"Move now."
"We may have an hour."
The radio acknowledged.
Cyrus looked at Sully and Levon.
He looked at the small fire.
The threadbare blankets.
The milk crates.
His face changed in a way he did not let it change often.
"Both of you," he said, "get your things."
"The truck's at the corner."
"You sleep at the clubhouse tonight."
"Both of you."
Levon looked up.
His eyes were wet.
"Sir, I can't pay you for that."
"You already did," Cyrus said.
He ducked out of the shelter.
Eli had reached a place where the sidewalk dropped into an old stairwell.
Concrete steps descended into darkness.
An iron gate had once sealed the entrance.
Someone had pried it partly open years ago.
A faded sign above the stairwell, nearly illegible beneath decades of grime, read:
WOODWARD STATION.
An underground terminal abandoned decades before when plans had changed and the city moved on to other failures.
It was dark below.
It was quiet.
The wind could not reach.
Eli Carter, 14 years old, 90 pounds, wearing three sweaters and wrapped in a borrowed blanket, stepped through the gap and descended into the dark.
He did not know that across the city, at that exact moment, his father's photograph was being held in the trembling hand of a woman in a wheelchair.
A woman saying his name aloud over and over like a prayer she had been waiting eight years to be allowed to say.
He did not know that Sully was telling Cyrus Boyd which direction he had run.
He did not know that another man had arrived at the Detroit clubhouse.
Tall.
Broad.
Older.
A scar running up one side of his neck.
The man embraced Beau Whitlock and said he had ridden in from Indianapolis to help find the boy who saved Maggie's life.
His name was Roland Mueller.
Everyone called him Tank.
He had been Beau Whitlock's road brother for 26 years.
He had been godfather to Beau and Maggie's son.
Best man at their wedding.
Three years earlier, Tank's own son, Mason Mueller, had been killed during a confrontation with a rival club in Cleveland.
Beau had authorized the action.
It went wrong in ways he had never stopped paying for in the private hours of his own nights.
Tank stood beside his son's grave and embraced Beau.
He said it was not Beau's fault.
Beau believed him because he needed to.
Because brotherhood was the thing that held all of them together.
Because the brotherhood did not survive fractures of certain kinds.
But Tank Mueller had not believed his own words.
For three years, he carried his grief.
He built a quiet plan.
A plan to take from Beau Whitlock the one thing whose loss would destroy him completely.
He meant to do it in a way nobody could trace.
Now the plan was in danger of unraveling because of a boy who had never been part of the equation.
The homeless child who had saved Maggie Whitlock's life.
The child who was still alive.
For now.
In the abandoned Woodward Station, Eli Carter sat with his back against the cold tile of an old ticket booth.
He pulled the blanket tight around his small body.
He could no longer feel his fingers.
He could no longer feel his feet.
The shivering had stopped 20 minutes earlier.
He understood what that meant.
He had seen Gregory.
He thought about Maggie.