Page 2 of On the Edge

“You know it.”

Only too eager to move along, I didn’t need Stacey prodding me this time. I made my way back to my mechanics. My lead dude, Joey, was deep in concentration as one of his helpers revved the engine. I trusted them to have the bike ready, so I focused on getting myself in the right headspace as I located my gear. I found the perfect hype tune, an uplifting anthem from the ads for one of my favorite first-person shooter games.

I kept my big noise-canceling headphones on as I switched to my race boots and readied my goggles and gloves. A frigidbreeze swept through the mechanics’ area, making me wrap my parka tighter around me. Needing my muscles to stay loose and warm, I did some jumping jacks. As riders headed to the starting line, I blocked out everything other than my music, visualizing the perfect race. My hands flexed, adrenaline starting to gather, body eager to ride.

At my gate, I removed my coat and handed over the headphones and my phone to Joey. Taking deep, slow breaths, I fastened my helmet and lowered my goggles into place to do my site lap and check track conditions.

Once back at the gates, I swapped goggles before Joey helped me engage my starting mechanism.

“Get ‘er done.” Joey gave me a solemn nod that hid his snaggle-toothed grin. We didn’t say good luck or anything like that. No empty praise between us. This was work for the whole team, and they all counted on me to do my job.

“Let’s go racing.” The announcer yelled as the engines revved, the last seconds of the countdown ticking away.

I’ve got this.As soon as my gate dropped, my good feeling from earlier became an utter certainty that the race would come to me. Rather than a chaotic rush of milliseconds fighting for the holeshot, the start unfolded in slow motion, a clarity of senses that allowed me the sort of precision I could usually only visualize over and over in the lead-up to each race.

This was real life, not a video game or a practice track, yet everything came easily to me. I had the first gate pick and used that to my advantage, seeking the easiest, fastest path to the holeshot. I jockeyed for position, finding the outside line my team and I had chosen after the qualifying heats.

Having the lead coming out of the first turn—the holeshot—was more than a point of pride. My team loved to drown me in stats, and their numbers were clear. When I got the holeshot, Iwon. A bad start tended to doom me to playing catch-up to the leaders and making stupid mistakes.

Getting the holeshot made my already revved adrenaline rush like shot-gunning three of my sponsor’s trademarked energy drinks. My whole body buzzed, hands tingling, but my track awareness had never been higher. We’d been at this track for the better part of a week, and I knew exactly which jumps I wanted to triple and how fast I wanted to hit the whoops.

My timing was a thing of beauty, and by the end of the first lap, I’d started pulling away from the field. Everyone else could fight for second place. No one could keep up with me. Not today.

Lap after lap, I flowed around the track, one with my bike, as though I were on my thousandth lap back at our practice track. Each obstacle came easier than the last. As I accelerated out of the corner toward the finish line jump, I was already anticipating coming around for another lap closer to victory. While approaching the jump, however, I lost traction and cross-rutted, my wheels falling into separate ruts, not allowing me to hit the face of the jump square. The second my tires left the track, I justknew.

I couldn’t save this one.

There was no time, no way.

I was falling.

Faster and faster.

Plummeting to the dirt.

Tumbling, rolling, crashing, slamming, metal crunching, pain taking over swiftly and violently.

Not today.The thought fluttered through me right before my world went dark and cold.

Chapter Two

Jonas

“Is he going to make it?” My friend Eric’s voice was crackly on my phone. Nasty early December weather meant horrible cell reception. He was asking what everyone wanted to know, yet no one had the answers.

“Hold on.” I paced farther down the chilly hospital corridor, away from Declan’s ICU cubicle and Sean’s hearing. Eric was a seasoned paramedic and undoubtedly knew what my pause really meant. Likewise, I understood he was asking my opinion more than wanting a regurgitated version of what the medical team had told our friend Sean, Declan’s father. “Doctors are saying the usual about head injuries being unpredictable and tricky. Between us, though, it’s pretty bad.”

Bad was a wild understatement for our last three days, starting with the moment Sean received a phone call that Declan had been injured at a motocross event near Salt Lake City. And every update since then had been worse than the previous. “Declan sprung a major subdural bleeder last night, so the on-call neurosurgeon had to go in to fix it.”

Eric sucked in a breath. Brain surgery was never anything minor, and bleeding was the one complication of traumatic brain injuries that everyone dreaded. Brain bleeds were associated with lower survival rates and more loss of function, something all of us in the first responder field knew all too well.

“He’s still sedated for rest after that surgery, I bet.” There was a clinking noise like Eric was stirring something. Like me, he tended to put his excess restless energy into cleaning or cooking when home.

“Yeah.” I paced the length of the hallway, my own nerves jangling. Eric and I were best friends and didn’t look the most alike, but people occasionally mistook us for brothers because of our similar mannerisms. “Now it’s a waiting game.”

“What’s the EEG showing after the brain surgery to relieve the bleeding?” Eric’s voice was crisp, the sort he used on a call. Focusing on medical jargon, chart data, procedures, percents, and so on was so much easier than admitting our other friend, Sean, might lose his son. I flexed my hands as acid gathered in my already sour stomach.

“Latest reports show some brain activity, so there’s hope Declan can pull through this TBI, but of course, there’s no telling what limitations he may face if—when—he wakes up.” Testing could only tell us so much. As a longtime emergency room nurse, I’d seen more than my share of head injuries, and each one was its own unique beast with a hard-to-predict outcome. I’d seen lesser injuries than Declan’s yield permanent comas, while injuries that at first appeared far more severe resulted in a patient who was up and demanding food by this point.

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