Dangerous Passenger

I don’t say it like a warning. I say it like I’m reading her the news.

“Copy,” Nova breathes, and the Charger drops a gear so hard the whole chassis flinches, engine note dropping from a scream to a snarl, and the streetlights start smearing sideways past the windshield like something being erased.

I’ve got a map of this city that doesn’t exist on paper. It lives behind my eyes, every one-way and dead end and pothole deep enough to eat a rim, cross-referenced against six scanner feeds I built myself out of secondhand radios and spite. Right now three of those feeds are screaming at once—Metro dispatch, Metro tac, and the private Blackline channel where Jonesy is somewhere behind us swearing a blue streak about brake dust—and I am the only person alive who can hold all three in her head at the same volume and still tell you which one matters.

Right now, it’s dispatch. A black-and-white just called our plate in from the overpass on Fifth, which means in about forty seconds there’s going to be a cruiser sitting exactly where Nova wants to turn.

“Left in three,” I tell her. “Not the one you’re thinking. The next one.”

“There is no next one, Max, that’s a wall—”

“It’s an alley that thinks it’s a wall. Trust the wall.”

She doesn’t answer, which from Nova is a yes. I love that about her. She argues with me for exactly as long as it takes to also be doing what I told her, which is the only kind of argument I have any patience for.

The alley opens at the last possible second, a gap between a shuttered laundromat and a chain-link fence that some genius left unlocked, and the Charger screams through it with maybe eight inches of clearance on either mirror, and I don’t flinch, because flinching costs a tenth of a second and a tenth of a second is a dead navigator.

Behind us, red-and-blues wash the mouth of the alley like a held breath. We’re already gone.

“Houston, you beautiful lunatic,” Nova says, and there’s a laugh crawling up underneath the words, high and wild, the sound of somebody who just found out she’s not going to die tonight after all. “How did you even know that was there?”

“I did recon on it in March. In the rain. While you were asleep, like a person with priorities.”

“I have priorities.”

“Your priority is that guardrail in four hundred meters, so priority up.”

She takes the guardrail line clean, the whole car leaning into it like it wants to, and somewhere behind my ribs something settles into place that only ever settles when we’re doing exactly this—flying blind at a hundred and forty behind a windshield that shows nothing but darkness, and me the only light either of us has got.

This is the finale sprint. Three miles left, four cars still live in the field, and two of them are Wraith, which means two of them are driven by people who’d be delighted to see us in a ditch. I’ve got Kessler’s black GT running our six, close enough that his headlights strobe through our back glass every time Nova brakes, and I’ve got a second Wraith car—silver, newer, driver I don’t recognize—running a shadow line two streets parallel, clearly trying to cut us off at the harbor merge.

“Silver car’s going to try to beat us to the merge,” I say. “Don’t let him. Speed up into the S-curve, not out of it.”

“That’s backwards.”

“That’s the point. He’s expecting you to brake into it like a person who wants to live. Don’t.”

Nova makes a sound that is somewhere between a laugh and a scream and puts her foot down.

The S-curve at Dockside is four hundred meters of decreasing radius that’s killed two rookies and humbled every driver in this city at least once, and Nova takes it wide open, tires screaming a note I feel in my molars, and I watch the silver Wraith car brake early on our left—exactly like I told her he would—and lose forty meters he is never going to get back.

“That’s it,” I say, low, almost gentle, the way you’d talk somebody down off a ledge except we’re the ones flying. “That’s the whole race right there. Straight shot to the line. Kessler’s not catching us, he doesn’t have the motor for it, and the silver car just handed us the merge. Nothing left to do but drive it.”

“Say something nice to me, Max.”

“You didn’t die. That’s the nicest thing I’ve got tonight.”

“I’ll take it.”

The harbor straight opens up in front of us like an exhale, container cranes strobing past black against a sky gone orange with sodium light, and the Charger hits a buck-eighty doing absolutely nothing but running in a straight line, which after the last six minutes feels obscene, feels like cheating, feels like the reward you get for doing everything right for long enough that the universe gets bored of trying to kill you.

We cross the line first by two full car lengths. Kessler’s second. The silver car limps in fourth, which I already knew, because I called it eleven seconds before it happened.

Blackline’s pit is already a riot by the time Nova rolls to a stop, Jonesy vaulting the wall before the tires have finished smoking, Ana out front with her arms crossed and her face doing the thing it does when she’s proud and doesn’t want anyone to see it, which is nothing, which is the most transparent nothing in the world if you’ve known her as long as I have.

“Two blocks east,” Nova announces to the pit at large, popping the door, “and then she made me drive at a wall.”

“It wasn’t a wall.”

“It had every visual characteristic of a wall, Max.”

“It had the visual characteristics of a wall and the practical characteristics of an alley. That’s called a disguise. Try to keep up.”

Jonesy’s already got the hood up, muttering to the engine like it’s a wounded animal that might still bite him, and somewhere in the crowd somebody’s cracking something open that fizzes, and for about ninety seconds it is exactly what it’s supposed to be: loud, filthy, ours.

Then Ana says, “Afterparty’s the warehouse on Ninth. League wants everybody there. Mandatory.” And something in the way she says mandatory—flat, careful, a word she’s laid down like a card she doesn’t want to be holding—makes the good feeling in my chest go quiet and watchful.

“Since when does the League do mandatory?” I ask.

“Since tonight,” Ana says, and doesn’t elaborate, and walks away to go be tense at somebody else.

The warehouse on Ninth is standing room only by the time we get there, every crew in the city packed under one roof for what I assumed, foolishly, was going to be a party. Apex is clustered by the north wall in their obnoxious matched jackets, and I clock Colt Barrett before I mean to—you can’t not, the way a room organizes itself around him without seeming to try, laughing at something with that mechanic of his, looking like a man who has never once lost a night’s sleep over anything, which I happen to know for a fact is a lie, because I have made it my business for six years to know exactly how many nights that family doesn’t sleep.

I look away before he catches me looking. I am extremely good at that. Six years of practice.

The League rep climbs onto a crate with a microphone that shrieks feedback, and the whole room quiets down out of morbid curiosity more than respect, because League reps do not personally show up unless something is about to be taken away from somebody.

“Effective immediately,” he says, without preamble, without so much as a thank you all for coming, “driver-navigator pairings for the sanctioned season will be randomized across crews.”

The silence after that lasts exactly one second before the room detonates.

I don’t hear most of it—I’m too busy watching Ana’s face go the color of old concrete, her jaw setting the way it does right before she says something she can’t take back.

“Randomized,” she repeats, pushing toward the crate through the crowd, and I’m right behind her, because where Ana goes when her voice gets like that, I go too. “Across crews. You’re joking.”

“I don’t joke about rule changes, Ms. Garcia.” The rep doesn’t even blink. Smug bastard’s clearly rehearsed this. “The League’s found evidence of pre-arranged intel sharing within crews skewing race outcomes. Cross-pairing forces genuine random assignment. Levels the field.”

“You’ll get people killed. Half these teams have worked together for years. You put a Blackline navigator with a driver she’s never sat next to at a hundred and forty—”

“Then I’d suggest everyone learn fast.”

Ana’s hands are white-knuckled on the crate’s edge, and I have never in six years seen her look like this—not scared, Ana doesn’t do scared, but cornered, an animal doing math on an exit that isn’t there.

“If we draw Apex,” she says, quiet, and it isn’t really a question, “we forfeit the season.”

The rep smiles. It’s the kind of smile that’s been practiced in a mirror.

“Then you dissolve.”

Behind me, somewhere in the Apex cluster, I hear Duke Barrett’s voice go up half an octave in exactly the tone Ana’s just used, and across the warehouse, for one unbearable second, my eyes find Colt’s.

He isn’t laughing anymore.