The telemetry didn't lie.
That was what Rachel had always liked about data. It wasn't trying to perform. No image to protect. No one to win over.
The numbers on her laptop showed her exactly what the car had done through Turn 7, three-tenths slower than the simulation said it should be.
She highlighted the sector and flagged it, then made a note in the margin of her printed timing sheet, the handwriting so small it was almost impossible to read. That was the point.
The Kestrel Racing garage was empty at this hour. Or at least, it should've been.
She didn't hear the door. She only realized someone had come in because the silence felt different, a slight shift in the air, footsteps carrying over the polished concrete, and by the time she looked up, he was already halfway across the garage, his race suit unzipped to the waist, the top half hanging loose around his hips.
He didn't see her.
That wasn't surprising. Most people didn't notice her unless she made them.
She watched him cross to the car, her father's, technically, though she'd stopped thinking of anything as hers a long time ago, and crouch beside the front-left wheel assembly.
His head tipped a little to the right, the way it always did when he was trying to figure something out. She knew that because she'd gone back over the debrief footage more times than she'd ever admit.
She should've said nothing. The smart move was to wait, stay where she was, let him leave.
"The oversteer isn't the tyre," she said instead.
He went very still.
Then he pushed himself up slowly and turned to face her.
Up close, closer than the debrief room, closer than the paddock corridor where they'd passed each other twice that weekend without a word, his eyes were sharper than the cameras ever gave him credit for.
They sized her up in two seconds, laptop, timing sheets, a cup of coffee that had gone cold a while ago. She was still on the stool, hadn't shifted, hadn't flinched, hadn't done anything except look at him with that look, the kind of calm people always mistake for cold.
"Ms. Lin," he said.
"It's the rear suspension geometry," she said. "Jacob already has the data. He'll have something for you by morning. But if you're standing out here replaying it in your head, it wasn't your input."
There was a pause. He glanced at the car, then back at her.
"You've been here the whole time," he said. It wasn't really a question.
"I'm usually somewhere," she said, which was more than she'd said to him in three months of sharing the same paddock.
He should've left. The polite thing, the professionally appropriate thing, was to say thanks for the info and walk out.
Instead, he closed the last bit of space between them and leaned against the workbench on the other side of the car, across from where she was sitting. Close enough now that she could see the tension still sitting in his jaw from the race.
There was a faint mark on his neck where the mic tape had been, a pale ghost against his skin.
"The geometry," he said. "What specifically?"
She turned the laptop to face him. He studied the screen for a moment without leaning in, as though he didn't want to seem too interested.
"Toe angle," she said. "Corner entry. The car's fighting you, not the other way around."
"Jacob said driver error."
"Jacob said *possible* driver error. The full stop was his qualifier, not yours."
He looked at her then, properly. It wasn't something people usually bothered with.
"You were in the debrief?"
"I read the transcript."
The hint of a smile touched his mouth. Not a full smile. Just almost.
"Does your father know you read the transcripts?"
The question landed light, a little teasing, fishing for information under the cover of small talk. She'd been dodging that since she was fourteen.
"My father knows everything that happens in this garage," she said evenly. "And nothing that matters."
That caught him off guard. The easy charm slipped from his eyes, and he looked at her more seriously now.
"That's a convenient way to put it."
"It's just accurate."
He didn't say anything for a moment. A door slammed somewhere outside in the paddock. She went still, her spine straightening before she forced herself to relax. She didn't look toward the sound, keeping her eyes on the screen instead.
He didn't say anything about it either.
"The toe angle," he said. "How big of a change?"
She pulled the timing sheet toward her and turned it around for him. He looked at it longer than necessary. She got the sense he was stalling. She just didn't know for what.
"If Jacob applies this tomorrow," he said, "and it works…"
"It'll work."
"…and if it works, you'll be right about something you weren't meant to be involved in."
"I'm always involved," she said. "I'm just not visible."
He straightened. Looked at her like she'd said something that mattered, not pity, not analysis. Something else.
"Right," he said.
He pushed off the workbench.
"Well… thank you. For the data."
"Goodnight, Mr. Wang."
He walked toward the door. She turned back to her screen.
"Silas," he said, from the threshold.
She didn't look up. "I know."
The door closed, and everything settled again, but it felt different, not empty like it usually did after someone walked out, just heavier. She didn't let herself think about why.
She went back to work, flagging another sector and adding a quick note.
The telemetry didn't lie. She just wasn't sure what he'd do with it.
---
She left the garage at half past midnight.
The paddock was different at that hour, stripped down. No sponsor banners. No cameras. No strange energy from two hundred people pretending not to watch each other.
All that was left were cables, equipment cases, the low hum of generators, security lights stretching orange shadows between the motorhomes.
Rachel walked with her laptop bag on one shoulder and her timing sheets under her arm, eyes fixed a few steps ahead. It was how she moved in places that weren't hers.
The Kestrel motorhome was dark except for the upper level, a light burning behind frosted glass. Her father's floor. He stayed up late on race weekends. Not because he was anxious.
He told her once that anxiety was just a thinking error. He stayed up because he had this thing for going over everything that happened and deciding what it meant for him.
She took the side entrance. The stairs were narrow, and she climbed them without turning on any lights, moving by memory and the orange glow from the window at the top.
The door to her room was at the end of the corridor. She was three steps from it when the other door opened.
"Rachel."
Her father's voice had a quality she'd spent twenty-seven years studying. Right now it was what she privately categorized as administrative, not warm, not cold, the tone he used when he was measuring her against what he expected.
She turned. "I thought you'd be in the debrief review."
"I'm finished." Adrian Lin stood in the doorway of his office in a suit that looked as though he'd just put it on instead of wearing it for fourteen hours. He had her eyes, or she had his, dark and very still, giving nothing away.
"Where have you been."
"The garage. Going over the sector data."
"Eric handles the sector data."
"Eric missed the rear suspension issue too." She kept her voice level. "I flagged it. Jacob will have it by morning."
Her father regarded her briefly, then moved on, as though a box had been checked.
"I see." He studied her for a moment. "You were alone?"
He asked it like he asked all his important questions, in a tone so neutral it gave nothing back. She'd learned early that the only safe answer to that tone was the simplest one.
"Yes," she said.
He held her gaze for three seconds. She met it without difficulty, which had taken years to learn.
"Get some sleep," he said. "We have the sponsor breakfast at seven-thirty. I need you presentable."
Presentable. Not there, not ready, just presentable, like a room prepared for guests.
"Of course," she said.
He stepped back and closed his door.
She stood in the corridor for a moment after the latch clicked, her hand at her side, fingers uncurled. Then she went to her room and sat on the edge of the bed in the dark, not turning on the light for a long time.
---
The sponsor breakfast was in the hospitality suite above pit lane, glass overlooking the circuit, a buffet along the wall, and forty people who all wanted something from someone.
Rachel arrived at seven-twenty, exactly as intended, neither early nor late.
She worked the room as she'd been taught, unhurried, present without being available. A slight smile that said *I see you* without promising anything more.
Every name was familiar. The sponsors anxious about the team's mid-season standing. The ones satisfied. Others caught up in internal politics she'd been keeping an eye on from a distance. All of it stayed filed away in a part of her mind her father had spent years shaping, and she drew on it now with the ease of long practice.
Mid-conversation with a logistics sponsor, nodding along to something about freight, she noticed Silas walk in.
The room shifted, forty people adjusting without meaning to, nearby conversations growing slightly louder. He just had that effect. A pattern she'd seen often enough to understand.
"…which is why the Q3 routing will be a lot smoother," the director was saying.
"That makes sense," Rachel said. "Have you talked to Eric about the logistics review in October?"
She caught Silas out of the corner of her eye. He'd already been pulled into a conversation, a sponsor, a PR guy at his side. He had that smile he always used in rooms like this. It looked right. There was nothing behind it.
He was good at the handshakes. At becoming exactly what the room needed.
She knew what that took. More than he would have guessed.
"Ms. Lin?"
Rachel brought her attention back to the regional director. "I'll put you in touch with Eric. He handles that."
She said her goodbyes in a way that made people feel heard, not dismissed. It was its own kind of performance.
The coffee station sat in the corner away from the windows, the quietest spot in the room, and she had chosen it deliberately. Milk halfway to the cup, someone stepped up beside her, not crowding her but keeping a little distance as he reached for the pot.
"The rear toe," Silas said under his breath, not looking at her. "Jacob checked it this morning. They're fixing it before qualifying."
She kept her eyes on her cup. "Good."
"He thinks he figured it out himself."
"That's fine."
He paused to pour his coffee while someone in the main room laughed too loud, the sound sharp enough to catch for a second before she smoothed it away. Her hand stayed steady.
"Three-tenths," Silas said. "If you're right about what we get back."
"I'm right."
He let out a soft sound, not quite a laugh, and probably not meant for her to hear. She caught him out of the corner of her eye, staring into his coffee. It wasn't the same smile from across the room. This one carried more weather.
"You're pretty sure," he said, "for someone who's not even in on this."
"You don't need a little to be sure."
He turned to look at her, and she held his gaze, a habit she had only recently begun to unlearn. In the daylight, he looked like he hadn't slept deeply, the kind of tiredness that came from waking too often and deciding it didn't matter.
"Are you always like this?" he asked.
"Like what."
"This," he said, gesturing loosely in her direction without quite pointing at her. "You're just… steady. Like you're taking notes.
"I'm usually taking notes."
His expression changed, the easy charm pulling back just slightly. Before he could speak again, the PR guy was there at his elbow, polite and immovable.
"Silas, sorry… the AutoSport guy's ready for you. Five minutes, okay?"
"Sure." He didn't look away from Rachel right away, holding her gaze a second longer than he needed to. She noticed, but let it pass. Then he straightened, picked up his coffee, and turned to the coordinator. "Yeah, I'm coming."
He stepped away and disappeared into the crowd.
Rachel turned back to the window. Through the glass, the pit lane was already alive, engineers in motion, equipment being wheeled across the concrete, the low white GT3 easing out of the garage for qualifying.
She watched the car roll down the lane, the mechanics walking alongside it, everything moving according to a schedule that wasn't hers.
Her phone buzzed.
*Sponsor dinner tonight. Black dress. 7pm. — Father*
She put the phone away and finished her coffee.
---
Qualifying was at two.
She watched from the timing room instead of the glass suite, a small, practical space two floors below her father's level, accessible by a back staircase most people didn't bother with.
Jacob was at the pit wall. Eric was with her father.
One engineer on duty. A bank of screens. The radio in her ear, always talking. No cameras.
She stood at the back with her timing sheets and waited.
Silas went out on his first run and put in a lap that was, by her calculation, 0.28 seconds faster than his Friday practice best. She noted the number and turned to the sector breakdown.
Turn 7 looked cleaner this time, more committed on entry, the car rotating the way it should and giving him the exit he needed.
She circled the sector time and kept it to herself. No one in the room was looking her way.
On his second run, he went three hundredths faster and took provisional pole by four tenths. The radio crackled with Jacob's measured approval, and one of the engineers at the screens gave a quick fist pump and murmured *yes*.
Rachel uncapped her pen and wrote the final time at the top of the sheet.
*P1. +0.31 on sector 3.*
She capped the pen, rolled the sheet, and got out before anyone came looking.
---
She was halfway down the back staircase when she heard footsteps below, coming up fast.
There was nowhere to go. The staircase was narrow, raw concrete, single file. No landing. No side exit. Just up or down.
A second later, Silas appeared around the lower bend.
He was still in his race suit, half unzipped, radio earpiece hanging loose against his collar. Like he'd walked straight out of the pit lane and into this.
He stopped when he saw her.
For a second, neither of them moved.
They just stood there in the tight stairwell, concrete pressing in on both sides. The noise from the paddock bled down from above, engines revving, someone shouting, a burst of static from a radio.
This place kept things longer than it should.
Into every memory she had of this place.
"You weren't upstairs," he said.
She didn't ask how he knew. "No."
"Timing room?"
She held up the rolled sheet.
He looked at it.
Then at her.
The practiced composure fell away, leaving him open and almost unguarded, nothing like the face he wore upstairs for the cameras.
"You saw the sector," he said.
"Yes."
"And?"
"And you were right about Turn 7," she said. "You weren't fighting the car. It was finally doing what you needed."
He took a second before speaking.
A flicker of relief crossed his face. She caught it and let it go.
"I haven't felt that in four races."
"I know." She paused. "I've been watching the data."
He looked at her for a long time in the stairwell, not with the face he used upstairs or under the lights, but with nothing in its place.
Then he said, simply, "Thank you."
It was the second time he'd said those two words to her in less than twelve hours, and she felt the shift. The first had skimmed past, polite and forgettable. This one lingered.
It felt more certain, not like he was filling silence, but like he had chosen it.
"Goodnight, Mr. Wang," she said, without thinking.
He blinked.
A trace of amusement crossed his face, and he didn't try to hide it.
"It's two in the afternoon," he said.
She held his gaze. "I know."
She walked past him and down the stairs without looking back. Halfway down, she was almost sure she heard him let out a breath that sounded a lot like a laugh.
Down the stairwell, through the service corridor, out to the back of the paddock. The afternoon light turned everything flat and white. No cameras. No waiting eyes. No one who needed anything from her.
She uncapped her pen and circled Turn 7 again.