Meu Deus. This is unexpected.
Something warm floods my chest and creeps lower than that, even though I try to concentrate on getting this ball past her, you know, just your average football one-on-one.
So naturally, collision is inevitable when Shantal swoops in and fights me for possession. She brings her leg over mine and tosses the ball behind us with the tap of a cleated foot whose spikes are maybe an inch from leaving scratches on my skin. Even when I fight back and succeed in stealing it at such close quarters that my back is almost against her chest, she keeps chipping away at me. She is merciless and takes no breaks for ‘are you good’ and ‘you okay’. She is a little too good at this. She has beautiful footwork. She has a beautiful body.
Shantal takes advantage of my distraction, sweeping the ball from beside my foot. She smacks an absolute cannon into the top right of the net. I’m shocked to the point where I can barely tell my own legs to move. Well, either shocked or in complete and utter awe. Why isn’t this chick playing club football?
‘Fuckin’ hell, Shantal,’ I manage when she returns to centre pitch with a dimpled grin and the ball at her feet.
‘Keep up,’ she quips, executing a flawless drag-back. She uses her size as an advantage rather than a drawback, darting away quickly. I’m still in the fight, but as I snatch away the ball and dribble around her, she tries her level best to keep me from getting away with it. If I nudge her arm away, she nudges mine back. We go shoulder-to-shoulder, the proximity marked enough to make out the baby hairs on her forehead. I couldn’tcare less if I won or lost. At this point, I’m just making excuses to so much as breathe the same air as her. I can’t do much else other than admire this woman.
It’s my slide tackle to step in and rein in a slightly long ball that ends the frantic scramble for control of the game. All of a sudden, we’re lying in the turf, laughing both at and with one another. I’m so close to Shantal now that I can count the barely discernible freckles on her nose, that I can feel her breath on my cheek as she loses her composure with her eyes squeezed shut, burying her head into my shoulder. She snatches my voice away so even when I try to laugh, I can’t get a sound out. I feel like it’s ridiculous. Yeah, it’s ridiculous.
It’s immaculate. It’s a moment that ends as soon as it had begun.
‘Hey! Dar!’
Shit. It’s Celina’s voice, and not too far away, either. Shantal pulls away with a gasp as we scramble to our feet in an attempt to amend the situation, but coming our way with a smirk on her face, my trusty trainer’s seen it all.
She stops before us, cocking her head, interrogating us in turn as if she can glean some information from our very demeanours. ‘Hmm. Well, Darien, I’m here to let you know the mayor called. Youdorecall you’ve got civic duties today?’
‘Wha … civic duty?’ I groan, grateful at least for a distraction on which to focus all my emotion. ‘Noooo!’
‘Sorry, but you know these things. You’ve got to go talk to him, shake hands, other niceties,’ says Celina with a shrug. ‘You have fifteen minutes, and I,’ she holds up a backpack, ‘have good clothes. Go look pretty.’
She shoots a wink and a smile at Shantal, but our steady technology genius just looks slightly more irritated than usual.
Forget that happened.Her eyes throw a silent piercing glare at me.
I nod her way.Okay, I imply with a widening of my own eyes.
‘See you guys,’ I actually blurt, before grabbing the backpack, turning, and nearly bolting to the locker rooms.
My heart is beating double time. I’m grinning stupidly. But that’s for no one to see or know except myself.
Chapter Sixteen
Shantal
‘Turn hard, turn hard, more, a little more …’
Jack Lyons chants his encouragement as I watch Henri take his trainer’s suggestion and lurch to the side on the sim, gritting his teeth against the weight of the steering. As the development driver, he is essentially next in line to either of the two seats, Darien’s and Miguel’s, whichever might require filling at some point. So we’ve been working him up the walls just as much as the other two, and now I’m throwing the brand-new Ring simulation track I tailored with mods picked out from the Cantagalo drive into the regimen. It has all three drivers just as nervous as I’d intended. It’s a fair reaction; it’s been a good two weeks since the football game, and they’ve not got so much as a look at the new system. This is a surprise for all of us, which is what makes it so perfect.
‘Whoa!’ Miguel yelps, physically recoiling from the screen. ‘Guys, Turn Seven, there’s some weird … is that a chicane onelevation? Dude, what’d I just experience?’ he calls out to the other two.
‘Warning would have helped about ten seconds ago,’ Darien grumbles with an exhausted air. ‘What’d you put in this sim?’
Knowing I’m making men who are supposed to be at the top of their sport struggle gives me a wicked burst of satisfaction. I have to hold back a slightly evil smile as Darien tugs his car around yet another hairpin turn. They’ve not even encountered the worst of it yet – the very reason this sim was so highly sought after by Heidelberg.
As the guys each come to the end of their first few practice laps, the screens display a rest prompt, and I get to work on my end. I run the new program on my control computer. ‘Okay, and now I’m going to throw a couple of things in there for the next few laps,’ I warn them.
‘You’re throwing in more than whatever the hell we justdid?’ exclaims Miguel incredulously.
I just shrug and bring my cursor over the button that will push the program to the simulators. ‘Have fun.’
With a click of my mouse, the real Conquest simulation starts to run on all three set-ups. It looks fairly normal at first, with a rolling start when the drivers guide the car through and out onto the track. This time, I’ve enabled opponents, with nineteen other cars on each simulator.
The sims themselves are well-crafted pieces of technology, essentially a chassis with a screen set-up that wraps all the way around, so the driver, suited in their helmet and strapped into the seat, feels as if they’re in the actual car. Conquest’s physical set-up is a tad different from most of the existing technology, integrating statistics obtained from the wind tunnel tests we’ve received so far from Heidelberg HQ in Germany to create a levelof resistance, porpoising – bouncing of the car – and handling that mimics the real thing as closely as possible. But the jewel in the crown of the new simulators is in the program and its ability tolearn– to use the sensors in the seat, in the pedals, all throughout the chassis to scope out the driver’s style. And then, it does something magical with that learning.
