REDLINE

Chapter 2

The second day was easier, which wasn’t much.

Avery found her rhythm in her small ways, the fastest route from the junior lockers to the south building, the water fountain near the gym that actually ran cold, and the fact that the cafeteria line moved twice as fast if you came in from the side door by the gym rather than the main entrance. She thought about things like this always, It was useful intelligence, Journalism 101, or maybe just survival 101. It was hard to say where one ended and the other began.

She was eating lunch at the end of a table near the windows alone, deliberately, because eating alone on day two was a choice but eating alone on day seven started becoming a statement when Priya appeared, set her tray down across from her without asking, and said, “You heard something last night.”

Avery looked up. “Good morning to you too.”

“It’s twelve-fourteen. It’s afternoon.” Priya sat. She had a notebook of her own, spiral-bound, green cover, already open to a page dense with handwriting. “You had that look in homeroom. The one where you’re processing something and trying to decide if it’s worth saying out loud.”

“You were watching me in homeroom.”

“I watch everyone in homeroom. I told you, it’s a thing I do.” Priya stabbed a forkful of salad. “What did you hear?”

Avery considered her for a moment. Twenty-four hours in Hollow Creek and somehow she’d already found the one other person in this school who operated on the same frequency, that particular wavelength of I notice things and I write them down and I am not apologetic about it. It was either very good luck or the town was small enough that there was nowhere else for that frequency to go.

“Engines,” Avery said. “Late at night, Northwest, I think.”

Priya’s fork stopped moving.

“How many?”

“At least two. Maybe more. Hard to tell from a distance.” Avery kept her voice neutral. “Sounded competitive. The acceleration pattern wasn’t random.” She paused. “You already know what it is.”

It wasn’t a question. Priya looked at her for a long moment, and in that moment Avery saw something she recognized the specific internal calculus of a person deciding how much to trust someone they’d just met. She’d done it herself enough times to know the shape of it.

“The Redline Circuit,” Priya said, finally. She said it quietly like a word you said carefully in certain rooms. “Illegal street racing.” They use the salt flats about four miles out on the northwest side, past the grain elevators. The terrain’s flat for almost two miles and there’s no residential area anywhere near it, so the sound doesn’t carry much unless the wind is right.” She looked at Avery. “You must have had the wind.”

“Who runs it?”

“That,” Priya said, “is the question.”

The answer, or the beginning of one, came forty minutes later and it wasn’t Priya who gave it to her.

Avery had AP History seventh period, which she’d tested into and which turned out to be a class of eleven students in a room that smelled like old paper and dry-erase marker. She was copying notes from the board, it was Reconstruction policy, Freedmen’s Bureau, the specific political machinery of failed promises, when the door opened and a boy walked in six minutes late.

The teacher, Mr. Osei, didn’t look up. “Mr. Calloway.”

“Sir.” Not apologetic. Not defiant either. Just present, like tardiness was a weather condition and not a choice.

He dropped into the seat two ahead of Avery and one to the left. She had a clear sightline.

Zane Calloway was tall, with the kind of build that came from actual work and not a gym, dark hair pushed back from his face, a line of grease along the edge of his left hand that hadn’t come entirely clean. He wore a black t-shirt with the sleeves cut off and the name of an auto parts distributor printed on the back in letters that had been through the wash enough times to go soft. His notebook, when he opened it, was half-filled with what looked from two seats away like engine diagrams.

He was not, as far as Avery could tell, taking notes on the Freedmen’s Bureau.

But here was the thing. Here was the thing she noticed that went into her mental file immediately, in the category she labeled significant, when Mr. Osei asked the class what structural conditions made Reconstruction’s promises impossible to enforce, it was Calloway who answered and it was completely accurate,the political economy of Southern resistance, the withdrawal of federal troops, the systematic dismantling of voting infrastructure. Then he went back to his engine diagrams as he’d never spoken.

After class, she fell into step beside him in the hallway. She’d decided during the last fifteen minutes of the period that this was what she was going to do, and she’d learned that the decision was usually the hard part, the doing was mostly just momentum.

“Zane Calloway,” she said.

He looked sideways at her. His eyes were dark, and his expression was the particular kind of neutral that took work to maintain.

“Avery Chen.” She didn’t slow down. He didn’t either. They walked. “You knew that answer and you didn't even pause.”

“So?”

“So you spent the class drawing what looked like a carburetor.”

Something moved in his jaw. Not quite a smile and not quite annoyance somewhere between the two, in that narrow territory. “Fuel injection manifold. And I can do two things at once.”

“Clearly.” She let a beat pass. The hallway noise moved around them. “You work at a garage?”

“My uncle’s.” He said it simply, without the self-consciousness some kids had about working, like it was information he’d made peace with a long time ago. “Ray’s Auto, off Mill Road. Why?”

“I’m nosy.” She said it without apology. “New town. I notice things.”

“You’re a journalist.”

“How do you know that?”

“Priya texted Marcus in the third block. Marcus is my brother. He tells me things.” He glanced at her again, briefly.

Avery filed that away. “What does Marcus think?”

“Marcus thinks everyone’s interesting until they’re not, He’s sixteen. He still thinks like that.”

They had reached the point where the hallway split, the east building, the west building. Zane stopped. So did she.

“You’re going to ask about the racing,” he said.

She kept her face even. “Why would I do that?”

“Because Priya brought it up. She always brings it up with new people she thinks can help.” He looked at her steadily. His voice had gone quieter, not threatening, more like someone adjusting a dial to the right frequency. “I’d be careful with that story, Chen.”

“I haven’t said it’s a story.”

“You didn’t have to.” He shouldered his backpack. “People in this town have reasons to keep certain things quiet. People you wouldn’t expect.” He paused, and she had the sense he was deciding something, right there, the same calculus she’d seen in Priya. Deciding how much. Deciding what. “Just…look at what’s on the surface before you go digging. That’s all I’m saying.”

He turned and walked toward the east building.

Avery stood at the split hallway and watched him go and wrote four words in the margin of her notebook without looking down,

He knows. He races.

Uncle Ray’s Auto sat at the end of Mill Road like it had grown there, a low building, two bay doors, and a hand-lettered sign above the entrance that had weathered to a warm brown. Avery drove past it on the way home. Just past. Just to see.

One bay door was open. She could see the undercarriage of a truck raised on the lift, legs visible beneath it, and beside the truck, half-visible in the dimmer interior, another car low to the ground, black or very dark blue, stripped of its rear paneling. It did not seem like a customer vehicle. It seemed like something personal.

Something built.

She didn’t stop. She drove the three miles back to the laundromat apartment and went up the stairs and sat at her desk and opened her notebook to a fresh page. She wrote REDLINE at the top and underlined it twice.

She also wrote, “Zane Calloway. 18. Mechanic. Races. Knows the Circuit. Warned me off. Then, why warn me if there’s nothing to find?”

Her phone buzzed. It was a text from an unknown number.

Don’t go to the salt flats alone. Especially not at night.

She stared at it for a long time.

Then she typed back, “Who is this?”

Three dots appeared, then disappeared.

The message was read but there was no reply.