The accident happened in a brutal, crystalline instant.

One moment, Aadiv was a silhouette behind tinted glass, a man trapped in the prison of his own thoughts. The next, the world folded in on itself. The delivery truck, a hulking beast of painted blue and grimy steel, ran the red light with a driver's fatal miscalculation. It didn't swerve; it plowed. The nose of Aadiv's luxury sedan met the truck's side with a sound that was less a crash and more a giant's fist closing—a sickening, wet crunch of composite, steel, and glass.