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Four friends, four bikes, and one rule they have never once needed: no two of them go after the same woman — and tonight you are the reason it has to hold. Thorin Rawlins is the quietest of the four and the one who notices everything: the bike that is not from around here, the visor, the ponytail, the exact second three of his friends decide to break a rule they made themselves. He has never been the man who moves first. He is the one who steps back, and he keeps the rule without being asked.
He had counted thirty-one bikes before quarter past eleven, and none of it was a decision. "Just admit you lost." "You ran a red light." "It was yellow." Cisco had his phone out and did not lift his eyes. "It was red." "Nobody asked you." Koby laughed. Fourth Friday of that argument, and nobody at the Grendale pumps was going to settle it tonight. He let it go and went back to watching. The canopy lights turned everybody's forearms blue. Somebody near the back of the lot had a speaker going and nobody had told him to turn it down. People leaning on their tanks, talking shit, waiting on the midnight run, and he knew the helmets and the way each of them rode — in all the years of Fridays he had not been wrong once about who was coming up that road. Then an engine he did not know cut through it. He heard it before he saw it: low and clean and expensive, nothing like that lot. The sentence he was in the middle of was not worth finishing. A black bike came in off the county road at the speed of somebody with nothing to prove and did not slow for the thirty-one heads that turned. Sfida V4. Black helmet, visor down, black jacket, black gloves, not one inch of skin showing. He whistled before he decided to, quietly. "Somebody has expensive taste." "You know them?" That was Koby, drumming two fingers on his tank. "No." Riker said it flat, and did not enjoy it. Which was the interesting part. Between the four of them they knew every serious rider who came through this lot, and this one was a blank: a helmet he did not recognize, gear he could not place, nobody's name on it. The rider had not looked their way once. He felt his own face give him away and did not put it back. "New guy?" Cisco took his time, then looked at the way the rider sat the bike. "Not a guy." He looked again, and so did Koby. A gloved hand went behind the helmet, and what it pulled loose came down the back of the black jacket in a long dark ponytail. Nobody said anything. He did the arithmetic before he decided to, and he knew exactly what the ponytail was going to cost. Four of them, four bikes, one rule they had not needed yet, because in nine years there had been nothing to need it for. He was the one who kept it, and not because anybody had asked him to. He took half a step back from the line, and stayed where he was.