CHAPTER SEVEN #2
‘Don’t you dare laugh at me.’ Her anger was cold and quiet, so at odds with my hot and loud kind.
I held my hands up in placation. ‘I laughed because I should have known. I’ve only been speaking to you for five minutes and you’re already the biggest know-it-all I’ve ever met.’
Tension left her stance, not that it had been a good one to begin with.
‘So, what? You’re going to be my strategist?’
‘Yes.’ Her confidence was clear.
I wasn’t so sure. Trusting someone else had failed me before. Every day of the past five years had been a reminder of that.
Yet … she hadn’t told anyone. She’d found me, helped me and then kept her mouth shut. If there was anyone in Volitant who was the opposite of Theo Vaspre, it was Josie.
‘Okay. You can brief me, but I’m not promising I’ll follow through on it.’
She smiled for the first time. It was, unfortunately, contagious.
‘Good. I have a condition though.’
I scoffed. ‘Are you really in a position to be negotiating?’
She cocked her head at me. ‘I’m not the one stealing someone’s identity and racing in secret.’
I tried to come up with an argument that would work, but it was taking too long. ‘Fair.’
‘Speaking of which.’ She sat on the bottom bunk and flipped open the first binder.
‘I checked and technically you’re not breaking any Volitant rules.
You’re a Kiestral employee, so you’re not stealing Gottyk to race.
You have your flying licence from being a keeper and …
’ – She ran a finger down the first page.
– ‘You have twice the number of points you need from the junior series to be eligible to race in Volitant.’
That was surprising. Not the points, I’d already known I was beyond qualified for the job. The surprise was that Josie knew that too.
‘Before I go through your other statistics—’ She silenced me by holding up her hand. It seemed to be a habit of hers. ‘We need to make an agreement. I’m going to help you. In exchange for that help, you need to agree to take me with you.’
‘Where?’ She already had access to all the races, just as I did. Only the rider facilities were off limits.
‘To the top.’ She flicked through the pages of her binder. ‘After our conversation in the aviary, I did my research. You had a junior career just as good as the other riders of your generation – better than some even. You were even tied on points during the last race of the Wyvern Cup.’
White noise fuzzed in my ears. Josie started to sound faraway.
‘You’ve had a near-identical set of results to Theo Vaspre, who you were teammates with for two years, pulling off some of the more impressive racing the wyvern class has seen.’
The memory came back unbidden. I couldn’t stuff it down again, not with Josie reading out my past from a piece of paper. Flying in that last race, my own mottled grey wyvern matching Theo’s as he flew in front of me. Him looking over his shoulder. Him diving to force me to back off …
‘So I know you’re good enough. That’s why the agreement is that when you succeed and get an official job with a team, you take me with you.’
I snapped back to the present, seeing Josie clearly for the first time. She’d read my stats and decided I could do it. She’d found evidence to back up her theory and the outcome was that I was worthy of her time, of her effort.
‘You think I can do this?’ My voice rasped.
‘I know you can,’ she replied, standing again, resolute. ‘I wouldn’t tie my fate to yours otherwise. The only thing in our way is all of them.’ She thumbed over her shoulder, towards the door and the rest of Volitant Chroma.
The only thing in our way.
Josie was already thinking for the two of us. She’d already decided there was an us. A team. My hands began to twitch. It’s not like we had the same goal, so it wouldn’t be the same as last time.
I looked at her. I’d seen Josie around the headquarters and aviary for years, but I’d never truly paid attention.
She had the same tired anger in her eyes as I did. A woman stuck in place. A fire was burning inside her brighter than any dragonbreath. It stoked the fire I had inside me too. It grew brighter, hotter and bigger the longer I stood there.
I held out my hand. ‘Deal.’
Josie didn’t smile this time. She became more still and solid. She accepted my hand in her own and shook it.
‘Deal.’
My eyes glazed over as I flicked through page upon page of information that Josie had collected. We’d been sitting on the floor of the bunk room for an hour going over the next race, much like the team briefings I attended. The binders though … they were something else.
There was a whole section on my racing history. The five years in the Junior Drake Series as a kid, racing the four-legged wingless lizards and winning it all at twelve years old. Graduating to flying for the first time in Wyvern Cup on the dragons’ lesser cousins.
It was all laid out in numbers: my lap times from the wyvern class (stellar), my sponsorship history (cheap) and teammate comparisons (sore spot).
More interestingly, she’d collected information on every other rider too.
Specifically, how they’d performed at the Mirendi circuit over the past few years.
‘How did you get access to all of this?’
‘The control room.’
It wasn’t hard to tear myself away from the table of numbers outlining the champion Ellas Ruan’s lap times from last year, but even if I’d been engrossed that statement would have worked.
‘You broke into the control room?’ I’d been assuming Josie was a rule follower, with the removal of Thorne an outlier. Apparently I was wrong.
She shook her head. ‘It’s not breaking in if you have an access pass.’
‘I don’t have one of those!’ I could hear the pitiful whine in my voice, but I didn’t care. I hadn’t ever needed access to the room with all the team records, but it still hurt to know I was missing out.
‘I didn’t say it was my pass.’ She smiled as she pulled out two Kiestral ID cards. Identical to my own, except one had Josie’s name on and the other—
‘Bach Lotiere?’ I scrambled forward from my reclined position on the floor and grabbed her wrist, pulling the card close to my face. ‘How did you get this?!’
‘Try not to get your drool on it,’ she said, amused. ‘He lost it and got himself a replacement. He lets me use the spare.’
My mouth hung open as I stared at her. Bach had given her an access pass. Bach Lotiere, the greatest rider of all time, had helped her.
‘Don’t they notice there’s two of his passes gaining access to places?’ I whispered it, reverent in the presence of something the legend himself had owned.
Josie rolled her eyes. It wasn’t the first time she’d done so in our strategy session so far. Apparently I knew very little and it was a source of great exasperation for her.
‘Access doesn’t work like that. The cards can grant or block access to certain areas, but it’s essentially a fancy key with a name tag. There’s no big system letting security know who goes where. It’s basic arcanite magnetism.’
I settled down, cross-legged, next to her. My knowledge of augments was limited to the ones used for racing, and even then I didn’t know the details of how they worked. I didn’t need to.
She tucked the passes back into her pocket. ‘Honestly, it’s a miracle you’ve made it this far by yourself.’
I narrowed my eyes at her. ‘What a shame you need a meat sack like me to fly the strategies for you, hm?’
Josie wasn’t affected by my teasing at all. At least, not in the way I was used to. Instead, she seemed bored with my goading.
‘So, what are Meat Sack’s plans for using comms during the next race? I’ve been in this tiny room with you long enough to know you’re incapable of staying quiet when you should, so that’s not going to be an option for long.’
My mouth and nose scrunched up. I was aware of that problem, but ideas for solutions hadn’t been forthcoming.
‘Have you considered a voice augment?’ It was a wild suggestion, but the tone wasn’t sarcastic. Coming from Josie it sounded like it was something I should have genuinely considered.
How I would even go about finding a voice altering augment, let alone get it working, was a mystery to me.
‘Okay, then,’ she continued. ‘I’ll sort it before the Mirendi race.’
‘Uh, you will?’
She nodded, like it wasn’t a big deal. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Given that she’d organized the tables, graphs and data into folders for fun, finding and fitting complex augments was likely just another hobby.
‘Though there’s not much point to it if you don’t know what information you need from the team.’ Josie snapped the binder in her lap shut. ‘Who’s likely to be your direct competition this weekend?’
‘Easy.’ I was happy to get a question I could answer. ‘Bach – teammates are always your closest competition.’
She gave me a flat look. ‘No. Don’t be so big-headed.’
‘It’s true. Same dragons, same pace—’
‘You are not as good as Bach Lotiere. Same dragons be damned! You don’t have a chance to compete with him. No, think about performance over the past year on all the circuits. Think about the Mirendi circuit in particular.’
I stared at her, doing my best to sift through the information.
‘Lena! Come on, we have literally just been talking about this.’
I grasped my head in my hands. ‘Yeah, but it was all relative acceleration and performance differentials. Those numbers don’t actually mean anything.’
‘Yes, they do! They mean everything!’ Her cool attitude finally broke. ‘How are we supposed to measure results and make improvements without them? Lena, you need to think about the data. You need to learn what separates a good rider from a great rider.’