Brutus grinned. His grin is a bad idea with teeth. “You think I’m stupid?”
“I think you’re awake,” I said. “It looks the same.”
He loved me anyway. That’s the thing about a club. You tell the truth, and you get forgiven for your tone. Or you get punched and then forgiven. Either way, the forgiveness is the point.
We filed out into air that wanted to be a day. Ranger put his hand on the gas tank of his bike like it was a knee he meant to steady. We didn’t fire them up. Not yet. We took the truck back out because noise is a ladder; it lets men climb to where you're faster than you can decide to jump.
As I slid behind the wheel, I looked down at my phone one last time. 2:11 a. m. Ping. Quarry. Our boy saying I’m breathing. The SIM tucked back like a secret that wanted to be polite.
“You ever think about how he learned to trust us?” Ranger asked as we rolled, uncharacteristically church quiet.
“He watched us do the right thing when no one could see,” I said. “Then he watched us do the same thing when everyone could.” I paused, because the road deserved it. “We do it again.”
Ghost looked out the window at a town that had never loved us and always needed us. “We bring him home.”
“We bring him and her home,” Doc said, soft but iron. He meant Ariel without saying it. We all heard her in the way Cap has learned to say less so the world can say more.
“Yeah,” I said. The word felt like a chain properly set on new sprockets. “We bring them home.”
The quarry sat out there in the dark like a promise I hadn’t made yet. The drone would come back. The Lords would too. Their watcher would hold his men like a leash. And Cap would look at what we’d left him and pick the path we wanted him to pick, because he knows how we talk when we can’t use words.
“Dawn’s not our friend,” I said again, and this time nobody argued. “We move before it.”
