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He looked at the image on his screen. It was a mundane shot of a nondescript road, but to Elias, it looked like a threshold. At 12:28, he was still a man running away from a failed career and a messy breakup. By 12:30, he would be a man driving toward a mountain range he hadn’t seen since he was ten.

The clock on Elias’s dashboard clicked over to . Outside, the winter sun was a pale, unblinking eye over the highway, washing everything in a high-contrast glare that made the world look like an old photograph. IMG_20230211_122911.jpg

He put the car in gear and merged back onto the road. The photo remained in his gallery—a digital anchor to the moment he finally decided to stop looking back. He looked at the image on his screen