‘You have to trust me, buddy,’ Asta whispered to him. ‘It’s the only way.’ The dragon scrutinized her once more with his silver eyes and then finished climbing out of the pit with a flap of his massive wings.
Asta looked from one end of the raceway to the other. The spectators were a hazy, monolithic blur, their voices a steady hum. They wouldn’t care if Asta Ekenberg and her dragon won or lost tonight, so long as they got a good show. And she would certainly give them that.
To Asta’s surprise, the cheering from the stands seemed to crest as she and Carmine walked on to the track. Natalia Bruce appeared at Asta’s side on the back of her bronze-headed dragon, Vulture. She shouted to Asta over the noise.
‘You’re a freaking superstar, Ek! There are going to be a lot of disappointed people out there when I beat you.’
Asta tensed at Nat’s words, but she had to admit that she enjoyed the attention. Since they had arrived in Hallium City five days ago, Asta and Carmine had made more than a few enemies, but Asta hadn’t realized until this moment just how many fans they had won over. She looked up at them– the throngs of people on every side– and felt them looking back at her.
Asta lifted her hand to acknowledge the crowd and caught a glimpse of the gesture mirrored on the big screens. The crowd went wild, their voices pulling Asta under their riptide. She wanted to laugh. And cry. So many people. So many. And all, every one of them, expecting something of her.
She hoped they would forgive her.
Felix, who had been prancing Essie up and down the track, waving to his adoring fans, turned and looked in Asta’s direction, but he had his visor down, and she could not see his face through its mirrored surface. Behind Felix, the screens displayed a triumphant photo of him from last year’s podium, the Silverscale trophy raised in his hand. A single word took form over the image. It read ‘Unbeatable.’
That was a lie. Felix Seraphin wasn’t unbeatable. He had too much to lose. But Asta? Asta had already lost everything. Nothing and no one could stop her now.
The Silverscale Grand Prix: Day One
Registration
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.
