Page 24 of Tailwind

White noise fuzzed in my ears. Josie started to sound faraway.

‘You’ve had a near-identical set of results to Theo Vaspre, who you were teammates with for two years, pulling off some of the more impressive racing the wyvern class has seen.’

The memory came back unbidden. I couldn’t stuff it down again, not with Josie reading out my past from a piece of paper. Flying in that last race, my own mottled grey wyvern matching Theo’s as he flew in front of me. Him looking over his shoulder. Him diving to force me to back off …

‘So I know you’re good enough. That’s why the agreement is that when you succeed and get an official job with a team, you take me with you.’

I snapped back to the present, seeing Josie clearly for the first time. She’d read my stats and decided I could do it. She’d found evidence to back up her theory and the outcome was that I was worthy of her time, of her effort.

‘You think I can do this?’ My voice rasped.

‘I know you can,’ she replied, standing again, resolute. ‘I wouldn’t tie my fate to yours otherwise. The only thing in our way is all of them.’ She thumbed over her shoulder, towards the door and the rest of Volitant Chroma.

The only thing in our way.

Josie was already thinking for the two of us. She’d already decided there was an us. A team. My hands began to twitch. It’s not like we had the same goal, so it wouldn’t be the same as last time.

I looked at her. I’d seen Josie around the headquarters and aviary for years, but I’d never truly paid attention.

She had the same tired anger in her eyes as I did. A woman stuck in place. A fire was burning inside her brighter than any dragonbreath. It stoked the fire I had inside me too. It grew brighter, hotter and bigger the longer I stood there.

I held out my hand. ‘Deal.’

Josie didn’t smile this time. She became more still and solid. She accepted my hand in her own and shook it.

‘Deal.’

My eyes glazed over as I flicked through page upon page of information that Josie had collected. We’d been sitting on the floor of the bunk room for an hour going over the next race, much like the team briefings I attended. The binders though … they were something else.

There was a whole section on my racing history. The five years in the Junior Drake Series as a kid, racing the four-legged wingless lizards and winning it all at twelve years old. Graduating to flying for the first time in Wyvern Cup on the dragons’ lesser cousins.

It was all laid out in numbers: my lap times from the wyvern class (stellar), my sponsorship history (cheap) and teammate comparisons (sore spot). More interestingly, she’d collected information on every other rider too. Specifically, how they’d performed at the Mirendi circuit over the past few years.

‘How did you get access to all of this?’

‘The control room.’

It wasn’t hard to tear myself away from the table of numbers outlining the champion Ellas Ruan’s lap times from last year, but even if I’d been engrossed that statement would have worked.

‘You broke into the control room?’ I’d been assuming Josie was a rule follower, with the removal of Thorne an outlier. Apparently I was wrong.

She shook her head. ‘It’s not breaking in if you have an access pass.’

‘I don’t have one of those!’ I could hear the pitiful whine in my voice, but I didn’t care. I hadn’t ever needed access to the room with all the team records, but it still hurt to know I was missing out.

‘I didn’t say it was my pass.’ She smiled as she pulled out two Kiestral ID cards. Identical to my own, except one had Josie’s name on and the other—

‘Bach Lotiere?’ I scrambled forward from my reclined position on the floor and grabbed her wrist, pulling the card close to my face. ‘How did you get this?!’

‘Try not to get your drool on it,’ she said, amused. ‘He lost it and got himself a replacement. He lets me use the spare.’

My mouth hung open as I stared at her. Bach had given her an access pass. Bach Lotiere, the greatest rider of all time, had helped her.

‘Don’t they notice there’s two of his passes gaining access to places?’ I whispered it, reverent in the presence of something the legend himself had owned.

Josie rolled her eyes. It wasn’t the first time she’d done so in our strategy session so far. Apparently I knew very little and it was a source of great exasperation for her.

‘Access doesn’t work like that. The cards can grant or block access to certain areas, but it’s essentially a fancy key with a name tag. There’s no big system letting security know who goes where. It’s basic arcanite magnetism.’