“Ain’t nothing,” she said at last.
“ ’Kay,” said Kyren. She sensed disappointment in his voice and felt like she’d failed a test of some kind.
“What about yours?” she asked in an attempt to resuscitate the conversation. “He okay?”
“Draden? Sure. He does his job.”
“You guys get on?”
Kyren made a noise that she took to mean so-so. “Don’t really know him. Anderos put us together.”
“You weren’t friends before?” She knew that most teams were built that way, but it still struck her as strange, the idea of driving with someone you didn’t trust down to the bone.
“Friends are for when you’re off the track,” said Kyren. “You don’t work with ’em. Too easy for things to get complicated.”
Yeah, that’s the truth, thought Cassica.
“Y’know, he thinks a lot of you,” Kyren said.
“Draden?”
He snorted. “Anderos. Thinks you’ve got what it takes. Doesn’t think much of your manager, though.”
“Him and me both,” said Cassica, her mood curdling.
“Forget him,” Kyren said. “Managers, techs, organizers, all those guys. It ain’t them out there making the life-or-death decisions. Ain’t them with the guts and the reactions to do what we do. Hundreds of good techs out there, but only a few great drivers. You and me, we’re the talent. Everyone else makes out they’re important, but they wouldn’t even have jobs if not for us.”
It felt like he’d read her mind, said aloud the thing she’d never dared admit to herself. Yes, damn it, yes! The drivers were the most important ones. More important than crew, more important than production, more important than all those other people doing jobs she wasn’t aware of and didn’t understand.
More important than techs.
She’d dragged Shiara to Anchor City when Shiara would have rather stayed at home, not taken the risk. They wouldn’t be here if not for her. She was the one willing to do what it took to get them both to Olympus. And what thanks did she get? Scorn and disapproval.
It felt like a connection between them, this shared understanding. She wanted to know more about him, to see beneath the surface, and she was bold enough to push. Ahead was an intersection, showing them red lights; Kyren was slowing the Banshee when Cassica said: “You got family?”
She saw immediately that she’d made a mistake. He didn’t like that question, and the warmth went from him. “Got a daddy,” he said at last.
She sought some way to repair what she’d done. “Bet he’s proud of you,” she suggested.
“Daddy was never proud of me for nothing,” he said, and the bitterness in his voice was so thick it made her cold.
A heavy silence fell between them. Is that what makes you want to win? she thought.
It was as if she’d spoken aloud. He turned his head, glared at her with anger in his eyes. Like he was furious with her for exposing him, like she’d tricked him into giving himself away. For a moment, she thought he might actually hit her; but then he jammed the gearstick into a new slot, stamped on the accelerator, and she was thrown back in her seat as the Banshee roared forward.
She sucked in her breath as the intersection rushed toward them, red lights glowing a warning to stop. There was a stationary car in one lane, traffic crossing fast in both directions. But Kyren kept accelerating.
They darted past the stationary car. Headlamps lit up their faces from both sides. Horns blared and tires screamed as they shot across four lanes of traffic. Cassica pressed her foot on an imaginary brake in the footwell, teeth gritted and hands clawed as she gripped her seat. Kyren swerved, a truck thundered toward them, there was a crash of metal …
… and then they were on the empty road with the freedom of the lanes, streetlights sweeping past like beating wings. Behind them, the intersection was a snarl of stopped traffic. Several vehicles had collided, though none of them hard.
Cassica barely had time to wonder about the people in those cars before she was thrown to the side as Kyren swerved, hauling on the handbrake. She held on as the wheels locked and the Banshee skidded hard, drawing a smoking arc of burnt rubber across the tarmac. Gawking onlookers hopped back in fright as the car slid a hundred and eighty degrees and rocked to a halt neatly against the curb on the other side of the road.
They stared at each other, breathing hard. She didn’t know whether to shout at him or laugh in dizzy relief. He had a fierce, exultant grin on his face. He’d shown her he wasn’t scared of danger. He’d shown everyone. But Cassica saw the desperation behind his eyes, and in that moment she knew: he was scared, just like she was. Scared he was losing control, scared he’d gotten himself into something he couldn’t get out of, swept along by forces he didn’t understand. Scared of the Widowmaker.
She lunged across at him, seized his face, kissed him fiercely.
“Take me somewhere,” she said. And so he did.
“It is the day, it is the time! The drivers are ready, the techs are ready, the Wreckers are ready … and the long wait is finally over! The greatest race on Earth is about to begin! Welcome to the Widowmaker!”
Fifty vehicles in a line, engines idling in the damp heat of the bayou, watched on fifty million screens all over the planet. Around them, an enormous paddock of tents and scaffold towers, bleachers rammed with onlookers, cameras turning on masts or hovering in the air, kept aloft by whirring fans. Ahead, a sea of drooping trees, thick with vines, endless.
“They have come through fire and fury, through trials and torment; they have succeeded where their fellows have fallen. These special hundred will compete for the prize among prizes, the most precious of all things: two tickets to Olympus itself, to become Celestials, immortalized in legend!”
The cameras track along the array of vehicles waiting to start, stewing in their own fumes. For the most part, they are brutal machines, with thick wheels and towbars and cowcatchers, built for power over speed. Their drivers know the terrain ahead will be difficult. But some have risked lighter cars, like the scuffed red Interceptor bearing signs of hasty repair to its front left fender: sturdy all-rounders, faster but harder to control, more likely to get bogged down in the swamps.
“Out to stop them: the Wreckers! The most vicious band of psychopaths and killers in Pacifica will be released five minutes after the racers set off!”
A fearsome quartet of cars brood inside a bleak compound, caged in with rusty spikes and a gate adorned with skulls. They are not like the racers; some are delicate and spotless, some armored and dirty, but each one is dark with threat.
“All of your favorites are here! Like Buzzkill!”
A car with circular bandsaws set into its flanks, hood, and trunk. They whirr and spin as the driver guns the engine. He is a snarling mass of stitches behind the wheel, wearing a grimy motley of belts, buckles, and blades.
“Dr. Sin and the Carnasaur!”
A crazed man in bloody scrubs and a surgeon’s mask sits in the driver’s seat, quivering like a plucked string, staring madly into camera. Standing in a harness, his upper body emerging from the roof of the car, is a man whose skin is tattooed with green scales like a lizard’s, teeth filed sharp and narrow-packed. He is bulging with veins and muscles, stretched from within as if containing some immense pressure, and he carries a rocket launcher on his shoulder.
“The Ghost!”
A white-masked man, his features invisible, inside a gray reflective car so sleek it seems it was made to travel through the air. As the camera turns on him, his car takes on the color of its surroundings, and suddenly it’s hard to make out its outline against the background.
“And last year’s champion Wrecker, with a kill count of eight in that year alone: Lady Scorpion!”
A low, black car with a roof-mounted spear gun. Behind mesh windows, the Lady herself, dressed in dark leathers like a carapace. She looks ahead, patiently waiting for the moment she’ll be unleashed, already choosing her prey.
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“We have some exciting racers vying for the top prize this year! Like the son of Dutton Rye, one of Maximum Racing’s all-time greats! Sammis Rye and his tech, Tatten Breesley!”
“And … cut to twelve!” says the producer, standing in front of a bank of tiny screens in a darkened studio, each one showing the view from a different camera. The broadcast feed switches to show Sammis in the cockpit of his racer, discussing plans with a stolid, red-haired boy, who is pointing to items on a list.
“Hot favorites Kyren Bane and Draden Taxt, managed by the kingmaker of kingmakers, Anderos Cleff! These two came first in all their qualifying stages!”
Kyren knows where the camera is; he just pretends he doesn’t care.
“And from the tiny town of Coppermouth way off in the Rust Bowl, two best friends who rose above their humble beginnings by building their own car to race with! Cassica Hayle and Shiara DuCal!”
In the living room of the DuCals’ apartment over the auto shop, a room stuffed with Coppermouth locals explodes into cheers. Heavy pats of congratulations pound down on Blane’s broad back, and he accepts them as if it were him out there and not his daughter. Creek is not there; he’s in the mountains. Melly sits quietly amid that raucous lot, hands clutched together to stop them shaking, eyes glued to the television and dread in her breast.
“Latest gossip is that Kyren Bane and Cassica Hayle have become an item! Let’s see if lovers can live as rivals or if this relationship will crash and burn!”
“He did not just say that!” screams Beesha as the kitchen staff of Gauge’s Diner whoops and slaps the countertop. Nobody is even pretending to work. Even Gauge himself has crowded in and popped a beer.
“Our Cass done good!” cries the busboy.
“That lucky sow!” Beesha shrieks. Then she cackles and punches the air. “You go, girl!”
“Over the next three days, these racers will face the most deadly test of their lives. Many will not survive. Just to make it through is an achievement most racers can only dream of.”
In a humming grove in the shade of a tanglefruit tree, Card lies against a drystone wall with another girl in his arms, listening to the radio. The girl has drowsed in the sun. She’s thinking of how safe she feels when she presses close to him. He’s thinking of Cassica.
“The officials have given the signal! The racers are ready to begin! Just listen to those engines!”
In the silence of space, beyond the bright, cloudy curve of Earth’s atmosphere, Olympus waits to know who will be next to walk its halls. It hangs suspended on its vast tether, the ends of which are too distant to be seen: a space station, a monument among the stars, relic of a lost age when humanity’s reach was greater than its control. Ten thousand lights speckle its dark surface, but they do nothing to warm the view. It is huge and cold and alien, and it watches.
“Three! Two! One! The Widowmaker is go!”
The vehicles pull off the line in a churning cloud of dust and fumes. Hovercams swoop down the line as they charge. The broadcast cuts from close-ups to wide shots, screaming crowds and screaming wheels. The racers separate out as they cross the open ground, faster vehicles pushing ahead. One by one they are swallowed by the trees, darting down rally trails and dirt tracks, until finally the last of them is gone.
The Widowmaker has begun.
Mud sprayed across the Interceptor’s windshield as the racer ahead of them slewed through a puddle. Cassica swung the wheel, trying to take her opponent on the inside, but the trail was too narrow and she had to brake to avoid a collision. Her wipers smeared the mud away, showing them a view of the back end of Kasey Rall’s armored Scout, brake lights glaring like a warning. It was a sight they were rapidly getting sick of.
Down the dirt paths of the Crookback Bayou they skidded and slipped, engines growling in the sweaty gloom. Gnarled trees leaned in, reaching for them: old things, bent and warped in unnatural ways, twisted and blistered by strange chemicals in the water. Moss hung from their branches in spidery curtains. The warm haze in the air softened edges, swallowed sound.
The race was an hour old, and the pack had split and split again, dividing itself among the trails and tracks. The maps showed only one route through the swamp, an old road long overgrown; but it was looping and indirect, and dangerously obvious. The swamp folk didn’t like strangers, and the road was prime target for an ambush. Most racers went off road, where the land was crazed with logging trails and routes known only to the locals. The trails there were tight and hard to find, and there were many dead ends and rivers that needed crossing, but for the lucky ones it would make for a quicker journey. Cassica and Shiara had gone that way and had been making good progress until they caught up with Ralls and got stuck behind him.
“You got anything?” Cassica asked. A hovercam swooped overhead, tracking them; miniature cameras in their helmets provided point-of-view footage for the viewers.
“Nothin’ new,” said Shiara, but she checked again anyway.
A small screen bolted to the dash fed Shiara live broadcast footage, crackly and unsteady but clear enough to learn from. It was their only source of information about the race.
Right now it was showing a map of the swamp. Most of it was green and unknown, with only a few major waterways and the road marked on it. Scattered blinking dots, representing the racers, were making their way in from the bottom. Shiara made a note of their location on her own map.
A table ranked them according to distance from the finish line. It was measured as the crow flies, so it meant little when the routes were so winding. Still, Shiara was pleased to see they were seventh. She found Sammis in fifteenth and Kyren in twentieth, but the table was shuffling about minute by minute. Next time she saw it, she expected it to be very different.
The screen switched to show footage from the road, where several racers had fallen victim to an ambush. Cassica and Shiara had been wise to take the back routes with the others. The road had been blockaded with old cars, and now the racers were frantically maneuvering to escape as ragged, frightening figures came lurching from the trees to either side: things in the shape of people, but who didn’t seem like people anymore. Then the picture bent and the Interceptor lost reception.
“We’re doin’ alright,” Shiara muttered. “Better than some, anyway.”
“Fork ahead!” Cassica said, perking up. She craned her neck to see past the Scout. “Which way?”
Shiara consulted her compass and map. “Go left if you can. We’re drifting too far east. Don’t want to hit the river.”
“Ralls is going left!” Cassica protested. She was desperate to get out from behind the Scout.
“Probably his tech knows what he’s doin’, then,” Shiara replied. She didn’t know what lay ahead, but she was minded to keep going in the right direction, Ralls or no.
The fork was little more than a muddy clearing where three trails met. The way to the left was the more inviting; the trail to the right was a dark, narrow tunnel through the trees, heavily overgrown. A staff stood in the ground at the clearing’s center, hung with sinister bone charms and vaguely humanoid figures fashioned with twisted twigs. The Scout smashed through it and slid off to the left, spraying mud.
Shiara took petty satisfaction in hearing Cassica tut as she followed Ralls left. Yeah, sometimes you still got to listen to me, don’t you?
The trail widened out and the trees thinned to either side, broken up by sodden knolls. Cassica, seeing an opportunity to overtake, pushed forward again, but she had trouble keeping a steady line and the Scout pulled away from them. The Interceptor’s wheels were coated in mud, and the chains they’d put on for grip were losing their effectiveness.
“We gotta get past him before the track narrows again,” Cassica snarled.
She’d been on a shorter fuse than usual lately; her racer’s calm seemed more fragile than before. Shiara wondered if the pressure was getting to her or if she was distracted by Kyren. Maybe it was the way things between her and Shiara had so
ured.
Shiara was about to tell her to be patient, that it was a long race and they wouldn’t win it in the first hour, but then she saw something moving through the trees on their right. Something fast. Something big.
“Brakes!” she yelled, and Cassica stamped on the pedal. They were thrown against their harnesses; the Interceptor’s tires plowed into the mud. A short way ahead of them, the Scout was smashed aside with a scream of metal as an avalanche of haunch and flank and fury charged out of the undergrowth and rammed it. It tipped over on its side and skidded along the trail until it slammed roof-first into a tree.
The Interceptor came to a shuddering halt. Shiara and Cassica stared in shock. Standing across the trail was a creature bigger than any they’d seen in their lives. It stood on all fours, twice the height of a man, a leathery monster that once might have been a reptile but had transformed over generations into something else. Its body was covered in uneven knobby protrusions, and its skull had been warped by rampant bone growth, giving it a huge lumpen forehead. Its eyes were tiny and stupid in a misshapen face; a small, low mouth opened above the flapping dewlap at its throat.
It shook itself, grunting, dazed by the impact with Ralls’s car. Some cool, distant part of Shiara’s mind noted how the tree had smashed in the Scout’s cockpit, and that Ralls and his tech had likely been killed on impact. Then shock wore off and panic flooded in, and she yelled, “Back! Back! Get us out of here!”
Cassica threw the Interceptor into reverse, its wheels chewing at the dirt. The creature raised its head at the sound of their engine, regarding them with dull interest, but it didn’t pursue as the Interceptor sped backward up the trail.
“He wants to be left alone, I reckon,” said Cassica. She was twisted in her seat, one arm on the headrest, navigating through the rear window.