Every time he took a step, it made a soft slapping sound against the pavement, like a tired heartbeat.
His backpack held everything.
One change of clothes.
A water bottle he refilled wherever he could.
A small notebook with a broken spiral where he sometimes wrote things down because he had read somewhere that writing things down helped you hold on to your sanity when everything else was sliding.
A granola bar he had been saving since Tuesday.
And a photograph, folded soft at the creases and worn nearly transparent at the corners, of himself at sixteen standing next to his mother in front of a house that no longer belonged to their family.
That photograph was the most valuable thing he owned.
He had been sleeping near the back end of a strip mall on the east side of the city, in a space between a shuttered tax prep office and a wall of overgrown oleander bushes that smelled sharp and sweet in the cool desert morning.
It was not comfortable.
It was not safe.
But it had a lip of concrete awning overhead, and the oleanders blocked the wind.
And in Las Vegas, wind at five in the morning was no small thing.
He gathered his backpack, checked the zipper twice, always twice, and stepped out onto the sidewalk.
The city that never slept had at least quieted down.
The neon had dimmed to a hum. Delivery trucks rumbled somewhere east. The air smelled like concrete cooling after a long, hot night, and something faintly fried drifting from a ventilation shaft two blocks over.
Noah followed the smell out of pure instinct.
His stomach was already making its case for attention.
He walked six blocks east on Charleston Boulevard before he found a roadside diner called May’s Place.