For three days, the desert wind was the only thing speaking to Eli Dunbar.
It moved through Box Elder Canyon in long, dry breaths, pushing sand against the wrecked Harley-Davidson and dragging cold air down the red stone walls after sunset. During the day, the Nevada sun burned the rocks until touching them hurt. At night, the temperature dropped so sharply that Eli could see his breath while he pressed himself beside the injured biker to keep the man from freezing.
The boy was only eleven years old.
He weighed seventy-three pounds, wore cracked boots two sizes too large, and had not slept longer than twenty minutes at a time since the motorcycle came over the canyon ridge. Yet Cade Harlow was still breathing because Eli had refused to leave him.
Three days earlier, Eli had been walking along Route 376 after slipping away from the Sagebrush Youth Home. He was not running from the other children or from Mrs. Avery, the exhausted director who spent her own money to keep food in the kitchen. He had gone to check the small tool shed once used by Earl Trimble, the home’s elderly mechanic.
Earl had died five months earlier from a heart attack.
He had left Eli a brass key on a shoelace and told him the shed belonged to anyone willing to keep its tools clean.
That morning, Eli had wanted to sit at Earl’s workbench and remember the only adult who had ever trusted him with something valuable. Instead, he heard the roar of a motorcycle, the harder growl of an SUV, and then the violent scream of metal.
A black Cadillac Escalade struck the motorcycle from the side.
The biker fought to control it, swerving toward the ridge rather than hitting Eli, who stood frozen near the shoulder. The Harley broke through loose gravel and vanished over the edge.