Someone mentioned a courier had arrived earlier today. A lone man who runs the most dangerous routes on a motorcycle—fast, reckless, willing to go where convoys won't. Iron Wolves tattoos, they said. Former gang member who went solo two years back.
My stomach turned at the name. The Iron Wolves destroyed Clearwater Settlement before it was rebuilt. Murdered families in their beds. Burned homes with people still inside. They became the boogeyman story we tell to scare children into staying inside the walls.
Monsters.
But monsters are all I have left.
I lean down and press my lips to Allie's burning forehead. Her skin is papery, hot as sun-baked stone. "I'll be right back, baby. I'm going to find help."
Her eyes flutter. "Promise?"
"I promise."
I grab my medic bag and run for the south gate.
The biker is exactly where they said he'd be, checking his motorcycle near the trading post. The bike is a modified Honda Shadow, low and mean, with reinforced saddlebags and a framebuilt for survival. The kind of machine that saysI go where others won't come back from.
He’s tall, muscular, and has tattoos that crawl from his knuckles up past his collar, disappearing into a jaw dark with stubble. The Iron Wolves insignia sits stark on his neck, a snarling wolf head surrounded by flames.
Every instinct screams at me to walk away. To find another option. Any other option.
But there is no other option.
I square my shoulders and approach.
"I need your help."
He doesn't look up from adjusting his bike's chain. "Not interested." His voice is low, rough, like gravel scraping stone. Not unfriendly, just indifferent. Like I'm a fly buzzing near his ear.
"My daughter is dying. Bacterial infection in her blood. I need you to take me to Fort Nelson General Hospital. Two hundred miles."
"Still not interested."
"I can pay."
"Lady, I don't do passenger runs." Now he looks up, and I see his eyes for the first time. Gray, cold, with a distance in them that speaks to walls built thick and high. "Bike's built for speed, not extra weight."
I should accept this. Should thank him for his time and walk away with my dignity intact.
Instead, my voice breaks. "Then just tell me the safest route. I'll follow on foot."
Those gray eyes study my medic bag, my shaking hands, the desperation I can't hide. Then, I catch a flicker of something human beneath all that ice.
"You'll be dead in twenty miles."
"Then my daughter and I die together."
The words hang between us. His jaw tightens. His hands still on the bike.
"How old?"
"Ten."
The silence stretches long enough that I hear my own heartbeat. His gaze drops to his forearm, where faded ink forms letters I can't quite read.
When he speaks again, his voice is different. Lower. Rougher. Like the words cost him something.
"Get what you need. We leave in ten minutes." He meets my eyes, and what I see there isn't coldness anymore. It's something far more complicated—old pain, barely contained. "But if you slow me down, if you panic, if you do anything that puts the mission at risk, I'm leaving you behind. Understood?"
