Chapter 6 Back Road Escape #2
Behind us, one of the riders overshoots, forced wider by speed. The other sees the move too late and fishtails, recovering ugly.
I feel savage satisfaction bloom for half a second.
Then the front tire hits slick concrete.
The whole bike slides sideways.
Mara screams my name.
I wrench the bars back, boot skimming sparks off the embankment, and somehow—barely—catch traction before we low-side into the water. The engine growls, angry and alive. The tunnel mouth yawns ahead, round and black, just above the runoff line.
“Are you insane?” Mara shouts into my back.
“Yes.”
That answer survives because it’s true.
We hit the tunnel.
Sound changes instantly. Engine roar magnified. Water hiss under the tires. Concrete walls throwing every vibration back at us. Darkness swallowing the moon. The headlight cuts a narrow white path over graffiti, litter, and trickling runoff.
The space is barely wide enough.
Mara goes rigid behind me. “Ronan—”
“Trust me.”
Silence for half a beat.
Then, shocked and furious: “Absolutely not!”
I grin in spite of myself and keep the throttle steady.
The bikes behind us don’t follow at first. I hear one of them brake hard outside the entrance. Another revs uncertainly. Tunnel riding blind at speed takes a particular kind of idiot.
Or a man desperate enough to become one.
Give them another two seconds and they’ll decide desperation wins.
So I cut our headlight.
Mara’s whole body jerks.
Then we are in almost-total darkness, moving on sound and memory and the ghost of pale runoff reflecting distant light.
“You turned it off!”
“Needed to.”
“We are going to die in a sewer!”
“Drainage tunnel,” I correct.
Something between a laugh and a sob punches out of her.
There it is again—that wild edge where fear flips so hard it almost becomes exhilaration.
I ride blind by feel, counting seconds, knowing the tunnel bends sharply right, then levels, then forks where one branch is blocked with debris from the last flood. If I misremember, we slam into concrete at forty and it’s over.
The bend comes.
I lean.
The bike obeys.
Mara makes a choking sound and buries her face between my shoulders.
Then the blocked fork flashes past as a deeper darkness to the left.
Got you.
I cut farther in, slow for exactly three heartbeats, then kill the engine completely.
The sudden silence is violent.
We roll the last twenty feet on momentum alone, coasting into a pocket of black beyond a maintenance lip where the tunnel widens just enough to hide us from the entrance.
Behind us, engine noise surges into the tube.
One bike.
Maybe two.
They roar past the dogleg too fast, overshooting where we ducked into the widened recess. Headlight washes the far wall for one wild second, then shoots onward down the main channel.
Gone.
I hold my breath.
So does Mara.
The sound keeps going. Fades. Then, faint and far off, curses echo somewhere deeper in the runoff system. Then nothing but cooling metal and both of us dragging air back into our lungs like we earned it.
For a second neither of us moves.
Then Mara starts laughing.
Not soft. Not pretty. Shock laughter. Sharp and breathless and a little unhinged.
It hits me wrong—in the chest, low and human, somewhere I forgot was still mine.
I laugh too.
I can’t help it.
It tears out of me rough as gravel, half from relief and half from the sheer absurdity of being alive after that piece of suicidal stupidity actually worked.
Mara’s forehead thunks lightly between my shoulders. “You are completely out of your mind.”
“Been told.”
“I hate you.”
The laugh in her voice ruins the claim.
“Liar.”
That gets a strangled sound out of her, closer to another laugh than anger.
I flick the headlight back on low. The widened recess comes into view: wet concrete, runoff stains, old graffiti, beer bottles lodged in the grime. We are filthy. Mud sprayed up both legs. Her hair wild. My hands shaking now that adrenaline has somewhere to go.
Mara slides off the bike carefully, boots splashing in shallow water. When she straightens, she wipes rain and tunnel grime off her face and just looks at me.
For a second the whole world narrows to that.
Her chest still heaving. Eyes bright in the dim low beam. Mouth parted from laughter she didn’t expect and doesn’t quite know what to do with now that it’s fading.
Then she steps closer to the bike, still breathing hard. “We actually lost them.”
“For now.”
She huffs once and drags a hand over the back of the seat. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but your terrifying death machine may have saved my life.”
“Don’t sound too grateful.”
“I’m not. I’m in shock.”
That smile tries to happen again at the corner of her mouth.
Then it dies.
I see the exact second.
Her eyes drop under the bike frame. Fix. Narrow.
The shock laughter drains out of her so fast it’s like somebody pulled a plug.
“What?” I say.
She crouches in the runoff, fingers sliding beneath the lower frame rail near the rear mount.
When she rises, something small gleams wet and black in her palm.
A tiny square magnet with a blinking red light no bigger than a thumbnail.
Tracker.
For one frozen beat, all I hear is water dripping in the tunnel and the blood pounding in my ears.
Mara looks from the device to me, every trace of laughter gone.
“At the motel, they tracked us with my phone,” she says quietly. “And now this?”
Her fingers tighten around the blinking square.
Then she lifts her eyes to mine and says, very quietly, “They didn’t find us. They followed us.”