1
The hotel lobby was bustling with riders and trainers, owners and reporters.
Wearing identical collared shirts of blue and gray, Silverscale staff dashed about frenetically with clipboards and forced smiles.
Asta had to push her way inside the hotel past mobs of fans trying to catch a glimpse of their favorite racer.
The security guard at the door hadn’t believed her at first when she told him that she was a rider here for registration.
He had let her in reluctantly, but she could still feel his eyes on her as she made her way to the sign-in table.
All around her, everyone was talking and hugging each other and taking pictures.
It reminded Asta of the first day of camp, the one time she’d been.
The Seraphins had somehow convinced her parents that every child should go to camp at least once.
They’d probably paid for it, too, Asta now realized.
It was a swanky dragon camp with daily lessons and posh cabins.
There’s no way her parents could have afforded it.
She remembered getting off the bus and it feeling just like this – like everyone knew each other except her.
Asta barely registered that the guy at the table had said something to her.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘What?’
The registration guy gave her a look that, if it were a color, would have been acid yellow. ‘Name and age,’ he said, slowly and deliberately, like he thought she might not be capable of understanding such big words.
‘Oh, sorry,’ she said again. ‘It’s Ekenberg. Twenty-two.’ She didn’t know what her age had to do with anything.
The guy at the table looked through several sheets of paper on his clipboard, flipping them with mounting impatience. He went back to the beginning and looked again but with no more success. He scowled at Asta and extended his hand across the table. ‘May I see the passport, please?’
‘I don’t—’ Asta panicked. ‘I don’t have it with me.’
The man put the clipboard down on the table with what appeared to be his last ounce of patience. ‘Why are you wasting my time? You can’t register without a passport.’
‘But I didn’t even leave the country. Why would I bring my passport?’
‘Not for you, cupcake. For the dragon.’
Asta’s face burned.
Suddenly, Gem was at her side. ‘Here, here – here it is! Sorry, there was a thing with the trailer. But I’m here.
’ He handed a bundle of papers over to the man at the table.
‘The dragon’s name is Carmine. Standard Western Class.
Six years old.’ Gem set down the duffle bag that was slung over his shoulder.
‘I told you to wait for me,’ he said to Asta under his breath.
He was sweating, his brown curls plastered to his temples.
‘Sorry,’ Asta said, relieved that she was no longer required to continue her conversation with the rude man at the table. She turned around to get a better look at the hotel.
Huge plate glass windows made the boundary between Hallium City and the hotel feel almost permeable, like the sidewalk trees, girdled in iron, might drop their brilliant autumn leaves, gold and red and orange, directly into the foyer.
Asta was mesmerized by the constant motion of the traffic zipping between block after block of skyscrapers.
Through the windows behind the hotel’s bar, Asta could just glimpse the outline of the raceway looming on the other side of the river.
It was enormous. Like a live volcano sitting on the edge of the city.
Out on the sidewalk, people in suits elbowed their way past the gawking fans and hurried on their way without so much as a cursory glance at the spectacular view of Horizons Raceway.
In fact, they seemed to find their surroundings entirely unremarkable. But Asta couldn’t stop staring.
All season, she had been traveling from one corner of the country to the other trying to get here – but the only races she could afford to enter were podunk, backwater affairs.
Registration was usually just a folding table outside the track.
If they had anything that could be called a track at all.
At the Welton Falls tournament, the racecourse had been constructed in the middle of a field.
The spectators, rowdy and half drunk before the first race even started, sat on dented old bleachers that looked as if they had been salvaged from the local high school.
They didn’t even have any illusionists to dress up the course.
What you saw was what you got. The fire hedges weren’t wrapped in magic to disguise them as fire-breathing imps or dragon’s eggs.
They were just regular old propane tanks hooked up to piping on a wood frame.
The scramble was a steep plywood ramp with old tires screwed to it.
And forget about fancy accommodations. Most of the time, she and Gem rented a scuzzy motel room somewhere in the rough vicinity of the race. At least most of the venues had stables for the dragons, but Carmine had spent his fair share of nights shut up inside his trailer.
Asta couldn’t hold it against the security guard at the front door.
She wouldn’t have let herself into this place either.
The décor in the hotel was chic and modern – a far cry from the ruffled curtains and wobbly wooden chairs of her parents’ farmhouse.
Everything was straight lines and geometric blocks of color: the lights hanging from the cavernous ceiling, the concierge desk staffed with uniformed attendants, even the artwork hanging on the walls.
The couches looked like slabs of stone, blocky and slate black.
They had no backs, so that the hotel’s well-dressed patrons had to perch rather than sit.
Asta was suddenly very aware of the unkempt state of her favorite sweatshirt, its blue chevron turned gray by too many washes, the red sleeves threadbare at the cuffs, and the deep pouch held together with safety pins.
When she put it on this morning, she was thinking only of comfort – it was a long drive from Port Veracruz.
Now, she felt like she had stepped onstage without her costume.
At least the sweatshirt was warm. She had been surprised by how much colder it was in Hallium than it had been in Port Veracruz, which lay along the coast. It reminded her of being back home in the mountains.
‘Asta Ekenberg?’
At the sound of the voice, Asta’s shoulders tensed.
She turned to see Dr. Isley standing four feet from her, his salt-and-pepper goatee twisted into an expression of surprise and befuddlement.
Of all his former students, she was probably the last one he expected to see standing in line to register for the Silverscale Grand Prix.
‘Dr. Isley,’ Asta said. ‘It’s nice to see you.’
It wasn’t. If anything, it was bringing up some very unpleasant memories.
The last time Asta had seen this man, he had been rescinding her scholarship and kicking her out of the Pillar School.
Technically she’d been expelled because of the fight, but Pikki had fought her right back, and Pikki hadn’t been sent home.
The real reason Asta had lost her spot at the best dragon training college in the country, though no one said it outright, was Felix.
What she had done to Felix. He was the future of racing, after all.
He was to be protected at all costs. Even if the cost was Asta.
She hadn’t seen Felix since that day. Her eyes drifted around the lobby, half afraid and half hopeful that she would spot him standing beside one of those blocky couches, charming the pants off everyone within spitting distance, totally at home in this madhouse.
She had been building up this moment in her mind for years, and she just wanted to get it over with.
She needed to see his face, then she could feel whatever it was she was going to feel and get back to focusing on the tournament.
‘So you’re . . .’ Dr. Isley glanced over to the table where Gem was bent over a map with the registration guy. ‘You’re racing?’
‘Yup.’ Judging by the look on his face, Asta guessed that Dr. Isley wasn’t exactly thrilled to hear this. Pillar was supposed to be the only legitimate path to Silverscale. But here she was, a Pillar reject who had somehow qualified for the Grand Prix anyway. She hoped it kept him up at night.
Dr. Isley ground the heels of his hands into each other. He used to do that, Asta recalled, when a student asked a question he didn’t know how to answer. ‘Well, good luck to you. I must, uh . . .’ He pointed vaguely to a knot of students gabbing by a wide staircase that led up to the mezzanine.
This was the big trip of the year for them. Asta remembered missing it because she couldn’t afford the Grand Prix tickets and refused to let Felix pay for her to go. She remembered the other students coming back to campus chattering about the races they had seen.
This year, she thought with a waxy smugness, those students were going to go home chattering about her. She was going to make sure of it.
‘Who was that?’ Gem asked, handing Asta a lanyard with her credentials attached. Asta Ekenberg. Riding ‘Carmine’. Unaffiliated. Below the words, a red stripe. On the other side was the Silverscale logo with a fire-breathing dragon, the year worked into the shape of the flames.
‘That,’ Asta said, ‘was Dr. Marvin Isley.’ She gazed after him, the bitterness of his name curdling on her tongue.
‘Wait, that Dr. Isley? Head-of-School Dr. Isley?’
‘The very same.’ Asta continued to watch him, her heart heavy, as his clutch of students laughed at something he said and let themselves be herded up the stairs.
Gem was the one person Asta had thought to call after she’d been expelled from Pillar. She couldn’t bear to go home and face her parents. So she’d called her cousin in Port Veracruz and begged him to come get her.
On the train ride from Pillar, with all her stuff shoved into trash bags at her feet, Asta had told Gem everything.
He had done the dutiful-cousin thing and hated whoever she hated and taken her side in all matters.
He had helped her find a stable in Port Veracruz where Carmine could lodge.
And he’d never once implied that she should go home and apologize to her parents.
She’d only meant to stay with Gem for a few weeks while she figured out what to do, but technically, his apartment was still listed as her mailing address.
‘Dude.’ Gem looked after Dr. Isley with appropriate cousinly scorn. ‘That’s super awkward.’
‘No kidding.’
‘Well, it’s going to be even more awkward when you win.’ Gem picked up his bag and slid the registration packet into one of its large pockets. ‘Come on. Let’s get settled in.’