‘Thanks,’ Asta said, and began to leave. But then she thought better of it. ‘Torque, can I ask you something?’
‘Sure,’ he said, casting a glance Asta’s way. His attention diverted, Vulture snatched the last quail from his hand. ‘Aw, you sneaky thing,’ he scolded. He reached as if to reclaim the prize, but Vulture lashed her tail so forcefully that he had to back away. ‘Alright, you big baby. It’s all yours.’
He came out of the stall and shut the door behind him, wiping the few quail feathers still sticking to his hands on to his pants. ‘What do you want to know?’
Asta didn’t know how to ask. It was too embarrassing to come right out and confess that she may have misunderstood the arrangement she had with the Bruces.
‘You’re not a Bruce, are you? Not some third cousin twice removed or whatever?’
Torque made a sound of amusement and marked something on the clipboard hanging by Vulture’s stall. ‘I’m no Bruce.’
‘So howdidyou start working for them? I’m guessing it wasn’t an ad in the classifieds. “Sketchy-ass dragon racers seek crew boss. Snitches need not apply.”’
Torque laughed. ‘No, missy, it wasn’t that. I got hired on by Old Bruce, Hummer and Tru’s dad. Just showed up at his stables looking for work. Told him I knew more than I did. Fact was, I didn’t know the first thing about working with dragons. Needed a job, that’s all. I was going door to door trying to get anyone to hire me. Lord, but I must have sounded a fool. He was the one that started calling me Torque. Don’t know where I picked the word up, but I must have said it five times in five minutes trying to impress him, and Old Bruce never let me forget it.’ Torque propped a hand against the stable wall. His eyes were cast down, reflective and far away.
‘So he knew,’ Asta said. ‘He knew you weren’t telling the truth.’
Torque smiled wryly, his dark eyes wistful. ‘Sure, he did. I was too young to be any good at lying.’
‘Then why did he hire you?’
Torque looked over his shoulder at Vulture. She had finished her snack and was now threading her neck through the bars of her stall door, hopeful that there might be one more quail somewhere on Torque’s person. ‘When I finished making a fool of myself, he took me out to the stables, set me to mucking.’
Vulture rested her bronze-colored head on Torque’s shoulder as he spoke, and the breath from her nostrils blew his hair. He tickled behind her horns, and she pressed her head against his.
‘It was a test. Anybody can lift a shovel. That wasn’t what he was looking for. He loved those dragons, Old Bruce did. Loved them better than his own children most of the time. Sure treated them better.’ Torque sighed. He bent down and picked up a shoulder bag with a few ointments and grooming tools in it. It clacked and clattered against his side as he slung it over his shoulder. ‘Tru got some of that from him,’ he said. ‘Loving the beasts. Hummer, not so much.’
If Tru had her way, Asta knew, the dragons would be sleeping on down pillows every night, fed only wild salmon and exotic beef flown in from the ends of the earth. But Hummer brooked only so much expense as might improve their performance and no more. The day a dragon showed the slightest sign that it had passed its racing peak was the day Hummer started making plans for immediate sale, though Tru would scream at him, berate him, beg him not to do it. Tru mourned every departure like she had lost a child, and her usual surliness deepened and grew caustic, sometimes for weeks on end.
‘The dragons,’ Torque concluded. ‘Theywere the test. He had to see how we got on, if I gave ’em their respect. If those big galoots hadn’t liked me, I would have been out on my ass.’
‘When you were hired. . .’ Asta began to ask, following Torque out of the stables. She paused, choosing her words carefully. ‘Were there any. . . unspoken parts of the job?’
Torque stopped under the wide, open doorway. He studied Asta’s face, but she avoided his eyes and looked out instead across the avenue to where crowds were streaming into the raceway, pre-race music blaring over them.
‘What’s he asking you to do?’ Torque’s voice was heavy and reluctant.
Asta took the card out of the pocket of her sweatshirt and handed it to Torque.
He grunted at what he read and handed it back.
‘I’m not even sure what it means,’ Asta said.
It was Torque’s turn to gaze out at the track. The sky was overcast with gray-bellied clouds, but he squinted as if the bright autumn sun was out, glaring in his eyes.
‘It wasn’t always like this, you know. Hummer changed things. He ain’t like his father was. Old Bruce was a wily old bastard, but he wasn’t. . .’ Torque frowned.
‘What am I supposed to do?’ Asta asked him when it became apparent that he was not going to finish his thought.
He gave her a somber, almost sorrowful look. ‘He’ll tell you. And when he does, my girl, you do what he says. You hear me?’
A chill ran through Asta. She had been naïve to think that getting herself to Silverscale would solve all her problems. And if she was being honest, she hadn’t gottenherselfanywhere. In this world, you always owed something to somebody. It was becoming clear that she had chosen the wrong people to owe something to. ‘But what if—’
‘You do what he says.’ Torque’s attention shifted, and Asta turned to see Nat approaching them.
Natalia ran up and grabbed Asta from behind, wrapping both arms around her waist. Asta whimpered at the pressure on her bruises, which Nat did not seem to register. Her perfume smelled like cherry and tobacco.
‘Hey, hot stuff.’
