would do this by him- or herself, but she wasn’t taking chances. Her students had never run side by side before, on a shielded track. So far, all their experience with riding the kehoks had been solo, heavily supervised by her. She held the mounts steady with her will.
This is going to work, she thought. I’m going to make them into winners! I’m going to change their destinies! Instead of dilettantes who dabbled in racing before returning to run their parents’ estates, they’d be champions. When they went for their annual augur readings—or however often rich kids went—they’d be told hawk or tiger, instead of cow or mouse. They’d be thrilled—the young always wanted to be reborn as something grand.
The two students lowered themselves into the saddles and belted themselves in with the harnesses—the straps should keep them on their kehok’s back no matter what the monster did. In a professional race, there were no harnesses and no chain nets.
It added to the excitement.
She broke contact with the kehoks and climbed the ladders to check the straps. The second she switched her focus to the saddles, the kehoks began to buck and snort. Fetran and Amira clung to their backs.
Straps were secure.
She took a breath . . .
Reconsidered all her life choices that led her to this moment . . .
Decided it was too late to change her mind and run off into the desert to live a less stressful life subsisting on scorpions and camel dung . . .
She retreated to the stands, beyond the dampening shield that covered the track. All racetracks had an augur-created psychic shield that prevented anyone in the stands from influencing the racers, whether it was by concentrated determination or an overabundance of enthusiasm. From here on, it was up to her two students.
“You have one task,” Tamra called to Fetran and Amira. “Fix this word in your mind:
“Run!”
Tamra then slapped the lever that unlatched the gates, and the two kehoks, with their riders still clinging to their backs, burst out of the starting shoots. They barreled forward—even at a cheap training facility like theirs, the practice track was hemmed in by high walls, so there was no place for the massive mounts to go except forward. But that didn’t mean they wouldn’t try to resist.
She jogged through the stands, parallel to the track.
The lion-lizard bashed against the wall, trying to knock his rider off. He didn’t understand that the rider was attached. Tamra felt each blow in her memory—her bones still ached because of the number of times she’d been slammed against a training wall. Then there was the time a kehok had rolled on top of her in an attempt to unseat her. Her right leg had broken in three places, but she’d won that race. Some days—like today, with twinges of sympathy—her leg still hurt.
“Run!” she shouted at the two riders. “That’s all that matters! That’s all that exists! You are nothing but the sand beneath the hooves, the wind in your face, the sun on your back. You are this moment. Feel the moment. Feel the race!”
She missed it, the way the wind felt, the way the rest of the world fell away, the way life was distilled into a simple goal. Nothing about life was simple anymore.
She wished she could peel away everything else and just focus on this: a race. Just her and a monster that she understood and could control, rather than the monsters who wore human faces and believed they were purer of soul than she.
Maybe they are purer than me. But that doesn’t make their actions right.
She couldn’t dwell on that now, though, as Amira and Fetran demanded her attention. The other students and trainers cheered as the two kehoks and riders thundered around the track. Sand was kicked into the air in a cloud that billowed up toward the sky. She began to feel a shred of the old exhilaration—the barely bridled wildness of the kehoks, matched with the barely contained terror of the riders. It was intoxicating. Tamra cheered with the others as the riders rounded the third corner.
And then it happened—
Fetran lost control.
She knew it a split second before the crowd gasped. It was in the way the boy’s kehok tossed his head, the sun glinting off his golden eyes—
Freedom.
The rhino-croc sensed that the boy’s focus had slipped, and he pivoted on his back feet. Rising up, he struck the other kehok, the lion-lizard, in the face. The lion-lizard crashed to the