(ty for reading :D the little star thanks you for your presence)
(EDITED)(Note to readers: Some chapters ahead may not be fixed to be in line with the new edits)
The first person I cut open was my mother.
I'd never been allowed outside of the house in Incheon, then the apartment in Seoul, then the Blue Rooms of Mercy's intricate underground hideouts that she'd placed all across America in innocuous Chinese restaurants, modern art galleries, or subpar pawn shops. Such rooms were typically reserved for bodies, dead or soon-to-be dead, so being holed up in one for the better part of a year could only give a kid so many ideas.
Mercy must've known my train of thought too, because her first words upon meeting me were, "You know you're going to die."
I looked up at her, fourteen and fearful, my father's shadow and my brother's words and my mother's death a vicious metastasis in my bones, growing like a hungry, thorny vine from the inside out. I said, "Yes."
She waltzed across the gray-green stone. She crouched in front of me. "Do you want to?"
I repeated, "Do I want to?"
"Die."
A ridiculous question, for most people. But I hesitated.
Mercy's grin was slow, cold, unkind but unarmed. She said, slower, "Do you want to die, Ghost?"
I said, "Ghost?"
She pointed a black talon at my chest. I stared. Mercy said, "One more chance. Do you want to die?"
I considered her for a long, endless moment. I said, "No."
Her grin widened with life. She got to her feet and walked away from me. "Let me tell you something honest," she said. "No one will ever know you breathed the air of this earth. No one will ever know you bled, or you cried, or you smiled, or you lived. Your existence is as negligible as a grain in this stone." She slammed her heel into the floor just for emphasis. "You were meant to be a nobody, and you will die as such. The unchosen. The ghost."
I stared, but didn't dare speak. I let such cruel words sink into my skin, nestle like ink spiked into the epidermis by fine-point needles. So quick, but so permanent.
"I don't like that, if I'll be honest," she sighed. "I and Fate are not familiar, and if we are, we are not friendly." She turned around in a perfect circle. Her black fingers sparked in the air beside her white teeth. "I think you should get a say, don't you?"
"What're you talking about?" I snapped.
"There are no chances in this world, Ghost," she said. "There are only choices." Mercy splayed her hands wide. "You want to die? Then I will end your misery now, and you will be buried under the empire your father built and your brother inherits. You want to live?" She gestured around us. "Well, I'm certainly not going to stop you."
I pushed myself up to my feet, albeit shakily. I narrowed my eyes. "What's that mean?"
Mercy shrugged. She stalked towards me, then reached out. Her hand slid into my hair and she pulled my head back with a gentle order. A sharp nail sliced across my throat in a definitive line. "A ghost becoming a person is not an easy feat. When you are made to be one thing, the world has a way of making sure you greet it one way or another. To defy the world, you've got to be smart about how you do it. You've got to wait for when."
"My father will kill you if you don't kill me."
"Your father also likes a good game," she argued, blue eye glinting. "How entertaining of a player can you be?"
I considered that carefully. I said, "Teach me."
Mercy's grin was light's egress from a nascent black hole. "Good answer."
She'd laid out a variety of animals at first. Anything from a shrew to a possum to a cat. She didn't want me stinking up one of her other rooms so she'd let me roam the hallways of her intricate basement-that-wasn't-really-a-basement. I figured I would one day discover an end to the bloody maze, but I never had a gap of time big enough to go exploring to find it. I suppose adventure is off your mind when the only thing your life depends on is how fast you can find a mouse's kidneys.
D had laid out textbook on textbook of animal anatomies, integumentary to skeletal, with one too many realistic images to accompany them. Mercy let me scan them over before every animal. Then, she handed me two scalpels and a towel with nothing but a grin to assist.
"We learn by doing here," she said. "Don't worry. There are no wrong answers."
I sunk the knife in and sliced. Blood spurt, gurgled out like fresh pomegranate juice. Metal was acidic in the air. I gagged and shivered. The knife sunk too far and hit something hard and bloated. Something rotted cleaved the scent of blood.
"Oh my, oh dear!" Mercy cried, and gave me a pitying grin. She grabbed my clean scalpel, and swung for my back. The knife cut skin under cotton. I stumbled back and fell with a yell. Blood was a hot and squirming tapeworm wriggling into skin.
Mercy bent down and said, "Try again."
And, again.
Another year went of me trying to open up every animal imaginable, trying to keep every precious organ intact as I did, hissing a little less at every scalpel that dug its way into my back. Time was my only anodyne, and eventually, the slivers of sunlight from venturing out to school or street races. C1. C7. T2. My spine withdrew nerves like a shriveling tree.
She placed a plate of blue steak before me. Red gushed out of the edges. A human heart on a plate. I tried to trace the shape of it. Coronary artery. Left ventricle. Ascending aorta. Marginal artery. My stomach twisted so tight it threatened to crack altogether.
"I've got a present," she said. "Wanna come see?"
"I hate you," I gagged.
"What's wrong? Not hungry?" She made a heart shape. "Look. It's familiar."
"Stop."
She cocked her head to the side. She grabbed me by my shoulder and dragged me down the hall, towards the last Blue Room at the end of the gray corridor. I tried to tear myself from her grasp, but she held fast, nails in deep.
"10.5 million dollars is a lot to cover, Ghostie," she sang. She made a rectangle in the air. "Every body is just another dollar to offer, another stair to climb. You want to live? You would do that pretty head of yours a favor, and remember that." She tapped my chest. "All you own, is all you owe. You want to live?" She let my shoulder go, but kept her finger stabbing into my skin. "Want nothing that will stop you from getting there."
She pushed the door open. It swung wide to reveal the other side.
On the steel table, waiting beneath the sickly white light, was my mother.
Mercy placed a scalpel in my hand.
"Now," she whispered. "Let's talk about that debt of yours."
I screamed up from Hell, and hoped the angels' ears bled from it.
____________________
The Luck House was one unofficial clubhouse for the Bengals in the deplorable crevices of Southern California, off a leg of the Splinter in Hallgate, settled under the guise of a poorly-stocked Asian market. Technically, there were three Luck Houses, one in Hallgate, one in Tokyo, and one in Boston, but Hallgate was the flagship, as it had the most members in operation.
Hallgate was a neon monster. It pulsed like a blockage in an artery, a clotting thing that had no way forward or back to get out, and simply settled for filling itself to progressively enormous concentrations until it either broke skin or killed itself completely. People scattered the streets in attires ranging from black suits to racing jackets, pack pride and class shame. Everyone had somewhere to be they really shouldn't be. Each corner was a lightning strike, every building a chromatic icicle. Without a strand of real sunlight or moonlight in sight, the sky had made itself a digital picture show just to keep the illusion it was there at all.
Right up the Bengals' alley, if you will.
The Bengals were mainly a fae group, with one or two lycans on the outskirts, and several bulgae and sirens sprinkled in. They were extensions of my family, tied in only by lucrative business deals and the iron grip they held over other pack-affiliated gangs. I never knew their exact intents as Mercy wasn't stupid enough to tell me, but I did know what they weren't supposed to do, and jobs, especially on wheels, was one of them. But fae were fae, and given a crumb, you better be prepared to part with the whole cake.
I was due for a job in the midst of Friday's ungodly hours and had slipped away in the narrow corridor of night-morning to Hallgate. Pity the survivor, because it was less a job, and more an opportunity.
Mercy stood in on a scar of a street between a half-vacant apartment complex and a stacked series of pawn shops, laundromats, palm readers, art galleries, and other money laundering silkscreens. Luck House loomed beside her, a green and red market selling only the worst of any Asian goods to offer. The stone walls purred with the city's blood.
I said, "Sorry I'm late."
"Hey, hey," someone called from inside. "Look what the dog dragged in."
Bengals creeped out from their places around the store, from behind the counter that served frozen mandu, to the aisles of fish sauces and dried fruits. Their eyes bore into me like bullets and oil drills.
"Hi, everyone," I said with a salute. "You look great."
Mercy grinned something wide and something awful. D was behind her, uninterested and gruffer than usual in the shadows. He looked me up and down and said, "You look terrible."
"Don't make me blush," I deadpanned.
D shrugged. Mercy cackled.
"Now, Ghost," she cooed. Cyan boots clicked on pavement, a head-to-toe set of a leather skirt, jacket, and gloves to drive the whole getup home. Her face glittered gold with the streetlights. Her long fingers pointed at my eyes. "What's wrong? Don't you like being back home?"
I sneered. I pushed past her prodding hands to head for the Luck House. "I'm just here to get this over with."
She pointed at her pouted lips. "You gonna make me cry."
"Why am I here, Mercy?"
Her expression flickered into something like joy. "Why else are you ever here, Ghostie?" She tapped her skull, and her black and blue eyes turned to slits when she laughed. "And here I thought you were getting easier to train."
My skin was infested with bugs, roaches, beetles galore. Spindly legs sunk into my shoulders, hips, back. I saw a butterfly knife, gunmetal black. My muscles burned. I smelled pungent iron.
I pushed the door open to the Luck House. "Sorry to disappoint."
A Bengal, Violet, by the chip aisle made a sneering face at me when I appeared. "Who brought the runt?" she hissed, slithering over the counter to glare me down through kinky curls. Violet raised a finger, the nail longer than a pocket knife could manage. "I thought he'd be too busy getting cozy with the lap dogs."
"Thought you'd be dead in a ditch by now," I shot back. "We're both surprised."
She snarled and I leapt. The smell of something burning caught my nose and yanked my eyes to the left. A bulgae, Jia, threw her head back in a scoff and said, "Surprised they haven't gutted you in your sleep, maybe."
"Don't hetch bets just yet," I sighed.
The Bengals seemed, at most, amused at that, glancing about each other with mocking mirth. They dispersed from me to return to their chatter.
Mercy waltzed inside, stubbing the cigarette out between her fingers, ignoring the singe that disappeared seconds later, replaced with the pitch skin of her fingertips. The night rolled fast around us. Billboard moonlight watched us from above. I thought of track charcoal and smoke, the wheels striking between the vertebrae, into a sliver of space where only the thinnest of chances could fit. Skin. muscle. Organs. Nerves. Median nerve. Brachial plexus.
I craved the Corvidae like nothing before.
"What's the job?" I asked her.
Mercy slid her eyes to me, bored. She scraped her nails along the side of the molding wood counter, then snagged a lukewarm beer from the edge of it to tip the golden liquid back. She angled it at me.
"Just a drive," she replied. "Hallgate to Cat's Eye, back again. The car is parked out back."
Nothing out of the ordinary, then. I just nodded. I leaned against one of the aisle shelves, packed to the brim with long-expired chocolate biscuits. Kane's words were gentle knives, delicate bullets. Then know me. It was grueling to keep Kane as an obstacle, but it might be twice as dangerous to have him as an ally. Then know me. But at what cost?
I pushed my palm against my temple to ease the ache it brought.
"Hey, kid."
I opened my eyes. My head lolled to the side.
JJ, a glorified instigator of the Bengals wrapped up in a class-less lycan rogue that had no origin nor pack nor full name, stood above me. His black hair coated his forehead and eyes. The pale hand that stretched out to me was wired with blue veins and red scars.
An innocuous flip phone sat between us. Its slim body and fresh screen gave away its novelty. When I stared blankly back at it, JJ sighed and grabbed my wrist for me. He placed the phone in my palm.
I opened my mouth, but he beat me to it. "You're moved, you're with those crows, we need a better way of communicating that isn't showing up at the front doorstep. It's got what you need on it. Don't put anything or do anything on it that you don't want Mercy to find. When it rings, pick up. Got it? Okay."
He turned around, and left me with that. I stared at the phone's black screen, ran my thumb across it. It wasn't mine, but for all of a moment...
I shoved it into my jacket. The Luck House began to empty out, until it was vacant save for Mercy and me. Her blue eyes zeroed in, and she began to walk.
I got to my feet. "Thanks for the phone," I said.
"Thanks for picking up."
"I haven't—"
"You will." She grinned. "It's not yours, anyhow. It'll just keep my life efficient."
I stared. I said, "They're asking questions about my file, about my whereabouts, why everything's blank. What do you want me to say?"
"What do you want them to believe?" she returned.
"Whatever keeps them from asking, frankly."
"I'm a business woman, not a magic-maker," she laughed. "There's nothing but questions to you. I cannot manifest an identity that doesn't exist."
"You can't even change a few things? Not even basic enrollments, an address?"
"You think a blank file is what will draw eyes, Ghost, but it's a fake one that will make things complicated," she sighed, waving me off like dismissing a whining child. "My connections only stretch so far."
"You could do it," I snapped. "You just don't want to."
"Well, that certainly doesn't help," she admitted with a devilish grin.
I gritted my teeth. I swallowed what little pride I clung to with bleeding hands.
"I'll owe you," I said.
Mercy tilted her head. "You always do," she said. "You say those words more often than not these days, you know that, Ghostie? A man with nothing, doing nothing but owing. Irony?" Her eyes glimmered. "You're trained a little too well."
"Are you gonna help me or not?" I snapped. "Corvus isn't part of this dance you've got me chained to, and we've already established that you've got no stance on the matter. If you get what you want from me, then you can keep your comments to yourself. Can you do it or can't you?"
Mercy was bemused by my retort, but not surprised. She drummed her claws against her arm, then shrugged. She said, "The best I can do for you is Arleta and 17th. We can conjure up some placeholders for logistical numbers. The rest is up to you to fabricate."
I turned on my heel to head out. "Thanks."
"Ghost."
I stopped. I waited for the wave to it. Tidal and vicious.
"I am no one to divert you from your personal endeavors," she said carefully, her tone like granite. "And I have no interest in ruining such endeavors without appropriate reason. You know this."
"But?" I sighed, because there was one.
A hand closed around my shoulder and twisted me around. I barely got both feet planted before the very same hand was snatching my chin in its clutches and wrenching me forward so fast I left my breath behind.
Mercy held me suspended between us. Her grip bruised, bled, demanded attention where attention refused to go. Her black scleras were cavernous dungeons. I saw myself in their reflection, gripping the blue bars of her irises.
"But you do not know everything about the world you work for," she hissed. "The sea is shifting, Ghost. Your year is only ending faster. Did you think I would give you all the time in the world to change your fate?" Her laugh came through gritted fangs. "And to think you walked right into the riptide, and have the nerve to face me, asking for a favor."
I pushed her off of me. My feet stumbled back. "What the hell are you going on about?" I said.
"I thought I'd give you time to settle, but you've caught me at a bad time and my nerves have grown rather short over the last few decades," she sighed, pulling her black mane back from her face. "Your crow crew makes my job a titch tricky, to be honest. Un peu précaire. I can't say they're going to be an easy bunch to work around. What with the timing."
"Stop playing," I said. "I'm not doing this. Tell me what you mean."
"You don't know?" she gasped, then thumped a fist to her chest. "Oh, heavens! Oh, mercy. You don't know, do you? Your habitual neuroticism is difficult to predict, I've got to say, I thought you would have found it in your folders."
I stared, trying to decipher just what she could be talking about. I said, "Kane is a Drachmann, his family is an empire, what of it? They have no connection to RIYU. If that's what you're so caught up in."
"Caught like a gnat!" she proclaimed. "Caught in the wild. Prey to a Bengal, if you will. Irony?"
"Mercy."
"You want a seat at the table, Ghostie?" She gestured around us. "You've got one. I thought, having witnessed all that you have, you'd know better than to think all the webs you see are the webs you get." She drew a line in the air, all the way until it struck me in the sternum. With each word she spoke, she stabbed me a little harder until she hit the bone. "Everything costs itself. What you think your crow kings will cost?"
"Tell me what RIYU is planning," I snapped, grabbing her at the collar. "Tell me what the hell you're going on about. What do you mean things are shifting?"
Her grin was slow, knowing, venomous and potent with acid. "You want to be a champion, Ghost?" she hissed. Mercy tore free from my grip with barely a blink. She held my wrist up between us. Her grip twisted so tight I feared she'd break the skin. "You should be prepared to pay the price."
She dropped my wrist and shoved past me to walk for the door. The click of her heels was drowned out from the rush of blood to my head and limbs. I held my reddened wrist to my chest.
This isn't an everyday chance for everyday people. This isn't your world.
"Remember!" she called lightly. "You owe me."
The door slammed shut. I sank against the aisle shelf, anger like bile in my throat, defeat just as suffocating.
How could I forget?
It was only my life.
____________________
Without much warning, night practice began.
I found Kane in the pit. His bike was propped up on one stand, hooked up to wires and cables galore, the energy pulsing through the vehicle's LED veins. Next to it, a pristine, silver and black bike of equal caliber—and equal lethality—waited in a corded prison. His jacket had been discarded along with his armguards, leaving him in nothing but his undershirt and padding. He was unplugging a cord from the tail when I stepped into the pit. He didn't look up at my approach, but he seemed to see me nonetheless.
"You're late," he called.
I blinked. "Five minutes."
"Still late."
"You gotta get a hobby," I said.
"You're looking at it." He dropped the cord onto the black floor and stood, turning on me. He pointed at the bike beside his. "Leave your bike up there, we'll donate it in the morning. Come here."
I said, "Donate it? Why?"
Kane pointed beside him. "That's why," he said. "Did you think you were gonna race on that thing?"
Cue knockout. A sucker punch. Comic sans serif screaming POW!
I looked from my TRAX to the Drachmann bike waiting for me. Bright violet sang through its arteries, the inky paint devouring space and time by the mouthful. Chrome outlined a crow's outstretched wing on the tail, all the way around the shape of the lightless bike, just to assure onlookers that the vehicle was there at all. It was, in so many words, glorious. It was made to win.
"No," I said.
Kane paused. He frowned. "No?"
"My bike has survived worse," I said. "And I can't afford a new one."
"I didn't ask if your bike would survive," he said evenly. "It's not a matter of making do with what you have, it's a matter of having the best that you can." He gestured at the new bike. "No one's gonna send you a bill, it's out of the budget. Hurry up."
My conversation with Mercy—if it could be called that—had left a gaping pit in my stomach that'd been filled to the brim with questions I couldn't ask. Not directly, at least. Just seeing Kane made me light-headed. Racking up anything else I owed, and to him of all people, would take me out altogether.
Kane sensed I wasn't letting up and said, "Either do it or we can end this early. I'm not working with a junkyard bike."
It was a junkyard bike, but calling it such so blatantly still made me bristle. "It's not a junkyard bike."
"Might as well be," he sighed. Kane dusted off his hands and faced me. It took a moment of him staring for me to realize he was waiting for me to decide.
I looked from my bike to the new one. It'd be stupid of me no matter what I decided. It was more a matter of what was less consequential.
I kicked the stand out from my bike to let it sit lopsided on the concrete. I grabbed my helmet from the back and descended to the pit.
"Fine," I bit out. "Now what?"
Kane gestured at the corner. "Grab a box, we've got to adjust it, do some calibration."
"Calibration?"
"You're either gonna fly off the bike or lose out to native sloths if you don't calibrate it for whoever's riding it." He got impatient and grabbed the a red box from the corner himself. He set it down next to the bike, then raised a brow at me. "I'm guessing you never bothered with that."
I side-eyed him. "How about for everything you teach me about racing, I teach you about people skills?"
"Uneven trade," he said, and my eye twitched. "Open those panels under the stomach, we'll re-calibrate the balance and turn ratio."
"What?"
"Panel." He kicked his foot towards the underbelly of the bike, where the light ran around a steel square. "Two gears. Turn them. Your weight, the bike's weight. Left, right."
He retreated to his own bike at that, leaving me with the succinct directions and nothing more. I sighed. I popped open the lid of the box and grabbed a screwdriver to begin undoing the panel.
As I worked, I said, "Why did you offer midnight practice to me?"
Kane paused. He looked up from where he was shining a flashlight down at the wires of his bike and turned to me. When he looked at me, he did so as if waiting to catch something neither of us could see at first.
"You need it," he said plainly. "Why else?"
"I thought the last thing you wanted was to spend more time than necessary with me."
"It doesn't really matter what I want or don't want," he replied, returning to his work. "You're going to have to hold your own by the time the season begins, and race halves by the time the Diamond Prix starts."
I stared. "But, you all race full matches. You always have."
"I didn't recruit benchwarmers," he said, as if I was being stupid.
I turned the dial to the appropriate number. I began to close the panel up. Just being near the bike was enough to send shockwaves up my skin, the sleek metal, the pungent rubber, the swollen potential burning through its body.
"Turn ratio is below it," Kane called. "Set it to adhere to the balance."
I set it. "Are we actually going to race this time?" I asked.
"Against me? No." He screwed in the final bolt to his own bike's panel and got to his feet. He gestured for me to finish up. "We'll just assess, see where you are in categories, go from there."
"Then?"
Kane turned on me, expression exasperated. "Potential isn't a skill," he said. "Stop trying to run before you've crawled. Putting you into a race with the kind of gaps you have right now would be a disaster for everyone involved."
It was fair, but it didn't make it any less grating. "Fine. Lead me where you go."
"This is to help you," he reminded me. "Whether it benefits you or not is your choice."
"Seems like there's not a lot of choices on this team, frankly. Even dinner has rules."
"Then don't come. Rules aren't laws. I make the rule for the team, if you don't want a part of either, then that's your choice," Kane snapped. "I'm not your dictator."
"When does that memo kick in?"
"When you stop asking for things you haven't earned," he retorted, and I pursed my lips tight. He gestured to the track. "We're wasting time, I didn't bring you here to chat. Grab the bike, get on the track, we'll start drills."
I grabbed the bike. I unhooked the wires and cords trapping it where it sat before wheeling it out onto the concrete. Something shuddered awake and soon, the stadium lights were showering the track with white fire. I stood at the finish line.
Kane said, "Good. Leave it there, put your helmet on."
"What?"
"Bike, there. Helmet on. You, here." He gestured at his right, his eyes utterly unamused as if I'd made a bad joke.
I kicked the prop out to leave the bike where it was. I stood at his right with my helmet in hand. Dread was as fervent as excitement was as fervent as even more dread.
"Don't turn your head," he told me, then pointed at the end of the track, where the first corner jutted left. "We'll run from here to there and back again. Your job is to block me. You don't, we start again. Got it?"
"With this helmet on?"
"I'm not repeating myself," he sighed, and pulled off his chest padding to toss it beside the pit. "Got it?"
I pulled on my helmet, and strapped it tight. I nodded. We lined up on the starting line.
"Go," he said.
We went.
The night was young, despite it being morning.
It took fifteen laps for me to eventually keep Kane from cutting me off. By the end of it, oxygen was a privilege, and sweat was beading beneath the several layers of gear I was still wearing despite every inch of my body begging for it to be shed. Kane let me rest for only a handful of minutes, before he was dragging me to the ramps and starting all over again. He was perfectly composed, with barely a pebble of sweat to show for it, the bastard.
"There's ten bolts on either side, four feet apart," he told me, gesturing at the silver bolts holding the gargantuan contraption together. "You have to touch each one at least once within the next thirty seconds. Either hand, doesn't matter. Got it?"
"How is this supposed to—"
"Helmet on."
"Don't make me—"
"Go."
I went.
Another twenty laps passed before I managed to complete the drill. I sat on the concrete, pushing air into my lungs. Kane began to walk for the start of the track.
"Get up," he called.
I got up. I followed.
This isn't your world.
It was a soundtrack to my downfall.
Kane said, "Take your helmet off. There's two tennis balls in the box, go grab them." I went to grab them. I handed him one. "Hit mine with yours when I throw it. We'll do it until you can do it three times in a row."
"How is this related?" I snapped.
"Timing," he said. "You've gotta know how it works."
"I know how time works, thanks."
"Do you want to be here or not?" he snapped, turning a sharp glare on me. "I'll save us both the sleep deprivation and call it now, or you can shut up and trust me here enough to cooperate. Which is it?"
I clenched my fists. But I knew better than to discount Kane's help, especially now. I needed neutral grounds, not animosity. Most of all, I just needed to race.
I held the tennis ball up. "Throw it."
Kane didn't say anything else, and threw it. The ball bounced from the ground, to the pillar, to another pillar, to a ramp, to the wall, to the ground, and again. I aimed, and threw. It struck concrete, and watched its companion roll away untouched.
I closed my eyes. Kane said, "We only have two."
It took me a moment to realize it was an order to go and retrieve them. I closed my eyes. "Fantastic," I muttered.
Thirty tries later proved to be the magic number for me to finally strike the ball three times in a row. By the end of it, both of my arms were aching something awful, and my fingers were threatening to go numb. Every time I bent down to grab the ball, my head swam sideways a little more.
Kane took the tennis balls and tossed them into the box. He said, "Grab your gear. Start up the bike."
My heart spiked north. I didn't even bother questioning him, grabbing my helmet from the sidelines and dashing for the bike. I slid onto the seat. I tightened my gloves, and started up the engine.
Kane stood beside the bike. He gestured at the panel, then at the sockets, then at the handlebars. "Everything is congruent with your TRAX except for the braking and the turning. This won't turn with you. This is degrees, not speed. The brake is enforced in a way that requires more pressure so you don't brake too suddenly, it means you've gotta push harder than you're used to. Accelerator is reversed, a lot more sensitive, this gauge will let you know what range you're in. Don't push this, it'll shut everything down, it's for technical emergencies. Got it?"
I just nodded. Kane said, "You've got one minute to get around this track and turn that—" He pointed at the scoreboard, which had turned on at some point, the sensors attached to the obstacles blinking awake. "—into 150, or higher."
"This track is nearly three miles long," I argued.
Kane said, "Good to know you know how to Google." He pointed forward. "Ready?"
I strapped my helmet on tight. I nodded at him.
He tilted his head to the side.
I went, went, went.
Ten laps.
"Again."
Twenty.
"Again."
Thirty.
"Again."
Forty.
"Again."
Fifty.
"Goddammit."
I fell against the stone wall, my helmet sinking to the ground beside me. The hour ticked towards two AM, the blue sky heavy on my shoulders and the cool night numb on my sweat-riddled skin. My head fluttered, full of smog and light. I couldn't even feel my throat when I swallowed or my feet when I walked. But the number was 143, and I was a minute-ten in, and it wasn't over yet.
I sighed. I let my head hit the concrete. "Embarrassment" wasn't really the word for it. Dread, sordid humiliation, starkness. Reality. Those were better.
Footsteps stopped diagonal from me. "Get some water," he said. "We'll go again."
I didn't reply and he didn't wait for me to. I let my eyes linger on the numbers displayed on the board. They seemed to mock me, growing brighter and brighter the longer I stared. There are years between you and them. There are worlds. There are universes.
None of which I'd live long enough to cross.
My arms rested on my knees. Kane's words ricocheted against my skull. I'm not scared to cut my losses. But I couldn't be one, not yet, not when I hadn't even raced once. It couldn't be over this fast. It couldn't be this fleeting. If Mercy was right, then forget about the flicker of a chance, I'd chosen this. Was it so much to ask to have my choice for a little longer?
My forehead slumped on my forearms. I let my heartbeat lull the thoughts into a centrifuge.
"I said we're going again," Kane called. When I gave no response, he added, "Unless you're done for the night."
I couldn't say such a thing outright. I'd collapse in on myself if I admitted it. So I stayed silent.
Kane let the stalemate sit for a beat, before he let out a sigh. Footsteps padded away, before a crack of thunder and subsequent beeping shut the Corvidae down until the morning came. The lights flickered out, the scoreboard melting black, the sensors clicking off, until there was nothing to see of the track except for the faint glow along the chrome of my abandoned bike at the starting line.
I lifted my head just slightly to watch. A beam of pale, yellow light from the tunnel illuminated my shadow across the concrete. Kane stepped into it, standing in front of me. My eyes and ears burned just seeing him. I braced myself for impact.
A water bottle appeared in front of me. I paused.
"You'll pass out from dehydration before you even make it out of the gates," Kane explained. He dropped the water beside me when I didn't take it. "Come on, grab your gear, let's go."
I didn't move. My eyes stared at the bike.
Kane stood a ways away. I looked up at him. The light was unforgiving for my sight, half of his body coated in listless amber, the other half shrouded in AM blues. I waited for the irritation to bleed from his expression, but when I glanced at his face, it was surprisingly calm, an indifference that bordered on discernment painted over black eyes.
He drummed ringed fingers against his hip. He blew a strand of black hair from his face, and returned to me, settling down on the other side of the water bottle in a copy of my position. Blue turned his eyes into indigo fragments.
The silence was so thick I swore even a scalpel couldn't penetrate it.
Eventually, I said, "Are you gonna cut me?"
Kane considered that. "Do you want to be cut?" he said.
I frowned. "No."
"Okay."
"Okay what?"
"What are you so angry over?" he asked. He said it like it was a real question that wanted a real answer. "What are you so scared we're gonna do to you?"
It was an alarmingly skeletal question, on that tore the silence into shreds and left me front and center in his gaze. Kane waited.
I said, "I'm not angry."
He tilted his head. "Then, my second question."
I opened my mouth, closed it. There were a hundred answers. There were few I could afford to give him.
"I...just wanna race," was all I could muster.
Kane took that with a nod. The crown of his head rested against the wall, throat bared to the wind, and the light delved into the black ink clawing up his neck.
"Listen," he said evenly. "You have no prior racing experience, you have no affiliations or references, you're a first year, you're a Class III Stirling, and you've got a serious attitude issue." He said it so matter-of-factly, I could almost overlook the insult in it. "Corvus has never recruited anyone with even one of those attributes, let alone all of them. You're more than a risk on the track, you're a risk for the team as a whole. Frankly, you should've been dismissed the moment the tryout ended."
"You don't trust me."
"No," Kane agreed. "I don't."
I waited for the inevitable. I closed my eyes.
"But I can't make a team decision without the team," he said. "And they think you're worth the trouble."
I did a double take. I turned on him. "They what?"
He held up a hand to stop me. "If it were up to me, I'd cut you," he said, and my stomach bottomed out. "But Coach and Corvus want to give you a chance."
A chance. It was a shot of adrenaline, a spike of epinephrine. I pushed air into my lungs.
"What does that mean?" I asked carefully.
Kane eyed me in the same way you watched a wolf begin to circle. Like diverting your gaze would be a fatal error.
"Stop picking fights," he said. "No one here is holding you back but you. If you really want to race, then prove it. Do the drills. Come to practice. Do what we tell you. No one is trying to play games, no one is against you. So stop treating us like it."
He got to his feet. He held out a hand for me. I stared at it, then at him, then back again.
Kane raised a brow. "Help me help you, okay?" he sighed. "Or you're welcome to walk back to the Talon on your own."
I pursed my lips. I glanced from him to my bike to helmet. The night hovered over me.
I took his hand, and let him haul me to my feet.
We wheeled my bike to its charging station before Kane was locking up and heading down the sidewalk. The Talon pulsed like a mirrored god, watching Avaldi from its ebony perch.
We walked in silence for the most part, half-because I was busy chugging down the water and half-because of the conversation that lingered between us from the Corvidae. Avaldi's cityscape pulsed with Saturday night paloozas and a bacchanalian haze. We walked its outskirts, not daring to touch it.
I said, "Is this what you prefer to spend your Saturday night on?"
"No," he said plainly. "But there are worse things."
"Than me or than racing?"
"Which do you think?"
"And I have the attitude problem," I muttered.
Kane scoffed. When he spoke again, I got the second shockwave of the night, English fleeing to be replaced by the terrifyingly familiar sounds of Korean instead. "If Class was determined by how much you could talk, I bet you'd be ranked higher."
I gawked at him. I had half a mind to pretend I didn't understand at all, and brush on, but my retort got the better of me and I spat out, "I'd definitely be higher than you."
Kane's steps stuttered. His head whipped to me. I suppose regrets were for bigger brains and longer lives.
"You speak Korean?" he said. Cruelly, in Korean.
I paused. "Some," I lied. "Enough."
Kane blinked. He narrowed his eyes. "Where did you say you were born?"
Panic was a clean slice over my throat. I scrambled for something plausible. "Downtown," I lied. "I've never been beyond SoCal." A blaring lie, if you will.
Kane considered that. "How'd you learn Korean?"
I frowned. He'd said he'd been born in Gangnam, but the catch to his words gave way to a different accent, something beyond the city. I didn't have the nerve to ask.
"Parents," I said. "My old manager."
"Where are your parents from?"
"Don't know. They moved around a lot. They don't talk about their childhood."
"What about now?"
I'd play the language card, then. "Washington," I said, because it was the only nearby state Mercy and my father had no affiliation to. "Don't know which city, though."
"You don't visit?"
"If I can help it."
"You like SoCal."
"SoCal likes me."
Kane's lip twitched. For a moment, I thought it could be a smile, but it left too quickly to confirm. He faced forward and I jumped to turn the attention away.
"What about you?" I said. "Korea, LA, is that all?"
He hesitated, like he was also unsure how much truth he was willing to give up. After a beat, he said, "I've traveled a lot. But I've only ever lived in those places."
"Then, you like SoCal."
Kane shrugged. "Probably more than it likes me."
"How's that?"
We turned the corner to head inside the Talon. Uma gave us a sleepy smile and a half-hearted wave. We entered the WEST corridor, and headed for the stairs.
"It's a big place," he decided on. We ascended to Corvus's floor. "Lots of things to get caught up in."
It was a vague answer, but a strategic one. We stopped in front of the door. Kane flashed his card, and the lock clicked undone.
Kane was quick to kick off his shoes and head for his room. I mustered up enough breath to say, "Thanks."
Kane paused. He glanced at me. "For what?"
I paused. "For the chat."
He seemed to understand, and that might've been more terrifying than anything else that night.
"Don't thank me," he said.
His door shut, and in all of a moment, I found myself alone again.
(ty for reading :) a more chatty chapter if anything? hopefully that's all right. the little star thanks you for your patience)