Read Chapter 3: Cold Shoulder

The knock on Elise’s door came at seven sharp. Not the tentative tap of a junior mechanic, but the firm, impatient rap of someone who expected the door to open instantly.

It did.

Dieter stood in the corridor, arms crossed, his face a slab of concrete. Behind him, the garage hummed with early-morning activity, the smell of rubber and fuel already bleeding through the air vents.

“Briefing in ten,” he said. No good morning. No acknowledgment that she’d been up until two reviewing the telemetry logs Riko had flagged.

“I’ll be there,” Elise said.

Dieter didn’t move. His eyes swept over her, taking in the team polo, the lanyard around her neck, the toolbox at her feet. “The boys like to have their tools where they left them. Don’t be moving things around.”

Before she could respond, he turned and walked off.

Elise stood in the doorway, letting the words settle. That wasn’t a general reminder. That was a warning aimed square at her.

---

The garage was a cathedral of carbon fiber and controlled chaos. Mechanics moved in choreographed patterns around the two chassis, their conversations clipped and technical. When Elise walked in, the rhythm didn’t stop, but the temperature dropped. Conversations that had been flowing freely went quiet until she passed. Eyes that should have been on their work flicked to her and away.

She set her toolbox down on the workbench assigned to her—a corner station near the data acquisition rig. She’d barely opened the lid when one of the mechanics, a wiry man named Pavel, backed into her station without apology, reaching across her bench for a torque wrench that wasn’t there.

“Sorry,” he muttered, not looking at her. He grabbed a socket from a nearby cart and was gone.

Elise counted to five. She was used to being the outsider. In every garage she’d worked in, from Formula Renault to Formula 2, she’d been the first woman on the engineering side. But she’d earned her place in those rooms through results, not introductions. Here, she’d barely shaken hands and already carried the weight of Julien’s public contempt.

She knelt, running her hand over her tool roll. Everything was in place. The calibrated wrenches, the precision screwdrivers, the Allen key sets she’d bought herself at the start of her career, worn smooth from years of use.

Except.

She checked again. Ran her fingers along the slots.

The twelve-millimeter combination wrench was gone.

Elise stood, scanning the floor around her station. Nothing. She checked the drawers of the workbench. Nothing. Her pulse quickened, but she forced herself to breathe. Tools went missing in garages all the time. Borrowed without permission. Misplaced in the chaos of a race weekend. It didn’t have to mean anything.

But the way Dieter had looked at her. The way Pavel had backed into her space.

She zipped the roll closed and headed to the briefing.

---

Nadia caught her in the corridor. The head of aero fell into step beside her, the older woman’s voice low. “I heard you had a long night.”

“I wanted to cross-reference the sensor data from FP1 with the vibration telemetry,” Elise said. “Before we set the baseline for qualifying.”

Nadia nodded. “Good instincts. But be careful where you look.”

Elise slowed. “What does that mean?”

“It means this team has a lot of moving parts, and not all of them are mechanical.” Nadia glanced ahead, where the driver room door was closing. “Julien likes his world orderly. You’ve already disrupted that. Some people see that as an opportunity to push back.”

“Dieter?”

“Dieter’s loyal to one thing: speed. If you deliver it, he’ll come around. If you don’t…” Nadia didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t have to.

Elise entered the briefing room and took her seat at the far end of the table, next to Riko, who gave her a subtle nod of solidarity. Marco sat opposite, his tablet already glowing with data readouts. Julien was last to arrive, and he didn’t sit. He leaned against the wall, arms crossed, sunglasses perched on his head despite the dim room.

“FP1 showed promise,” Marco began, flipping through his data. “Tire degradation is within acceptable margins. We’ve got a few balance tweaks to make, but the car’s fundamentally strong.”

Elise waited. When Marco didn’t mention the telemetry gaps, she spoke up. “The signal dropouts in turns seven and nine are still unaccounted for. I’d like to run a full diagnostic on the data acquisition system before FP2.”

Marco’s smile was thin. “Already done. Sensor interference from the broadcast trucks. Standard street circuit noise.”

“I reviewed the files from last year’s Monaco race,” Elise said. “Same trucks were present. No dropouts.”

The room went quiet. Marco’s eyes narrowed. Julien shifted in his chair.

“It was a different setup last year,” Marco said. “Different electronics package.”

“I compared the electronics schematics,” Elise said. “The architecture is virtually identical.”

Marco opened his mouth, but Julien cut in. “We’re not here to argue about data ghosts.” His voice was smooth, dismissive. He pushed off the wall, walking toward the table. “We’re here to win Monaco. So let’s focus on that.”

The briefing continued. Elise made notes, highlighting points she’d need to address with the suspension crew, but her mind kept circling back to the missing wrench.

---

She returned to her station after the briefing to find Dieter standing over her toolbox.

“Problem?” she said.

He turned. In his hand was her wrench. The twelve-millimeter. He held it up. “Found this where it shouldn’t be.”

“It was missing from my case,” Elise said. “I was about to report it.”

Dieter’s jaw tightened. “It was jammed in the star drive of the rear wheel gun. The one we used in the last pit stop simulation.”

Elise’s blood went cold. A wrench jammed in a wheel gun. If that hadn’t been caught during the simulation, it would have been a disaster during an actual stop. A slow pit stop. A lost race. Possibly worse.

“I didn’t put it there,” she said.

“You’re the new one. You’re the only one whose tools aren’t accounted for by my team.” Dieter tossed the wrench onto her bench. It clattered, loud in the sudden quiet. Around them, the mechanics had stopped working to watch.

“I’ve done two pit stop simulations since I arrived,” Elise said, keeping her voice level. “In both, I was on the data readout station, fifteen meters from the wheel guns. I never touched the pit equipment.”

“You touch everything else,” Marco said, appearing at Dieter’s shoulder. “You’ve been in the garage all morning. Moving tools, checking systems.”

“I was checking data lines.”

“Same thing, from a certain point of view.”

Elise looked at Marco. His face was unreadable, but there was satisfaction in his eyes. She thought of Riko’s warning. If Marco wanted her gone, a sabotage accusation was an effective way to do it. Plant a tool, cause a scare, blame the outsider.

“This is my first race with the team,” Elise said. “Why would I sabotage my own debut?”

“I don’t know,” Marco said. “Why did you ask to review the telemetry before anyone else had seen it?”

The question hung in the air. Julien hadn’t spoken. He stood near the garage entrance, watching the scene unfold, arms crossed, expression unreadable.

Elise met his eyes. “I was doing my job. The same thing I’m doing now.”

Julien said nothing. He turned and walked back toward the driver room.

Dieter stared at her for a long moment. “The pit stop crew will be doing a full equipment audit. If anything else is out of place, it’s on you. Understand?”

“Understood,” Elise said.

He left. The garage returned to motion, but the coldness remained. She could feel it in every glance, every deliberate turn of a mechanic’s back.

Riko approached slowly, a clipboard in his hands, scanning a checklist he clearly wasn’t reading. “You okay?”

“Peachy,” Elise said.

“Look, I’ve been here three years,” Riko said, lowering his voice. “Marco’s been here six. Dieter’s been here twelve. You’re not going to win them over in a day.”

“I’m not trying to win them over. I’m trying to do my job.”

“That’s the problem.” Riko glanced around, then leaned closer. “In this team, doing your job is only half of it. The other half is showing you belong. And right now, you look like a threat.”

“To who?”

“To everyone who’s comfortable.” Riko shrugged. “Marco controls the data flow. Dieter controls the garage. Julien controls the car. You came in and touched all three. What did you expect?”

Elise looked down at her wrench, still lying on the bench where Dieter had tossed it. She picked it up, feeling the worn grip, the familiar weight.

“I expected to build a faster car.”

“Build a faster car, sure,” Riko said. “But don’t forget to watch your back while you’re doing it.”

He walked off, leaving Elise alone in her corner of the garage. She slid the wrench back into her tool roll, then pulled out her phone. She opened her encrypted file storage system and checked the timestamp on her raw telemetry backups. Still there. All of it. FP1 data, unedited, unmanipulated. Her insurance policy.

She pocketed the phone and looked at the car, gleaming under the garage lights. It was a beautiful machine. Thousands of components working in perfect harmony. The only thing that wasn’t working was the people.

And Elise was beginning to suspect that was the real danger.

She pulled out her tablet and opened a fresh app for inventory logging. If they wanted to play games with her tools, she’d play. She’d log every piece of equipment she touched, at every moment she touched it. A complete digital trail.

Because if the team was going to frame her for sabotage, she was going to have the evidence to prove exactly who was really at fault.

She started documenting her wrench, photographing it against her personal serial number log. Then she methodically photographed every single item in her case, timestamping each image.

Let them come for her. She’d be ready.