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.”
Her mouth tightened. “So what do you do now? Tell someone? Get the officials to look?”
His instincts yelled yes, but another part of him ran the odds. The Dragons had money, sponsors, and history. He had suspicion and the word of a woman the paddock barely knew.
And that wasn’t what scared him most.
“You realize,” he said slowly, “if I march over there and accuse them, the first thing they’ll ask is how I know. Who saw what? How somebody got close enough to spot a hidden bottle in a frame channel.”
Color drained from her face. “You think they’d come after me.”
He saw again how alone she’d looked in that pit. Not in a crowd of fans; surrounded by their people. Their crew. Their security.
“The kind of people who cheat like that and build a whole circus to hide it aren’t big on leaving loose ends,” he said. “You saw what they didn’t want anyone to see. That puts a target on your back, whether we say something or not.”
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” she protested, but there was a tremor under the words.
“I know that.” He stepped closer, needing her to feel the certainty in him. “You didn’t; you did exactly the right thing. You saw something off, you got out, and you came straight to me. That’s textbook.”
Her eyebrows flicked. “Textbook what?”
“Textbook field work,” he said. “You stumble into something dirty, you don’t confront the guy kneeling over the bomb; you back out, you tell your team, you let the people with the right gear handle it.”
Her eyes searched his. “You’re scared.”
“Yeah,” he said, because there wasn’t any point lying. “I am.”
The admission cost him, but not as much as the thought of her walking through that pit again with Einstein’s eyes on her.
“You’re good at reading people, Bree,” he said. “Did he see you watching him?”
She thought for a moment. “I don’t think so. He glanced over once when the argument got louder, but I was standing near the edge. He rolled his eyes at Heidi, not at me. He never stopped working.”
“Okay,” Hank said. “That buys us time.”
