Chapter 9. Soren
Saturday rides start early at Redline, before the sun's done deciding whether it's actually going to show up, and by the time I roll into the gravel lot behind the clubhouse, there are already eleven bikes lined up in loose formation, engines idling, exhaust ghosting pale in the cold morning air.
Ni waves me into the gap beside him. "You made it."
"You say that every time like you're surprised."
"I am, a little. You used to need three days' notice before you'd leave the shop on a Saturday."
"Things change," I say, and Ni gives me a look that says he knows exactly what he thinks changed them and has the good sense not to say his name out loud in a parking lot full of people still waking up.
King's up front on a wide, low cruiser that suits his big build, going over the route with two of the newer prospects—north on the county road, up through the switchbacks past the reservoir, out to the diner near the state line for breakfast, back before noon.
Simple.
Familiar to everyone but me.
Dex and Sol are near the back, already deep in an argument about tire pressure that I suspect started before either of them got out of bed.
Sol is not wearing a helmet yet, so his bald head is shining, and Dex still looks like Bad Bunny.
Ni's long hair is in a braid, and he has braided his beard to match.
Kit pulls in last, the way he usually does, his neon-green Yamaha cutting a showy line into the lot before he settles it into the row beside mine.
He's got his hair pushed back under the helmet, sunglasses on despite the weak early light, and there's an ease in the way he swings off the bike that I recognize now as the good kind—not the manufactured looseness he wears at the bar, but something closer to the version of him I got at the bowling alley, over fries, laughing about a stranger's near-miss with a bowling ball.
"Morning," he says, dropping into the space beside me while King finishes talking. "You look suspiciously well-rested for a man who apparently used to hate Saturdays."
"I had a good week."
"Yeah?" He glances at me sideways, a small, private smile tugging at one corner of his mouth, like he knows exactly why. "Good. Me too."
King raises a hand, calls out the order of the formation, and the whole lot fires to life at once, engines catching in a rolling wave down the line.
Then we're moving, Kit peeling off two positions ahead of me, the bike answering him like it's an extension of his own spine.
The road opens up fast once we clear the last stretch of town—flat, wide, empty at this hour, fields on either side going gold and brittle with the season, the mountains a blue smudge on the horizon that gets less smudged the farther we ride.
I keep a controlled position in the pack, watching the group's rhythm, noting who rides tight and who rides loose, who brakes early and who trusts the corner.
Kit brakes late.
Every time.
Committed all the way to the edge of the possible, same as always, but there's a discipline underneath it I hadn't clocked before. He's not reckless exactly, not out here, not with eleven other riders depending on the group holding formation.
He's precise.
Fast, but precise.
It's the first time I've watched him ride in daylight, sober, with an audience that isn't performing back at him, and it's a genuinely beautiful thing to see.
We hit the switchbacks an hour in, climbing into the low hills that fold up toward the reservoir, the road narrowing and curling back on itself in long, graceful S-turns that the whole pack takes with the loose, practiced confidence of people who've ridden this exact stretch a hundred times before.
I fall a little behind on the tightest curve, giving myself room, and that's when I see it—off to the side, in the gravel pull-off at the base of the switchback, a single bike down.
Not one of ours.
King's already braking, the whole formation slowing and peeling off the road in a ragged line behind him, engines dropping to idle one by one, boots coming down on gravel.
I bring my own bike to a stop near the back of the group and kill the engine.
In the sudden quiet, I can hear a man's voice, thin and strained, coming from somewhere near the downed bike.
He's maybe thirty, in gear that looks new—the kind of new that means recently bought, a jacket still stiff at the shoulders, boots that haven't scuffed yet. His bike's on its side in the gravel, a midsize standard, nothing special.
He's standing beside it, shaken and dusty, one knee of his riding pants scraped where he hit the gravel, but he's putting weight on both legs without trouble.
Even from here, I can see the problem before I'm close enough to properly diagnose it. The chain has come off the rear sprocket and is hanging loose along the swingarm. A few links sit at the wrong angles, kinked badly enough that nobody sensible is putting it back on and riding forty miles home.
"You alright?" King calls, already moving toward him, and the rest of the group fans out behind him in loose clusters.
"Yeah—yeah, I'm fine. Just embarrassed." The guy gestures toward the gravel. "Chain went and I got it off the road before it locked anything up. Lost my footing when I stopped and dumped it. I don't even know what happened."
Dex crouches by the bike, running a hand carefully along the chain before looking over the rear sprocket.
"Chain's thrown and kinked," he says. "Rear sprocket took a hit too. You're not riding this home without a new chain, and I'd want to inspect that sprocket first."
The guy closes his eyes for half a second.
"I don't even have a tow service." There's a rawness under the words that tells me this is worse than a bad morning for him—that this bike, wherever it came from, however new the gear is, matters more to him than the casual way he's trying to play it.
"I just bought it. Three weeks ago. First real ride out on it. "
"Where's home?" King asks.
"About forty minutes from here. Past the diner, other side of the county line." The guy scrubs a hand over his face, and I watch something crack behind his composure, quick and involuntary. He has dark eyes, a beard, and brown hair. "I don't—I don't even know anybody out here. I just moved."
Kit's already moving.
I almost miss it, because he doesn't announce it, doesn't make it a moment.
He just walks past Dex, past King, heading straight to his own Yamaha where it's parked at the edge of the gravel.
"What are you doing?" Dex asks.
"Giving him a ride," Kit says, like it's obvious, like there's no other possible answer to the math everyone else was still working out. "You said forty minutes from here?"
"Yeah, but—"
"So it's forty out, forty back. I can live with that.
" Kit's already pulling his gloves back on, brisk, matter-of-fact, no drama in it at all.
"Climb on behind me. I'll get you all the way home.
Better than sitting out here waiting on a tow just to figure out the next problem, which is you still being forty minutes from your own bed with a busted bike. "
"I can't ask you to do that. That's, what, an hour and a half round trip? More?"
"You didn't ask. I offered."
Kit shrugs, easy, already checking the strap on his tank bag out of habit more than necessity.
"Look, man, I get it. First ride on a new bike, nobody around you knows your name, and now you're stuck on the side of a road forty minutes from home with a busted chain. That's a genuinely shit morning. I've got a full tank and nowhere I have to be until the diner. It's not that big a deal."
"It's a lot," he says.
"It's a full tank of gas and one missed breakfast," Kit says. "I've spent worse on dumber things. Come on, before it gets colder out here."
"I don't even know your name."
"Kit."
He holds out a hand, brief, casual, like they're meeting at a bar and not in the aftermath of a wreck.
"And don't worry about the bike behind us. It's not going anywhere the tow truck can't handle."
King's already got his phone out, calling a tow service he apparently keeps on speed dial for exactly this reason, rattling off the location.
Dex crouches back down by the bike, checking that nothing is leaking and making sure it's safe to leave for the tow.
Sol's found a strip of reflective tape in his own saddlebag and is wrapping it around the crash bar so it's visible to traffic while it waits.
I don't say anything.
I watch.
Kit swings a leg over his own Yamaha and settles into the saddle like he's done it a thousand times.
The stranger hesitates beside him.
"You ridden pillion before?" Kit asks.
"Once."
"Good. Use the passenger handholds, not my waist. Keep your feet on the pegs. Lean with me, don't fight it, and don't try to correct the bike yourself. You'll be fine."
"Okay. Okay, yeah."
The man climbs on behind him, still awkward in his unfamiliarity with a bike that isn't his own, and grips the passenger handholds.
Kit glances back at King.
"I'll catch up at the diner if the timing works. If not, don't wait on my account. I know the way back on my own."
"You sure?" King asks, though it's clear from his tone he already knows the answer, already knows there's no version of this where Kit doesn't do exactly this.
"I'm sure."
He starts the engine—that same aggressive, throaty growl I've come to recognize from two lanes over during every ride we've taken together—and pulls out of the gravel.
But he eases the throttle open with a gentleness I've genuinely never seen him use on that bike before.
Careful.
Controlled.
Nothing like the full-commitment riding I watched him do not twenty minutes ago on this exact stretch of road. He's riding like there's someone behind him who matters. There is.
I watch the green Yamaha disappear around the first curve of the switchback, handling another person's life with a care I've never once seen Kit extend to his own.
He knows how to be careful.
He just doesn't believe his own life deserves the same care.
The thought settles heavily in my chest.
"He does this," Ni says quietly beside me.