The road folded into night like a film strip—frames of telephone poles and the dull, repeating blink of cattle guards. I’d been following a rumor, the kind that lives in comment threads and late-night message boards: a lost installment, a mythic seventh turn in a franchise that should have ended years ago, whispered to be archived somewhere off the indexed map—“Internet Archive: free,” someone wrote, as if salvation and piracy shared the same breath.