Chapter 10
Morning broke cold and sharp, the pale light of dawn filtering grayly through the dirty, cracked windows of the cabin. The fire in the iron stove had burned down to a bed of glowing embers, leaving the room chilly, though still holding a faint trace of residual heat. Jax was already awake. He sat on his wooden crate, sharpening his heavy hunting knife with a small oilstone, the rhythmic schwing, schwing sound echoing softly off the log walls.
Across the room, Leo was still fast asleep, curled up under the army blanket and the oversized canvas jacket. His chest rose and fell in a steady, peaceful rhythm, the dark circles under his hazel eyes less pronounced now that he was safe from the endless marching of the past few weeks. Jax stopped sharpening the blade, tested the edge with his thumb, and slipped it back into its leather sheath on his hip. He stood up quietly, his joints popping in the morning chill, and walked over to the door.
He stepped out onto the sagging wooden porch. The mountain air was crisp, smelling of wet pine needles, damp earth, and distant woodsmoke. Down in the valley below, a thick blanket of morning fog rolled lazily over the treetops, hiding the highway and the rest of the world from view. It was quiet—the kind of absolute, heavy silence that only high altitudes could provide. For twenty years, Jax had worshipped this kind of isolation, believing that freedom meant being untethered from everyone and everything. Now, standing in the freezing dawn, he realized that isolation wasn't freedom at all; it was just a very long way of being lost.
A creak behind him made him turn. Leo was standing in the doorway of the cabin, rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand, still swallowed up in Jax’s oversized jacket. The boy looked smaller in the daylight, but there was a new color in his cheeks, the pale, pinched look replaced by the quiet resilience of someone who had survived the worst and was waking up to a different kind of reality.
“Morning,” Jax said, his voice rough with sleep.
“Morning,” Leo mumbled back, his voice thick as he yawned. He looked around the clearing, then up at Jax. “What are we going to do today?”
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“First, we find some coffee and something decent for you to eat that doesn't come out of a gas station wrapper,” Jax replied, stepping back inside and grabbing his heavy leather vest off a peg by the door. “Then we pack up the bike and head south toward the shelter of the badlands. There’s a guy I used to know down near Custer—an old mechanic named Eli who owes me a favor and runs a quiet salvage yard. Nobody looks for anyone out there.”
Leo nodded, not asking any more questions. He trusted the plan because he trusted the man, and for an eight-year-old boy who had lost his mother, that trust was everything. Within twenty minutes, they had packed Leo’s small backpack, doused the last of the embers in the stove, and strapped everything down to the back of the FXR.
