He swings a leg over the bike. His boots sit flat on the asphalt on both sides, his hands dwarfing the grips.
“Now I go find it.” The brown eyes are steady. “Bears don’t run in packs. But we know what trouble smells like, and I’ve been smelling it inside Aurora for a year.”
He kicks the engine over. It turns with a sound that bounces off the motel walls.
“Take the truck,” he says over the rumble. “Go north. Stay low. When I find what I’m looking for, I’ll find you too.”
He pauses at the edge of the lot and looks over his shoulder.
“Disappear well,” he says. “I’ll know if you don’t. Creed might too.”
Then he’s gone, the engine sound fading down the highway.
Sable and I stand in the parking lot. The sun is cracking the horizon. The air smells like pine and frost and exhaust.
“Do you trust him?” she asks.
“I think he does what he says he’ll do. Whether that’s comfortable or not.”
She looks at the duffel. At the truck. At the road heading north.
“We’re not running forever,” Sable says, as if she needs me to know that. “Just long enough for you to heal in your own time.”
“I know,” I tell her. “I won’t take you from your pack, Sable.”
“You’re my pack now.” She touches my cheek. I smile. “We should go,” she says.
“Yeah.” I nod.
We load the duffel. Check the room one last time. Leave the Aurora van where someone will find it and report it eventually.
The pickup’s engine catches on the first try. Sable takes the passenger seat, the duffel at her feet. She’s already going through it, pulling out a flannel shirt, a pair of boots that might almost fit her, the burner phone.
I put the truck in gear. It coughs and grinds as I fumble with the shift.
Sable looks at me. “You okay with this thing?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Out of practice. It’ll come back.”
“Like riding a bike.” She grins.
“Something like that.” I grind the gears again. She grimaces but doesn’t say anything.
The road stretches north. Empty. Open. The mountains are turning gold at the peaks where the sun is hitting, and the valley below is still in shadow.
Sable settles back, props her feet on the dash, and finds my hand on the gearshift. Her fingers lace through mine. She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t need to.
I drive. I get better at it with every mile that passes.
The sun fills the cab. The road winds through country neither of us has seen before. The truck smells like canvas and old upholstery and the faint, dense scent of bear that Decker left behind.
Sable reaches for the radio. Old dial, manual tuning. She spins it through static and fragments—a preacher, a farm report, a country song with too much twang—and then stops.
Strings. A cello, low and warm, carrying a melody I know. Dvorák. The New World Symphony, second movement. The largo. The one that sounds like someone describing a place they’ve never been but already love.
My hands tighten on the wheel.
The cello gives way to the English horn. That solo. I’ve conducted this piece. I’ve stood in front of an ensemble with my hands raised and shaped this exact passage out of the air between the players and the ceiling. I know where every breath falls. Where the strings come in underneath. Where the brass swells and pulls back.
