‘Don’t be such a goober. They just say that for the headlines.’
Asta hadn’t been frightened by the reports like Gem was. It wasn’t like street racing was that much more dangerous than track racing. The newspapers loved to run stories about the casualties littering the streets after each race– riders crushed against walls, gored by spikes, or killed by a fall– but the body counts at tournaments could be just as high. People apparently found whisking the dead and injured off the track in little white ambulances a tidier, more comfortable prospect than scraping them off the sidewalk in the dead of night.
As soon as the sun went down, Port Veracruz police began patrolling the streets, hunting for Hummer’s races. Every now and then, by dumb luck, they would stumble on one and make some arrests. Somehow, there was never enough evidence to charge the Bruces with anything, and no one spent more than a night in jail after a roundup. The Bruce family kept racing the tournaments, but since taking to the streets, they had become outcasts among the other old racing houses, who had never cared for them in the first place. Hummer wore their scorn as a badge of honor.
Her first week in Port Veracruz, Asta had asked around about the street races. She wanted to see one for herself. But no one seemed to know anything– or else they wouldn’t say.
In the end, it was Hummer who had found her, not the other way around. He walked up to her on the street as she was leaving Gem’s apartment building one day and just introduced himself.
Like most dragon riders, he wasn’t a tall man. The years had hunched his athlete’s posture, and his face was blotchy from sun exposure. He’d worn a shapeless green bucket hat and a few days of unshaven scruff. Until he said his name, she’d thought he was a street vendor selling umbrellas or something.
It was a dumb way to get his attention, he’d told her, asking questions all over town. But lucky for her, he’d recognized her name from that little incident at Pillar. Asta had blushed, hot with shame, but he’d said it almost admiringly. His niece, Natalia, needed someone to train with, someone with a little college learning. Would she be interested? He could pay her some, but more importantly, he would teach her how to win.
So, swapping Pillar’s sprawling training grounds for the back alleys and abandoned warehouses of Port Veracruz, Asta’s training had started again. For a change of scenery, sometimes Hummer would take them down to the piers at midnight to train, leaving tomorrow’s fishermen to wonder about the talon scratches in the wood. Instead of Dr. Isley’s classroom lectures on the history of the sport, or Mr. Carle’s mnemonics for perfect riding posture, Asta had Hummer and his sister Tru shouting foul-mouthed instructions at her and Natalia as they flew straight off the end of the pier, over the jetty, to splash-land in the ocean.
Nat and Asta were friends almost immediately, but the competition that emerged between the two dragons bordered on animosity. The only time Asta ever saw them play together was in the ocean. It was hard, some nights, to convince them to come back out of the water, but as soon as they hit solid ground, Carmine and Vulture returned to their usual sniping.
Asta had started training with the Bruces over three years ago now. Hummer Bruce was a hard man, but Asta know how much she owed him. If he hadn’t taken a risk on her, a heartbroken kid who had tanked her one chance at a real racing career, and trained her right alongside his own niece, Asta never would have gotten to Silverscale. In a way, Asta was glad she had borrowed the money from Hummer to pay for this tournament. She was glad to have something that she could actually pay back.
But in order to do that, she had to win. Shehadto.
3
Asta tossed a few toiletries from her suitcase on to the nightstand by her bed. Her race suit, she hung in the closet. She paused to inspect its tucked waist, the zipper up the front, the tight cuffs on the sleeves and legs. The poor thing was showing its age. Once she started her own racing house, she’d finally get a new kit. She had even been daydreaming recently about designing her own logo. Something less stodgy than the pretentious shields of the legacy racing houses, she thought.
But the thought of replacing the jumpsuit did make Asta a little sad. She remembered the night she’d spent bent over the dorm bathtub, her first week at Pillar. She had been required to treat the suit with fire retardant before she could race, but Asta was determined not to look like a farmer’s daughter and had taken it upon herself to dye the ugly khaki canvas as well. The red dye had unfortunately stained the tub, too. Every day, the pink line on the porcelain reminded her that she was an outsider, a wannabe, a pretender.
Asta took the cuff of the left sleeve in her hand and ran her fingers over a small bit of flame embroidered in vibrant orange and yellow thread. Her mother’s handiwork. Why she bothered with this one tiny embellishment when the rest of the suit was so plain, Asta never knew, but she felt surprisingly sentimental about it– this little vote of confidence from her mother, who had always been so discouraging of Asta’s dreams to ride. The dye job that night in the dorm hadn’t touched the bright colors of the thread. If anything, it made the embroidery glow even hotter. Whenever Asta found a patch that complemented her little flame, she would buy it and sew it on to the suit. She made a point to add a patch for each tournament she raced in on her way to Silverscale. The fading red of the dyed canvas was now a backdrop to embroidered scales and dragon’s breath, talon scratches and billowing smoke. She was a walking map of her own ambition.
Asta wasn’t embarrassed of her homemade suit anymore. It reminded her that she had gotten herself here, all on her own.
She placed her helmet, boots, and gloves in the bottom of the closet. Carmine watched, curious and attentive. Asta didn’t have a whole lot else in her suitcase: a few changes of clothes, socks and underwear, a hairbrush, and a gently tattered postcard with a picture of Tess Curie, the only woman to have won the Silverscale Standard Western Class, kissing her trophy. Asta propped the postcard on her bedside table against the round base of a black ceramic lamp.
Carmine withdrew his head into his stable, and Asta heard someone chattering to him on the other side in lilting tones. She climbed onto her bed so she could look down into Carmine’s stall. A narrow-shouldered woman with a black, chin-length bob stood near the door of the stall, cooing to Carmine.
‘Oh my god! Yixin!’
Yixin turned her head from side to side, hair swishing, trying to figure out where the voice was coming from.
Asta waved to draw her friend’s attention.
The other woman laughed with delight. ‘Asta la vista!’ Asta beamed back at the old inside joke. ‘May I?’ Yixin asked Carmine politely and slipped into his stall. He lumbered over to one side to let her through. Yixin ran up to Asta, but the best she could do was reach her arms up to the hatch, wiggling her fingers in greeting.
Asta reached an arm through and squeezed her hand. ‘Yixin, I can’t believe you’re here!’
‘Official and everything. See?’ She stepped back and lifted her lanyard. It had a blue stripe, but Asta couldn’t read the words from that distance.
‘What does it say?’
‘Oh!’ Yixin exclaimed and turned the lanyard to herself. ‘Wang Yixin, DVM. Silverscale Staff, Dragon Medical.’
‘My goodness, Dr. Wang, I apologize! I didn’t realize I was talking to such an important person.’
‘I know! Now, if anything happens to this big boy, you come to me first thing. He’s my baby! Aren’t you?’ Yixin ran her fingers down Carmine’s throat, and his eyes went droopy.
Back when Yixin was only the junior vet at the Seraphin Estate and Asta was just the neighbor kid getting in everyone’s way, Asta used to follow Yixin around, asking endless questions about the difference between caring for drakes and westerns and whether wild dragons could be tamed. She’d made her explain every injection, salve, and exercise she prescribed for her patients. Yixin had answered Asta’s questions in full, just as excited to tell someone all the things she knew as Asta was to hear them.
‘Some baby,’ Asta huffed. Carmine was the size of her father’s old tractor. He even emitted the same random belches of smoke when she ran him too hard. ‘Do you know how much he eats?’
