Free Gold by Chris Cleave Page B

the rivet and the adrenaline blitzed your senses.
    They went quicker. Zoe grinned into the wind. This was pure racing because there was no prize and no glory and no one knew who you were. There was no recognition and no fame. You could ride to a place beyond yourself. This was what she loved. When she raced like this, she couldn’t think about her life. You were intent on not making the tiniest error. You could ride so fast that the speed fed on itself and your wheels began to roar in the dark and your heart was going so hard that you thought one more beat per minute might kill you, and then suddenly you heard a motorbike and you looked round and you saw the white headlight behind you, and somehow you went even faster. Lights flashed past like laser bolts. You leaned and you wove and you accelerated. Street racing was the only part of her life where Zoe felt in control. It was the only time she could ride past a twenty-foot-high floodlit billboard of her own face and notice only the helpful illumination it gave to the road surface.
    Kate and Zoe jockeyed for position on the narrowing central strip, first one pulling ahead, then the other. They were perfectly matched. After nearly a full mile, with lungs bursting, neither could open up a gap on the other. The central strip was getting too skinny for them to come alongside each other in safety, and twice they bumped shoulders and had to hold their line hard not to careen off into the cars.
    Two hundred meters ahead, a set of traffic lights marked the T-junction where their route went left onto Great Ancoats Street. The lights were green.
    Kate looked up the roadway and judged the point at which the lights could show amber and she would still carry on rather than braking. Without signposting it in her body language, she suddenly kicked hard and opened up five bike lengths on Zoe. This was a power play in a street race: you dug extra deep for a few seconds, way beyond your aerobic limit, knowing that if you gapped your rival, then there was a chance the traffic lights would catch them after letting you through. The risk was that the lights might not change, in which case your rival could cruise past you as you drowned in your own oxygen debt.
    Kate risked it, grimacing as the pain in her body began to spike. She badly wanted to win. To beat Zoe now, even in a play race like this, would be to lodge a negative association in Zoe’s mind the next time they lined up together on a serious start line. She kicked harder. At this intensity a single second seemed unendurable, and twenty unimaginable. By an effort of will, she called the image of Sophie into her mind. This was how she coped with suffering. She thought, If I win this race, Sophie will get better. There was no logic to it, but her mind above one hundred and sixty beats per minute of heart rate had no use for logic. As she powered on through the dark, she visualized Sophie ahead of her, and the image pulled her forward.
    Zoe knew the traffic-light trap by heart and she’d been expecting Kate to jump ahead. She steeled herself and powered up her pedal stroke, refusing to let her rival open up more of a gap. She looked at the roadway, and now she was judging the point beyond which an amber light would not stop her. Her muscles were in agony, but she didn’t acknowledge pain. Her tires slipped and skidded from the lateral force as she cranked the bike forward so hard that the frame gave out cracking noises.
    Kate was operating at her limit. Just as the pain in her muscles and her lungs reached an unendurable pitch, the lights went amber. She was still fifteen meters short of the point on the roadway that she had marked as the absolute point of no return. She had a flash of relief: she could brake now. She risked a quick look behind her to check that Zoe was thinking the same. But Zoe was going for it. Eyes glazed, she was rocking from side to side in a trance of effort; Kate didn’t think she’d even noticed her looking