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F lames raced past Kel’s stinging eyes. Hotter and brighter than any sun, red collided with gold and amber in wild streaks across the sky.

Along the obstacle-laden aerial track, Kel tried to follow the phoenixes’ route.

From her booth in the raised stands, they were little more than ribbons of blood.

Painters across Salta’s four islands had tried to capture the phoenixes’ brutal radiance. But to Kel, anything that didn’t cause seared arm hair and painful blistering seemed a crude imitation.

An earsplitting screech echoed down the track. The crowd below and beside Kel’s booth roared, deafening her.

After a few loud seconds, the voices in her ear-comm returned.

“ Veer left! Veer left—no, too far !”

“Tuck in nice and low. Yes! Like that!”

Kel bit down on her lip. She glanced at Rube to her right, rising onto his toes and craning his head.

“Ignore that last one, Oska,” Kel shouted into her comm. “It’ll get Savita boxed in.”

Oska—their team’s rider—responded with a strained grunt, though she followed Kel’s instructions. Kel’s phoenix, Savita, was easy to spot, soaring above her competition, nearing the race’s 150-meter height limit.

“Level out,” Dira barked. “Any higher and you’ll be shot down.”

Kel’s gaze lifted to the dark, mechanical clouds barricading the sky. If any phoenix attempted to soar above them, acid rain would likely pour from the clouds’ haze.

Rube removed his ear-comm and spluttered, “Sorry, Kel. I just wanted to—”

Dira clamped a hand on Rube’s shoulder. “What Kel means , is that you should let me—the winger —do the strategizing.”

Dira smirked. Her brown eyes flickered to Kel. “The tamer should, too.”

Though they stood beside each other, the crowd, shouting with applause and last-minute bets, made it near-impossible to hear Dira without their thin headsets.

Kel bit back a retort. Dira was right. As the team’s winger, she was in charge of track strategy. Kel was their tamer—responsible for the care and training of their phoenix. Her phoenix.

Though Rube meant well, his job was to engineer equipment, not offer tactical advice. They couldn’t risk any well-intentioned blunders.

Kel’s sweaty palms clamped around the metal railing separating the stands from the vast, circular track.

Her knuckles turned bone-white. This race was too important, one of the biggest in their city’s annual calendar.

Kel’s cut of the first-place prize money— 50,000 ceres —would help her stave off the council vultures hunting her over bills.

They’d already started circling, as if she was a corpse to strip bare.

Today’s track was narrower than usual, set inside an open-roofed stadium.

Each team had to complete one hundred laps of the two-kilometer loop.

Stands surrounded the race. The giant flat screens above them, honing in on the race’s minute details, climbed almost as high as the phoenixes themselves.

An electric pillar rose at the very center, creating a lethal ring that shocked any firebirds who flew too close.

While keeping the creatures from flying too high, the dark, overhead clouds also dropped sporadic obstacles: man-made meteors falling from tiny, hidden aircrafts.

From the team’s private booth in the stands, Kel watched Savita swerve to narrowly avoid a spiked, plummeting bludgeon, large enough to crush Oska.

“There’s a rhythm to the falling objects.

” Dira’s voice rang through Kel’s ear-comm.

“The clouds are moving, so no track loop is the same. But the darker clouds are throwing bigger weapons and the lighter ones are dropping things more frequently. Just stick to a steady path near the track’s inner pillar and swerve when I tell you to. ”

Kel shot Dira an incredulous look. The sky was an uneven tapestry with no two clouds the same color or size. Dira was somehow predicting the objects’ descent while monitoring Oska’s position.

“Let’s pray there’s no delay in the comms,” Oska muttered, before guiding Savita closer to the track’s inner pillar. A crackle of electricity sparked alarmingly close to the tip of Savita’s left wing. Kel flinched.

With Dira’s help, Oska avoided three more obstacles, forging a careful path behind another phoenix—close enough that Sav stretched forward and bit at the other creature’s tail feathers.

Oska jostled in the saddle at Sav’s sudden movement, but she managed to stay low, balanced.

Relief weakened Kel’s knees. Today was only Oska’s third race with the team.

Kel and Dira had spent a grueling five months trying to convince Savita to let Oska on her back, and it was only in the last month that Savita had acquiesced.

Even though they hadn’t practiced as much as Kel would have liked, Kel knew Savita was fast enough— strong enough—to win this race.

She was a carnel phoenix, naturally the swiftest of Cendor’s seven subspecies, and the race wove around the electric ring in tight loops that favored Sav’s agility.

As long as Oska listened to Dira, Kel was sure they could place in the top three.

That would at least guarantee them a small portion of the race’s winnings.

A larger, darker phoenix soared in front of Kel’s booth, half a lap behind Savita. Suddenly, silver burst through the clouds and a cluster of thick arrows shot down. The phoenix’s cherry-red heat hit Kel’s face a moment before hot blood sprayed the stands.

She sucked in a shaky breath and wiped the gore from her cheeks, relieved that was all that had struck the crowd.

Though wire mesh divided the phoenixes’ track from the audience, it was mostly a decorative safety measure.

Plenty of races had led to hospitalized spectators, whether from misfired obstacles or a bloodthirsty phoenix shoving another into the stands.

People watched at their own risk. But that knowledge never thinned the crowds.

The phoenix and its rider plunged to the ground in a ball of fire. They landed on the track with a deafening crash, beating dust into the air.

At the center of the dirt storm, neither the phoenix nor rider moved.

Kel winced as the crowd crowed in mingled delight and despair.

They screamed their bets into tele-comms and pounded them into glimmering tablets, gambling on everything from the first phoenix to die to the race’s winner.

Though her team stood apart in a private section of the stands, Kel’s ears still ached from the crowd’s violent excitement.

She focused on that pain, keeping her mind clear of any pity for the fallen pair.

Another phoenix blazed past in a copper blur, moving at unholy speeds.

Kel raised a hand to shield her face from the heat as black stars danced across her vision.

When her sight returned, the blurred colors had transformed to feathers, and the wind forcing her back had dulled.

She brushed damp brown hairs from her face.

Another unfamiliar phoenix and rider had collided with a falling obstacle—an enormous, leather mace—and plunged to the dirt track. The duo seemed surprisingly uninjured, the firebird stumbling and shaking its head. Stunned, the creature refused to lift back into the air.

Dira tucked an umber curl behind her ear. “Serves that rider right for thinking they could gain that much speed on a turn like that. Tracks with falling obstacles always confuse phoenixes. They should’ve known to take their time.”

“ Shut up ,” Oska snapped through the comms. “Since none of you can afford comms with a mute button, stay quiet unless you have something useful to say.”

Kel bit down on her tongue, forcing her own silence. She needed to trust that the past months Oska had spent training for CAPR—the Cendorian Association of Phoenix Racing—would be enough to keep her alive.

Kel shifted back, eyes raking the track.

Twenty phoenixes lit up the sky like fireworks.

Savita and Oska were placing fourth, though only by a hair’s width.

Across the opposite side of the track, she watched her newest teammate swerve around more falling metal and soar above another pair of blazing wings.

Moments later, a siren blasted through the air.

The leading phoenixes had entered the race’s final lap.

Bile crept up Kel’s throat. She watched Oska guide Sav, imagined the rider instructing the phoenix with clumsy fingers along her neck, tracing patterns to inform Savita’s movements.

Kel could almost feel Savita’s soft, near-molten feathers beneath her fingers, like honeyed weapons straight from the forge.

Rising onto her toes, Kel spotted two blurred phoenixes pulling ahead, coming up on Savita’s tail.

“Oska—two riders climbing up on your right,” Dira said sharply. “Don’t give them room to overtake.”

Though Oska didn’t respond, Savita swerved to the right and stretched her wings, just in time to prevent the two riders from creeping ahead.

Kel rocked back on her heels as a human scream broke through the bellowing crowd. Heart in her mouth, Kel scanned the remaining phoenixes but couldn’t spot who the sound belonged to. She wondered which rider’s leathers were currently melting into their skin.

Though she pitied the poor soul, the pained cry didn’t make her flinch.

It was their own team’s fault. Their technician was meant to monitor everything from temperature to saddle wear to leather durability.

Everyone knew phoenixes grew hotter the faster they flew, and it needed to be accounted for during races.

The Howlers’ own technician, Rube Rohin, would never make such an easy blunder.

Though he still had no clue how to interact with Savita, his tech designs would likely make him a millionaire one day.

Oska dipped low, barely skirting a falling mace.

“Good.” Dira’s voice rang through the comms. “The rider coming third leans too far to his left. His phoenix has a blind spot if you fly closer, just below its left wing.”