The ditch fell away below the guardrail in a long white slope, maybe forty feet from the roadbed to the bottom, and halfway down there was a gap in the rail itself — a bright torn place where the metal had folded back like the lid of a can. Tire tracks veered off the shoulder above, cut straight through the snow to the gap, and did not come back.
Ava went down the slope the way you go down anything in a blizzard at night: half sliding, half falling, her backpack banging against her spine, snow filling her boots and her sleeves and the neck of her coat. The screaming had stopped while she climbed the fence, and the stopping was worse. She shouted as she slid — "Hey! Hey, I'm coming!" — more to keep the silence from swallowing the man whole than because she thought he could answer.
At the bottom the wind died. The ditch was its own weather, a trench of still, deep cold, and in it, on its side like a shot animal, lay a motorcycle.
It was a big Harley, chrome and black, and it had come to rest against the concrete footing of a drainage culvert with its front wheel folded under. Under the machine — under six hundred pounds of engine and frame and fuel tank — a man lay on his back in the snow.
He was not screaming anymore. He was breathing in short, terrible hitches, and his eyes were open, fixed on the sky that wasn't there, and when Ava dropped to her knees beside him his gaze moved to her with an effort that seemed to cost him everything.
"Leg," he said. His voice was ground glass. "It's — under. Can't — feel it right."
His left leg was pinned beneath the bike at mid-shin, twisted at an angle legs are not issued with. The snow around it was darkening. Ava's hands were already shaking and she told them, silently, to stop it — fear was a luxury item and she had a strict budget — and she put her palm flat on the tank of the motorcycle and felt the tick of cooling metal through her glove.
"Okay," she said. "Okay. I'm here. My name's Ava. I'm going to get you out."
"Phone," he said. "Pocket. Vest." Each word was its own project. "Call — Emergency. It's — a contact. Emergency."
He was a big man, broad as a door, with a grey-streaked beard crusted with snow and blood running from a cut above one eye, freezing as it ran. His vest was black leather, road-worn, and across the back — she could see the edge of it where his shoulder had twisted — were patches. She didn't need the whole picture. She had seen the rocker patches on riders at the truck stop all her life: the winged skull, the top rocker, the bottom one that named a state.
But the patch she could read, stitched on his chest where her hand had brushed the leather, said PRESIDENT.
"Don't move your neck," she said, because she'd watched a first-aid video in the library once, three times, the winter a man had frozen at the underpass and she'd decided that ignorance was also a kind of debt. "Don't move anything. I'll get the phone."
The phone was in an inside pocket and getting it meant reaching across him while the bike ticked and settled a fraction deeper into the snow — and into him. He made a sound she would not forget and did not scream. His hand found her wrist and held on with shocking strength.
"When you lift," he said, and his eyes bored into hers, grey and absolutely lucid under the pain, "you lift — once. I pull. Don't — try twice. You'll — hurt yourself."
"I lift heavy things for a living," Ava said, which was not true, and then, because he had the kind of face that audited lies, "I lift them anyway."
Something moved across his expression that might, in a warm room, have been the start of respect. "Name's — Reaper," he said. "Now you know — who you're saving. In case — it matters."
"It doesn't," Ava said. "Save first. Names after."
She worked her fingers into the pocket and got the phone. The screen was cracked but alive, the battery at thirty percent, no passcode between her and the contacts — a man who rode alone in blizzards, she understood suddenly, kept his phone unlocked on purpose, the way soldiers write their blood type on their boots. She found the contact at the top of the list, saved under a single word.
EMERGENCY.
But first she had to lift a motorcycle off a man's leg, alone, in a ditch, in a storm — and Ava set the phone face-up in the snow beside his head, light glowing, and stood up, and walked around the machine to find the place where a hundred and fifteen pounds of homeless girl could argue with six hundred pounds of Harley-Davidson.