Phaios pulled his phone out of his pocket and lobbed it across the room, where it scattered in pieces and no one said a thing. Nika tried to comfort him, but when he pulled away from her, she shoved him further toward a corner. Phaios rubbed at his shaved head. Strangers didn’t cut each other’s hair. They didn’t keep secrets. They didn’t punch each other for bringing ex-boyfriends, or whatever Lu and Adon had been at the Academy, to the track years later. Adon hadn’t been a stranger to Phaios since the day he’d brought Lu-Bird the bio-scanner, since that ding of the credit transfer to the Flock. He’d been a victim, then an acquaintance, then a partner on the track. He’d been at Nyx’s, drinking between Xeri and Nika, and Phaios realized Adon had never blamed him, and that’s what he’d hated. Adon had only been his friend.

And now Doni had saved his life, because no matter how he assembled the pieces, there was Troy walking into the ARC workshop with Flock leftovers, Troy threatening Lu, Troy playing with knives, and now Troy was…. Phaios didn’t know, but he doubted cup winner was all. Troy would have come after him next, and Phai hated that Adon had seen it first, had been his friend first, again, always Adon was taking the steps first. 

Phaios kicked at the Med-Pod, rubbing his head with a groan that rose into a shout. Nika shoved him back toward the corner and he was grateful for it. 

“You hurt my machine before it saves him so I can kill him myself, you’ll be next in line, got it?” Nika shuffled tablets, dumping several into Phai’s hands, “help me post the videos to the anonymous channels, I’m doing the PR work. It doesn’t have to be fancy, just get it uploaded.”

Phaios sat down on a rubber drain mat and leaned against the glossy white surface of the pod, feeling it vibrate through his back as he moved between Platform accounts, uploading the videos of Troy cutting the brakes, the clip of Adon’s lines flapping as he leaned into the turn (no one would understand the close-up shot until other rider team mechs and fanatic know-it-alls explained it was the brake line fix failing), then he began on the series of crash clips, numbly dragging them from one side of the tablet to the other, into the Profile Uploads, wait for the green outline, then the check, then tab into the next account and do it again. 

He didn’t stare too long at the thumbnail stills of the crash, of Adon flying through the air, upside down, hitting the judge panel glass, falling onto the track-level audience glass. Nika had even queued any clips of Adon staggering toward the fire or pulling the chain, probably because she thought of it like a racer trophy, like he’d saved the soul of the bike while the rest of it filled his lungs and mutated any traitor cells it found there, but Phai didn’t upload those. He’d seen the glossy distance in Doni’s eyes, the cracking in his voice, almost begging. Had Phaios ever begged for his life? From Benny? From Lu-Lu? Sure he had, every day he’d survived had been by begging. But Adon wasn’t begging for himself, maybe he couldn’t. He was saving Lu, he was sacrificing himself because he knew he was a monster, and Phaios curled over his knees and cried. 

He had no idea what to tell Lu, and he could only imagine Lu watching what he thought would be Phai’s cup race on some stream-cast, only to see Adon crash. Would he recognize him? Of course he would. Lu would recognize Adon as a bloated corpse mummified by the icy ground. Lu would know his bones. 

Phaios wept harder, because he’d never let himself know someone by their bones. Not Nika, not Xeri, not himself, and because his phone was broken and he didn’t know Lu’s comm ID, and Lu was probably terrified that Phaios had crashed, or had seen Adon’s body crunch and fold and flop around, good as dead, and already knew Phai had let Adon make the sacrifice because he hadn’t understood they were friends. 

Tutor hovered, sliding down the pod so he was squatted next to Phaios, “you should have told me he was that good. I would have believed you.”

Phaios shrugged, swallowing thickly as his tears dried and he unfolded bitterly, “he’s not. He’s just a stubborn asshole and Troy pissed him off.”

Tutor chuckled to himself, “Troy does that a lot.”

Phaios said nothing. There was nothing to say.

Tutor sighed, nudging him with a shoulder, “Troy does that a lot… and no one’s killed him yet.”

“I don’t know why,” Phaios lied, predicting the question, “I don’t know—” his voice cracked, the tears welled again, and he rubbed both hands over his face, letting the lie hang between them before sinking against the pod and staring into the distance, watching the crew crowd around the salvaged bits of bike. They dug through the wrecked pieces, sorting and cleaning the reusable pieces like it would help put their rider’s broken body back together, because the only other option was to pray to the Clearwater gods who never listened that it looked worse than it was. But they'd understood by then who Adon was, and they all knew the damage never looked worse than it was, not on the Finder. 

Dummel dumped an arm load of melted plastic sheets into the blue reuse disposal and marched back to the circle of quiet crew members while the others circled drones and followed their post-race task lists like it was any other day. The roaring overhead only increased. 

Phaios inhaled, “he was protecting someone.”

Tutor arched a brow, “he didn’t need to kill himself in front of everyone to do that.”

Phaios whimpered at the thought, “me. And someone else.”

“From Troy…. Troy, who can’t even cut a brake line properly?”

Phaios nodded once, his head falling a little too hard into the pod wall because he no longer had a spongy head of hair to stop it and he wasn’t quite used to the new style yet. “Troy is a message, probably.”

“Why would you need protecting from Troy?”

Adon would tell him not to say. Lu would tell him not to say. Benny would have told him not to say. But Phaios was tired of secrets and half-understandings, so he said what he knew. “Lu and I run a workshop, ARC workshop,” he gestured toward the Wells. “We help people get training and jobs, especially after they served time in the Charity House—”

“The hospital?”

“No, the Asylum,” Phaios clarified, remembering Tutor wasn’t from Caldera. “We get them licensed and certified, good jobs, decent ones at least.”

“How very noble.” Tutor bounced a foot, waiting for the point.

“Yeah, well, the Conductor doesn’t like that we’re helping people who would otherwise join his stupid Quartet.” Phaios glanced over to see if Tutor was following. 

Tutor nodded, but only to keep Phaios talking while they waited. He knew his riders, and Phai was like a caged wildcat when he got scared, but Tutor didn’t think anyone from Caldera would know what that looked like. They didn’t have the kind of menageries Vice had. So he gestured for Phaios to continue and did his best to follow along. 

“They ordered a hit on us. Get rid of the workshop, get their henchmen back.” Phaios scoffed at all his own sympathy for Adon as he put the pieces together out loud, “Doni took the job—”

Tutor held up a patient hand, his accent more pronounced in his annoyance, “his name is actually Adon Calderis?” It was the kid now, to Tutor at least.

“Adonis Caldera, he’s my age, they change the standardization a little each decade.”

Tutor nodded along, but the more he learned about Caldera, the more he thought he’d simply jumped from one malfunctioning network to another. 

Phaios sighed at the details that weren’t his to tell, navigating them gracefully with a wave toward the sputtering machine that had started up its clanking again, the arms whizzing inside as a million wires and screens responded to an Upper doctor’s every code, every surgical movement of their robotic knives, every command to disinfect the chamber or report vitals. “Adon took the job, but not for me. For Lu. And then he didn’t kill him. And now he’s kill—” no, Adon hadn’t killed Troy. It would have been easier if Adon had just killed Troy. “Now he’s getting rid of everyone that came after us, and I….” Phaios dropped his hand from his forehead, staring at the pieces of his phone Dummel was sweeping up and dumping into its various reuse receptacles. “Now I have to tell Lu-Lu… and I don’t know what to say. He would have seen… how do I…. Ughhhh.”

“Ah,” Tutor finally understood the frantic pacing, the anger rustling beneath Phai’s skin, “and this Lu is on the Ground?”

“Mids,” Pahios sniffed. 

“Mids….” Tutor had very little patience for the unfathomable illogic of human problems. “Isn’t there a very famous firewall at the Mid-Gate? Between the New and Old Internets? The Network? Even I know about it.” He was very familiar with said firewall, his sympathy drying up fast, “your friend can’t even watch the cup race without descending, and they’ve blacked out the whole Ground.” Tutor tilted his tablet screen, revealing an updated district hazard map showing everything below the Mid-Gate gone dark. 

Phaios chewed his lip, but Lu had called. A million times. Lu knew, and he would demand Phaios say what he knew in words. Adon was hurt. Adon was broken. Adon wasn’t coming back. He was waiting for a ghost.

“Phai?” Nika stomped over, tucked into the largest sweatshirt from his locker, her hair mussed, the hoodie pocket weighed down by all the comms devices she’d tucked in it. She waved her phone, “Lu-Lu kept calling, so I answered and told him to just wait. He said he’s tired of waiting, and honestly,” she plopped down facing Phaios and Tutor, “I really don’t blame him. I’m pissed. I can’t believe Doni—did you, are you crying?” 

“No,” Phaios wiped his nose on his sleeve, but there was no point lying to her. 

The machine’s generator centrifuge slowed and the printer began etching out the triage print-o while the doctors filled out their advised actions, or wrote up reports, or filed prescriptions, or took a coffee break, or whatever they did between pod clients, and Tutor jumped up to grab it, but it took a lot longer than normal, so he stood with his hand out, letting the narrow paper fold into his palm.

When it finished and cried for a new roll of copy paper, it had spat out a small booklet of triage errors another Upper team would take over automating. Tutor thumbed through it, summarizing what he understood, his voice flat, “three breaks, four cracks, internal bleeding that they cut him open to mop up after patching a kidney, bruising for days,” he flipped through the long receipt scroll, pausing with a huff, “and I don’t even know what all this old stuff is from, though I have an idea.” He tossed the report toward Phaios while the machine began its formal print-o because it was Grounder logged and Grounders still preferred paper. Tutor sighed at the red-splotched body diagram and the alias ID printing below it—the kid didn’t even have an authentic ID to put in? Well, he wouldn’t, not if the Pits ate it. He sighed helplessly, “a bike with this kind of maintenance log would be scrapped as a mercy.”

Phaios’ rueful smile fell at the sheer enormity of the paper stack printing all the damage, line by line, every page a rainbow of red, orange, yellow and grey, not a single pixel green. Phaios knew Doni’s ID was as fake as Xeri’s, mostly because she was the one who made it for him, so he didn’t know who the machine thought it was scanning, if it was a blank read comparing him to the ideal state (which would account for the lack of green), if it was comparing him to a dead-ID (also accounting for the lack of greens), or if it was comparing him to his own last scan, the one he’d watched in a trance as it scrolled over the screen, from the Mids (which meant the lack of green signaled no improvements). 

His awe for Adon doubled, leaking into his already-obsessive reverence of Y, who’d survived beside him, wearing the same scars, but also a metaphorical cape, ever the people’s hero. If he hadn’t seen her fold Doni’s visor down herself, he’d already be running for his life. But she must have given permission, or agreement, she must have known his plan somehow. Adon’s friends were all ruthless like that, harsh and clawed, biting at their own legs, climbing over each other to survive without asking each other what it meant. What it cost. What they were willing to give up. 

“You knew,” Tutor nodded to himself at Phai’s passive gaze over the horrific print-o report that had finally finished, pulling the thick stack and smacking it at his chest, “you knew enough, and you let him race?” It wasn’t an accusation as much as a gathering of facts so he could decide how to direct his team after they finished their field reports and determined how long they’d be bunkered down. 

“Let?” Phaios snorted, pushing the papers away, he had enough secrets from Lu, he didn’t want to accidentally see more in a med report that may or may not belong to Adon, “sure, let’s say I let him race. What about it…?”

Tutor huffed, flipping through the report to the end pages and stabbing at the medical gibberish over the red diagrams, “has he never had a checkup? Did you write off his medical file? Delete it? Invent it? How did he get into the race? How did officials clear him? How is he even alive?”

“Tape and oil, Tutor! How else do you survive the Wells?” Phaios jumped up, the idea of Adon dying inside while he was flipping through papers a little too possible. He craned around Tutor to look into the tinted window of the hatch, but all he could see were mechanical arms whizzing through the air. He’d be the one to tell Lu, and he wasn’t sure if he would bother to duck out of the way if Lu held a gun to his head and told him to beg.

Tutor held his gaze until they both jumped as the bridge-access door banged open, followed by several shouts. 

“Tutor!” Lucia called to the whole garage, Kayla breathless behind her. “Get Tuto—OW! Watch it kid, I’ll put you through a wall right this second, I swear—” Lucia barked.

“Phaios, some kid’s going crazy, everyone’s going crazy.” Kayla’s voice shook, directing the scuffling group into the Duster garage.

Phaios realized the rumbling above the hangar was feet. Thousands of people, raging, stomping and screaming, racing down the cold cement halls toward the back halls to their team bunkers, out for blood. “Nik?” He called over heads of the filling garage, searching for Nika, but she’d left some time during his pity-party. “Nika?” He shouted over the noise, ignoring the fight breaking out at the opposite door as Tutor lumbered over to investigate.