They sped over the cracked earth, raising dust behind them, the thunder of Maisie’s engine in their ears. Cassica’s foot was pressed to the floor. She leaned forward, fierce with determination. Shiara worked at the dash, making minute adjustments, optimizing Maisie for the sprint. The tiniest advantage could make the difference.
Kyren came closer and closer. And then: “His turbos have cut!” Cassica cried.
“Told you. Automatic safety. He’s overhot.”
Cassica watched him nervously in her mirrors. Overhot or not, he was still gaining. And the finish line wasn’t approaching fast enough.
“We’ve got one more burn. He hasn’t,” Shiara reassured her. She eyed the temperature gauge. “His turbos won’t cool in time.”
“Will ours?” Cassica was ready to scream with the pressure. He was too close, he was going to overtake, he was going to win!
“Thirty seconds or so,” Shiara said.
Then Kyren fired his turbos again. Cassica’s eyes narrowed in anger.
“I thought you said—”
“I know! He’s taken the safety off! He’s—”
But she didn’t hear the rest, because she’d pressed the turbos herself.
One last burn. One last surge to the finish. Come on, Maisie! You can do it!
The wind roared around her, and Maisie roared with it. Still she imagined she could hear the cheers from the stands. They were near enough now to pick out individual people in the mass.
A scaffold arch, hung with adverts, straddled the finish line. MaxCo, TessaCorp, Foo and Blick’s, Chomson’s Chews, and more: the keepers of the gate, beyond which lay a life of unimaginable fame, for whoever got there first.
“We’re too hot!” Shiara said.
“He’s still burning his turbos!” Cassica cried. “So we are too!”
She glanced in her mirrors. They were close enough to see his face now. His beautiful face, stern and flawless like a statue of a gladiator from ancient days. She’d fallen for those looks once. But now she saw him for something else: an opponent, an enemy, inhuman. He existed only to steal the victory that should be hers, the victory she’d earned through blood and sacrifice.
“You only got a few seconds’ more burn,” Shiara told her.
“That ain’t enough!”
“It’s enough if you don’t wanna blow us both to hell!”
“Damn it, you know they set these gauges too high to be extra safe! We got more time!”
How could he still be turboing, still eating up the distance between them? It seemed impossible that his car could sustain it.
“I built this car!” Shiara yelled. “She ain’t gonna take it!”
“She’ll take it,” Cassica replied. The finish line wasn’t far now, the end was upon them, and it was too cruel to have it snatched away like this, too unbearably cruel. Shiara was always too sensible, too unadventurous; it was Cassica’s job to push her where she didn’t dare to go.
“You’re gonna kill us!” Shiara screamed over the howl of the wind, her white hair flapping where it had escaped her helmet. The temperature gauge was into the red and climbing.
“We ain’t giving up now!” Cassica shouted into the maelstrom. Because she couldn’t give up, because she needed to win, because she couldn’t let Kyren beat her, and Harlan and Hasp and all the rest.
“It’s not worth it!” Shiara shrieked. “It don’t matter if we win! It just don’t matter enough!”
“The hell do you mean, it’s not worth it?” Cassica cried, because that was just about the most insane thing she’d ever heard right then. “It’s everything!”
Shiara reached over and grabbed her by the front of her racing leathers, forcing Cassica to look away from the finish line and into her eyes. There were tears running down her face, tears of fright and desperation, and in her eyes was an animal fear like Cassica had never seen before. The look of someone falling from a tall building, plunging to their death.
“Not to me,” she said. “It ain’t everything to me.”
And there was something in those words, in her expression, that frightened Cassica, quenched the madness inside her. She saw then the risk she was taking, not just her life but Shiara’s, a risk she didn’t have a right to take.
And for what? What happened if she won? She didn’t really know.
So she took her thumb from the turbo button.
Maisie began to slow immediately, pushed back by wind resistance. Shiara hit a switch to activate emergency cooling, drawing more power from the engines, slowing them further. The needle on the temperature gauge hovered where it was, almost at the top of the meter … and then slowly it began to swing back toward blue, and safety.
“Thank you,” Shiara whispered.
Kyren shot past them on their left. Cassica heard his whoop of celebration as he overtook them, turbos blazing. She saw the savage joy of victory, the righteous gleam of the entitled in his eye. He was someone who always expected to win, who believed he deserved to, because no one in his life had ever shown him otherwise. And now, neither would she.
The crowd went crazy as he raced away ahead of them. Cassica fell back into her seat, smothered by a numbing sense of resignation as Maisie dropped back to cruising speed and the needle on the temperature gauge crept out of the danger zone.
There was nothing she could do, no way to claw back the lead. They’d fallen at the final hurdle. They’d lost. The game had gone to the men who rigged it, the men who prized money over fair competition, appearances over talent, sponsors over souls. Perhaps, against such relentless disregard for decency, they’d never had a chance at all.
But they’d tried. And they came damn close.
She watched the black-and-red car tearing toward the finishing line, carrying victory away with it. In her mind, she heard Kyren’s whoop of triumph again as he took first place, a position apparently assigned to him by destiny.
Kyren Bane and Draden Taxt were a hundred meters from the finish line when their car exploded.
The crowd was shocked into silence. Cassica and Shiara stared, breath stilled in their lungs. The car flipped and spun, a blackened metal chassis trailing flame and smoke, bouncing heavily over the hardpan. One instant it had been a machine of precision engineering and elegance, and the boys inside had lived and thought and fought. Then, in a heartbeat, they were gone.
The blazing chassis crashed to a halt just short of the finish. A flaming wheel rolled away. Cassica drove past the wreck in a daze of horror.
He’d taken off the safety, pushed the turbos too hard. That could have been Maisie. It could have been them.
When they crossed the finish line, she was barely aware of it. She slowed and stopped without thought, body operated by her subconscious.
“Hoy!” She felt Shiara pushing her on the shoulder. Her friend’s face was lit with excitement. “Hoy! We made it! We won! You hear me? We frickin’ won!”
Cassica didn’t feel present. It was as if she’d been disconnected from her own body, like she was watching herself on television. She popped her harness, pushed open the door, and got out.
The barrage of noise came to her gradually, as if someone were steadily turning up the volume in her ears. She stood by the side of her racer with the hot sun warming her dirt-caked cheeks and looked about with an expression of vague confusion.
The stands were going wild. People cheered and yelled and punched the air. It didn’t quite connect. What did it all have to do with her?
Emergency vehicles sped past, heading for the wreck of Kyren’s car, sirens wailing. On one of the enormous screens, she saw a face that she recognized. Harlan, the man who’d been their manager once, standing in a VIP box. He was slack-jawed with horror, skin shining with sweat, staring into space. With him were Dunbery Hasp and Anderos Cleff; they’d all been watching the event together. All on the same side, since Harlan sold his racers out.
But now Hasp and Cleff gave Harlan a look of anger and disgust. They were cheated of their winne
r, and their money and their arrangements and all they’d put in place had come crashing down around them. They walked away, out of the frame, leaving Harlan abandoned.
Their departure revealed another man, standing in the background, picking his nails with the point of a knife. His eyes were on Harlan, now unprotected.
Scadler grinned his horse grin.
“Cassica!” It was Shiara again, now at her side. Through the cloud of shock she focused on her friend, and it brought her back a little. “You there? Can’t you hear ’em?” She gestured to the crowd.
They shouted their approval. Shiara raised her fist, and they roared again.
“Take a turn, why don’tcha?” Shiara said. She took Cassica’s arm and raised it high, and the cheers became ecstatic.
“Put your hands together for this year’s champions!” the loudspeaker urged the spectators. “Widowmaker winners, instant legends, and soon to be Celestials! Those brave girls from the backcountry! Cassica Hayle and Shiara DuCal!”
And slowly, as she stood there with Shiara holding her arm up, it began to sink in.
“Did we do it?” she asked, tears pricking at her eyes.
“We did it,” said Shiara. “Both of us.”
And the cheers went on and on and on, until Cassica’s heart seemed ready to burst.
“Cassica Hayle, Shiara DuCal … your chariot approaches!”
They stood side by side on a stage, their heads tipped back to the sky. Behind them, penned behind fences, a sea of hushed faces filled the boulevard. A red-carpet walkway cut through the center of the crowd. They’d passed along that way, through the cheering throng. They’d accepted congratulations and given their thanks. But here was the moment the crowd had been waiting for.
The space elevator was descending. A ring of light could be seen against the red dusk, slipping down the cable from the unimaginable heights of space, coming to lift them up to a life among the stars.
Anchor City seemed to hold its breath. Neon advertisements glowed acid colors against the dusk. People had gathered on the rooftops of nearby buildings. The streets were choked for several blocks in all directions.
Shiara felt the eyes of the world upon them. She saw the two of them on the enormous screens that showed them to the crowd. They’d been styled and dressed by the most famous designers in the world, who’d paid handsomely for the privilege of using their bodies as a canvas. Cassica had the bones and the figure to make the most absurd fashions look natural, but not even the greatest artists of the day could stop Shiara from feeling ridiculous. She squirmed and sweated under the hot lights and wished it was over.
Did Cassica feel what she felt? The crawling terror in the pit of her stomach? Was she having second thoughts, as Shiara was? She wanted her friend to turn to her then, to tell her they didn’t have to go through with it. But it seemed like it had all gone too far to turn back now.
“Cassica,” said the interviewer, Jenty Gane, a television presenter all hair and teeth whom Shiara had never heard of till today. “Can you tell us a little bit about what you’re feeling right now?”
“Well, Jenty, I guess first and foremost I’m really just excited to be here,” Cassica began, in that voice she used for interviews, the one that sounded like she was an overenthusiastic teacher trying to rouse a room of bored children. She said some inoffensive and meaningless things, exactly what the crowd expected to hear. They cheered at pretty much everything. Shiara tuned her out and let her get on with it.
Some of the screens, mounted on scaffold frames around the boulevard, were showing the best parts from their races. Their encounter with the mutant beasts in Crookback Bayou. The Howler attack in Lost Angeles. Taking out Slick with the magnet trap on the Anchor City qualifier. Driving over a rock bridge with singstones falling all around them in Ragrattle Caves.
The Linty Maxxon crash. That one still made her stomach knot. Linty was alive, but minor brain damage meant she’d have to relearn certain motor skills. She’d never drive again, and one side of her face would always droop.
Notable by their absence were the parts where Cassica rescued Shiara from the Howler lair and the whole final day in the Blight Lands. There had been no cameras on them then, during their most desperate moments, when four Wreckers had met their end. Dunbery Hasp was seething about that. It was the worst crime in broadcasting to miss the best bits.
But those parts nobody saw were more vivid than the others, more real to Shiara. Only she and Cassica had experienced those times; they hadn’t been shared with anyone else. A bond of memories, unrecorded except in their minds. That was more special to her than a thousand replays.
Other screens showed the crowd, faces turned upward in adoration. Faces she didn’t know. Cassica basked in the love of strangers, but it meant nothing to Shiara. They were in love with an idea, a story told to them through their zines and televisions: a simple tale of rags to riches, two poor girls from the Pacifica badlands who overcame great odds to win fame and fortune, a place in the heavens, and a place in their hearts. It made them happy; it made them believe that life was safe and understandable and controllable. It made them believe that they could do it too.
The truth, as ever, was murkier. People had gotten hurt on their way to the top. People had died. The game was fixed so businessmen could make money. The powers that be, who were praising and congratulating them now, had cheated and plotted against them.
But the crowd didn’t want the truth. They wanted the story.
Up there on the stage, in the company of millions, Shiara had never felt so alone.
She’d had one brief video-link conversation with her family since they won the Widowmaker, and that, as ever, was broadcast to the world. Mom cried; stout Daddy held it together. Everyone back home was so proud of her. They all wanted to see her again, but they knew they probably wouldn’t be able to, except on Celestial Hour. They couldn’t leave the auto shop to come see her; it’d likely be robbed and ruined by the time they returned. Shiara promised she’d visit them soon, but she could tell they didn’t believe her. Once they were on Olympus, people seldom came back down. There wasn’t much call to visit Earth when you were living a life of pampered luxury in space.
Talk had turned to news of home. There were rumors of a harsh winter with high winds blowing off the Rust Bowl. It’d be a bad time for dust lung. A ship had gotten beached a few days back; the harbor was silted up so high that even light fishing vessels were having a hard time getting through. They might have to close the docks entirely. Meanwhile, the town council was trying to get a Justice appointed to deal with all the dangerous scavs who would come south with the bad weather, like they did every year. They all knew what the chances were of that happening.
Grim news, but grim news didn’t faze the folks of Coppermouth. Melly, who’d apparently forgotten they were being broadcast to the world, launched into an anecdote about a plague of cats that was driving Mrs. Jebbit to distraction. Then she told Shiara about Mimzy Muckle’s wedding, which the whole town turned out for, and how her brothers had too much moonshine and got into a fight with the groom, and how by the morning it was all forgotten.
Shiara smiled through the tears in her eyes. That was home. She missed it badly.
The bright ring slid down the cable of the space elevator. Now they could see there were long rows of lights running the length of the cable, lighting in sequence to mark the elevator’s location. The crowd hushed as the lights reached the base of the enormous cable, and the elevator settled to Earth without a sound.
A warm breeze blew through the darkening city streets, brushing past them. Shiara reached out and took Cassica’s hand. She was frightened. Cassica gripped her fingers, and she knew Cassica was too. That thought reassured her.
“Cassica and Shiara,” Jenty Gane stage-whispered into his mic. “Olympus awaits!”
The doors of the elevator slid slowly open. They watched in awe as the gate to a new world opened before them. Within, a cavern of lights, empty but for
one thing: a small black oblong about four feet high, standing on its end just inside the doors. It was tiny in comparison to the gateway, but it seemed so solid, so present, that it loomed larger than its size.
Shiara stared at it. Her mouth was dry.
“And now,” Jenty cried, “to present our winners with their tickets to Olympus: the father of Maximum Racing, Dunbery Hasp!”
A cheer went up as Hasp emerged from backstage and approached them. He was wearing a uniform not unlike an old-time bellboy, his trademark glasses dwarfing his ancient face. He raised his hand in acknowledgment of the crowd, then turned to Cassica and Shiara. Jenty Gane stepped back respectfully.
Shiara had never been this close to the man who owned Maximum Racing before. He smelled sour and dry, with a hint of something antiseptic. He held in his thin veined hands two gold oblongs the size of playing cards, inscribed with strange patterns that looked almost mystical. The language of the days before the Omniwar.
She steeled herself to meet his gaze. By winning, by beating Kyren Bane to Olympus, they’d cost him untold amounts of money in broken contracts and failed deals. All the plans he’d put in place to fashion a new Celestial for the people had fallen apart. She expected anger, resentment, the promise of revenge. And the wrath of Dunbery Hasp wasn’t to be taken lightly.
Instead, as he handed her the ticket, she saw nothing. He didn’t care. Even the millions he’d lost had hardly scratched the surface of his fortune. Kyren’s death was a minor inconvenience for his underlings to deal with. There’d be another year, another race. The machine rumbled on, too huge to be stopped, and their triumph was insignificant in the big scheme of things.
Shiara felt herself flush. She wanted to hit him, this man who’d tried to have them killed. She wanted to hit him so he’d feel something.
But he was just an old man.
“Many congratulations,” he said to them. The ticket was cool and weighty in her palm. “You’re both worthy winners.” Then he stepped back from them and swept an arm toward the elevator. “Olympus awaits!”
Jenty Gane took up his mic. “All that’s left is for our champions to enter the elevator, insert their tickets in the special slots to either side of the obelisk, and they will be on their way to Olympus. Cassica, Shiara … are you ready?”