Devil's Luck

by Carolyn Crane

“Hold on.” He got out of the car and walked over to Burtido, got his assurance that he’d see Fawna off safely, and borrowed a ten. He strolled back to where she stood, just outside the car; quietly, she shut passenger door.

  He shoved the money into her hand. “After we set off, Burtido’s going to walk you up the steps and three blocks over to Central Lane, and there’s a cab stand there.” This was a bad area of town, but she’d be okay with Burtido.

  “You’re still racing?”

  “Crashes happen all the time, Nostradamus.” He left her standing there and got back in the driver’s side, revving the engine. It was true, he reminded himself. Air bags deployed, people got banged up. What was he supposed to do, junk his car? Stop racing? Play it safe? He might as well get out a velour track suit and personal blood pressure cuff and start up his subscription to Shuffleboard magazine.

  He pulled his penknife from his boot and transferred it to his front pocket. He was starting to feel alive again—that rare sense of aliveness when he was up against it all.

  She leaned in the passenger window, eyes wide. “What are you doing? Why do you need a knife?”

  “Deployed air bags are a bitch to drive with. They block your vision and your movement.” He revved the motor some more and pushed in his Johnny Cash cassette. Air bags, blood. He reminded himself that the future was unwritten, as Joe Strummer from The Clash once said. Anything could happen. Simon was twenty-nine—that alone proved that anything was possible.

  Johnny began to sing in his deep baritone, naked and raw with feeling.

  Simon could feel Fawna’s eyes still on him.

  “You’re really still going?” she asked.

  “What does it look like?” He buckled up and met Burtido’s eyes from across the yard.

  “What about the crash?”

  “What about it?”

  “You think you can change the currents of fate?” she asked.

  “Screw the currents of fate. I’m not the bitch of fate.”

  When he looked over, she was smiling into the window at him. Beaming at him. She stepped back, opened the passenger door, and swung herself in, slamming it shut.

  “No way,” Simon said to her. “I’m not driving you into a crash. I’m not that big of an asshole.”

  “You’re going.” She buckled her belt.

  “And you’re not.” It was a little thrill, though, that she wanted to.

  “If you’re in, I’m in.”

  “I’m not messing around,” he said.

  The way she looked at him, eyes flashing, he had the sensation suddenly that she was drawing something from him. Something like nourishment. “What do you want?” he asked.

  “I want to go.” She buckled up. “And for your information, the future has shifted now that I’m riding. There’s no more problem. It’s all clear now.”

  “Stop telling me the future!”

  “I thought you would want to know that the prediction’s off.”

  “Maybe I’ll drive recklessly now that I know we won’t crash.”

  “It doesn’t work that way.”

  He revved the engine. “You’re not bullshitting me, are you?”

  “You sound like a worried mother hen.” She reached in her pocket and pulled out a tube of lipstick, tipped the rearview mirror and put it on.

  Mother hen. That was his line. She turned and gave him a pink-lipped smile. She’d put on lipstick. For a car race. It was all he could do not to grab her and kiss her. And obviously, she was telling the truth about the prediction being off. Of course she wouldn’t ride if she thought they’d crash.

  Still.

  He reached into the back and grabbed a bike helmet that somebody, probably Justine, had left there. He handed it to her.

  She squinted. “Really?”

  “Humor me.” He wanted her safe. He wanted her to stay.

  She frowned.

  “Come on, Burtido’s about to signal the start. And don’t forget to skunk your thoughts—we don’t want Jackson knowing our moves.”

  “You’re not wearing a helmet,” she said.

  “I never do.” The other drivers were revving their motors. Jackson and Harley in front, Cruster in the car next to them. “Put it on, or you’re out.”

  Burtido waved the flag and the other drivers peeled out, leaving them behind.

  “Go!” she screamed.

  Simon pointed at the helmet.

  “Shit! Okay!” She shoved it over her head.

  Simon blasted out. Quickly, they got up to speed, and Fawna started laughing.

  Laughing.

  He zoomed around a washing machine, clipping it. Fawna scream-laughed. Up ahead, Cruster was spinning out, forcing Harley up the tilted side.

  A moment later, debris flew through the air overhead, like a flock of misshapen birds. Harley. Fawna screamed as a bucket bounced off their window.

  “Don’t worry, it’s Plexiglas.” He dodged the debris that fell all around them and caught up to Cruster, who’d straightened from his spin. Cruster banged into their side. Fawna shrieked with delight.

  “Please!” Simon said. “I’m going deaf here!”

  Loose tires dropped into the middle of the straightaway. Harley again.

  “Hold on!” Simon zoomed up the side again, even farther this time.

  She screamed. “Whoa!”

  He laughed, skunking his thoughts with the music.

  Riding the tilted sides meant less debris—telekinetically thrown or otherwise—but more danger. Usually, the other drivers blocked him from the sides, but they hadn’t because she was there. They thought she wouldn’t allow it. They didn’t get her.

  And it was here, riding the side, passing Cruster, then Harley, then Jackson, that he realized something big: Fawna was different. She would never try to stop him from doing anything. When he got too close to the edge, she would not pull him back.

  The realization was dizzying.

  Fawna laughed and screamed, and it made him feel like laughing and screaming, too. Inside his chest, he was laughing and screaming. When he came down, he had the lead.

  “That works!” he yelled above the roar of Harley’s motor, Johnny Cash, and the rushing wind.

  “What?” she shouted as they avoided another rusty appliance.

  “They thought I’d take it easy.”

  She beamed at him. “Screw that!”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  She couldn’t believe how fast they were going. Wind rushed through the open window, whipping her hair.

  She’d been willing to die to get free of Bobby Barrington. Hell, she nearly had died. But even after she got away, she hadn’t felt free, because the future was always caging her—it caged her whether she peeked at it or not; it caged her when others wanted her to look; it caged her when people reacted to what she’d seen, or when she saw the worst and they didn’t know. It all made her feel like a caged rabbit.

  She would rather spend one afternoon as a lion like Simon than ten thousand days as a caged rabbit. She could see the future, but she didn’t have to care. It was delicious. They were outlaws of the universe.

  She was finally free.

  The wind whipped Simon’s dark hair as he shifted gears with rough, confident movements. The way he drove seemed impossibly masterful and sexy, and made her think about being kissed by him.

  They rounded a corner and went up on a side again and she hooted with total abandon. It was like a roller coaster. The old nearsighter, Cruster, pulled up beside them. He drove so close that she could almost reach through her open window and touch his cheek. She couldn’t believe they weren’t scraping sides. She exchanged glances with Simon, so happy to be there with him.

  She’d lied about the crash, of course. But if Simon would defy the future, she would too. The hell with it!

  She’d never known defiance was an option. Together they were making the future irrelevant. No, it was more than that—she felt safe with him in a way that made safety itself unimportant.


  “Watch out!” she cried. A burnt-out truck blocked the way. Screeches of brakes—theirs, Cruster’s. Jackson the telepath’s black-muscle car snaked out to take the lead, as their own car went into a spin.

  “Hoo!” Simon yelled, fighting to gain control.

  Was this it? The crash?

  The world spun, and then stopped. Simon jerked the shift and zoomed backward, then zoomed forward and they were back in the race.

  “Yay!” She pumped a fist. They still led Harley the telekinetic and Cruster the nearsighter. The road leveled up and they left the wash, bumping over a curb onto a service road for buses.

  Cruster veered off to the right.

  “The short-term prognosticator flees,” Simon shouted over the music. “Never a good sign.”

  “Bye, sucker!” Fawna yelled. Simon smiled. He liked when she talked like that. They roared through an empty parking lot when suddenly, loose tires and shopping carts began rolling around as if they’d come alive.

  “Harley! Dammit,” Simon said, swerving. “He wants to get a good position going into the Tangle. Really hard to pass in there. Jesus.” He avoided another rolling tire.

  She laughed. “Bring it on!”

  She hung onto the door handle as they headed through a hole in a chain-link fence and on into the dim cavern of the Tanglelands, Midcity’s ultimate no-go zone. Slivers of light shone from the slim gaps between the snarl of roads high above.

  He flicked on the headlights. “Gets bumpy in here. Just hold on until we get through.”

  They followed Jackson’s red taillights and throaty engine down some ancient road, like a ghost road underneath the loops of real road above.

  She’d never been in the Tanglelands, fabled graveyard of highway parts, home to dangerous miscreants. It looked like a postapocalyptic Habitrail.

  The Tanglelands.

  She smiled, feeling delirious with defiance. It was like a drug to her, these cool gasps of freedom; she wanted more, more, more! On impulse, she ripped her helmet off and threw it out the window. “Woooo!” She felt even freer. With every act of defiance, the stranglehold of her foresight loosened.

  “What’d you just do?” Simon yelled.

  She laughed. Johnny Cash was singing about a prison break. So perfect.

  “Where’s your helmet?” Simon glanced back and forth from her to his driving and back to her, a strange, dark god, hair wild in the wind. “What the hell did you do that for?”

  “I didn’t like that thing!”

  Simon fishtailed around a guardrail, then straightened.

  “The telekinetic will never catch up now!” Fawna said.

  “Jesus, Fawna!”

  “This is better.”

  Simon glanced at his rearview mirror, brows knitted. “Harley’s slowing!” It seemed to trouble him greatly that Harley the telepath was slowing.

  “Because he’ll never pass, that’s why!” she yelled. “Fuck it all! And fuck the crash!”

  “What?” He looked at her, wildly. “What?”

  “The crash! Fuck it!”

  When he glanced at her again, she saw something new in his eyes: Awe. She felt honored, somehow, to have awe from Simon, to be on this level with him. He was saying something about having to get out of there—she barely heard him over the engines and the music, and it didn’t matter, because she felt him with her. He seemed pure, that’s the thought she suddenly had. Simon was pure and shining, and with her.

  “Shit,” he said. And he began to laugh. And she laughed.

  She could let it be just this. This. With him.

  She could!

  Suddenly something caught her eye. “Hey!” She pointed overhead—it was like a big, prehistoric bird. As it neared, it was clearly a tarp of some sort.

  “Dammit, Harley!” Simon slammed on the brakes, and then gunned it. But the tarp clapped onto their windshield with a wet slap, blocking their view, the corner smacking Fawna’s face through her open window.

  “Ow!” Brakes squealed.

  Fawna screamed. A head-jolting bang—they’d hit something. They were spinning. The tarp flew off, and they could see the dim world of the Tanglelands again, spinning and whipping around.

  A series of bangs joggled her butt, her spine. They were off the road, banging down a level, another. The bangs rattled her teeth and her eyeballs, and then the hard screech of metal on metal twisted into her eardrums. A gray pillar suddenly appeared out of nowhere—right at the front of the car—as the air bag blew up into her face, blotting out the world.

  And just like that, everything stopped. Her stomach felt funny. It was so startling, the jolt of the stop, this air bag exploding at her.

  Her ears rang with a silence that was its own kind of loud.

  “Simon?” She pushed at her air bag, trying to get it off her face, but it was like fighting water.

  She thought she heard him, but she couldn’t hear—or see. God! What if this was how he got the heart injury that later killed him?

  “Simon?” Her pulse raced, and her lip stung; it seemed warm and wet. Bleeding.

  “Simon!” She pushed at her air bag.

  The loud was coming back. Was that his voice? Oh, he had to be okay! The seat bounced. A grunt, a rip. A hand pushing the bag off her face.

  Horror appeared in Simon’s eyes. “Fawna!”

  She shook her head, touched her lip, and smiled. “I’m okay. I’m okay! It was just that stupid tarp.”

  Simon looked shaken.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Of course,” he said.

  Engines roared above their heads—her hearing was back. Their dimmed headlights illuminated mist or smoke or whatever was down here. A massive something tilted above, maybe a long-ago collapsed road, she thought. Or were they the ones who were tilted?

  She licked her lip, and then pointed to the bit of blood on her nearly deflated air bag. “That’s the picture I saw.”

  And she was okay.

  “You lied.”

  She couldn’t tell from his dazed blue gaze if he was angry or impressed. Maybe both. She grinned at him. They were outlaws. Two lions.

  “And you ditched the helmet? Knowing we’d crash?”

  “So sorry, Mister Safety First.”

  “You can’t do that,” he said. “Ever again.”

  “It’s okay for you to race into a crash and not for me?”

  “In a nutshell? Yes.”

  “Sorry. This was too amazing to miss. Not the crash, but you know.” She meant the defiance, the freedom of slapping the future in the face—her new favorite sport. She grinned. She knew he knew.

  He reached across to her now and pressed his thumb to her lip, wiping the blood, still gazing into her eyes. “You shouldn’t have.”

  “It was just a way of retracting the prediction,” she said.

  He paused, thoughtful. Did he appreciate the gesture? “I mean you shouldn’t have waded into a crash. But yeah, you can’t look at my future anymore. Fawna, I need you not to look. Got it?”

  “No new looking. Got it,” she said, feeling so sick for what she’d seen that spring. Him dying under that gaming table. What she’d seen, it could be years away—she hadn’t really studied it for time or place cues; she’d have to call it up again for that. But she wouldn’t. She’d respect his wishes as best she could.

  “I understand,” she said. “I do.”

  He squinted at a smoky shaft of sunlight.

  It was nice, just sitting there with him. They’d been through something—more than one something. She felt as if she’d known him for years.

  “We need to get out of here.” He hopped out and walked to the front of the car. The headlights from the low angle gave him a devilishly lit face, black hair flopped over one eye.

  She unbuckled, looking around, trying to figure out where they’d come from. Where was the road? Which way was east? She could usually tell.

  Her door flew open. “Get out!” Simon gripped her arm and jerked her out of the seat
with a ferocious yank.

  “What?”

  He didn’t answer. He didn’t even close the door—just dragged her along with him up the ruined road into the darkness beyond where the headlights shone. They scrambled over some rocks and squeezed in behind a block of concrete. He grabbed her hands and put them over her ears, then did the same, crouching in front of her, covering her, just as an explosion ripped through the space.

  The car.

  She didn’t see it, but she felt it, heard it, and saw the flash through her shut eyelids. “Crap.” Slowly, she took her hands from her ears.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah. You?”

  “Yup.” Simon stood up, peeked out around the corner, then gazed down at her, all cool. There was a beat of silence as he watched her. Then he reached down to where she still crouched, took her hands, and pulled her up.

  “Wow,” she said.

  Just then, his face was invaded by a smile so lovely that it broke her heart. She realized that he didn’t smile much—not in a genuine way.

  He said, “Told you I wasn’t driving you home.”

  Laughing, she pulled from his grip and punched him in the chest. He caught her hands and a mad, good feeling rose between them, pure heat and exhilaration. Simon’s breathing seemed ragged; was something happening to him? Then he hauled her to him and kissed her, lips pressed hard and hot to hers.

  The strange force of the kiss stunned her momentarily—it was like lightning and heat had opened a gate between them, and she felt flooded with it and with him. She wrapped her arms around him, luxuriating in his soft lips, frantic to pull him closer to her, to eat him up, to kiss and bite and love him. Oh, it was all wrong and crazy, but this too was an unstoppable freight train, and she wouldn’t have it any other way. She breathed him in along with the smoky air and the excitement of the darkness around them.

  Suddenly he broke away, breathless. “We have to get out of here.”

  She stared, dumbfounded, with a pounding, wild feeling in her heart. “Shouldn’t we stay put? Won’t they be sending people after us?”

  “Sending people into the Tangle? Like who? No, that’s not how this works. And this place is full of oily water.”

  He peeked out again, and then led her across a rubbley passage, away from the burning car and the tiny fires that were springing up all over.