All Chapters of Blood on the Asphalt biker: Chapter 141 - Chapter 150

Mia Chen did not consider herself a woman who could be surprised. Surprise was a luxury that required the prior possession of certainty, and certainty, in her experience, had proven to be roughly as reliable as a second-hand alternator on a January morning. She had learned to hold her assumptions loosely, the way her father had taught her to hold a wrench on a rusted bolt, firmly enough to apply torque but not so firmly that you couldn't release before it snapped.And yet.Chen Wei. Her father. A man who had sung tuneless songs in the kitchen and kept a photograph of the Taiwanese coast on his workbench and taught his daughter that an engine's heartbeat was a form of language if you were patient enough to learn it. A man who had died slumped over a partially assembled motorcycle in a garage that no longer belonged to him, his hands still wrapped around tools he no longer had the right to use.Not simply a mechanic.She kept her voice very flat. "Explain."Elias Vorn moved to a low iro

The ten minutes happened near the eastern hatch, out of comfortable earshot of Elias Vorn and his guardian units, in the grey wind that swept across the roof of the Iron Citadel with the indifference of weather that had long since stopped taking human opinion into account.Dax spoke first, because that was how it worked. Not because he needed to establish authority over the group, he had never operated that way, but because the group had a practised rhythm and the rhythm said that Dax opened the question and then shut his mouth and listened until everyone had finished."Votes," he said.Reyes spoke without hesitation. "I don't trust him.""Noted," Dax said. "Reason?""A man who has imprisoned six people and calls them guests does not get the benefit of my doubt simply because he delivers the information in a pleasant tone." Reyes stood with her arms folded, her ballistic rifle slung across her back, her weight distributed evenly in the stance of a soldier who was never fully off duty.

Sera Voss moved through the world with the contained, deliberate quality of someone who had learned to occupy exactly as much space as she needed and not one inch more. She was forty-one years old, and she had arrived at that age through a sequence of events that would have produced in a lesser person either a complete philosophical breakdown or a career in motivational speaking. Sera had produced neither. She had produced instead a very specific and rather dangerous clarity about what mattered.She had grown up in Los Angeles, in a house in Silver Lake that her parents had rented for twenty-three years without ever owning it, the house of people who were always one month from stability and never quite arrived. Her father had been an electrician. Her mother had taught primary school until the school closed and then taught from the kitchen table to whoever's children needed it. The house had been small and warm and full of the particular dignity of people who held themselves together t

Elias Vorn had assigned them quarters in the west wing alongside the released carriers, rooms that were functionally identical to the ones the prisoners had occupied, which Reyes noted with the dry precision of a woman keeping score. The rooms had beds, actual beds rather than iron cots, and running water, and the plants in the corridor outside continued their quiet, obstinate existence in the analogue light.Mia sat on the edge of the bed in her assigned room and did not sleep.She turned the detonator over in her hands. It was a simple device, a physical trigger mechanism, nothing sophisticated, the kind of thing that worked because it did not require anything beyond a person pressing it with intent. She had been holding it or touching it every few minutes since Vorn had agreed to her terms, not out of anxiety exactly but out of the same instinct that made her check the oil level on a long job even when she knew it was fine. Some things required periodic verification.She thought ab

Nobody spoke for a moment that lasted considerably longer than it had any right to.Jax broke it, because Jax had never once in his life permitted a silence to go unanswered when he had a functioning set of vocal cords and an opinion, which was always."So let me make sure I understand the situation," he said, resting his dead gear-axe on the iron housing beside him and folding his arms. "We flew into a continent-sized machine. We fought our way up sixty stories of iron ladder. We placed explosive charges inside your suppression array. And now you want us to join your side." He looked at Elias Vorn with an expression of forensic scepticism. "Brother. You have a deeply unusual recruitment process.""I did not know you were coming," Elias Vorn said. "I knew someone with immune architecture would reach this roof eventually. I did not know it would be this team, on this day, through that particular skylight." Something in his expression shifted toward what might, in a different light, have