Chapter 7
Noor
The rally begins at seven o'clock on Friday morning, and at six fifty-eight I am standing at the gate of the Ember Falls fairgrounds with a headset on and a clipboard in one hand and a coffee in the other and the small gold horseshoe pendant Callum gave me four nights ago tucked under the collar of my polo shirt, and I am — for the first time in eleven weeks — completely calm.
I will tell you why I am calm.
I am calm because every contingency is in place.
I am calm because every vendor knows where to be.
I am calm because Mateo Reyes, who has been running point on internal security all week, has, twenty minutes ago, walked the entire perimeter with me one final time and confirmed that we are clean.
I am calm because Diesel is in the VIP tent and Razor is at the main stage and Havoc is at the south entrance and Callum — who is in his prospect cut, on his second-to-last day as a prospect, with his hair under control for once and his eyes still a little tired from a Thursday night that I am not going to apologize for — is at the equipment depot, where he has been since five a.m., directing the unloading of the speaker rig and the lighting rig and the backup generator and a hundred small pieces of infrastructure that, in eight hours, I will be very glad he personally inspected.
I am calm because the work is done.
I am calm because I love him.
I am calm because, this past Tuesday at lunch, I sat down with Bridget at the kitchen island in our apartment and I told her exactly what had happened and exactly when it had started happening, and Bridget — who never says she told me so, because Bridget is a better friend than I deserve — listened to all of it without interrupting, and when I was done she said, "Noor, do you want me to set up the spreadsheet for the move-in?
" and I said, "Bridget, we are not moving in," and she said, "Yet," and refilled my tea, and that was the end of that conversation, and I have not, in fact, ruled out the move-in, but I am keeping the timeline conservative because I am a conservative woman.
The gate opens at seven sharp. The first wave comes in.
It is a small wave — vendors and early arrivals, the diehards who came up the night before and slept in their trailers — and the noise grows by the minute.
By eight a.m. there are two hundred bikes in the lot.
By ten a.m. there are six hundred. By noon there are over a thousand, and the smell of grilled food and exhaust and pine smoke and a thousand different leather-cleaner products is hanging in the air, and the staging tents are full, and the merch tents are running smoothly, and I am moving across the fairgrounds in my running shoes with the headset crackling in my ear, and I am loving every second of it.
The Vipers and the Stallions are in opposite quadrants.
I checked. I have personally checked three times.
Booker waved at me from across the parking lot at ten forty-five and gave me a small, ironic salute, which I returned, and Hatch found me at lunch and told me — with the gruff sincerity of a man who has decided he likes me — that the Vipers were grateful for the rally and were going to stay out of trouble, and I said, "Hatch, that is the best thing anyone has said to me all week," and he said, "Don't get used to it, Abbasi," and walked away.
Friday goes flawlessly.
Friday goes so flawlessly that, at eleven o'clock that night, when I drop into the cot I have set up in the back office of the operations trailer — because I am not going home tonight, I am sleeping on-site like a general at a campaign — I am almost worried.
I am almost worried because I have run enough events to know that when a complex event goes flawlessly on day one, day two is when something breaks, because the universe, like Callum, has a sense of humor.
The universe is on schedule. The universe arrives at four-fifteen p.m. on Saturday, in the middle of the headliner's main-stage set, when the speaker stack on the right side of the stage cuts out abruptly and the headliner — a band called Saint Concrete, a regional outfit with a serious local following — looks at his bassist and shrugs and keeps singing, and the crowd does not at first understand what is happening, and then thirty seconds later the left speaker stack also cuts out, and then ten seconds after that the stage lights go down, and the entire main-stage system goes dark, and what I am hearing in my headset is not a calm engineer but a panicked one, and what he is saying is: "We've lost the main feed.
The backup generator just kicked, and now the backup is gone too.
We're on emergency power only. I need ten minutes. "
We do not have ten minutes.
We do not have ten minutes because there are three thousand people in front of the main stage, and the mood was festive thirty seconds ago and is shifting fast, and three thousand bikers in the dark with no music is a chemistry problem I do not want to test the boundaries of.
I am already moving toward the stage. I am already calling Callum on the radio.
"Brennan."
"Here."
"Generator down. Backup generator also down. Where are you?"
"South lot. Heading to you."
"Run."
"Already running."
I get to the generator pad ninety seconds later.
The engineer — a man named Rivers, contracted from the AV company in Portland — is on his knees in front of the unit with a flashlight in his teeth, and he is very fast and very competent and he is not, in this moment, fixing it.
He is, in this moment, swearing at it. He looks up when I arrive and shakes his head.
"Fuel line. Maybe. Or it's the alternator. Or the —"
"How long to diagnose?"
"Ten minutes. Maybe more. The backup is supposed to take over and it didn't, which means the transfer switch is also bad, and that I cannot fix on-site. We need to call —"
"Rivers. We have three minutes before the crowd starts to move."
"I know."
"Fix it."
"I'm trying."
Callum arrives. He is sprinting across the gravel from the south lot.
He has not stopped sprinting since I called him.
He is in his cut and his boots and a black T-shirt that is, by now, marked with sweat from a day of hauling equipment, and he comes up to the generator pad and he does not, immediately, speak.
He nods at Rivers. He kneels beside the unit.
He puts his hand on the side of it. He listens.
I will tell you what I see, and I will tell you what I will remember.
I see Callum Brennan put his hand on a generator and tilt his head and listen the way a doctor listens to a chest. I see him close his eyes for two seconds.
I see him open his eyes. I see him say, very quietly, to Rivers, "Hand me your light.
" Rivers hands him the flashlight. Callum tips it down the side of the unit.
He runs the beam along a curve of pipe. He stops on a fitting.
He says, "Loose connection, fuel line, second clamp from the inlet.
The vibration walked it loose. The backup ran low because the fuel never quite reached it, and the transfer switch is fine, it just had nothing to switch to. "
Rivers stares at him.
Callum says, "I have a clamp in my saddlebag. Give me four minutes."
"You have a—"
"Saddlebag clamp. Yes. And duct tape."
He runs. He sprints back to his motorcycle, which is parked twenty yards away.
He is back in ninety seconds. He has, in his hand, a small kit roll and a roll of black duct tape and a multi-tool, and he kneels at the generator and he does not look up and he does not, in any way, hesitate, and what I witness is something I will, for the rest of my life, defend against anyone who calls this man a jinx.
He works fast and he works clean. He tightens the clamp.
He runs a band of duct tape around the seal as a redundant measure — belt and suspenders, he mutters under his breath, an expression he has gotten from his father — and he triggers the manual fuel-pump primer the way he learned on a 1998 Sportster in an abandoned grocery-store parking lot, and he flips the breaker on the transfer switch, and he stands up, and he says to Rivers, "Hit it. "
Rivers hits it.
The generator catches.
The generator catches with the deep, satisfied cough of a machine that has been waiting to be understood, and a second later — and I will tell you about this second, because it is the best second of my professional career — the main-stage rig comes back to life in a wave, the speakers first and then the lights, and three thousand people in front of the stage who have been growling in the dark for what is, by my count, three minutes and forty-two seconds, erupt into a roar that I can feel in my chest from a hundred yards away, and the band — I have to credit Saint Concrete here, they are professionals — is already mid-song again before the lights are fully up, and by the time the lights are up the crowd is back, and the festive is back, and the chemistry problem has resolved itself.
Callum stands up. He brushes his hands on his jeans. There is grease on his palms and on the side of his face. He looks at Rivers. Rivers looks at him.
"Brennan," Rivers says. "What the hell."
"I have spent two years rebuilding things in my apartment that I broke. You learn things."
Rivers shakes his head. He laughs once, a tight surprised laugh. He says, "I am going to pay you for that."
"You are going to pay the AV company. The AV company can do whatever it wants with the money."
"Brennan."
"Rivers."
"I owe you."
"You owe my club."