Car 31

The cover comes off your car at 11:04 a.m., and four hundred phones go up like a wave.

Veloce red. Gloss black. Kaltberg Energy in silver down both sidepods, and on the nose, in a white so clean it hurts, the number you've drawn on every school notebook since you were eight.

31.

The factory floor in Silverbrook has been dressed up for the cameras. Fog machines, a stage of brushed steel, a DJ who keeps dropping a bass line every time someone says the word champion. Somewhere behind the curtain, two hundred engineers are pretending they haven't been awake for three days.

You stand on the left side of the stage in a team shirt that still has the fold lines in it. Your mouth is dry. Your hands are steady, because they always are, right up until they aren't.

"And driving car 31," says the presenter, a former racer with very white teeth, "the Academy Series runner-up, the youngest driver on this year's grid, Veloce's new rookie... Ethan!"

Applause. Flashbulbs. In the front row, Zoltan Ottaway, your number one mechanic and the closest thing you have to a brother, puts two fingers in his mouth and whistles so loud a photographer flinches.

You lift a hand. You smile. You do not throw up. Good start.

"And now." The presenter's voice drops into something reverent. "The man who needs no introduction. Two-time world champion. Car number 1."

The fog machines go into overdrive.

Matthis Ronne walks out of it like the weather was made for him.

You've seen him on television a hundred times. You've raced him on a simulator in your bedroom at fifteen, when he was the kid from Copenhagen winning everything. None of it prepares you. He's taller than drivers are supposed to be, lean as a swimmer, white-blond hair cut close, and he has the kind of face that sells watches on airport billboards. Sharp cheekbones. A faint pale scar on his chin. Eyes the gray of a winter sea, and about as warm.

The room changes when he enters it. You actually feel it happen, a pressure drop. Someone in the press section whispers God without meaning to.

He stops beside you. The presenter beams. "Gentlemen, a handshake for the cameras?"

You hold out your hand.

Matthis looks at it. Then he looks at the cameras. Then he turns, smoothly, and puts both hands in his pockets.

The applause stutters. Four hundred phones catch it.

"Lovely," says the presenter, faintly.

The press pen afterward is a crush of microphones. You answer the same three questions twelve times. How does it feel. Are you ready. What's it like to partner Matthis Ronne.

"I'll let you know when he says something to me," you tell a Spanish radio crew, and they laugh, and you instantly regret it.

Three meters down the barrier, Matthis is doing his own interviews in his famous style, which is to say barely. A man in tinted glasses and a linen jacket leans over the rope toward him. Hartmut Pelgrom. Everybody in the paddock knows Pelgrom. He writes the stories other journalists pretend not to read.

"Matthis," Pelgrom says, all honey. "Your new teammate. Twenty-three, no wins in the junior series last year. Is this the partner a champion deserves?"

Matthis doesn't even turn his head toward you.

"The team made a budget decision," he says. "I'm sure he'll be very affordable."

Pelgrom's recorder practically purrs.

Heat climbs your neck. Beside you, Radka Moradi, the team's head of communications, puts one perfectly manicured hand on your arm and says, without moving her lips, "Smile. That clip is going to do eleven million views and you are going to look like a saint."

"I'm going to look like a punchline."

"Same thing, darling, if you play it right."

Heloise Eskedal's office overlooks the factory floor through a wall of glass. The team principal is Norwegian, silver-haired, reading glasses on a chain, and has never in your hearing raised her voice. She doesn't need to. The silence around her does it for her.

"Sit, Ethan."

You sit. She slides your contract across the desk, already signed, and taps a paragraph with one finger.

"Clause fourteen. You've read it."

"I've read it."

"Read it again."

The Second Driver acknowledges that the First Driver holds priority in all sporting matters. Instructions from the pit wall regarding position, strategy and team orders are binding.

"If Matthis is behind you and faster," Heloise says, "you move over. If he needs a tow in qualifying, you give him one. If he needs you to hold up an Aurum car for three laps so he can pit, you become a very small, very wide wall. Understood?"

"Understood."

"You don't like it."

"I don't have to like it."

Something almost like approval flickers behind her glasses. "Good answer. Wrong team, maybe, but a good answer."

Through the glass, a dark-haired man in a Kaltberg polo is leaning against the wall of the garage, watching your car with his arms folded. Handsome in a glossy, expensive way. Gianluca Banfi, the reserve driver. Everyone thought this seat was his. Kaltberg's money thought so most of all.

"Banfi drives a few practice sessions this year," Heloise says, following your eyes. "Sponsor commitments. Don't take it personally."

"Does he?"

She takes off her glasses. "Mr. Banfi takes everything personally. That is not your problem. Your problem is the man in the other car. And for the record, I didn't choose you because you're cheap."

"Then why did you?"

A pause. A very small one.

"Go home," she says. "Testing in eleven days."

You don't go home.

At ten that night you badge back into the race bay, because you can't sleep and because the car is there, and because some part of you is still eight years old and needs to touch it to believe it.

The bay is dark except for the work lights over the two chassis. Car 1 on the right. Car 31 on the left.

Someone is kneeling beside yours.

You stop in the doorway. He's in a gray hoodie, sleeves pushed up, one hand inside your cockpit, measuring something with a steel rule. The light catches the white-blond of his hair.

"That's my car," you say.

Matthis doesn't startle. He finishes the measurement, writes something on a strip of tape with a marker, and stands up.

"It's the team's car," he says. "You're borrowing it."

"What are you doing to it?"

"Nothing you'll notice." He wipes his hands on a rag. Up close, in the half-dark, he's even worse. Not handsome. Handsome is a word for people you can look at comfortably. "Can I give you some advice, Rookie?"

"Can I stop you?"

The corner of his mouth does something, so fast you might have imagined it.

"Stay out of my mirrors," he says. "Stay off my radio. Don't do interviews about me." He tosses the rag onto the trolley and walks past you toward the door, close enough that you smell cold air and cedar. "You won't last to the summer break, Ethan. I'll make sure of it."

The door hisses shut behind him.

You stand there with your heart going far too fast for a man standing still. Then you walk to your car and look down into the cockpit.

On the center of the steering wheel, in neat capital letters on a strip of white tape, he's written:

PEDAL BOX 2 CM TOO FAR FORWARD. YOU WILL CRAMP BY LAP 40. FIX IT.