Then she steps around the side of the bar and nods for me to follow her. We walk to the back, where a bathroom door is locked tight with a sign over it that reads:OUT OF ORDER.
She scans a finger in front of the door. It cracks open.
She nods for me to go in, but doesn’t make a move to follow. I give her a quick smile, then step past her and head into the darkness beyond the door. It closes behind me. I’m in some sort of dark, enclosed space. All I can see for a moment is a faint, glowing green light on the door handle. My heart thuds, and I feel a hint of claustrophobia.
Then the ground beneath me shudders. A neon-green light washes over the space, and the wall in front of me slides open with a rusty creak. I pull my shirt up over my nose as the smell of sewage threatens to suffocate me.
I step out of the makeshift elevator into a square plaza fenced in by four skyscrapers, lit by flickering neon lights against the walls and a haze of crimson fog. Pounding music and a roar of voices hits me.
I don’t know what I expected to see. Neon-red bulbs dangle by the thousands from building to building. Vendors selling savory buns and fried meat on sticks jumble near the edges of the square. The walls are lined with lattices of steel support beams, and a giant circuit breaker hangs near where I came in. This looks like it used to be an elevator station under construction at one point that then got torn down and abandoned.
People are packed so tightly into the space that any disaster—a fight, a fire—would turn this place into a death pit. But no one cares. They all gather around a circular clearing in the middle of the plaza, where the racers for tonight are now lining up and preparing their drones.
A giant virtual countdown hovers over the middle of the plaza, turning in my view to match wherever I move.
DRONE RACE: SEMIFINALS
FIRST HEAT COMMENCES IN 10:00 MINUTES
Right below it is the list of racer names for the first heat, updating as each racer checks in to the space.
My false name is up there.
ENTRY 9: ELI WHITMAN
For a moment, I freeze up. The people around me look like they’ve been coming to races like this forever. I, on the other hand, must look like the easiest mark that ever stumbled into the Undercity. My palms start to sweat.
Pressa,I send out a message.I’m here now. Where the hell are you?
Eventually, I catch sight of a stand where people are registering their drones. I walk over to it, trying to ignore the way others are staring at me from the corners of their eyes.
The man behind the stand gives me a skeptical look. “Drone,” he says.
I swing my backpack to my front and unzip it, carefully removing my drone model for him to inspect. He raises an eyebrow at my design. It looks unlike anyone else’s here, with its small, slender shape and the glowing engine attached to its end. I stand back and wait as he holds it up this way and that.
“A little runt of a drone, eh?” he mutters. Finally, he nods at me. “Patron?”
I frown. “A what?”
He raises an eyebrow. “Every racer needs a patron. We need assurance that you can pay for any damage that you cause. Unless you got ten thousand corras lying around, and can be your own.”
Pressa hadn’t mentioned anything about a patron. “I don’t have one yet,” I start to say, glancing around for any sign of my friend, “but I’m on the roster to race. If you look—”
But he’s already shaking his head at me and handing the droneback. “You must be new here,” he says with a laugh. “No patron, no race. I don’t care where your name is.”
“But if you just let—”
Any sympathy for me now leaves his eyes. Annoyed, he waves for me to exit the line. “There are people behind you,” he barks, gesturing for the next person to step up.
“Wait!”
I slacken in relief as Pressa emerges from behind the gamblers and heads to the table. As usual, her persona down here looks completely different from what I’m used to seeing of her at the university and her father’s shop. She’s in a long wig, for one—bright blond, a startling contrast from her black, bobbed hair—and sporting a pair of fake pink glasses that make her eyes look abnormally large. She flashes a frown at the man.
“I’m his patron,” she says, taking out a sealed envelope and sliding it over to him.
He seems to recognize her, because he grunts in acknowledgment before tearing the envelope open. Inside is a stack of corras, clean and crisp. He holds them up to the light, then nods and pockets the envelope.
“You’re official,” he says to me, and barely a few seconds later, he nods up to the racer names displayed in the rotating virtual menu. Over my head, a blue light goes on, indicating me as one of the entries. As if in unison, people around us turn to look at me.
