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I only spent a day in Dubrovnik back in September, but if my father and I have one thing in common, it’s an eye for detail. I’m not just a pretty face—everything I see, I memorize. I remember every street I walked and every shop I passed the night before I caught the ship to Kingmakers.
I know exactly where Coco is located, and how to get there.
In fact, I might know a faster route than Adrik.
Avoiding the crowded thoroughfare of Placa Stradun, congested with tourists, sidewalk cafés, and overburdened carts of kitsch, I take a hard right through an alleyway, then several more twists and turns through narrow residential streets.
Adrik’s bike howls as he speeds after me.
He’s trying to catch me.
His bike is faster, no question—if this were a track, he’d blow past me in a single lap.
But we’re not on a track. The more we have to stop and start, and the sharper the corners we navigate, the more I can make use of the light frame and zippy 650 engine on the Ninja.
I expect to leave him in the dust.
Tossing a look back over my shoulder, I see Adrik bent low on the bike, cutting the space between us.
He handles the machine like a pro, slicing through turns with surgical precision, slowly gaining ground on me.
Adrik doesn’t just know how to ride. He knows how to race.
Racing is all about taking lines. It’s strategy. That’s why the best brain wins, over hundreds of laps. You have to shave off fractions of a second each turn, each lap more perfect than the last.
I’m taking my turns at maximum speed, coming in hot, turning as tightly as possible.
Adrik’s bike is bigger; he has to slow at the corners. But he’s calculating his angles like fucking Pythagoras, flattening the curve, bringing the bike to a straight line as soon as possible so the Ducati can make full use of its monstrous 998 engine.
Adrik is sacrificing entry velocity for exit speed.
It’s a math equation. I know that—and apparently he does too.
I speed through a tight roundabout, leaning so hard that my bare knee almost scrapes the road and my hair trails in the dust.
I started this race, and I’m damn sure gonna win it.
My bike sounds like a lawnmower compared to the leonine roar of the Ducati. I rise up off the seat, feinting like I’m gonna turn right out of the roundabout, then juking left instead, shooting the gap between a delivery van and a Fiat. The delivery driver lays on his horn and the Fiat’s owner shouts furiously out his window. I cackle with triumph, pulling away from Adrik.
Not being entirely familiar with the area, I fetch up against a stone staircase so tight that the handlebars of my bike scrape the plaster walls on either side as I bump down. Terrible on the shocks, but who cares, it’s not my bike.
I almost collide with an old woman in a flowered headscarf, who gives a startled squawk.
“Oprosti!”I call to her cheerfully.
She shakes a fist at me, then begins her shaky ascent of the stairs, a basket of bread, jam, and fresh-cut flowers tucked over her arm.
Adrik is forced to stop at the top of the stairs, watching as she painstakingly makes the climb.
Laughing madly, I zip through the Buza gate, while a furious uniformed attendant shouts something in Croatian.
Adrik will never catch me now.
I pass under the bright orange cable cars ascending to the top of Srd Hill. We could have ridden the cars, but I’d much rather take this winding road on the bike, roaring up the Mediterranean hillside, the ocean flat and glittering below me.
Clouds of dust billow up behind me like smoke. I speed faster and faster, reckless and thrilled, chasing the swallows that dart and swoop across my path. I’m not racing Adrik anymore—I’m challenging the voice that tells me to slow down before I take a curve too hard and tumble off the cliff, or collide with a tour bus driving the opposite direction.
Sense is never as strong as the impulse for more.
