9
Asta followed Nat off the track, down the main avenue of the Horizons complex, and straight out into the city streets.
Nat rode Vulture over a long bridge that spanned the Hallium River, its cables lit up with rippling ice-blue lights in honor of the tournament.
The traffic on the bridge, glutted with departing fans from the Horizons complex, slowed to a crawl, and people gazed up at the pair of large dragons passing them by.
Some honked their horns or rolled down their windows to shout and cheer and wave at them.
Carmine nosed his head into one car and came away with a morsel of something in a greasy wrapper, which he scarfed down before Asta could stop him.
The occupants of the car were beside themselves, laughing and exclaiming to one another.
At the end of the bridge, Nat led them down a side street, then another, then another.
Asta could hardly keep track of where they were anymore.
The streetlights gave off a flat orange light that made everything seem more like a photograph than real life.
Asta gazed up at the backsides of the tall buildings – some of the same buildings, she supposed, that she had admired from the hotel lobby earlier today.
How plain they looked now, she thought. How lifeless.
As if all their industrious activity of earlier was just for show.
Most of the floors stood dark, though a few windows remained lit here and there, the last holdouts against the surrender to the night.
Asta and Nat skirted dumpsters and parked cars and kept on through the back streets of the city. Nat said nothing, so Asta said nothing. Every now and then, one of the dragons would groan at the other, sometimes sneaking in a petulant nip, until they too fell into silence.
They left the business district and entered a much more industrial area of the city, with factory buildings and manufacturers, warehouses and smokestacks. At last, Nat turned down an alley between two low, steel-clad buildings and led Asta into some sort of construction depot.
Asta saw Hummer, his sister Tru, and several other members of the Bruce clan waiting for them between mountain-sized heaps of gravel and sand that loomed throughout the dark lot.
Following Nat’s example, Asta dismounted, leaving the dragons to their own devices, and walked over to where the others waited.
One of Nat’s many cousins came forward with helmets for both Nat and Asta.
‘Thought training was over, didn’t you?’ Hummer called as Asta and Nat approached.
Hummer’s hat made it so that his face, down to his nose, was swamped in darkness.
Asta watched his mouth spew spittle into the harsh beam of the floodlights that shone over the depot.
‘I heard that chucklenuts Seraphin harping on about how great it is to fail, and I thought you girls needed one more lesson.’
Tru snorted. Gertrude Bruce was the same height as her brother, the same build, with almost the same face.
If it weren’t for her sagging breasts and his scruffy beard, they would have looked almost identical.
Tru wore a boxy tan blazer over a thin-striped sweater, gray corduroys, and a billowy neckerchief.
Her sense of fashion was fairly eclectic – floral-print blouses and plaid trousers, drop-waist chiffon dresses, a swishy track suit – but she always paired her choices with the same blazer, as if her brother’s trademark hat had made her jealous.
‘The magic of failure,’ Tru said. She was mocking Felix’s speech from dinner, and her face creased with disgust.
Hummer growled. ‘What a load of dragonshit!’
Asta eased back to avoid the droplets of spittle. She fought the urge to defend Felix to them, even though she too had found his speech infuriating. But at the moment, she didn’t want to remind them that she and Felix used to be friends.
Hummer swiped at his nose with his thumb and forefinger and deposited the result on his pantleg. ‘Nobody won anything just by getting here. Whoop-de-do for you, getting here. If you want to be a winner, what do you gotta do?’ He was asking Nat.
‘Win,’ Nat said, her chin high.
‘Win what?’
‘The Grand Prix.’
‘That’s right. The Silverscale Grand-fucking-Prix.’
Tru walked back and forth in front of Asta and Nat, her hands clasped behind her back like a professor. ‘“Prix” means “prize”.’
‘Yes, it does,’ Hummer said. ‘And unless you walk away with the prize, you’re just one more shit in a shit pile. So starting tonight, you race like you don’t want to be a piece of shit.’
Asta felt the twinge of anticipation ripple down her body. ‘We’re racing tonight?’
Hummer turned to his cousin’s son, a kid named Karol with stringy hair and a perpetual sneer. ‘Light it up.’
Karol took a circular token from his pocket and cracked it. It glowed with a magic illusion that raced away from him in a long thread, snaking between heaps of stone and gravel and up and over the cinderblock wall surrounding the depot.
In the back of Asta’s mind, she could hear Gem’s voice telling her this was a bad idea. NFDRA was none too fond of street racing. It tarnished the reputation of the sport, they said. But what NFDRA – and Gem for that matter – didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them.
Karol’s course marker was tuned to be visible only to the riders, their dragons, and the Bruces.
The police – or any other busybodies who might cause trouble – simply couldn’t see the thread.
The racers were too fast to get caught if you didn’t know when or where to expect them.
You had as good a chance of catching a bullet hot out of a gun.
Even the spectators stayed in constant motion, traveling between vantage points to watch each leg.
But at the first sign of snitches or cops, they would scatter.
The thread trailing from Karol’s hand snaked over the wall, topped with iron spikes, that surrounded the depot.
Wedged between two spikes was a glowing ball.
It was the first beacon, similar to one that might be used in track races.
The small electronic transponder was wrapped in a bright illusion to make it easier for the riders to spot in the dark.
Asta and Carmine would have to pass within a body’s length of every beacon along the course for their trigger to register it as completed.
Karol handed Asta her trigger for the beacons.
During a regular track race, the triggers were chips embedded in the racer’s official armband.
Street racers had to make their own devices.
Asta’s trigger was a metal pin in the shape of a dagger with her chip and a small LED hand glued to the back.
When a rider came close enough to the transponder, both the beacon and the trigger would flash.
Nat’s was the shape of a dragon’s tooth.
Asta fastened the trigger to her collar.
‘One of you will win,’ Hummer said. ‘One of you will lose.’
‘What does the winner get?’ Nat asked.
‘Greedy girl,’ Tru snapped. ‘You know what else “prix” means? It means “price”. Winning ain’t a right, Natty. Mostly, it costs you more than you get. Remember that.’
Nat’s shoulders tightened. ‘What does losing cost?’
‘Don’t lose,’ Tru said, a little softer. ‘Then you don’t have to find out.’
Asta and Nat exchanged a look. The Bruces were veritable artists of punishment.
One time, when Asta had lost a training race, she’d spent the day as the designated shop rag.
Whenever anyone on the crew had needed to wipe their hands, they used her clothes, her hair, her face.
She had ended the day crusted with grease, dirt, and dragon mucus.
During their first year together, Nat and Asta had shared the punishments more or less equally, but lately Nat had been losing to Asta more often, and Hummer’s response had been to make the consequences worse than ever. It made Asta feel like she was hurting Nat by winning.
Nat played it off like she didn’t care, but there were times when her jokes took on a sharpened edge, times when her playful violence hit a little too hard, and Asta suspected Nat resented her a great deal more than she let on.
Before long, the only way to save her friendship with Nat might be to leave the Bruces.
But where would she go? And now that she thought about it, would leaving save the friendship?
Nat didn’t have friends. The only people she spent any time with were her family and her flings.
If Asta won Silverscale and launched out on her own, she realized with sadness, she would cease to exist for Nat. Out of sight, out of mind.
‘Mount up,’ Hummer said. Asta and Nat put on their helmets and lowered their visors. Nat lit out for Vulture, whom she had left standing by the side of a large shed.
Asta called to Carmine, and he met her halfway.
She reached as high as she could to grab hold of the harness, found the lower stirrup with her toe, and climbed into the saddle.
Street racers, Asta learned early on, rarely used tethers.
Hummer was of the opinion that riders got hurt more often by having the tethers than not.
Asta left hers loose and took Carmine’s reins.
‘Go!’ Hummer hollered before she was even half settled.
Asta didn’t like the look of those spikes at the top of the wall.
She signaled Carmine toward the nearest gravel pile, hoping to use it as a jumping-off point.
Nat and Vulture had headed straight for the wall and were already clambering up it.
Mortar and crumbling cinderblock fell under Vulture’s talons as the dragon climbed toward the row of iron spikes where the beacon was lodged.