Chapter 6 Six

"Mile two is where most riders lose their heads," she said. "The straight looks clean but there's a camber shift halfway through that pushes the bike wide if you're not sitting right. Venom exploits it on the exit. He sets up his overtakes there."

I leaned over the map beside her. "What line does he run going in?"

"Tight left. Earlier than you'd expect." She tapped the paper. "He sacrifices entry speed to own the exit. By the time everyone else is correcting, he's already gone."

"I can match that."

"You can match it when you've ridden it twenty times in the dark and it's sitting in your hands the same way your own name is." She rolled the map up. "First pass today, you do nothing. You ride it like you're reading a book. No pushing."

"You said that last night."

"I'm saying it again because last night you nearly introduced yourself to a concrete barrier."

I didn't argue. I drank the rest of my coffee and followed her out.

The championship course ran through the industrial edge of Coldwater, the part of town that the rest of Coldwater pretended didn't exist. Abandoned lots, chain-link fences, a stretch of road that connected nothing to nothing and got used for exactly that reason.

We rode it twice. Clean, like she said.

The camber shift at mile two was exactly where she'd marked it. I felt it the first time through and adjusted before it pushed me wide. The blind crest at mile six was worse than the map suggested, a sudden rise that killed your sight line completely for three full seconds at race speed. Three seconds blind at ninety miles an hour was a long time to trust that the road on the other side was empty.

Venom had won two championships on this course. He knew what was on the other side of that crest. He'd be using that knowledge while everyone else was guessing.

I filed it away and kept riding.

On the second pass Dax pulled up beside me on the long straight and pointed left, toward a gap in the chain-link fence. I followed her through into an empty lot where we stopped and killed our engines.

"The crest," I said before she could speak.

She nodded once. "What did you see?"

"Three seconds blind. Surface on the other side is rougher than the approach. If you carry too much speed over the top, the front goes light and you're fighting the bike instead of racing it."

"Venom comes over that crest five miles an hour slower than his average for the rest of the course." She looked at me steadily. "Every other rider thinks he's being cautious. He's not. He's setting up for the left-hand bend two hundred meters after it. He hits that bend perfectly every single time because he scrubbed the right amount of speed at the crest. Not caution. Calculation."

"So the move isn't to attack the crest," I said. "It's to get there ahead of him so the setup is mine."

Something in her expression settled, the way it had the night before when I came out of the switchback clean on the third lap.

"Now you're thinking like a championship rider," she said.

She said it the same way she said everything. No performance, no warmth turned up for effect. Just a fact she had decided was worth stating.

It landed harder than a compliment would have.

We rode the course two more times before noon. Each pass I found something new, a surface change I'd missed, a sight line that opened earlier than I'd thought, a braking point that could move ten meters without costing anything. The course was starting to build itself inside me the way circuits always did, less like a map I was following and more like something I was beginning to know.

By the fourth pass, Dax stopped correcting me.

Back at the compound, Tank was in the garage when we rolled in. He looked at me the way he'd looked at me that morning, like I was something that had gotten in through a gap in the fence and hadn't been dealt with yet. He didn't say anything. Neither did I.

I parked the Ducati and started on the post-ride check. Brake pads, chain tension, tire wear on the outside edge from the switchback last night.

Tank's voice came from across the garage. "You ride the course today?" I didn't look up. "Yeah."

"Venom's taken two of our boys out in the last two championships. Put one of them in the hospital for six weeks." He picked up a wrench and turned back to the bike he was working on. "Just so you know what you're riding into."

I looked up then. Tank was focused on his work, not on me. It wasn't a threat. It wasn't friendly either. It was information, delivered the same way a mechanic tells you a part is worn. Straight and without decoration. "Noted," I said.

He grunted. We worked in silence after that, and the silence was a different kind from the morning. Not hostile exactly. Just the way two people who don't trust each other get through the hours when they have to share a space. I'd take it.

Dax appeared in the garage doorway at four o'clock. She looked at me, then at Tank, then back at me, reading whatever was in the room the way she read everything, quickly and without making a production of it.

"Course debrief. My office. Ten minutes," she said, and was gone.

Tank watched me stand up and wipe my hands on a rag. "Chen." I stopped.

"The camber shift at mile two." He didn't look up from his work. "Run wider on the approach than you think you need to. Gives you a cleaner line out."

I looked at him for a second. He was already back to his own bike like he hadn't said anything. "Thanks," I said. He grunted again.

I walked out of the garage and down the hall toward Dax's office, and I turned that small moment over in my mind the way I'd been turning over the course all day. One piece at a time. Building a picture.

Tank had been with the Iron Wolves for fifteen years. He'd watched Venom put his club brothers in the hospital. He hated me on principle and he'd told me a useful thing anyway, without being asked, without making it a gesture.

Because winning mattered more than who was doing it. I filed that away too. Some things in this compound were exactly what they looked like. Others were going to take longer to read. Dax's door was open when I got there. She was already at the desk, a new set of maps laid out and a laptop open beside them. She didn't look up when I walked in.

"Close the door," and sit down, there are things you need to know.