Silence rolled in eventually, heavy and buzzing.
“Check,” I called.
“Breathing,” Diamondback replied, hand pressed over the graze on her arm. Blood smeared her fingers but the wound looked clean. “Stings like a mother fucker.”
“Indigo?” I asked.
“Fine,” she said. “Ego bruised. That’s it.”
“Medusa?”
“Disappointed,” she answered. “Thought I was going to get to cave someone’s skull in. Shooting works, I guess.”
I holstered for a second and crossed to the Serpent who’d almost put me down. The one Jersey had shot.
He lay half-on, half-off a rusted hood. The hole in his face was impossible to mistake. Up close, he was young. Most of them are. Tattooed throat, pale eyes already glazing.
“Strip him,” Liberty said behind me. “We’re not leaving anything that ties back to us, and we’re not wasting a perfectly good cut. We can use it forevidence.”
Vipers moved with that grim, practiced ease that comes from too many years of cleaning up other people’s messes. Medusa sliced the patches free. Indigo peeled the leather off his shoulders. We even found a burner phone in one of his pockets.
“Wait,” Liberty said. “Pictures first.”
She stepped in with her phone out.
I grabbed the corpse by the hair and tilted his head enough that his face pointed toward her. His skin flopped. Liberty snapped a photo. Then another with his cut draped over his chest so the emblem was clear. Then one wide, catching the body, the car stacks, and the wreckage for context.
She lowered the phone, checked the shots, nodded once.
“Now you can undress him,” she said.
I followed Jersey who went to the bike.
Even twisted and scraped, I knew why Miami’s chest had cracked when it went down. The frame was bent in like a punched lung. The tank was caved; the bars were at wrong angles.
“That’s it,” Jersey said quietly. His voice had gone strange around the edges. “That’s the bike.”
Diamondback joined us.
“Let me look,” she said.
She crawled around the wreck like a spider. Checked under the tank, around the frame. Felt for hollow sounds where there shouldn’t be any.Ran her fingers along welds that might have been newer than the rest.
Nothing.
“If there was more in here, it’s gone now,” Diamondback said finally. “Either he pulled every piece that mattered, or someone else beat us to it. This is just scrap.”
“Then it dies,” Liberty said. “On our watch.”
The crusher loomed at the far end of the yard. It looked like a metal mouth waiting for its next chew. Medusa and Indigo maneuvered the wrecked bike onto a rolling cart and pushed, grunting with the weight. Jersey put a shoulder in without being asked.
We loaded the bike into the crusher.
Then Liberty hit the control.
Hydraulics whined. Steel descended. The frame shrieked as it folded, metal giving up the ghost. When it came back up, the bike was a twisted, unrecognizable chunk in a bin of other dead machines.
“Body next,” Liberty said.
