Page 89 of Ghost’s Awakening

I put my right arm through the sleeve. Fast. Then the left. "Jake."

"—when someone feels like they need to—sorry. Yeah?" His hands stopped on his zipper.

It fit the way he'd known it would. The weight of it came down onto my shoulders, and I stood in the middle of his room with his name on me.

"I love it." The smile came up out of me and took my whole face with it. "Now let's fucking go!"

He went redder. I hadn't known that was possible.

We went out the door and down the hall at a run. Patches turned as we came past, and I was already saying sorry before I reached them, sorry, sorry, one shoulder brushing Santos, scusa, the Italian slipping out when my head ran too fast for one language, Ghost's boots on the concrete behind me the whole way.

We came out into the lot, and the sun was straight up and warm on my face after the cold hall, the gravel throwing the light back, and behind me, Ghost was laughing.

Loud, in the middle of the yard, with his helmet in his hand and his head back.

"What is it?!" I turned around, halfway to his bike. "Come on, let's go!"

"Nothing, it's just…" He wiped his eyes with the back of his glove. "I'm happy. Get on."

I stood there and looked at him for one second longer than I had to spare, Ghost in the sun with his head back and his eyes wet with it. Then I smiled. He swung onto the Harley and I got on behind him, and the spare helmet came back over his shoulder to me without a word, and I pulled it on and closed my knees against his hips and put my arms around him. The engine came up under us with a bark I felt in my teeth.

The gate was already sliding open when he rolled the throttle on. Vega stood at the post beside it with a coffee in his hand and the eye that had been swelled shut in a hospital parking structure open and clear, and he lifted the coffee at us. I lifted a hand back. That parking structure had put him in Rosa's chair, and I was riding toward it grinning.

Then the road.

Ghost opened it up before we'd cleared the fence line, and the desert came at us flat and endless on both sides, brown scrub under a white sky, the mountains standing along the edge of it. The wind came around his shoulders and hit me in the chest. Cold, hard enough to push me back against my own spine, hammering the front of the jacket flat against me while the back of it lifted and snapped behind me. I couldn't feel the letters through the hoodie and the leather, and I knew they were there anyway. His name, across my back, riding out of that gate for the whole desert to read. I felt the weight of it more than the jacket.

The road blurred at the edges. Then it blurred in the middle. The white lines went by faster than I could count them, and I quit counting, and I held on. His back against my chest, his stomach hard under my forearms, the engine going through both of us until I couldn't tell his pulse from the bike. Seventy. Eighty.

And under all of it, Liam. Awake. Liam with his eyes open in room 217, asking for me, and me at eighty miles an hour with Ghost's name on my back and no count in my head at all. Five months of that chair. Five months of counting his fingers and watching a sheet go up and down. My eyes went hot again inside the helmet.

We hit the edge of Henderson and a light went red in front of us, and he brought the bike down through the gears and put a boot on the asphalt. The cold came in around my neck the second the wind quit. He shoved the visor up with his thumb and turned half around in the seat.

"You know you're going to have to tell your brother everything." He had to shout it over the engine. "There's no debt left on that account, there's money sitting on it, and you're walking in with a helmet under your arm and a stranger behind you."

"Oh, I know." I leaned in to his ear. "He'll love you. Trust me."

"I'm telling him he's got better hair than you." His visor was still up, and the grin under it took his whole face. "I promised. In that room. You were there."

"Don't." I put my chin on his shoulder.

"Immediately." The visor came down.

The light went green. He rolled the throttle to the stop, the front wheel got light for a second, and we went into Henderson faster than I'd ever gone into anything.

I felt all of it. The hope, sitting high in me where the bill used to be, and I let it sit there for once instead of pushing it back down. The buildings going past in a blur. Ghost and not Jake right now, riding the way only Ghost rode.

The first night, with a blanket around my shoulders in a room I didn't know, he'd told me I was safe, and at eighty miles an hour into Henderson with his name across my back, I finally believed him.

EPILOGUE: DECISIONS

THAT SAME NIGHT

HAWK

The paper had been in my hands so many times the folds had gone soft.

I sat on the edge of my bed with it open in one hand and read it again. The lamp on the nightstand put yellow light across the page. Late, and the compound had gone quiet the way it did most nights, boots on concrete somewhere down the hall, a door, then nothing. The cold came up out of the floor through my socks and into my feet. It had turned cold in the last few weeks, and the building held it in the concrete until morning. I let it.