Chapter 2
I'm back in the silo watching myself—fifteen-year-old me—when she appears.
Eleanor Ashby stands beside me in the silo. Not the withered corpse they buried, but Eleanor at thirty-eight, her prime. The Eleanor who photographed me for years. The Eleanor who owned everything, including parts of me nobody else ever touched.
"Hello, Legion," she says, her voice exactly as I remember it—all honey and broken glass.
I don't answer. Can't. My mouth is sand-dry, and my heart hammers against the smooth skin where my brand should be, but isn't. I touch my chest, feel nothing. No proof I ever belonged to anyone.
Eleanor doesn't seem to notice or care about my silence. Her eyes—Savannah's eyes but colder, sharper—follow my younger self as he and Savannah, still excited every time they meet up, even though it's daily that summer, look into each other's eyes.
"Watch," she says, nodding toward the teenagers. "Moments come and go. You're gonna miss it."
Thirteen-year-old Savannah is wearing a blue dress that makes her eyes look electric and her skin glow golden. My younger self can't stop looking at her.
"I remember this day," I say to no one. Savannah and I stand three feet apart, just lookin' at each other. Neither of us able to speak.
"This moment," Eleanor whispers, almost reverent. "This is when everything changed."
My younger self extends his hand. His fingers are callused from barn work, nails broken and dirty. Savannah looks at his hand for a long moment before placing hers in it.
Their fingers intertwine.
I remember the feeling—her skin impossibly soft against mine, her pulse fluttering against my wrist like she was scared.
I remember thinking her hand was so small, wondering how something so delicate could make me feel like I was drowning and breathing all at once.
"You knew, didn't you?" Eleanor asks. "Even then."
The teenagers stare at each other. Not smiling. Not speaking. Just lookin’. Recognizing something in each other that nobody else ever saw.
"Knew what?" I finally manage to ask, though my voice sounds wrong.
"That she was meant for more than you."
God, she's such a bitch.
But she's also right. I did know. Savannah knew it too. We never talked about it, but we understood it sat between us, unavoidable. As futures typically are.
She was an Ashby. I was a Kane. Her life stretched out before her, golden and certain. Mine was a question mark, a dark road leading nowhere worth going.
But that day, holding her hand for the first time, I made a silent promise. Not that I would love her forever—though I would. Not that I would wait for her—though I did. The promise was deeper and impossible.
That I would become someone worthy of standing beside her, not just holding her hand in secret.
Fifteen-year-old me squeezes Savannah's fingers gently. She squeezes back.
"It wasn't love," I tell Eleanor, though I'm not sure why I'm explaining myself to a ghost, or a hallucination, or whatever the fuck she is. "Not yet."
"No," Eleanor agrees. "It was a pledge."
The word strikes me as exactly right. A pledge. A commitment more binding than a promise, more sacred than a vow.
"You pledged yourself to her knowing you would fail," Eleanor says.
I watch my younger self lead Savannah to the blanket. They sit side by side, shoulders touching, hands still linked. They don't speak much. They don't need to.
"I never failed her," I say, the words burning my throat.
Eleanor laughs, the sound echoing off the silo walls. "You've done nothing but fail her, Legion. And you'll keep failing her until she breaks."
My younger self brushes a strand of hair from Savannah's face. She leans into his touch, her eyes closing briefly.
We spent that entire summer finding excuses to touch. Holding hands while walking through fields. Shoulders pressed together as she read books to me. Her head on my shoulder as we watched clouds drift overhead.
We never kissed. Never did more than hold hands. But every touch felt like a confession, every silence a conversation.
"You held her hand for a summer," Eleanor says. "Then what?"
The scene before us shifts. Summer becomes fall, becomes winter, becomes spring. The silo remains, but we change. I grow taller, harder. Savannah grows more beautiful, more reserved.
Sixteen-year-old me parks a motorcycle outside the silo. Not my dirt bike—a real motorcycle. The Honda Shadow I saved another year to buy, working those same three jobs, pushing my body past exhaustion, sleepin’ four hours a night.
I bought it with hard-earned cash, counted out bills at the seller's kitchen table while he watched, suspicious of a kid with that much money. But it was mine. All mine. The first real bike I ever owned.
Sixteen-year-old me waits in the silo, pacing, runnin’ his hand through his hair. When Savannah arrives, I stop breathing. Because I know what happens next.
She steps inside, her hair longer now, her face thinner. No longer a child.
Sixteen-year-old me stops pacin’.
Looks at her.
Takes a step forward.
The memory of our first kiss burns through me like wildfire. I can't watch anymore. I turn away, my eyes finding the rusted walls of the silo instead.
That summer I turned sixteen changed everythin’. Not just because of Savannah, though she was part of it. It was the Shadow.
I bought it for three reasons. One. I had the money. Saved all year for it, even while I was paying Deacon to stay away.
Two. It was street legal. Which was better than a horse and a dirt bike. We’d ride that horse of Savannah's double sometimes. But two teenagers on a horse makes a scene. Two teenagers on a motorcycle with helmets on, do not.
I wanted to take her places. Places that were not a state park. I had big plans for dates. Most of which we never did because we were too busy kissing by that time. Doing bits and pieces of other things too.
But fourteen was too young. I wanted her pretty bad, just… not yet.
It was another year before we slept together. The summer I was sixteen was practice for that.
Third. A boy could not join a MC if he didn't have a fuckin' bike. Even if it was just a shitty Honda, it was better than a dirt bike.
I rode it into Terry, Montana almost every day that summer, got a job at their grain mill instead of Drybone’s.
There was no way to bump in to the Badlands crew in Drybone.
They just didn’t go there. I'd been tracking them for months after that first encounter with Brick.
Watching. Learning. The clubhouse was somewhere near Terry—I'd figured that much out from following their bikes at a distance, seeing which roads they took.
I made myself a fixture in town, a local face, even though I still slept at home.
"You were hunting them," Eleanor says beside me, her voice almost admiring. "You wanted to be one of them."
I don't answer. I don't need to. She already knows.
After working at the Terry co-op for two months, I realized my mistake.
Outlaw bikers don't frequent grain mills.
They weren't gonna magically appear while I was sweeping floors and stacking bags.
The men who worked there were decent enough—quiet, hardworking types who minded their business and expected the same from me.
But they weren't bikers, that's for sure.
So I quit and got a job at a garage in Terry instead.
Parts driver. It didn't pay as well as the co-op, but I didn't care about the money anymore.
I cared about positioning. The garage was on the edge of town, the kind of place that didn't ask too many questions about who you were or where you came from.
Most of the mechanics were Northern Cheyenne from the reservation.
They spoke their language to each other, switching to English only when they needed to talk to me.
They treated me like a ghost—there but not there.
I didn't mind. I watched. I listened. I picked up words here and there.
Enough to understand when they were talking about bikes or customers.
The first time a Badlands member came into the shop, I almost missed him. No cut, no patches. Just a tall man with a long black braid and coveralls so stained with grease they might have been black originally.
Ratchet.
I didn’t know his name back then, obviously, but I recognized his face. He was there that day out at Makoshika. Not the one who held the gun to my head—that was Brick—but one of the others. Loading crates into the bunker.
He paused when he saw me, just for a second. A slight narrowing of the eyes, a tilt of the head.
I kept my face blank, but inside, my heart hammered against my ribs. This was it. The connection I'd been looking for. The way in.
Ratchet said something in Cheyenne to one of the other mechanics, who laughed. Then he walked past me like I didn't exist, heading straight for the manager's office.
I knew I'd been made. Known and categorized. I should have been scared, but instead, I felt a thrill run through me. I was on their radar now.
I turn back to face Eleanor's ghost, her presence as unwelcome now as it was the past. Even back then, she was hunting me. Following me. Watching me. Not just with Savannah, but everywhere.
She showed up outside the parts store in Terry one afternoon. I was loading boxes into the back of the delivery truck when I spotted her across the street. Camera in hand, as always. But she wasn't taking pictures then. She was waiting for me.
When my shift ended, she approached me in the parking lot. Pulled an envelope from her bag and handed it to me without a word.
Inside was a photograph. Me and Savannah in the silo. Our first kiss. Me sixteen, her fourteen. Her hands on my face, my fingers tangled in her hair. The moment captured in perfect, terrible detail.
"Savannah will love you forever," Eleanor said, her voice soft but her eyes hard. "No matter who she marries. Take solace in that."
The meaning was clear. Savannah is not yours. Will never be yours. You can have her heart, but not her life.