The summer Nevada heat does not cool at night. It just changes shape.
During the day, it comes down from the sky like a punishment. At night, it rises up from the asphalt, from the concrete, from the earth itself, as if the ground has been storing it all day, just waiting for the moment the sun goes down to release everything it has been holding.
Riley Cole knew this heat the way she knew hunger. Intimately. Personally. The way you know something that has never once left you alone.
She was nineteen years old, one hundred and twelve pounds of muscle and stubbornness, and she had been sleeping under the Interstate 80 overpass in Reno for the last three weeks. Before that, it was a shelter on Virginia Street. Before that, the backseat of an abandoned Pontiac in Sacramento. And before that, eleven different foster homes in ten years, ending with a man who had set a black garbage bag of her clothes on the porch on her eighteenth birthday and told her she was no longer his problem.
Seven months of being invisible. But Riley was good at two things: staying invisible, and fixing engines.
The invisible part she had learned in foster care. The engine part was harder to explain. It was not something she had been formally taught. She had picked up pieces watching mechanics, reading thrift-store manuals, and wandering junkyards. But the core of it—the deep, instinctive part that let her hear a misfiring cylinder in a rough idle or feel a worn bearing through the vibration of a frame—that had always been there. It felt handed down through blood rather than instruction.
In her left jacket pocket, worn soft as skin, was a photograph she had stolen from a foster mother years ago. It showed a pair of large, heavily scarred hands holding a torque wrench over a Harley-Davidson engine. On the back, faded blue ink read:
Raymond Cole. Best mechanic I ever knew.
Riley did not know if Raymond Cole was alive or dead, or if he even knew she existed. But she knew the shape of his knuckles matched hers.
On a Tuesday morning, while methodically searching a truck stop dumpster for copper wiring, she found a grease-stained flyer:
Mechanic wanted. No experience required. $10,000 cash. Iron Legion MC.
At the bottom was the logo of an eagle skull with wings spread wide, wrapped in chains—the mark of a Hells Angels-affiliated club. Iron Legion did not advertise. They did not ask for inexperienced help. Either the job was a trap, or it was a problem so impossible that traditional experience no longer mattered.
Riley folded the flyer, put it next to the photograph, and started walking south.