His robes glowed faintly, as if moonlight lived inside them. He raised one hand and pointed—not toward any street, but down.

Elena’s engine died. The asphalt beneath her tires became wet earth. Tule reeds rose around the circle. The smell of river water replaced exhaust, and stars multiplied over a landscape without buildings. A bell sounded far away where no mission had ever stood.

A man stepped from the statue. Dust covered his sandals. “Which road is yours?” he asked in Spanish.

Elena tried the ignition. “The one home.”

“All roads say that.”

Around the circle appeared seven exits. One led to her apartment. One to the hospital. One to the farmhouse where her mother had died. The others opened onto places she did not recognize: a flooded settlement, a burning hotel, a cemetery bright with blue lanterns, and a city of black towers pumping oil from the moon.

In her passenger seat lay a leather journal. Its pages described journeys made across the valley long before roads, naming springs that had dried and villages covered by concrete. The final entry was in Elena’s handwriting: I WENT AROUND UNTIL THE BEGINNING BECAME THE END.

Headlights appeared behind her. A procession of vehicles entered the circle—wagons, Model Ts, ambulances, patrol cars—each driven by someone dead. Her mother sat at the wheel of a green pickup Elena remembered from childhood.

“Follow me,” her mother called.

Elena almost did. Then she saw that every vehicle completed the circle but never left. The drivers aged with each revolution, becoming bone, then dust, then drivers again.

The friar’s stone hand lowered. “A circle is a road that refuses to choose.”

Elena turned toward the darkest exit, the only one showing nothing she wanted. She accelerated. Her car crossed a strip of wet earth, struck pavement, and burst into ordinary traffic. Horns screamed. The statue stood motionless in the center.

She reached home at 12:12.