There is a technique for lifting things that are too heavy for you, and Ava had learned it the way she learned everything: by having no alternative.
You do not lift with your back. You get under the load, you set your feet wide so the earth can help you, you take the weight into your legs and your hips, and you do not think about whether you can. Thinking about whether you can is how loads win. You decide the thing is already lifted — that the moment is merely the world catching up to the decision — and then you stand.
She dug the snow away from her boots until she found gravel and frozen mud and braced her feet in it. She worked her fingers under the edge of the fuel tank and the frame rail, where the metal gave her something like a handle, and she wedged her shoulder against the machine's flank, and the cold of it went through her coat and her shirt and printed itself on her skin like a brand.
"On three," she said. "You pull when I lift. Ready?"
Reaper's hand closed around a fistful of his own vest, and he nodded once, a movement so small it was mostly intention.
"One," Ava said. "Two. Three."
She stood up into the weight.
The Harley did not want to move. For a moment — a moment that had whole minutes inside it — nothing happened except the sound of her own body, tendons and breath and the small bright fireworks of pain across her shoulders. Her boots slipped an inch in the gravel. The machine groaned. Somewhere under the roar in her ears she heard Reaper begin to make the sound again, the one that wasn't screaming yet, and she understood that the bike had shifted onto the leg differently, worse, and that she had perhaps three seconds of strength left and a choice about how to spend them.
She spent them all at once.
It was not a graceful lift. It was a heave, a snarl, her whole frame shaking like a cable in wind, and the motorcycle rose — two inches, three, four — enough. Enough is a country and Ava had just dragged them both across its border. Beneath the machine she saw Reaper move: he hauled himself sideways by main force, dragging the ruined leg out from under the frame with his arms, his teeth bared, making no sound at all now, which frightened her more than the screaming had.
"Clear," he gasped. "Girl — I'm clear. Let it go."
She let it go and the Harley slammed down into the snow with a sound like a dropped anvil, and Ava went down too, on her knees, then on her side, laughing or sobbing — her body hadn't filed the paperwork to say which — with her arms trembling so hard she couldn't push herself up for a full ten seconds.
The leg, when she crawled to it, was bad in the ways she'd feared: broken, certainly, maybe in two places, bleeding through torn denim from a gash the footpeg had opened. She did what the library video had taught her. She didn't move it more than she had to. She packed clean snow — no, she tore a strip from the flannel shirt under her coat and bound the gash tight, and she took her own scarf off and laid it over him, and then her coat, and climbed back into the freezing wind in two shirtsleeves, because a man in shock in a ditch dies of the cold while you're being sensible about coats.
"Phone," Reaper said. His voice had changed — thinner, farther away. "Call. Now. Tell them — mile marker. Tell them it's — me."
Ava's fingers were clumsy with cold but the phone obeyed. The contact rang once.
A voice answered that sounded like gravel being poured down a well. "Who is this? Where's Reaper?"
"My name is Ava," she said, and was proud, later, of how steady it came out. "Your president went off the interstate into the ditch, east of Billings. There's a broken guardrail. His leg is broken and bleeding and he's going into shock. I got the bike off him. I need an ambulance and I need it now."
A pause — one second, in which she could hear the whole world rearrange itself on the other end of the line. Then the voice, transformed, iron-hard and absolute: "Mile marker, Ava."
She scrambled up the slope on her hands and knees until she could see the green sign through the blowing snow and screamed the number back down into the phone.
"Listen to me," the voice said. "You stay with him. You keep him awake. You keep him warm. Whatever it takes. We are already moving. You will hear us before you see us — do not leave him. What's your name again?"
"Ava," she said. "Ava Wright."
At the bottom of the ditch, half-conscious, wrapped in her coat, the president of the Montana Hells Angels opened his eyes and looked at her — and something passed through his face that was not pain, and not shock, and closed his eyes again before she could name it.
"Hold on," she told him, and knelt in the snow and took his freezing hand in both of hers. "They're coming. You just have to hold on."