Drabble: Storm Winds

Drabble: Storm Winds

I had been in Pittsburgh, as the humans say, for a coon’s age, when I first saw her. We elves say “nae hae” but what we’re both saying is “we’re too shit lazy to figure it out.” I think it was a month before everything went to hell and back, so it means that she would have been seventeen.

I had been to the hoverbike races before, had seen her race before, and even knew her name—how couldn’t I as the crowd chanted it when she won? But usually she was just a roar of engine, a blur of motion, and a small figure muscling a flying piece of steel through impossible maneuvers.

This time I was down by the pits. I was debating on moving. This close and the bikes flashed by in a heartbeat, and vanished around the bend. And yet, part of my talent was whispering to me, “stay here, stay here, this is important.” So I lingered, wondering what could possibly be important in this loud, pulsing celebration of human recklessness?

And then my talent cried “now” and two bikes came flying around the corner. She was down low, hugging the curve, cutting off the leader. She would have made it, but he caught sight of her and dropped down, nearly on top of her. And my heart must have known, even then, even before the rest of me, because it leaped up to my throat. And my hand, guided by my heart, went to my sword. If she had died at that moment, so would have the man that killed her—and what a fucking mess that would have been to explain.

But she sensed him, and slammed into a desperate sideways slide to avoid him. His drive missed her body, but caught her front chain, and the two bikes became a tornado of machines and bodies. The crowd screamed and surged backwards, trying to escape the oncoming wreckage, and I lost sight of her for a moment. Then I spotted her, climbing to her feet on the other side of the track.

“Don’t go out onto the track!” She caught a member of another team’s pit crew that was about to dart out to check on the other driver. “Get a caution flag up! Call for a caution!”

The pack of bikes came around the corner at that moment and roared through, drowning out whatever commands she was shouting, but I could see her both keeping check on those who would wander out into the race, and organizing clearing the wreckage when the all clear came.

I watched her, wondering why I had my hand on my sword, why I was ready to leap to her defense. My talent is so sporadic that I didn’t even realize yet that she was female. I thought she was a boy and wondered at my fickle heart. Wolf Who Rules was my only love—but what was this odd niggling feeling I had that he’d just lost his place?

The other driver surfaced, helmet already off, shouting out obscenities in English. She turned and shouted back in language just as human, just as foul. He made a rude gesture, and she launched herself toward him—only to be plucked out of the air by a very tall man.

That moved me out onto the track. No one could touch her like that—certainly not that man.

“Let me at the bastard, Nathan!” She didn’t even seem to be aware that she was being restrained except that it was keeping from her inflicting pain on the other driver. With a curse, she tore off her helmet and flung it at the other driver.

And knowledge pierced through me—there and gone—like an arrow passing through my body. She was to be the one I love above all the rest—the one I would die for.

I stumbled to a halt, stunned and confused. Her brown hair was hacked short, making it easy to see in a glance that she was human. She was small, Stone Clan dark, and howling curse words in English. Her nose was bloody. She was caked with mud. And she was human—which meant she would be dead of old age in a blink of eye.

How could I ever look to her? For all of being a mutt, I was still sekasha, by blood and by sword, and only a domana-caste elf could hold one like me.

My erratic talent—having shot certainty through me—fell quiet.

“Holy one,” someone called me back to myself. A human was bowing before me. He spoke fluent high tongue, a rarity, and he wore a pit crew shirt from the Team Tinker. Over his heart, the word Oilcan was stitched in as his name. “I am sorry, holy one, but you must leave the course. The race is about to begin again.”

I blinked at the man, realizing that he looked like her male twin.

“Who is he?”

He glanced over his shoulder to verify I meant her. “The small angry one? She is my cousin, Tinker.”

So I learned the name but I did not learn the means that our fate was to be connected for months to come.