8
Because they were unaffiliated with any racing house, Asta and Carmine were placed at the end of the line for the opening ceremonies procession.
Felix and Essie were up first, waiting side by side with last year’s Drake Class champions at the main gate of Horizons Raceway.
They were followed by champions from past years.
Then came the legacy racing houses in order of seniority – the Gameiros, the Taggarts, and the rest. Then the co-ops and the newer houses.
Then the riffraff. The line stretched down the avenue, past the housing units, between a couple of metal-sided storage facilities, and petered out here, in what seemed to be a weedy parking lot for forklifts and hydraulic track conditioners.
There were only two other unaffiliated teams holding down the end of the line with Asta, one western, one drake. They waited together in silence. The pre-ceremony music sounded dull and indistinct in the night air.
‘It’s Ivan, right?’ Asta said to the drake rider, a compact little man in a white jumpsuit with two purple stripes running from his left shoulder to his ankle. She had not met him before.
‘Yeah . . .’ He tugged at his suit to straighten it, seemingly annoyed that Asta was bothering him.
‘Do you know what time it is?’
He checked his watch. ‘Six minutes after nine.’
‘We should be moving, right? Wasn’t it supposed to start at nine?’
The other western rider sighed. Her name was Basma Bohra.
She used to race under the crest of one of the lesser family houses, then with a co-op, but in recent years, she had gone independent, taking her primary sponsor, a delivery company, with her.
In place of a racing shield, Basma wore her sponsor’s logo: a box fitted with a dragon’s wings and tail and surrounded by an aura of flame.
The sponsor’s name spanned her shoulders on the back.
Her jumpsuit was rich orange and yellow, matching both the logo and her dragon Stryke.
Asta knew Basma. She had stood with her on the winners’ podium a half dozen times over the past year, sometimes above her, sometimes below.
After their first race together, there had been a moment, tending to their tired dragons together in the stables, when it seemed like they might become friends.
Basma had told Asta about her career and her decision to leave her team.
Asta had told her the short version of her own history as a farmgirl who’d gone to Pillar and lost her scholarship.
She’d begun to hope Basma might become a kind of mentor to her, but as soon as the other woman learned that Asta was working with the Bruces, she’d cooled off.
Her answers became abrupt and factual. She was never unkind after that, but Asta had gotten the message.
‘They always have a big intro,’ Basma said in answer to Asta’s question about the late start.
‘To get the crowd amped up.’ As if on cue, a distant cheer reached them from the direction of the raceway.
Basma’s dragon – a pale, long-legged creature with speckles of ochre and marigold – shifted and rumbled.
Carmine lifted his head and sniffed the air.
‘For all we know, they have started, but it will take a while for our end of the line to move.’
It felt to Asta like they were a million miles away from the raceway.
The floodlight mounted on the blocky storage building beside them cast stark, unforgiving shadows.
On the other side of the building was a fence.
Beyond the fence, the city streets were clustered with restaurants and merch shops waiting to serve the masses of racing fans now crowded into the stands.
They were all but exiles, Asta thought. They had made it into the Grand Prix by the back door.
They were an afterthought. No one came to Silverscale to watch unaffiliated riders.
‘Was it better being in the middle of the line?’ Asta asked.
‘She used to race with the Iron Oaks co-op,’ Asta added for Ivan’s sake.
More and more cooperatives were cropping up these days, forming their own houses to challenge the old dynasties.
If Asta won this week – once she won – that was the kind of house she wanted to start, one that would bring nameless racers like her in out of the cold.
Basma shook her head. ‘The only really good spot is out front.’
‘Next year,’ Asta said.
Ivan sniffed a laugh, and Basma smiled.
‘Sure,’ Basma said. ‘Next year.’
The cheer that flowed out of the raceway this time was so sudden and sharp that dragons up and down the line startled. Carmine snorted little blueish flames and backed further into the shadow of a backhoe.
‘He’s not used to crowds this big,’ Asta said to the others. She bent forward and ran her hand down Carmine’s rust-red scales. ‘It’s okay, buddy. It’s just people. Hear that? They’re excited to see you.’
‘They’re excited to see Seraphin,’ Ivan said, a hint of bitterness in his voice.
‘I don’t know when he finds time to practice,’ Basma said. ‘He must pose for pictures eight hours a day. Everywhere I look, I see his face. TV, magazines, cereal boxes.’
‘Tell me about it,’ Asta muttered.
The cheering was constant now, intensifying whenever a favorite entered the track. Finally, the line started to move, and Asta and the other unaffiliated riders followed. The good thing about going last, Asta thought, was that Carmine would have time to get used to the crowd’s noise.
Finally, they were nearing the tunnel into the raceway.
A dragon a few spots ahead in the procession balked and reared at the last moment, tossing the rider from the saddle.
The rider scrambled to his feet immediately, but the dragon had taken off in the direction of the stables.
Two people in Silverscale marshal’s shirts jumped into action, one going after the dragon on a little motorized buggy, the other talking sharply into a radio.
Asta steered Carmine around the hubbub and through the main gate.
Horizons Raceway was brilliant and loud and alive.
Encircled by the flat outer track, the terrain of the middle section of the course was fully assembled now.
The illusion of the racers of the past two centuries, which Asta had seen earlier, paraded up the jagged mountainside.
This time, when the dragon in the magical procession roared, the sound that came through the speakers shook the air.
The lower part of the terrain was dressed up in its magic illusions, too, with rushing rivers, dank culverts and raging bonfires.
What Asta had not noticed before, probably because of the brightness of the sky, was that the entire dome over the track was alive with moving images – flying dragons and billowing bursts of flame, talons tearing into the track and riders bent in their saddles. The sight of it took her breath away.
But even more overwhelming than the illusions were the people.
The stands stretched away from Asta on either side, bending around as they reached the far point of the track’s oval.
The upper tiers were closed off tonight to keep the crowds fuller down below, but it was still more people than Asta had ever seen in one place.
The crowds were in constant, chaotic motion, like an active nest of fire ants.
Fans were waving team banners, dancing, screaming. Ecstatic music filled the air.
Aside from Gem and maybe Allie Vorajee, Asta was pretty sure no one had noticed her entrance to the track. Felix was right. She was nobody.
For now, anyway. Let her race, and they wouldn’t be able to forget her.
Finally, she would get her chance. Asta let the crowd’s cheering push against her chest. She smiled.
She had never heard anything like these bewitching voices that seemed to blend into one voice, but she loved it. It was a sound she could ride.
The screens on the Needle showed the dragons and their riders, one pair after another, as they dashed down the straightaway of the outer track.
That had been the instruction that Flávia had given them at the end of the dinner.
Two at a time. As soon as the track ahead of you is clear.
Basma and the drake rider that she had been paired with took off.
Asta counted – one, two, three, four – and waited for the signal from the Silverscale marshal standing to the side of the entryway. There it was.
Asta loosened Carmine’s reins and gripped his sides with her legs.
Beneath her, she felt his muscles tense and release into the sprint.
She had not worn her helmet for this short dash, and the wind whipped tears from her eyes.
Her honey-blonde hair streamed back from her forehead and temples.
Carmine extended his wings and pumped once, twice, adding a burst of speed to their dash down the track. Dust boiled up in the wind behind them.
They had been told not to let the western dragons use their wings, but Carmine was jittery from the noise, and he had taken Asta by surprise. By the time Carmine folded his wings again, they were running well ahead of Ivan and his drake.
‘Bad boy,’ Asta said, but she didn’t mean it.
Every time Carmine spread his wings, even if they never left the ground, it made her heart skip a beat.
Unfortunately, they were now four full body lengths ahead of Ivan, and Carmine was a strong sprinter, hard to dissuade once he had taken on speed.
According to the instructions, they were supposed to enter the first turn side by side.