Dust Sprint

The dust-sled didn't like the heat, and honestly, neither did I. I rolled her into the staging yard at the Star-Bazaar just after seven in the morning, when the awnings were still throwing long shadows and the luck-sellers hadn't finished arguing with each other about their spots. The sled coughed twice and settled. I patted the dash like she was a horse, which is a habit I picked up from my uncle and never got rid of.

Vanessa Reed, thirty-four years old, cargo runner, single as of eight months ago. That last part still sat funny in my mouth.

I climbed out and started checking tie-downs. The Relic Run had a rule about stripped-down rigs, so everything not bolted to the sled had to come off and go in a crate. I was hauling my spare water cell out of the back bin when I saw them across the yard.

Adrian Ferris. Thirty-six, still wearing that stupid wide-brim hat he thought made him look like a broker instead of what he was. He had a clipboard under one arm and a driver in a yellow jacket standing next to him, and beside Adrian, holding a stack of papers, was Wally Lagarde.

My jaw did the thing. The clenching thing. I knew it was happening and I did it anyway.

Wally was the auctioneer's clerk. Young man, twenty-nine, always looked slightly apologetic about existing. I'd seen him a hundred times at market fairs over the years, back when Adrian and I were still together, back when things were fine. Then eight months ago I caught Adrian at the Saffron Fair leaning way too close to some enamel-jewelry woman, laughing at whatever she said like it was the funniest thing ever said in a desert. That was the end of four years. That was it.

And now here was Wally, who I'd later find out had his own history with Adrian, standing at Adrian's elbow like a paid accessory.

"Vanessa!" Avery Pace's voice carried across the whole yard. She was up on the announcer's platform already, a tall woman of forty-one in a racing jacket with twelve years of Relic Run patches sewn down one sleeve. "You're early. I like early. Early means you're scared, and scared drivers put on a good show."

"I'm not scared, I'm punctual," I called back. "There's a difference, Avery."

"Not from up here there isn't." She laughed and turned back to her checklist.

I went back to my crate. I was stacking the water cell when a shadow fell over me and I didn't have to look up to know who it was.

"You're running this year," Adrian said. "I heard, but I didn't believe it until I saw the sled."

"Believe it." I set the cell down and stood up. "Who's your driver? That yellow jacket?"

"Corin Bask. He's taken second three years running. This year he takes first," he said it like he was reading a shipping label.

"Confident."

"Invested. There's a difference." He smiled at me, and it was the same smile from the fair, the one that thought it was charming. "It's good to see you, Van. You look well."

"I look sweaty. It's seven in the morning in a desert." I picked the cell back up. "Good luck to Corin. Genuinely. He seems like a decent guy, which means he's stuck with you as a sponsor, so he'll need it."

I walked off before he could answer. Behind me I heard Wally say something quiet to him and Adrian laugh. I didn't turn around to see what the laugh looked like. I had work to do and a race to win, and the race was the only one of those two things I could control.

By nine the yard was packed. Racers, crews, the usual crowd of bazaar folk who show up to any event with free noise. A woman selling cold cucumber water worked the lines of spectators. Somebody's bottled cantrip escaped its jar and drifted around the staging area glowing a soft green until a hex-tinker caught it in a net and charged the owner a retrieval fee.

Avery took the platform at nine sharp. She had a brass megaphone she never actually needed, but she liked the weight of it in her hand.

"Welcome, welcome, to the twelfth annual Relic Run!" she boomed. "For those of you new to the Dust-Shelf, here's the shape of it. The course runs out of this yard, through the back alleys of the Star-Bazaar, across the old salt lake, and down into the canyon of the abandoned spirit-forges. First sled back through this gate with a driver still breathing wins. Everything else is decoration."

Somebody in the crowd cheered. Avery held up a hand.

"Now. The prize!" She reached behind her and lifted a box. Not a crate, a box, black lacquer with a wax seal the size of my fist. "This year's prize comes to us sealed and unexamined, per the donor's request. I have been told it is a relic of considerable power. I have not been told what it does. Neither have you. That's the fun of it."

I looked across the yard. Adrian was smiling at the box like it was already his. Corin stood next to him with his arms crossed, and Wally was off to the side, checking a ledger. The clerk's job, I figured. He kept the prize registry for the Star-Bazaar, so of course he'd be here.

"You may be wondering who the donor is," Avery went on. "Per tradition, the donor remains anonymous until the race concludes and the prize changes hands. I will say only this: the donor has done business in this bazaar for a very long time, and the donor has a flair for the dramatic, which is why the seal is unbroken and the contents are a surprise even to me." She set the box on a stand. "The sealed relic goes to the winner. No trades, no refunds, no whining. Questions?"

There were always questions. A guy near me asked if spirit-forge canyon was still haunted. Avery said yes, but only on the parts that mattered. A woman asked if the salt lake was passable. Avery said it had been passable last Tuesday, and good luck. Somebody asked what happened if two sleds crossed the line together, and Avery said that had never happened in twelve years and if it happened this year she'd flip a coin and enjoy the riot.

I spent the last hour before the start doing what I always did. Fuel line. Air filter. The tensioner on the rear tread, which had been making a noise I didn't love. A kid, well, a young woman of about twenty-two, came by selling good-luck charms and I bought one mostly to make her stop hovering. It was a bent iron nail on a string. I tied it to the mirror.

"You racing?" she asked.

"That's the plan."

"Against Corin Bask?" She made a face. "He's good."

"Everybody's good until the canyon."

She shrugged like that was either very wise or very stupid and moved on down the line.

At noon Avery came back up. The crowd had swollen, and the heat had too. I was in the sled with my gloves on, visor down. Fifteen rigs on the line, mine in the third row. Corin had pole position, because of course he did, points standing from last season.

"Drivers," Avery called. "The prize is on the stand. The gate is on the switch. The desert does not care about any of us, which is why we love it. On my mark."

Adrian was standing at the barrier right across from my row. He gave me a little two-finger salute. I gave him one back, because I'm not rude, I just hold grudges.

Wally was beside him with the ledger, and for a second, maybe half a second, he looked over at my sled instead of the prize box. Then he looked down at his papers like he'd made a mistake doing it.

"Mark," said Avery, and hit the switch.

The gate dropped and the yard went from noise to engine noise, which is a better kind. I dropped into third and took the first alley with the tread sliding just a little, the way I like it, and the Star-Bazaar blurred past on both sides, stalls and awnings and saffron dust, and somewhere behind me Adrian was watching his driver take the lead.

The first alley dumped us into the spice row, which is the wrong place to be at speed but the right place if you're behind. Corin took the line clean and I tucked in behind him, third sled back, with a guy in a green scarf riding my left tread so close I could hear him breathing through his vents.

"Back off, friend," I said, though he couldn't hear me.

The spice row bends east around the candle-wax stalls, and the bend is where you lose two seconds if you're polite. I wasn't feeling polite. There's a talisman stall right on the apex, the one with the striped awning and the ward-chains hanging off every corner, and the whole row narrows to a gap about as wide as a sled and a half. Every driver goes around it.

I went through it.

Now, I could claim my uncle's voice was in my head telling me not to, but honestly my uncle would've been the first one through. He taught me that a ward-chain sings before it bites, and if you hear the note you've already committed, so you may as well hold your line. I heard the note. It was a high thin thing, like a wet finger on glass, and then my left arm lit up.

I kept the throttle down. The sled clipped a hanging lantern of bottled luck, which burst, and for about ten feet the air in front of my windshield was the color of a bruise. Somewhere behind me I heard green scarf hit the ward-chains at speed, and he was not holding his line, and he was out.

"Third place," I said to the dash, and patted it the way you pat a horse that just jumped something it had no business jumping.

The alley after the spice row opens onto the salt road, and the salt road is where the pack sorts itself out. Corin was still ahead, yellow jacket bright against the white. The second sled was a heavy rig out of the north stalls, all torque and no manners, and I sat on its bumper through the first quarter mile of the lake until it got salt-crusted and I got around it.

The ward-singe was still talking to me. I checked it at the second turn, one hand off the yoke. It wasn't a burn exactly, more like a sunburn drawn in lines, tracing where the chain had brushed me. It would sting for a day and then it would be a story. Fair trade for two seconds and a position.

Avery's voice came out of the relay stones they'd staked along the course, thin and crackly with distance. "And the pack hits the salt lake, ladies and gentlemen, where we have lost our first driver to the spice row wards, which happens more years than not, and where Corin Bask is running the kind of line that's won him second place three years running. Somebody tell that man second place pays the same as third minus the glory."

I laughed in my helmet, alone, like an idiot.

The middle of the salt lake is the boring part. Flat white, heat shimmer, nothing to do but hold the throttle and listen to your own engine and your own blood. That's when I did my thinking, and most of my thinking was about a box.

A relic of considerable power, unexamined, in a lacquer box. And Adrian smiling at it like it was already his. Adrian had been brokering relics for a decade and he had a nose for value that I used to think was a virtue. Eight months ago I'd thought a lot of things about him were virtues.

Here's the arithmetic I did at speed on a salt