✅ A Dose of Humiliation

74. Racing Line

This bonus chapter is dedicated to Eladon. Thank you!

I felt my feet leave the floor as acceleration crushed me against the seat. And I couldn't be sure, but it was easy to believe that the seat was shifting behind me, giving a little under the sudden force so that the impact was slightly less intense. Dirt from the track filled the air around us, and I heard what I was sure was loose gravel bouncing off both of the cars. I would have flinched, if I'd been able to move at all in that instant. But as we pulled away, I told myself that there was no reason to be scared. This was Serena's car, after all. And if it was possible to have bulletproof glass on a car, she would have it. She had every extra known to man; and the only compromise on this one was to reduce weight and increase speed. She wouldn't cut back on safety, at the speeds she expected to be running.

We were speeding along concrete tracks between half-collapsed warehouses now; storage depots related to whatever industry had once taken place on the site. The doors were barred, but there were still handles and other ornaments protruding, or the fixtures which had once held exterior lights or cameras. And between these little ornaments, long streamers of yellow and black hazard tape had been draped, marking out the intended course.

Serena had to react quickly; almost every corner we turned around brought a new strip of tape into sight, requiring us to turn again two or three seconds later. The course could have been a slalom, and I guessed that this would have given a big advantage to anybody who already knew the turns. As she fought to keep in control without losing speed, the rear end of the car swung out one way and then the other, but we never really seemed to slow down. And feeling the speed we were moving at, I expected to see the back of Todd's car come back into view at each turn. But the only time I caught a glimpse was past a crowd of jeering spectators, going the other way along a parallel part of the track.

I glanced down and saw that the big screen on the centre console showed a map of where we were; a recognisable graphic of the car from above, and a blue dotted line marking out the route we had followed. It was a squiggle like a rat in a maze, never quite meeting itself, and the computer was marking in each of the warehouses as we passed it; although there were still a number of question marks where it hadn't been able to pick up any information about the scenery. One thing I did notice, though, were faint lines that crossed the track quite often. And when I looked outside again, I could see that there had once been some kind of tram lines connecting the different buildings. Some of them still had metal rails, either flush with the ground or creating a ridge above it, while others were just ugly ruts in the concrete. I thought about how my parents would have driven if we came across a road so poorly maintained when taking a trip somewhere; the car jerking up and down, Dad driving at a snail's pace, and Mum telling him that it was going to be extra rough on the suspension. Serena didn't even acknowledge the quality of the surface, and I didn't feel the bumps at all.

Then we were on asphalt, looping around a small stand of trees on the far corner of the site. An old access road or something else, I had no idea. But here, the tapes marking out the race circuit were tied around metal posts in the ground, or the branches of trees. It was a more open space, although Serena was staring intently at the ground ahead, watching out for young trees that were in the process of slowly bursting through the track. I watched the screen again, comparing the blue line of our path with a yellow line which I could only assume was an ideal route; wavering back and forth across the track like an oscillating spring as the positions of more trees ahead were added into the computer's memory. Even avoiding the trees, I could feel that we were accelerating, and it didn't entirely surprise me when the first digit on the speed readout at the top flickered over from '1' to '2' briefly.