Read Chapter 2: Data Gaps

Timing screens glowed across the garages like guilty confessions. Elise leaned into the monitors, her finger tracing the throttle trace as it dipped at Turn 7—not from braking, but something else. The sensor had blinked to zero for three hundred milliseconds. Then recovered.

She studied the graph again. Then again.

“Marco,” she called, without looking up from the screen.

Marco Brandt, Apollon’s senior data engineer, ambled over. He was a lean man, fortyish, with spectacles resting on an unkempt crown of hair. He smelled of stale coffee and bandwidth. “What’ve you got?”

“Telemetry. Car 22. Two hundred milliseconds missing at 7, one forty at 11. Same thing happened on the out lap, consistent intervals.”

Marco squinted at the graph, then snorted. “Sensor glitch. Happens all the time, especially on cold tires. We calibrate for it.”

“I’ve worked with cold sensors,” Elise said, keeping her voice level. “This isn't noise. The throttle position clocks to zero, but the engine RPM doesn't dip. The waveform is too clean. That's data dropping out, not signal degradation.”

“Or your eyes are playing tricks,” Marco said with a shrug. “The car’s fine. You want me to log this as a false read?”

Elise met his gaze and held it. “No. I want you to check the acquisition unit on the floor. Physical inspection.”

Marco laughed—a short, dismissive bark. “We’re in Monaco, Moreau. We don't have spare personnel to chase ghosts. Practice is live. If you want to panic the garage over something I've seen a thousand times, be my guest.”

He peeled away, back to his own cluster of screens.

Elise let the silence sit for a beat, assessing the anger wrapping itself around her throat. She had expected resistance. That didn't make it feel fair. In the garage across the pit lane, the Ferrari mechanics laughed over something, their sound muffled by the concrete hallway’s echo.

Her radio crackled.

“Box, box. Rear grip is gone. Understeer like a pig in mud.”

Julien's voice. She knew it before the final syllable came through—that dry, clipped delivery that seemed to taste every word like it was underwater. The pit wall went pale. Voices overlapped. Dieter, their race director, was already barking.

Elise lifted the mic. Swallowed once. “Copy. Bring him in.”

The crowd in the garage shifted. She felt their eyes like a weather system, moving toward her, assessing. Elise stepped closer to the window as the black and gold livery of the Apollon car screamed down the pit lane. Tires smoked as Julien stamped on the brakes.

He pulled to the mark.

She was over the nose before the engine died.

“What’s the issue?” Elise said, her voice clipped but audible through the helmet.

Julien popped his visor. His face was flushed, sweat beading his brow, but his eyes were ice. “I just told you. The front end washes out under braking. Mid-corner the tail kicks. The car feels like a drunk on a tightrope.”

“Which corner is worst?”

“All of them.”

“Pick one, Julien.”

He stared at her. Five seconds of thick, unbroken silence passed. The crew shifted. Someone coughed.

“Turn 10,” he said finally. “Multiple laps. It’s not tuneable anymore. Every time I turn in, the front is full of air.”

Elise stepped back, scanning the scribbled notes on her slate. Turn 10 was a high-speed right-hander. Fast entry, heavy trail-braking zone, most of the car’s grip transferred to the front left tire. Understeer there could come from the mechanical balance—or from something trickier. She pulled up the cornering load data. The sensor gap showed up again. Same hundred-millisecond dropout, and this time it had triggered the traction control's interference map, cutting power and pulling the car out of its corner attitude.

*The data gap wasn't a sensor glitch. It was the cause.*

“Front wing,” she said.

Dieter raised his brow from his station. “What about it?”

“One degree more downforce. No, wait—zero-point-five. We can't afford the rear drag on this track. But we adjust the flap to work with the sensor dropout. Wait,” she shook her head. “No. We aren’t fixing the symptom. Marco—check the wing actuator on the left front.”

Marco’s voice came tinny through the headset. “What for?”

“Because the flap angle has moved three degrees since the start of session: it's drifting. And it's not the mechanic’s adjustment. The actuator is getting resets from a faulty sensor. The car is fighting itself.”

“That’s not the setup I signed off on,” Marco said.

“It's not the setup Julien drove last lap either,” Elise said, feeling the sudden oxygen of certainty. She turned to Dieter. “We replace the actuator. Two minutes. Then we set the front wing to my spec and send him back out. I'll have the data by turn 6 to confirm.”

Dieter looked at her like he was weighing an invoice. He was old school—believed you earned trust through decades, not gestures. Elise had weeks.

Julien tapped his steering wheel. “I can’t sit here all day while the clock runs out.”

Elise faced him directly. Her voice was low, for him only. “You asked for a car that behaves. I’m giving it to you. Trust the process or find another engineer. Your choice.”

The challenge hung between them like a dropped saw.

Julien’s lips thinned. He said nothing. But he didn't voice dissent.

Dieter waved his hand, a sharp gesture of clearance. “Get it done.”

The mechanics swarmed. A wheel gun zipped, the air compressor coughing against the pit lane asphalt. Elise walked around the front of the car, checking the actuator’s mounting bolts herself—partly for diligence, partly to remind the crew she wasn’t afraid to get her hands dirty. She caught the eye of a mechanic named Riko, who gave her the briefest nod. Not friendship. But not hostility either.

They had the car out in one minute, fifty seconds.

Elise watched the telemetry feed as Julien tore through Turn 1. Then Turn 4. Then the long sweeps leading to Turn 10.

The data lines rode smooth.

“That's better,” Julien said over the radio, surprise bleeding into his tone. “That’s… a lot better.”

Elise allowed herself a single breath. She watched the lap times continue dropping. By his next pass through the start-finish line, Julien had gained two tenths against his previous best.

In the garage, someone exhaled. Marco rubbed his neck. Elise didn't smile. She couldn't afford to.

She pulled up the downforce map again, and froze.

The sensor gap at Turn 7 had returned.

Not intermittent now. Regular. Like a heartbeat.

She zoomed in. The dropout occurred precisely every third lap, always at high-load corners. It didn't match any electrical signature she knew from a standard failure. The amplitude of the interruption was too clean, too perfect. It looked less like hardware decay and more like a signal being suppressed.

Someone was feeding interference into the car’s data bus.

Her stomach tightened. She looked across the garage. Marco was still leaning back in his chair, feet up, scrolling through social media on his tablet. Dieter was working the timing sheets. Julien was halfway around the circuit, now pushing the car closer to its edge.

Elise made a decision. She saved a duplicate file of the raw telemetry to her personal device, silently, without moving her lips.

Practice ended twenty minutes later.

Julien pulled into the garage. He didn't climb out immediately. When he did, he found Elise standing by the sidepod, clipboard in hand, looking at him through the gap in her hair.

“Car felt alive at the end,” he said. Flat, but not cruel.

“The actuator was the issue.”

“Mm. Must've been.”

He clicked his helmet latch. Walked past her, towards the motorhome. But he paused at the door. Half-turned.

“Good change,” he said. “Don't expect it to happen often.”

Then he disappeared inside.

Elise didn't wait for the warmth. She stared at the data file on her tablet, highlighted the suspicious section, and labeled it in her head: *not sensor noise. deliberate.*

Riko walked past her, carrying a tire. He paused, lowered his voice. “Hey. New boss.”

She looked up.

He tilted his head toward Marco’s station. “Check the clock on your screens, not his. Brandt has been known to edit out what he doesn't want people to see.”

Before she could respond, Riko was gone.

Elise turned back to the floating data. The sensor gaps glowed like wounds no one else was willing to admit existed. She pressed two fingers to her thumb, feeling her heartbeat in the pressure.

Someone inside Apollon had made those gaps.

And with Julien finally starting to trust her, she had just made herself a target.