The city didn't calm down after the collapse.
It got meaner.
The dust cloud from the fallen structure turned the air into a choking gray curtain, and through it came silhouettes—cruisers skidding, officers shouting, civilians abandoning cars in panic because they couldn't tell what was safe anymore. Sirens wailed in fractured harmony, some close, some distant, some suddenly cut off mid-note as units collided or stalled.
And through all of it—smoke, sparks, fear—Wanted kept moving.
The BMW tore out of the haze like a wounded animal that refused to lie down, scraping metal on concrete, one headlight dead, the other flickering like an eye that wouldn't fully close. It shoved through the city with a brutality that didn't look like skill anymore.
It looked like defiance.
Behind it, Brian followed through the wreckage.
Not as a cop. Not cleanly. Not with any neat justification he could report later.
He drove with his teeth clenched and his hands locked on the wheel, Mitsubishi bucking over broken pavement, tires slipping in scattered gravel and debris. Every time he should've backed off—every time common sense screamed this is suicide—something in him leaned forward instead.
Because now it wasn't just a chase.
It was a question that had become personal: what kind of thing survives that?
He passed a cruiser that had nosed into a smashed barrier, hood steaming. Another unit sat half sideways across a lane, wheel bent wrong, lights still strobing as if the car hadn't gotten the message that it was done. Officers ran, shouting, trying to re-form a perimeter that kept dissolving.
Brian threaded through them like a ghost of his own, jaw tight, eyes scanning.
Above, the news chopper stayed on it.
The spotlight washed over the torn street, caught dust swirling like ash, caught the BMW's blue-and-silver streak reappearing in flashes—sometimes sharp, sometimes half-swallowed by smoke.
The anchor's voice had lost its performative excitement. It sounded strained now, afraid.
"—the suspect vehicle is continuing… it is continuing at high speed… we are watching multiple units damaged… this is extremely dangerous…"
Dangerous didn't cover it.
This wasn't "a chase" anymore.
This was the city watching its authority get hurt.
And the city didn't know how to look away.
Jacob took the chase west like a man running toward an edge.
He didn't plan it with a map. He didn't think in street names.
He followed the pull of open space.
The city began to thin—buildings giving way to longer stretches of road, intersections widening, fewer civilians in the lanes. The sirens behind him scattered and regrouped, still aggressive but now forced to stretch out, to chase in a line instead of flooding him with angles.
The BMW's engine note stayed furious, but Jacob could feel the damage—vibration where there shouldn't be, heat climbing, the harsh smell of something burning that wasn't just rubber.
He also felt something else:
A lightness.
Not relief.
A drifting sense that the chase had peeled him away from being a man in a car and turned him into a moving idea.
Wanted.
Not Jacob.
Not "someone."
A phenomenon.
He hated it.
He rode it anyway.
The freeway signs blurred overhead. Then the air changed—cooler, saltier. A darkness opened ahead that wasn't city-dark; it was ocean-dark, wide and endless.
Malibu.
The BMW spilled onto the coast like a wound reaching the sea.
Streetlights became sparser. The horizon became black water. The road curved along cliffs with the kind of beauty that made you forget you could die here.
The helicopter followed—still there, still chasing—rotors thumping, spotlight bouncing as the pilot fought wind and distance.
The broadcast caught the moment the chase turned surreal.
There were fewer buildings now to frame it, fewer cars to make speed look impressive. Just the BMW on the ribbon of road, smoke trailing behind it, the ocean beside it like a silent witness.
And behind it, police lights struggling to remain relevant.
And farther back—Brian—still in it, still pushing, still refusing to let the ghost vanish without leaving him an answer.
Dom's crew watched from the TV as the chase left their city and ran along the coastline like a nightmare that didn't know where it ended.
Mia's voice was small. "He's going to drive off a cliff."
Letty didn't blink. "He won't."
Vince muttered, pale now, "This is insane."
Dom's face stayed carved, but his eyes tightened. "That ain't racing," he said again, like he was reminding himself of a rule. "That's… something else."
Then Jacob turned away from the water.
He cut inland, climbing.
The road tightened into canyon curves—black rock on one side, drop-offs on the other, darkness pressing close. The BMW took the turns like it didn't fear gravity anymore, tires biting, suspension absorbing, the damaged chassis still holding together with an impossible stubbornness.
The police units fell further behind in the canyon—too heavy, too cautious, too unwilling to die on a mountain road for a ghost story.
But the helicopter stayed.
Brian stayed too, though he had to fight for it now. His Mitsubishi didn't like the debris and dust and sudden elevation changes. His suspension complained. His tires protested. He still pushed, heart hammering, eyes fixed on the faint blue-silver flicker that appeared and vanished between turns.
Then the road rose toward something darker than the canyon.
A steepening rockface. A hillside that looked less like "road" and more like "nature deciding you don't belong."
Tuna Canyon.
And at the edge of the broadcast frame, the BMW did something that made the anchor's voice break.
It didn't take the road anymore.
It left it.
Jacob aimed the M3 toward the rising rock and climbed.
Not carefully. Not like a stunt. Like the car had decided the concept of "road" was optional.
Tires found purchase where there shouldn't have been purchase—scraping and clawing up stone, the BMW's nose lifting, the body angling into a climb that would've flipped any normal vehicle. The headlights threw distorted light over jagged rock, turning the hillside into something alien.
The helicopter spotlight flailed, trying to follow, beam jittering as the pilot fought disbelief and distance.
The camera zoomed hard, grain turning ugly.
"—we… we are watching the vehicle leave the roadway—this is—this is not possible—"
People across the city stared at screens and felt something cold in their stomachs.
Because a car can outrun police.
A car can survive too much.
But a car doesn't climb rock like an animal unless the rules have changed.
Brian hit the point where the road ended in his view, tires squealing as he braked hard on the canyon pavement. He leaned forward, gripping his wheel, staring upward through his windshield.
He saw it—blue and silver clinging to stone, rising like a nightmare trying to escape gravity.
His mouth went dry.
Whatever he'd been chasing… wasn't behaving like a man anymore.
The police units arriving behind him skidded to stops, doors flying open, officers pouring out onto the shoulder with weapons drawn out of reflex and fear. They shouted up into the darkness as if a voice could pull the car back down.
But the car didn't answer.
It climbed.
Higher.
Then it reached the ridge where the hillside met the darker mass of wilderness—brush, trees, the first suggestion of forest.
And for one final, impossible second, the BMW's flickering headlight caught the leaves like a lantern moving through a haunted woods.
Then it vanished.
Not "drove away."
Vanished.
Swallowed by the black thickness of the trees.
The spotlight chased it, sweeping frantically, searching for the blue-silver gleam.
Nothing.
The helicopter circled, beam carving the forest into slices.
Nothing.
Brian stared until his eyes hurt, waiting for the engine note, the shimmer of paint, any sign that physics had returned to its normal rules.
Only silence answered him—canyon wind, distant rotors, the faint tick of cooling engines from cars that had arrived too late.
On TV, the anchor's voice sounded hollow.
"We… we have lost visual. The suspect vehicle has entered… what appears to be wilderness terrain. Officers on the ground are unable to pursue. This is… unprecedented."
Unprecedented was a polite word for impossible.
On the canyon road, cops stood with guns lowered slightly now, because you couldn't shoot a myth hiding in trees. They looked at each other with something like fear and something like confusion, their authority suddenly feeling small against the dark mass of the forest.
Brian stayed in his car, hands still on the wheel, breathing shallow.
He didn't feel victory.
He felt the emptiness of losing the only thread that made sense.
Because the chase hadn't ended with cuffs.
It hadn't ended with a crash.
It had ended with the ghost choosing to stop playing by roads at all.
And across Los Angeles—across the country—people stared at screens and tried to decide what they'd just witnessed:
A car?
A man?
Or something that had started as a myth… and, under pressure, shed the last parts of humanity it couldn't afford to keep.
In the city below, the sirens gradually quieted.
But the confusion didn't.
It spread—through police departments, through street crews, through living rooms, through Dom Toretto's house where everyone sat frozen in the TV's fading glow.
Mia whispered, voice shaking, "Where did he go?"
Dom didn't answer.
Letty's voice came low, unsettled. "Into the trees."
Vince swallowed hard. "You can't hide a car in a forest."
Dom's eyes stayed fixed on the empty frame where the BMW had disappeared.
His voice was steady when he finally spoke, but there was no comfort in it.
"He's not hiding," Dom said. "He's gone."
And somewhere in the wilderness above Malibu—deep in brush and shadow—Jacob Cooper sat behind a black visor with his hands trembling on a wheel, listening to the forest breathe around him, feeling the myth still clinging to his skin like smoke.
He had escaped everyone's sight.
But he hadn't escaped what he'd become.