4. Gone
GONE
GHOST
The alarm went off and I killed it before the second beep, and the first thing in my head wasn't Church, or Gravedigger, or the fact that I'd burned my own cover less than ten hours ago.
It was him.
I lay there in the dark with my arm still stretched toward the nightstand.
The window over my bed had gone the flat gray that comes before the sun clears the ridgeline, the glass cold enough to feel from three feet off.
Seven. Church at eight. Hawk didn't do late and he didn't do excuses, and I'd never once tested whether he'd make an exception.
My body wanted another two hours. My body always wanted another two hours. Twenty-six years old and no amount of muscle or mileage had fixed that. Tank found me asleep on the garage floor once with my cheek flat on a wrench, and he'd been dining out on it for six months.
I dragged myself up and into the bathroom.
The faucet squeaked. I threw cold water at my face with both hands and it cracked the fog straight out of me, skin drawing tight, breath snagging in my throat. I gripped the edge of the sink and let the water run off my chin onto the counter.
Then I looked up.
The mirror handed back what it always did.
Ice-blue eyes that made people remember my face even when they couldn't come up with my name.
A jaw that still couldn't hold stubble for more than a day.
The face my brothers looked at and saw the prospect who caught a bullet on the common room floor and had to be carried to the med bay in Tank's arms like something that weighed nothing.
The body under the face was different.
I'd come to the Steel Phoenixes wiry. Fast, but thin enough that a hard wind could've rearranged me.
The muscle sat on my frame now in a way that made the rest of me look older than my face was willing to.
Wider through the shoulders. Thicker in the arms. Bigger chest. Three years of the compound gym, of Blade's hand-to-hand sessions, of Tank's strength circuits that made me want to die and then made me feel like I could walk through a wall.
I was proud of it. It took me three years to build.
My eyes fixed themselves on the scar that sat high on the left side of my pectoral, a puckered knot of pale tissue about the width of a dime, ridged at the edges where Rosa's sutures had drawn it shut.
My fingers found it before I decided to touch it.
Slick in the middle, raised around the rim.
It still pulled tight when the weather turned.
Devil's Dust got to me twice.
The first time they took me off a supply run and tied me to a chair in a warehouse and worked on the parts that don't show. Twisted my arm until the shoulder came out of the socket. Split my lip open. Cracked something low in my side that ached for a month.
I didn't get myself out of that chair. Axel cut the ropes and Tank and Irish held me down while Kai put my shoulder back where it belonged, and the only part of that night anybody ever tells is Kai walking up on Slash, my kidnapper, with a pen and sending him home with a message for the president of Devil's Dust.
The second time they came through our own walls with rifles.
I don't remember the shot. That's the thing about it.
What I remember is being flat on my back on the common room floor with Kai's whole weight bearing down on me, his shirt ripped off and balled up under his hands, and the wet heat spreading underneath it faster than he could press it back.
I remember my fingers locked around his wrist. I remember what I said, out loud, in front of every brother still standing.
Don't let me die. I just found my family.
Rosa dug the bullet out the next morning by flashlight while Tank stood in the doorway with a gun and Kai kept his hands on me and his voice steady.
Three brothers didn't get up that night. I still run the names when the scar goes tight.
When I finally came around I made a joke about it.
Said chicks dig scars. Kai didn't correct me.
He just looked at me a second longer than the joke deserved and let me keep it, and it took me a couple of years to work out what that look had been, and a while after that to stop pretending I didn't already know.
After my recovery I trained. Every day, for years.
Blade taught me angles, how a hallway works, how to take a man apart with nothing but my hands and the shape of the room.
Tank taught me how to hit, and then spent twice as long teaching me how to eat a hit and stay upright.
Irish taught me to watch a room without the room ever knowing.
They put a bullet through a kid who couldn't stop them. The kid was gone. The hole stayed.
I pulled my hand away, and my brain did what it always did and went sideways without asking me first.
Caleb.
He was here. Maybe fifty feet from where I stood, probably still asleep in the medical bay, and all of last night came back at once.
The way he'd moved in that ring. The shin that folded the Jackal in half.
That spinning kick I still couldn't work out mechanically, no matter how many times I ran it back.
A man thrown off a platform with nothing but legs and the guy's own momentum.
Years of work packed into every strike, and under all of it something quiet, something that made the whole thing look almost gentle, a thing I'd never have said out loud without sounding like an idiot.
"I'm thinking about him again." The words came off the mirror flat.
Talking out loud to an empty room was a habit I'd picked up somewhere in the last year, a way of giving my thoughts a place to land instead of letting them bounce around my skull until they smeared together.
"That's normal. He's new. My brain does this with anything new. "
The mirror declined to argue.
I got in the shower, and my head went straight back to the corridor anyway. Caleb on his feet with his arms wrenched behind him, blood coming off his chin, and no fear anywhere in his eyes. The kick. The ride. His arms locked around my waist and his breath landing on the side of my neck.
And the name out of the mezzanine. Liam at UMC.
Caleb had handed me the rest of it himself, moving down that corridor with blood drying on his chin.
He's the one who put my brother in the hospital.
So Liam was the brother. The brother was in a bed at UMC.
And Gravedigger had leaned on that rail and said the name out loud in front of two hundred people for one reason, which was to watch it land.
Caleb heard it and said no anyway.
I stood under the water and turned that over and couldn't make it sit right. Nobody did that. You heard the name of the person you'd put yourself in the ground for come out of a mouth like his, and you folded. That was the whole point of saying it. Everybody folded there.
He hadn't.
I turned the water up until my skin went red, and quit thinking about it, and that lasted about nine seconds.
The kitchen at seven-thirty sounded the way it had every morning for years, and I'd never once gotten tired of it.
Boots on tile. A cabinet banging shut. Something hitting a hot pan with a hiss. And over all of it, Irish, because Irish carried over everything.
The club was stronger now than it had been in years.
After Blade's run at the Montana operation, the people we'd pulled out of that nightmare got a choice.
Some went home. Some didn't have a home left to go to.
The feds pushed through visas for the survivors, the quietest apology the government knows how to make after a federal agent ran the whole trafficking operation, and a lot of the ones who stayed in the country ended up out here with us.
They prospected fast. Months, not years. Hawk had put it to the table, whether it was too quick, and Tank stood up and said people who'd lived through what they'd lived through didn't need a year of oil changes to prove where they belonged. The table voted. We'd damn near doubled.
Six of them were women. Trenza came in with that group, and nobody at that table so much as blinked. Every man in the room had seen what those women walked out of in Montana. Nobody was about to turn around and ask them to prove they were hard enough.
The Phoenixes had been calling themselves a brotherhood for over a decade. It stretched without anybody needing to say a word about it. Sisters now, too. Same patch, same vote.
I dropped into my usual spot across from Blade and Trenza.
She was going at a stack of pancakes like they'd said something to her, squaring off every bite before she took it. Slightly over a year out of Montana and she still ate each meal like somebody might come and take the plate.
The roster those High Basin bastards kept had her down as Sofía Vega. It was never her name. It was whatever somebody typed into a fake visa application.
Logan told me the rest of it one night on the back steps, a couple beers in, and he still sounded sick about it a year on.
Said he stood in his own yard and called her Sofía and she kept right on working the wire.
Didn't turn around. Not until he said it again, louder, and even then it took her a beat to remember it was supposed to be hers.
That's how he knew the whole roster was invented.
Ana. That was the name she gave Logan up in Montana, the day the fence came down, and I heard it out of her mouth exactly once, her first morning in our kitchen.
Some of the people we brought out of Montana went home after it was over.
She didn't, and she's never said why, and nobody's worked up the nerve to ask.
Ana went into a drawer with the rest of it. She never used it here.