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It was annoying, not being able to ride her Firefly. Darting around other cars was so much more satisfying with an engine vibrating between your legs, the wind clawing at your skin, the knowledge that you could take a lethal spill if you didn’t pay enough attention.
She would have been more awake, that was for damn sure.
She tried to clear her mind, to think about work, to think about Oskar, the oracles, Alex. It didn’t take long for her thoughts to circle back to Tristan, her mind on an endless loop, just like her Adessi.
Lights flashed in her rearview.
A haggard Bullstow cruiser turned on its siren, struggling to keep pace.
Lila cursed and pulled over, her sedan bouncing as she slipped off the road.
A fresh-faced Bullstow militiaman knocked on her window with a few sharp strikes. “ID,” he said when she rolled down the glass. He slipped his palm from his front pocket and began tapping on the screen. “Do you have any idea how fast you were going?”
“Not really.” She handed him her ID.
The blackcoat nearly choked as he read it, apologizing and stumbling over his words. He bowed and blustered for so long that his palm began to beep, prompting him for the next piece of information for the ticket.
The palm went unanswered.
Lila frowned. The leather blackcoat didn’t him fit him yet. It still bagged around his thin frame.
“I didn’t recognize you without your family colors,” he stammered at last.
“Give me the ticket. It’s not like I can’t pay it, and I deserve the damn thing. Besides, it’ll do my mother good to wonder why I was doing… What was it?”
“Two hundred and ten kilometers per hour.”
“Good. It’ll shut her up for a while.” She rubbed her chin as her brain finally caught up with the number. “Wait, two ten? Really?”
“That’s nothing. This car could hit two fifty. The roadsters climb even higher. At least that’s what I’ve read. My cruiser only goes up to one ninety. If you hadn’t stopped, I never would have caught you.”
“We’re militia. We stop for one another.”
The young blackcoat nodded and reluctantly tapped away on his palm. “Did you receive your ticket, chief?” he asked as though reading from a script.
Lila lifted her palm and scrolled, finding the message.
Oracle’s light. Two ten.
She was almost proud of herself.
“Yes. Remember, never let a highborn off with a warning if you wouldn’t let a workborn off as well. It disgraces the militia.”
The officer bowed before he darted back to his cruiser and sped away, perhaps worrying she might change her mind.
Lila leaned against the still open window. He’d remember this stop, this lesson she’d tried to impart for a very long time. Not only because he’d dared to give an heir a speeding ticket but because he’d dared to give one to a chief.
And because she’d given him permission to do it, instructed him to do it as though it were part of his training.
She hated that. She hated that people remembered such little things about her, such insignificant annoyances in her life, things that echoed in their memories. The time they gave Elizabeth Victoria Lemaire-Randolph a speeding ticket. The time they saw Chief Randolph eating crème brûlée with the prime minister in Hotel Emeraude. The time they saw the Randolph prime outside a teenage highborn party, taking a break from the ridiculousness inside. The time they saw the heir in El Dorado, eating lunch with a man who couldn’t stop grinning.
Shaw would praise her words after he saw the ticket and brought the boy in for a debriefing. He would have done the same at his age, though without her permission. He’d put almost anyone in a holding cell for breaking almost any law, no matter the crime, no matter who they were.
He’d put her in one the moment he found out about the things she’d been doing lately.
He’d only hired her because the prime minister insisted on it, because Bullstow needed her help to solve its most desperate cases, because she worked for free, because he didn’t have to put the expense on a spreadsheet and justify it to High House. Because he knew she wouldn’t blackmail him.
Because he could trust her.
