Read Chapter 1: The Call-Up

The rain didn’t so much fall as attack. It came down in sheets off the Mediterranean, hammering the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya until the tarmac turned to black glass and the grandstands dissolved into gray smears. Jack Turner gripped the wheel of his Dallara-Mercedes, the privateer shitbox he’d been wheeling around for three seasons, and tried to see through the spray where the front wing was supposed to be.

He was running eighth. Eighth. In a field of twenty-two, with nineteen of them in factory-backed machinery, eighth felt like a goddamn coronation. And then his engineer’s voice crackled in his ear, twelve laps from the flag.

“Jack. You’re going to want to hear this.”

“Unless it’s a weather update that says the sun’s coming out, I don’t want anything right now.” Jack flicked the wheel through turn nine’s sweeper, the car squirming beneath him like a live animal.

“It’s bigger than that.” Roy’s voice had a strange edge to it—something between awe and panic. “I’ve got a man here. Says he’s from Scuderia Fenice.”

The car snapped sideways. Jack caught it with a stab of opposite lock, heart hammering against his ribs. “You’re shitting me.”

“I’m not. He’s got credentials out the arse, Jack. And he wants to talk to you. Now.”

“Tell him I’m a bit busy,” Jack growled, braking for the chicane, feeling the rear end try to step out again. The tires were gone. Everyone’s tires were gone, but his were gone-er. That was the privateer tax. You paid in rubber and hope.

“He says it’s about Monaco. The Grand Prix. He wants to sign you for next weekend.”

Jack nearly missed the apex. He clipped the curb hard, the car bucking, and he had the absurd, vertiginous thought that this was a joke. Some of the lads from the junior series pulling his chain at the worst possible moment. But Roy wasn’t a joker. Roy had been balling his eyes out for four years straight, and he didn’t have the imagination for pranks of this scale.

“Put him in the pit wall,” Jack said. “I’ll call back when I’m done.”

“Jack, he said *now*. As in, he wants you off track.”

“Then he should’ve waited until I’d built a bigger lead.”

Fenice. The name alone was enough to make his vision tunnel. Scuderia Fenice—the fire bird that rose from its own ashes. One of the most storied names in the sport, a squad that had won championships, survived scandals, and that season had a car fast enough to fight for wins. They were also the team that had watched their golden boy, Luca Moreau, burn to death in a ball of flame at Monza the year before. Jack remembered watching it live, the sick orange bloom on the screen, remembering thinking: *that’s the same fire that’s always waiting at the bottom of every straight.*

It hadn’t put him off. Nothing had put him off.

Jack crossed the line again—lap sixty-six of the feature race, third of the day—and the gap ahead of him to seventh was nine tenths. The two cars in front were fighting like dogs. If he could thread the needle at turn one—

“Jack.” Roy again. “This bloke, he’s watching your telemetry. He’s tapping his watch.”

“Good for him.”

“Jack. He’s got a contract with him. A real one. I looked at the first page.”

The next corner arrived. Jack’s hands moved—a flick, a breath on the brake, transfer weight to the front and the car is still loose, so loose—and he came out of the hairpin with a run on the car ahead. A Haas-adjacent Dallara with a pay driver in it, the kind who blocked like his life depended on finishing ninth in a spec series.

Jack saw the gap. It wasn’t there. Not on a wet track. Not with cold shoulders and a greasy racing line.

“Fenice,” Roy repeated, in the tone of a man pulling a joker from his sleeve. “Monaco. Next Sunday.”

The rain had stopped for a moment, that eerie false lull in the storm. The track was worse now—drying lines of tire rubber over sheets of water. The cars in front of him were slowing, playing it safe, banking points for their factory backers. Jack had no points. He had no backers. He had a two-year-old engine with 30,000 kilometers on it and a sponsor patch on his halo that said “Turner’s Scaffolding—Your Dad’s in Safe Hands.”

“Give me two laps,” Jack said.

“The contract’s got today’s date on it.”

“Ten seconds, then. Tell him I’m demonstrating something.”

What he was demonstrating was the precise art of survival. Lap sixty-seven. He lined up behind the pay-driver, patient, waiting for the mistake. It came at turn five—a small lift, a twitch wide by half a car width—and Jack committed. He threw the Dallara down the inside of the wet curb, wheels clattering over the painted white line that was as slippery as ice, and for a heartbeat the car was fully sideways, both rear tires lit up, and he was *praying*.

The pay driver saw him. Saw the shape of the privateer lunging into his blind spot and swerved anyway. They touched—banging wheels at 150 kilometers an hour, a steel handshake that juddered up Jack’s spine—but he held it. He held the throttle, waited for the slide to hook, felt the rear tires catch five meters later and catapult him out of the turn on a straight line.

He cleared the pay driver by a third of a car length and closed on fifth.

“Does he like that?” Jack asked, breathing hard.

Roy’s voice came back, different now. Calmer. “He’s not smiling. But he wrote something down.”

“What?”

“The name of a casino in Monte Carlo. Says you know it.”

Jack’s chest tightened. The Casino de Monte-Carlo was a landmark, a tourist pit. But there was a card room in the basement, quiet, where deals got done that never made the papers. Every driver in every series knew about it. Only some of them had ever been summoned there.

He crossed the line in fifth place—two spots higher than his machinery deserved—and pulled into the pits. The rain had stopped for real now, a useless blue sky breaking through the clouds. He unbuckled, climbed out of the cockpit, and let the crew swarm past him to shade the engine. Roy met him at the front wheel with a phone in his hand.

It was on speaker. The voice on the other end was French, clipped, aged.

“Mr. Turner. You overtake like a man with nothing to lose.”

Jack took a water bottle, drained half of it. “I’ve got nothing to lose, so that tracks.”

“We offer you a test. One race. In Monaco. You replace a man who died in that car. You are aware of this.”

Jack went still. “Luca Moreau.”

“Yes. His seat has been… difficult to fill. Bad luck. Bad history. Our current second driver is too slow, and our first is too smart to care. You are neither. You are desperate. Desperation is a resource we can use.”

“Why me?”

“Because you got out of that car just now and you didn’t look at the damage. You looked at the lap time. That is the look we need.”

Roy coughed. Jack pulled the phone off speaker, brought it to his ear. "What’s the catch?"

"The catch," the voice said, "is that if you sign a racing driver’s contract with us, you will learn what really happened to Luca Moreau. And we will learn whether you are brave enough to do anything about it."

Jack stared at the sky, at the clouds tearing apart over the mountains.

"Casino de Monte-Carlo," he said. "Tomorrow. 10 PM. Basement bar." He hesitated. "How do I find you?"

"Look for the man holding a red envelope."

The line clicked off.

Jack handed the phone back to Roy, who was staring at him like he'd grown a second head. "So?"

"So," Jack said, pulling his balaclava off and shaking rain from his hair. "I've got a flight to book."