At 2:00 in the morning, Lucas Trowman sat up in bed and watched the system appear without ceremony.
The room was dark enough that the glow of the text looked almost unreal, suspended in the air just beyond his reach like it belonged to a different world entirely.
[Daily Pull Available]
He stared at it for a moment, then exhaled slowly through his nose.
"Alright," he muttered. "Let's see what kind of trouble you've got for me this time."
He had already decided that noon had been a mistake. Too public. Too inconvenient. Too easy for chaos to shove its way into the middle of everything he was doing. The ticket had been worth it just for that. Now the system belonged to the hours when nobody sane was awake, which made it feel a lot more manageable. Less like a curse with a schedule and more like a secret he could at least pretend to control.
He pressed the prompt.
[Pull Now?]
"Yes."
The spin began.
Symbols flashed by in a blur of clean, bright motion, each one too fast to identify. Lucas watched them with the same quiet focus he used when gambling with anything that mattered. The screen had already proven that it did not care about his preferences. It only cared that he show up and accept the result.
The spinning stopped.
[Reward Acquired]
Thermal Regulation (Passive)
Lucas blinked once.
Then again.
"…Huh."
No explosion. No strange object. No dramatic miracle.
Just a passive.
Still, when he let the words settle in, he could feel what it meant. It was not the kind of thing he would brag about. It did not make him stronger or faster or richer in any immediate, obvious way. But it would help. That much was clear. He would handle heat better. His body would fight off fatigue more efficiently in harsh conditions. The desert would be a little less punishing.
"Useful," he said quietly.
The screen disappeared.
A second later, his phone buzzed on the nightstand.
He picked it up.
Jesse: need u. junk lot in 2 hrs
Lucas looked at the message for a second, then set the phone down and swung his legs out of bed.
No explanation. No context. Just Jesse being Jesse.
Which usually meant money, trouble, or both.
---
By the time dawn bled into Albuquerque, the city was already waking up into heat. The light hit the streets hard and bright, bleaching the edges of buildings and making every piece of dust in the air look like it was suspended in glass. Lucas drove with one hand on the wheel and the other resting near the gearshift, his mind already moving ahead of the road.
The system's new passive sat in the back of his awareness like a quiet adjustment. He could feel it in the way the morning air seemed slightly less aggressive against his skin, in the way the rising sun felt manageable instead of oppressive. It did not remove the desert. It just made the desert less interested in killing him immediately.
Which, for now, was good enough.
He reached the junk lot just after Jesse's text had instructed, and the first thing he noticed was that Jesse was already irritated before he even saw Lucas get out of the car.
That was normal.
The second thing he noticed was the RV.
Old. Worn. Rectangular in a way that made it seem less like a vehicle and more like a bad idea with wheels.
Lucas stared at it for a second longer than necessary.
Then his eyes shifted.
Walter White stood near the RV, his posture straight, his expression composed in the way that suggested he had forced himself to become composed rather than been born that way. He looked cleaner than the lot around him, but only just. The tension in his face was easy to read if you were looking for it. There was caution there. Control. A need to make things obey rules whether the world wanted to or not.
Walter's eyes found Lucas almost immediately.
He did not look surprised.
He simply looked like a man confirming that a variable he had already seen once had returned.
"…Lucas," Walter said.
Lucas gave him a short nod. "Mr. White."
Jesse looked between them and let out a breath through his nose. "Great. You two already know each other."
"We met," Walter said, without looking away from Lucas.
Lucas shrugged. "Briefly."
Jesse rolled his eyes. "Well, that's way less weird than I was expecting."
Walter's gaze moved to Jesse. "You're late."
Jesse frowned. "Man, I'm on time enough."
Walter glanced toward the RV. "That is not reassuring."
Jesse threw his hands up a little. "You know what? Fine. Let's start with the part where you stop insulting the only thing I got that can get us anywhere."
Lucas folded his arms, taking in the junk lot, the RV, and the two men standing in the middle of it like they had arrived at the edge of two different disasters.
He could already tell this was going to be one of those days.
"Why are we here?" Lucas asked.
Jesse answered first. "Because we need a place."
Walter said, at the same time, "Because this is where we begin."
Lucas looked at Walter. "That's not an answer."
Walter's expression barely shifted. "It is if you already understand what we are doing."
Lucas held his gaze for a beat, then glanced toward Jesse. "You two always like this?"
Jesse sighed. "No, usually he's worse."
Walter ignored that. "We are going to need isolation. Distance from traffic. Minimal visibility. A place where no one will notice us."
Jesse gestured toward the RV. "Which is why we're not doing this in the middle of town like a couple of idiots."
Walter gave him a flat look. "The fact that you consider this an improvement is concerning."
"It should be," Jesse muttered.
Lucas shifted his weight and looked out toward the lot's edge. The sun was rising fast now, lighting everything in long strips. The air already felt dry enough to crack open if he breathed too hard.
"So," he said, "we're taking the RV out to the desert."
Jesse pointed at him like he had said something smart. "See? He gets it."
Walter did not react to the praise. He simply looked at Lucas again, as if weighing how much he needed to say out loud in order to keep the conversation moving.
"You understand what this means?" Walter asked him.
Lucas shrugged. "It means if this goes badly, we'll be far enough away that nobody hears the arguing."
Jesse barked a laugh.
Walter didn't.
But something in his eyes suggested he appreciated the answer more than he wanted to admit.
---
The RV took forever to get moving.
It coughed. It rattled. It complained at every turn as if the engine itself had taken the entire situation personally. Jesse fought with it like he had been born into a long and bitter relationship with bad machinery, while Walter watched from the side with the kind of expression people usually reserved for failing hospital equipment.
Lucas, meanwhile, mostly watched the street.
The junk lot had no immediate traffic, but the longer they stayed in one place, the more the possibility of being noticed grew teeth. His new passive helped more than he expected; his sense of distance and open space made the lot feel readable in a way it had not been before. He could tell where the blind spots were. Where a vehicle could turn in too quickly. Where a person could stand and still see them. It was not perfect, but it was enough to keep him from feeling blind.
Jesse slammed the side of the RV with the heel of his hand. "Come on, come on…"
Walter crossed his arms. "Your method appears unconvincing."
Jesse shot him a glare. "You wanna try it?"
Walter looked at the vehicle like it had offended him on a chemical level. "I do not."
Lucas leaned against a nearby post. "You both sound like divorced parents yelling at a refrigerator."
Jesse looked over. "How are you always this annoying so early in the morning?"
Lucas shrugged. "Talent."
That got a short snort out of Jesse, which was probably the closest thing to peace they were going to get out of him.
Eventually the RV shuddered, coughed hard, and then finally caught with a low, ugly growl.
Jesse straightened triumphantly. "There we go."
Walter looked unconvinced that anything had actually been solved. "It is still a mobile laboratory built from scrap."
Jesse pointed at him. "And yet it moves."
Lucas stepped forward a little, glancing into the cab. "Do we have everything we need?"
Walter's eyes shifted to him. "We have what we need to begin."
"That's not the same thing."
"It is for now."
Lucas watched Walter for a second longer, then nodded once. "Alright. Then we move."
---
They were halfway out of the lot before the heat really started to settle in.
The roads opened wider and wider the farther they drove from the city. Albuquerque thinned into rougher edges of pavement, then into long stretches of empty space that made the horizon feel much farther away than it had any right to be. Houses disappeared. Traffic disappeared. The world became open and flat and brutally honest.
Jesse drove with one hand and complained with the other.
"This thing is a death trap," he muttered, gripping the wheel. "I'm just saying. If we die in this, I'm haunting both of you."
Walter sat rigidly in the passenger seat, arms stiff, eyes on the road ahead. "If we die in this, the vehicle will be the least of our concerns."
Jesse shot him a look. "That's not comforting."
"It was not intended to be."
Lucas sat in the back, watching the desert roll by through the window. He could feel the change in the environment more sharply than before. The open road was a different kind of threat than the city. There were fewer eyes, which meant fewer witnesses, but also fewer places to hide. Every turn mattered more. Every vehicle on the road stood out more. The silence between towns felt bigger than it used to.
He found himself almost trusting the system's passive simply because it gave him something tangible to lean on.
"Where exactly are we going?" he asked.
Walter answered without turning around. "Far enough away that no one will disturb us."
Jesse added, "And far enough away that if something goes wrong, nobody's gonna just stumble into us."
Lucas nodded to himself. "That's reassuring in a deeply unhealthy way."
Jesse grinned at him in the mirror. "You're fitting in already."
Walter did not join in. He looked focused, but Lucas noticed that focus had a shape to it now. Not panic. Not fear. Preparation. Walter had moved past the stage where he was pretending this was a ridiculous idea. He was inside it now. Committed.
That made him more dangerous.
And more useful.
Lucas could understand that.
---
After nearly an hour, Jesse cut the RV off the road and into a more isolated stretch of desert land where the dust was thicker and the emptiness felt almost absolute. The city was gone now. So was the road in any meaningful sense. Just dirt, dry brush, a few uneven ridges, and enough open space to make every shadow look deliberate.
Jesse killed the engine and sat back for a second. "Welcome to the middle of nowhere."
Walter looked out the window with a displeased expression. "Yes. It is exactly as unpleasant as one would expect."
Jesse huffed. "You're welcome."
Lucas got out first, feeling the heat immediately press at him. The passive helped, just enough to keep the first wave of it from hitting too hard. He looked around slowly, taking in the terrain, the lines of sight, the sparse cover, the bright emptiness of the place.
No one nearby.
No obvious traffic.
No witnesses.
Good.
Walter stepped down from the RV and looked around too, though his attention seemed to be on the practical problem of what they were about to do rather than the environment itself.
"This will do," he said.
Jesse groaned. "That's the nicest thing you've said all morning."
Walter ignored him. "We need to prepare properly."
Jesse opened one of the compartments and started pulling out supplies. "Yeah, okay. Great. Prepare. That's a thing. We're doing that."
Lucas moved to the side and glanced down the empty stretch behind them. He did not trust open desert to stay quiet for long, not because it was lively but because wide-open places made danger feel farther away than it really was. That kind of distance was how people got stupid.
Walter watched him from the corner of his eye. "What are you doing?"
Lucas looked over. "Looking."
"At what?"
"At the fact that nothing is happening."
Walter seemed to consider that for a moment, then gave a faint nod. "That is often when problems begin."
Jesse looked up from the supplies. "Can you two stop talking like you're in some kind of low-budget crime documentary?"
Lucas glanced at him. "You're the one who asked us to come out here."
"Yeah, and now I'm regretting the phrasing."
Walter stepped toward the RV. "We should begin."
Jesse handed him a bag of ingredients and tools. Walter inspected them with one glance and frowned immediately.
"These are adequate," he said.
Jesse stared. "That sounded like you were about to insult them."
"I was."
Lucas almost laughed.
Walter set the supplies down inside the RV and looked at Jesse. "Do not touch anything unless I tell you to."
Jesse pointed at himself. "You're the bossy one now?"
Walter gave him a cold look. "If we are doing this, we are doing it correctly."
Lucas stepped closer, peering into the RV's cramped interior. The setup was ugly, improvised, and just barely coherent enough to function. That, more than anything, seemed to irritate Walter. Not the danger. Not the illegality. The lack of elegance.
Lucas understood that kind of frustration more than he liked.
"You need the space cleared," Lucas said.
Walter looked at him. "Yes."
"I can stand watch outside."
Walter nodded once. "That would be helpful."
Jesse pointed between them. "Hold up. Why does he get to do the responsible thing?"
Lucas gave him a flat look. "Because I have the emotional maturity not to argue with a teacher inside a mobile sweatbox."
Jesse snorted. "Yeah, okay, fair."
Walter had already started laying things out with the meticulous motions of a man who had finally found the one area of his life where his intelligence might matter in a way that nobody could ignore. Lucas watched him for a second, then backed out of the RV and took a few steps away.
The desert was silent except for the faint sounds of Jesse and Walter inside. Lucas stood at the edge of the clearing and looked out toward the horizon.
He had the eerie feeling that the world had just narrowed.
Not into danger.
Into consequence.
This was not some side hustle anymore. Not one of Jesse's loose, messy, half-committed operations. This was a line being drawn in the dirt. A decision. A beginning.
And he was standing in it.
His phone buzzed once in his pocket, startling him slightly.
A system message did not appear yet. It would at two. He already knew that.
What he saw instead was a text from Jesse, sent less than a minute earlier.
Jesse: dont let him back out lol
Lucas stared at it for a second, then looked toward the RV.
Walter White had chosen this.
Jesse had dragged them into it.
Lucas had shown up because the alternative was sitting on his hands and waiting for the city to eat him alive in smaller, more boring ways.
He let out a breath and shoved the phone away.
"Yeah," he muttered to himself. "No pressure."
Inside the RV, Walter called out to Jesse with the sharp tone of a man about to start something he refused to let fail.
Jesse answered with equal irritation.
Lucas took one last look at the empty desert, then turned back toward the RV.
Whatever this was going to become, it was already too late to pretend it was harmless.
He stepped inside.
And the first cook began.