But as her mother held her, sobs rose in her throat and continued until they shook her whole body. Maeve rocked Asta lightly and let her cry.
‘It’s all I ever wanted.’ Her voice was fractured by her weeping. ‘I screwed everything up.’ She had come so close. Silverscale. Felix. For one wonderful moment, she’d had it all. And now she was falling back down to earth, and there was no one who could catch her.
‘You were amazing out there,’ her father said. His voice, too, was trembling with tears. ‘I couldn’t believe it was you. I’m so proud to be your papa.’
Asta couldn’t answer him through her crying.
Gem turned off the TV.
Almost immediately, a knock came at the door.
‘Oh my god,’ Gem said, checking the peephole. He swung the door open.
Tess Curie’s tiny figure stood backlit in the doorway. She wore a thick fuzzy coat that nearly enveloped her, and in one hand, she carried a cloth bag.
‘Why’s it so damn dark in here?’ Tess squinted. ‘I can’t see for shit.’
Asta tumbled out of bed, wiping her eyes. ‘Ms. Curie.’
‘Oh, there you are. Huh,’ she mused, looking Asta up and down in the light falling from the open door. Asta’s hair was uncombed, her clothes rumpled. The bandage holding the ice pack to her leg extended out from under her shorts. ‘It was better when I couldn’t see. Well, I never liked you for your looks in the first place.’
‘Who’s this?’ Asta’s mother asked, a thin veneer of politeness on her words.
‘Mama, Papa, this is Tess Curie. She’s a Silverscale champion. She’s. . . my hero.’ Asta went to her bedside table and picked up the postcard with Tess’s picture on it. ‘See?’
Tess tromped over and snatched the picture out of Asta’s hand. ‘Ha!’ she barked, and threw the picture on the bed. ‘I remember her. She didn’t know her head from a hole in the ground, but she was fast, eh?’
‘Yeah,’ Asta said, smiling. ‘She was really fast.’
‘I don’t know what the hell you were doing out there, girl. I thought you were dead for sure about twelve different times yesterday. I always said she was a dummy,’ she said to the others.
Asta blushed.
Tess’s eyes slid from Asta to her parents to Gem and back to Asta. She lowered her voice. ‘Didn’t leave you much choice, did he?’
Asta met her eyes and found them kind and gentle.
Tess breathed hard out of her nose in disgust. ‘That’s what I thought. It ain’t right what that man gets away with, but it ain’t your job to fix it. Might be, some time, you get a chance to stick it to him. If you do, take it. In the meantime, I got something for you.’ She reached into the cloth bag that she had been clutching and wrestled something out of it. It was a silver chalice with a sweep of dragon scales arcing down the side of it. Dark tarnish filled the little cracks and crevices between the scales, but the smooth surfaces gleamed bright, almost white, in the light from the open door. Tess handed it to Asta.
Asta read the inscription on the face of the chalice. ‘This is your trophy!’ She stared at it in awe, turning it in her hands. ‘This is your Silverscale trophy.’
Tess looked quite pleased with herself. ‘I want you to have it. Never seen riding like that before. You had me going.’ She made her way back toward the door of the suite but paused on the threshold, door half open and the cold air coming in around her. ‘It’s too bad what they did to you.’ Asta wondered if she meant the Bruces or the NFDRA board. ‘But I’ll hear your name again, Asta Ekenberg. That, I know.’
‘Wait,’ Asta called, and limped after Tess. The cold outdoor air shocked her bare skin, and she danced haltingly on the frigid sidewalk to keep her feet from freezing.
Tess turned back.
‘What happened with Felix?’ Asta asked.
Tess squinted at her in confusion. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Felix Seraphin. At the press conference, Flávia Gameiro said he had withdrawn. What happened?’
Tess scratched her neck through the fluff of her coat. ‘Well, you know old Peter and Sofia. They’d be damned if they would let her say it outright.’
‘Say what?’
‘He helped you, didn’t he? Gave you that magical contraption.’
