Macbook Air unable to complete internet recovery

Hi there,

I have a 2018 macbook air here, I'm not quite sure what happened to it, I believe the user played with some settings. May have deleted a partition or something? really not sure. It won't boot but automatically performs an internet recovery. after a few minutes we get to a screen like this:

Clicking 'Startup Disk' takes us here:

selecting the only disk available and clicking 'Restart' gives this error:

And I'm really not sure where to go from here. I don't have any other macs around here, and reading over some of the information online, it looks like that makes the situation more complicated.