Page 43 of Reckless Heir
I find my boots on the east lawn the next morning, still damp, standing upright beside the second oak, exactly where he said.
13
SOFIA
Miami doesn't ease into you.
It hits — heat and noise and the smell of something burning, always burning, the specific sweetness of hot asphalt in October sun that has no business existing in October but does anyway, because Miami operates on its own calendar. The circuit is here twice this season — the team lobbied for it; the city's appetite for the race is apparently insatiable and the calendar bends to appetite when there's enough money in the room. The humidity is a physical thing. It presses against your skin like a second layer of clothes you didn't choose, and everything smells faintly of salt and exhaust and the ocean a block over, and by the time the car drops us at the paddock gate I've already accepted that comfort is not the register this city operates in.
The circuit runs through the city's heart. Past the casinos, past the waterfront, through corridors of glass and steel that double the cars back at themselves. I've seen this on broadcast — the wide shots, the aerial views, the way it looks from the cameras mounted in the grandstands. Seeing it from inside is a different thing entirely. The circuit is real in a way the broadcastisn't: the asphalt is present, the kerbs are physical, the corners are geometrically actual rather than graphically represented. I understand, for the first time, what it is he does.
He drives through this.
At speed.
Fifty laps.
"Stay where I can see you," he said this morning at the gate, which is the version ofI want you closethat he knows how to say in public, and I've been in his orbit long enough now to have started translating him without trying to.
He walked me through the paddock gate and handed me a headset and put me on the pit wall with the engineers.
The pit wall is nothing like the hospitality suites.
The suites are elevated, glassed-in, designed for the comfort of people who want to watch the race without being in the race. Everything filtered, managed, the noise dampened and the smells excluded. Up there you can eat canapés while the cars go past and feel approximately present.
Down here is different.
The wall is immediate — no glass, no filter. The engineers are at their stations, laptops and telemetry displays, the specific controlled urgency of people who are simultaneously watching seventeen things and must not visibly panic about any of them. The smell of fuel and carbon fibre sits in the back of my throat. Everything is loud. The communication is in shorthand I don't fully have yet but am learning: the shared vocabulary of a team that has worked together through full seasons and has developed the efficiency of a language that's been stripped to its load-bearing elements.
I watch the engineers' faces instead of the screens.
This is what I've been doing since October — reading the faces around Aleksei rather than the official channels, becausethe faces are where the real information is. The screens tell you what's happened. The faces tell you what it means.
I learn the practice session in the first twenty minutes by learning those faces: what a good lap looks like (the slight exhale, the barely-there nod), what a bad lap looks like (the specific quality of stillness that isn't calm), what a communication issue looks like (two engineers making eye contact over their headsets in a particular way).
Aleksei's car holds position one after the first run.
His lap times are consistently a tenth faster than the next driver, which is — I understand from watching the engineers' expressions — comfortable but not complacent. They're watching the tyres. They're watching the fuel load. They're doing math in their heads and on their screens simultaneously.
Turn seven. Third flying lap.
The engineer on my left slaps the pit wall.
I don't know what I'm watching but I know from his face that something has gone wrong, and then the car trace on the main display does something that it shouldn't do — sideways, the GPS line breaking from the expected path — and my hand is at my sternum before I've decided to put it there.
He's fine,someone says.He saved it.
The car trace resolves. Stabilises. Continues.
I breathe.
The car comes in for the mandatory check. The mechanics descend — tyres, data download, the choreography of a team that has drilled this until it takes sixteen seconds — and he sits in the cockpit with the visor down, very still. The quality of that stillness is different from his usual stillness. His usual stillness is contained processing — the machine running. This is something else. Something that is finishing.
Then he turns his head.
I can't see his eyes through the dark visor. But he's looking at me. I know it the way you know things about a person you've been studying for weeks: the angle, the duration, the specific quality of directed attention even through the dark.
He looks at me for three seconds.
