Nilah sliced through the chicane, screaming out of the turn with her booster aflame. She was a polychromatic comet, completely in her element. This race would be her masterpiece. She held the record for the most poles for her age, and she was about to get it for the most overtakes.

The next nine laps went well. Nilah handily widened the gap between herself and Kristof to over ten seconds. She sensed fraying in her tires, but she couldn’t pit just yet. If she did, she’d never catch Clowe by the end of the race. His fiery orange livery flashed at every turn, tantalizingly close to overtake range.

“Put out the blue flags. I’m on Cyril.”

“Roger that,” said Ash. “Race control, requesting blue flags for Cyril Clowe.”

His Arclight flashed as he burned it out along the straightaway, and she glided through the rippling sparks. The booster was a piece of garbage, but it had its uses, and Clowe didn’t understand any of them. He wasn’t even trying anymore, just blowing through his boost at random times. What was the point?

Nilah cycled through her radio frequencies until she found Cyril’s. Best to tease him a bit for the viewers at home. “Okay, Cyril, a lesson: use the booster to make the car go faster.”

He snorted on his end. “Go to hell, Nilah.”

“Being stuck behind your slow ass is as close as I’ve gotten.”

“Get used to it,” he snapped, his whiny voice grating on her ears. “I’m not letting you past.”

She downshifted, her transmission roaring like a tiger. “I hope you’re ready to get flattened then.”

Galica’s iconic Paige Tunnel loomed large ahead, with its blazing row of lights and disorienting reflective tiles. Most racers would avoid an overtake there, but Nilah had been given an opportunity, and she wouldn’t squander it. The outside stadium vanished as she slipped into the tunnel, hot on the Hambley’s wing.

She fired her booster, and as she came alongside Clowe, the world’s colors began to melt from their surfaces, leaving only drab black and white. Her car stopped altogether—gone from almost two hundred kilometers per hour to zero in the blink of an eye.

Nilah’s head darkened with a realization: she was caught in someone’s spell as surely as a fly in a spiderweb.

The force of such a stop should have powdered her bones and liquefied her internal organs instantly, but she felt no change in her body, save that she could barely breathe.

The world had taken on a deathly shade. The body of the Hyper 8, normally a lovely blue, had become an ashen gray. The fluorescent magenta accents along her white jumpsuit had also faded, and all had taken on a blurry, shifting turbulence.