Fastest Rookie

The Castellcorb circuit sits in a dry valley in Spain, all ochre dust and pine trees and a grandstand the color of old bone. At eight in the morning the air smells of rosemary and jet fuel, and you are sitting in a Grand Prix car for the first time in seven hundred and thirty-one days.

You know the exact number. You counted on the plane.

"Radio check," says Agnetha.

"Loud and clear."

"Good. Installation lap, then in. No heroics. Kirsi's orders."

"Is she here?"

"She's always here. She's just usually somewhere you can't see her."

The mechanics pull the tire blankets. The car fires up behind your spine and the whole world shakes. It's not a sound, it's a weather system. Your hands tighten on the wheel and for one long, horrible second you think you're going to ask them to stop.

Then the pit lane light goes green, and your right foot remembers something your head forgot.

The first day you are slow and you know it. You lift where you shouldn't. You brake for the pit entry like a man approaching a cliff. You finish P14 of seventeen, and you hear it in the paddock before you've got your helmet off. Told you. Charity case.

The second day you are less slow. P9.

The third morning, Kirsi takes the radio.

You know it's her before she speaks. There's a click in your earpiece that isn't Agnetha's click, and a silence with a different weight in it.

"Car 41, this is Kirsi."

Every engineer in the garage stops what they're doing. You find out later that team principals don't do this. They sit on the pit wall with their headsets and their faces and let the race engineers talk. Nobody can remember Kirsi Kristiansen ever pressing the button.

"Copy," you say.

"Turn seven. You're lifting before the apex. The car will take it flat. Take it flat."

"The car will take it flat if the car doesn't have a person in it."

"The car has a person in it. That's the point. Flat."

"Have you ever driven one of these?"

"I've read the data on four thousand laps of turn seven. Flat, Ethan."

You go out. You lift in seven.

"You lifted," she says.

"I know I lifted. I was there."

"Do it again."

You do it again. You lift again. She says nothing at all, which is worse than anything she could say, and you come in at the end of the run so angry you can't see straight.

You rip off your helmet in the garage. She's not even there. She's on the pit wall in the sun, black sunglasses, black jacket, a headset around her neck like jewelry, reading a screen.

"She's a nightmare," you tell Agnetha.

"She's right," Agnetha says. "Go again."

The afternoon run you take turn seven flat.

You don't decide to. You're in the middle of a lap and the car is light and loose and alive, and her voice is in your head saying the car will take it, and you don't lift, and it does.

It's like falling off a building and finding out you can fly.

You go faster after that. Everywhere. The car stops being a wild animal and starts being the thing it was always meant to be, a part of you with wings. Lap after lap the times drop. The garage gets quieter, and then louder. Somebody whoops.

When the checkered flag falls at six, the timing screen in the garage reads: P3. Penhale. Brunsvik. Fastest rookie by eight tenths.

Lukas Wynmark is P6.

He gets out of his car on the other side of the garage, looks at the screen, and throws his gloves at the wall.

On the pit wall, Kirsi doesn't move. She just takes off her sunglasses, and looks at the screen for a long moment, and puts them back on.

The paddock at Castellcorb is a strip of tarmac lined with team motorhomes, glass and chrome and sponsor flags. You're walking back to Brunsvik's when a voice behind you says, "So you're the ghost."

You turn. A woman in a crimson Bellacqua team jacket is leaning against a scooter. Dark hair, bright eyes, a mouth that looks like it has a joke ready at all times. You'd know her anyway. She's on billboards. Lisbeth Mossgrove, twenty-eight, the reigning Mondial champion.

"I'm not a ghost," you say.

"You were dead for two years and now you're P3. That's ghost behavior." She looks you up and down, slowly, as if she's deciding whether to buy you. "You're better looking than your crash photos."

"Thanks. I think."

"It's a compliment. I don't give many." She grins. "Drinks at the Bellacqua motorhome tonight. Come. Bring nobody."

"I don't think my team principal would love that."

"Your team principal," Lisbeth says, raising her voice just enough, "doesn't love anything."

You don't have to turn around. You feel it. Kirsi has come out of the Brunsvik motorhome twenty meters away with a tablet under her arm, and she has stopped, and she is watching.

Lisbeth waves at her with two fingers. Kirsi doesn't wave back. She looks at you, just once, a cool gray look that goes through you like wind through a jacket, and then she goes back inside.

"Oh, she's fun," says Lisbeth happily. "This is going to be a great season."

You don't go to the drinks. You eat paella with Agnetha and two mechanics in the hotel restaurant and go up at eleven, and at midnight you're still awake, so you go out to the ice machine just to have somewhere to walk.

Kirsi is coming down the corridor.

She's barefoot. She's carrying her heels in one hand by the straps. Her hair is down, the first time you've seen it down, pale and heavy past her shoulders, and without the armor of the knot she looks younger, and tired, and so beautiful it's almost rude. She sees you and stops.

For a second neither of you says anything. The ice machine hums.

"Your room's on the second floor," she says.

"I know where my room is."

"Then why are you on the fourth?"

"Ice." You hold up the empty bucket. She looks at it. You both know there's an ice machine on the second floor.

She almost smiles. Almost. It gets as far as her eyes and stops.

"Turn seven," she says.

"I took it flat."

"I saw." She looks down at her shoes in her hand. When she looks up again, something in her face is careful, as if she's carrying something heavier than the heels. "Good work, Ethan."

It's two words. She says them like they cost her money.

Then she walks past you, close enough that you smell rain and something like cedar, and goes into her room and shuts the door.

You go back to the second floor. You lie on the bed in the dark with your heart doing laps.

At 12:14 your phone lights up on the pillow next to you.

Kirsi Kristiansen.

The message is formatted like a lap report.