Chapter 34
thirty-four
Remy
Ipress my forehead against the window hard enough to feel the cold through my skull, and I've been here long enough that the contact point has gone numb.
Three hours since Damian's call. Three hours of engines and dark sky and Jax pretending to sleep in the seat across the aisle while I sit with my palms down on my thighs, rubbing slow, fingers not quite steady because if I close them I'll put a fist through the plexiglass.
Three nights in my mother's house. Three mornings of coffee on the porch with Maw Maw. The last thing Evie said to me on the phone was stay with your family. I stayed three days. Then Damian called and Mama's hand was on my sleeve when I stood up from the table.
Vanessa has the team mobilized, Kade is running C2 from the mobile unit, Cole is coordinating with contacts on the ground, and I'm thirty-seven thousand feet in the air with nothing to do but calculate how many minutes she's been gone and divide that number by all the ways a person can disappear in the dark.
My phone lights up on the armrest.
Darcy.
I pick up before the first ring finishes, and the voice on the other end is wrong. Flat, simple, stripped of every exclamation point Darcy has ever used in her life.
"Evie called me. She got out, Tripp, she climbed through a window, but she's hurt and the line went dead and she said send you."
Send Remy.
My chest cracks open. Not the pain of hearing she's hurt, though that's there, burning underneath everything else. The name. My name in her mouth, carried through Darcy's, handed to me across two thousand miles of dark air.
She asked for me.
"What did she say." My voice doesn't sound like mine. Too low, too steady, the Saint register trying to hold while Louisiana bleeds through every consonant.
"Head was bleeding. Her speech was slurring. She said she got out, she went through a window, she's been walking, it's a field and dark and she doesn't know where. Cole was on the office line the whole time. Vanessa's already pinging the tower."
Jax is out of his seat, one hand braced on the overhead compartment, reading my face the way he reads a road at a hundred and sixty miles an hour. "That's not your bad news face. That's your different news face."
"Stay by your phone," I tell Darcy. "I'll call you when I have her."
I hang up.
Cole picks up on the second ring.
"Tell me what we have."
"Tower trace running. Vanessa's narrowing it." Cole's voice doesn't change. "What did Darcy hear?"
"Head injury, scalp bleeding. Right ankle hurting enough she mentioned it. Walking. Slurring speech. She climbed through a window, Cole. She got herself out."
"Copy. Stand by for Vanessa."
The line clicks, holds, and then Vanessa's voice cuts through with the locked-in calm she only uses when her screens are giving her exactly what she needs.
"Okay, so it's a prepaid burner, purchased cash at a store in Lodi six days ago.
Phone pinged a tower and then went dark.
We won't get another ping. Last ping puts her in a triangle between Thornton, Galt, and Lodi.
I'm narrowing now, but we're talking two to five square miles of agricultural land.
Cole, I'm sending the overlay to your tablet.
Grid sectors seven through twelve just became priority. "
Two to five square miles. Farmland. No lights, no landmarks.
I brace both hands against the bulkhead and the metal is cold and useless because there's no pulse underneath it, no skin to assess, no injury I can map and fix with the contents of my bag.
Kade's voice surfaces on the open channel, low and unrushed, the register that means the machine is already running.
"Grid teams are repositioning to the corridor. Damian has the north sector. We're tightening."
He doesn't ask me to confirm. The objective just changed. Not "find the building." Find her.
Find her in a field. In the dark. Hurt and alone and she called for me and I'm not there.
Jax shifts in the seat across the aisle, the chip Mira had made for him still moving between his knuckles in that restless figure-eight he does when there's nowhere to put the excess.
He watches me pace and doesn't offer comfort or humor or any of the things his mouth usually runs to when a room gets heavy.
"Twelve minutes to Stockton." He glances at the window where the first faint lights of the valley floor are appearing through the cloud layer below. "We'll get there, Saint."
The jet banks left, and the cabin tilts, and Stockton spreads out beneath us like a circuit board. I grip the seatback, lean into the turn, and count the minutes because counting is the only thing I can do right now that isn't useless.
The wheels touch Stockton asphalt and I'm out of my seat before the jet finishes taxiing, go-bag over one shoulder, medical kit over the other, fingers already working the zipper on my jacket because the valley floor in October is cold enough to matter at speed.
The cabin door opens. The night air hits wet and sharp, tasting like irrigation water and diesel.
My legs almost buckle on the first step because they've been still for three hours and my body doesn't know what to do with solid ground.
The Agusta sits under the wing lights at the edge of the tarmac, deep metallic red with gold accents catching the runway floods like something alive.
A Suburban idles next to it. The team member meeting us doesn't waste words.
Keys for both vehicles in his palm, mine first. They know which one I'm taking. They know I'm going alone.
I take the Agusta key, swing my leg over, and the seat is still warm from the ride here.
Helmet. Visor down. The engine catches on the first press and the sound settles into my ribcage, low and mechanical and perfectly calibrated, and after three hours of stillness the vibration in my palms feels like permission.
I roll the throttle. The Agusta responds with the kind of immediate, savage bite that means someone tuned it recently, and then the tarmac is gone, the access road is gone, and I'm merging onto I-5 northbound with the needle climbing past ninety before I finish the on-ramp.
Cole's voice comes through the helmet comm, steady and measured.
"Grid teams covering sectors seven through eleven. Damian has the north corridor. Kade's coordinating from the mobile unit. Your approach vector puts you entering the search area from the south in approximately thirty-five minutes at current speed."
I don't answer. The highway opens ahead of me in a straight dark line. The Central Valley at night is flat enough that the headlight cuts a tunnel through the darkness. My thighs grip the tank, my shoulders drop, my body remembers what speed feels like after hours of stillness.
Every muscle that locked during the flight releases into the bike, into the lean, into the wind shear that presses my jacket flat against my ribs and makes my eyes water behind the visor.
The Agusta eats highway in clean, hungry gulps, and I feed it more, pushing past one-ten, one-twenty, because the distance between us is the only thing I can shrink right now.
The last highway lights slide past and vanish in my mirrors. Ahead, the road narrows to two lanes and the darkness changes texture, thickening into the deep agricultural black of land that hasn't seen a streetlight in decades. I lean into it and let the engine scream.
Sector reports come through the helmet comm in clipped professional intervals, voices I know by sound alone laid over the engine noise and the dark.
"Sector eight, clear. Moving to nine." Damian, low and final.
"Sector eleven, nothing. Repositioning south." Cole, controlled, certain.
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Each clear report is a door shutting on a room she isn't in. I hold that thought between my teeth like a wire and ride.
The road beneath me is packed dirt with shallow tire ruts that grab at the front wheel when I push past sixty, and the headlight throws a pale cone into a darkness so complete it feels solid, like something I'm cutting through rather than moving across.
My thighs burn from gripping the tank on uneven ground.
My shoulders have locked into a forward hunch that'll cost me tomorrow and doesn't matter now.
The cold has worked through my jacket and settled against my ribs where the old scar tightens when I breathe.
The medic in me builds the differential without permission. Walking. Bad ankle. Forty-degree dark. No jacket. Wet. Concussed. Hypothermia risk climbing every minute. Concussion means impaired judgment, impaired balance, potential loss of consciousness.
"Updated coordinates." Vanessa's voice cuts through, stripped of everything except data. "Tower triangulation plus thermal overlay from the drone puts her probable position at 37.7814 north, 121.3067 west, margin of error four hundred meters, moving southeast along an unpaved agricultural road."
I bank hard left onto a narrower track and the Agusta's rear tire slides on loose gravel before the tread catches and throws me forward.
Then the comm crackles again, and the voice is one of the ground team, someone whose name I know and can't access because every synapse I have just redirected to the words coming through my helmet.
"Grid lead, I have a visual. Single figure on foot, small dirt road, heading southeast. Moving slow, appears injured. Following on foot, two hundred meters back, lights off."
My grip goes white on the handlebars. The Agusta wobbles for a half-second because my thighs forgot to hold. I check my position against Vanessa's coordinates and the number that comes back is small enough to taste.
Four minutes. Maybe three if the road holds.
"Hold position." My voice comes through rough, the drawl so thick I barely recognize it as mine. "I'm three minutes out."
Nobody asks why. Nobody needs to.