The mirror in the Vagabond gave me back a stranger’s face. Nose swollen. Eye bruised. I didn’t care. The thugs who had come to assault me at the hotel would be surprised to see me alive.
The hammer and knife lay on the floor. I wrapped them in a motel towel. Grabbed my car keys and phone. My ’74 Dodge Dart waited outside with its trunk full of old typewriters, ghost keys possessed by the spirits of hundreds of dead writers who had once owned them, until their middle fingers got stuck from a severe case of Dupuytren’s Contracture.
I left the Vagabond in a hurry, heading south on Biscayne toward Van Orsdel Crematorium. The Mayan artifact my grandfather had given me on his deathbed needed to be recovered. I had to hold it before it disappeared.
The Dart coughed, then roared awake. I pressed the gas. It leapt forward like the devil on a leash, every gear shift a tug at the chain. I almost let it go.
Somewhere between the neon of pawn shops and the crematory sign, I saw her, Amara Li. First in a dream days ago, and now, in a flash vision from the future. She sat beside me on the bench seat, translucent and barefoot, dress wet, hair slick as if combed by the tide. She looked ahead, not at me.
The city broke in a pause. The present dissolved. I was underwater in the year 2150. Biscayne Boulevard was a drowned causeway. Condos like reefs, balconies heavy with coral. Street signs swaying, unreadable. Cemeteries emptied. My own ashes dissolved in saltwater, drifting in the Biscayne currents. It hit me like a tsunami I didn’t see coming, salt and decay, fear and awe so murky I could not breathe.
Her hand brushed the rearview mirror. “You’ve been here before,” she said. Her voice was a current through time. I gripped the wheel for control. I could feel her presence, the future spilling into the present. The hammer and knife hummed. My grandfather’s dying words echoed: You are its keeper. Its voice is yours.
The Dart tore down Biscayne Boulevard, southbound. Typewriters clattered in the trunk, like ghost fingers on keys. The city rose and fell around me, living and drowned. The air smelled of salt and something else I couldn’t name.
I didn’t understand it. I didn’t need to. The artifact, the flood, the ghost beside me, they were all the same. I was moving through time, through an undertow, and moving fast.
I made a right on Biscayne and Northeast 34th Street. The Dart stopped in front of Van Orsdel Crematorium, engine ticking down, headlights spilling across cracked pavement.
I pushed the door open and got out. My shirt was bloody, boxers torn. Knife in one hand, hammer in the other.
Above the crematorium, the sky had turned unnatural, burgundy and red streaked with blue and purple. Lightning flashed slow and deliberate, like the heartbeat of some enormous, unseen storm. A category seven hurricane seemed trapped in the clouds, waiting.
I knew the artifact was inside. Activated. Calling me. I could feel its pulse through the metal in my hands, through the blood on my skin, through the heat of the smoky air. The wind carried the smell of ash, ozone, and salt. I didn’t look back at the Dart. The typewriters rattled in the trunk like a warning, ghost keys clicking in the dark.
The door was cracked open. Smoke poured out in thick, black waves. The smell, faintly barbecue. I stepped inside. My lungs started to burn.
The crematorium was a furnace. Flames roared along the walls, devouring everything. The furnaces were abandoned. Bodies lay still beneath the smoke and heat, untouched. Only fire and the roar of it.
The artifact burned in the back center of the room, white-hot, red-hot, almost alive. I could feel it throbbing in my hands even before I touched it.
Something glimmered on the floor, a single heat-resistant glove. I dropped the hammer and snatched it, palm slick with sweat, fingers stinging from the heat. The artifact was on my hand.
The smoke clawed at my throat. I stumbled forward. Amara was inside my mind, her presence warm and urgent, threading through memories of that Miami night when the AC had broken, and she had first whispered into my dreams. It tests you. Not for strength. For everything you are.
I moved down the center aisle, past rows of marble niches, blackened urns, and stainless-steel beds on wheels, every step slow. Shadows clung to the walls, but I could see enough to keep my footing. Lightning from the storm above streaked through stained-glass windows, casting long stripes of burgundy, violet, and blue across the floor. The artifact pulsed in response, a steady rhythm I could follow in the dark.
At the far end, Amara waited, hovering just above the ground, hair slick, eyes reflecting the storm outside. She did not speak aloud. I heard her voice in my head: Do not falter. You are its keeper.
The pedestal rose a few steps ahead, plain marble, artifact glowing faintly atop it. Smoke curled around the edges but did not obscure the way. I stepped forward, knife steady in one hand, hammer in the other, following the pulse.
The artifact now on my hand pulsed harder, demanding, insistent, alive. I could feel it threading through me, through everything I was, everything I had ever thrived for. I remembered my grandfather.
I moved back toward the exit, lungs burning, smoke thickening enough to remind me of the danger, but not so much I couldn’t see the path.
That’s when I saw them.
Two bodies sprawled on the floor, semi-fresh but already catching flame. The stench hit me first, sickly sweet, mixed with scorched leather. The fire crawled up their clothes, licking at blistered skin, erasing faces I had last seen snarling in the half-light of my apartment doorway. A flash, one of them shoving me against the wall, the other yanking the artifact from my hands. Another, the metallic taste of blood in my mouth as the door slammed behind them.
Now, their eyes, what was left, stared glassy into the dark, frozen wide, as if they had seen what was coming but too late to run. The flames made quick work, turning muscle to shadow, shadow to ash.
I stepped past without slowing, the artifact pulsing like a second heartbeat in my hand, and made my way toward the exit.
Outside, Biscayne Boulevard sparkled with water. The Sinbad Motel at 62nd half-submerged, its neon sign flickering, reflecting in shallow pools. The Dart waited, engine growling, typewriters rattling in the trunk. I climbed in, chest burning, muscles screaming. The artifact no longer hot, but glowing beside me on the bench seat.
Amara Li whispered in my mind: Alive. Wild-eyed. Burned but unbroken.
I pressed the gas and headed back to the Vagabond Hotel. The city rushed past, alive, drowned, chaotic. I moved faster than the world could follow, the artifact glowing beside me. In the rearview mirror, everything slid away. I caught a glimpse of my strange, bloody face. And In that madness, I smiled.
