The Blood Racer (The Blood Racer Trilogy Book 1)

by Winchester, Matthew

  I, on the other hand, was the total opposite. Trying to crawl over the flat metal plaque was not my best idea. As I began to work my way across it, I wasn’t able to grip it very well with my knees, and I felt my balance shifting to the left.

  “Rigel,” I said as I began to tilt. My muscles were too exhausted for me to right myself on the cable. “Rigel!”

  I slipped.

  “No!” I heard Rigel shout.

  I felt my fingers vibrated as they slid off of the cable. I felt weightless for a split second. I was falling. I felt my torso jerk, however, and my upper body swung backwards. By some miracle, my legs had remained wrapped around the steel cable, and I was hanging upside down over several thousand feet of empty air.

  Suddenly, Rigel’s boot was in front of my face. “Use my leg to pull yourself up!” he shouted.

  Immediately, I clawed for the leg of his thick trousers. My fingers, fueled by the threat of death, found the strength to grip his pants and drag the upper half of my body back up to the cable, which I practically bear-hugged.

  “Are you okay?” Rigel asked, his voice high with concern.

  I nodded. “Yeah. Thanks.”

  I heard him let out a small sigh of relief. “Come on. The sooner we’re back on solid ground, the better. Think you can crawl like that?”

  Despite my intense desire to not move at all, and simply have someone air-lift me back to safety, I nodded again, taking several deep breaths.

  “Yeah, I’m good. Let’s go,” I said, feigning confidence.

  I knew Rigel wasn’t buying it, but he didn’t question me. He began to squirm quickly back toward the docks. Behind him, I clutched the cable as hard as I could and crawled upside down, hoping that my arms and legs could handle the trip. It took forever, but we eventually did make it back to the edge of the dock. The cable led up over the side, but I wasn’t going to be able to climb up. Not at this level of exhaustion.

  Ahead of me - and also above me, as it were - Rigel clamored up onto the docks and turned around. “Grab my hand!” he said, crouching down.

  Taking a few deep breaths, I pulled myself up as far as I could and reached up toward him, wrapping my fingers around his forearm. I watched his face as he strained to pull me up. I knew Rigel was strong, but I had never asked him to lift me by one arm before. I moved upward a bit, but it wasn’t enough. He couldn’t get me past the cable.

  “Okay,” Rigel said, panting for breath. “You’re gonna have to let go of the line.”

  “What!?” I shouted.

  “You need to get free of the cable,” he told me. “Hurry, I can’t hold you much longer!”

  I had to loosen my legs. I had to trust Rigel to hold me, single-handedly, above nothing. I had to literally put my life in his hands. He had saved me before, in the Veil, and now I was trusting him to keep me alive once again. He was my best friend, but I couldn’t deny the fear that I was feeling.

  I looked up, locking eyes with him. “Rigel-”

  “I know. Just let go!” he bellowed.

  And so I did. I released the grip that my legs had on the cable, and I was falling again. Instantly, the strain on my shoulder told me that Rigel had me. I felt my back and heels swing forward and smack hard into the wall of the dock, which sent jolts of pain through my already aching body. Above me, Rigel was grunting loudly, and I could feel his hand crushing my arm like a vice. After a moment, though, I began to rise. With my feet dangling over open air, he gave one last growl and pulled me up and over the side before collapsing with my head and shoulders across his legs.

  “Good work,” I said after a moment, relishing the feel of solid ground beneath me.

  He took a few deep breaths before I felt him sit up. “Come on!” he said urgently. “They’re getting ahead of us!”

  Groaning with dread, I rolled onto my hands and knees and pushed myself to my feet, feeling all of my limbs trying to function normally. Sadly, it wasn’t working very well, but I did my best to keep up with Rigel. His eyes were locked onto the backs of Grace, John, and Killian, all of whom were dashing away from the docks and into the city.

  As we were turning to follow them, I saw a figure in the crowd waving wildly from my peripheral vision. Turning my head to the right, I saw Darby, hopping up and down and flailing her arms at me to get my attention. I could also see her mouth moving like she was calling me, but I couldn’t hear her over the crowd noise.

  “Rigel!” I called, hoping to stop him with me.

  At the sound of his name, he skidded to a stop and looked back at me, his eyes wide with adrenaline. He glanced over to Darby, but as he looked back at me, his eyebrows pulled in, twisting his face into an expression of regret. I figured out why as soon as he turned and broke into a run, following Grace, John, and Killian…and leaving me staring after him in utter disbelief.

  “Rigel!” I screeched. He didn’t stop. He just lowered his head and sprinted after the others.

  Did he really just run away and leave me here? Did he really just steal the clue that he and I had worked together to collect? I wanted to dash right after him, to tackle him to the ground and maybe punch him a few good times. I turned back to Darby, wondering what she was doing. Whatever she wanted must have been important.

  Or at least it better be, I thought. As much as I wanted to follow behind the new group of leaders, I knew she would never leave me in the same way. Cursing at the top of my lungs - and vowing a painful revenge against Rigel - I spurred my rubbery legs into action, hustling back over to the spoke I had started from.

  As I passed by the sea of excited faces, I did my best to humor them by waving and giving weak smiles. Unfortunately, this didn’t really do much to placate them. If anything, it made them more ravenous, it made them cheer louder. If the Dominion’s rules weren’t so strict, I had no doubt that they’d all be clawing for a piece of me right now. Thankfully, none of them were willing to chance it, and I skirted by them untouched, reaching Darby in just under a minute.

  “What’s going on?” I wheezed, doubling over with my hands on my knees.

  She was standing right in front of the Mother Stone, her hands resting on the words that were carved into its smooth surface. “Some of the people were pointing to this,” she said, practically shouting in my ear. “I think it’s important.”

  I wanted to yell at her for wasting my time, for stopping me when I could have been right with the leaders, but the citizens had been the ones to point out the cable to me. Not that it would have been hard to figure out, but still…they knew much more about what was happening in their city than I did. If they were pointing to the Mother Stone, then I needed to at least take a look.

  Quickly, I scanned over the text. It was familiar, of course, but I hadn’t read it in three years, and I had never committed it to memory. “Shiloh ascended in the year 2119, blah blah blah,” I muttered to myself, still breathing heavily as I scanned the long inscription. “Carrying the Dominion on its back…beacon of excellence…holds the Wall of the Fallen…hope for humanity’s future…blah blah.”

  “The Wall of the Fallen,” Darby said. “That must be where they’re all going!”

  I nodded. “Yeah, but…I mean, why were these people telling you to look at this thing?” I asked, pointing down to the stone.

  Darby shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe there’s something there that we’ll need to remember?”

  “I think it was probably just to clue us in about the Wall of the Fallen,” I said. “Come on, we can still catch Rigel!”

  At once, the two of us took off at a run just as two more ships were approaching the docks. I didn’t bother to look and see who it was, though. I probably wouldn’t have even known. Instead, I used their arrival to fuel my burning legs, to push them as fast as they would carry me. I had to catch Rigel. He had the piece of the clue that I needed. If I reached the Wall and he was already gone, Darby and I would both be in serious trouble.

  I had been to the memorial wall before. Twice, to be exac
t. I knew where it was, located in the middle of one of Shiloh’s small parks. There were four nature parks in this city, all of them designed to give the citizens the illusion of walking on the planet’s surface…or how the surface used to be, anyway. But, since the Wall was sort of a tourist destination, it was in the park nearest to the docks. Sadly, it was still about ten minutes away, strategically positioned so that a trip there would lead visitors past all the shops and boutiques that were built to grab their tokens.

  Darby and I weaved through the wide, cobblestone streets, alternating between jogging and walking, and avoiding as many people as we could. The buildings here were so pleasant to look at. Many of them were made of brick and stone, which was almost mystifying to me. Rainier had a few buildings made of stone, but these were carved so perfectly, so intricately, and they looked nothing like what I was used to. In Adams, if it wasn’t made of rusted metal, then it was definitely from out of town. Here, the skyscrapers were very modern and very classy-looking, which the residents loved, I’m sure. But there were also buildings, like the shops we were currently passing, that were carved to look ancient. Residents of Shiloh could get the best of both worlds. Despite how much I wanted to feel indifferent, I resented them for this, and had to remind myself that none of them would last a day in the Gap. Not without the luxuries that they were all used to having.

  Silently, I wondered what it would be like to take it all away from them…to give it to the people that actually deserve it.

  “Which way?” Darby asked breathlessly, pausing in the middle of the intersection that we had come to. I didn’t much wind in my lungs, so I just pointed straight ahead. We clumsily plodded our way through the next few streets, until we were suddenly on grass. Our footsteps were muted and soft, and the impact on my feet was much less painful. Beside me, Darby let out a wild giggle.

  “Elana, this is grass!” she exclaimed. “I’ve never been on grass before!”

  Still too winded to talk, I smiled over at her. In truth, I had only walked on grass twice before, and both of those times had been in this exact park. I shared her enthusiasm for genuine soil under my boots. In my head, I decided that I would make my own grass park if I were to win the race, and I would let everyone walk on it as much as they wanted.

  Up ahead, the Wall of the Fallen loomed as large and impressively as it had before. Seven massive, stone slabs, each of them with the names of every contestant that had lost their life in the race, all arranged in a semi-circle in a small concrete courtyard. The slabs were divided into sections of ten races each. As this year was the 70th competition, they’d be forced to start a new slab of names after this race ended. With luck, my name wouldn’t end up on it.

  Already, the contestants that I had seen at the docks had their back to me, and were poring over the wall, hurriedly searching through the names and scribbling things down on the papers in their hands. Toward the middle of the wall, I saw Rigel, writing furiously with his charcoal. I changed directions and headed straight for him, resisting the urge to shoulder check him into the wall. Instead, I simply grasped a handful of his hemp shirt and spun him around to face me.

  “What are you doing!?” I shouted at him. “You left me!”

  His facial expression didn’t show as much fear as I would have liked. All I could see in his hazel eyes was guilt…and something that looked like sorrow. It caught me off guard, stealing away much of my anger. Between us, during my silence, he tore his paper in half with one swift motion and handed me the numbers that we had worked together to collect.

  “I’m sorry,” he said sadly. Before I could reply, he quickly pried himself from my grip and dashed away, back in the direction we had all come from.

  As I watched him go, Darby emerged right next to me, huffing loudly as she tried to catch her breath. “What happened?” she asked, leaning against the wall for support.

  “I got the numbers,” I told her, watching Rigel vanish around a distant street corner. “We need to figure out what to do with them.”

  “From what I gather,” Killian said, appearing behind Darby, “the numbers are in groups of three. The first number corresponds to a panel. The second number is the name, and the third number is a letter in that name.”

  I looked down at the paper in my hand, reading over the numbers that had been scrawled in Rigel’s sloppy handwriting. “Six…seventeen…six,” I read aloud.

  “So the sixth slab,” Darby said, shuffling all of us over toward the end of the wall. “The seventeenth name.” Using her slender index finger, she silently counted down from the top left column of names, stopping at the correct one. “Percival Fellows,” she announced. “The sixth letter…V!”

  She looked up at me excitedly, a smile spread wide across her face. It took me a moment to realize what she was waiting for, and I gave a small start as the thought hit me. Fumbling a bit, I reached into my pocket to fish out my piece of charcoal. I was very glad that I had saved it. Flipping the half-page over, I hastily scrawled a ‘V’ onto the finger-smudged paper.

  Killian nodded. “Well done, ladies.”

  “Thanks, Killian!” Darby spouted.

  “Cheers,” he said, giving a nod before turning and jogging in the direction Rigel had gone. Just a few seconds behind, I saw Grace Buchannon barreling after him. In addition, a couple of unfamiliar racers were now on their way to the wall. We needed to hurry this up. The thought of falling behind was making me crazy.

  “Here, take half,” I said to Darby. Carefully, I gently tore the paper as close to the middle as I could, making sure that I didn’t split up any of the number combinations. I gave her the smaller half, along with a sliver of the charcoal, and we both set off to collect the rest of the letters. Whatever the finished code was, we would gather in in half the time if we worked together.

  For nearly ten minutes, we scoured the Wall of the Fallen, our fingers running along the carved surface, racing over names long forgotten by the Dominion. Without a word to one another, we gathered our letters, bumping shoulders with other contestants as we tried to hide our pages. We didn’t want anyone piggybacking off of our work, after all. Finally, after the wall had begun to get much more crowded with racers, Darby slipped in next to me.

  “I’ve got them,” she whispered in my ear.

  I nodded, scratching a black C onto the paper slip in my hand. “On my last one now,” I muttered. “Seven...forty two…five.”

  With my breathing becoming more labored by the minute, I shuffled past several unknown contestants and made my way the seventh and newest slab of the wall. As fast as I could, while still confident that I could keep track, I counted out the correct number of names. “Here. Forty two. Amelia Sil…ver.”

  Immediately, in my peripheral vision, I saw Darby’s eyes flicker across my face.

  “Mom,” I whispered, gently sliding my calloused fingers across the etching of her name. Tears were already obscuring my sight, but I couldn’t seem to look away. It was the first time in three years I had seen her name in writing. The workers had made a small memorial for her in Adams, for my father, too, down at the plant that they had both worked in. I avoided that place, though, so I had never seen it. But here, my mother’s name was right in front of me, and I couldn’t suppress the memories of her that suddenly began to blossom forth from my mind. At once, they threatened to overwhelm me. Mercifully, Darby placed a ginger hand on my trembling arm.

  “Elana,” she said softly. “Elana, we - I’m sorry, but we need to go.”

  Her words were just strong enough to pull me out of my thoughts. I whipped my head over to her and sniffled loudly. “Yeah,” I said, blinking away the tears. “Yeah, you’re right. Letter number five. It’s an I.”

  “Come on,” she said, turning to jog away from the wall. I gave my mother’s name one last glance and followed after her, making a sloppy ‘I’ on the edge of the paper. Once we were far enough away from the wall to not be overheard, Darby stopped and turned to me, holding out her paper.

&
nbsp; “Okay, what do you have?” she asked.

  Unfolding my smeared, crumpled paper, I squinted down at it, suddenly realizing that I was still wearing my goggles. Pushing them up onto my forehead, I looked again. As I was gathering the letters, I hadn’t been able to tell where the spaces would go. I had just written them down one after another. It looked like one giant, screwy word, and I was suddenly afraid I had picked some, or all, incorrectly.

  After a moment, though, I was able to identify one word, which made the rest easy. “Villefort Cargo,” I said. “And then just ‘F-I’.”

  Darby nodded. “All right. I’ve got R-S-T and then ‘ascension’.”

  “Villefort Cargo, First Ascension,” I said.

  “What’s Villefort Cargo?” she asked, scratching the back of her head.

  Somewhere in the deep parts of my brain, the name sounded a tiny bit familiar. Maybe I had seen it stamped on a box somewhere. Had I delivered it? Or had I seen it on some parcel that Sparks had brought by the shop? It didn’t matter at the moment. What I did know, is that we had to get back to the docks.

  “Any kind of cargo company is gonna be by the docks,” I told Darby. “Especially if it’s a warehouse, which I’m betting it is.”

  She seemed to find my reasoning sound. Nodding, she fell in beside me as we both took off at a jog. I hated the fact that I’d be jogging for another ten minutes, but I needed to catch up. I had fallen much further behind than I had ever planned to. I didn’t want to be left behind by all the others, especially Rigel.

  Rigel. I needed to give him a piece of my mind. He stole a clue from me and left me practically in the dark. What if I hadn’t caught up to him at the Wall of the Fallen? I doubt he would have left the numbers for me. He would have taken them, and I would have been put in last place, probably.

  My renewed anger was enough to keep me moving through the Shiloh streets at a steady pace. Darby stayed right by my side, and we emerged back onto the docks, where the crowd was still all too eager to erupt into cheers and jeers at the sight of us. Together, Darby and I turned our backs to them and searched the buildings along the wharf, despite the fact that neither of us knew what we were looking for.