Chapter 131: Racing With Vexa

Leo flexed his fingers inside the glowing grips, and the racer answered him before he’d even finished the thought.

The nose swung gently toward the distant moon as the strange warm current kept humming through his arms and down into the ship like the two of them were plugged into the same heart.

’Okay... this is weird,’ he thought, staring down at his hands. ’This is really weird. I’m not even linked to this thing... so why does it feel like it’s listening to me?’

He tilted his wrist a single millimeter to the left and the racer drifted a single millimeter to the left.

He breathed in, and the engines seemed to breathe in with him.

"Heh..." he said out loud, and his grin got wider. "Alright, then. Let’s go."

He squeezed the left grip all the way down.

KA-WHOOOOOOM!

The racer leapt forward across the black so hard that the stars smeared into lines, and the little moon ahead of him swelled from a pale pebble into a huge grey world covered in craters.

The force pressed him back into the seat, but it felt different from the ascent, lighter and cleaner, like the racer had stopped fighting him and started running with him.

"Leo?" Vexa’s voice came through, bright and teasing. "Are you still back there? I can barely see you on my scanner... You’re just a teeny tiny little blue dot!"

"I’m coming..." Leo said.

"Take your time!" she sang. "I already told Ollo to start baking the wedding cake! Do humans like pink frosting? I’m going with pink frosting since it matches my skin!"

’Nope,’ Leo thought, and squeezed the grip harder. ’Absolutely not. No pink frosting.’

Far ahead, the pink racer was already swooping toward the first beacon gate... a ring of blinking white lights hanging in empty space just above the moon’s surface.

BZZZT-CLICK!

"Leo!" Vexa’s voice sang through his headset. "First gate, coming up! Watch how a champion does it!"

Her racer dipped, rolled once and slid through the exact center of the ring in a perfect elegant arc and the gate flashed green behind her.

PING!

"Did you see that?! Perfectly centered! The judges on Thyrra would’ve given me a ten!"

"There are no judges, Vexa."

"I’m the judge! And I gave myself a ten!"

Leo laughed and kept his eyes on the gate as it rushed up toward him.

It was big, about fifty meters across, and the safe line ran straight through the middle the way Vexa had flown it, but the next gate was down and to the right, tucked behind the curve of a crater rim, and flying through the center meant swinging wide afterward to reach it.

...The guide tugged at the base of his spine feeling warm and insistent.

’Not the middle,’ it seemed to say. ’The edge.’

’The edge?’ Leo thought. ’That’s... that’s a lot of edge...’

He didn’t let himself argue.

Leo tipped the grips hard and sent the racer screaming toward the lower right rim of the ring, so close that the white beacon lights flared bright as suns in the corner of the canopy.

WEEEE-WEEEE-WEEEE!

[Warning: Proximity]

The wingtip passed the beacon with less than a meter to spare, and he was through.

PING!

And because he’d come through on the edge, his nose was already pointing straight at the second gate.

"Wait," Vexa said slowly. "Wait, what did you just do...?"

"I flew through the gate..."

"You flew through the side of the gate! Nobody flies through the side of the gate! The side is where you hit the gate!"

"I didn’t hit it, though," Leo said while grinning. "Stop whining and focus on what you’re doing..."

He reached the second gate a full two seconds faster than she had, cut it on the inside edge again and came out pointing at the third.

PING!

The proximity alarm shrieked at him the whole way through, and he ignored it.

’This is insane,’ he thought, with his heart pounding. ’This is completely insane... but it’s working!’

It felt a little like flying the Wanderer-7, and at the same time, it felt like something completely new.

With the Wanderer-7, he sank his hands into the cradles and the ship poured into his head like water, every plate and every thruster part of his own body.

This was gentler and stranger.

...The racer stayed outside his head, more like it was standing right beside him, close enough to hear him whisper, and doing exactly what he asked a moment before he asked it.

’Like a really good dance partner,’ he thought, and then immediately felt stupid for thinking it. ’Okay, Harper’s never hearing that one...’

Gate after gate flashed past.

PING!

PING!

PING!

Each one he took on a line no trained racer would ever choose, skimming the edges of the rings and dropping so low across the moon’s surface that his exhaust kicked up long plumes of grey dust behind him, and with every gate, the tiny pink dot ahead of him got a little bit bigger.

On his canopy, a thin line of numbers showed the gap between them.

[Gap: 41.2 seconds]

Then, a gate later...

[Gap: 33.8 seconds]

Then...

[Gap: 27.1 seconds]

"Leo." Vexa’s voice had changed. The teasing was still there, but it was quieter now, and a little puzzled. "Your racer’s flying weird. Like... really weird. Are your grips working properly?"

"They’re working fine..." Leo muttered. ’Given that we both have the same feeling, why isn’t she flying like this too? Or is it different?’

"Then how are you turning like that? Those racers aren’t built to turn like that without a tail-link! The grips don’t have enough feedback for that kind of precision!"

Leo looked down at his hands.

The warm current was still pulsing through them, steady and strong, and the grips seemed to be glowing a little brighter than before, like the hard light was leaning toward his palms.

’I don’t know,’ he thought honestly. ’I really don’t know... It just feels right.’

"I guess I’m a fast learner..." he said.

"That’s not learning! That’s cheating!"

"How is it cheating?!"

"I don’t know yet but I’ll figure it out and you better not be cheating!"

Ahead of them, the course curved around the moon’s horizon, and the gates started getting closer together, threading through a field of jagged rock spires that rose up out of the surface like the broken teeth of something huge.

The guide tugged again, harder this time and Leo let it pull.

He dropped the racer down among the spires, weaving between them so low and so fast that the rock walls blurred past on both sides of the canopy and he could hear the gravel from the surface pinging off the underside of the hull.

PING! TING! TING!

A spire loomed straight ahead, and he rolled the racer onto its side and slipped through a gap between two pillars so narrow that his wings were pointing straight up and straight down.

WHOOSH!

Another spire, and he flipped back level and dropped even lower, skimming the dust.

SHHHHHH!

’Left... right... under that one... over that one... Oh, that one’s really close... okay, still alive!’

It felt exactly like the canyon run, except the canyon was made of real rock, and the ship was real, and if he touched a wall, he’d turn into a smear on the side of a moon.

He was grinning so hard his face hurt.

[Gap: 19.4 seconds]

’Come on... come on, closer...’

He came screaming out of the spires and saw the next gate hanging just above a deep crater, half-hidden in shadow.

The guide said tight and Leo went tight... much too tight actually, and the moment his wing slipped through the ring, he knew he’d misjudged it, and his starboard wingtip smacked straight into one of the glowing beacons on the rim.

CLANG!

The world flipped over.

The racer spun sideways in a violent corkscrew, and the stars, the moon and the black sky whirled around the canopy so fast that he couldn’t tell which way was up, while every alarm in the cockpit started screaming at once.

WEEEE-WEEEE-WEEEE!

[Warning: Attitude lost]

[Warning: Surface impact imminent]

"LEO!" Vexa shrieked.

The moon’s grey surface filled the whole canopy, rushing up at him, and he could see the individual rocks in the crater floor getting bigger and bigger.

’No, no, no, no...!’

He wrenched the grips back, and the racer bucked and kept spinning.

He tried again, and it shuddered, and still kept spinning...

’Don’t fight it,’ a voice in his head said, and it sounded a lot like Vexa in the asteroid stream, and a lot like Aoi at the front of her classroom. ’Let it spin... then catch it.’

Leo let go.

For one terrifying heartbeat, he took his hands completely off the grips and let the racer tumble, and he felt the guide reach out through his whole body and find the exact moment where the spin came around.

He grabbed the grips again and pulled.

WHOOOOSH!

The racer snapped out of the corkscrew and leveled out so low over the crater floor that its belly scraped a long trail through the grey dust.

KRRRRRRRSSSHH!

Then he was climbing again, and the alarms were fading one by one, and he was breathing so hard that his visor fogged up.

"...Leo?" Vexa’s voice was very small. "Leo, are you okay? Say something... please say something..."

"I’m okay," Leo gasped. "I’m okay... That was way too close."

He heard her let out a long, shaky breath.

"Don’t do that again," she said fiercely. "You scared me half to death... I don’t want to win because you crashed into a moon! That’s a terrible way to win!"

"Wasn’t planning on it," Leo said, and laughed weakly.

[Gap: 26.0 seconds]

He’d lost almost seven seconds.

’Damn it,’ he thought, gritting his teeth. ’Okay... okay, that’s on me. I got greedy. Don’t get greedy... just fly.’

His hands were shaking inside the grips, and he made himself loosen his fingers one at a time.

’Harper’s going to yell at me so much,’ he thought. ’Elena’s going to say my landing was sloppy... and I haven’t even landed yet and if I lose this because I crashed into a rock... Vexa gets her pink frosting.’

That thought alone was enough to steady his hands.

He took a deep breath and let the guide settle back into his spine and he flew.

He stopped trying to cut every gate as tight as humanly possible, and instead he let the racer find its own lines through the rest of the course with one gate flowing into the next like a river finding its way downhill.

PING!

[Gap: 18.3 seconds]

PING!

[Gap: 11.7 seconds]

PING!

[Gap: 5.2 seconds]

Vexa’s racer was right ahead of him now, close enough that he could see the pale pink of its hull and the white glow of its engines through the canopy.

She’d stopped talking.

There was no teasing over the comms anymore and no giggling either, it was just the quiet sound of her breathing and the steady thump of her tail against the back of her seat.

Leo could feel it too, the thing that had been building between them since the asteroid stream... the hum in his back reaching out across the empty space toward her racer, and something in her racer humming back.

’She feels it too,’ he thought. ’She’s flying on it just like I am... So weird...’

"Leo," Vexa said quietly, and her voice had no laughter in it at all now. "Where did you learn to fly like this?"

"A classroom," Leo said. "On Thursdays, I mean, you’ve already told me about yours."

There was a short baffled silence.

"...Humans are so, so weird," she whispered to herself, and then she pushed her throttle forward, and so did he then Vexa did something sneaky.

Right before the second-to-last gate, her racer drifted sideways into his line, smoothly taking the edge he wanted and leaving him only the long way around the center.

"Oops!" she said innocently. "Was that your spot?"

"You did that on purpose...!"

"Racing is racing, Captain Handsome!"

Leo’s guide flared, and for a split second, he saw two choices... follow her and stay stuck behind her exhaust, or go somewhere nobody would expect.

He dropped.

He tipped the racer’s nose down and dove underneath the gate entirely, skimming so close to the moon’s surface that the dust exploded up behind him in a huge grey plume, and then he hauled the grips back and came shooting straight up through the gate from below.

PING!

[Gap: 1.1 seconds]

"WHAT?!" Vexa screamed. "You can’t go UNDER it!"

"The gate flashed green," Leo said, grinning. "So I guess I can..."

"That’s... that’s... ugh!" Her tail thumped against her seat so hard it sounded like a drum. "Okay! Fine! You want to play it like that?!"

The last gate in the moon loop hung ahead of them, marked with bright red beacons instead of white, with the huge blue curve of Nexus-Prime glowing behind it.

Vexa took the center and Leo took the edge.

[Gap: 0.0 seconds]

PING!

They came out of the last gate together, side by side, wingtip to wingtip... so close that Leo could have reached out and touched her canopy if there hadn’t been a few meters of empty space and two layers of glass between them.

Through her canopy, Vexa turned her head and looked straight at him.

Her violet eyes were wide behind her visor, and her mouth was open slightly, and for a long frozen moment, she just stared at him like she’d never seen him before.

’Truly, I want to marry you... Leo...’