We float over warped and buckled cement. Frozen weeds thrust up from fissures and cracks a foot wide in places, but we glide uninterrupted over the broken surface, leaving eddies of mist in our wake. We pass few other vehicles, some clusters of tents on the roadside—refugee camps, I imagine. People fleeing the fighting. I duck my head lower, out of the freezing wind, and push my body up against the bike for heat. I think: we’ve made it, we’re home free.

And then the bike’s engine chokes.

—

Malik rises off his haunches and kicks my bike’s undercarriage as he blows out his cheeks. They’re smeared with grease. His eyes are so dark, they’re almost black.

“Kaput,” he says, not looking at me, a grim expression on his face. He works his jaw as if he’s clenching his teeth. “No damn Thunderbird,” he says.

“So we share,” I tell him. “Two on one, like before.”

Malik clicks his neck. He looks at the road. He looks at the bikes. He arches his neck and scans the sky. The ash has stopped falling. His eyes travel to the horizon, across a frozen field of wind-beaten plant stalks. He takes a deep breath and exhales.

“No,” he says, finally. “They’ll be looking for us on bikes anyway. We ditch ’em here.”

“Malik…,” I say, searching for words.

But I’m robbed of them.

Gabe is dead. He was alive an hour ago and now he’s gone. The irreversible truth of it cuts into my gut. I see him falling, smacking into the roof. The appalling sound. The stillness after. Everything in the multiverse, until this moment, has seemed unreal—a dream. But now it’s something else altogether.

No one speaks. Above us, the clouds gather.

Vidhan polishes his glasses. He stoops to lift a stone and hurls it across the road, jerking his skinny arm. He fetches more and throws them. Thwack! Thwack!

Every stone hits his mark—the trunk of a dead tree.

Thwack! Another ricochets away.

He stands still now and lets the stones fall from his hand. They scatter over the broken asphalt. “Those fuckin Reapers,” he says, staring at the road.

“They’re Reapers,” Malik says. “They don’t care about us. They don’t care about Gabe. There is no damn revenge. Not against them.”

“Shinigami will pay,” Vidhan says, wiping the corners of his eyes with the heel of his palm. “Graziani too. They’ll taste my blade, those bastards.”

Malik pulls out his pistol.

He shakes his head—violently, as if he’s been caught in the rain—and he points his weapon at the broken bike. Gives it a hard, thousand-yard stare.

He leaps in the air, wheels, hammers the bike with a crunching reverse-kick.

It crashes down, parts flying.

Malik shouts, letting loose a gut-wrenching, despairing sound from a deep well of pain.