Suzuka — Left for the Spiders
Mary POV
I come from a family of tall, loud, occasionally famous Marx hockey players. I’m 5′8", which in my family barely counts as tall, and some of us actually have to worry about wearing a bra—I said it, and I’m not taking it back. And no, before you ask: this is not a hockey story.
I drive. I drive fast. I drive hard. And right now I’m sitting on the floor of a garage.
I could hear the driver from here. “She has no clue what she is talking about. The car is too conservative. I need control, she limits it.”
“The nose will lift and cause more drag!” I yelled at the overpaid driver who could not and would not listen to me.
A weathered team manager came through the door, thick German accent, a build more functional than a beer stein, and the expression of a man who’d already spent too much of his morning managing me. “You are not helping,” Hanz said, smiling but offering a look that let me know I needed a walk.
I walked out of the garage. It was hot. It was Japan. I took off to walk the track. There’s something calming about it for me. Did I mention it was hot? Suzuka blisters this time of year, the kind of heat that puts grown mechanics flat on their backs in the medical center by mid-afternoon, and half the paddock treats late-summer hydration with the same dread usually reserved for brake failure. People faint out here. Regularly. It’s basically a second sport.
Suzuka does that to people. It’s not a track that lets you think about anything except itself—the Esses demand your whole brain, 130R demands your nerve, and somewhere in between you forget you’re a twenty-six-year-old woman who just got called conservative by a man who once put a perfectly good car into a tire wall because he “felt it in his gut.”
I walked the outside line through the Esses first, the way I always do, running along the barrier like I could feel the car’s weight transfer through the soles of my feet. Left-right-left-right-left. Six corners that flow into each other like a sentence with no punctuation. My brother Danny used to say I loved tracks more than I loved people. He wasn’t wrong. People lie. People cheat. People die. Corners don’t. A corner will tell you the truth about a car every single time, if you’re willing to listen.
Nobody on my current crew wanted to hear that the truth this weekend was simple: our driver is overdriving the rear end and blaming the setup for what is, embarrassingly, a driver issue. I’d built a reputation on being right more often than I’m liked, which is a hard sell when you’re twenty-six and everyone in the paddock assumed I’d gotten the headset only because of my figure. I did have a figure. Several of them, actually—and together they’re called telemetry. I had four laps of data showing exactly what he needed to fix, and I said so, out loud, to a rock near the corner, because apparently that’s a thing I do now. “Turn in half a car length earlier. Scrub the speed off there instead of on the brakes at the last second. Stop mashing the throttle like the accelerator owes you money. Do that, and you shave a tenth of a second. Do it your way, and you keep blaming the car for a problem that lives entirely in your own hands.”
Then I kicked the rock, because it hadn’t said anything back, and hurt my toe, which did nothing to improve my mood.
I stopped near 130R and looked out at the empty track. I liked it out here. It was the only place I’d found where nobody needed anything from me.
Which is, of course, exactly when someone needed something from me.
“You’re going to get heatstroke standing out here arguing with a corner about a tenth of a second.”
I didn’t jump. I did, however, turn around fast enough that if I’d been any hotter I might have fainted and become lunch for one of Suzuka’s enormous Joro spiders.
He wasn’t in team kit. That was the first thing I clocked—jeans, a plain gray shirt, baseball cap, sunglasses, lean and fit. Very lean, very fit, five-o’clock shadow, irritatingly attractive. Not a mechanic. Not media, no lanyard. Too relaxed to be a sponsor, too tan to be one of the engineers who lives in a windowless room running CFD simulations fourteen hours a day.
“I get heatstroke every year,” I said. “It’s basically a team tradition at this point.”
“Sounds healthy.”
“I don’t do healthy. I do fast.” I looked him over once more, the way one might look at corners. “Who are you?”
“Depends who’s asking.”
“The woman who’s about to have you escorted off a track you apparently don’t have credentials for,” I said, pulling out my phone.
That got something out of him—something like a smirk, maybe. “Fair,” he said, and pulled a lanyard out of his back pocket, which. Rude. Hiding evidence. “Just didn’t want to lead with it.”
I took it from him and read it twice, because the first read didn’t seem right.
Nico Calder. Meridian Racing.
Not my team. Not even close—Meridian was sitting sixth in the standings in a car that cornered like a shopping trolley with a bad wheel, and everyone in the paddock knew whose fault that wasn’t.
“You’re a long way from your own garage,” I said, handing it back.
“Needed the walk. Same as you, I’m guessing.” He nodded at the track like it explained itself. “Actually—can I ask you something? Since you work with Anderson.” He nudged his head at my outfit.
“You can ask.”
“There’s an engineer somewhere in that paddock who fixed a tire degradation problem last season that had been eating a team alive for two years straight. Just—gone. Solved. Nobody will tell me how, and nobody will tell me who.” He said it with the specific hunger of a man who has spent eight months losing tires he shouldn’t be losing. “My principal won’t listen when I bring it up. I don’t suppose you know him or her.”
Something in my chest went very still, the way it does right before a car finds the limit of grip.
“Why do you care so much?” I asked, carefully.
“Because my car does the exact same thing, and I would very much like to steal whoever fixed it.” He said it like that was obvious, like poaching another team’s best asset off a public footpath was simply how Thursdays worked for him.
“I’m not well liked in the paddock, so I don’t know many people.”
“Shame.” He didn’t look like he believed me, not entirely. Then his eyes narrowed. “You? Delightful smile, sharp wit, obvious sense of danger? Not well liked?”
“People don’t like what I say.”
“Okay,” he said slowly, and there was something in it I didn’t love, something interested. “So, are you marketing?”
“No.”
“Social media.”
I just threw him a look and started on around the track.
“I’m Nico, by the way.”
“Mary.” Not Emma. I don’t do Emma.
“Mary,” he repeated. “Well, Mary. If you ever happen to meet the tire whisperer—tell them Meridian’s paying very well this year.”
“I’m sure that will help my winning personality.” I continued walking.
He stayed with me.
“And tell them I want them personally.”
I looked over. “Personally.”
“For the job.”
“That pause didn’t sound very professional.”
“I don’t know them yet. I’m keeping my options open.”
“I’ll keep an ear out.”
“Thank you, Mary. Watch the line on the next corner, I don’t want you to trip, and watch out for those spiders.”
He smiled like he knew something I didn’t, which, infuriatingly, he sort of did, and turned back toward his own garage. I watched him go for exactly as long as it took to convince myself I wasn’t watching him go, and then I walked back into a building full of men who were, at that exact moment, actively engineering my unemployment.
I just didn’t know it yet.
