A pause. His hands don't stop. "The brake bias needs?—"
"Aleksei."
He stops.
The tool clicks against the floor. In the silence the garage breathes — cooling systems, the distant murmur of the city three floors up, the specific quiet of a machine at rest.
"You scared me today," I say. "On the track."
He doesn't answer immediately.
"The trace," I say. "Turn seven. I was watching the engineers' faces, not the screen — I know something went wrong before the screen showed it." A pause. "You scared me."
"I had it," he says.
"I know. That's not what I said."
He sets the tool down. He straightens from the crouch and turns, and I brace for the visor — the flat controlled expression, the blank assessment — but instead he just looks at me. The way he did from the cockpit through the dark visor, which is without buffer. Without the architecture between us.
"You think I'm dangerous behind a wheel," he says.
"I think you drive like you want to find the exact edge of what's possible and live there."
"Yes." The corner of his mouth moves, almost. "That's the point."
"The edge moves," I say. "Conditions change. Physics doesn't care about the calculation you made last lap."
"I know."
"Then—"
"I know, Sofia." Not harsh. Quiet. Something in his voice that's doing something different from the usual registers. "I've been doing this since I was nineteen. I know exactly how far the edge moves and I know exactly how to find it."
"And when you can't?"
He looks at me.
He takes a step toward me. And another. Not the paddock corridor movement — nothing tactical about this, nothing that serves an agenda I can read. This is slower. The movement of someone who hasn't decided what they're doing yet but is doing it anyway.
"Then I find the new edge," he says.
"And if there isn't one."
He stops.
We're close — close enough that I can see the fine tension lines around his eyes, the ones that appear at the end of a full day at speed, the specific fatigue of someone who has been running at a very high level of attention for many hours and is now in the room at the end of it. He smells like the garage and underneath that something warmer. I know this smell. The knowing sits in me like a fact about geography.
"There's always an edge," he says.
"That's not reassuring."
"It wasn't meant to be."
He moves around me.
Not away — around, a slow circuit, and I don't turn to track him because tracking him would be an admission and I'm not making it yet. His footsteps are very quiet on the concrete. I feel the air shift as he passes close behind me and I feel him stop, and then his hands settle on my upper arms — barely, just the warmth and weight of them, the barest contact.
His forehead drops to my shoulder.
