Ethan had seen that expression before in the faces of people who had just put down something very heavy that they'd been carrying for a very long time. The lightness wasn't joy yet, it was just the unfamiliar absence of the weight. Rex caught Ethan looking. He held it for a moment, then he gave a small nod, not apologetic, not warm, not fully anything yet, just acknowledging a beginning.
Ethan nodded back. At 6:14 in the morning, he pressed the ignition on his father's motorcycle for the first time as its rider rather than its mechanic. The engine responded like it knew the difference, full and immediate and without the scream, without the shutdown, just the power clean and controlled and massive vibrating up through the frame and into his hands and chest and spine. The man directly behind him in the formation, a veteran named Crow who had ridden with the club for 30 years and had the posture of someone who has spent 30 years on a bike, said loudly enough to carry, "There she is."
And a sound moved through the entire formation, 80 men on 80 bikes, that was the closest to reverence Ethan had ever heard come out of a group of human beings. The gate opened. They rode. Devil's Pass earned its name.
Ethan understood that within the first 3 miles, the way the road climbed and then dropped and then climbed again, the way it wound through the canyon with the kind of tight geometry that separates competent riders from exceptional ones. He was neither technically. He was a 19-year-old with seven prior rides on far less demanding machines running a $2.5 million motorcycle at the front of an 80-bike formation through Nevada canyon roads at dawn. But the bike knew things he didn't.
That wasn't mysticism, it was engineering. Victor Ryder had built a machine that responded to input with a sensitivity and precision that Ethan had never experienced on any mechanical device in his life that translated intention into action with almost no lag, no slop, no ambiguity. It was like the difference between trying to communicate through a bad phone connection versus standing in the same room as the person you're talking to. The bike heard him, the bike answered, and somewhere in that conversation, the gap between his experience and the machine's capability started to close.
He found the rhythm of it around mile seven. Not mastery, he wasn't delusional about that, but the beginning of understanding. The way the throttle wanted to be handled. The way the bike communicated the road surface through the frame and handlebars in a language his hands were learning in real time.
The way the weight moved in a corner, the way it settled coming out. He was so deep inside that learning that he didn't notice the other bikes until they were already close. Crow's voice crackled through the radio mounted on the Harley. Ethan hadn't known it was there until it spoke.
"We've got company, coming off Route 93. Four bikes, maybe five. Moving fast." Ethan checked the mirror.
"Four bikes," he confirmed. Riding hard, not in formation, the loose aggressive spacing of riders who weren't riding together, but towards something. Toward them. Closing fast.
"Who are they?" Ethan said. Joker's voice replaced Crow's. "Iron Wolves."