She was about to invite the storm back in.
"Bring him home," she said quietly. "But Cole?"
"Yeah?"
"If he comes near my son... if he evenlooksat him wrong... I will break the other leg. Do you understand?"
"I understand," Cole said. "Thank you, Elena."
The line went dead.
Elena slowly hung up the phone.
She looked at her hands. They were shaking.
The silence of the clinic rushed back in, but it wasn't empty anymore. It was filled with the roar of a distant crowd, the echo of a siren, and the terrifying certainty that her eight seconds of peace were up.
The Wild Ride was starting again.
CHAPTER 2: THE GRAVITY OF GRAVITY
I. The Ceiling
The first thing Ryder noticed was the silence.
It wasn't the dead, antiseptic silence of the ICU in Billings, pierced by the rhythmic chirping of machines. And it wasn't the roaring, static silence of the arena after the buzzer.
It was a heavy, wooden silence. A silence that smelled of dust, pine cleaner, and the distant, muffled lowing of cattle.
He knew this silence. He had spent eighteen years trying to outrun it.
Ryder opened his eyes.
He expected the white tiles of the hospital. Instead, he saw a water stain on a plaster ceiling. It looked like a map of a continent that didn't exist. He knew that stain. He had stared at it when he was ten years old, hiding from his father’s temper in the downstairs guest room.
No.
He tried to sit up.
The universe slammed a sledgehammer into his left thigh.
"Gah!"
The sound tore out of his throat—a wet, animal gasp. The pain was absolute. It was a white-hot spike that drove itself through his femur, nailed his hip to the mattress, and radiated outward in waves of nausea.
He fell back against the pillows, sweat instantly popping on his forehead.
He looked down.
He was in a hospital bed—a metal, mechanized contraption that looked alien in the farmhouse bedroom. His left leg was elevated, encased in a heavy fiberglass cast that ran from his toes to his hip. His right arm was strapped to his chest in an immobilizer.
He was a mummy. A trussed-up piece of meat.
"Don't move," a voice said from the corner. "The block is wearing off. You're going to feel everything in about ten minutes."
Ryder turned his head. The movement made the room spin.
Cole was sitting in the armchair by the window. He was reading a livestock journal. He looked exactly the same as the last time Ryder had seen him—stoic, solid, and radiating a quiet, judgmental disappointment.
