark it up 300% and people would still buy it because it was the only grocery store within twenty miles that wasn't a gas station.
Cedar's back was screaming. His shoulders were screaming. His knees were screaming. At twenty-five, his body felt like it belonged to someone twice his age.
His phone buzzed in his pocket. He ignored it. It buzzed again. And again.
Marcus.
It was always Marcus.
The phone calls had started around noon. Fifteen of them. Then texts. So many texts Cedar's phone had probably burned through 10% of its battery just receiving them.
Where are you — Why aren't you answering — I know you're at work but you can still text back — Are you ignoring me — Baby, come on — Don't be like this — You know I love you — You're being ridiculous — ANSWER ME — I'm coming to the store if you don't answer
Cedar had responded once, around 2 PM: Working. Will call on break.
That had bought him maybe ninety minutes of peace. Now the texts were back, escalating in that familiar pattern Marcus had: confusion, hurt, anger, apology, threats, love-bombing, back to anger.
"Cedar! You almost done?"
Stephanie appeared at the end of the aisle, clipboard in hand, already looking annoyed. She was maybe thirty-five, wore too much makeup that couldn't quite hide the exhaustion in her eyes, and had the particular edge of someone who'd been with Joja long enough to know exactly how shitty it was but not quite long enough to escape.
"Yeah, almost." Cedar straightened up, his spine making sounds that bones should absolutely not make. "Just finishing this section."
"Good. Because we need you in receiving. Truck came early, and Derek called in sick again." Her mouth twisted. Again meant hungover, but nobody said it out loud. "You mind staying an extra hour?"
It wasn't a question.
Cedar looked at the clock on the wall. 10:47 PM. Marcus would be absolutely losing his mind by now.
"I'm already over my scheduled hours—"
"It'll be overtime. Time and a half." Stephanie said it like she was offering him a gift instead of asking him to work until midnight on what was supposed to be a closing shift.
Time and a half of $12.50 an hour was $18.75. An extra hour would be eighteen dollars and seventy-five cents before taxes. Call it fifteen dollars after the government took its cut.
Fifteen dollars to unload a truck full of boxes in the middle of the night while Marcus spiralled and sent increasingly unhinged texts.
"Sure," Cedar heard himself say. "Yeah, I can stay."
Because he needed the money. Because saying no meant being the "difficult employee" and getting his hours cut next week. Because this was his life now — a biology degree collecting dust, sixty thousand dollars in student loans that he was just able to pay off Two thirds of, was going to pay off the rest with the money that Marcus had "borrowed against" (stolen, his sister Maya had said bluntly, he stole your loan money and used it to buy inventory), and a job stocking shelves at JojaMart for poverty wages while pretending he was building toward something instead of just slowly drowning.
The receiving bay was arctic. January in Pine Mesa meant temperatures hovering just above freezing, and the loading dock was essentially outside with a roof. Cedar's breath misted in the air as he and two other guys — both of them also working overtime, both of them looking as dead inside as Cedar felt — started unloading pallets.
His phone buzzed constantly in his pocket. He ignored it. Focused on the work: boxes of canned goods, cases of soda, pallets of paper products. Everything heavy, everything requiring the pallet jack that didn't quite work right, everything needing to be signed for and counted and organized in the back room, where things got lost for weeks because the inventory system was from 1995 and nobody knew how to update it.
By the time they finished, it was 12:15 AM.
Cedar clocked out, grabbed his jacket from his locker, and checked his phone.
Forty-three texts from Marcus.
He didn't read them. Just scrolled through watching the previews escalate: Where are you → Why aren't you home → You're cheating, aren't you → I'm sorry, baby, I didn't mean that → But seriously, where the fuck are you → I swear to god, Cedar.
The last one, sent five minutes ago: I'm at the apartment. you better get here soon.
The threat was clear. Not physical — Marcus had only hit him once, and Cedar had hit back hard enough that Marcus had backed down and never tried again — but psychological. Marcus would be in one of his moods. Would want to "talk." Would need reassurance, attention, forgiveness for whatever he'd convinced himself Cedar had done wrong by not responding immediately.
Would make Cedar's life hell until he performed the right combination of apology and affection to reset Marcus's emotional state back to baseline.
The apartment was a fifteen-minute walk from JojaMart. Cedar walked slowly, putting off the inevitable.
Pine Mesa at midnight was dead. A strip mall town built around a highway exit, kept alive by through-traffic and the faint hope that someday the tech companies in Zuzu City might expand this far and property values would go up. Most of the storefronts were dark — a check-cashing place, a dollar store, a pizza place that had been "temporarily closed" for six months, a vape shop with bars on the windows.
The only lights came from the 24-hour gas station, a bail bonds office, and the Denny's where the same waitress had been working the night shift for three years and looked like she'd aged a decade.
Cedar's breath misted in the cold air. His feet hurt. Everything hurt. He was so tired he could feel it in his bones, in his teeth, in the spaces between his thoughts.
The apartment complex was called "Mesa Vista Gardens," which was aspirational at best and an outright lie at worst. There was no mesa view — just the parking lot of a tire shop. There were no gardens — just patches of dead grass and some shrubs that had given up trying to be green years ago.
The building itself was three stories of peeling stucco and broken security gates, built in the 1970s and not updated since. The pool had been filled with concrete after a kid nearly drowned in it. The playground equipment had been removed after someone OD'd on the swings.
Home sweet home.
Cedar climbed the exterior stairs to the third floor, each step sending protest signals from his legs and back. Apartment 314. The door was slightly ajar.
Great.
He pushed it open. The smell hit him immediately: weed, stale beer, and that particular chemical tang that meant Marcus had been cutting product in the apartment again despite promising — swearing, actually swearing on his mother's life — that he'd do it elsewhere.
Marcus was on the couch, laptop open, surrounded by the evidence of his evening: sandwich bags, a digital scale, and a pile of what looked like pills in various stages of being portioned out. Oxy, probably. Or maybe Adderall this time. Marcus had diversified his inventory over the past six months.
He looked up when Cedar walked in. His eyes were red — not from crying, but from being high. His jaw was tight.
"Where the fuck were you?"
Not a question. An accusation.
"Work." Cedar closed the door, too tired for this. "Told you I had a late shift. Then they asked me to stay for receiving."
"Until after midnight." Marcus's voice was flat. Dangerous. "You couldn't text me back? Not once?"
"I was working. They don't let us have phones on the floor—"
"Bullshit. I know you keep your phone in your pocket. I've seen you." Marcus set down the scale with exaggerated care. "You were ignoring me."
Cedar's hands clenched at his sides. Don't engage. Don't take the bait. Don't give him what he wants.
"I wasn't ignoring you. I was literally unloading a truck for an hour. Both my hands were full of boxes. I couldn't text back even if I wanted to."
"If you wanted to." Marcus latched onto that like a dog with a bone. "So you didn't want to. You didn't want to talk to your boyfriend. The person you supposedly love."
"Marcus—"
"You know what I think?" Marcus stood up now, moving toward Cedar with that particular energy that meant he was building toward something. "I think you're seeing someone. Someone at work. That's why you're always taking extra shifts. Why you're always 'too tired' when you get home. Why you don't want to fuck anymore."
Cedar's exhaustion was transmuting into something else now. Something harder. "I'm not seeing anyone. I'm tired because I just worked a twelve-hour shift stocking shelves and unloading trucks. And I don't want to fuck because I'm exhausted and you're high and you're accusing me of cheating when all I did was go to my shitty job."
"Don't turn this around on me—"
"I'm not turning anything around! I'm stating facts!" Cedar's voice was rising now, the careful control slipping. "You asked where I was. I told you. You don't believe me. That's a you problem, not a me problem."
Marcus's expression shifted — hurt now, wounded. The anger replaced with something that looked like pain, but Cedar had learned was just another manipulation tactic. "I just miss you, okay? I barely see you anymore. You're always working or sleeping or—"
"Because I'm trying to pay off my student loans that you used as collateral for your fucking drug deals!"
The words came out before Cedar could stop them. The thing they never talked about. The thing Marcus had explained away six months ago with tears and apologies and promises that it would never happen again.
Twenty-two thousand dollars. Cedar's third-year student loans, the money he'd borrowed to finish his degree. Marcus had convinced him — begged him — to let Marcus "invest" it. Promised huge returns. Swore it was legitimate.
It wasn't.
Marcus had used it to buy inventory. Oxy, mostly, at wholesale prices from a connect in Zuzu City. Had flipped it for triple the profit and kept the money. By the time Cedar figured it out, the loan was in default, and the interest was compounding.
Marcus's face went cold. "I told you I'd pay you back."
"When? When, Marcus?" Cedar was shaking now, adrenaline and exhaustion and three years of swallowed words finally coming up. "It's been six months. You keep saying you'll pay me back, but every week you've got some new excuse. Business expenses. Restock costs. Your car needs work. Your mom needs money."
"She does need money—"
"I know! Everyone needs money! Including me, because I've got debt collectors calling me about loans that I don't have the money for, because you stole it!"
"I didn't steal — I borrowed —"
"Without asking! That's called stealing!"
They stood in the middle of the shitty apartment, both breathing hard, three years of dysfunction compressed into this single moment.
Marcus moved first. Crossed the space between them, reaching for Cedar's face with hands that smelled like weed and chemical residue. "Baby. Baby, I'm sorry. I know I fucked up. I'm fixing it, I promise. Just give me a little more time—"
Cedar stepped back. Out of reach. "No."
"No?"
"No more time. No more excuses. No more promises you're not going to keep." Cedar's voice was steady now, certainty settling into his chest like a weight. "I'm done."
Marcus laughed. Not because it was funny — because he couldn't believe what he was hearing. "You're done? Just like that?"
"Not just like that. It's been building for months. For years, if I'm honest." Cedar looked around the apartment — the evidence of drug dealing on the coffee table, the dishes piled in the sink, the mold growing in the bathroom they both pretended not to see, the stain on the ceiling from the leak upstairs that the landlord wouldn't fix, the general atmosphere of decay and dysfunction. "I can't do this anymore."
"Where are you going to go?" Marcus's voice had an edge now. Not threatening — calculating. Trying to find leverage. "You can't afford your own place. You barely make minimum wage."
"I'll figure it out."
"Yeah? How? Going to move back in with your mom? With your Uncle Tom and all those kids? I'm sure they'd love having another mouth to feed—"
"Or maybe," Marcus said, his voice taking on the particular careful flatness that meant he'd been sitting on something for a while and had decided now was the time, "you'll go running to Adrian."
Cedar stopped.
Turned around slowly.
"What did you just say."
"Adrian." Marcus said it like a name he'd rehearsed. Like a card he'd been holding. "You mention him. You think I haven't noticed? Every time your mom calls, every time you talk about going back up north, it's Adrian this, Adrian that. You're too close to him. I've always said it."
Cedar stared at him.
"You think I'm—" He couldn't finish the sentence. Started again. "Marcus. Adrian is my stepfather."
"That's what you say."
"That's what he is. He married my mother. He has been married to my mother for six years. I have called him my stepfather to your face, in front of you, at minimum a dozen times."
"People say things—"
"He is fifty-three years old, and he coaches little league, and he cries at nature documentaries." Cedar's voice had gone very quiet, which was somehow worse than shouting. "You have been jealous of my stepfather. You have been building a whole thing in your head about a man who sends me birthday cards and fixes my mom's gutters and once drove four hours in a snowstorm to help my brother move a couch."
Marcus's jaw worked. "I just think you're—"
"Do not finish that sentence." Cedar looked at him for a long moment. Not angry. Something further past anger than that. Tired in a way that had nothing to do with the twelve-hour shift. "I have defended you to my family for three years. My sister Maya told me to leave you after six months. My brother called you a leech to my face and I told him he was wrong. I have spent three years telling everyone who loves me that they didn't understand you, that you were complicated, that if they could just see what I saw they'd get it."
He turned toward the bedroom.
Marcus followed him. Got ahead of him, actually — stepped into the doorway, shoulder against the frame, blocking it with the particular body language of someone who had decided this conversation wasn't finished.
"You're not walking away from me right now."
Cedar stopped. The tired thing in his chest had gone very still.
"Move."
"No." Marcus's voice had found its cruelty now, the register it only reached when he was high and cornered and had decided that damage was the only card he had left. "You want to go? Fine. Go back to your sad little family. Go back to your junkie mom and her charity husband and her charity case kids and let them look at you — with your degree that doesn't get you work and your job that doesn't pay worth shit and nothing to show for three years except a bag of clothes and a rifle you bought off my father because you couldn't afford your own—"
Cedar hit him.
Not a shove. Not a warning. A real punch, right cross, the kind that had three years of held breath behind it — the kind that came from a man built like a gridball player who had been carrying something very heavy for a very long time and had just put it down.
Marcus went into the doorframe hard, rebounded, sat down against it. Stared up with an expression Cedar had never seen on him before: genuine, undisguised surprise. Like he had always assumed, somewhere underneath everything, that this particular line would hold.
Cedar's hand hurt. He flexed it once, twice.
"Get Out" Marcus said, voice thick. Testing whether this had changed anything.
"I'm not going to hit you again." Cedar stepped past him into the bedroom. "But I'm leaving with my things, and if you touch me or that bag, I will call the cops and walk them straight to that coffee table."
He meant it. Marcus, still sitting against the doorframe, could see he meant it.
"Fine," Marcus said, after a moment. His voice had gone very flat. "Go. I don't care."
Cedar went to the bedroom, grabbed his duffel bag — military surplus, green canvas and brass buckles, the kind of bag built to carry everything a person needed through things they'd rather forget. Started throwing things in: clothes, toiletries, his laptop, the field guides and textbooks he'd kept from college.
His grandfather's binoculars. The good ones, Zeiss, worth more than everything else he owned combined. Grandpa had left them to him when he died. Cedar would live in his car before he left these behind. He wrapped them in a flannel shirt and set them in the center of the bag like something sacred.
The hunting knife that had been a sixteenth birthday present. His compound bow, disassembled into pieces that fit along one side.
The few photos he had of his family, his siblings.
His biology degree, still in its frame. He pulled it out of the frame, rolled it up, and shoved it in a side pocket. Sixty thousand dollars in debt for a piece of paper that had gotten him exactly nowhere.
Finally, from the top of the closet, his rifle. He'd bought it off Marcus's father two years back — a private sale, a favour, a price low enough that Cedar had been able to manage it — and wrapped it in its cloth case the day he moved in, a precaution that had, in hindsight, been good instinct. He eased it down carefully, tucked it along the bottom of the duffel beneath the clothes and the field guides, the case's worn canvas swallowed by the bag's depth. Nobody looking at a stuffed military duffel on a bus would have any reason to think twice.
He shouldered the bag.
Marcus appeared in the doorway. "If you leave—"
"I'm leaving."
"—don't come back. I mean it. You walk out that door, we're done."
"We were done six months ago. We just didn't admit it." Cedar zipped the duffel. It was heavier than he'd expected, but not unmanageable. Everything he owned in the world. "I'm admitting it now."
He walked to the dresser — the one they shared, the one Marcus had claimed three of the four drawers in. Cedar opened Marcus's sock drawer, knowing what he'd find.
The cash box.
Marcus kept his profits in a fireproof lockbox hidden under winter socks he'd never wear because Pine Mesa never got cold enough for them. The combination was Marcus's mother's birthday because Marcus was sentimental and predictable.
Cedar opened it.
Inside: rubber-banded stacks of twenties and fifties. Drug money. Money Marcus had made selling oxy to people who'd probably developed addictions, who'd probably overdosed, whose lives had probably been destroyed by the same pills Marcus portioned out on that coffee table.
Money that was partially bought with Cedar's stolen student loans.
"Don't," Marcus said from the doorway.
Cedar counted. Twenty-two stacks, each one a hundred dollars thick with mixed bills. Twenty-two thousand dollars, give or take.
The exact amount Cedar's third-year loans had been worth, before interest, before six months of compounding default, before the debt collectors started calling.
He took all of it.
"That's mine—"
"It was mine first." Cedar shoved the cash into the duffel's front pocket, the one that zipped shut. His hands were completely steady. That was a thing he noticed distantly, the way you noticed your own heartbeat — that his hands weren't shaking at all. "You borrowed twenty-two thousand dollars from me without asking. I'm taking it back. With the interest it's earned sitting in your sock drawer while I worked myself into the ground paying minimums on a defaulted loan."
"Cedar—"
"Stop me." He zipped the pocket closed. "Go ahead. Call the cops. Report the theft. Tell them exactly where you got twenty-two thousand dollars in cash and what you used my student money for in the first place. I fucking dare you."
Marcus didn't move.
Cedar walked past him, duffel bag over his shoulder, twenty-two thousand dollars zipped into the front pocket, everything he owned compressed into things that could fit on a bus.
At the door, he turned back. Marcus was standing in the middle of the apartment, surrounded by evidence of his crimes, looking smaller than Cedar had ever seen him.
"I'm sorry," Marcus said. "I really am. I did love you. I do love you."
"I know." And that was the worst part. Marcus probably did love him, in his broken, dysfunctional way. "But it's not enough. It was never going to be enough."
Cedar walked out. Closed the door on three years of mistakes.
The Greyhound station was open 24 hours. Cedar bought a ticket with some of Marcus's drug money — $87 back to Pelican Town, a route that would take nine hours with three transfers and a layover in a town whose name he'd already forgotten, where he could hopefully begin transferring some of this money.
He had four hours to kill before the 3 AM bus.
He called his sister Maya. She answered on the second ring, voice thick with sleep.
"Cedar? What's wrong?"
"I left." His voice came out steadier than he expected. "I left Marcus. I'm at the bus station."
Silence. Then: "Thank god. Finally. Are you okay?"
"No. But I will be." Cedar looked at the other people in the station — a mom with two sleeping kids, a guy who looked like he'd been traveling for days, an elderly woman knitting. All of them going somewhere else. All of them leaving something behind. "I'm getting out of Pine Mesa. Got a job offer back in Pelican Town."
Silence of a different kind.
"Pelican Town," Maya said. "Like — Marnie's Pelican Town."
"Yeah."
"Our Pelican Town."
"It's still there. Apparently they need a biologist." Cedar pulled up the email on his phone — the one he'd read four times without replying to, sent a few weeks back from an address he didn't recognise, offering part-time ecological work, something about grant documentation and local wildlife assessment, with a vague line at the bottom about accommodation being available for the right candidate. He hadn't replied. Had told himself he was thinking about it. Had been thinking about it every day since. "Pays like shit. But there's somewhere to stay, sounds like. And it's — it's home. Sort of. It was, once."
"That's great, Ced." Maya's voice had gone warm in the way it did when she was trying not to cry. "You should go back. You should've gone back ages ago."
"I know."
"You need anything? Money? A place to crash while you figure things out?"
"No, I'm okay." Cedar thought about the twenty-two thousand dollars zipped into the front pocket of his duffel. Dirty money. Money he'd taken back from someone who'd stolen it first. He was going to put twenty-one thousand of it directly into the account with the debt collectors the moment any bank was open, pay off every cent of what Marcus had defaulted on, and sever every financial tie he had to Pine Mesa in one transaction. The remaining thousand was bus fare and groceries and a bridge to whatever came next. "I've got enough to get on my feet. I'll be fine."
"Call me when you get there. Tell Marnie I said hi."
"She might not even remember me."
Maya laughed, short and sharp, like that was the funniest thing she'd heard in weeks. "Cedar. She will absolutely remember you."
After they hung up, Cedar sat with his duffel between his feet and looked around the station. The fluorescent lights were the same as JojaMart's, that same dull hum, that same particular shade of institutional white that flattened everything it touched. A vending machine in the corner had three items stuck in its spiral mechanisms. A television mounted near the ceiling played a news channel with the sound off.
He had nothing to do for four hours.
He went to the 24-hour drugstore two blocks from the station and bought a box of bleach powder, a bottle of neon lime green dye, a pair of latex gloves, and a plastic mixing bowl. Paid with a twenty from his pocket and didn't wait for small talk from the bored cashier.
Back in the station bathroom — single occupancy, the lock actually worked — Cedar stood at the sink and mixed the bleach.
He didn't think too hard about what he was doing or why. His roots were dark auburn. Had always been. Born that way, like his grandfather, like his mother before her hair went grey. He'd been dyeing it since he was seventeen, chasing whatever colour felt right for whoever he was trying to be that year. Red, then black, then blue, then that disastrous copper phase he didn't talk about.
He wanted something loud. Something that didn't belong in Pine Mesa. Something that would look absolutely insane under the grey-green mist of where he was going, and be perfect for exactly that reason.
He worked the bleach through methodically, section by section, the way he'd taught himself to do years ago. Waited. The station's single hand dryer served as an approximation enough. Then the green — a specific, aggressive, almost radioactive lime, the colour of something that grew in places it shouldn't. He worked it in, wrapped his hair in a plastic bag from the drugstore, sat on the closed toilet lid, and read the Wikipedia article on Pacific salmon runs on his phone while he waited.
Twenty-five minutes.
He rinsed in the sink, dried as best he could, and looked at himself in the spotted mirror above the tap.
Dark auburn roots. Lime green from there to the ends, bright enough to be slightly upsetting under fluorescent light. His resting expression, which Maya had once described as "a man considering a verdict," looked exactly the same as always. The contrast was, genuinely, a lot.
He looked like himself. Like who he actually was. For the first time in a while.
Cedar cleaned up the neon-stained sink as best he could, bagged his mess, and walked back out into the station.
At 2:58 AM, the 3 AM bus pulled up to the curb. Cedar shouldered his duffel, twenty-two thousand dollars in the front pocket, biology degree rolled in the side pocket, grandfather's binoculars wrapped in flannel, rifle nested in its cloth case at the bottom of it all.
He climbed onto the bus, found a seat in the back, and watched Pine Mesa disappear through the rain-streaked window.
Didn't look back.
Didn't let himself think about Marcus waking up alone in that apartment, hungover, finding the cash was really missing, realizing it was all real, and it was all really over.
Just sat in the dark, surrounded by strangers, heading back to a place he hadn't been in eleven years, for a job that paid barely enough to matter, with twenty-two thousand dollars in drug money and a biology degree that had never been worth the paper it was printed on.
But it was his choice. His money. His life.
For the first time in three years, Cedar was making his own decisions instead of just surviving someone else's.
The bus pulled onto the highway, heading north toward the mountains, toward valleys still dark and wet and full of things worth studying, toward Pelican Town, toward whatever came next.
Cedar closed his eyes, leaned his forehead against the cold window, and let himself believe — just for a moment — that maybe this time things would be different.
Maybe this time he'd get it right.
The universe laughed, but quietly, so he couldn't quite hear it over the rumble of the bus engine and the sound of rain on the roof.
End of Prologue