“Jumped you? When?” Christina looked back. Melissa was silhouetted in the Lotus’s headlights, which had the predatory instinct to creep into Otto’s interior.
“When I had to run out to the car. When we were at the hotel.” Christina recalled the way he’d burst through the door to their room, out of breath, which made sense at the time—her own heart was pounding. If anything was wrong with him it had been lost in the heady fog of the moment. “I think it was supposed to be a warning,” he continued. “One girl had an eyepatch and a burned-up face.” He paused. “That was actually pretty cool. But yeah, they hate us.”
“Enough to follow us all the way to New Orleans?”
“Which is why we have to end it here, or else they’ll be on our ass all the way to Moonshadow.”
He was speaking in a low voice—this was a situation for the two of them to handle together. She found herself thrilled at the prospect of a showdown and wondered if William’s recklessness was sexually transmitted. A week ago she would have urged him to kill the lights and hide in a dark alley, but now she was ready to go all Dierdrax on U8DUST.
Just ahead was a four-way intersection. The light was green. William slowed Otto to a crawl. The Lotus rode up on them, flashing its brights, then pulled into the right lane. The light turned yellow, then red. The two cars idled side by side, silver bullet and insectoid Lotus, headlights sweeping out across the empty intersection.
A windblown Popeyes bag skimmed the crosswalk.
The Lotus revved its engine, and the baritone growl shook Otto’s interior and drowned out the throat-shredding screams of Dethroned Kings’ lead singer.
“Honestly, I’ve always wanted to do this,” William said, turning to his backseat passengers. “Might wanna buckle up.”
“I seriously can’t even,” Melissa said. She held up her phone to snap a picture of the Lotus.
Christina rolled down her window, stuck her arm out and extended her middle finger. The Lotus’s glass was tinted. She couldn’t see the driver’s reaction.
“That’s how we do it,” William said.
Christina rolled up her window. The light turned green. William slammed his foot down on the gas and sprang Otto from his cage.
The cars were side by side at 80 mph when the road narrowed to a single lane. The custom exhaust system on the Lotus emitted a whine that climbed and receded with each upshift. The cars hugged the road’s shoulders and traded the lead like thoroughbreds, the Lotus nosing ahead until William slid past to regain the top spot. They moved as if drawn by a single puppeteer letting out slack with his right hand while reeling the left hand in, then switching. They blazed down a street between rows of shuttered warehouses as the last vestiges of Kenner dribbled out.
Otto played Melissa’s Kitty Purry Road Trip Mix #2. Christina tuned out the voice assuring her that she was a firework and poured all her energy into the map. She pressed her palms together to widen the scope, then swiped ahead to make sure their path was clear. Focusing on the race kept them from dwelling on Daniel’s admission, as if Otto’s filters had removed its particles from the air.
“You’ve got a sharp right in three-quarters of a mile,” she warned. The street dead-ended at a tile manufacturer. There was a parking lot to the left and what looked like a footpath to the right.
“That’s in, like, thirty seconds!” William said.
“Let the Lotus move ahead, it’s already on our right, and its turning radius is way better than ours. Also the next straightaway is basically just a sidewalk.”
“Maybe you should let Otto drive!” Melissa said.
“Nah, you got this,” Daniel said.
Ratteree & Sons Tile loomed; the façade was a huge mosaic of a tropical beach. Monkey faces leered out from the fronds of a palm tree.
“Everybody hold on!” William tapped the brake. The Lotus jumped ahead and accelerated through the turn. William leaned even harder on the brake as he cranked the wheel to the right. RenderLux snaked into Christina’s lap and held her fast. The tile monkeys swung out of view, and Otto was back on course, headlights shining directly into the Lotus’s angled rear windshield.
Two stout nitrous oxide tanks crouched like artillery shells inside the Lotus. As William bore down, Christina read the decals on the tanks’ smooth sides: FAT MAN and LITTLE BOY.
The Lotus was going to destroy them. Otto shouldn’t be able to keep pace at all; the fact that they were even close defied basic aerodynamic laws. How long could William keep it up against a car built for this express purpose?
The cement footpath ran parallel to a gravel road cordoned off by construction cones. Otto’s tires churned through grass on either side of the path. The Lotus widened its lead.
“Okay,” Christina said, “you’ve got two miles before we hang a left onto a real road. Just try to stay close.” Keeping one eye on the map, she sifted through a sub-menu she’d never seen before, under a heading that hadn’t existed before they started racing.
Countermeasures.
“I get it,” she said. “We’re unlocking new options, like achievements in a game.”
“If you kill us, I’ll kill you,” Melissa said.
“Noted,” William said. He hit the gas and eased the wheel to the right. Otto nudged a pair of construction cones out of the way at 90 mph with a brutal thunkathunk. For an eerie weightless second, the tires failed to bite the loose gravel of the unfinished road. Otto fishtailed, gained traction, and they overtook the Lotus on the right. “I gave ’em the last turn,” William said. “That’s the only one they get.”
“Then you better beat them by a mile,” Christina said, “because we’re on the wrong side again.”
Christina explored Countermeasures. Among the newly unlocked
