Asta was suddenly aware that the reporters assembled on the bleachers were all looking their way. She half wished Gem were here to stop her from saying something she would regret, but he wasn’t.
‘Just listen to me for once, Felix. You make it sound like it doesn’t matter, win or lose. You’re wrong. It’sallthat matters.’ Asta couldn’t stop herself now. ‘It’s not about the damned journey. It’s not about the “magic of perception” or whatever that crap was you were talking about.’ She pointed a gloved hand at the massive hulk of the raceway. ‘This is the Silverscale Grand-fucking-Prix. I don’t know about you, but I came here towin.’ She felt dirty putting Hummer’s words in her mouth. Last night had shown the kind of person he was, but he wasn’t wrong about this. When it came to Silverscale, there was nothing else that mattered. Carmine drew close, and Asta ran her hands over his tuft of red chin feathers for comfort.
Felix turned his face toward the raceway in the distance. ‘It’s always been about winning with you,’ he said dully. ‘You don’t give a damn about anything or anyone else.’
Asta stooped to pick up her helmet from the ground. It dangled from her fingertips, swinging back and forth. ‘Winningis myonlyoption. I need this. You know I can’t go back to the farm. I can’t live that life. I have to ride.’ She moved to Carmine’s side and took hold of the harness. ‘I wasn’t born with a stable full of dragons, Felix. I don’t have a family crest to run under like you do. I don’t have sponsors. It’s just me. I am standing with my back to the fence, as far from the starting line as a person can be.’ She put her toe in the lower stirrup, grabbed the tethers, and launched herself into the saddle. ‘But that’s where I’ve always been. The only chance I have is at the finish line. That’s why I’m going towin, Felix. That’s why I’m here.’ Asta pointed Carmine’s head toward the gate.
‘Prove it,’ Felix said, and she stopped and looked back. He gave a tight nod in the direction of the track that ran around the exercise grounds. ‘Right now. A Parsons circuit.’
Ulli Parsons was the course design instructor at Pillar. The Parsons-prescribed sequence of ground- and airwork was drilled into Pillar students from the first week of classes. Terrain first: two fences, a river trench, the false ladder, and the plateau. Then back to the outer track to get enough speed to go airborne. A figure eight around the buoys, through the canyon, and then down the home stretch to finish at ground level.
Asta nodded. She tucked her braid into the helmet and buckled the chin strap.
Felix adjusted the brace on his knee, slipped on his helmet, and mounted Essie. ‘What if you lose, Asta? What if it turns out that you chose wrong, and your worst mistake– the one you really can’t come back from– was that you wouldn’t take help when it was offered?’
It was suddenly feeling very hot inside Asta’s helmet. ‘I’m not going to lose, so I guess we’ll never know.’
From across the complex came a loud, collective moan and the sound of a caution horn. Someone had fallen during the race. Perhaps tumbled from the peak of the scramble. Perhaps tripped and rolled on the straightaway. Something terrible, anyway. The crowd only sounded like that when blood had been spilled.
Asta and Felix approached the starting point, just inside the gate, and lowered their visors.
Asta could feel the reporters watching from the other side of the fence, curious now that Felix Seraphin was here.
‘On two?’ Felix asked.
Asta scowled behind her visor. He was making fun of her. When she had first started riding, she had been so impatient during their practice races that she would make false starts whenever Mr. Seraphin counted them down.
Felix raised himself on his toes and began the countdown. ‘Five, four, three, two—’ Both dragons sprang for the first fence. Their movements were perfectly synchronized. Essie looked like Carmine’s shadow, her black shape a perfect mirror of his red one.
They leapt the first fence without a stutter in the stride of either beast. They even made the same funny little grunting sound when their feet hit on the other side. They repeated their mirrored movements over the second fence, but coming out of the jump, Carmine’s foreleg slipped in the gravel, and Essie pulled ahead.
At the edge of the river trench, Essie hesitated minutely before springing into the water with a splash. Her gold-feathered tail disappeared under the tidal wave of her own wake. Carmine, however, did not slow as he approached the trench. Just as he had done a hundred times on the docks in Port Veracruz, Carmine launched forward from the ledge, his wings and limbs tucked, skimming low over the water’s surface. Then he bent his neck and plunged into the water. Asta sealed the vents on her helmet just as they hit the water’s surface.
The sound of the rushing water echoed inside the helmet. Asta held tight to the handles on Carmine’s harness. Forelegs and wings pressed flat, Carmine wriggled his haunches and tail to propel them forward against the resistance of the water.
Before Asta had begun her training with the Bruces, Carmine– like most westerns– had been chary of the water. But ending almost every night, summer and winter, in the ocean’s waves, had left him as lithe and sinewy as an eel. And fast, too. They came out of the water a half-length ahead of Essie and Felix. Asta released the vents and gasped in enough air to let out a triumphant yell as she steered Carmine for the false ladder.
Carmine was up one side of the A-frame in a single bound. He jumped from the top, stretching out his wings to catch the air. Felix and Essie were right behind them.
This used to be her favorite thing in the world, Asta thought. Testing herself against Felix, taunting him from a pace or two ahead. There was something grim about it now, as if the outcome would be chiseled into stone and could never be undone.
Essie gained on them in the air so that the dragons were neck and neck as they approached the plateau, a smooth steel surface elevated ten feet off the ground and studded with wooden posts like tree trunks.
‘Down,’ Asta shouted to Carmine. He braked his wings, pounding against their forward motion as they neared the plateau, stirring up dust from the ground that stuck to Asta’s wet clothes. His hind legs braced against the side of the plateau; his forelegs caught a post and anchored them. Essie wasn’t so lucky. Her landing had fallen short of the goal, and her rump hung over the side of the structure. Essie scratched with her forelegs for purchase on the steel surface, but there was none.
Felix was racing like the spoiled ass he was, Asta thought with pleasure. During a regular race, Essie’s leg guards and foot pads would be fitted with high-traction fabric. He had forgotten about precision. Gravity. Momentum. The fundamentals. Poor Essie was left clawing her way up with her back legs, costing precious seconds.
Carmine, meanwhile, was snaking across the tabletop like greased lightning, grabbing at posts as he went by to correct and redirect. His talons screeched on the steel. The moment he reached the far side of the plateau, he dug his claws into the wood structure below, and they hurtled forward.
Knowing that Felix and Essie would close the distance between them as soon as Essie hit the ground, Asta gave Carmine his head and raised herself in the stirrups. Carmine galloped down the track, wings beating in great rushing flaps. His head bobbed as a counterweight to his pounding wings. Asta could hear when the sound of his footfalls changed and the crunch of the gravel grew lighter. They were lifting into the air. Carmine let out a roar that shook Asta’s chest.
Asta looked behind her. Felix and Essie were no more than two lengths behind them and gaining. It might just be a stupid dare, but Asta could not let him win it. What right did he have to judge her about her ambition or her friends? The Bruces were ruthless, but at least they’d never pretended to be anything else. A Seraphin would smile to your face and then make their secret deals behind your back, leaving you none the wiser. Making a fool out of you.
Asta made herself small and tight in the saddle and shouted to Carmine.
The dragons raced for the buoys– large red-painted balls lifted high on poles that flanked the western end of the exercise grounds near the bleachers. Asta’s eyes were locked on the first buoy. As they banked for the turn, a dark shape, moving too fast for her to react, flew out from her blind spot underneath Carmine’s bulk. Felix and Essie tore up and into their path to snag the inside position around the buoy.
Startled, Carmine pulled up, his wings flailing. The ground rushed up at them like a pouncing lion, and Asta let out an involuntary shriek. She held on to the harness grips and tried desperately to decipher the ground from the spinning sky so that she could do something to pull out of the fall before they hit. But it was Carmine who saved them. With fearsome strokes of his wings and a sickening twist of his body, he righted out of the tumble.
