The Blood Racer (The Blood Racer Trilogy Book 1) (36 page)

              “Rigel!” I called out. My voice was miniscule compared to the roar of my turbines as they worked to keep my ship aloft. Poking my head out, I turned to the starboard and saw nothing. No Rigel. When I turned my head to port, I had only a fraction of a second to react, catching his foot in my hand before it could crack me in the skull.
              With a grunt, I held fast to his heavy boot, grabbing a fistful of his pant leg to make sure he didn’t float any further away. “I got you!” I cried. “I got you, Rigel!”
              He gave no reply as I stumbled down the ladder, trying to pull him in. The small hydrogen balloon on his back was making it difficult, though. I ended up having to wrap my arms around his waist and jump off of the ladder. Our combined weight was too much for the balloon, and I was able to pull most of his body into the ship before I reached up and hit the buckle release that was fastened around his chest. Grunting again with the effort, I had to jostle Rigel’s unconscious body in order for the backpack’s straps to slide off his shoulders.
              Finally, the pull of the balloon helped to jerk the pack off of him, leaving me to bear his full weight, which was enough to bring me to my knees. As the pack floated away, I could only clutch my best friend as we lay in a tangled heap on the floor of the
Kicker
. I didn’t care how feeble it made me look, I held him close and sobbed into his shirt, which smelled like exhaust and hazelnuts.
              “Hey, Ellie,” he said weakly, his voice sounding almost like a whisper due to the turbines.
              Quickly pulling back from him, I wiped my face on my sleeve and looked down at him. “I can’t believe it. The pack,” I sputtered. “If you hadn’t had that pack, Rigel, I –”
              “It’s okay,” he said, smiling up at me. “I’m all right.”
            Without thinking, I leaned down and kissed him, pressing my lips tightly against his, and reaching under his helmet to clutch a fistful of his dirty blonde hair. I can’t say why exactly I did it, but I didn’t care at the moment. I was just so grateful to have him with me, to have him alive and breathing in my arms. In that instant, he was the most wonderful sight I had ever laid eyes on I couldn’t deny how good it was to feel his sun-drenched lips melding into mine. The cold hysteria that had gripped me before was melting away, fought into submission from the constant warmth that radiated from him. That same warmth was now spreading through my entire body, pulsing a wild energy with every thunderous beat of my heart. It threatened to engulf me. I wasn’t sure quite how to handle that, so I opened my eyes and pulled away from him.
            “I’m…” What was I going to say?
            Rigel could only stare up at me, his eyelids slightly drooping. He looked like he’d just been clubbed in the back of the head. “I’m definitely fine,” he breathed, grinning.
              With a small laugh, I sat back and helped pull him to a sitting position. “Hang on, okay? I have to get us moving again.”
              Rigel nodded slowly and reached to for the nearest wall, grasping one of the straps that I usually used to secure cargo. “Adams,” he murmured.
            My head cocked to the side. “What?”
            Refusing to repeat himself, he dug into the pocket of his scorched brown trousers and retrieved a square of parchment. He acted as though it took a great deal of effort to just hold the paper out for me. I took the parchment and looked it over, smoothing it out against my knee. There were words written on it, scrawled in the same fashion and hand writing that all the other clues had been in.
            “A clue!” I blurted out. “You got the clue!”
            Rigel simply nodded.
            I looked down at the paper in my hand and focused on the ornate letters. “To finish, you require great power,” I read aloud. “But, the power, you should not seek. What began as a warning of
Tristitia
became a nickname from the meek.”
            At once, I knew what Rigel meant. As the image of the rusted metal sign above the plant entrance appeared in my memory, the plant that my father had worked in, and my mother after that. I knew the race was taking us back to Adams.
              Wiping away fresh tears from my cheeks, I got to my feet and hopped back into my pilot chair, spinning around to face out the windscreen. With the flick of a switch, I fired up the
Kicker’s
primary engine and killed the turbines, which caused me to begin losing altitude. Thankfully, my engine got up to full power in just a few seconds, and I was easily able to swoop around and pull up before we fell into a dive. Now that we were moving in the right direction again, I punched the throttle and leveled off the nose of the ship, making sure I was flying evenly before turning my chair around once more.
              Rigel was still sitting where I had left him. As I approached his right side, I could see that that entire half of his body looked to be bright pink in color. He was badly sunburned, surely from floating around the clouds with no protection from the ultraviolet rays. In addition to this, he had a long, bloody wound down his left shin.
              “Is that from a gunshot?” I asked him, grabbing Darby’s flask of water.
              Rigel shook his head. “No, I got that from kicking out my own windscreen. I only had a few seconds to punch out of there.”
              I handed him the canteen and he tipped it upside down, gulping loudly several times before pausing to take a breath. “Thanks,” he panted. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes, resting against the metal wall of the hold.
              “I was so afraid you were dead,” I said softly, feeling my lower lip beginning to quiver.
              Rigel smiled lazily. “Yeah, well…it’ll take more than a fiery crash to stop me.”
              I couldn’t help but laugh at his stupid joke. The sheer relief of having him there with me was incredibly uplifting. “I can’t believe you were able to hang onto the clue!”
              “That wasn’t all of it,” Rigel told, forcing himself to sit up straighter. “There was a small route map that looked like it would have led to a platform.”
              “Another clue?” I asked, suddenly losing the excitement I was beginning to feel.
              Rigel shook his head. “No way. The route looked like it ran through the stop…instead of diverting from it like the rest of the clue locations.”
              I breathed a sigh of relief. “Refuel station?”
              He nodded. “Fresh hydro, fresh charges, all that good stuff.”
              “Well, I guess we’re in luck!” I told him. “I’ve just been to Ravencog! They charged my batteries and filled my tanks. We don’t have to divert to the station! We can head straight on to Adams!”
              Rigel looked surprisingly happy at this news, but his rising smile faltered. “Ravencog? How did you…? Wait…how far behind are we?”
            I blinked. “Well, it took me a little over an hour to get to you. Probably seventy-five minutes, give or take.”
              Rigel closed his eyes and leaned his head back, running the numbers in his head. Since he was the only one that had seen the location of the refuel platform on the map, only he could determine how far of a head start we’d have on the rest of the competition. After a moment, he opened his eyes and sighed.
              “I think we’ll make the same time I would have made if I hadn’t been shot down,” Rigel said with a shrug. “Best guess…we’ll get there about the same time as Audra. Maybe a few minutes after.”
              I sat back on my heels and exhaled nervously. “Well, at least we’re still in it,” I said, trying to remain optimistic.
              Rigel nodded, giving me an exhausted grin. He reminded me of a child that was fighting sleep, trying not to let his eyelids close all the way. It made me laugh. Letting out another sigh of relief, I swiped the heavy helmet off his head and smoothed his dark blonde hair.
              “You should rest,” I told him.
              I was expecting him to argue with me, to keep insisting that he was just fine, and that he should fly while I rested. Instead, he just nodded once again and slowly slumped down to the metal grating of the floor, using his flight helmet to cover his eyes.
              With another small laugh, I patted his hand and stood up, slowly making my way up the few steps to the cockpit. I plopped down in my chair, huffing all the air out of my lungs. I was suddenly thinking that
I
could use a nap. The excitement I’d felt when racing toward Rigel was all leeching out of me, and I was feeling pretty drained. After a moment, though, I remembered that I wasn’t yet in the clear. I still had to step on it if I was going to catch Audra. I didn’t know how many more stops were in the race, but it never lasted more than a couple of days. We had to be getting close to the end.
              I made sure my throttle was pegged. I would save my hydro boosters for when I was desperate, but I still wanted to be going as fast as I could. If Rigel was right, we’d be approaching Adams at roughly the same time as Audra, and things were sure to get interesting after that. As tired as I felt, I couldn’t falter. I knew we were pretty far off course, but I still couldn’t count out any of the other racers.
              In truth, I didn’t even know who was left to worry about. Darby had dropped out, so that was one less ally I would have on my side, John Deseo was dead, Killian was dead, and Rigel was here on the
Cloud Kicker
. The only remaining contestants I could even remember were Thorn and Grace Buchannon. I hadn’t seen Thorn since everyone had departed from Shiloh. As for Grace, I still wasn’t sure where she stood.
              As I struggled to stay awake, I decided to pull back on the yoke and climb as high as I could. If I could catch a tailwind, I could potentially make fantastic time back to Adams. At the moment, I wanted anything that could give me an edge over Audra Carina. I felt my ears pop as I went up, and the temperature began to drop. I searched around the cockpit for my jacket and draped it over my shoulders as I stared out the front screen to read the sky. There wasn’t much of a tailwind, but I spent quite some time weaving in and out of air streams, trying to find a path of little resistance. According to my gauges, it was working. I had to keep checking my windspeed to be sure, but I was making excellent time.
             I decided it was safe to flip on my transponder, and I wished I could have been there to see the looks on the faces of the Archons, watching their own table screens as I suddenly made my reappearance. They would be furious. Livid, even. They thought they had taken care of me, only to have me reemerge so close to the end of the race. Just knowing that was a delicious feeling, and I laughed to myself.
              After roughly an hour of traveling at high altitude, I began to hear Rigel making strange sounds from behind me. When I spun around, I saw him curled in a u-shape, clutching his arms to his midsection as his whole body shivered on the floor of the ship. Immediately, I pointed the nose of the
Kicker
downward and began to descend. It took only a minute, but the warmer temperatures were all Rigel needed to relax. As he rolled over, I spotted the wound on his left shin again. He needed to have something on it before it got infected.
              Once again making sure the ship was level, I stepped into the back with him and retrieved the first aid kit that I’d received with one of my clues. As I pulled it from its strap on the wall and plunked it down in the metallic floor, Rigel jerked awake.
              “Ellie!” he shouted, his eyes suddenly wide and searching. He whipped his head around in several directions before finally looking back at me.
              “Relax!” I snapped back, startled by his sudden flailing. “Holy foxtrot, I’m just trying to help your leg!”
              Still breathing heavily, Rigel pulled himself into a sitting position and rubbed his face with his hands. “Sorry. Forgot where I was for a second.”
              “Don’t worry about it,” I told him cracking open the first aid kit. I noticed a small leather pouch of slippery elm bark powder and loosened the cinch. Glancing up at Rigel, I tried as hard as I could to nonchalantly ask, “What were you dreaming?”
              He blinked his eyes a few times and looked into the distance. “I was…” he began. He must have noticed me staring at him, though, because he suddenly shook his head. “Hm. I can’t remember.”
              I scoffed as I poured some water into the pouch of elm powder. When it was mixed into a paste, the powder was the best thing around for pain and inflammation of wounds. After a few silent seconds, the powder was mixed, and I began to spread it onto several strips of cloth bandage that were also in the kit.
              Beside me, Rigel let out a small chuckle. “Never thought I’d be dead-heading the last leg of the race.”
              Without looking up, I shrugged. “No big deal. I’m just glad you’re alive.”
              “You and me both,” he said with a sigh.
              We both fell silent again as I gingerly applied the bandages to his leg. Despite the pain that it must have caused, Rigel barely made a sound as I covered the bloody wound and secured the dressing.
              “Should have cleaned it first,” I said. “But, we don’t have much water left.”
              Rigel tenderly prodded the bandages, wincing as he did. “Don’t worry. It’ll be fine.”
              I nodded and quickly shoved all the supplies back into the first aid kit before strapping it to the wall again. From behind me, I pulled my satchel around in front of me and opened the flap to look inside. I didn’t need anything, but I was forming a habit of checking it to make sure everything was still there. I had stuffed all the clues thus far into the satchel, just in case one of them came in handy.