Book II. Chapter 123. Tin Can

Dagdag tugged the back panel straight. Heavy-duty snaps fastened it to the gray jumpsuit. A matching panel, built on a rigid framework of plates and “ribs,” lay snug against his chest and thighs. Ard’s wrists were wrapped in thick bandages, with the strap of each thick leather glove fastened over the wrapping. The gloves were so thick that making a fist took a little effort. But they hardly slipped even on the lacquered board the lieutenant had used to test them before fastening them onto Ard’s hands.

“Feel like a medieval knight?” Milar asked.

Still in his wheelchair, he smoked and leafed through the Imperial Herald. His Imperial Majesty looked out at Ard from a photograph on the opening spread. He had displaced Tess as the “top story.”

Beneath the photograph of Pavel IV Agrov visiting the Parliament building was a long and rather peculiar headline:

“By a new supreme decree of His Imperial Majesty, it has been ordained that the budgets of the Provinces and their provincial capitals shall be based on the Provinces’ own resources, and that subsidies from the capital, henceforth and hereafter, shall not exceed one-fifth of any such budget!

The Provinces are in a panic; the capital rejoices!”

A long economic column followed, devoted to the reform that had passed the Upper Chamber of Parliament. The Emperor was entitled to introduce legislation on his own, but the Upper Chamber still had to approve it. The reverse was also true: if a law passed Parliament, it needed the Emperor’s signature to take effect, and the Emperor held the power of veto.

In the past, during the reign of the current Emperor’s father, the Upper Chamber had often defied his will and killed the initiatives he did put forward, rare though they were. Now, nearly two years into Pavel IV’s reign, the Upper Chamber had never once withheld its approval. Ardi remembered the sheer force of His Imperial Majesty’s personality and wasn’t the least surprised by the pattern.

Anyone who shared Lord Boris Fahtov’s views—or supported the various socialist parties he sympathized with—could hardly say the same. It wasn’t as though the Emperor had begun to lose the people’s affection. Quite the opposite. Among ordinary workers and farmers, among those living paycheck to paycheck, Pavel IV was only growing more popular. Little by little, he was becoming all but a saint in his own lifetime.

He was building a new “great temple” and helping the church, even as he kept it from having any role in governing the state. Religion mattered enormously to the vast majority of the Empire’s population. To say nothing of reforms to transportation and health care, pay raises for civil servants, and the introduction of a universal pension funded by the Crown.

Why, then, was there unrest in the very parties that were supposed to represent the interests of the common people?

Ardan suspected it all came down to who attended socialist meetings. Lord Fahtov had begun showing up at them far less often after his daughter was born.

Ordinary workers and farmers, low-level clerks and shopkeepers, chimney sweeps and cobblers, mechanics and stablehands, and all the others struggling just to make tomorrow a little better than yesterday simply had no time for socialist meetings. So students and... people like Boris often made up the bulk of the crowd at socialist meetings, strange as that sounds. In other words, people who had the means and therefore the time. And after the recent education reform, the second in just over a year, mages had begun joining them as well.

“I can’t believe we’re finally going to get to see the fruits of our own labor,” Milar said, exhaling a cloud of smoke.

“And what about your rule about staying out of politics, Captain?” Dagdag asked, a mocking edge to his voice, as he carefully fitted a pair of goggles with a rigid rubber frame to Ard’s face.

“It’s not about politics, Dagdag. It’s about...” Milar waved a hand and fell silent.

After all, the capital wasn’t just Metropolis but the entire Capital Province (stretching east to Swallow Bay, north to Shamtur, west to the border of the Kings’ Forests, and south to the last milepost before Nigrad), home to nearly a third of the Empire’s heavy industry, half its Ertalain-processing operations, and roughly two-thirds of its total seaport trade.

“The trouble is, unless you kick them, they’ll keep right on sucking us dry,” Milar continued. “While we waste away here under the smog and soot, they lie around on the grass, waiting for the Emperor to bring them everything on a platter and spoon it into their mouths, and for the Black House to make sure no one knocks out their little teeth. Did you know, Dagdag, that in five years they built as many schools on the Azure Coast as in the whole Capital Province? And only one-sixth as many people live there.”

“I get it, Captain.” Lieutenant Dagdag nodded and cinched the goggle strap so tight that the bridge of Ard’s nose began to sting. “I don’t have kids yet, of course, but I get it. Still, you can’t explain that to the average resident of Azure Province. And when, a few years from now, he’s left with holes in his pockets and only one shoe, where’s he going to go?”

“Perfect. We’re short on workers anyway.” Milar nodded.

Dagdag sighed, looked over his handiwork, and pointed Ard toward... a spot by the wall. Ard had no desire to sit down and stand back up in those stiff coveralls unless he had to.

“Stand there for now,” Dagdag said. “Then sit down, stay seated for a while, and tell me if it chafes anywhere. It shouldn’t, but if it does, I’m out of ideas. I’ve fitted everything exactly to your measurements.”

Ardan nodded and walked over to the wall. This wasn’t the first time he’d put on a racing suit. It was... the second. The previous time had been at the beginning of the week, and at the end of that training session, Ardan had all but taken a bath in a vat of talcum powder.

Dagdag, meanwhile, wiped his hands and sweaty forehead, then went over to Milar, who was still reading the newspaper and a report by Eriozem Klochkov, Senior Magister of Economic Sciences and the country’s chief economic commentator. Klochkov had apparently even tried to join the Ministry of Finance’s economic advisory council, but he had been turned down for reasons that remained unclear.

“You do realize, Milar, that this law has exactly the opposite purpose?” Dagdag flopped into an armchair and wiped his sweaty hands and face. “To make the provinces stop waiting for subsidies and start developing industrial bases of their own.”

“On the one hand, yes.” Captain Pnev nodded. “On the other, you can’t build much industry out in the steppes of Foothill Province. Not unless we exterminate the Shanti’Ra to do it. The whole thing is complicated, Dagdag.”

“Complicated,” Dagdag agreed. “But we may not have much time. Of course, we should have started industrializing the provinces a good ten years ago, but His Imperial Majesty...”

“The law didn’t allow for it then,” Milar finished Dagdag’s sentence. “I know, Dagdag. It’s just...” The captain sighed, folded the newspaper, and set it back on the table. “...all of this is coming too late, Dagdag. How much time do we have? Three, five, seven years?”

Dagdag, the Black House’s chief engineer, muttered something under his breath.

“Another whole lifetime, ideally,” he replied tersely.

“A lifetime would be ideal.” Milar shrugged. “But even if we take the average and call it five years, they won’t get much built there in five years.”

“We don’t need much,” Dagdag countered. “We only need mining rigs set up around Alcade, rail lines laid to them, and foundries and armor assembly shops chugging away in or near the provincial capitals. And weapons plants too, at the very least. Bullets. Barrels. Stocks. Almost sixty percent of all that is currently produced in the Capital Province. And here we are...”

Dagdag repeated Milar’s gesture, then waved a hand dismissively. But the thought hung in the air. Metropolis was both the key and the gateway to the entire Capital Province, which, in the broadest sense, was the heart of the Empire. Yet its location did it no favors. The legacy of Vetrograd, as the capital of Galess had once been called, had not aged well: what had protected Galess a thousand years ago had become the Empire’s exposed underbelly.

“There’s enough money in their budgets,” Dagdag continued. “The auditors have been on-site for six months now. By summer, the ministries and our colleagues will be sending out handpicked commissions. They’ll see to the construction. And rightly so. If we’re going to prepare, we need to take it seriously. No half measures.”

Milar glanced sidelong at Ard, who had moved to the little couch and was twisting this way and that. Ardi didn’t want the suit to start chafing him at the worst possible moment.

“What kind of life is this, Dagdag? It’s always one thing, then another...”

“You think it was ever any different anywhere?”

Milar merely grimaced in annoyance. They were about to continue their conversation, but a green light came on above the door to the small changing room. The signal meant the teams had permission to bring their cars up to the pit boxes.

Dagdag all but shot out the door. Milar hitched the blanket up over his legs and began working the wheels of his wheelchair. Ardan followed his partner, swaying awkwardly from side to side and feeling like a scarecrow. Crashes happened so often on the racetrack that the teams did everything they could to protect their drivers, known here as pilots. All that protection produced outfits more like wooden stocks than actual suits.

They passed through a narrow corridor and emerged into a small hangar. For a second, Ardan squeezed his eyes shut against the glare of the floodlights as the loudspeaker roared. An emcee was addressing the several hundred spectators who filled the tall grandstands.

“All right! Ladies and gentlemen!” Judging by his build, the emcee might have been a distant relative of John Brolid. He sat in a crow’s nest atop a structure resembling a watchtower and held forth to the crowd. “The teams are cleared to enter the hangars! You have ten minutes left to troubleshoot and tune your machines. After that, the pilots will have thirty seconds to report to the starting line! Let me remind you: today’s race is for speed, not endurance. So it’ll be just ten laps under standard rules!”

Ardan spotted Miss Taisia Shpritz. The Empire’s most famous predatory journalist, as statuesque and predatory as ever, sat in one of the “boxes,” if you could call a compartment high above the stands a box. She wore a backless gown with a fur wrap draped over it. Several gentlemen kept her company. One of them, who looked at least as old as Professor Convel, was stroking her shoulder in a decidedly suggestive way and whispering something in her ear. Taisia kept smiling, though now and then she drew away, all the while holding a miniature pair of opera glasses mounted on a handle close to her face.

Oh, right.

People’s eyes...

It wasn’t hard to guess that the journalist’s overpersistent companion, whose attention was becoming a nuisance, was Senior Magister Chaz Nalensky. He held the rather exalted post of first assistant to the chief anomalies researcher at the Hunters’ Guild’s central branch. It was through him that Taisia Shpritz, along with the Black House, hoped to secure the chance to participate unofficially in the expedition to the north.

All to “get a feel for the thread” (as the Investigators put it) linking several events: the death of Taisia’s father long ago, corruption in the Hunters’ Guild, and, perhaps, the possibility that both were connected to the Puppeteers, who were intensely interested in anomalies.

“You remember the rules?” Milar asked as he unfolded a map of the racetrack in front of Ard.

Meanwhile, Dagdag was filling the tank and running the final diagnostic.

“Milar, why can’t someone else drive instead of me?” Ardan pleaded yet again.

“Because absolutely no one is supposed to know the Black House is taking part in this circus!” Milar hissed yet again. “And because of our damned need for secrecy. Do you remember the rules?!”

“I remember!”

“List them.”

“Don’t ram anyone in the side, don’t rub wheels, don’t use magic, and don’t force anyone toward the edge in a turn.”

Milar nodded, and Ardan merely sighed sadly. As if anyone could forget a grand total of four rules of racing. Then again, wheel racing had only been around for eight years. Perhaps the list would grow someday.

“Perfect. Now forget they exist!”

Ardan blinked.

“What?”

“I said forget they exist!” Milar repeated. “You’re new here, so they’ll play rough. They’ll crowd you any way they can. Cut you off with their hulls almost scraping yours. They’ll try anything to force you out of the race and improve their own chances of winning.”

“Then what’s the point of having these rules at all?” Ard threw up his hands.

“The point is this. Say a referee flags someone.” Milar pointed to several smaller watchtowers positioned around the track’s perimeter. “Then points can be deducted. But the referees can’t watch everything, Ard. And the speeds here are off the charts. A hundred to a hundred and twenty kilometers an hour on average.”

Ardan shook his head.

“This is nonsense, Milar.”

“It’s not nonsense,” Captain Pnev countered. “You’ve got a huge advantage over them, Ard!”

“What advantage?” Ardi said, his voice low and rough. “That I’ve only made it around a replica of this stupid track a few times without clipping anything with the hull? At two-thirds the speed you just quoted?”

“You just need to stop being afraid.”

“Afraid of what, exactly?!”

“Of smashing this tub all to hell!” Milar said through clenched teeth, his voice barely above a whisper. “Who gives a damn what it costs? We need that damned ticket to the expedition! That gives you an obvious advantage: these racers are here for the prize and the race itself, while you’re doing this in the line of duty!”

“Lovely,” Ardan said, matching his tone.

“What’s more,” Milar added, much calmer now, “they haven’t been through even a fraction of what you have. And all fifteen are ordinary people. Not matabar half-bloods. So whenever things get dangerous, they’ll be afraid of getting hurt.”

“And I won’t?”

“Why would you?”

Ardan nearly choked with outrage.

“Maybe because I’ve still got that mutant’s poison in my blood?!”

“Well, that doesn’t mean your reaction time has slowed or your eyesight has gotten worse,” Milar said calmly. “You’ll take longer to heal, sure... but, Magister, what would leave you a little battered would break someone else in half. Don’t forget that, either.”

Ardan rasped out a curse in the Fae tongue, followed it with the orcish equivalent, then, after some thought, finished his tirade with a pair of choice elvish expressions.

“Feel any better?” Milar asked.

Ardi thought about it.

“No,” he admitted honestly.

“Perfect.” The captain nodded. “It’ll keep you sharper. Now go on, show them what you’ve got out there... and, well, don’t come apart down the middle.”

“Milar!”

“That’s just my way of encouraging you.” Captain Pnev bobbed his head.

Ardan was about to say something cutting, but a piercing whistle knifed into his ears. The drivers raced to their cars. Reluctantly, Ard joined them, shuffling along in his oddly shaped boots and swaying inside his creaking jumpsuit.

“Remember,” Dagdag called, rapping a wrench against some piece of machinery. Oh, Sleeping Spirits, he was banging on it with a wrench! “Slow down before the turn, then accelerate as you come out of it! Keep your inside wheel tight to the inside edge: left wheel on a left turn, right wheel on a right! And don’t forget, my creation is the fastest on a straightaway. So the straightaways are your trump card. Don’t let that advantage slip away.”

“Yeah,” was all Ard said, and he jumped inside the shell.

At some point, Dagdag had done away with the door as well, turning the tin can, as Ardan privately thought of the car, into one seamless shell.

“Drivers!” the emcee bellowed into the megaphone. “Start your engines and pull out onto the starting grid!”

Ardan turned the key in the ignition, depressed the clutch, and...

“Looks like trouble in hangar sixteen! The driver’s car lurched and stalled.”

Ard closed his eyes, exhaled, and went through the procedure again. The engine sounded less like a machine than some kind of rabid beast. It growled, and the car began to move.

“He’ll come apart, you know,” someone said behind him.

“Most likely, yes,” Milar said.

“Hey, I can hear you!” Ardan tried to shout back, but the roar of the engine and the shuddering shell swallowed his voice.

“And did you warn him about our plan?”

“No, Dagdag, I didn’t warn him. If I had, he wouldn’t have agreed.”

“Hey...” Ardan drew the word out, already steering onto the straightaway, where the other fifteen pilots were pulling into position.

“Makes sense... but it’s not exactly right, Captain.”

“Part of the job, Lieutenant.”

“What plan?!” Ardan tried to turn toward the speakers, but in doing so nearly rammed the car beside him. That drew a response:

“Watch where you’re going, rookie!” the pilot beside Ard shouted, with no real malice but unmistakable irritation.

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Ard really did have to focus on the track.

Sixteen cars lined up on the starting strip, each growling in its own way: some with a deep, guttural rumble, others with a hoarse, labored rasp. Sixteen hungry beasts locked in cages of steel and rivets, waiting for the one moment when the doors would fly open and they could finally sink their teeth into the wind’s throat.

Ard sat in his tin can, waiting for the start. His gloves squeaked as he rubbed his palms against the steering wheel. He was in fourteenth place on the sixteen-car starting grid because positions were assigned based on the results of the qualifying runs, and his performance in qualifying had been less than impressive, to put it mildly. He gripped the wheel so hard that his knuckles whitened even beneath Dagdag’s gloves.

The track spread out ahead of him and to either side. A broad strip of hard-packed gravel, bordered by low stone blocks and sandbags at the turns. It ran ahead in a long straightaway, then plunged right into the first of six turns, marked by red-and-white striped posts. The grandstands loomed over the track in wooden tiers, packed with several hundred spectators. A hum of voices drifted down from them, punctuated by whistles and the clink of tin mugs.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” the announcer boomed. Amplified by a megaphone, his voice rolled over the track like thunder before a storm. “The pilots are in their starting positions, engines running and ready for battle! A reminder: ten laps under standard rules, and may the best pilot win!”

Ard glanced at the car on his left. Low and squat, it was painted a toxic green, with a long, lean hood like a greyhound’s muzzle and chrome exhaust pipes jutting from behind the rear fenders like a beetle’s horns. At the wheel sat a pilot with a red mustache so bushy that its ends spilled from beneath his scarf and streamed in the wind like two little battle banners.

To Ard’s right sat a massive, square machine painted a dingy red. It looked like a brick on wheels, with two protruding headlights like a frog’s eyes. The pilot was bald, with a head that gleamed like a polished kettle and a monstrous wart on the tip of his nose. He never even looked Ard’s way, his full attention fixed on the starting line.

Ahead, the favorites occupied the front positions. Ard had even memorized their cars by now. Elegant, streamlined machines, long-bodied and low-slung, painted silver and dark blue. They had clearly been assembled not in a half-mad dwarf’s state-run workshop but in real design bureaus, with real engineers and a real budget.

Then again, Dagdag’s workshop probably counted as a real design bureau too, in its own way. Still, Ard was not happy with where he was sitting, or with the situation.

A silver car with a black stripe down its hood occupied pole position. At the wheel sat a man in a white scarf and a leather helmet pulled so low over his eyes that only his sharp, predatory chin remained visible.

“The referees are in position!” the announcer continued. “Flags raised! Gentlemen, prepare yourselves!”

Ard depressed the clutch pedal. His left leg trembled slightly. Not from fear, but from strain: the pedal in Dagdag’s creation was as stiff as a yew bough bent back, and pressing it took so much force that after only a minute his thigh, not yet fully healed, began to ache.

His right hand rested on the gearshift. He worked it back and forth between first and neutral, testing the lever’s throw and feeling the mechanism click beneath his palm. The engine was hidden somewhere behind him. Dagdag, in a fit of engineering madness, had mounted it in the rear, claiming the arrangement improved the rear wheels’ grip on the road. It roared with a low, gut-deep rumble that made everything vibrate, from the seat and steering wheel to his teeth.

“Ready!”

The shot from the starting pistol ripped through the air with the sharp crack of a cowboy’s whip.

All sixteen cars shot off the line at once, and the world around Ard became nothing but roar, smoke, and gravel hammering the glass windshield. Ard let out the clutch too sharply, as always, and the “can” lurched, nearly stalling. But Dagdag’s engine, tempered by the hands of a dwarf who rapped its parts with a wrench rather than offer them gentle words, held firm and hauled the car forward with such fury that Ard was pinned against the seatback.

He needed to shift into second. Gritting his teeth, Ard pressed the clutch pedal down, shoved the gearshift forward and to the left, then let the clutch out sharply. The motor howled a semitone higher than before, and gravel shot from beneath the wheels. The wind struck his face and shattered against his goggles. Thanks to his third eyelid, Ard didn’t need them, but it would have been strange to show up without that important piece of the “uniform.”

He was already falling behind. The green car with the mustached driver pulled ahead almost at once. So easily, as if his car weighed half as much. Despite its absurd appearance, the red brick to his right also proved quicker than it looked. Its bald driver with the wart was already looming ahead, blasting Ard with hot exhaust.

Time for third. Ard shoved the clutch pedal down, yanked the gearshift back and to the right, caught third, then let the clutch out as he floored the gas. A straightaway lay ahead. A long, level stretch of roughly three hundred meters. And here, right here, Ard felt what Dagdag had been talking about. His ugly, riveted, utterly graceless tin can (or so Ard’s inner voice maintained) suddenly grew wings and flew. When third gear engaged, the engine kicked so hard that Ard lost all sense of his own weight for a moment, and the car tore down the straight, devouring gravel and outrunning its own roar.

The red brick, ahead of him only a moment before, began to slide backward, slowly and reluctantly: first drawing even with Ard’s front fender, then his cab, and finally dropping into his side mirrors.

“Number sixteen picks up speed on the straightaway and passes number nine!” the announcer erupted. “Unexpected from a rookie, ladies and gentlemen. Very unexpected!”

The first turn loomed ahead of Ard like an impassable wall: an impossibly sharp right-hander marked by striped posts and sandbags, beyond which the ground dropped away toward the spectator stands. Ard remembered Dagdag’s words and hit the brake, stamping the clutch down with his left foot at the same instant. His right hand yanked the gearshift back into second, and he cranked the wheel into the curve, keeping the right-side wheels tight against the inside edge of the turn. He felt the rear wheels slip slightly on the gravel, felt the car pull outward toward the sandbags, the curb, the drop. He gripped the wheel tighter and held his line.

And then the green car with the mustached driver, which had slowed for the turn along with all the others, darted into view from somewhere on Ard’s left and moved to pass. Right there on the flat, curving stretch of road, it took the outer line and crowded Ard’s car so close that no more than a palm’s width remained between their sides.

Ardan saw the red mustache flutter in the wind, saw the mustached man’s eyes gleam. They glittered merrily, utterly shameless and wild with excitement. His green car scraped its fender against the “can’s,” squeezed ahead, and made for the turn’s exit, sending a fountain of gravel over Ard.

Pebbles clattered against the bodywork; one struck his goggle lens and left a cloudy scratch. Ard paid no attention to the judges; Milar’s words were all he needed. He waited until the turn began to open up, then floored it, feeling Dagdag’s engine roar and fling the car forward. But the green car was already gone, and there were still fourteen cars ahead of him, and the first lap wasn’t even over.

The second turn swept back the other way but looked longer and less sharp. Ard entered it more cleanly than the last. He hugged the edge with his left-side wheels, felt the tires scrape against stone, then shoved the gearshift into third as he came out of the turn and floored the gas. The engine answered with the furious, hoarse howl Dagdag called his creation’s “battle cry.” The next straightaway opened before him. Up ahead, Ard saw the tail end of the “procession.” Six or seven cars formed a knot, shouldering one another like bulls at a watering hole. One was braking, another swerving. Again and again, chunks of stone, pieces of fender, and someone’s curses flew out of the knot; the wind carried the curses to Ard in ragged snatches.

“What a battle, ladies and gentlemen! Number three and number seven are running side by side as they enter the third turn, and it looks extremely dangerous for both drivers! No call from race officials so far!”

For the first time in the race, Ard dared to shift into fourth. His left foot pressed the clutch pedal down; his right hand shoved the gearshift into its far-right position. Ard released the pedal, feeling as if a gust from a storm during the Week of Storms had snatched the car up. The small, round speedometer, its needle trembling, read ninety, then ninety-five, then a hundred.

The wind no longer merely beat against his face. It roared and howled around him, battering his arms and making the wheel buck as if it might tear free of his hands. Ard felt every bump in the road jar his spine, felt every rivet in the car’s body vibrate, felt the very space around him tremble, squeezed by speed into the narrow tunnel of his awareness, which could barely keep pace with the speedometer’s rising needle.

On the third lap, Ard overtook two more: a fat man in a checkered jacket whose car, painted like a black-and-white chessboard, had overheated and begun belching smoke on the climb; and a young guy with a long scar running the length of his left cheek, who had taken the fifth turn too wide and flown off onto the shoulder, where his rear wheels bogged down in the sand. Ard raced past him and glimpsed, out of the corner of his eye, the guy pounding his fists on the steering wheel. For a moment, he almost felt sorry for the poor sap. But pity, fear, caution, even common sense: all of it had been left behind, back at the starting line, along with the Ardan he’d been before, the one who’d feared the clutch and sweated behind the wheel of a government-issue Derks.

Because here on the track, at a speed that made him see double and set his ears ringing, something began to wake inside Ard, something he had never known he possessed. Something hot, greedy, insatiable. It stirred in his chest like a beast that had caught the scent of prey, and it demanded only one thing: faster, faster, faster still.

As though he were back there again, somewhere on Alcade’s mountain trails. Once more, racing Kaishas over rock, snow, and craggy ridges. With no hope of outrunning the four-winged eagle, but simply for the sheer joy of the game: racing the wind.

Lap four.

“Number sixteen keeps surprising the crowd and is already up to ninth place after overtaking three more drivers in the last two laps! The rookie clearly has no intention of sitting at the back of the pack, ladies and gentlemen!”

The sixth and final turn was the hardest, a snaking bend that forced two quick changes of direction. Ard made a mistake as he entered it. Carried away by that childhood feeling, he came into the curve too fast, too late to brake, and the car swept wide toward the outside of the turn and the sandbags. Ard wrenched the wheel, trying to stay on the track, and the rear wheels broke loose, throwing the car into a skid. For an instant, the world became a sickening carousel: the grandstands and the road spun into one another, while the sky flashed somewhere down in the gravel between the asphalt track and the sand of the shoulder. Acting more on instinct than conscious thought, Ard steered into the skid and stomped on the gas.

The car snorted like an angry alley cat, straightened out, and sped on. Ard had lost time and a position, but he was still in the race.

“O-o-oh! Number sixteen nearly wiped out in turn six, but by some miracle he stayed on the track! Bravo, young man, bravo!”

His heart pounded so hard that his pulse throbbed in his throat. His hands trembled. But inside... inside, everything burned. With every passing second, it only burned brighter, hotter, hungrier. Ard wasn’t even frightened. He was angry instead. Angry with himself. For the stupid mistake, for the time he’d lost, and for the position he’d let slip away, a position he certainly hadn’t won easily. But rather than blind him or leave him helpless, that anger did the opposite: it only sharpened everything. His vision grew clear, just as it once had on the hunt. His grip on the wheel grew firmer. Every turn, every rise and dip, every flaw in the surface, every patch of gravel scattered from the shoulder onto the track stood out clearly. He could read it all as easily as if Ard were once again poring over his own formulas with an open grimoire before him.

He’d finished the fifth lap. On the sixth, someone flew off the track while taking a curve. Ard didn’t see who; he only heard the crash and the scrape of metal. An overturned car flashed past him on the shoulder, its wheels spinning in the air. The driver was already climbing out from under it, his racing suit torn, clutching his head and swaying like a drunk.

“Number eleven is out of the race after hitting the curb in turn four! The medical crew is already on the scene! And on we go, ladies and gentlemen, on we go!”

Fourteen drivers remained. Ard was in tenth place. A stream of cars stretched ahead of him, and every one of them was faster through the turns because their drivers knew the track by heart, knew every bump, every slope, every pebble. Ard knew only what Milar and Dagdag had told him and what he’d managed to memorize during several practice sessions on the replica track the lieutenant had built.

The straights were another matter. On the straights, Dagdag’s engine raged, leaving most of those who dared challenge it behind. Ard felt it every time he emerged from another arch onto a long, level stretch and floored it. The car shot forward. Rivals who had loomed ahead only a moment before suddenly began sliding backward, like boats moving against the current. But then the road bent into another turn, and his entire advantage was wiped away on the slope in an instant. Ard entered it too cautiously and too slowly, taking it wider than necessary, and those he’d passed on the straight easily overtook him, showing him their red taillights.

On the seventh lap, Ard’s helmet, already sitting askew, finally gave up. Its chin strap snapped when a bump jolted him as he entered turn three. The onrushing air caught the helmet and sent it flying somewhere behind him, into the dust and gravel. For an instant, Ard saw it in the mirror, rolling along the track, bouncing and clacking over the asphalt like a ball someone had thrown.

“And there goes number sixteen’s helmet, ladies and gentlemen! Careful, young man! This isn’t a Sunday drive!”

The wind struck the crown of his head with a wet, stinging palm. His hair, which Tess had been planning to trim again, instantly flew in every direction, lashing his forehead and temples. Ard swept it back with one hand, never taking the other off the wheel, and plastered it down with sticky sweat. He clenched his teeth, feeling the wind squeeze his throat and dry his lips.

On the eighth lap, Ard was running eleventh. The leaders had pulled even farther ahead. The silver car led, its driver in a white scarf; behind it was the dark blue number four, followed by two more. Ard could see them far ahead, flickering specks entering each new turn while he was only coming out of the last. The gap was monstrous, and it only grew with every lap because the favorites made no mistakes. They didn’t skid, they didn’t lose their helmets, and their cars didn’t scoop up gravel at each successive turn.

Ard made up too little ground on the straightaways to offset his losses.

But the beast inside him wouldn’t be still. It gnawed at his ribs and strained to break free, demanding more speed, tighter turns, and a headlong chase after the wind racing ahead of him. Ard flew into the fifth turn far faster than usual. The wheels shrieked, gravel flew in a wide fan, and the car slewed outward. Fueled by sheer exhilaration, Ard held it on course. He wrenched the wheel so hard his wrists began to ache, then floored it in third gear as he came out of the turn and shot forward.

He passed two cars at once: the green car, whose mustached driver shouted something after him, though the wind ate the words, and the red car, whose warty driver saw the “can” streak past inches from his door, swerved away, and nearly shot off the track onto the shoulder.

“Our rookie’s gone all in, ladies and gentlemen! And now we’re watching number sixteen pass numbers fourteen and nine at the same time. He’s literally squeezing between the two cars! Judges, that’s almost a violation! Isn’t it?! But no, they let it go! Beautiful, Eternal Angels. Just beautiful, no matter what anyone says about rookies!”

At last, the ninth lap. The next-to-last. Ard was running seventh, the best he could hope for, because the six drivers ahead of him were in another league entirely. They weren’t just faster and more experienced. They had cars that whole teams of engineers labored over day and night.

But the hunter in him wasn’t counting positions.

The hunter didn’t even think about his position. He just ran. At the very limit of what he could do. As fast as his rubber-skinned iron paws would let him. And to his own surprise, Ard did too. The urge was so sharp, so hot, so alive that his mouth went dry and his ears began to ring. Just run. As fast as possible.

On the straight, he passed another driver, a skinny man in round glasses. His dark green car, with birdlike wings painted along its sides, swerved when it hit a bump. Ard spotted the gap and threw his car into it, nearly shearing off the skinny driver’s mirror. Was he sixth now? Or fifth? Who cared.

Five drivers remained in front of him, all of them already more than half a lap ahead. It was impossible to catch them with only one lap left. Absolutely impossible, both physically and mathematically.

But Ard wasn’t going to catch them.

He was going to run.

The tenth lap lay ahead.

The last.

Ard entered it in fourth gear, at a speed the speedometer needle refused to register because it was pegged against its stop, trembling there like a trapped butterfly. Dagdag’s engine roared. It didn’t growl or howl; it roared, with the primal, gut-deep roar beasts make when they run not away from something but after it, knowing they will catch it.

The wind tore at his hair, squeezed his chest, and clawed at the bare skin of his face. Ard felt nothing but speed.

The opening turn of the final lap curved before him once more. Ard took it as he’d taken no other turn in the entire race. He cut across the inside edge, and his right wheel ground over the gravel, striking sparks. Coming out of the turn, he jammed the accelerator down so hard that the rear wheels spun in place before biting into the asphalt and thrusting the car forward.

The second turn. The third. The fourth. Ard took them one by one as though they were spells in a Resonance chain: precise and fast. Right at the limit, on the very edge, where a mistake would mean more than merely losing some idiotic position in an equally idiotic race. The hunter inside him sang; blood pounded in his temples, and for the first time in his life, Ard understood why Arkar, Nita, Taisia, and Milar loved racing with their own engines roaring beneath them.

Without warning, something banged under the hood, and up ahead, the road itself began, impossibly, to slide away.

Not right away, not all at once. First came a tremor. Ard felt it through the steering wheel, through the pedals, through every bone in his body. The tremor rose from below, from beneath the asphalt covering the sleeping earth, from the very quicksand the engineers had warned of and the newspapers wrote about every spring. Then came a sound. Dull and guttural, like the groan of a wounded steppe Shaggyer. Finally, about seventy meters ahead, between the fifth and sixth turns, the track simply vanished.

It hadn’t even sagged. It had simply collapsed. A full seven-meter stretch of road dropped away as though someone had yanked the support out from beneath it, and a pit gaped where the smooth strip of asphalt had been. Jagged, with crumbling edges, shattered chunks of curb jutting out, waterfalls of gravel, and sandbags hanging over the void. The quicksand, stirred awake by spring meltwater, had devoured a chunk of the track the way a hungry fish gulps down bait.

The track was brand-new, after all... but last winter had proved so fierce...

“Eternal Angels!” the announcer screamed, and for the first time all race, his voice carried fear instead of excitement. “The track’s collapsed between turns five and six! All drivers, stop immediately! Red flag! Red flag!”

Up ahead, about thirty meters from the gap, Ard spotted a car: the same dark green one, with birdlike wings, that he’d passed on lap nine. The driver in round glasses stood on the brakes in desperation. Flinging gravel, the car slewed sideways and came to rest only a few meters from the edge, tipped onto two wheels and frozen there like a rearing horse.

Behind him, the others tried to save themselves one after another. The shriek of brakes, the grind of gravel, the screams. Red flags on the referees’ towers thrashed frantically from side to side, as if that could change anything.

Ard hurtled toward the gap in fourth gear at a speed his speedometer refused to register. He had perhaps only a few seconds to decide.

Brake.

Or not.

He looked at the gap. In his mind’s eye, a pencil began dancing across imaginary paper. Seven meters or more. Depth unknown. The two edges were clearly at different heights, separated vertically by perhaps a meter, but no more. The far edge was level, and beyond it lay turn six and the straightaway to the finish.

The hunter inside Ard didn’t hesitate for an instant.

Ardan stomped on the gas. He didn’t merely press it; he drove the pedal into the floor hard enough to feel the metal plate give beneath the sole of his boot. His left foot slammed the clutch all the way down, his right hand wrenched the gearshift into third, and Ard revved the engine to its limit. The engine howled at impossibly high revs. The tachometer needle behind the cracked dashboard glass shot to the right and slammed into the stop with a metallic click Ard never even heard.

He let the clutch out sharply, with no attempt at smoothness, no needless gentleness. The engine roared with such fury it threatened to crack its pistons and choke on its own rage; the body shuddered, the rivets clattered, and the tachometer needle simply froze. The speedometer fared even worse, buckling outward like the swollen lid on a jar of spoiled pickles.

The edge of the chasm drew closer. Somewhere behind Ard, the wind laughed. What lay before him was no dark hole in the asphalt. He saw the rocky sweep of the mountains back home, just as he had in childhood. Once again, as he had in childhood, he ran after Kaishas, listening to the rhythm of the eagle’s heart and the beat of his wings. He heard the wind in the feathers of that wanderer of the skies and felt himself drifting in that wind as if on water.

The wheels left the ground.

Silence fell.

A little strange. The engine still roared, and the wind still tore at his hair. It was a silence entirely new to Ardan. The silence of flight. The silence of the instant when the wheels no longer touch the earth and you’re not a pilot, not a mage, not an Investigator, not anyone’s husband and not anyone’s son; you’re simply flying. Over the void. Over the chasm. Over everything that has weighed on you lately.

Over your brother’s hurt. Over the impending birth of Shaia’s fourth child. Over Grand Magister Emergold’s offer. Over the outcome of the Congress. Over your own confusion about what you expect from life. You just fly, held aloft by invisible hands that dare to lift you above the ground.

You just fly.

Ard half-closed his eyes.

The wind whipped his hair.

Below him, the dark chasm’s maw wore a bloodthirsty grin as it waited for its rightful prey. Above him, the sky smiled crimson with sunset, opening its doors to the young night. And somewhere at the very edge of hearing, beyond the engine’s roar and the wind’s whistle, he thought he heard a cry. Thin, piercing, joyful.

The cry of a swallow.

Whenever they returned in spring, they told wild stories, foolish tales, and outright lies about what went on there, beyond the Great Water.

Atta’nha told him never to listen to them, and Ardan shamelessly lied, claiming he never did. But the instant the first warm rays touched the cliffs, he would climb higher and wait for the little birds to return. Long ago, in another life, a little hunter had lain on a crag and watched them come home, thinking there was nothing better than being able to fly. And now, in this moment suspended between sky and earth, in the gaps between the second hand’s quick little ticks, Ardan thought the same thing.

Being able to fly wasn’t all that bad.

The air was knocked out of his lungs as a metallic crash boomed in his ears like an alarm bell, then gave way to a piercing screech.

The car slammed down on the far edge of the chasm, all four wheels striking at once. The impact hurled Ard upward inside the cab, hard enough that the back of his head slammed into the headrest. His vision went dark for an instant, and his teeth clacked together. The suspension, what little remained of the thing Dagdag called a suspension, crunched, wailed, and snapped apart on the left side. The car immediately pulled to one side, then whipped broadside, and the left rear wheel, unable to take that kind of abuse, tore free of the axle and went rolling off somewhere.

The body dropped onto its left side, sending up a fountain of sparks from the asphalt, and hurtled sideways toward the final straightaway: grinding, howling, coming apart as it went, trailing a strip of shredded metal and clouds of dust. Ard seized the wheel with both hands and furiously... kept the gas pedal pinned, though by then it made no sense at all, because the car wasn’t even moving under its own power. It was simply hurtling onward on momentum alone, riding on three wheels and a hunk of metal, and every meter sent a bone-crushing vibration through his forearms. The metallic clatter already had his ears ringing.

Ard thought he could make out the finish line. The white ribbon, already strung between two posts at the very spot where their race had begun.

The car ripped hungrily through the strip of paper. Sideways. On three wheels. In a cloud of dust and sparks.

It dragged itself a little farther, then stopped dead.

“I can’t believe my eyes!” The announcer wasn’t shouting anymore. His voice was completely shot, and now he rasped at full volume. “Number sixteen! Number sixteen jumped the chasm! He jumped the chasm and crossed the finish line! Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve been calling races for almost ten years, and never in my life have I seen anything like it!”

The other cars sat on the far side of the chasm, a safe distance from the edge. A dozen drivers, a dozen cars, and not one of them had dared. The drivers stood and stared at the wrecked “tin can” across the chasm. Ard, hair tousled, helmet gone, coveralls torn, was climbing slowly and awkwardly out of it.

The stands roared.

And Ard stood beside his dead car and breathed hard as he looked up at the sky. Far, far above, birds wheeled in the dark crimson distance.

Swallows.

They had returned.

And spring had come to the city with them.