Chapter 80: Fastest Choice
The vehicle level wasn’t a room so much as a runway that had multiplied. Rows on rows stretched into a soft vanishing point - sleek bikes perched like patient animals, low-bellied cars with knife-bright seams, compact drones folded like sleeping birds. Overhead, rails carried gantries that purred to themselves. The air smelled like clean metal, warmed rubber, and one sharp note of ion - like a storm that had memorized the rules.
Hikari took one step inside and forgot to breathe.
"It’s bigger than my grocery list" Esen said, reverent and ridiculous in the same breath.
"It’s a whole ass city" Feris corrected, already craning for something with propellers.
Alteea spread her arms as if she were hosting a banquet. "Wheels, wings, sins against regulations. We don’t start polite before we misbehave." She cut Hikari a sidelong look over the rim of her glasses. "Try to pretend you haven’t already picked."
Hikari failed to pretend. She was moving before anyone could point her, a quiet magnet snapping to the right thing. Past the commuter-safe bikes. Past the tidy scout models. She stopped where the lights caught on a body that was more line than machine.
It was all blade and swallow - black, no chrome to brag, just a whispering curve of frame and a saddle that sat like a held breath. The front fairing narrowed into a prow. the tail lifted just enough to promise a clean cut through air. A thin mouth of a light traced the rear - swallowtail. The printed stencil near the fork said nothing helpful: KESTREL-X.
Hikari stood there like someone who’d found a word in a language she’d always known and never studied.
"You’re not even going to look at the other options?" Arashi tried, for the sport of it.
"No" Hikari said, sure on herself.
"Specs?" Esen asked, martyrdom ready in his voice. "Range, torque, weather pack, suspension maps-"
"No" Hikari said again, softer.
Alteea’s grin admitted defeat with enthusiasm. "Finally, someone who picks with their heart and then tells their brain to draft an apology." She brushed the seat with her knuckles and the console woke - muted white, no braggy colors. "She’s... fast. That’s the short of it. But you’ll need proper training. I’m sure you never even touched something of this caliber in your life."
"Finished the rush room. That enough? Raizen asked.
"Rust room, huh?" Alteea muttered, her eyes sharpening even more.
How fast is it?" Arashi asked before he could stop himself.
"The fastest we keep for Academy hands" Alteea said with an uncanny confidence. "She ain’t forgiving. She wants a steady spine and clean eyes."
Lynea interrupted: "Why X though? Other models have a number, like the board that took over two hundred previous prototypes"
Alteea smiled. "Because it’s not even a prototype. It’s too strong to be used by others. But I suppose that Rust room training..."
"Rust room?" Lynea raised her brow.
"Doesn’t matter. Hikari, this thing sings. Are you sure about this?"
"I can listen" Hikari said. She laid her fingers on the bar as if the bike might spook. The display greeted her with a mild hum - the way exquisite machines say hello.
"Helmet" Alteea said, and a tech brought one like a magic trick. When Hikari slid it on, the chin strap felt like a promise rather than a rule. She swung a leg over, sat, and something in her shoulders learned the exact angle of having always belonged there.
Engine on, Alteea wanted to say, but Hikari had already thumbed the starter. The bike didn’t roar - it woke. A neat line of sound under skin, a purr meant for the rider rather than the room.
"Lane three" a tech called, jogging ahead. "We’ll light you one."
At the track, stripe lights traced a path: blue dashes along a stretch cleared of obstacles. Hikari eased the bike forward - no wobble. First meter slow. Second meter quicker. Third - her spine took the hint. The Kestrel lifted like it had just remembered it had nothing to prove and everything to enjoy.
Hikari didn’t grin. Her mouth softened into the shape of concentration, the corners threatening. She rolled on. The blue dashes became a line. Wind - not much, the level was controlled - threaded the edge hair at her temple. She took the first wide curve like a bow takes a string: in one forgiving arc. On the return she dared more. The Kestrel’s tail twitched, then settled - an animal telling her it noticed and didn’t mind.
"Good." Alteea said, one hand loosely cradling the air like she was steering from a distance. Hikari breathed out. The instruction slotted into the place all good instruction goes - just behind the heart. She leaned a touch, and the Kestrel whispered yes, and the blue dash-lights went under her like a song different people hum the same.
Esen cupped his mouth. "Do a wheelie!"
"Don’t" three people said in exhausted chorus.
Hikari didn’t even hear him. Honestly? She would have nailed one. She braked smoothly at the end of the lane, turned, and came back with a little more courage in her knuckles. On the second pass, she took the curve tighter and the rear drifted a polite millimeter. She corrected without panic. The bike forgave her without smugness.
"Listen to her" Alteea called. "She’ll tell you if your greed is bigger than your hands."
On the third pass she clipped a cone because the cone had been placed by a petty god. It tapped the fairing and spun away. Hikari flinched, then grimaced, then - because she was stubborn in the sweet way - took the exact same path again and did not clip it.
She killed the engine at the mark without being told to. The stop didn’t pitch or wobble. When she took off the helmet, her hair had a crease and her cheeks had the same.
"Not based on perks" Alteea said, delight irrepressible. "Not based on what it can do. You just picked it."
"I like it" Hikari said. She placed her palm on the tank like blessing. "And I think that it likes me back."
"That is the only spec that matters on your first day" Alteea conceded. "Later you can bore me with tire compound."
Arashi leaned on a crate and smirked. "Name her?"
Hikari considered, shook her head. "Nobody’s as obsessed with names like you are, Arashi..."
Keahi huffed a laugh. "Tradition I can respect."
Raizen watched Hikari dismount. The line of her mouth had steadied. The stubborn had cooled into decided. Something in his chest did a small, undignified thing. He forgave it and put his hands in his pockets so they wouldn’t do worse.
Alteea twirled a finger. "Alright. We have indulged romance." Her gaze slid to Keahi, amused and anticipating. "Now we indulge arson."
Keahi’s smile was not a smile, not really. It was a baring of intention. "I need room" she said.
"You’ll get sky" Alteea promised, and led them back to the elevator spine.
This cab was bigger than the last and less polite. It sealed without ceremony. "Hold to rails" Alteea said, the way you tell people to wear seatbelts in a car that has only ever wanted to be airborne. The elevator dropped, slid sideways in a smooth insult to orientation, then carried them down in a long, steady fall. Numbers winked by: H-4, H-7, H-12. Air changed - cooler, thinner, edged with a mineral breath from deep structures.
When the doors opened, the word "room" gave up. The ceiling lived somewhere above where you could reach lights along the ribs of the arching vault ran off into distance. The floor was a field of grey tile broken by expansion seams and the ghosts of old scorch patterns buffed down to memory. Far along one wall, gaping vents slept behind grilles, the kind of mouths that could drink heat and call it breakfast.
Raizen put a palm on the rail beside the door. The metal answered him with a shiver that wasn’t sound. "There’s a hum here. Like the one on top of this place" he said, more to confirm reality than to inform anyone.
Alteea tipped a shoulder. "Underworks are closer than you might think. Dampeners in the walls will catch spill, mostly. Try not to aim a tantrum at the vents - they take things personally."
"So do I" Keahi said.
Alteea made a circling motion. Somewhere off to the left, foam crews lifted nozzles and checked pressure. Saffi said, "Heat online" to nobody and everybody. An amber line traced itself on the floor twenty meters out. DO NOT COOK PAST THIS, it meant.
"Whenever you’re ready" Alteea said, and the flirt she hid in her voice went very, very quiet.
Keahi stepped to the mark. She rolled her shoulders once, like remembering armor that wasn’t on her. She dropped into her stance with her weapon in her hands. There was nothing showy to it. Hips. Breath.
The first flame came like a rumor.
It licked up from her blade around her arms, thin, pink-hot filaments that didn’t waste time with orange. They braided, found each other, grew. Her palms tilted and the fire obeyed - it rose up her forearms, not touching skin, not burning cloth, trailing veins of incandescence that made the white room admit it had always wanted color.
Keahi lifted her blade and the flames gathered in front of her. They knit, fracture by fracture, into a shape that kept refusing and then agreeing to be the same shape again: head, breast, the long sweep of a body that decided to be a bird today. A beak formed - not a knife, a promise. Wings unfurled in segments, every feather a filament-sharp sliver of heat suspended by will.
Keahi stepped onto it.
Not onto a platform, not onto a trick. Onto the back between the wings, where the fire arched to meet the soles of her boots and held. The air around them bucked. The nearest heat baffles woke with a contented inhale. Hikari’s hand found the rail and closed without asking permission.
Keahi bent her knees and the phoenix obliged. The wings dropped once - no flapping for show, just the necessary physics rewritten - and the body rose. Air slipped along tile and hair. The temperature spiked across their cheeks, a dry heat that didn’t scald so much as insist. Keahi guided with palms and shoulder, and the bird banked left in a shallow curve that left melted mirage lines hovering where she’d been.
Arashi made an involuntary, inappropriate noise. "Okay. THAT’S ILLEGAL."
"Not yet" Alteea murmured, eyes hot and analytical at once. "Saffi?"
"Surface temp surprisingly not rising to threshold. Containment at thirty-two percent. Wind shear acceptable."
Keahi let the phoenix climb. The flames jittered on one wing, a stutter in the filament - there was a heartbeat where the construct wanted to peel into parts and stop pretending to be a whole. Keahi’s jaw set. She reached with the weight of her torso rather than her hands and the disorder remembered who owned the name. The wing smoothed, the curve held.
She didn’t make it pretty. She made it honest.
A second circuit, tighter. The heat baffles shifted tone, that bass that rooms make when they work for you harder than you deserve. The phoenix let out a sound that wasn’t sound - pressure through the chest, a phantom rung of metal in the ears. It wasn’t a threat. It was a mark of existence.
On the third pass, Keahi dared a descent too fast. The bird didn’t love that choice. It snapped a wing-kick to correct and the correction overdid it. She drifted toward an expansion joint and the scorched ghost of someone else’s mistake. Everyone flinched like they could help with eyebrows. Keahi swore, a minimal, elegant curse, slammed her will across the construct like a hand over a mouth, and the phoenix listened. It leveled. It held.
She brought it down on a long arc toward the mark, easing the burn so the foam crews didn’t tell stories to the next class. The flames thinned, showing more skeleton than skin - delicate ribs of heat threaded together. Then, in one neat decision, she let the phoenix come apart.
The wings collapsed into strings of light that snapped back into her claymore. The body softened, unwove, and flowed back into the air as heat you could see blur and then not see at all. Keahi hit the tile in a crouch and stood before anyone could clap.
Silence. Then Esen, very softly: "That was a lot."
"It was a start" Keahi countered. She took her claymore back from Feris, who had forgotten to breathe and then remembered all at once.
Alteea took exactly one heartbeat longer than necessary. It wasn’t theatrical; it was respect. "Approved" she said. "But you’ll need a harness line for extraction if you stall out high. A ceiling on the ceiling. Not many get to do that on their first try."
Keahi’s mouth considered pride and decided on something grimmer. "It will do."
"It will do beautifully" Arashi said. "And very illegally."
Saffi’s stylus traced the words "Keahi - Phoenix thing (Field restricted)". She added a tiny flame doodle in the margin and then blinked at it like she was surprised at herself and erased it.
Raizen was still at the rail, feeling the heat dissipate through the metal like a heartbeat that had decided to walk away. The hum beneath his palm returned, that Underworks bass, like a city clearing its throat.
Hikari stood beside the helmet tucked under her arm, eyes bright with reflected fire and something that wasn’t fire at all. Her Kestrel waited two floors up, a patient animal that already knew her weight.
Alteea blew out a breath she pretended she hadn’t been holding. "Speed and fire" she said, satisfied. "That’ll wake a city."
She turned, white coat catching the dying heat like it wanted to be a cape. "That’s two more signatures on my wall" she added, pleased. "One line carved in air and one bird taught to be a bridge."
"Birds don’t like being bridges" Esen observed.
"Then we pay them well" Alteea shot back, smile wicked and warm.
The crews stood down - the baffles sighed. Heat-lag rippled the far end of the hall. The lowest level held their echoes and swallowed them like secrets are supposed to be swallowed.
On the lift back up, Hikari held the helmet close as if sound might jostle it away. Keahi flexed her fingers and unwound the last threads of invisible flame until her hands were only hands.
No one told jokes in the cab. They didn’t need to. The day had made two new shapes for them to move through the world. The Heart purred, pleased to have been useful.
Then, the doors opened on white.