Jackson Ford - The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t with Her Mind

The next pair of lights ignited: four seconds.

The other drivers revved their engines, feeling the tuning of their cars. Nilah echoed their rumbling engines with a shout of her own and gave a heated sigh, savoring the fire in her belly.

Three seconds.

Don’t think. Just see.

The last light came on, signaling the director was ready to start the race.

Now, it was all about reflexes. All the engines fell to near silence.

One second.

The lights clicked off.

Banshee wails filled the air as the cars’ power units screamed to life. Nilah roared forward, her eyes darting over the competition. Who was it going to be? Bonnie lagged by just a hair, and Jin made a picture-perfect launch, surging up beside Kristof. Nilah wanted to make a dive for it but found herself forced in behind the two lead drivers.

They shot down the straight toward turn one, a double apex. Turn one was always the most dangerous, because the idiots fighting for the inside were most likely to brake too late. She swept out for a perfect parabola, hoping not to see some fool about to crash into her.

The back of the pack was brought up by slow, pathetic Cyril Clowe. He would be her barometer of race success. If she could lap him in a third of the race, it would be a perfect run.

“Tell race control I’m lapping Clowe in twenty-five,” Nilah grunted, straining against the g-force of her own acceleration. “I want those blue flags ready.”

“He might not like that.”

“If he tries anything, I’ll leave him pasted to the tarmac.”

“You’re still in the pack,” came Ash’s response. “Focus on the race.”

Got ten seconds on the Arclight. Four-car gap to Jin. Turn three is coming up too fast.

Bonnie Hayes loomed large in the rearview, dodging left and right along the straight. The telltale flash of an Arclight Booster erupted on the right side, and Bonnie shot forward toward the turn. Nilah made no moves to block, and the R-27 overtook her. It’d been a foolish ploy, and faced with too much speed, Bonnie needed to brake too hard. She’d flat-spot her tires.

Right on cue, brake dust and polymer smoke erupted from Bonnie’s wheels, and Nilah danced to the outside, sliding within mere inches of the crimson paint. Nilah popped through the gears and the car thrummed with her magic, rewarding her with a pristine turn. The rest of the pack was not so lucky.

Shredded fibron and elemental magic filled Nilah’s rearview as the cars piled up into turn three like an avalanche. She had to keep her eyes on the track, but she spotted Guillaume, Anantha, and Bonnie’s cars in the wreck.

“Nicely done,” said Ash.

“All in a day’s work, babes.”

Nilah weaved through the next five turns, taking them exactly as practiced. Her car was water, flowing through the track along the swiftest route. However, Kristof and Jin weren’t making things easy for her. She watched with hawkish intent and prayed for a slip, a momentary lockup, or anything less than the perfect combination of gear shifts.

Thirty degrees right, shift up two, boost… boost. Follow your prey until it makes a mistake.

Nilah’s earpiece chirped as Ash said, “Kater’s side of the garage just went crazy. He just edged Jin off the road and picked up half a second in sector one.”

She grimaced. “Half a second?”

“Yeah. It’s going to be a long battle, I’m afraid.”

Her magic reached into the gearbox, tuning it for low revs. “Not at all. He’s gambling. Watch what happens next.”

She kept her focus on the track, reciting her practiced motions with little variance. The crowd might be thrilled by a half-second purple sector, but she knew to keep it even. With the increased tire wear, his car would become unpredictable.

“Kristof is in the run-off! Repeat: He’s out in the kitty litter,” came Ash.

“Well, that was quick.”

She crested the hill to find her teammate’s car spinning into the gravel along the run of the curve. She only hazarded a minor glance before continuing on.

“Switch to strat one,” said Ash, barely able to contain herself. “Push! Push!”

“Tell Clowe he’s mine in ten laps.”

Nilah sliced through the chicane, screaming out of the turn with her booster aflame. She was a polychromatic comet, completely in her element. This race would be her masterpiece. She held the record for the most poles for her age, and she was about to get it for the most overtakes.

The next nine laps went well. Nilah handily widened the gap between herself and Kristof to over ten seconds. She sensed fraying in her tires, but she couldn’t pit just yet. If she did, she’d never catch Clowe by the end of the race. His fiery orange livery flashed at every turn, tantalizingly close to overtake range.

“Put out the blue flags. I’m on Cyril.”

“Roger that,” said Ash. “Race control, requesting blue flags for Cyril Clowe.”

His Arclight flashed as he burned it out along the straightaway, and she glided through the rippling sparks. The booster was a piece of garbage, but it had its uses, and Clowe didn’t understand any of them. He wasn’t even trying anymore, just blowing through his boost at random times. What was the point?

Nilah cycled through her radio frequencies until she found Cyril’s. Best to tease him a bit for the viewers at home. “Okay, Cyril, a lesson: use the booster to make the car go faster.”

He snorted on his end. “Go to hell, Nilah.”

“Being stuck behind your slow ass is as close as I’ve gotten.”

“Get used to it,” he snapped, his whiny voice grating on her ears. “I’m not letting you past.”

She downshifted, her transmission roaring like a tiger. “I hope you’re ready to get flattened then.”

Galica’s iconic Paige Tunnel loomed large ahead, with its blazing row of lights and disorienting reflective tiles. Most racers would avoid an overtake there, but Nilah had been given an opportunity, and she wouldn’t squander it. The outside stadium vanished as she slipped into the tunnel, hot on the Hambley’s wing.

She fired her booster, and as she came alongside Clowe, the world’s colors began to melt from their surfaces, leaving only drab black and white. Her car stopped altogether—gone from almost two hundred kilometers per hour to zero in the blink of an eye.

Nilah’s head darkened with a realization: she was caught in someone’s spell as surely as a fly in a spiderweb.

The force of such a stop should have powdered her bones and liquefied her internal organs instantly, but she felt no change in her body, save that she could barely breathe.

The world had taken on a deathly shade. The body of the Hyper 8, normally a lovely blue, had become an ashen gray. The fluorescent magenta accents along her white jumpsuit had also faded, and all had taken on a blurry, shifting turbulence.

Her neck wouldn’t move, so she couldn’t look around. Her fingers barely worked. She connected her mind to the transmission, but it wouldn’t shift. The revs were frozen in place in the high twenty thousands, but she sensed no movement in the drive shaft.

All this prompted a silent, slow-motion scream. The longer she wailed, the more her voice came back. She flexed her fingers as hard as they’d go through the syrupy air. With each tiny movement, a small amount of color returned, though she couldn’t be sure if she was breaking out of the spell—or into it.

“Nilah, is that you?” grunted Cyril. She’d almost forgotten about the Hambley driver next to her. All the oranges and yellows on his jumpsuit and helmet stood out like blazing bonfires, and she wondered if that’s why he could move. But his car was the same gray as everything else, and he struggled, unsuccessfully, to unbuckle. Was Nilah on the cusp of the magic’s effects?