19
Asta was on the floor between her bed and Gem’s, stretching, when the knock came on the door. The pain was better this morning, further away from her present awareness. Before her semifinal race this afternoon, she could visit the medical tents and get a liniment for her stiff muscles.
Gem was in the kitchenette peeling an orange for his breakfast, but he put it down to answer the door. Curious, Carmine worked his head through the hatch and watched Gem put his eye to the peephole.
‘It’s Hummer,’ Gem said in a low voice.
Asta got to her feet and winced. Maybe she wasn’t feeling as good as she thought she was. ‘Shit. Give me a second.’
Hummer knocked again.
‘Hang on!’ Asta called. ‘I’m coming.’ She threw her sweatshirt on over her T-shirt and shorts and put her feet, sockless, into her boots. ‘Be right back,’ she said to Gem, pushing by him to the door.
Gem clucked his tongue. ‘You’re going to freeze,’ his tone already in I-told-you-so territory. ‘It’s cold out there.’
‘I’ll be fine, Mother.’
The morning sun was bright in Asta’s eyes, but it didn’t do much to warm her. There was frost on the ground, and her breath came out in a white cloud.
Hummer was planted directly outside the door.
Two of the Bruce cousins – the wheedling Karol, still sporting a purple bruise from Nat’s boot, and his brother Michael – hung back, their eyes scanning the sidewalks.
Torque stood at Hummer’s side. Hummer was scratching at his head impatiently, pushing his bucket hat so far back that it almost fell off.
As soon as Asta opened the door, he tugged it down again over his ears.
‘Get this to Natalia’s crew,’ Hummer said without greeting or explanation.
He nodded to Torque, who reached into one of the deep pockets in his dark blue shop coat and pulled out a little jar.
He held it discreetly in front of him, his body blocking it from any view but Asta’s.
‘After the white coats come through. Orville will be expecting it. Don’t be obvious. ’
‘What is it?’ Asta asked, eyeing the jar, but she recognized it as the irritant that Yixin had spotted on day one.
‘A favor,’ Hummer said. ‘Now be a good girl and do it.’
With a glance to either side, Torque extended the jar toward Asta. She took it from his calloused hand and shoved it into the pouch of her sweatshirt.
In a way, Asta was relieved. After all those warnings from Torque and Tess, this wasn’t nearly as bad as she had been expecting. Use of the irritant was a fairly minor infraction. Until a few years ago, the stuff had remained legal, if frowned upon, in NFDRA races.
It wasn’t even all that helpful. Spreading the greasy stuff down the throat and nasal passages of a slow-footed dragon caused enough pain to spur a little extra speed, but it also made the dragon peevish and ill-tempered.
It was cruel and unpredictable, and Asta had never let anyone use it on Carmine.
Nonetheless, it was just a little jar of spicy goo. Asta had all but convinced herself that Hummer would task her with something a bit more sinister. Still, if Asta got caught with the jar, Flávia would have her out on her ass faster than she could blink.
‘Is that it?’ Asta asked, shifting from one bare leg to the other in an effort to keep warm.
Hummer stopped. ‘Is what it?’ Under the brim of his hat, his eyes probed Asta’s face.
‘The favor. Just deliver it?’
Hummer huffed a quick breath of air through his nose. ‘For now.’ Hummer motioned to his nephews and Torque that it was time to go.
Torque hesitated. His hands were shoved into the pockets of his open coat. He pressed his lips together and swung his hands wide, as if to say, ‘What can you do?’ The coat spread with his arms – like wings. He would fly away, Asta thought, if he could.
Asta went back into the room. Carmine stretched his neck as far as it would go, trying to reach her. His silver eyes narrowed, like a peevish schoolmarm eyeing up one of her delinquent pupils. She went to him, and he began to sniff at her. She wondered if he could smell the irritant.
For now, he had said. A flutter of worry was knocking around in Asta’s head. What if the jar was just a test? Asta wasn’t sure if it would be better to pass this test or fail it.
Gem had his orange pieces on a plate now, and he was eating them one by one as he read over a paper from the Silverscale packet that they had received at orientation.
He looked up, his finger marking his place, and studied Asta.
Asta kissed Carmine on the head and plopped down on the edge of her bed.
Then, since she was there anyway, she kicked off her boots and burrowed back under the covers to get warm.
From the look on his face, Asta could tell that Gem wanted to ask her about Hummer, but he went back to whatever it was he had been reading.
She gripped the jar of irritant in her sweatshirt pocket.
With or without this stuff, Nat might not make the top five in her heat, and then Asta would be off the hook.
She could sign with another racing house or start her own and be out of the Bruces’ orbit forever. The day could not come soon enough.
She slipped the jar out of her sweatshirt and stuffed it under her pillow.
In the kitchen, Gem ran his fingers under the faucet to clean the stickiness from them.
‘You ready for today?’ he asked.
‘You know it.’ Asta slouched into the bedcovers and tried to quiet the thousand thoughts racing through her mind. She peeked at him over the mound of blankets. ‘Are you mad about yesterday?’
He looked thoughtful as he dried his hands on the tea towel beside the sink.
With a sigh, he came around from behind the counter.
‘I’ve known you all your life, Asta. You getting yourself in trouble – it wasn’t exactly a surprise to me.
But it did make me realize something.’ He walked to his bed and sat down, his hands on his knees.
‘This arrangement – me as your manager – I don’t think it’s working. ’
Asta felt her panic rising. ‘Please don’t say that. Gem, I’m so sorry about—’
‘Asta, shut up. I’m not trying to make you feel bad about anything. I know you. I know how you get when the pressure’s on. You need to let it out somehow, and usually it’s by doing something stupid. And I knew it. I knew I should have stayed on top of you that night.’
‘You’re not my babysitter anymore, Gem. I’m a grown-ass woman.’
Gem gave a half-smile. ‘And yet I still get the feeling that I’m going to catch you on the roof with homemade dragon wings, about to jump.’
‘That happened one time.’
Gem leaned back, propping himself with straight arms. ‘I don’t think I have a choice.
With us, it’s always going to feel like babysitting, like you’re this little hellion getting into trouble, and I’m the one pulling you back from the edge.
I knew I should have stopped you, but I was so sick of being the wet blanket all the time.
Or, I don’t know, maybe the Bruces make me nervous. Anyway, I wasn’t there.’
‘It wasn’t your fault.’ Asta felt awful that he was taking this on himself.
‘No, it kind of was. Hear me out. I’ve been thinking a lot about this.
I’m pretty sure you don’t need someone to hold you back.
You need someone who can let you loose. You have this fire in you, Asta, and it needs to burn.
It needs to go a little crazy sometimes.
When you’re in it, you’re gone. That’s your magic.
’ His eyes scanned the ceiling, as if all of Asta’s races were playing out before him.
‘You’re so good. Damn it. You’re so good.
By the time we’re out of here, you will have the entire racing world eating out of your hand. ’
Everyone kept saying stuff like that. People had said those things about Leia once – how she was going to be a star – and look what happened to her.
Asta remembered how she had felt at West Granger, and again this week, when the dragons started falling in front of her.
Gem didn’t know how close she was to failure.
What if the best she could hope for was a raceway full of people chanting her name when she was nothing more than a bloody smear on the track?
‘Gem—’
‘Look, I’m not saying I’ve done a lousy job or anything.
But you need a real manager, someone who knows when to let you go off and do something stupid and when to hand you some different stupid thing to do – one that won’t wreck your future.
’ He laughed to himself. ‘Mostly, you need someone who doesn’t have to answer to Grandma.
She thinks it’s my fault you aren’t already the queen of the world. ’
Asta wriggled happily under the covers. ‘I knew I was her favorite.’
Behind Gem, Carmine pulled his head back through the hatch, and the sound of his scales sliding against the wall sounded almost mechanical, like the soft purr of a smooth-running engine.
‘That stuff that Felix Seraphin said to you yesterday,’ Gem said gently. ‘It wasn’t fair. You know that, right?’
Asta could still see Felix’s face. Underneath all his anger and frustration with her, there had been a river of sadness. There was something he wasn’t saying. She was sure of it.
‘He talks like his way is the only way. What an ass! I’m sorry, Asta. I didn’t know he thought like that.’
‘He doesn’t.’ Asta pulled the duvet further into her lap and bunched it around her fists.
Gem looked confused. ‘You’re defending him?’
‘No,’ Asta said. She didn’t know how to tell Gem what she knew in her gut. When Felix said those things, it was like someone else was saying them. His parents, maybe? All she knew was, something was off.
‘Well, he was right about one thing,’ Gem ventured. ‘You can’t do this by yourself. You have to let people help you. Just, you know, the right people.’ Gem glanced at the door, but once again stopped short of saying more.
Asta laughed sadly. Ask for help. It wasn’t bad advice, just too late.
‘What I’m saying,’ Gem concluded, getting back to his feet, ‘is that you don’t have to feel bad when someone else comes along and tells you that they can do a better job than me.
They can. To me, you’ll always be my weird little cousin who, for whatever reason, I really want to like me.
And because of that, there are things I’m too much of a dragonshit coward to tell you.
Or ask you.’ He met Asta’s gaze for a second and then looked away.
‘There’s nothing to ask,’ Asta said quietly. ‘Remember? I’m behaving myself now.’
On hesitant footsteps, as if he wasn’t sure if their conversation was done or not, Gem returned to the kitchen to fetch his cup of coffee, which he had left on the counter. Asta wondered if he knew she was lying.