Page 167 of Green Flag
There was distance. And I couldn’t tell if he or I had put it there. Luca was screaming in my mind. I was barely a whisper in his.
My investigation came to a grinding halt. What was there to search for anymore? My dad had protected me from the investigation and persecution. The new season had started. Luca was still in Ciclati.
Pedro remained blocked.
By the second race, I was so sick of the fake smile that I managed to escape the whole weekend and record more music in LA.
For the third week, in Indonesia, I stayed at a friend’s Airbnb.
But it looked like next week, in Australia, there was no escaping the one-bed trope—the forced proximity of our job. It wasn’t part of StormSprint, but Luca and Nix’s bromance had gone viral last year, and when Nix’s new teammate at MotoBike needed surgery, Luca was asked to be a temporary replacement. Livie had requested I join as his grid girl.
At the time, it sounded like the perfect opportunity for Luca to get his name and reputation into a different championship if we were successful and got him out of Ciclati.
But now… not so much.
I really missed Livie working for Ciclati. Now that the only person who knew we were fake was on a different team, there wasn’t really anyone to go to.
Not that she wasn’t around. And even though Nix no longer worked for Ciclati, he was often hanging around the Ciclati box, eyeing up his replacement with a frown.
In his mind, no one would ever be good enough to replace him.
The new guy, Emre Koz, was not necessarily doing as well as everyone had hoped. But he was new to this.
He was Luca’s old friend from his Sprint3 days. Even Ces made a sour comment about their friendship.
Once the StormSprint race was happening, my duties were done. I could go and enjoy myself in VIP, but when Nix walked into the pit box to watch the race with his friends, I stopped.
His commentary made me cackle.
He hated that I found it funny, but he even presented last week in Malaysia. It was highly requested that he return in a full-time role, but with races potentially clashing with his new championship, his commentary remained only for Ciclati.
I got comfy on one of the seats, ready to listen to his grumbles and disgust over the manoeuvres of his past competitors.
The race started without incident. There were smooth corners, and Luca and the other racers ate the ground, following the twists and turns as if in a choreographed dance. Clean moves meant no one was particularly forceful.
But when the focus turned to Luca, I was standing, my attention on nothing else.
Luca was all over number 42, inches behind, and when the screen switched to his front-wheel camera, I couldn’t help but cringe and stumble back into Abbé as I imagined the crash.
After the comments the press had made, I knew this was just a warm-up for him. He’d be out for spinning wheels, crashed bikes in his rearview and a bottle of champagne in his hands as he got onto the podium.
But then it didn’t come. Lap after lap, he didn’t overtake. He needed some more aggression in his turns.
And I already knew his confidence would have dwindled in the alone time on the bike.
Mentally, he’d given up.
It wasn’t the only thing that had gone.
The white skies of earlier had passed, darkening to a deep grey.
Rain wasn’t forecast—but it came anyway.
It started to spit down, just a drop here or there. When I looked out of the garage door to the pit lane, there were tiny dark dots on the tarmac—slow drop after slow drop.
“It’s raining,” I said but no one was listening to me, intent on the screens.
With nine laps left, the rain picked up. Luca was in position ten, having slipped down three. I rarely worried about him — he played a clean game, but with the weather taking so brutal a turn…
