“Northwest Passage”, by Stan Rogers, played quietly on the radio, and slowly pulled her heavy eyes awake.

Marie Walker yawned, smacking her lips together as she blinked out the window. It’s dark. The rolling of the car jostled her slightly as she peered around her father’s half-awake daze, staring at the clock in the car.

It says 4 AM in blinking, green lights.

She doesn’t know where they’re going, and she never asked, because wherever they go, they’re never there for long. They park, they refuel, they go for walks and stand in line for rations and supplies, before they pack it up and travel again. Circling wildly around the broad, semi-tamed swatches of Canada, running from something they can never quite escape.

She should be terrified, but she’s not. She actually quite likes it.

“For just one time”, she would remind herself, “I would take the northwest passage”, perfectly in tune with Stan Roger’s heavenly, syrupy voice. This was a journey. An adventure. And while her legs hurt and she didn’t sleep well and she’d heard the same five playlists over and over for the past two years, she never ceased to thrill at the adventure. Her memory was flawless, but even when they traveled a road she knew well, she would always find something new to memorize and catalogue, which in turn, she could turn into any number of adventures and stories, possibilities and of course, entertainment. Even as little as a crashed car or a new corpse conjured endless hours of speculation as she imagined the long, endless chain of events that could have led to that small adjustment in the world. Retracing the winds of a hurricane to the careless take-off of a distant butterfly.

...of course, that only worked when she could see out the window. It was too dark for that now.

She would have taken out one of her handful of books that shared the backseat with her, or maybe beat Wario’s Woods again on her old Game Boy Color, which was still sticky from the time she dropped it in her pancakes a few years ago. But her mother was twitching and moaning in her sleep. Which meant she was having one of her dreams again.

Her mother had very lucid dreams, and often spoke when she slept. Both Marie Walker and her father could derive some amusement from playing into her dreams, having an abstract and often loving back-and-forth rapport with the unconscious woman.

“Hngg…” she hummed, “three of a kind…”

“Three of a what?” she asked in a whisper, prompting her father to turn around and smile, unaware until now his daughter had woken up.

But her mother didn’t answer…

“...shit… j-jackpot…”

“Mom?”

Her mother didn’t answer. Marie Walker reached forward to gently nudge her elbow, which usually would have woken her up, but wherever she was, she was there too deep. There was no drudging her out.

“So… Silver Wheel… will…”

“Silver Wheel?”

She glanced at her father, who glanced back at her. The road was empty, so he could afford to exchange shrugs before he turned to look straight ahead once more.

At the time, neither Marie Walker nor her father understood this was the most important dream of their lives. Soon afterwards, during one of their pit stops, her father would buy a lottery ticket on a whim, simply because he had the change, and he would win a healthy sum of cash: not much, but enough for them to get a new, self-driving car, one with enough space in the trunk for more supplies for Marie Walker’s schooling. This included a small engineering kit, which Marie Walker quickly used to prototype a new kind of bioelectric battery that could recharge someone’s phone using their own heartbeat. This invention would be refined and improved until it made Marie Walker her first million, and from there, Walker Industries would start to indulge Marie’s fascination with exploration, seeing other worlds, and uncovering the mystery of the Silver Wheel — a hypothetical space Marie Walker figured her mother may have visited that somehow twisted reality to bring her this sudden upturn in fortune.

No, at the time, she would merely look back out the window, staring at the dotted, occasionally broken line of streetlights that illuminated the road, and hum alongside her hero and favorite singer, Stan Rogers.

Ah, for just one time I would take the Northwest Passage

To find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea;

Tracing one warm line through a land so wild and savage

And make a Northwest Passage to the sea.