Page 30 of Tailwind

‘Have a nice day.’ I bit off adding an insult at the end and opted for pushing Colly through the crowd before the Bolls realized I’d been rude.

‘Is that true?’ Colly asked as we dashed across the street, back the way I’d come.

I nodded, weaving between pedestrians doing double takes at Colly. ‘Yep, all style over substance. If you want a good personal wyvern, go for one of the reds. Intelligent and ethically bred for generations – classics for a reason.’

‘Thanks, by the way,’ he says, looking down at me with big brown eyes that reminded me of Gottyk.

‘No worries.’ I shrugged it off. I couldn’t count the number of times I wished someone had helped me.

‘I’d totally forgotten I had plans.’ He ran a hand over his face to his close-cropped hair, his eyebrows bounced up in disbelief as he did so.

Guilt tugged hard on my gut. He’d believed my line about his teammate. I scrambled for something to say, a way to get out of explaining that I’d made it up without embarrassing him.

‘There they are.’ He looked up at the corner building, his moment of confusion gone and replaced with joy once again.

His chest began to expand, I barely had time to cover my ears.

‘Hey!’ He cupped one hand around his mouth and waved the other dramatically in the air. ‘Quinn! Theo!’

My stomach didn’t care about food anymore since my heart had just dropped into it. I looked up to where Colly was waving. My head began to fill with fuzz as I recognized which balcony the other riders were on.

Luzzi’s.

I don’t know why I was surprised that Theo was there. From the sickly squirm in my chest I figured it was probably something like jealousy. Of course his life had remained exactly the same.

Theo appeared over the edge of the balustrade, joined by Quinn a split second later. I ducked away, standing behind Colly and keeping my head down.

‘Hey, kid, I’m gonna head out.’

The young rider paused with his waving hand still in the air, literally caught between two thoughts. ‘Oh, you’re not coming too?’

I was stunned at the assumption until I remembered I’d made my introduction by pretending to know about his plans. ‘Nah, not for me,’ I said. ‘Not my style.’

I gave him a friendly clap on the shoulder – upper arm, really, given how tall he was – and a genuine smile. ‘Enjoy it. I hear the pancakes are popular.’

His eyes shone with appreciation. ‘Thanks, Lena!’

I joined the flow of people around us and did my best to disappear, hoping that Theo hadn’t spotted who Colly had been talking to and grateful that the rookie was tall enough to hide behind. So grateful that I didn’t put much thought into how he’d learned my name.

CHAPTER NINE

Starting tenth wasn’t ideal at the best of times, but in Eauveil? I could have been the best rider in the pack and the odds would still have been stacked against me. The Volitant Chroma commentators only ever had two things to say here: it was iconic for the history, and it was near impossible to overtake. Half a century of dragons speeding around the harbour, taking the narrow streets two at a time when there was only space for one.

I rolled my shoulders. This wasn’t going to be about rider versus rider.

We were starting from the lowest launch point thanks to my unlucky draw ahead of the race. Each of us had been assigned a floor of the tower, with a short balcony our only runway. Gottyk barely had any room for a running start before having to take off into the air, only thirty feet above the ground. Directly above us on the fourth storey was Omar Wilver on his purple Ballenir dragon. He would be my first obstacle.

Then it would be the city itself.

It stretched out in front of us in ornate, centuries-old stonework. Buildings storeys upon storeys high that our dragons couldn’t go above without being penalized. The streets were narrow at the best of times, but the circuit specifically wound under and over bridges, around single-space corners and tight hairpins that led to the harbour before doubling back on itself. All in a city whose history was as old as the continent itself. It was, frankly, wild to host a dragon race through it all.

‘Thirty seconds to launch,’ Hector’s voice cut through my thoughts, only slightly less jarring now it was my second race.

My stomach flipped over as I tapped the side of my helmet.

‘Ready.’ It wasn’t my voice that I heard come out, it was Thorne’s. I thought it would ease the nerves to hear Josie’s augment working, but it was just as unsettling as hearing my own voice.

It didn’t affect the comms – Josie had at least been patient when I’d asked. It was changing my voice before it even reached the comms sensors inside my helmet. No interfering with official Volitant communications, since that was against the rules. We wouldn’t want to break any of those.