‘Critics of the magical arts say that magically influenced perception is a trick. Perception, they say, is not real. Now, if we’re talking aboutcharms,I’d agree with you. That kind of magicisn’treal.’ Asta snorted, knowing this barb was for his mother, who had a weakness for such superstitions. ‘But perceptioncanshape reality. It canbecomereality. After my injury, all I could perceive was my failure. But when I changed my perception, everything changed. And that’s the magic that saved me.’
Asta glanced at the faces of the others at her table. They seemed enraptured, but the speech was total nonsense. As if everyone had this miraculous ability to bounce back up when life knocked them down. All you have to do is pretend it’s fine, like he did. And if you can’t do it, it’s your own dumb fault. But that’s bullshit; sometimes you don’t get back up. The entire metaphor seemed to Asta like an excuse for Felix to geek out about magic in a semi-socially acceptable way. And yet, look at these people, lapping it up. You really could just put a Seraphin onstage and let him ramble about anything at all.
‘So when the hard times come– the losses, the setbacks, the pain– let’s apply a little magic to the situation. Let’s change our perception and open our minds to accept these obstacles as part of our reality– part of our victory. Thank you. Good luck to you all. Ride high!’ Felix pumped a fist, and the room broke into applause.
Soon, it was all clattering forks on plates and swells of conversation. The courses were removed and replaced, one by one, by the white-gloved hands of the servers. Asta ate. She smiled when it seemed like she was supposed to and wished the other riders at her table good luck. She wondered if Felix would try to talk with her again, now that Nat wasn’t there to chase him away. But he stayed at his table all through dinner, shaking hands with a steady stream of well-wishers and suck-ups, and Asta stayed at hers.
The Silverscale Grand Prix: Day One
Opening Ceremonies
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, theyhavestarted, 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.
