Chapter 12. Soren
It isn't a ringtone. It's a siren. Ni stops moving. His phone is already in his hand. One tap opens a map, a red location pin pulsing against a stretch of county road I recognize from the ride last weekend.
His face goes dead serious.
"It's the safety app," Dex says.
Every trace of amusement is gone from his voice.
"Safety app?" I ask, already standing.
"It's Redline's," Dex says. "We had it custom-built. Anybody in the club can hit the emergency button and it sends their location to everyone on the response list."
Ni looks up from the screen.
"Kit's down."
That's all he says.
"Let's go."
They don't explain further. They don't need to. Ni is moving. Dex is moving. Sol is moving. So am I.
My helmet is secured to the lock beside the rear peg of my bike, three rows from the entrance. I have it free in seconds, pull the matte-black shell down over my head, fasten the strap beneath my chin.
The padding closes around my skull, muffling the outside noise.
I swing a leg over the saddle, thumb the ignition, and the engine fires with a deep, rolling thunder that vibrates up through the frame.
Around me, three more engines start in rapid succession.
Ni pulls out first. Dex rides tight behind Ni's left shoulder. Sol takes the right.
I maintain a controlled gap behind the group. Nobody speaks. There is nothing useful to say. Ni sets a pace that is aggressive but disciplined, well above the legal limit on the empty stretches, braking cleanly before every corner and accelerating hard out of them.
He knows where he's going. I follow without needing to think.
The town disappears behind us. Streetlights thin.
The road narrows. Guardrails begin appearing along the shoulder, their reflective strips flashing white in my headlight for fractions of a second before vanishing back into darkness. The temperature drops as we climb.
I know the road now. I know where the longer sweepers are. I know where the pavement changes texture near the county line. I know where Kit likes to carry too much speed. I know because I've watched him.
I don't know what down means.
Not yet.
A mechanical problem. A low-side. A broken wrist.
A body in the road.
I shut that last possibility down before it can take shape.
Ni's taillight stays fixed ahead of me.
I follow it. The first evidence is not rubber. It's debris. A small shard of neon-green plastic glints at the edge of my headlight and disappears beneath my front wheel.
Then another.
Then the scrape marks begin.
Long, ugly scars carved through the surface of the asphalt, pale lines where plastic and metal have ground hard enough to chew through the dark top layer of pavement.
Thirty feet. Forty. Farther.
My chest tightens.
The trail angles across the lane toward a broad shoulder where the asphalt gives way to gravel beside a low metal guardrail.
Then I see the bike.
Kit's Yamaha is lying on its left side half in the gravel, half on the edge of the pavement. The fairing is torn open. The engine case is gouged deeply enough that raw aluminum catches our headlights. One mirror is gone. The tail section sits at an angle I don't like.
Then Kit.
He's sitting with his back against the guardrail several feet away. His helmet is on the ground beside him. I don't like that either. His legs are stretched out in front of him. One boot rests loosely against the other, an attempt at casualness so transparent I almost resent him for trying.
His left arm is held tight against his chest.
The left sleeve of his jacket is torn through at the forearm, dark with blood. His jeans and riding gear are shredded along the same side. He looks up when four headlights sweep over him. And squares his shoulders.
Or tries to. The movement stops halfway. Pain crosses his face before he can bury it.
"I'm fine," he says.
His voice is thin. Of course that's what he says.
He looks impossibly small sitting there against the steel barrier, covered in dust and blood and fragments of reflective material from his gear. A hurt, frightened little thing trying desperately to look like a man who has everything under control.
Dex is off his motorcycle first.
"Don't move." Dex opens the compact first-aid kit from his saddlebag and drops into a crouch beside him. "Give me your arm."
"It's attached."
"Kit."
"Jesus Christ, fine."
He lets Dex inspect the torn sleeve. Dex doesn't try to remove the jacket. He works around it instead, pressing sterile gauze firmly against the bleeding section of Kit's forearm. Kit sucks a breath through his teeth.
"Shut up," Dex says.
"I didn't say anything."
Sol crouches on Kit's other side and pulls an emergency blanket from another kit, unfolding the thin metallic sheet.
Kit stares at it.
"No."
"Yes."
"I look ridiculous."
"You look cold."
"I'm not cold."
His teeth click together at the end of the sentence. Sol raises an eyebrow. Kit mutters something I don't catch and allows the blanket to be draped over his legs and around his right side without moving his left shoulder.
Ni stays standing. Phone already out.
"How long ago did you hit the alert?"
Kit doesn't answer immediately. Ni looks down at the screen.
"Fourteen minutes."
Fourteen minutes since Kit pressed the button. Not since he crashed. Since he made the decision to ask for help. I look at him. He looks away. Something changes inside me. He pressed it. He sat alone beside a ruined motorcycle in the dark and pressed a button that meant: Come get me.
Poor thing.
"Did you lose consciousness?" Ni asks.
"No."
"You sure?"
"Yes."
"Throw up?"
"No."
"Vision weird?"
"No."
"Dizzy?"
Kit hesitates.
Dex looks up immediately.
"Kit."
"A little when I stood up."
Every head turns toward him.
"You stood up?" I ask.
His eyes flick to mine.
"For like three seconds."
"Why?"
He gives me a look suggesting this is an unreasonable question.
"Because I was lying in the road."
The anger that rises in me is sharp enough to surprise me. Not at him. At the image. Kit flat on dark asphalt. No traffic. No lights. No one there. He dragged himself off the road because nobody else was there to do it for him.
"Anything else?"
"My shoulder hurts."
"Your shoulder looks like it hurts." Dex says.
"Insightful."
"And your hip?" I ask. That gets his attention. His gaze drops.
"You can see that?"
"I can see your entire left side hit the pavement."
"Oh." The little word is quieter than everything else he's said. I move closer but don't touch him.
"How bad is it?" I ask.
"It's fine."
Four people make essentially the same irritated sound at once.
Kit closes his eyes.
"Okay. Fine. It hurts. Everything fucking hurts. Happy?"
“No. Not remotely.”
Ni is already dialing.
Kit hears the first ring.
His eyes snap open.
"Who are you calling?"
"Emergency services."
"No. Fuck, no."
Ni pauses.
"Kit—"
"No ambulance! I mean it!" he exclaims.
"You're hurt." I say.
"I know."
"You crashed at highway speed."
"I was there."
Brat.
"Kit."
"No." His voice changes. Panic underneath the anger. "I can't pay for an ambulance."
Nobody speaks.
"We can handle the bill," Ni says.
"No."
"Redline has an emergency fund."
"No."
"Then I'll pay it," I say.
"No!"
"Kit—"
"I said no! I mean it! No!" His good hand closes around the edge of the emergency blanket.
His face is pale beneath the road dust now, eyes too bright.
"And before anybody else gets clever, none of you are paying for it either.
I am not getting a four-thousand-dollar taxi ride because my shoulder hurts. "
"It's more than your shoulder," I say.
"Still no."
I understand the impulse to fight him. But I've learned something about Kit in the last six weeks. Push hard enough and the only thing he hears is pressure. Give him one clear path that doesn't feel like surrender and sometimes he'll take it.
I look at Ni.
"Call King," I say. Ni's eyes move to mine. "Have him bring the club truck." Kit looks at me. I keep going. "We don't move you until it gets here. You stay warm. Dex keeps pressure on the arm. Somebody monitors you. The Yamaha goes on a tow truck."
Kit narrows his eyes.
"And then?"
"Then we get you off the side of the road."
"That's it?"
"For tonight?" I say. He hears the qualification.
"So that's not it," he says, a little weak, but with a smile.
"No."
One fight at a time. Ni watches the exchange for another second, then ends the emergency-services call before it connects and calls King instead.
I finally move toward the motorcycle. I don't need him to explain what happened to understand enough.
He was carrying speed. Too much of it. Again.
My palm presses flat against the damaged case.
Still warm. I think about the man on the side of the road last weekend.
The stranger Kit carried forty minutes home.
How gently Kit rolled on the throttle. How carefully he handled every corner.
How obvious it was that he knew exactly how to preserve somebody else's life when it was placed in his hands.
He knows how to be careful. He just doesn't believe his own life deserves the same care.
The thought was terrible then. Standing beside the physical result of it is worse.
"Soren."
I turn.
Kit is watching me. He doesn't look angry. He doesn't look frightened of me. He looks resigned. Like a man caught doing something he can't charm his way around. Like he knows exactly what I asked him not to do. Like he knows exactly what happened because he did it anyway.
There is shame in his face.
I hate seeing it there.
He needs me. That's my first clear thought. Not he needs a Daddy. Not he needs discipline. Not he needs somebody to control him.
Me.
He needs me to be useful.
I cross back to him and crouch several feet away. His eyes drop to the ground between us.
"I messed up." The words are so quiet I nearly think I imagined them.
I don't answer immediately. He still isn't looking at me.
"I know," I say. No lecture. No I told you so. I don't need it. He already knows.
His face folds for half a second, enough that I see the twenty-five-year-old underneath every layer of noise and leather and bravado, sitting hurt beside the thing he uses to outrun himself.
"I lost my job today," he says it very quietly. He rubs his thumb back and forth over the edge of the emergency blanket. "They cut me. Not enough hours. Last check. Good luck out there… and then John's engaged."
Ni looks away. Dex's hand stays steady over the gauze. Nobody interrupts. Kit keeps staring at the gravel.
"So I drank too much and acted like an asshole and you told me not to ride and I rode anyway, and now my bike's fucked, and I'm probably fucked, and I don't know how I'm going to pay rent, and I definitely don't know how I'm going to pay for whatever this is."
His good hand gestures vaguely at his own body.
"And if anybody says emergency fund again, I swear to God."
“We’ll figure it out, bro,” Dex say. “Don’t worry about this anymore.”
Kit sighs, a little relieved. We don’t say anything anymore.
The club truck arrives twenty minutes later with King behind the wheel and Allie in the passenger seat. Kit spends approximately nineteen of those minutes insisting he doesn't need a truck anymore.
Nobody listens.
King parks at an angle to give us light without aiming the headlights directly into Kit's face. Allie gets out carrying another blanket and takes one look at Kit.
"Oh, honey."
"Don't."
Apparently everyone at Redline knows the face. The tow truck arrives five minutes after King. I handle the Yamaha. That part, at least, I know how to do. I speak to the driver, give him the address for Halverson Moto, make it clear the bike isn't to be started or rolled under its own power.
Kit hears me.
"Your shop?"
"Yes."
"I didn't say you could—"
"You want it left here?" I ask, sharp.
"No."
"Then my shop."
He stares at me. I wait.
"Fine," he murmurs.
"Thank you."
He scowls at me for thanking him for permission.
Good.
Getting him into the truck is slow. Nobody pulls him upright.
Dex and King help him carefully, one on either side, letting Kit do as much of the movement as he can without loading the injured shoulder.
He goes white halfway up. I step closer automatically.
Kit's right hand shoots out. For one second, I think he's reaching for the door frame.
He's not.
His fingers close around my jacket. Hard. Everything in me stops. He doesn't look at me. Doesn't acknowledge it. Just holds on. I put one hand lightly over his.
"I'm here."
His grip tightens.
Then he finishes climbing into the back seat.
Allie gets in beside him.
Dex takes the front passenger seat. King will drive. Sol follows on his motorcycle. Ni stays with me while I wait for the tow driver to finish securing Kit's Yamaha.