Chapter Text
The air at forty-five hundred feet didn't move like the air in the valley. Down in the garage, the atmosphere was thick with the grey mist of the Puget Sound, heavy with the exhaust of logging trucks and the stale, damp smell of cedar. Up here, trapped in the deep, volcanic basin between three jagged granite peaks, the air was sharp. It tasted like snow crust and pine sap, cold enough to bite the back of the throat but instantly burned clean by a high, white alpine sun.
The lake was a cyan eye staring straight back at the sky. It sat perfectly level, a flawless sheet of mountain water so clear that the submerged boulders twenty feet down looked like they were hovering in mid-air.
Driver sat on a flat slab of grey shale at the water’s edge, his knees pulled slightly toward his chest. He was wearing his blue denim jacket—the heavy canvas acting as a necessary perimeter wall between his skin and the elements—and a pair of clean, brown leather driving gloves. Between his hands, he held a thick, dog-eared paperback: The Friends of Eddie Coyle. It was the source material for a crime film Colt’s production agency had optioned for the upcoming winter cycle. Colt had dropped it on Driver’s tool chest three days ago with a sticky note that read: The director says the main guy drives like a maniac. Thought of you. Tell me if the script needs more car flips.
Driver hadn't looked at the script aside from the stunt information. The script was a blueprint for a performance, and Driver didn't understand performances. He understood the architecture of the words. He liked the clinical, unfeeling prose of the paperback. It was static data. It stayed where he put it.
A sudden, concussive SPLASH shattered the mirror of the cove.
"Driver! Look! I'm an otter! A very large, highly paid cinematic otter!"
Driver didn't blink. His eyes remained fixed on page 142, but his internal diagnostic software instantly shifted focus.
Target identified: Seavers, Colt.
Distance: 32 feet out.
Velocity: 0 knots (currently treading water).
Respiration rate: Estimated 28 breaths per minute (elevated due to thermal shock).
Colt’s massive frame was cutting through the glacial water like a displaced log. His neon-pink baseball cap was floating three feet behind him, completely forgotten. The sun caught the broad, pale expanse of his back, highlighting the violent geography of his career—the thick, twisted scar over his left shoulder blade from a high-fall wire snap, the faint discoloration along his ribs where three different steering columns had crushed him. He looked like an expensive piece of machinery that had been repeatedly dropped off a cliff, patched back together with industrial weld, and then thrown back into the field.
Driver slowly raised his head, his face entirely expressionless, his jaw set in that tight, unblinking neutral mask.
Colt swam closer to the shore, his huge arms churning the water into foam until his knees hit the gravel bottom. He rose out of the lake like a sea monster, standing six-foot-four and two hundred and thirty-five pounds of waterlogged, soft-looking muscle. He wasn't jacked like the actors he doubled; he was built like an old-school ironworker—thick-waisted, broad-chested, carrying a layer of soft weight over dense, explosive power.
In his mouth, gripped tightly between his teeth like a prized bone, was a yellow tennis ball.
He dropped the ball into the shallow water at his feet, bent over with his hands on his knees, and shook his head violently. A spray of freezing lake water hit the shale three inches from Driver’s boots.
"Your turn," Colt panted, his grin stretching so wide it creased the crow's feet around his eyes. His skin was bright pink from the alpine cold, his chest heaving. "Come on. Put some back into it this time. You’re giving me the junior varsity throws."
Driver looked down at the tennis ball bobbing in the ripples. It was grey-green, waterlogged, and covered in Colt’s saliva. To anyone else, it would be a biohazard. To him, it was a tool for Colt's exhaustion. He'd sleep like a rock.
He carefully set the paperback face-down on a dry towel, ensured the edges were perfectly parallel with the seam of the fabric, and stood up. At five-foot-nine, he had to look up to meet Colt’s eyes, even with Colt standing a foot deep in the mud. Driver’s frame was narrow, his muscles wiry and hidden beneath the stiff black denim, but his shoulders were square—the posture of a man who spent twenty-four hours a day braced for an impact that never came.
Driver reached down, picked up the wet ball, and ran his gloved thumb over the fuzzy, soaked felt.
Mass: Approximately 3.1 ounces (weighted by water).
Wind resistance: Minimal.
Required trajectory: 42 degrees.
He didn't use the loose, easy wind-up of a baseball player. Driver’s movements were always mechanical, utilizing maximum skeletal leverage with zero wasted energy. He drew his arm back, his elbow locking into a precise ninety-degree angle, and snapped his wrist.
The ball cut through the mountain air with a sharp thwack, flying fifty yards out into the center of the deep basin before dropping cleanly into the dark blue water.
"Oh, yeah! That's what I'm talking about! That's an Academy Award-winning throw!"
Colt didn't hesitate. He dived back into the water with a clumsy, explosive splash, his massive legs kicking up a wall of spray as he swam straight for the bobbing yellow speck.
Driver watched him go. A dull, rhythmic ache was beginning to bloom in his right rotator cuff—they had been doing this for exactly forty-two minutes by Driver’s internal clock—but he didn't lower his arm. He just stood there, his fingers twitching inside the leather glove, waiting for the retrieval. He didn't want the ball. He didn't want the game. But Colt’s internal static was loud—Driver could see it in the way the big man couldn't stop moving, the way his eyes darted from the trees to the clouds to the rocks—and this game was a grounding wire. If throwing a wet piece of rubber into a volcanic trench kept Colt from fracturing into his own anxieties about his broken body and his stalled career, Driver would throw it until his arm tore away at the socket.