Chapter 1 — The Road That Led Nowhere
The first thing he noticed was the silence.
Not outside. Inside the car.
No music. No podcasts. No voice from the GPS telling him where to turn next. Just the engine humming low beneath him and the sound of tires eating up wet asphalt somewhere outside Moscow.
He left because staying felt worse.
The apartment still smelled like old coffee, stale laundry, and that particular kind of failure that sticks to the walls no matter how long you leave the windows open. His phone sat face down on the kitchen table like a dead insect. Missed calls. Messages. Bills. Maybe one apology he didn’t want to read. He didn’t check.
Artyom pulled the door shut behind him without even making sure it locked. Didn’t matter. There was nothing in there worth stealing anymore.
The car greeted him like an old drinking buddy. No warmth. No judgment either.
He slid into the seat, started the engine, and sat there for a moment staring through the windshield. Night hung over the road in dirty gray layers. Streetlights smeared themselves across melting snow piled along the curbs. Everything looked tired. Even the city seemed exhausted with itself.
“Alright,” he muttered.
Not to the car. Not to himself. Just to the dark.
He drove without navigation on purpose. That part mattered. GPS was for people who knew where they were going. He didn’t. Maybe he never really had.
At first the city held onto him the way cities always do. Traffic lights. Horns. Nervous lane changes from people racing home to lives they probably hated. Then little by little it loosened its grip. Buildings got shorter. Then fewer. Then gone.
Soon there was only the highway.
The kind where headlights from passing trucks look like brief flashes of somebody else’s existence. Everybody out there heading somewhere. Delivering something. Returning to someone.
Everybody except you.
He realized he’d been driving nearly forty minutes without holding onto a single complete thought. His mind drifted like a busted radio station cutting in and out between static.
Work.
“We had to make some difficult decisions…”
Sure they did.
Five years of your life and suddenly everybody “has to.”
Then Lena.
“You’ve become… empty.”
She said it gently, too. That was the worst part.
Money.
Hell, there wasn’t enough left to even think about seriously.
He laughed under his breath.
The strange thing wasn’t that his life had fallen apart. The strange thing was he couldn’t point to the exact moment it happened. No dramatic collapse. No single mistake. Just tiny turns taken without thinking until one day you look around and realize you don’t recognize the road anymore.
He pressed harder on the gas.
The highway stretched ahead of him like a question nobody expected answered.
Every now and then a semi roared past in the opposite direction, massive and determined. Those guys always had someplace to be. Cargo. Routes. Deadlines.
All he had was motion.
He reached into the glove compartment and found a crushed pack of cigarettes.
One left.
“Of course.”
He lit it.
Smoke filled the cabin, mixing with cold air slipping through the cracked window. The cigarette tasted stale. Everything lately tasted stale.
Then the thought came.
Quietly.
What if he just kept driving?
Not into a tree. Not off a bridge. Nothing dramatic.
Just… keep going until the gas ran out.
And stop there.
The thought should’ve scared him.
It didn’t.
That was the part that stayed with him.
His headlights caught a highway sign, but he never bothered reading it. Could’ve been any town. Any direction. It all felt equally pointless tonight.
Time stretched strangely out there. Thick. Sticky. More than once he caught himself wondering if he’d already passed the same stretch of road before.
Same lane markings.
Same poles.
Same dead yellow lights.
Then he glanced at the dashboard.
The fuel needle was almost empty.
“Well, that’s perfect,” he said aloud.
No gas stations. No exits. Nothing.
He eased his foot off the pedal and the car slowed slightly, almost grateful for it.
“Let’s be honest,” he said quietly. “We’re not making it far.”
And for the first time all night, something hit him clean and direct:
He truly had no idea where he was going.
Not vaguely.
Not spiritually.
Literally.
There was no destination. No plan waiting somewhere at the end of the road. Just movement for the sake of movement.
And suddenly even that started feeling stupid.
Like a man pretending to believe in a life he checked out of years ago.
He tightened his grip on the wheel.
Darkness stretched ahead of him. Thick highway darkness. Endless.
Somewhere deep inside, something finally admitted the truth:
He couldn’t keep living like this.
The problem was he had no idea how else to live.
Then, far ahead in the distance, his headlights caught something faint.
A light.
He narrowed his eyes.
For a second he thought maybe he imagined it.
But the light stayed there.
Small. Yellow. Motionless.
Artyom leaned forward slightly, as if that would somehow bring it closer.
“Well,” he whispered. “That’s something.”
He didn’t know yet what kind of place waited for him up ahead.
Or why it seemed to be waiting at all.
He only knew he was driving toward the light.
