The city itself was falling short of being a city, it was an engine of gnashing teeth, ejecting legends. Or corpses. Even the air itself was trembling with the bass-note throb of engines with high output and the ozone crackle of Drive Energy. Neon glowed with advertisements of any sort, such as a custom Rig mods and dingy med-bays which claimed to restore the lost fusion quickly. It was sensual onslaught, an attack of the senses which made the silence of the Scrap Wastes to seem years behind them.
Maxon took me to an area that was, as far as possible, sucking up the noise, not adding to it: a huge multi-level parking garage beneath a winding overpass. The mark over the strengthened door was plain, cut into a piece of steel: GEARHEART PIT. The smell of welding torches, grease and something else... a faint, electric aroma that I now knew was an excess of spent Drive Energy.
Maxon grunted in reply to it, the word home had a weight of the whole structure resting on.
It was the cathedral of the shattered dreams and the second chances. Wounded Rigs, half-healing, Hulking, sat in a variety of conditions of mending, their mutilations speaking the language of narrow escapes and disastrous failures. Some other competitors--a sleek woman with cybernetically optical eyes tuning a plasma vent, a giant of a man with arms riveted as one with what appeared to be hydraulic pistons--nodded to Maxon. But their gaze lingered about me. and on my Rig, who had pursued us in and was lying there in a silent pout by the entrance its amber eyes clouded.
Be at your ease, sink, rook," Maxon said and took a raggy rag and wiped off the oil on his metal hand. The clink sound was unnaturally natural. "That Shard in your system? It's a beacon. All the racers on the Circuit who are ambitious to rule the world can likely taste it at this time. The analysts of Zerath are probably already analyzing the energy signature. Orkan Blight will only experience it as an annoyance that he must break.
He threw the rag on a workbench that was full of engine cores that were disassembled. "You think you're special? A chosen one?" It was a short, harsh laugh with nothing humorous in it. Full of special ones, kid the Circuit is. They make fertilizers of the tracks. What you are is a target."
I felt a hot spike of defiance. I resisted that patrol of Syndicate.
The mooks you were up against were low-level grunts and had more to be surprised than you were, you got lucky, he replied, and his voice was flat. That will not get you out of a racer. From someone like Mira Volt." He made some motions toward the city skyline. She will put a race on like a theatre play, and you will be the one who falls over the scenery. Or Selvara Drift. She will not have you head-on, you will only have your systems malfunction one after another, a low crept death before the finishing line.
What were in themselves but empty words, the assurance of his voice was a shiver of cold truth. I inspected my hands, still covered with rust and dry blood of my useless efforts to get a dead engine running. What was I doing here?
"So what, then?" I inquired, the anger oozing out of my voice. I ought to hide in here, and make them forget about me?
Maxon paused his walking and stared me with that solemn look. "No. You learn. Majority of the rookies die as they believe that race is about speed. It's not. It's about survival. It is about reading your track, your Rig and the other guy, and being able to read him or her as well as the other fellow. He crossed to my Rig, and touched it with his good hand on its weirdly warm body. "This thing... it's awake now. It's part of you. But you still drive it like it were a pile of scrap that you are attempting not to break.
He turned back to me. "I'm offering you a spot. Not a free ride. You'll earn your keep. You will mop floors, carry parts and hear. However, I will show you how to hear your Rig. How to experience the Drive Energy rather than burn it out in a flashy burst. There was a moment of silence and then the harshness was lost and something older and weaker took its place. I have interred too many hot-blooded children who believed that a strong Rig was a kind of replacement of ability. I'm tired of digging graves."
It wasn't an inspiring speech. It was a list of harsh truths. His crude candor seemed the reality of the world to me, though, in a world of screaming announcers and glittering neon.
"Why?" I finally asked. "Why bother?"
He waited some time and his eyes were far away as though he saw ghosts in the shadows of the garage. One of you does not die sometimes, he said, his voice so low that I hardly heard it. And that... that too, is a rebellion.
He pointed at an open bay in a corner, which was strewn with tools. "Your space. First lesson starts at dawn. Don't be late." He strolled off, his footsteps and his rattling arm ringing down into the garage.
It was lonely once more, but this time the silence did not seem to be the prelude of death. It felt like a chance. I came up to my Rig and touched its hood. It was a low humming, and it shook me all through. It wasn't Rustbucket anymore. But could I cease to be only, with the aid of the Veteran, Kael the scavenger? Perhaps we can learn to be what we are not.
Dawn was a million years distant and I had an impression that it would come sooner than I could possibly be prepared to receive it.