11
Asta led Carmine through the gate of the exercise grounds with a hand on his bridle, pausing to let the attendant check her badge and unlock the gate.
She cast a cursory glance at a set of aluminum bleachers outside the fence.
A few reporters had come to watch the riders working out their dragons, but they did not seem particularly interested in Asta.
Her opening-night stunt had not held their interest for long.
The first drake heats were about to start.
Asta could hear the crowd buzzing like a nest of bees behind the concrete walls of the raceway.
There was nowhere in the Horizons complex – virtually nowhere in all of Hallium City – where the raceway’s enormous structure did not dominate the view.
Its sheer size made the structure impossible to ignore.
Even at night, when the only sounds in the complex were the voices of the dragons calling to each other from stable to stable, the raceway edifice loomed against the sky.
She had been conscious of it last night as she’d walked back from Nat’s room to hers in the cold.
It would have been so easy to give into Nat’s intoxicating flirtation. Even now, some aching part of her wished that she had.
But Asta had come to her senses and pulled away before they got more than a few kisses in. Nat hadn’t seemed to care. It was like the electricity had been switched off. She was closed off again. Checked out.
Asta replayed the scene in her mind again and again. Maybe if she hadn’t been such a prude, they could have had their fun – blown off some steam, as Nat had so eloquently put it – and moved on.
Carmine nudged her with the flat of his head, impatient to get started, and Asta stumbled out of her reverie.
‘Sorry, buddy. You’re right. Let’s go.’ Asta tucked her hair, buckled the strap on her helmet, and lowered her visor.
She toed the stirrup and climbed into the saddle, hoisting herself on the tethers that hung from the harness.
Once she was settled, Carmine sauntered to the track for his warm-up lap.
The exercise grounds were laid out almost exactly like those at the Pillar School.
Asta had to assume that this was not a coincidence.
Whoever had designed the facilities for Horizons had most likely attended Pillar.
The training fields out behind the old admin building would have been seared into their psyche, as they were into hers.
All the basic elements were the same: a gravel track, wide enough for two dragons to race, wings extended, encircling a terrain course with one river trench, one dry trench, a vertical canyon, and a fifty-degree scramble with faux rock attachments.
The rest of the course was made up of modular obstacles – coops, ladders, and fences; elevated buoys for the westerns; tunnels for the drakes – that could be changed out upon request.
Carmine was slow to pick up speed, but Asta wasn’t inclined to push him.
Their purpose here this morning was to keep him limber for tomorrow, not to prove anything to anyone.
Carmine’s happiness at being in motion, however, soon took over, and he put out his wings and began to pound them in rhythm with his strides.
Asta could feel him winning the battle with gravity.
The wind was buffeting her sweatshirt like a sail.
Carmine’s wings whooshed as he worked them.
He gave his head an exultant toss and lifted off the ground.
Set into the mosaic of rust and vermillion scales, his silver eyes shone bright.
To avoid the containment fence at the perimeter of the exercise grounds, Carmine tilted his wings and banked with the curve of the track below.
He straightened and kept climbing. Looking over her shoulder, Asta saw the entire Horizons complex laid out beneath them.
She had never seen it from this perspective before.
She directed Carmine to land on top of one of the long canyon towers to get a better view.
The wide avenue that ran through the complex served as its main artery.
Beginning at the north entrance where the racing museum sat, it curved around the raceway, past the parking lots and the housing units, and let out on the east side of the complex through heavy iron gates.
Smaller paths to access the storage facilities, the exercise grounds, and other support buildings spoked off from the avenue here and there, but everything came back to that one central road.
Down below, Asta heard the gate into the exercise grounds open, and another dragon and rider came through.
Carmine’s head craned eagerly and, before Asta could stop him, he was airborne again.
He spiraled down through the air like a falling leaf, so fast that Asta lost her bearings.
It took her a moment to realize, upon touching down, that they had landed directly in front of Essie and Felix.
She looked hopefully at the gate – maybe she could make a break for it – but it was already closed and latched.
Asta could sense Carmine’s excitement in the trembling of his body and dismounted as quick as she could so the siblings could give each other the proper greeting they had been denied last night.
Carmine was a year younger than his sister.
They shared a dam but had been sired by different fathers – the only similarities inherited from their mother were their bright silver eyes and the unusual, almost opal-fire iridescence of their horns and talons.
When their dam died, Essie, though still a juvenile, had played nursemaid to the hatchlings left behind.
All her siblings from that brood worshipped her – none more than Carmine.
Felix, still on the ground, let go of Essie’s bridle and stepped back to a safe distance.
The two dragons were on each other in the space of a second, a jumble of black and red.
They tussled and mewed, biting at each other’s legs and necks, their tails lashing wildly.
Gold and indigo feathers floated in the air.
‘Easy, you guys,’ Asta said. But if they heard her, there was no indication of it.
‘We should get out of the way,’ Felix said. He retreated behind a heavy A-frame ladder built out of whole tree trunks. Asta followed.
It was no better seeing him now than it had been yesterday.
Her brain was a perfect peanut gallery of unhelpful commentary: she should say something about the Running Corkscrew, right?
Make a joke. No, bad idea. Her jokes were way too dumb.
Oh god, why did she wear this ratty old sweatshirt today?
He was going to think she was flat-ass broke.
She was, but she didn’t want him to know that.
She should ask about his little sister. No, he would think she was trying too hard.
Better yet, she shouldn’t say anything. If he wanted to talk, let him talk, but she had nothing to say to him. But the silence was excruciating.
‘Those two,’ she said at last, shaking her head at the scuffling dragons.
‘Where did you end up going last night?’ Felix asked suddenly.
‘With Natalia Bruce, I mean.’ There was something stiff in how he said Nat’s name, like it was a little painful.
For a fleeting second, Asta almost thought it was jealousy.
But that was just her stupid brain spinning everything out into the weirdest possible interpretation.
He was a Seraphin. It was his duty to hate the Bruces.
‘None of your business.’ Asta felt her face go red, remembering Nat pulling down her zipper and how, despite her best efforts, Asta had been thinking of Felix. Asta bent to place her helmet on the ground.
Felix, of course, saw the blush, and when she straightened, she saw that an obnoxious grin had spread across his face. ‘Maybe I should have ditched the interviews after all. Whatever you were doing, it sounds like more fun.’
Asta drew her braid over her shoulder, but she worried that playing with her hair made her look insecure and pushed it behind her again. ‘Nat knows how to have a good time. She could teach you a thing or two.’
‘Oh, “Nat”, is it? So, you’re chummy.’ There it was, again.
The stiffness. The hint of jealousy. Not jealousy, she reminded herself.
Rivalry. Professional dislike. There was nothing to be jealous of.
She and Nat were not a thing. She and Felix were not a thing.
There were no things. There was no jealousy. They were competitors. That was all.
The dragons’ reunion had calmed to an occasional loving nip back and forth. Ready to stretch her legs, Essie took off for the track and Carmine lolloped behind her.
Asta cleared her throat. ‘Sure, we’re friends. We’ve been training together since I left Pillar.’
Felix rubbed at the stubble that had grown out overnight. His voice was flat, guarded. ‘Yeah, I heard you’d hooked up with the Bruces.’
Asta blushed again before she realized that wasn’t what he meant. She needed to get her mind out of the gutter.
Felix kicked at a splinter in the ladder with the toe of his boot until it flew off into the dirt. ‘There are better ways, Asta. To get what you want.’
‘Don’t—’ Asta nearly choked on the word as it came out.
What the hell did he know or care about what she wanted?
She didn’t have the patience for one of Felix’s infuriating lectures, as if he knew a damn thing about struggling for your dreams. When Felix wanted something, he asked Mommy and Daddy, and they gave it to him.
If Carmine hadn’t been off frolicking with his sister, Asta would have walked away right then and not looked back. ‘Don’t tell me what to do.’
Felix put his bad leg up on the ladder and leaned over it, inspecting his brace, flexing and adjusting it. ‘I’m just saying that you had other options.’