Page 110 of Blood & Throttle

Riot

Got It On Me - Pop Smoke

They callit The Dead Zone for a reason.

The Hollow is rot and ruin—an industrial graveyard swallowed by the tunnels that run beneath it. Above ground, the city’s nothing but skeleton scaffolding and silence. Below?

That’s where we race.

The staging zone is five stories deep in Riftline Basin’s gut—buried in blackout concrete and humming wire. The Dead Zone isn’t rot and ruin. It’s engineered silence. Industrial murder wrapped in steel and suffocation.

No light filters from above. Just the cold flicker of floodlamps caged in mesh and the red glow of standby circuits lining the walls like veins. The air vibrates with static, heavy with ozone and the faint stench of melted plastic and brake fluid. It's too clean to be natural, too sharp to be safe, like the whole place was sterilized after a massacre.

You don’t smell blood here.

You taste it in the tension.

Every sound echoes. Footsteps, clipped commands, the grind of wrenches on metal. It’s not chaos. Not yet. It’s pressure building in a sealed vault, waiting for someone to light the fuse.

Racers move through the pit like ghosts built for violence—sharp armor, gleaming mods, helmets blacked out for night vision and thermal sync. Their bikes purr or growl, engines tuned for the kind of speed that breaks spines and shatters lungs. Drones circle above, silent watchers with multi-spectrum feeds, ready to beam every crash, every scream, every kill to the Syndicate’s network.

Spectators line the upper balconies, outfitted in new-gen headsets and visor rigs that’ll let them see the carnage in full-spectrum color. They’re laughing. Pointing. Placing bets on who’ll die first, who’ll take out who, and who won’t walk away.

And all of them?

Waiting for the lights to drop.

Waiting for us to race into the dark and either make it out breathing or not at all.

The Gauntlet doesn’t just kill you. It fucks with your mind while it does it.

Across the grid, Jace adjusts the bolts on his obsidian-frame deathtrap, lean and quiet, like the kind of machine that doesn’t need to roar to hunt. Vex stands next to him, scarred throat glinting under the floodlights. Black-market eyes flicker with artificial light, cold and twitchy. He’s not talking. Just watching.

I’ve seen what he does with a blade.

He doesn’t speak.

He doesn’t hesitate.

He just carves.

I feel eyes on me—every crew, every Syndicate fuck, andhandler who’s too scared to move unless their orders come from the top. They know who I am. Know what I’ve done. What I’ll do again without blinking.

Let them watch.

They’re not the ones I’m worried about.

Bishop’s been pacing for twenty minutes. Muttering to himself. Chewing that same chewed-up protein bar like it owes him money. I don’t bother asking what’s wrong—he always does this before a race.

He stops near the front wheel of the bike, glancing over what Sin’s wiring into the dash. “Infrared’s reading clean. Pulse is synced. Might actually keep you two from dying ugly.”

Sin doesn’t even look up. “You’re welcome.”

“Didn’t say thanks.”

“Didn’t have to. Your emotional constipation said it for you.”

He huffs, but I catch the edge of a grin before he walks off.