As Oliver remained occupied with the mechanical symphony, Thomas felt a gnawing need to confirm what he had seen in the ladder's mirror.
He reached out and grasped the large, circular mirror—half a meter in diameter—that was bolted near the dashboard. He intended to tilt it toward his face, to study the "youth" staring back at him.
"No, don't—it will—" Oliver started to warn.
Tuck!
Before the warning could leave Oliver's lips, the mirror resisted Thomas's pull for a split second before a muffled snapping sound echoed through the cabin. The rusted mounting bracket sheared off completely, and the heavy mirror came loose in Thomas's hand.
"—will break," Oliver finished, his voice trailing off into a sigh.
Thomas sat there, frozen, holding the massive mirror in one hand like a discarded shield. He slowly turned his head to look at Oliver, waiting for an outburst of anger or an explanation of how fragile the machine was.
"Never mind," Oliver said, waving an arm dismissively as if a piece of his "baby" falling off was of no consequence.
"At least I'll have my own story to tell now! Hahahaha! You should hear the tales from the other settlements. One of my rivals—a real piece of work, that guy—he found a superhero who could actually release fire from his eyes! Can you imagine? The kid couldn't control it, and ended up burning down half the testing site and everyone around him. He went completely insane later, turned into one of those 'villain' types. As the saying goes, showing off your power before the formal test is a bad, terribly bad sign. It's a blessing you haven't shown us any 'tricks' yet, hahahaha!"
Thomas's eye twitched. The logic of this world was a labyrinth of insanity. He looked back into the mirror he was still holding, his breath hitching as he stared at the reflection.
The face was young. The jawline was sharp, the skin tan and healthy, and the hair was a thick, unruly mane of black—missing the "groove" he had lived with for years.
"Who the hell are you?" he thought, his reflection's eyes tracking his every move.
Deep within his mind, a new storm erupted. This wasn't the shallow confusion of a detective on a weird case; this was a fundamental crisis of the soul. Thomas felt like a newborn thrust into a world of blinding light and deafening noise.
Emotions—once explored only through the dry pages of medical journals—were now a visceral torture. His head ached with a rhythmic, pulsing intensity, and his mind felt as if it were being tossed about in a fierce tornado.
The "nothingness" of his old life had been a shield. Now that the shield was gone, the raw data of human feeling was tearing his internal architecture apart.
"Are you alright?" Oliver asked, his voice cutting through the mental fog. He sounded genuinely concerned, noticing how Thomas was clutching his head with both hands.
"I'm just... feeling dizzy," Thomas managed to choke out. He lacked the vocabulary to explain the psychological disintegration he was currently enduring.
"It's all normal, champ! Just the weight of destiny!" Oliver laughed, reaching for a final, massive lever in the centre of the console. "You've just had a door opened for you—a door to a bright, golden future. Now, hold on tight. Becky is finally ready to show you what she can do!"
He yanked the lever back with a grunt of effort.
ROAR!
The engine compartment beneath them didn't just start; it screamed. A deep, guttural vibration shook the very marrow of Thomas's bones as the scrap-metal behemoth lurched forward, leaving the testing grounds behind and charging into the unknown.
Just like a great, sleepy beast being prodded awake with a hot iron, the giant metallic behemoth roared.
The sound didn't just hit Thomas's ears; it vibrated through his ribcage, rattling his very teeth.
Back on Earth, Thomas had ridden in nearly every type of vehicle imaginable, from luxury sedans to heavy-duty military transports designed for the roughest terrain in West Africa. He had always considered those armoured carriers to be the pinnacle of punishing transit.
But every military vehicle he had ever known paled in comparison to the experience of riding inside Becky.
The moment the engine ignited, a massive, oily gush of black smoke erupted from the chimney on the side, momentarily blotting out the orange sun.
Then, the entire behemoth began to tremble and heave, shaking with such violence that Thomas was certain the mismatched metal plates were going to shear off their rivets and scatter across the desert.
"Is this… normal?!" Thomas shouted, but his voice was swallowed by the mechanical shriek of the machine.
The minutes that followed were a pure, unadulterated torture. It was a test of physical endurance that Thomas was wholly unprepared for.
As Becky lurched into motion, it became clear that Oliver drove the massive machine as if it were his first time behind the wheel—or perhaps as if he were trying to break a land-speed record in a junkyard.
If Thomas had thought the initial shaking was rough, he learned the true meaning of the word the moment Becky began to roll.
The vehicle didn't glide over the flat ground on its massive tyres. Instead, it felt as if the wheels weren't circles at all, but some jagged, irregular oval shape.
With every few meters of progress, Thomas felt the entire deck rise up like a cresting wave, only to suddenly, jarringly, slam back down into the dirt.
To his bruised body, it felt harder than riding a bucking horse; no, it was worse than being tethered to the back of a panicked, running camel. Every impact sent a shockwave through his spine that made his vision blur.
"It's looking great, isn't it?" Oliver was laughing, his voice barely audible over the din. He seemed to take Thomas's look of sheer, wide-eyed terror as a compliment. "Hang on tight, champ! Now that she's warmed up, we're really going to speed up!"
"No… wait! Hell, wait!" Thomas's detective instincts were screaming at him to find a point of stability. "Where are the safety belts? Oliver! Where are the damn belts?!"
"What belts?" Oliver shouted back, not giving a single damn about Thomas's protests. He didn't even look over as he slammed another lever forward, further increasing Becky's erratic speed.
Thomas felt like he was strapped to a rocket-powered camel that had just been fired out of a cannon.
Becky didn't fly, but she seemed to want to. She ate the ground underneath her with a predatory hunger, maintained that rhythmic, nauseating cycle of rising and falling.
The air wasn't just moving past them now; it was slamming fiercely against Thomas's face like a succession of open-handed slaps. He was being tossed up and down as if he were trapped inside a giant, industrial-sized blender.
"Hang tight! Going faster now!"
"Faster, my ass! Do you want to get me killed?!" Thomas screamed into the gale. His words were instantly whipped away by the wind and the deafening, metallic bellows of the engine.
As Becky accelerated, releasing even thicker plumes of black smoke that formed a long, mourning trail across the horizon, Thomas was forced into a desperate, singular focus.
He hung onto the side of the deck with his left hand, his fingers white-knuckled as they gripped the cold railing. With his right arm, he squeezed his Bonsai tree against his chest, protecting the swirling fog and the mysterious bubble with his own body.
The mirror he had broken earlier didn't last ten seconds into the acceleration. A particularly violent gust of wind caught the heavy glass, and it was blown clean out of the cabin, shattered somewhere in the dust behind them.
Thomas didn't even notice. He had no room in his mind for anything but a single, pulsing thought: Survive.
For the second time since his arrival, he experienced that overwhelming, terrifying surge of the survival instinct. It was a raw, primal energy that pushed aside his dizziness and his confusion.
SCREECH!
Thomas had no concept of how much time had passed. His eyes were watering so badly from the wind that the world had become a smear of orange and brown.
He felt the atmospheric pressure against his chest like a gigantic, heavy fist, pinning him into his seat. He had always wondered why vehicles on Earth were enclosed—why engineers spent so much time on cabins and windshields.
Now, in the roughest way possible, he had his answer. Human beings were not meant to move at these speeds while exposed to the elements.
Just as he felt he might lose his grip and be flung into the wilderness, he heard a sound like a giant clenching his teeth—a grinding, metallic screech of brakes.
"We're here," Oliver announced cheerfully.
The silence that followed the engine's cutoff was deafening. Thomas turned to look at the man, his chest heaving, his hair a wild, tangled mess. He was shocked to see that Oliver looked perfectly fine. The older man was now wearing a pair of old-fashioned, heavy leather goggles with thick glass lenses.
"You… you…" Thomas sputtered, his rage and frustration boiling over. He pointed a trembling finger at the goggles, unable to find the words.
"Oh!" Oliver looked surprised, then sheepish. He tapped the leather strap. "I totally forgot to give you a pair. Sorry about that! It's a bit of a habit of mine to forget the little things like that. Hahahaha!"
"Forget the little things?! You almost drove me to a heart attack! I nearly flew off this rusted bucket a dozen times!"
Thomas clenched his fists, his knuckles cracking. Every detective training module he'd ever taken on 'de-escalation' was failing him. He wanted to punch the goggles right off Oliver's smiling face.
It took a full, agonising minute of deep breathing for Thomas to check his rage. He didn't want to show this "weirdo" how much he had been fazed. He forced his muscles to relax and plastered a pale, stiff smile onto his face, masking his internal turmoil with the cold efficiency of his old self.
"That's our champ! Tough as nails!" Oliver said, punctuating the comment with a heavy, bone-jarring slap to Thomas's back. "Look out there. This is our little settlement—Dante. What do you think? It's a bit different from your wilderness villages, eh?"
Thomas finally shifted his gaze away from Oliver's goggles and looked toward the horizon.
He had expected a slum. Based on the scrap-metal nightmare that was Becky and the rugged, handmade clothes they wore, he had imagined Dante would be a cluster of tents and shacks huddling in the dirt—a place of poverty and ruin. He expected to see people in rags, living in the shadow of the desert.
But what welcomed his wind-burned, reddened eyes was something else entirely. It was a sight that defied his expectations and made him realise, once again, that he understood nothing about this world.