The cold worked on Ava the way water works on stone: patiently, and from the edges in.
She talked to keep them both alive. She talked about nothing — about the truck stop coffee, about the night manager, about how the snow in Montana fell sideways because even the weather here refused to do anything the easy way — and some of it Reaper answered, in grunts and single words, and some of it he didn't, and each time the silence stretched she squeezed his hand hard and said his name until the grey eyes opened again.
"Stay," she ordered him. "You don't get to go anywhere. I didn't lift six hundred pounds of motorcycle to watch you quit in a ditch."
"Bossy," he murmured.
"Alive," she said. "That's the word you're looking for."
The bleeding had slowed under the flannel binding, or her eyes in the dark wanted it to have slowed. His skin above the beard was the color of old paper. Once, his hand tightened around hers with that shocking strength again and he said, clearly, as if finishing a conversation begun years before she was born: "Should've known. Wrights don't — walk past." And then he was gone — not dead, she could feel the pulse jumping under her thumb, but gone somewhere below consciousness, where she could not follow and could not call him back from.
Ava put her forehead down against their joined hands and did the thing she had not done since the courtroom a year ago. She begged, out loud, to nobody, to the snow and the dark and whatever kept the accounts: "Not him. Not tonight. I already did the lifting. Not him."
She heard them before she saw them, exactly as the voice on the phone had promised.
It began as a vibration in the frozen ground, coming up through her knees, and then it was a sound — not engine by engine but as one continuous thunder, low and enormous, rolling down the interstate from the west. Ava stood up in the ditch with her heart slamming and watched the whole horizon of the highway ignite.
Headlights. Not ten. Not fifty. A river of them, a flood of them, pairs and singles and driving lights, stretching back along I-90 farther than the storm let her see, all converging on the green mile marker sign above the broken rail. And on the eastbound side, more, coming from Billings, and more still arriving from behind her out of the west, until the interstate in both directions was simply full — a shining, roaring, idling multitude of motorcycles, with an ambulance forcing its way through the middle of them on a path that opened like water before a ship's bow.
Later, people who were there would argue about the count the way fishermen argue about a fish. The club would say seven hundred and fifty, and the club's number is the one that stuck, and Ava never corrected it, because whatever the true number was, it was the number of human beings who had dropped everything in a blizzard at midnight and ridden into a killing cold because one phone call said their president was in a ditch.
Men came down the slope in a controlled avalanche — with ropes, with a backboard, with thermal blankets and a trauma kit and the calm, practiced efficiency of people who had pulled their brothers out of wrecks before. A huge man with a grey beard and a face like weathered granite took one look at Reaper, one look at the coat wrapped around him that was clearly a girl's, one look at Ava standing in her shirtsleeves in eleven-below cold with her arms wrapped around herself and her teeth chattering too hard to speak — and understood the whole scene in a single breath, the way some men can.
"You're Ava," he said. It was the voice from the phone. "I'm Bull. You did this?" He meant the coat, the binding, the moved motorcycle, all of it.
"He was — under it," Ava managed. "Somebody had to."
Bull stared at her for one long second. Then he shrugged out of his own coat — a vast leather thing that weighed more than her backpack — and put it around her shoulders, and turned back to the men bringing Reaper up the slope on the board, roaring instructions, and Ava, standing forgotten for a moment in the ditch with the empty, snow-filled hollow where a dying man had been, did the arithmetic she always did, automatically, like breathing.
She had saved a life. She had no idea yet what it was going to cost, or pay.
Somebody — she never learned who — had thrown a lit road flare down into the ditch while the crews worked, and for a moment the whole scene hung in its red, smoking light: the wrecked bike, the hollow in the snow, her scarf still lying where it had fallen from the man's shoulders like a flag nobody had claimed. Ava retrieved the scarf before they loaded her into the truck. She told herself it was because it was hers, and because waste was a sin. It was not the only reason, and even then, eleven below and shaking apart, she knew it.