Chapter 6 The Shadow on the Grid

MAYA POV

Hesitation is a slow death. On the grid, you either take the gap, or you become the wreckage.

"You’re braking ten meters too early into the hairpin," Nico calls out from the adjacent cockpit pod forty minutes later.

"I’m saving the front tires for the final sector!" I shout back over the whine of the hydraulic actuators pitching my seat forward under heavy virtual braking.

My palms are slick inside my gloves, my T-shirt sticking to my spine. We’ve been running head-to-head race simulations on the New York Street Circuit for eight straight laps, and Nico has been sitting three-tenths of a second ahead of my front wing like an immovable wall.

Every time I feint left on the main straight, he covers the inside line with maddening, robotic precision.

"You’re not saving tires, you’re waiting for me to make a mistake," Nico counters, his car’s virtual diffuser spitting orange sparks across the wraparound screen right in front of my nose. "News flash, rookie: I don't make mistakes. 

Racing is about total control. If you don't control the corner before you enter it, you’ve already lost."

"That’s how a bureaucrat drives, Nico!" I snap, dropping down two gears as the virtual harbor chicane rushes toward us at two hundred miles an hour. "If you wait until a gap is safe, it’s already gone! Hesitation is how you lose!"

"Don't do it, Maya," Nico warns, his voice dropping an octave as he sees my nose cone dart toward the razor-thin gap between his right rear tire and the virtual concrete wall entering Turn Seven. "There isn't enough room for two cars through there!"

There is if neither of us blinks.

Two years ago, this exact side-by-side entry put me in a hospital bed. My right knee throbs inside its compression wrap, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird, screaming at me to back off the throttle.

Instead, I lock my jaw, delay my braking by five meters, and throw my car into the gap alongside him.

The hydraulic rig bucks violently underneath me as my virtual right tires brush the concrete barrier and my left wheel misses Nico’s sidepod by a coat of paint. I hold the slide on the edge of traction, mash the throttle at the apex, and shoot past his nose cone onto the main straightaway—crossing the checkered line four-hundredths of a second ahead of him.

P1: M. BAUDELAIRES.

P2: N. LAURENT (+0.041).

The wraparound screen freezes on the timing board, and the hydraulic rams hiss as the pods lower back to level ground.

"Ha!" I yank my headset off and throw my fist into the air, a wild, breathless grin splitting my face as I unbuckle my harness and stand up on the edge of my cockpit pod. 

"Four-hundredths of a second, world champion! Tell me again how total control wins races!"

Nico unclips his belt and stands up in his pod, looking across the three feet separating our rigs. His dark hair is damp with sweat at his temples, his chest rising and falling hard beneath his charcoal shirt, and the look in his storm-gray eyes makes the breath catch right in the back of my throat.

He isn't angry that I beat him. He’s staring at me like I’m a live wire he can’t stop himself from touching.

"That move was reckless, insane, and completely suicidal," 

Nico says huskily, stepping across the steel catwalk between our pods.

"And it worked," I shoot back, stepping down off the carbon-fiber lip of my rig.

Except I land wrong on the metal grating.

My right knee, exhausted from forty minutes of heavy hydraulic braking—gives a sharp, sickening twist, and my foot slips straight off the edge of the catwalk.

I gasp as gravity pulls me sideways, bracing myself to slam ribs-first into the steel support rail.

I never hit the metal.

Hard, powerful hands catch me around the waist mid-fall, hauling me effortlessly against a solid wall of muscle. Nico spins with my momentum, taking the brunt of the impact with his own broad back against the side of the simulator pod and pinning me securely between his thighs so my bad leg doesn't have to take any weight.

My hands fly to his shoulders to steady myself, my fingers digging into the corded heat of his muscles through his thin cotton shirt.

"Shit," I gasp, my heart doing a violent flip that has nothing to do with falling.

"Got you," Nico murmurs.

His hands don't leave my waist. If anything, his fingers flex against my ribs, right over the edge of my sports bra beneath my damp shirt, sending a jolt of pure, liquid fire straight down my spine.

I look up and freeze.

His face is barely three inches from mine. In the dim blue glow of the simulator screens, his eyes are dark as midnight, fixed on my parted lips before lifting slowly to lock with my gaze. I can feel every heavy beat of his heart against my chest, can smell the intoxicating mix of rain, cedar, and warm skin that makes my brain completely short-circuit.

You hate him, I remind myself desperately. He is your rival. He is dangerous. He kept secrets about your crash for two years.

My body doesn't care about a single word of that. My pulse races like a runaway engine, and when his thumb brushes the bare skin at my hip where my shirt rode up, my breath hitches audibly.

"You're trembling, speed demon," Nico whispers, his rough voice skimming over my skin like a physical touch. 

"Is that the knee, or is that me?"

"In your dreams, Nico," I breathe, though I make zero effort to push away from his chest. "I just don't make a habit of letting my competition manhandle me."

A slow, dangerous curve tilts the corner of his mouth. 

"Funny. Because from where I’m standing, you aren't fighting very hard to get away."

He lowers his head half an inch, his gaze dropping back to my mouth, and every nerve ending in my body pulls taut as a bowstring.

Then a sharp, high-pitched alarm beeps from the master engineering terminal at the back of the room.

Both of our heads snap toward the control desk.

The main server monitor, which was supposed to be in sleep mode—has just flickered to life on its own, casting an eerie red glow across the floor as lines of code scroll rapidly down the glass.

Nico releases my waist slowly, making sure both my feet are steady on the floor before he strides over to the desk. I limp right behind him, leaning over his shoulder as he taps the keyboard to pull up the network activity log.

ALERT: REMOTE WIPE INITIATED.

TARGET DIRECTORY: //LEGACY_TELEMETRY/INCIDENT_M7_TURN7

ORIGINATING TERMINAL: BAY_01_ENG_DESK_02

My blood turns to ice. "Someone inside the garage is deleting the server backup of our old crash data right now."

"Not just someone," Nico says grimly, pointing a finger at the bottom line of the screen. "Look at the active login ID."

Staring back at me in glowing red letters is the exact credential I saw on the noodle shop table last night—and on the faded paper in my pocket.

USER: E_HART (ACTIVE IN BUILDING).

Before I can even suck in a breath, the handle of the simulator bay door rattles from the outside, and footsteps bolt down the hallway toward the stairwell.