“I am myself.”
“Then be the version they can use.”
The doors slid shut. My face became a smear in brushed steel.
That night London spread itself out under my windows: a patient animal, breathing in light. The penthouse was quiet in the way expensive places are—sound softened by distance and design. I left the TV on mute and let the captions talk to an empty room.
A highlight reel flickered: start lights, Turn One chaos, a surge of black and chrome leaving everything behind. Me on a podium I’d stood on too often to remember; a hand lifted; a bottle sprayed; a smile that didn’t reach my eyes.
The programme cut to the press conference. The subtitles put mine and Elena’s words in neat white letters:
RUMOURS DON’T WIN RACES.
DO THEY EVER START WITH SOMETHING REAL?
The camera found my face at that moment. Calm. Remote. A statue that talked.
I turned the screen off and the flat went dark enough to fit my mood. The fridge hummed. Somewhere below, a siren dopplered past, a blue and red smear against glass.
I tried to sleep. The bed was too soft. The pillow too perfect. Every time I closed my eyes I saw floodlights strobing across the halo and heard a voice at my ear that didn’t belong there:
Keep digging, and you’ll find something. Just make sure it’s not your own grave.
I got up before dawn and ran until the cold air burned the ache out of my lungs. When I came back, the city had lightened from graphite to ash. My phone blinked on the counter: schedules, a message from Ross with a link I didn’t open, a note from Mac—sim at ten, cold map loaded—and one I didn’t expect from an unknown number:
Congrats on the win. See you in Singapore.
No name. I deleted it and stared at the empty notification like it might admit it was still there.
Time moved the way it always does between races: days poured through a funnel of routine until only departure remained. The factory swallowed me and spat me out; the sim negotiated with my hands until they made peace with a model that would never be flesh; the PR machine took its pictures and printed its posters. Ross floated through it all, smiling the way men do when the numbers answer every question.
On the last afternoon, I stood in the wind-cut quiet beside the charter steps at a private terminal and watched mechanicsheft flight cases like they weighed nothing. The sky over Heathrow was a flat, patient grey. The aircraft’s fuselage was white as a tooth. A driver whose name I never learned took my bag and melted back into anonymity.
“Aleks?” Terri had to raise her voice above the turbines. “They’re ready for you.”
I nodded and climbed. At the top of the stairs I paused, one hand on the rail, and looked out at the runway lights beginning to bloom along the edge of the world.
Precision. Power. Perfection.
I said it in my head the way some men pray. The words tasted like metal.
Rumours don’t win races.
Maybe. But they ruin sleep.
I stepped into the cabin’s hush, took my seat, and buckled in. Across the aisle Mac was already asleep, mouth slanted, headphones jammed into a pocket like a stubborn idea. Terri tapped at her tablet; a spreadsheet glowed against her face. At the front, Ross laughed softly at something a sponsor had said, the sound easy as water.
The door sealed. The engines wound up. London fell away in threads of gold.
Singapore ahead. Floodlights. Heat. A woman with a story and a stare that put hairline cracks in things I’d once believed were unbreakable.
I closed my eyes and mapped the circuit in my mind.
When the lights go out, there is only the car.
On the track, I’m in control.
Chapter Five – Melbourne to Singapore
