The engine ran on, steady and clean and faithful to every hour its builder had put into it. Every promise buried in its frame, every secret it had kept for the right hands to find. The most expensive motorcycle the Hells Angels had ever owned, filling the Nevada night with the sound of something that had been broken for 20 years and had finally at the hands of a 19-year-old runaway with grease in his blood and a dead man's blueprint in his pocket been made whole. Ethan let himself breathe.
And somewhere in the back of his mind, quiet and certain as the engine's rhythm, he heard a voice he had never heard in his life and would have recognized anywhere. "Well done, son." The engine ran for 11 minutes before anyone moved. 11 minutes of men standing in a doorway and against the walls of a compound in the Nevada desert listening to a sound they had collectively stopped believing they would ever hear.
Some of them had been part of this club for 15 years, some for 25. Every one of them had a memory attached to this machine, a moment when they'd stood in this room or heard the story third hand, or watched another mechanic pack his tools in defeat, and now every one of those memories was being rewritten in real time by the steady, clean, extraordinary sound of the engine doing exactly what Victor Ryder had designed it to do. Joker was the one who finally moved. He walked to the bike, placed both palms flat on the tank where you'd place your hands on the shoulders of someone you'd thought was dead and stood there with his eyes closed for a long moment.
Nobody spoke. Nobody would have dared. Then he looked up at Ethan. "Tomorrow morning," he said, "first light, we ride."
His voice was rough at the edges, but certain all the way through. "The whole club, every bike that can move. We take her out on the road the way Victor always said she deserved to be ridden with the whole brotherhood behind her." A sound moved through the crowd, not quite a cheer, something deeper than a cheer, the sound of 70 men exhaling something they'd been holding for a very long time.
Ethan nodded. "She'll be ready." "Will you ride her?" Joker asked.
The room went quiet again in a different way. Ethan looked at the bike. He was 19 years old and had ridden motorcycles exactly seven times in his life, none of them on anything close to this machine's power level. The rational answer was no.
Given his limited riding experience, the honest answer should also have been no. "Yes," he said. Joker studied him for a moment. Then he almost smiled, the first time Ethan had seen anything close to it on the man's face.
"Victor would have said the same thing," he said, "in exactly the same tone of voice." The crowd began to move, to break apart into conversation and motion, in the particular celebratory energy of men who have been given back something they'd grieved. Ethan watched it from beside the bike with a bone-deep exhaustion that was starting to win the argument against the adrenaline. He needed to sleep, really sleep, not 90 minutes on a cot, but the long unconscious dark of a body that had given everything it had and needed to be rebuilt from the inside.
He was turning toward the door when Tank appeared at his elbow. "Room's set up for you in the main building," Tank said. "Real bed, Joker's orders." He paused.