Chapter 37 - The Wooden Thunder
"Racers... to your marks."
The automated voice echoed in three languages across the cavernous timber amphitheater.
The crowd fell into an electric, breathless hush. The smell of cedar oil and friction rubber hung thick in the heated air. Mia backed *The Phoenix-7* into the magnetic starting blocks, her gloved fingers resting on the high rims of her custom carbon wheels.
To her right was Moreau, his broad shoulders hunched over an ultra-light French machine built like an arrow. To her left was Yuki Tanaka, the reigning junior world champion from Osaka, calm and centered like a blade of folded steel.
I stood behind the coaches' barrier, my hands gripping the padded railing so hard my fingers went numb. Across the vast arena, high in the private glass boxes reserved for Swiss royalty and international financiers, a single silhouette stood near the center window. A tall man in a dark cashmere coat, holding a pair of field glasses aimed directly down at lane three.
Montgomery.
*Crack!*
The starting gun fired.
Mia’s reaction time was instantaneous—a sub-second explosion of raw, furious torque. Her titanium chassis launched forward with a mechanical shriek as her knuckles hammered the push-rings. *One! Two! Three! Four!* Within thirty meters, she had cleared the flat transition zone and carved upward onto the thirty-eight-degree wooden bank.
"Allez!" the French corner screamed.
Moreau was moving with terrifying velocity, using his superior reach to generate enormous downhill momentum off turn two. As they entered the back straightaway at thirty-two miles per hour, Tanaka held the low line against the inner apron, but Moreau deliberately swung wide, climbing the high wall to swoop down like a hawk upon Mia’s rear quadrant.
"Watch the tail, Mia!" I screamed, though my voice was swallowed whole by the thunderous roar of ten thousand stomping feet on the wooden bleachers.
Moreau banked downward, his front wheel cutting within millimeters of Mia’s right hub. It wasn't an overtaking maneuver; it was an aerodynamic chop designed to induce speed-wobble on the featherweight titanium frame.
The turbulent slipstream caught *The Phoenix-7*. Mia’s left wheel lifted an inch off the cedar boards. The machine shuddered violently, sliding two feet up the sheer wall toward the outer balustrade.
The crowd gasped in horror.
If she hit the outer lip at that speed, the centrifugal force would launch her out of the oval and into the steel support girders forty feet below.
In that split second of mortal terror, Mia didn't touch her brake.
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She leaned her entire torso out over the void, dropping her center of gravity beneath the tipping axis, dragging her right palm flat against the bare tire tread to create dynamic drag. The friction burned through her leather glove with a puff of blue smoke, but the violent maneuver snapped the front wheel back into line.
She dropped out of the turn like a stone falling down a well, cutting beneath Moreau’s rear axle with pinpoint surgical precision, taking the inside line into turn three.
