He let himself feel the sting and let it go. There wasn’t time for that right now.
“Thanks for being honest,” he said. “Now talk me through what you saw.”
Bree pulled in a slow breath. He watched her do that thing he’d seen on the balcony; sorting through impressions, lining them up like colors on a palette.
“While Heidi was yelling at the manufacturer rep, everyone’s attention was over there,” she said. “Marcus, the crew, some girls by the truck. Even the kid working on the chain stopped to watch. No one was looking at the bike you’ll actually be racing against.”
Hank’s muscles went tighter. “Marcus’s primary bike.”
She nodded. “Einstein was at it. He’d switched to earplugs, no big headphones. He opened a compartment along the inside of the frame, just under where the rider’s knee would sit. It’s not big; long and thin, like it was made for wiring. But I watched other guys wipe that area down. It was empty before.”
Hank pictured the Dragons’ main bike, the minimalist frame, the way they loved to brag about how clean it was. “Okay.”
“He pulled something from a tray. A cylinder.” She lifted one hand, thumb and fingers about three inches apart. “About this long. Metal. Dull silver. There was a small valve stem at one end with a hose already attached. It looked heavy when he shifted it; his glove dipped a little.”
“Gauge?” Hank asked.
“Yes.” Her eyes lit with the sharp relief of being understood. “A small gauge near the valve. He turned it, counted under his breath, then slid the cylinder into that channel. It fit too perfectly. Like it’d been designed to go there.”
Hank’s stomach went cold.
“Go on,” he said quietly.
“He laid the hose along the frame, pinning it under existing wiring so it looked like part of the loom,” she said. “Then he ran it up toward the front of the bike, under the tank. It came out again near the handlebars. He looped it around a bracket and connected it to a small device wired into the horn assembly.”
“The horn,” Hank repeated. His mind filled in the gaps. “Not the starter, not the kill switch. The horn.”
“He pressed the horn button once,” she said. “No sound. He adjusted something, pressed again. Still no sound, but the gauge on the cylinder flickered. He looked satisfied; then he closed up the frame so you’d never know anything was there unless you knew exactly where to look. He smoothed his hand over the metal, like he was proud of it.”
She stopped, breathing a little harder. “Everyone else was still watching Heidi. No one saw him. Except me.”
Hank stared at her for a second, his mind hauling years of mechanical knowledge and a decade of war stories into the same space.
Hidden cylinder. Pressurized. Hosed to the front. Horn-triggered. Gauge jump.
You want a hidden boost? You hide a shot of nitrous. You trigger it off something no marshal will think to check.
His molars ground together.
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered.
Bree’s fingers curled tighter around the sketchbook. “You think it’s nitrous.”
“I can’t say for sure without looking at it, but it fits,” he said. “Pressurized gas, gauge, hose routing; using the horn as a trigger is smart if you’re a coward. No one expects the horn to do anything on track, and tech inspectors don’t always test buttons if they look wired right. You could hide a short burst in a straight and gain a couple of bike lengths. Easy.”
She swallowed. “Is that the kind of cheating Brian was talking about when he listed tricks?”
“Pretty much,” Hank said. “And if they’re running extra pressure in a frame not meant to hold it, or playing with timing maps to compensate, they could blow the whole thing apart.” His voice flattened. “You put unexpected stress on a structure at speed, it doesn’t just fail; it shatters.”
For a second, he wasn’t looking at Copper Moon’s pits at all; he was staring down at twisted metal and sand, at the aftermath of somebody else’s bad call. Smelling burnt rubber and worse.
He shoved the image away and focused on the woman in front of him.
“You did good, Bree,” he said. He kept his tone low and calm, even though his pulse had picked up. “You saw something nobody else saw.”
“Because they were watching the show,” she said. “That suit fight was deliberate, wasn’t it? A distraction.”
“My money says they’ve used that routine before,” Hank replied. “Heidi and Marcus throw a fit, everyone looks, Einstein plays surgeon in the corner.”
