Once upon a time, back when they lived in the nation’s capital, Hennessy and Jordan had briefly run something called the Game. The Game began at midnight at the River Road exit on I-495. Not once you’d taken the exit. At it. On the interstate, screaming by it. Bit of a fraught proposition with DC traffic. Underestimate the congestion and the would-be player would end up passing River Road minutes after everyone else had left. Overestimate it and the player showed up too early, hoping they didn’t burn too much time looping around for another approach.

Easy? No. But Hennessy had never been interested in easy.

At midnight, ready-or-not-here-I-come, Hennessy howled by the River Road exit in whatever vehicle she’d taken from the McLean mansion or temporarily lifted, pied pipering a restless parade of horsepower to the location of the game. The other girls—June, etc.—would already be in place, two of them bookending start and finish, the rest stationed at exits. The usual tricks in the bag: police band radio, radar detectors, fourteen keen eyes.

Then they raced. Point to points, drags, drifts, two up, four up, whatever burned at Hennessy that night. Sometimes when it was Hennessy, it was actually Jordan. Sometimes it was both.

The stakes of the Game were always high. Sometimes the prize was drugs. Weapons. The loser’s car. A year’s rent in someone’s really posh second home. Goods too hot to sell on the open market. The drivers, the players, the pawns, they were all of a certain type: twenty- and thirtysomething men who only came alive after dark, usually white and swish enough to be able to survive any traffic infraction that might come their way, all of them driving cars designed to do more than get HOV lane violations. They congregated in forums to discuss the Game, to offer up prizes for the next, to talk smack and measure dicks. At first they were all area marks, but eventually people would come from up and down the 95 corridor in hopes of rolling into the Game.

Hennessy and Jordan usually just moderated the race for a cut of the prizes, but when the girls needed cash or were intrigued by one of the offerings, they raced, too. Hennessy was good at it because she had no fear and no inhibitions. Jordan was better at it because she did. Together they were known as the Valkyrie, although a few of the more observant return players called them the Valkyries.

The Game broke a shit ton of rules.

Hennessy loved it. Or at least she loved that she couldn’t think of anything else while she was doing it.

That was as close as she got to happiness. She thought it was probably the best she could hope for.

“Get in, hurry up, time is a waterfall, and the moment we’re trying to catch is rapidly swimming toward the edge,” Hennessy said.

“Hennessy?” Jordan asked, shocked.