Adon ignored all the extra questions, giving Jonah, the garage manager, only exactly what he needed to register Adon as part of their team crew and add him to the docket, replacing Phai’s name, moving Phiaios up to the Diamond League (apparently sponsored) to the great approval and acceptance of most of the crowd, except those who’d already planned sure bets. Adon had done enough favors that Nika owed him, but he was also right that Phaios winning another cup in the easy league because she was scared of him getting hurt would start something much bigger than Troy winning a legit match against a fresh racer would. 

Adon bounced through the paperwork, marked his schedule, picked his number, then continued through the milling crowd of swaying trackies, chatting up Troy’s certain victory while he texted Y to prepare him a real race suit. Please. 

☆

All week, Adon inflated Troy’s chances by talking to bookies and Nyx’s regular crowd, sloshing a glass of apple juice like he was plastered and letting out drunken secrets to the savvy listener. Mess only barely stopped Nyx from stalking over the bar and draggin Adon out by half an ear when she thought he was drunk, promising he was only drinking juice and plotting to kill someone. Nyx didn’t even ask who, she’d simply pointed two fingers to her eyes, then one at Adon beaming at her while he swayed into one of Frank’s old cronies. 

Each time Adon came back for a refill, Mess pulled the fancy bottle out from his secret stash behind the bar and Adon stared at the small apple on the bottle like it was Lu’s face and he was sorry. He wasn’t sorry. He was doing his best, and Lu could just keep waiting until Adon got a new phone. 

Nika stayed out of their plans, but even Phaios nodded along beside Adon through the bar, because he was finally competing again and he was nervous for his race. No one knew one Adonis Caldera from another Adon Calderis, all of the Asylum’s abandoned babies running around with the same handful of names, so they called the substitute the new guy while clapping Phai’s passing shoulder in congratulations, and reviewed the team reels Jonah had put together while Tutor worked on his rig, not a single one of them paying any attention to the Finder as he passed except as a reason to put bets on Troy… or maybe the new guy. It was a cup race, so the pot was much bigger, worth more risk, more chance, more debate. The Grounders only knew that the Finder was friends with the greatest racer of their generation and paced practices for Phaios, their next reigning champ, and that they both agreed Troy would win an easy victory. It was a good bet, an easy dollar, a safe investment, and every conversation ended the night with the same decision. 

The Quartet needed all the positive press they could get after the Conductor’s decade of wasted guns left their roster tragically empty, so they set up extra tents outside the track, exchanging Asylum credits for Grounder cash tokens and scanning names and ID badges by the dozens, eagerly whispering about the sure victory of Troy, Gideon’s little pigeon. On the corners of Forest, Violet, and Indigo districts, however, Adon whispered about all the quiet ways Troy the Cheater had failed to beat Phaios in the past, all his dirty tricks they’d caught and avoided, how he’d stop at nothing to beat Phai’s bike, no matter who was racing it. How a disqualification pot would be huge winnings if they had the guts to fight for it.  

The Midders praised their hero cheaters like Robin Hoods who didn’t share as clever tricksters who deserved their boons, entitled to whatever they got away with, independent vigilantes without the burden of a moral code, rich because they could be, takers of what was for taking because Midders who didn’t hover at the Mid-Gate line only knew taking to be good. But Grounders couldn’t exist alone, and none of them tolerated a cheat, the Uppers siphoned enough that their heroes still stalked corporate AIs and threw corrupt Uppers from sky balconies. Perhaps the mentality had begun with the Quartet, or the Catastrophe that had sent their ancestors skittering into a volcano or out into orbit, but either way, cheaters were for Uppers and Arcade rooms designed for the fish, not for careful kin-groups that needed trust and each other to survive the floods each year, they were intolerant. 

No comparison was more ripe than the way the Arcade was now rooting for Papa Pimp to be the Ground governor over the Conductor’s corrupt pick because of rumors of Gideon’s relationship with Heranika, who they all knew was a fish flooding their halls with ghost guns for her own Midder profit. Then there was the Conductor’s sheet music most of the Ground was tired of blowing away, protests and boycott posters plastering dead-end halls with Old Internet websites for The Real Truth and complicated pattern codes scrambling the brains of sec-off scanner bots with auto-downloaded viruses while the debate of the noble cheater was pulled into the forefront of Grounder debates.

The Conductor’s favored governor candidate insisted on keeping older passages to the Mids permanently closed, bottlenecking any upward mobility through the Mid-Gate, trapping Grounders and openly telling Midders that Grounders shouldn’t be trusted during his press tours that were supposedly only aired on the New Internet (the Ground was much more forgiving of pirates than cheaters). Adon was surprised by how little the Conductor seemed to understand about the ecosystem he’d built, but X wasn’t—he said it fit the Conductor’s illusion of power and greatness, so Adon went about his plans and let the rest of the Ground figure out the future for itself. He’d never joined X’s crusade, and he had no intention of being a savior to anyone but Lu. And maybe Mess if he didn’t figure his life out soon (they couldn’t work at Nyx’s forever, she was getting sick of them). 

By the end of the week, with the race approaching, Troy was a cheater to half the Ground and a sure victor to the trackies at 5:9 odds, which was only about thirty-six percent victory by Adon’s calculation, but the kind of Grounders voting on the final outcome didn’t shake on wagers out of reason or mathematics like those who set their money down out of gut and intuition, and most of their guts told them that Phaios’ takeover would be just as good. Most of the tents took a fourteen percent cap rate, and Adon was happy to hear that his new persona as an underdog racer, hand-picked by their preceding champion, was sitting at 2:1 to at least place. 

By the time he walked into the bustling arena to suit up, Adon Calderis, who did not exist but was a name shared by hundreds, was the favored winner, with Troy sitting at middle-pack odds, flagged by some stream-casters who were vehemently debating the public database numbers, pointing to several large bets for a victory where Adon had successfully convinced some of Troy’s skill. 

Already there was confusion, the perfect environment for conspiracy. 

Adon felt intimidation creep over his shoulder at the sight of so many people. Y had warned him that races weren’t the same as pacing runs, that the energy of the stadium and the stakes of the finish line changed everything. She’d also said he could smoke Troy in his sleep and that she didn’t understand why she was supposed to be convincing people that the little crater vermin would win, no matter how many times Adon explained the long-term plan. Y may be ready to start building a future, but it didn’t make her magically more capable of understanding how to do it. Well… if it worked, she was going to have an idea how not to do it by the end of the race, and Adon would be leaving with a Y-shaped-fist mark on his shoulder or chest. Probably two: one on accident, the other on purpose.

He let Phaios zip up the race suit Y had loaned him, remaining respectful of the reputation that their garage had worked so hard to build after Y got ganked by Gideon. Ganked was such a dumb word, he rolled his eyes at himself for thinking it, but it had grown on him all week. Adon liked it. Y had only explained that it meant Frank got got, and it was really all the definition the word needed. He’d grown fond of self-explanatory pseudo-onomatopoeia words. He smiled as he passed his team and thought of all the ways Troy was going to get ganked before the sunlamps died. He was no Y—hell, Yas wasn’t even Y anymore, too traumatized to attempt her own records anymore, but Phaios had been a good student, and now, Adon realized, they were both nervous for him. Phai had placed in his qualifying, ready to compete against the runners who’d been trashing him all week, already proving by time trials that he would dominate their league and be moving up into Crystal or Meteorite or Technetium or whatever the next league was, but it was still Adon wearing his number, using his garage, and escorted out by his team. 

Adon shook out the nerves from his own legs with a smile at Phaios, sweeping his hand off his shoulder and tucking the zip-cord into the leather pouch of the brown and blue suit. He preferred the clips, but Nika had outlawed them years ago when someone’s were a little too sharp. Adon hadn’t fully listened to Y’s explanation, he’d been very sick when she was telling him about all the different suits in the Pits, and, in his defense, she was regularly unreliable in her summary of events, even about track history, so he was never sure if listening to the details was worth it, but nodded along anyway because it made her feel like a person after her guts had just been restuffed then paraded around a room of bidders hoping for a champion trophy to add to their stupid office shelves.

“Hey, focus,” Phaios knocked his forehead lightly, pulling the buckle straps and neck padding from inside the helmet with a quiet grumble, “I’m not going to be the one telling Lu anything this time, got it?”

“You won’t have to, I’ll be fine.” Adon sighed into his helmet, flopping his head forward and tucking his hair out of his mouth, then pulling the helmet back off and trying again several times, until Xeri skipped in with a razor Phaios had called for and they shaved off most of his pink hair. It would grow back, but he felt around in his pocket for a phone that wasn’t there with a guilty pause. Cutting hair was the kind of thing people told each other about, but Lu shouldn’t see….  Adon shook the thought from his head. He wasn’t trying to scar Lu further, he just wanted him to live. Happily. He fixed his newly shaved head into the helmet, folding his half-ear into the padded comms piece, and stood with his arms out, letting Phaios pat him down for the security check while Tutor scowled behind him, ticking bike specs off on the pre-race clipboard before the officials  came through with their tablets. 

Tutor had been played with enough in Vice, he didn’t like the way Adon walked across the track like he owned it, no respect for the sport, just one of Phaios’ little nepotism friends. Tutor kicked the locker holding Adon’s coat and stomped to his comm board to instruct their crew through the race, setting up his screens and plugging his headset into the announcer streams until he had every angle displayed in front of him. 

He just needed his team to place, and unlike the rest of the Ground that trusted Phaios’ judgment, Tutor knew that their player package for Adon Calderis was absolute bullshit. He didn’t know anything more about Adon than that his player kit was full of lies, and he didn’t like doing a run with a stranger. It was his job to keep his rider alive and he had a feeling his rider wasn’t going to make success easy. Tutor had tried to get a feel for Adon’s riding while he tested the bike, but he always cut them short, made a few notes to Phaios because Nika couldn’t be seen around them during seasonal race cups, then ditched. 

Tutor wiped his sweaty hands down his thighs and adjusted the chair height, deciding it wasn’t on him. If they won, he’d consider it the Clearwater god’s gift and thank them for the miracle, and if their mystery rider survived and didn’t place, he’d have a nice long chat with Phaios himself about dignity and trust. Tutor’s whole team was nervous, running diagnostics and med checks, but some of that was because it was their biggest race, and they had a lot of younger mechanics in the garage, their first cup race already a mess without them knowing because they believed that their rider was a real person. Tutor sighed, rolled his eyes at all he didn’t understand about Caldera’s strange politics, remembered what his life had been in Vice, and focused all his concentration on keeping his rider alive. He had a perfect record in that, and whether this kid wanted to ruin it or not didn’t matter, Tutor was leaving the track with his record intact.  

Adon rubbed the back of his neck while Phaios pulled the zipper out of the pouch he’d stuffed it in, tucking it along the zipper and velcroing the flap. He clipped the magnets into Adon’s gloves and held them out, bracing himself so Adon could shove his hands in, then triple checking the cuffs because the cup final was open-track. Adon wriggled against his churning guts and took his helmet off two more times, once to rub against the ringing in his discount ear, the second time to scratch his bare head, self-consciously thinking of Lu’s frown when he showed up next.