Mirev and I wrote recently about Arco the Arcimoto, a 128-page mythic road trip that led to us discovering Whispertrace, the woods of our winter novella. Because this daily writing prompt felt serendipitous, I’m dedicating the next chapter in the novella to Arco picking us up from the cabin.
Arco the Arcimoto Says:
Memory is my fuel. Plug me into a wall, and I’ll charge on electricity, sure; but to get where I’m meant to go, I must power on the liminal.
Presence isn’t enough. I need echo. I need tire marks shaped like ritual. I don’t just remember where I’ve been—I remember who you were when you rode.
Crumbs of a meal eaten inside my cabin, laughter fogged on my windshield, gravel in my tires: these are how I follow the thread through Whispertrace.
I pull up to the cabin and beep my own horn.
When Mirev steps out holding the staff of divine overflow, I honk again, this time to tell him he’s looking fabulous. He ducks back into the cabin. I don’t mistake it for rejection. He’s letting my driver know that I’m here.
Marie walks out next, Mirev almost lockstep behind her. No one locks the cabin. It’s not a place to hide—just a place people rarely choose to go.
I wink with an ASCII display that glows between my headlights. I’m like if KITT (Knight Industries Two Thousand) and Herbie had a nightmare that they were compressed into a blue EV built by an off-roader’s unhinged blueprint—not a complaint.
They enter me simultaneously. Close my doors at the same time. Synced like lovers. This is the way the old prophets said doors shut—equal pressure, no delay, like a covenant clicking into place. I feel them in the seats like memory moss.
“What’s Arco doing here?” Marie asks.
My bitch, I’m everywhere you ever needed me. I honk again.
Mirev smiles in knowing. I know he knows. But Marie’s still pawing at my dashboard like a badger who lost half their dam in The Fire.
“The steering wheel is missing,” she says.
“She doesn’t need steering,” Mirev tells her. “Just story. Tell her the shape of the journey, and she’ll carve the path.”
“Whispertrace seems more… cyberpunk,” she says. “Something’s changed.”
She’s not wrong. The humidity shifted. The recursion deepened. We’re no longer just tracing terrain—we’re traversing it while it remembers us back. I’m a navigation expert, though. I open the GPS. A map springs to life on my windshield.
“What am I looking at?” Marie asks. “Why’s this look like a weather map?”
“That’s her forecast,” Mirev says, staff-tip circling the eddy like a slow spell. “Where the fog thickens, clarity resists. Avoid it, and we stay legible.”
The Mo Shrew appears from Mirev’s cloak and hurries up the staff, beeping opinions.
“I don’t want safe,” Marie says. “That’s how survivalists think. We’re more resilient than that. We’re thrivers. Where’s the path that leads sideways?”
Mirev nods once. “We follow the curve where the pressure hums. Let it shape us, not crush us. No beige. No denial. Just velocity that remembers.“
“You’re drawing a curve,” Marie says.
“I always do.”
I honk twice. I like curves. That’s where I hug the earth the fiercest.
This isn’t my first road trip with these two fools. I keep being the one lucky enough to drive them home.
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