I have an IT guy here. But if you want someone out there, I can email you a few names. When are you heading home?
I glanced after Volkov again but he’d vanished. I’d been planning to fly home with a story to write, but I didn’t have enough yet. I wanted to be in Singapore in two weeks and I couldn’t see my claim for two more long haul flights being paid out.
I’ll stay out here for the next race. I can work remotely. Send me those contacts. Thanks.
I watched the three dots bouncing at the bottom of the screen and waited. The sea air whipped my loose hair around my face and a shiver ran up my spine.
Roger. Elena, be careful. Don’t let this get personal.
I wrinkled my nose at the suggestion. But of course it was personal, because my Dad had worked for Obsidian and had lost his job when he tried to blow the whistle on them cheating twenty years ago. This was unfinished business. I had to prove they were still up to their old tricks. Everything was on the line.
Chapter Four – Oxfordshire
Aleksandr Volkov – Obsidian HQ, Oxfordshire
Morning cut through the tinted glass like a scalpel. Obsidian’s engineering suite was all edges and light: walls of screens, neat coils of cables, the quiet thrum of servers working harder than any human. The company’s slogan stared down from the far wall—Precision. Power. Perfection.—as if it were a judge and not a motto.
I slid into the simulator shell and let the belts bite across my shoulders. The cockpit hugged me with the familiar pressure of expectation. Up in the control room on the other side of floor-to-ceiling glass, Mac stood with a tablet, headset on, coffee cooling on a metal tray.
“Singapore baseline loaded,” he said. “Night race conditions, medium track temp. We’ll run three laps at banker pace, then push.”
“Copy.”
The wraparound screens bloomed into circuit: neon against black, floodlights flaring off painted kerbs, the city rising like a cage beyond the barriers. The motor in the platform hummed, the wheel alive under my hands. I breathed once, deep, and rolled the throttle in.
Turn One came at me like an accusation. Brake. Trail. Feed. The car in here wasn’t a car at all—an algorithm’s best guess at a monster I knew better than I knew my own heartbeat. Still, my hands did what they always did. Apex by feel. Power by faith.
“Entry’s a hair tight,” Mac said, voice flat, no judgement. “Turn Five, you’re pinching. Give it another foot of track.”
“Copy.”
Lap two. The city flickered around me; the halo frame sliced lights into bars. Somewhere behind the veneer of immersion, the platform hissed; fans pushed warm air at my knees. I placed the car where it should live.
“You’re early on throttle at Seven,” Mac said. “Back the rotation in, then go.”
“I am going.”
“Not yet.”
The word sat under my ribs a moment too long. I ran the braking markers again, line again, throttled earlier just to prove a point and fought the simulated snap when the rear protested. I caught it. Of course I caught it.
“Alright,” he murmured, like I’d won an argument he hadn’t voiced. “Again.”
By the end of lap three the delta strip at the top of my world was wrong. Not red, not catastrophic—just a thin, smug line of green in places I hadn’t earned and a flicker of yellow where I never saw it in reality. I knew this circuit. I knew where the car should breathe and where it should bite. The model was perfect. The model was lying.
I exited the box and lifted my visor, the room snapping back from neon night to cold morning.
Mac was already scrolling. “Your hands are fast,” he said. “Your head’s… somewhere else, lad.”
“I am right here.”
He didn’t argue, which is how I knew he didn’t believe me. “Again after debrief.”
We took the windowed corridor to the briefing room, past glassed-in bays where floor panels shone like piano keys and technicians moved like surgeons. Obsidian didn’t do clutter. Even the air smelled expensive—ionised and cut with metal.
The debrief table was chrome and dark glass. I sat where I always sat; Mac to my right; two power-unit engineers across; a vehicle-dynamics lead who never smiled to my left. Callum Drake, my team-mate, slouched at the far end, scrolling through something on his phone with one boot hooked over the chair leg. He looked like he’d rather be anywhere else, but he was listening—the twitch of his jaw gave him away. He caught my eye, gave a lazy nod that might have been respect or resentment, and went back to pretending not to care.
Norton Ross arrived last, as if the world had waited. Team shirt tailored tight to his frame, chrome piping catching the light, smile engineered to reassure shareholders at a distance of a hundred metres.
