Page 60 of Redline Communion

She looks at me. Not pushing. That nearly makes me change my mind. Then Cassian’s mouth flashes through my head again, followed immediately by the blank space after it.

“No,” I repeat.

Talia pushes the mirror toward me. I bend over it.

The coke burns up my nose. The drip reaches the back of my throat a moment later, bitter and familiar. My gums start to numb. My heart, sluggish for three days, kicks hard enough to make me sit straighter.

Marcus doesn’t disappear. Neither does the Offering. That isn’t what the coke does. It just makes everything move — the memories stop sitting in one place long enough for me to stare at the holes between them. Rafe’s mouth can become Cassian’s hands which can become music then can become Talia asking whether I need water, before any one image gets enough time to turn into a question. My thoughts stop dragging and begin to run.

Good. I can work with fast.

Talia cuts another line before I ask. I watch the card move through the powder and feel something in my chest loosen.

She knows what I came here for. I don’t want answers tonight. I want enough distance from the questions that I can stop feeling the shape of every missing minute.

I bend over the mirror again.

For tonight, that will have to be enough.

Chapter fourteen

Priming

Lorelei

The new fleet takes up half the paddock.

I hear the crowd’s approval before I see what they’re approving of, low murmurs rolling through clusters of people in expensive jackets standing too close to cars they’ll never be allowed to drive. Six new machines sit beneath the lights. A matte-black GT anchors the display, its livery painted by hand across the doors and hood, the clear coat still smelling fresh, and two stripped-down bikes stand beside it, their chrome throwing the overhead lights back into the crowd.

Someone keeps starting the engines just to let people hear them. The GT comes alive with a low growl that travels through the concrete and into my feet, and conversation stops for three seconds. When the engine cuts, everyone starts talking louder.

For one minute, surrounded by people who don’t know a single true thing about me, I feel almost normal.

Almost.

Kiwi finds me beside the GT, arguing with a mechanic twice her age about torque.

“You look like you need a drink,” she says without looking away from the open hood.

“I look fine.”

“You look like a woman contractually obligated to attend her own execution with good posture.”

“That’s oddly specific.”

“I’m a nursing student. Specificity is the whole job.”

“That has nothing to do with cars.”

“I contain multitudes.”

“That’s Rafe’s line.”

“It’s community property now.”

The mechanic laughs. Kiwi points at something beneath the hood and tells him he’s avoiding her question, then looks at me, and the joke leaves her face for half a second.

“You good?”