Page 16 of Ignition Rites

“You’re glowing like you don’t know what you walked into.” She looks past me at the next car in line. “Keep it on till someone tells you differently.”

She presses a small black token into my palm before waving me through, the same crest from the banner stamped into one side.

The circuit at night doesn’t look like the strip of asphalt I glimpsed from Cassian’s window two weeks ago. It looks like something out of a fever dream — floodlights turning the whole valley gold, engines idling in a chorus that vibrates up through the ground and into my teeth, a crowd two and three deep along the rail, all of them masked, all of them dressed like this is a wedding and a funeral at once. Somewhere above the pits, a banner I finally get close enough to read: a crest, a phrase in Latin I don’t know, gold thread on black.

My mother isn’t here. Alistair isn’t visible either, though I get the distinct, prickling sense of being catalogued the second I pass the gate, like the whole event runs on some frequency I can’t hear but my body picks up anyway.

I catch myself checking every tall figure near the pits for the set of Ash’s shoulders before I remember I have no right to be looking.

Rafe finds me first, grinning under a mask that doesn’t hide much of anything. “There she is. Try not to look so much like prey, yeah? Wolves can smell it.”

“Comforting.”

“I try.” He steals a look over my shoulder, and whatever he sees there makes his grin flicker, just slightly, just enough. “I gotta go check in before the first heat. You’ll be fine. Stay near the rail.”

I don’t stay near the rail.

Rafe’s warning follows me for maybe thirty seconds before curiosity wins. He told me what the masks are for, which is exactly why I should turn around, and I wander the gravel paths behind the garages anyway, past crates and coolers and men who barely glance at me because the mask lets me disappear into everybody else.

The private box is almost unmarked. The same crest stamped into the token in my palm sits beside the frame, easy to miss unless you already know to look for it. The door’s cracked, low light spilling out gold onto gravel, and something in me — curious and entirely unsupervised — pushes it open before better judgment gets a vote.

He’s already there.

Leaning against a workbench that’s cleaner than any workbench has a right to be, helmet under one arm instead of on his head, black from collar to boot, a mask that covers less than the lace on my own face and somehow reveals nothing at all.

“You shouldn’t be back here,” he says. His voice is pitched low, roughened at the edges in a way I don’t recognize, and for one unsteady second I genuinely don’t know if it’s him.

“Neither should you, probably.”

“I have permission.” He takes a step closer, then his attention drops to my hand.

The token is still caught between my fingers.

His gaze stays there long enough for me to look down too, from the crest in my palm to the one beside the door.

“You do too, apparently,” he says.

Something about that should bother me more than it does.

“Lucky me.”

He laughs — quiet, low, more breath than sound — and it does something to my knees I refuse to examine. “Careful. Some rules exist for a reason.”

“How convenient that the people making the rules never explain what the reason is.”

“Would it matter if I told you?”

“Try me.”

He doesn’t answer with words. He crosses the last of the distance instead, slow enough that I have a hundred separate moments to step back, to say no, to do any of the sensible things I’ve spent twenty years being told a girl in my position should do — and I don’t do a single one of them.

His right hand finds my jaw, careful and deliberate, tilting my face up. Silver catches the gold light, and the plain ring knocks something into place.

Oh. I know that hand.

I keep my eyes on the mask anyway. Knowing and saying it are apparently two different things tonight.

“You feel it too,” he says.