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

“What…” she forced herself to say, but pushing the air out was too much.

“Oh god, we’re caught in her spell!”

Whose spell, you git? “Stay… calm…”

She couldn’t reassure him, and just trying to breathe was taxing enough. If someone was fixing the race, there’d be hell to pay. Sure, everyone had spells, but only a fool would dare cast one into a PGRF speedway to cheat. A cadre of wizards stood at the ready for just such an event, and any second, the dispersers would come online and knock this whole spiderweb down.

In the frozen world, an inky blob moved at the end of the tunnel. A creature came crawling along the ceiling, its black mass of tattered fabric writhing like tentacles as it skittered across the tiles. It moved easily from one perch to the next, silently capering overhead before dropping down in front of the two frozen cars.

Cyril screamed. She couldn’t blame him.

The creature stood upright, and Nilah realized that it was human. Its hood swept away, revealing a brass mask with a cutaway that exposed thin, angry lips on a sallow chin. Metachroic lenses peppered the exterior of the mask, and Nilah instantly recognized their purpose—to see in all directions. Mechanists had always talked about creating such a device, but no one had ever been able to move for very long while wearing one; it was too disorienting.

The creature put one slender boot on Cyril’s car, then another as it inexorably clambered up the car’s body. It stopped in front of Cyril and tapped the helmet on his trembling head with a long, metallic finger.

Where are the bloody dispersers?

Cyril’s terrified voice huffed over the radio. “Mother, please…”

Mother? Cyril’s mother? No; Nilah had met Missus Clowe at the previous year’s winner’s party. She was a dull woman, like her loser son. Nilah took a closer look at the wrinkled sneer poking out from under the mask.

Her voice was a slithering rasp. “Where did you get that map, Cyril?”

“Please. I wasn’t trying to double-cross anyone. I just thought I could make a little money on the side.”

Mother crouched and ran her metal-encased fingers around the back of his helmet. “There is no ‘on the side,’ Cyril. We are everywhere. Even when you think you are untouchable, we can pluck you from this universe.”

Nilah strained harder against her arcane chains, pulling more color into her body, desperate to get free. She was accustomed to being able to outrun anything, to absolute speed. Panic set in.

“You need me to finish this race!” he protested.

“We don’t need anything from you. You were lucky enough to be chosen, and there will always be others. Tell me where you got the map.”

“You’re just going to kill me if I tell you.”

Nilah’s eyes narrowed, and she forced herself to focus in spite of her crawling fear. Kill him? What the devil was Cyril into?

Mother’s metal fingers clacked, tightening across his helmet. “It’s of very little consequence to me. I’ve been told to kill you if you won’t talk. That was my only order. If you tell me, it’s my discretion whether you live or die.”

Cyril whimpered. “Boots… er… Elizabeth Elsworth. I was looking for… I wanted to know what you were doing, and she… she knew something. She said she could find the Harrow .”

Nilah’s gaze shifted to Mother, the racer’s eye movements sluggish and sleepy despite her terror. Elizabeth Elsworth? Where had Nilah heard that name before? She had the faintest feeling that it’d come from the Link, maybe a show or a news piece. Movement in the periphery interrupted her thoughts.

The ghastly woman swept an arm back, fabric tatters falling away to reveal an armored exoskeleton encrusted with servomotors and glowing sigils. Mother brought her fist down across Cyril’s helmet, crushing it inward with a sickening crack.

Nilah would’ve begun hyperventilating, if she could breathe. This couldn’t be happening. Even with the best military-grade suits, there was no way this woman could’ve broken Cyril’s helmet with a mere fist. His protective gear could withstand a direct impact at three hundred kilometers per hour. Nilah couldn’t see what was left of his head, but blood oozed between the cracked plastic like the yolk of an egg.

Just stay still. Maybe you can fade into the background. Maybe you can—

“And now for you,” said Mother, stepping onto the fibron body of Nilah’s car. Of course she had spotted Nilah moving in that helmet of hers. “I think my spell didn’t completely affect you, did it? It’s so difficult with these fast-moving targets.”

Mother’s armored boots rested at the edge of Nilah’s cockpit, and mechanical, prehensile toes wrapped around the lip of the car. Nilah forced her neck to crane upward through frozen time to look at Mother’s many eyes.

“Dear lamb, I am so sorry you saw that. I hate to be so harsh,” she sighed, placing her bloody palm against Nilah’s silver helmet, “but this is for the best. Even if you got away, you’d have nowhere to run. We own everything.”

Please, please, please, dispersers… Nilah’s eyes widened. She wasn’t going to die like this. Not like Cyril. Think. Think.

“I want you to relax, my sweet. The journos are going to tell a beautiful story of your heroic crash with that fool.” She gestured to Cyril as she said this. “You’ll be remembered as the champion that could’ve been.”

Dispersers scramble spells with arcane power. They feed into the glyph until it’s over capacity. Nilah spread her magic over the car, looking for anything she could use to fire a pulse of magic: the power unit—drive shaft locked, the energy recovery system—too weak, her ejection cylinder—lockbolts unresponsive… then she remembered the Arclight Booster. She reached into it with her psychic connection, finding the arcane linkages foggy and dim. Something about the way this spell shut down movement even muddled her mechanist’s art. She latched on to the booster, knowing the effect would be unpredictable, but it was Nilah’s only chance. She tripped the magical switch to fire the system.

Nothing. Mother wrapped her steely hands around Nilah’s helmet.

“I should twist instead of smash, shouldn’t I?” whispered the old woman. “Pretty girls should have pretty corpses.”

Nilah connected the breaker again, and the slow puff of arcane plumes sighed from the Arclight. It didn’t want to start in this magical haze, but it was her only plan. She gave the switch one last snap.

The push of magical flame tore at the gray, hazy shroud over the world, pulling it away. An array of coruscating starbursts surged through the surface, and Nilah was momentarily blinded as everything returned to normal. The return of momentum flung Mother from the car, and Nilah was slammed back into her seat.

Faster and faster her car went, until Nilah wasn’t even sure the tires were touching the road. Mother’s spell twisted around the Arclight’s, intermingling, destabilizing, twisting space and time in ways Nilah never could’ve predicted. It was dangerous to mix unknown magics—and often deadly.

She recognized this effect, though—it was the same as when she passed through a jump gate. She was teleporting.

A flash of light and she became weightless. At least she could breathe again.

She locked onto the sight of a large, windowless building, but there was something wrong with it. It shouldn’t have been upside down as it was, nor should it have been spinning like that. Her car was in free fall. Then she slammed into a wall, her survival shell enveloping her as she blew through wreckage like a cannonball.

Her stomach churned with each flip, but this was far from her first crash. She relaxed and let her shell come to a halt, wedged in a half-blasted wall. Her fuel system exploded, spraying elemental energies in all directions. Fire, ice, and gusts of catalyzed gasses swirled outside the racer’s shell.