Right hand locked the throttle, scar tissue flaring as I maxed the grip. Left hand went under the cut, found the Glock's polymer handle, shoulder holster tight as a second skin. I kept the barrel low, a reflex from days when waving a weapon got you court-martialed instead of shot. My focus narrowed to the van, the left-right swerves as it gunned down Trinity, the wide turns, and the blown stop signs. In my periphery, everything else went ghost-gray.
They didn't expect pursuit. Not from me, not on this bike. The van’s driver tried to lose me, jumping the curb and banking down into a service road that ran behind the community pool. I followed, engine noise echoing off chain-link and cement. The gap closed to a dozen yards; I could see the stickers on the van’sbattered rear, the amateur job on the papered-over plates. She was in there, screaming, or maybe past screaming. The glass in the rear window was soaped over. If she kicked, I couldn't see it.
The first shot was not mine. The muzzle flash blipped like a camera in the driver's side, two rounds punching out the air. Both wild, both warning or desperate. I cut left, low and tight, the Harley skidding sideways in a half-drift that scraped my boot to the bone. The Glock came up, not at the driver, but at the back wheel. My shot landed, flattening the tire with a burst of shredded rubber and a squeal that sounded like a pig dying.
The van listed, fishtailing for twenty yards before it slewed into a lamppost and detonated its airbag. The back doors didn't open. The thick one crawled out of the passenger side, dragging Seraphina by her ankle. She fought like a trapped animal, leg pumping, arms windmilling. The second guy, the shooter, appeared on the other side, gun still up. He aimed at me, but I’d already ditched the bike and rolled up against the curb, feet planted, Glock steady, sights lined on his chest.
"Don't," I said, voice flat enough to make it a command.
He looked at me, then at his friend, then at the writhing cargo in his grip. He went for the shot anyway, because guys like him always bet on their own momentum. I put two rounds through his sternum. He dropped the gun and then himself.
The thick one froze. Seraphina raked her nails across his face, drawing blood, and in the second of surprise, I closed the distance, boots scraping glass and grit. I jabbed the barrel to his temple and watched his eyes widen, but didn't pull the trigger. He let go of her, hands up, fingers trembling. I could have killed him easy, but I wanted answers, not just a cleanup. Instead, I pistol-whipped him across the jaw and watched him collapse, cartilage and teeth a ruin.
She was free. She sat hard on the asphalt, breathing ragged and wet, her glasses gone, her hands shaking. The nylon zip tieon her wrist was already turning her skin purple. I knelt beside her, pulled my folding knife, and sliced her loose.
"You good?" I asked. It sounded idiotic, but it was the only script I had.
She didn't answer. Instead, she stared at the two bodies, then at me, then at the blood blooming through her shirt where they'd tried to gag her with a fist. Her focus ticked in and out, like a scientist recalibrating a microscope.
From behind the van, the sound of sirens. Faster than I expected. Maybe the clerk wasn't as useless as he looked.
"You need to go," she said, her voice already flattening into that calm, unshakable register I’d heard in the canyon. "If the cops see you—"
"I'm not leaving you," I said. My own voice sounded alien.
She nodded once, as if she’d already accounted for that variable.
I hauled her up, bracing her weight against my shoulder, and got her to the Harley. She hesitated, then mounted the seat behind me, hands gripping the leather with a force that would leave prints. I ditched the Glock in the engine compartment, wiped it once with my sleeve, and gunned the bike into the open road.
In the mirror, red and blue lights painted the van and the wreckage, strobing across the faces of the dead. The cops fanned out, weapons drawn, already writing a new narrative. We disappeared into the wind, her breath hitching in my ear, my hands locked white on the bars.
For a second, I thought we’d gotten away clean, but in Los Alamos, nothing is ever clean. Not the air, not the history, not the debts we carried.
I took us up into the switchbacks, away from the lights, the sound of the Harley swallowing every word we didn’t say.She didn’t speak, and neither did I. Some things were beyond language.
I took a back road to the Los Alamos Nature Center, and we parked, Seraphina still shaking.
I set the kickstand and killed the ignition. There was an echo in my bones that wouldn't quiet, the old drumline of chase and kill and keep moving. I checked the perimeter—just one Subaru, forest-green, the sort of thing parental units bought for their honor students. Nobody else, not even the local vultures.
Seraphina clambered off, arms wrapped around her own torso. I scanned her for blood, for anything leaking, but all I saw was tremor and sweat. Her eyes were huge, pupils blown wide, and I wondered if I should talk or just let her finish rebooting.
The night hung over the canyon, thick with piñon smoke, the breeze full of the dry metallic taste that meant “incoming storm.” The sky was almost black-blue at the horizon. Up here, at the edge of the wild, the world fell away, just the hum of the planet and the rattle in my eardrums. I wanted something to do with my hands that wasn’t shaking.
She sat on a split rail fence and hunched into herself. No tears; just shock processed at the speed of math. The moonlight picked out the hollows beneath her eyes, the ink smudge where a mascara streak had survived the attack. Her wrist wept a thin red line from the zip tie. I found the first aid kit under my seat and offered it. She didn’t look at me, only up at the moon, then at her own palm, as if confirming it was still hers.
I wanted to ask questions—who sent them, what they wanted, what the hell she was doing in a town like this—but I could see she wasn’t even in the same hemisphere as those questions yet.
“Do you want the cops?” I asked, quieter than I expected from myself. “Or EMTs, or—”
“No.” She shook her head fiercely, then winced when the motion made her whole body remember what it had justsurvived. “No police. They’ll make it worse. And I can’t…” She let the rest die, the words too big or maybe too small for the mess we were in.
Her breathing caught and stuttered. I watched her hands, how they flexed and curled like she was testing a new set of muscles. The blood on her wrist was already crusting, the worst of the violence sealed into memory. She didn’t ask for a bandage, so I didn’t offer again. Some pain you have to hold until it tells you who you’re supposed to be.
“Can you just take me home?”
I stepped forward and held her hands, me the biker everyone hated, her the scientist everyone envied. It was Los Alamos’ version of Beauty and the Beast. Not sure what the hell I was thinking, but I leaned in to kiss her. She let it happen for a moment and then pushed me away.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “I’m not like that.”
