She's the only one who'll believe me about the AI without me having to convince her.
Because she knows exactly what it feels like to tell the truth and have your own family hear it as madness.
I pick up my phone.
I find her name, my sister, the other damaged Crockett girl, the one who got out, and I start to type.
CHAPTER TEN
Njal
A rag in your hand and another man's chrome in front of your face will quiet a man down.
I've got Tor's Dyna up on the stand in the clubhouse yard.
I'm working a cloth into the spokes one at a time, getting the road grime out of the places you can only reach if you're willing to get down on the concrete and stay there a while.
I'm willing.
That's the whole job of a prospect—being willing, over and over, for the things nobody else wants to do.
You clean the bikes. You take out the trash. You clean the toilets.
Hell, you run for cigarettes and beer and whatever else the patched men decide they need at midnight, and you sayyeah, sureand you go, and you don't keep score where anybody can see you doing it.
A few years ago, the man I was would've put a fist through somebody for handing him a rag.
I rest my forearm on the seat and look at my own hands, black to the knuckle with somebody else's dirt, and I feel nothing but steady.
I came up here for her. That's the thing I keep coming back to, down on the concrete with the chrome.
Two weeks ago, I didn't have a single reason in the world worth getting on my knees for, and now I've got one asleep in a bed an hour south, and I'd clean every bike in this yard with my tongue if it bought her one safe night.
There's men inside who'll never know what it took to get me back to this yard with a rag in my hand and my mouth shut.
They knew the version of me that came up here in the spring seven years back, the one who couldn't sit still in a room, who flinched at sounds that weren't there, who had a certainty riding him so hard it ended with three men in the ground.
Some of them voted on whether I was worth the risk of letting back in at all. I know which ones. I don't hold it against them. They were right to ask, and to be leery.
So I clean the bikes. I take the dirt. I earn my place back one degrading task at a time, and every inch of it is proof—to them, and to me, and to the man I have to be for the woman down south—that I'm not who I was.
"Well, would you look at this?"
I know the voice before I turn. I came out of the same body as that voice.
Bjorn's standing at the mouth of the yard with his weight cocked over one hip, the new leg taking it the way the old one used to, and a grin on his face that I want to wipe off with the dirty rag.
"They've got you on bike detail." He whistles low. "Down in the dirt with a rag. Somebody get a picture. Ma'll want it for the wall."
"You could grab a cloth," I tell him. "There's a whole other side to this thing."
"I'm patched, brother." He taps the flash on his chest slowly, savoring it. "I did my dirt. This here's a spectator sport for me now."
He folds himself down onto an overturned crate anyway, because that's the thing about Bjorn. He'll needle you to the bone and then sit down in the dirt beside you while he does it.
We don't talk for a minute. We don't have to. That's the other thing about a twin: there's a whole language that runs underneath the words, and most of what passes between Bjorn and me has never once been said out loud.
He waits until I've moved to the back wheel.
