Ramsey, who is never far, looks up from wherever he was. "We do."
"He can't just be Austin. That's a name. That's what your mom calls you." Cash turns to me. "You need a road name."
"I'm aware." I turn my whiskey in my hands. "I assumed Razor would assign one."
"Razor assigns them sometimes. Sometimes they come from the floor. You got a preference?"
"Not something embarrassing."
Cash considers this. "Define embarrassing."
"Cash."
He grins. "See, I think the bar for embarrassing is higher than you think it is. Knuckles is called Knuckles. Pops is called Pops. Shadow is called Shadow because nobody could tell where he went half the time for about six months."
"That's not embarrassing."
"No, but you've got a situation on your hands, haven't you, Austin?" Cash leans on the bar and tilts his head, and he has the look of a man who's been sitting on something funny and waiting for the right moment. "You've got a baby on the way. Possibly. A baby that isn't here yet. Mother is a piece of work we don't discuss, and you've gone from prospect to patched member without knowing whether you're about to become a father."
"I'm aware of my own life, Cash, thank you."
"Just setting the scene." He looks at Ramsey. “You overheard Seb calling him something earlier. What was that?”
“No,” I say, “Definitely not that.”
Ramsey's face stays straight but his eyes give him away. "Sprog."
The word lands in the space between us.
Cash points at me slowly. "Sprog."
I look at him. "No."
"Yes."
"Absolutely not."
"Sprooooog." He stretches the word out like he's tasting it. "It works. It's got something."
"It's humiliating."
"It's memorable." Ramsey, the traitor, says this without any inflection whatsoever.
"Knuckles." Cash raises his voice without turning around.
Knuckles comes over from wherever he was, takes in the scene, looks at me, and says,Sproglike it was always obvious.
"You don't even know what's happening," I say to him.
"Cash texted me ten minutes ago."
I look at Cash. "You planned this."
"I had a vision," Cash says. "And I followed it."
Pops appears at Knuckles' shoulder. He hears the word, looks at me, and starts laughing. Not quietly. "Oh, that's good," he says. "That's very good."
"Pops, come on."
