Flying Lap

Turn Two

The velodrome smelled like pine resin and tire glue, and Maya Okonkwo decided immediately that she was going to like it here even if nobody liked her.

Greta Sandoval met her at the tunnel mouth with a clipboard she clearly never read from, because she recited Maya's assignment without once glancing down.

"You're on the sprint program. Dev's block, four to seven. Tommy trains with him, so you'll see both of them. Fair warning," Greta said, "Dev doesn't believe in analysts. He believes in his legs."

"His legs can't tell him what his power curve looks like lap by lap."

"No." Greta smiled like a woman handing off a lit firework. "But try telling him that."

Maya followed her up the stairs to the analysis booth above turn two, a glass-fronted box with a clear view of the whole 250-meter oval. Her laptop was already on the desk where the courier had left it, still in its sleeve. She unpacked it herself, set up the timing beam at the finish line herself, and was running her first calibration when the riders came down onto the boards.

She picked out Dev Larkin before Greta pointed him out. He rode like the track owed him money: fixed gear, no brakes, hands loose in the drops, eleven seasons of muscle memory in every pedal stroke. Tommy Iglesias circled behind him, younger, hungrier, sitting up to look at the booth.

Tommy waved. Dev did not.

When the riders rolled to the fence below the booth, Maya leaned into the microphone. "Good afternoon. I'm Maya. I'll be calling splits today, so you'll have numbers at the finish line."

Dev pulled one earplug out. "Numbers at the finish line. You know what else is at the finish line?"

"The timing beam," Maya said.

"The finish line," Dev said. "I've crossed it maybe ten thousand times. I know what a lap feels like. I don't need a laptop to tell me."

"Great. Then it'll be very easy for you to ignore me."

Tommy made a sound into his glove that might have been a laugh swallowed in self-defense.

Greta appeared at the rail above them. "Dev. She's federation assignment. Play nice or play somewhere else."

"I play here," Dev said. "It's my track."

"It's the federation's track," Greta said, "which is why she's in the booth and you're on the boards. Four to seven, gentlemen."

She was gone before Dev could answer, which told Maya that Greta had done this before, probably many times, and considered it somebody else's problem.

Dev climbed back onto his bike. He rolled a slow warm-up lap, then another, then pulled up under the booth with his front wheel skimming the blue line and looked directly up at the glass.

"Hey, analyst."

Maya keyed the mic. "Yes."

"You've got the beam at the line. What's my lap time right now."

"Your warm-up lap was forty-one seconds."

"Wrong," Dev said, with enormous satisfaction. "It was forty-one and change. Your beam rounds."

"My beam reads to the hundredth. I rounded because you were going four kilometers an hour and I didn't want to embarrass you."

Tommy rode past behind him and called out, "She got you, Dev."

"She got nothing." Dev stood on the pedals, circling, working up through the gears. "Tell you what. Flying lap. You call my splits live, out loud, and if your numbers match what I feel, I'll let you put your little meter on my bike. If they don't match, you pack the laptop and you go analyze swimming."

"That's not how measurement works. The meter doesn't care whether you believe in it."

"Then this should be easy for you."

It was a trap and they both knew it, and Maya keyed the mic anyway, because a rider who volunteers for live data on day one is a rider who can be taught, eventually, with patience.

"Flying lap," she said. "I'll call the half split at the line opposite, then your time at the finish. Go when you're ready."

Dev wound up through the banking, high on turn two, above her booth, and dropped in like a stone off a shelf. He came around turn one low and fast, and Maya watched the numbers climb and called them clean: "Thirteen-two through the back straight, hold."

He was flying now, genuinely flying, the boards humming under him, and she could hear the gear fixed and silent and the whole track ringing like a struck string. He crossed the line opposite.

"Fourteen-eight at the half."

He surged. That was the moment she knew exactly what kind of rider he was, because he didn't take the inside line like a man chasing a time. He took the sprinter's line up the banking, showing the whole empty stadium the shape of his power, and he looked up at the booth as he did it, to see whether she was watching.

She was watching. That was her job.

But a rider looking up instead of down at twenty-five meters a second is a rider not watching his wheels, and turn two has a seam where the boards meet that has thrown better men than Dev Larkin. His front wheel clipped it at full speed, the bike skipped sideways, and he went down along the banking in a long grinding slide that Maya heard in her teeth.

He was up before she reached the tunnel. She took the stairs two at a time and came out onto the apron as he sat up, swearing, checking his palms, checking his hip, checking the bike.

"Don't move," Maya said. "Don't move until you've checked yourself."

"I'm fine."

"You went down at speed on a forty-degree bank. You're not fine, you're adrenalized. Sit."

He sat. Tommy came around the track and stopped at the fence, breathing hard from a lap of his own. "Dev. You okay?"

"I'm fine. The boards are not fine." Dev picked up his bike, turned the cranks, frowned at the rear wheel. Then he looked past the bike to where the power meter had been, and wasn't.

The meter had been mounted on his bike before the lap. Greta had done that much, whatever Dev believed. Now it was a black box skittering across the boards above them, sliding down the banking in little hops, gaining speed the way anything gains speed on a slope built for exactly that.

It came to rest on the blue line near the fence, twenty meters away, dented on one corner.

Silence on the apron. Tommy looked at Maya. Maya looked at the meter. Dev looked at Maya looking at the meter.

"So," Dev said. "Does it still work."

"I don't know. I'm not the one who threw it."

"The track threw it. The track has a seam."

"The track has had that seam since before you were racing," Maya said. "You've ridden over it eleven seasons and never once looked up at the booth mid-lap until today."

Tommy made the swallowed-laugh sound again, then pretended to be very interested in his handlebars.

Dev got up, walked past her without answering, climbed the banking in his cleats with the little hopping step riders use, and picked the power meter up off the blue line himself. He turned it over once in his hands, thumbed the dent, and looked at it the way a man looks at something that has just made him a promise or an accusation, Maya couldn't tell which.

Then he came back down the slope, stopped in front of her, and held it out.

"Fourteen-two," he said. "My half split. You called fourteen-eight."

"You were decelerating when you crashed. My number was the honest one."

"We'll see." He didn't hand it over right away. He kept it there between them, dented corner up, and there was a dare in his eyes that had nothing to do with lap times. "Fix it. Mount it. If it tells me something tomorrow I don't already know, I'll listen."

Maya took the meter. It was warm from the boards and from his hand, and heavier than it looked.

"It'll tell you plenty," she said. "You crashed on the fastest lap of the day because you wanted an audience. That's free. The rest costs you a warm-up you don't skip."

Dev grinned for the first time all afternoon, rueful and bright, and Maya thought, with a sinking feeling she chose to ignore, that this was going to be a problem.

Tommy called from the fence, "Does this mean we get numbers too?"

"It means," Maya said, "that in twenty-one days, when selection comes, both of you are going to know exactly how fast you are."

Dev's grin faded at that, quick as a skipped heartbeat, so quick she almost missed it.

She didn't ask. Not on day one. She carried the meter up to the booth and set it on the desk beside her laptop, dented corner toward the glass, where she could see the whole track reflected in it.

Lactic Legs

By day four, Maya had learned the velodrome's evening moods. The overhead lights buzzed at a lower pitch after six. The boards cooled and got quieter under tires. The sprint squad came in loose and left hollow-legged, and between those two states she could learn almost anything about a rider if she kept her mouth shut and her stopwatch honest.

Tonight was the ergo session: warm-up jumps, then three sets of seated efforts on the trainers lined up along the straight, legs and lungs doing all the work while the track itself sat empty and waiting. Tommy Iglesias was on the end trainer, sweat-dark shirt stuck to his spine, chewing the inside of his cheek the way he did when he was determined not to show what the effort was doing to him.

Dev came in late, hair still damp from the shower he took before training instead of after, which Maya had decided said more about him than any power file she'd ever read. He nodded at her, which was new. Four days ago he'd looked at her booth the way other people looked at a speed camera.

She climbed down from the booth with her clipboard while the first set was still rolling. She'd set the power meter on the trackside stand that morning, its dented corner facing the riders, because if they were going to be measured they might as well know it. It had taken her twenty minutes of cable-ties and a short argument with the stand's wingnut, and the whole time she'd been aware of Dev watching from his trainer with the meter reflected somewhere behind his eyes.

"Twenty-five laps," she said to Tommy, tapping her clipboard. "That's your kilo effort, six and a quarter kilometers at effort. When we do it on the track tomorrow, I want the pacing from tonight to hold."

"It'll hold," Tommy said, not looking up from his pedal stroke.

"Set two drops off," Maya said. "Not because you're weak. Because you start set one too hot."

Dev's head came around. "He doesn't start hot."

"He starts like it's the last effort of the day instead of the first of three. Watch." She flipped her clipboard around so they could both see the splits. "Set one, he's three seconds under target pace. Set two, he's two over. Set three, tonight, he'll be another two over before he claws any of it back. That's not legs. That's arithmetic."

Tommy blew a breath out through puffed cheeks. "That's a guess."

"It's a projection."

"It's a guess wearing a lab coat," Dev said, and there was a grin in it, but only half of one. The other half was paying attention, and Maya was beginning to understand that with Dev those two things happened at once, and that the grin was how he carried the attention so nobody could take it from him.

"Fine," she said. "Then it costs you nothing. If his third set comes in within a second of my number, you carry my laptop case to the car every night until selection. If I'm wrong, I'll say so in front of everyone."

"Say what, exactly?" Tommy asked.

"Say I was wrong about you. Full sentence. No mumbling."

"Deal," Dev said before Tommy could, which interested Maya more than she let show. He wanted her to be wrong, and he wanted to be the one to set the terms of it.

She wrote her number on the clipboard in block figures and covered it with her palm until the start of set three. Then she held it up so both of them could read it, turned it face-down on the stand beside the power meter, and waited.

Set three happened. Tommy's shoulders dropped a centimeter on the fourth lap and stayed down. His cadence wavered through the middle third, and Maya watched Dev watch that waver with a stillness that didn't match the man who threw meters at seams in the track. When Tommy crossed the timing point for the final time, his head hung between his arms and he made a sound like a kettle giving up.

Maya turned the clipboard over. Her number. Then the meter's, half a second off.

"Within a second," she said.

"Half a second," Dev said, like a man reading his own sentence. He blew out a breath. "You're not going to let me forget the laptop thing."

"I'm going to enjoy the laptop thing."

"Yeah." He dragged the word out, rueful. "You would."

Tommy slid off his trainer and stood with his hands on his knees, dripping. "Okay. Fine. You can have my pacing. But if she starts predicting my breakfast, I'm riding for another country."

"You'd have to learn another language," Dev said.

"I know numbers now. That's basically her language."

Maya laughed before she could stop it, and both of them looked at her like the sound had come out of the speaker system by mistake. She covered it with the clipboard.

Hydration, she said, and cool-down cadence, and Tommy groaned off toward the rollers with a towel around his neck like a scarf. The squad drained out of the infield by ones and twos. Cleats rang on the boards. Somebody's phone played a notification chime from a gym bag and was silenced.

Maya stayed, because the evening numbers wouldn't enter themselves. She was halfway through the transfer when she noticed she'd followed Dev over to the storage bay under the stands, where his cracked disk wheel leaned in its padded bag against the wall, out of commission until the replacement rim arrived. He crouched to check a buckle, and she stopped a meter away, suddenly uncertain what she was doing there.

Then she saw the bag's clear plastic window and the grease pencil hanging from a loop on the zip, and her hand was already reaching for it before she'd decided anything.

"Your gearings," she said, and wrote on the plastic in quick strokes. "Tomorrow, on the track. Set three pacing, this is what it means for your rollout."

Dev stood up slowly and looked at the numbers on his own equipment bag, in her handwriting, and Maya had the absurd thought that she'd just written on something that belonged to him and that he was going to be angry about it. He wasn't. He read the line twice, lips moving a little.

"That's a lower gear than I ride."

"For the last kilo of a paced effort, yes. You can spin up through it. You don't need to tell me you've spent eleven seasons making big gears work. Tomorrow, try making this one work."

"You put this on my wheel bag like it's normal."

"It is normal. Analysts write on things."

"Not on other people's things."

"You left it in my eyeline," she said. "That's basically consent."

He laughed. It surprised them both, a short rough sound, and he turned back to the wheel as if to hide it. "The crack's not bad, you know. It's the same depth all the way along. Like the track and the wheel agreed on something."

"The track agreed with nothing. You put a wheel under more load than the rim could carry at that angle."

"You've watched the footage that closely?"

"It's my job to watch things that closely."

"Must be a fun job at parties."

"I don't get invited to parties where people ride wheels past their load limits."

"Those are the good parties."

He was grinning again, the whole of it this time, and Maya caught herself smiling back and recalibrated her expression toward professional. The lights buzzed. Out on the track, the timing beam at the finish line blinked its small red standby pulse, patient as a metronome.

"You've still got my meter down there," he said, nodding at the trackside stand.

"It's not yours. It's the program's."

"It's mine tonight. You're measuring my kilo effort with it."

"I'm measuring the program's kilo effort," she said. "You're just the legs attached."

"Eleven seasons of legs."

"Some of which I've got on file." She said it lightly, and watched it land, watched the grin dim by half a notch the way it had on day one, that quick flicker she wasn't supposed to notice.

He zipped the bag. Hefted the wheel onto his shoulder, easy, one-handed, a man who'd carried it a thousand times. "Goodnight, analyst."

"Goodnight, legs."

He got four steps toward the exit and stopped. Didn't turn around. The stands were empty and the infield was empty and the lights had gone to their evening pitch, low and yellow, and when he spoke it was quieter than anything he'd said all night.

"Off the record," he said. "Your files. The old ones, my files, whatever you've got. What do the numbers say about me?"

Under the Stands

Rain found the storage bay the way it always did, through the seam in the concrete above the third shelf, and by the time Maya came down the tunnel with her coffee it had a plan. A fat, patient drip. One. One. One. Onto the lid of the wheel collection.

"No," she said out loud, to nobody, and set the coffee on a crate.

The wheels lived in tall padded cases, six of them, stacked on their sides like coins in a roll. The top case had a dark bloom across its fabric. She hauled it down, heard water shift inside the padding, and felt her stomach drop with it. She was halfway through dragging the second case to the dry end of the bay when footsteps echoed down the tunnel.

Dev appeared in the doorway with his hood up and rain on his shoulders, holding a towel like he'd been sent for it.

"It's leaking," she said.

"I can hear that." He came over, looked at the seam in the ceiling, then at the trail of drips. "Third shelf. It always finds the third shelf."

"You knew about this?"

"I knew it leaked in November. Nobody asked me about September." He dropped the towel on the wet case and started shifting the stack with her, case by case, down to the far wall where the concrete was dry and pale. His hands knew the weight of them. He didn't grunt or adjust; he just moved them, and she noticed herself matching his pace without deciding to.

The last case was the heaviest, and when they set it down he didn't let go of it right away. His thumb rested on the zipper.

"This one's mine," he said.

"They're all the program's."

"This one's mine." He unzipped it anyway.

Inside, packed in a cut-open foam mattress, was a rear disk wheel. He lifted it out and turned it in the overhead strip light, and she saw it: a hairline crack running along the rim, from about the valve hole to where the spoke bed would be on a normal wheel, even and fine as a pencil line.

"That's the one," she said quietly. She'd seen the file. She'd watched the footage more than once, the way she watched everything.

"You know what it is."

"I know what day it's from."

"Everyone knows what day it's from." He set the wheel upright against the wall, and it leaned there like a person listening. He crouched next to it, forearms on his knees. "It's the same depth all the way along. Did I tell you that? Like the whole rim decided at once."

"That's how carbon fails at that angle. It's not mysterious."

"It is to me." He tapped the crack once, gently, the way you'd touch a scar on someone else. "I was doing a standing start. Full effort. And I heard it before I felt it. A click. Like a lighter, right under me, at sixty an hour. And I thought, well. That's the wheel. And then I thought, no, actually. That's my leg, or my collarbone, or my neck, and I've got about half a second to decide what I'm going to be when I land."

The rain kept its count above them. One. One.

"What did you decide?" she asked.

"Nothing. I got lucky. Grass on the outside of turn three, remember? The track's two hundred fifty meters of wood and then it just, it forgives you." He looked up at her. "Except now every time I do a standing start, I'm listening for the click. Every one. Sixty efforts a week, and I'm listening for a sound that already happened."

Maya sat down slowly on the nearest wheel case. The foam sighed under her.

"That's why the numbers," she said. Not a question.

"Greta says my start power's down six percent since the crash. She's got it on a graph. She showed me the graph, like a doctor showing you an X-ray of your own lung." He shook his head. "Six percent. On a standing start, that's the race. That's the whole race, gone before the bell."

"It's recoverable."

"You don't know that."

"I know what recoverable looks like on a graph. It looks like that."

"You've got a graph of me."

"I've got graphs of everyone in this program. That's the entire job."

He turned the wheel slightly, catching the light along the crack. "Before you. The last analyst. They had all our data, everything, and then one day it was all, I don't know where it went. Sold, leaked, whatever happens to data. And I thought, when they brought you in..." He stopped. "Never mind what I thought."

Maya's mouth went dry in a very specific way. She opened it to say: it wasn't sold. She'd given her old team two days of data, two days, and then refused to hand over the medical files, the fatigue scores, the things that could get a rider pushed past where their body would hold. She'd said no in a meeting with her whole chest and been walked out by security before lunch.

She got as far as, "It wasn't, I didn't..."

And then she stopped. Because it wasn't his yet, that story. Because he was sitting on the floor next to a broken wheel telling her the thing he was scared of, and the trade didn't feel even. He'd given her the fear. She'd give him the facts some other day, when they were worth more.

"It wasn't what you think," she said instead.

"Okay." He didn't push. She noted that, filed it somewhere she kept observations about him. He let it sit, and they sat in the leak-count together.

He rose and lowered himself onto the wheel case beside hers, close, the width of a track line between them. She could feel the warmth off his rain-damp arm without touching it. Neither of them moved away. Neither of them closed the gap either. The bay was quiet except for the drip and the rain on the roof above the stands, a soft crowd noise, almost like a race day.

"Twenty-one days," he said, "huh. Was it twelve when you got here?"

"Something like that."

"I keep doing the math in my sleep. Twelve days out of twelve, I wake up doing the math."

"That's normal."

"You write numbers on things," he said. "On my wheel bag. On my cases. There's a four with a circle around it on my handlebar tape that I have been afraid to ask about."

"Four's your cadence floor for the flying effort. Don't drop below it in the last corner."

"See, I knew it meant something. I thought maybe it was a grade. Like you'd marked me." He smiled at the wheel. "A four."

"Out of what?"

"Don't ruin it."

She laughed, a short sound that bounced off the concrete, and he looked over at her like he wanted to catch it and keep it. She reached into her jacket pocket before he could say anything about that, and found the folded square of paper she'd written on that morning in the booth: his projected kilo split, the honest one, the number she'd meant to tuck under his tape tomorrow. Her thumb covered the figures.

"What's that?"

"A number."

"Your whole life is numbers. Mine too, apparently. What number?"

She looked at it. Looked at him, at the crack in the wheel, at the rain still finding the third shelf. Then she folded the paper smaller and pushed it back down into her pocket, all the way to the bottom.

"Some numbers are private," she said.

He held her gaze a moment longer than the conversation required. Then he nodded, once, like a man accepting terms.

"Okay, analyst."

They sat on the wheel cases and didn't touch, and the rain kept counting, and neither of them got up to stop it.

The Whiteboard

Maya had the meeting room set up by seven forty, which was early, which meant she had not slept well, which was nobody's business but hers. The whiteboard came from the junior program's supply closet and it still had a training plan for under-fourteens ghosted under a half-hearted erase. She wiped it clean and rewrote it in her own hand: the squad, the events, the days. Day thirteen of twenty-one.

Tommy arrived first, hair damp, carrying two breakfast bars and no opinions yet. Greta arrived second with coffee for three people, which was Greta's way of making sure Maya had a cup whether she wanted one or not. Dev arrived last, and he arrived quiet, which Maya noted and then told herself not to note, because noting things about Dev had become a habit with no exit ramp.

"All right," she said. "Squad review. Sit."

The whiteboard did most of the talking. She had laid it out in three columns, and she watched their eyes travel down the middle one, which was the only one that mattered. Tommy's name sat at the top of the selection ranking with three clean rows of data beneath it. Dev's name sat second, and beneath his name sat the number she had not been able to make smaller no matter how many times she reran it: a six percent drop in standing-start power since his crash.

"The time trial is the whole decision," she said. "One rider gets nominated. I don't make that call, but the data makes it obvious what the committee will see, so I'd rather you all see it first, from me, than find out in a room with suits in it."

Tommy looked at the board, then at Dev, then at his breakfast bar, and peeled it very slowly, which was Tommy's way of removing himself from a conversation without leaving the room.

Greta looked at the ranking longer than the rest of it. "That's a big gap," she said. "That's not noise."

"It's not noise," Maya agreed.

"It's thirteen days of data," Dev said.

"It's the whole block, actually. I reran the full block twice last night."

"You reran it twice." He said it flat, testing the weight of it.

"Because I wanted to be wrong. I'm not wrong."

The room got very still. Somewhere below them, on the track, a junior session was doing rollouts, the soft clatter of beginners at walking pace. Two hundred and fifty meters of boards and they could hear every wobble of it through the floor.

"So that's it," Dev said. "Day thirteen, and you've already picked him."

"The numbers picked him. I just wrote them down."

"You wrote them down where anyone can see. His medical data too, I bet. You got a whole file on him? Resting heart rate, sleep, whatever you people trade around?"

"Dev," Greta said, low.

"No, I want to know. Because I know how this goes." He was standing now, arms crossed, and Maya watched him do the thing she'd seen riders do before, which was grab the nearest wall and start pulling the room down around him. "I had a friend on your old squad. Word came back through the bunch. Rider data, sold up the chain, whole program of it, and the analyst walked away clean with a better job. That analyst had a reputation for numbers on people's things. Sound familiar?"

The temperature of Maya's voice dropped so fast that Tommy actually looked up from his breakfast bar.

"Say the rest of it," she said.

"I just did."

"No, you said gossip. Say what you think I did, specifically, so I can hear it in a sentence."

Dev looked at the board, at Tommy's name, at his own. "You leaked your squad's data for a job. And now you're in here deciding mine."

Greta's cup went down on the table with a crack. "Dev. That is not what happened at her old team. I told you, I told you on Tuesday, you should have asked her before you, I said, ask her, don't assume. You didn't ask."

"Greta." Maya's voice came out quiet, and quiet from Maya was worse than loud. She picked up her pen, capped it, put it in her pocket with a care that scared Tommy more than the argument had, because he had watched her cap that pen the way other people holstered a weapon. She took her laptop bag off the chair. "The ranking stands. The plan's on the board if any of you wants to actually read it instead of guessing at it. Tommy, corner work at ten. Greta, the splits are in your inbox." She looked at Dev last, and there was nothing on her face he could read, and that was the worst part, because he had spent twelve days learning to read her. "Ask me next time," she said. "Before you decide."

And she walked out. Not fast. The door didn't slam. It clicked shut like a lock going over.

Tommy let a full ten seconds pass. "That was bad," he said. "That was the worst one yet."

"She didn't deny it," Dev said, but his voice had gone thin at the edges, like a wheel with a hairline in it.

"She doesn't deny things." Greta pulled her jacket on. "She just stops giving you the room to be wrong in. I'm going after her, and no, you can't come. Tommy, warm him up, and if he says one more thing about her old team, drop him on the apron." She stopped at the door, hand on the frame. "Eleven seasons on the boards, Dev, and you still don't know the difference between a leak and a locked door. She'll tell you what happened over there. She'd have told you Tuesday if you'd asked. It cost her everything she had, and it cost you nothing to assume."

Gone.

Tommy peeled the second bar, ate half of it in silence, then took his helmet and followed her out, because juniors on the track needed watching and because there was no version of staying in that room that helped.

Dev sat down. The meeting room smelled like dry-erase ink and Greta's abandoned coffee. On the table in front of him, next to his wheel bag, sat a whiteboard marker, blue, uncapped for the walk over and recapped somewhere along the way. Maya's. She'd been using it an hour ago. It sat on the flap of his bag where she'd set it down, the way she left numbers on his handlebar tape, on his cases, a four with a circle around it he'd been afraid to ask about until she'd told him it was his cadence floor. He picked the marker up and turned it over once and put it in the side pocket of the bag, all the way down, where he wouldn't lose it.

Then he stood at the whiteboard, alone, and actually read it.

It wasn't a ranking. The ranking was the front page. Behind it, in smaller script, in the margins, in her handwriting that leaned harder the later into the night it got, was a plan. Day thirteen of twenty-one ran down the left edge. His name ran down the right, not second, not ranked, just his, and beside it a progression she'd built for his standing start: load reductions, gear work, a corner drill with a cadence floor of four written at the bottom with a circle around it. Next to Tommy's block, a note about protecting his taper. Next to his own, eight days of work marked in blue, and under the last day, one word: peak. She had planned for him to peak on selection day. She had planned for both of them to peak. She'd written him a program inside the program, and he'd stood in front of it and called her a leak in front of the whole squad.

He looked at the six percent. She'd drawn a small box around it, and inside the box, in pencil, almost erased: recoverable? Not a verdict. A question. She'd been asking it the whole time.

Dev sat back down in the empty room and put his head in his hands, and the marker rode in the side pocket of his wheel bag, and he understood, finally and all at once, that he knew her splits and her handwriting and the exact weight of her pen, and knew nothing about her at all.

Two Days

Dev found Greta in the equipment room at ten past five in the morning, because Greta kept the hours of a person who distrusted daylight, and because he had texted her are you at the track and she had texted back where else and nothing else, which was Greta for come say what you came to say.

The equipment room ran on cinder block and fluorescent hum. The power meter sat on the trackside stand through the open door, right where Maya's program had put it, and Dev's wheel bag hung off his shoulder with a blue marker buried in the side pocket.

"You look terrible," Greta said. She had a clipboard and a mug and the expression of a woman who had been waiting two days for him to show up and was annoyed he'd taken exactly two days.

"I need to ask you something about her old team."

"No."

"Greta."

"No, because you're going to ask it wrong." She set the mug down on the bench with a click that meant sit, and he sat. "You're going to ask me if she sold a squad out, because that's what you decided in that room, in front of nine riders and a whiteboard. I watched you decide it. It took you about four seconds."

"Her numbers ended up somewhere they shouldn't have. I know what I saw."

"You know what you saw from the outside." Greta pulled the clipboard against her chest like a shield she was tired of carrying. "Her last team asked her for a rider's medical file. A junior, Dev. Nineteen years old, coming off a concussion, and the management wanted his fatigue data so they could decide whether to rest him or race him. She said no. They said the file or the door."

The fluorescent light buzzed. Somewhere under the stands, the storage bay door rattled in the draft, and Dev thought of his cracked disk wheel leaning against the far wall, and how long he'd let a broken thing sit where he could see it.

"She gave them two days of data," Greta said. "Two days, then they walked her out. Not a medical file. Not a rider. Two days of power files they already owned anyway, and she let them take her job rather than take anything from him. That's your leak. That's the whole story you didn't ask her for."

Dev's hands were flat on his knees. "She never said any of it."

"Would you have heard it if she had?" Greta picked the mug back up and looked at him over it. "You called her a leak in front of the squad. Tommy was in that room. Tommy has been riding like a man with a lawyer since. And Maya has spent two days up in that booth rebuilding Tommy's taper because she said somebody had to and it might as well be the person who doesn't hate him."

"I don't hate him."

"Not the point, and also I don't believe you." She drank. "But here's the thing about Maya. She'll do the work anyway. She'll get Tommy to selection day peaking, and she'll get you there too, if you let her, and she'll never once ask you to say sorry. So you're going to have to say it without being asked. That's harder. Most people don't."

He heard the door at the far end of the corridor before he saw her. He'd know her footsteps anywhere, quick and light, the walk of someone who counted everything, even stairs. Maya came around the corner with her laptop bag on her shoulder and stopped dead when she saw him sitting next to Greta.

"It's five in the morning," she said.

"I know."

"The squad doesn't arrive until seven."

"I know that too."

She looked at Greta, who raised the mug in something between a toast and a goodbye, and left them alone in the doorway of the equipment room with the power meter gleaming on its stand between them.

Maya crossed her arms over the laptop strap. "If you came to tell me you're pulling out of the analysis program, you can leave it with Greta. She handles the paperwork."

"I came to give you this back." He unzipped the side pocket and held out the blue marker, uncapped cap and all, in his open palm. "You left it on my bag. I took it. That was two days ago and I've had it in my pocket like it was mine to keep, which is apparently a habit of mine."

She didn't take it. She looked at it, then at him. "You read the whiteboard."

"Every word. Twice. The cadence floor. The corner drill. The box you drew around my six percent with recoverable in it, in pencil, like you weren't sure you were allowed to hope out loud."

Her arms came uncrossed by degrees. "It's not a verdict. It's a question."

"I know what it is now. I didn't know what anything was." He set the marker down on the stand beside the power meter, and then, because his hands needed somewhere to be, he put them back in his pockets and took them out again. "I found out about your last team. Greta told me. Not to hurt you. Because I asked, and because I'd already done the damage asking the wrong way."

"Then you know I don't hand files over."

"I know you gave them two days and your whole job rather than hand over one rider's medical file." His voice came out rough at the edge and he let it. "And I stood in front of nine people and called you a leak. Because it was easier to think you'd sold something than to think my six percent was real and somebody was still writing my name down the right edge of a board anyway."

Behind them, the corridor door banged. Voices. Tommy first, because Tommy arrived early when a taper made him nervous, and behind him the shuffle and clatter of the rest of the squad dragging bags through the gate. Greta reappeared at Maya's shoulder. The track spread out past the open door, 250 meters of pine rising into the lights, the timing beam waiting at the finish line like it always waited, patient as arithmetic.

Dev turned so he didn't have to raise his voice, so all of them heard it plainly.

"I'm withdrawing my objection. The analysis program, the medical review, all of it. I want her data on me, every file, every session. I've raced eleven seasons on feel and stubbornness and I've got six percent missing and I can't find it from inside my own head. She can."

Tommy had stopped in the doorway, helmet dangling from one hand. Dev met his eyes.

"And I was wrong about her, out loud, in front of you. Both counts. Her, and what she was building for us. I'm saying so out loud for the same reason."

Silence held for a second, then Greta said, "Huh," in the tone of a woman revising a ranking.

Maya picked the marker up off the stand. She turned it over once, the way he had seen her do a hundred times, checking the ink by habit, and something in her face came loose from where she'd locked it.

"You understand I'm going to work you," she said. "Corner drills at six a.m. Load reductions you'll hate. I'm going to write your name on a board and it's going to mean something hard."

"I'm counting on it."

"Six days left. That's not much to rebuild in."

"You wrote peak under day twenty-one. I want to be there for it."

She walked past him into the corridor where the whiteboard lived, the squad parting around her without being asked, and Dev followed. She wiped the old board clean with two strokes of the rag hanging off the tray, and then she uncapped the marker, and the cap clicked down onto the felt of the tray, and at the top of the clean white space she wrote his name, Dev Larkin, and underlined it twice, and began.

Finish Line

By noon on the twenty-second day, the velodrome had filled with the particular quiet of people trying not to jinx each other. Maya stood in the analysis booth above turn two with her laptop open and both hands flat on the desk, which was how she stood when she wanted to put them somewhere they couldn't shake. On the screen, Dev's warm-up scrolled past in green columns, and every number sat where she'd told it to sit.

Below, on the apron, he rolled a slow circle on the pursuit bike she'd built the plan around. Tommy stood near the rail with his helmet under one arm, and Greta leaned against the mouth of the equipment room where the power meter lived in its case, arms crossed, watching Maya watch him. That had been Greta's joke for a week now. The analyst needs an analyst.

The federation rep was a man with a clipboard and a lanyard, and when he raised his hand, the track went official. One rider nominated. Time trial first, flying laps after, best single effort counted.

Tommy went first. He was twenty-two kinds of fast, and he put a number on the boards that made the small crowd by the rail whistle low. Maya watched it and did the arithmetic without letting her face do anything. His flying lap was better than Dev's season best. It probably was. That had been true for a while, and Dev had known it in the way you know a staircase is dark, by running up it anyway.

Then it was his turn. Dev clipped in at the top of turn one, and Maya's throat did the thing she'd stopped fighting around day nine. He rolled down the banking, gathered speed through the back straight, and when he crossed the line to begin his effort, the timing beam caught him and the screen above the finish straight began to live.

She'd written the plan on the whiteboard and he'd ridden it into his legs every morning for six days, corner drills at six a.m., loads he'd complained about beautifully. First lap: controlled. Second: lift through turns three and four, where he'd been bleeding speed since the crash without knowing why. Third: everything, held together by the shape she'd drawn him.

Through turn two he came around smooth as a held note. Down the straight his hips didn't rock. Into turn three he rose off the saddle the exact meter she'd marked, and Maya realized she was gripping the edge of the booth's window, and let go, and gripped it again.

He crossed the line. The screen froze. The number hung there.

His best flying lap since the crash. Better than his best before the taper, better than anything the meter had recorded off him in a season and a half. Not better than Tommy's. Close. Close enough that the federation man looked at his clipboard twice, and Greta said, from the rail, "Huh," in the tone of a woman refusing to bet against either of them.

Dev rolled down to the apron, chest heaving, and stood in the infield while the federation man walked to the rail with his clipboard held up for quiet.

"Based on today's time trials and the full season of recorded data," the man said, "the nomination goes to Iglesias."

The small crowd clapped. Tommy's face did four things at once, joy and guilt and relief and something that looked like he was already planning to text Dev an apology and a sandwich. Dev unclipped his helmet and walked over and shook Tommy's hand before Tommy had finished figuring out his own face.

"Go win it," Dev said. "She'll want your data by Thursday. Say yes to everything."

"Everything?"

"Corner drills hurt less if you don't fight them. Trust me, I complained enough for both of you."

The announcement done, the federation man moved off toward the tunnel, and the spectators began to gather bags and drift. Dev could have gone with them. He could have gone to the changeroom, or to the storage bay where his cracked disk wheel leaned against the far wall under the stands, twelve months of bad memory standing upright in the dark. Instead he crossed the infield grass to the stairs of the analysis booth, taking them two at a time, still in his kit, sweat cooling on his neck.

Maya had her laptop open, cursor blinking on his last lap, when he filled the doorway.

"You saw the split," she said.

"I saw all of them. I've been riding behind my own handlebars for eleven seasons, and today was the first time somebody handed me the whole road."

"Tommy earned it."

"Tommy earned it," he agreed. "I'm not here about the nomination. I got something better back than a nomination. I got to feel fast in my own body again, and I got it because you kept every number I was too proud to look at, and you kept them private when the whole program was leaning on you to hand them around."

"Dev, that's just my job, that's..."

"It wasn't just anything where you came from. Two days of data and they showed you the door. You kept doing it right anyway, for a squad that had me standing in its mouth saying you'd sell us out." He set his helmet on her desk, next to the laptop, gently, like it was a thing she'd lent him. "The number I care about isn't on that screen. It's the one you kept. I'd like to start something with the woman who kept it."

Maya looked at him for a long moment. Then she closed the laptop, which was as close to a declaration as she'd ever made in a velodrome.

"You understand I'm going to keep working you," she said. "Off-season or not. Nobody's data is safe."

"I'm counting on it."

"And I'm taking the booth coffee machine home tonight, because it's ours now, apparently."

"Ours," he said, testing the word, and she watched him decide it fit.

They came down the stairs together. At the finish line, the timing beam was still blinking, waiting for the next effort, patient as arithmetic, and Maya stopped beside it. Dev reached past her and turned his hand over, palm up, an offer and a question in the same motion. She put her hand in his.

Across the track, Tommy waved from the rail. Greta didn't wave, just nodded once, the ranking in her head revised and filed. Somewhere under the stands, the old wheel stood against its wall, cracked and finished with.

The announcer's booth shut down. Then the concession lights. Then, bank by bank, the lights over the track began to go dark, rows of them, the shadow of turn four arriving early. The timing beam blinked on at the line, red and small and steady, and their hands stayed joined above it, warm, in the last lit patch of the velodrome.

"Six a.m. Thursday?" Dev said.

"Six a.m. Thursday," Maya said. "Bring Tommy. Bring coffee. Not from that machine."

The final bank of lights clicked off. In the dark, the beam went on blinking under their hands, and neither of them let go.