Chapter 5: The Crash
The heavy roll-up door slammed shut with a final, grating shriek of metal, plunging the garage back into the dim hum of dormant machinery and flickering neon. The only light now came from the back office, a sickly blue pulse from a half-charged core unit.
Daya stood with her back to the closed door for a long moment, her shoulders rising and falling with one deep, controlled breath. The electric blue corona around her irises faded like a dying star, leaving her dark eyes bloodshot and profoundly tired. She didn’t look at Vi or Caitlyn. She just walked, steps measured, towards the office.
Vi followed, the earlier argument hollowed out by what she’d just witnessed. The calculated violence, the way Daya had moved—not with anger, but with a devastating, pharmaceutical certainty. The three Sump-faces hadn’t been beaten; they’d been efficiently dismantled, joints targeted, weapons confiscated, egos crushed without a single word wasted. It was a performance. A deterrent. It had worked.
Inside the office, the scene was quieter, and worse.
Jess was curled on a stained couch shoved against the wall, wedged between a stack of engine schematics and a crate of spark-plugs. She was shaking. Not a subtle tremble, but a full-body rattle that made her teeth chatter audibly. Sweat plastered her honey-toned hair to her forehead and neck. Her skin had a waxy, greyish pallor.
“Crashing,” Daya stated flatly, the word clinical. She moved to a locked metal cabinet, her movements still precise but slower now, the shimmer’s edge wearing off. She keyed it open and pulled out a small med-kit.
Vi stepped closer, her boots avoiding greasy tools scattered on the floor. “Jess?”
Jess’s eyes rolled toward her, but they didn’t focus. The brilliant, awful pink was gone, leaving her natural green murky and clouded with pain. A thin line of saliva trailed from the corner of her mouth. She gasped, a wet, ragged sound, and curled tighter around her own stomach.
“How long does this last?” Caitlyn asked from the doorway, her voice low. She kept her eyes on the street outside the cracked window, but her posture was rigid, absorbing every detail.
“Depends on the dose, the cut, what she was trying to do,” Daya said, not looking up as she prepared a syringe from a vial of clear liquid. “This was a bad one. A push dose for a precision weld. Stupid.”
“You knew she was on it,” Vi accused, the heat returning to her voice as she watched Jess suffer.
“Of course I knew.” Daya’s reply was weary. “I mix half her batches. You think this is a secret?” She nudged Jess’s shoulder. “Come on, kid. Arm out.”
With a whimpering grunt, Jess flailed a trembling arm out from her body. Daya pushed up the sleeve of her undershirt, and Vi saw it.
The inside of Jess’s forearm, from the crook of her elbow down to her wrist, was a road map of damage. Not the clean, single puncture marks of a med-kit injection. This was a landscape of bruises in varying stages of yellow and purple, dotted with the angry red sores of missed hits and the silvery, pinprick scars of old ones. The skin was toughened, corded, but the damage was written plainly underneath.
Vi’s breath caught. The image of Jess as a kid, flinching from a splinter, flashed in her mind.
Daya swabbed a relatively clean spot, found a vein with practiced ease, and slid the needle in. Jess shuddered, then went limp as the clear liquid emptied into her bloodstream. The relief wasn’t instant, but the terrible, bone-deep shaking began to subside into gentle tremors.
“What is that?” Caitlyn asked, her Enforcer’s curiosity overriding her distaste.
“Counter-agent. Mitigates neural toxicity, eases the system shock. Doesn’t fix the craving. Just makes the come-down less likely to stop her heart.” Daya disposed of the syringe in a sharps box. “It’s expensive.”
Vi couldn’t look away from Jess’s arm. “How long?” The question came out hoarse. “How long has she been… like this?”
Daya settled onto the edge of the workbench, the weight of the last hour settling onto her. She looked at Vi, and for the first time, her calm seemed like a thin veneer over something exhausted and furious.
“You want a date? A specific moment?” Her voice was quiet, dangerously so. “She started about six months after the beam incident. Not recreation. Not to race. To get out of bed. To make her hands stop hurting enough to hold a wrench. The pain was… persistent. Topside painkillers might as well be fairy dust down here. Shimmer was cheap, and it worked.”
Vi’s jaw ached. “The beam incident.”
“Yeah.” Daya’s eyes held Vi’s, refusing to let her look away. “The one where you left her. You checked. No pulse. You assumed. I get it. In the chaos, with the enforcers closing in? It was a logical call.” She leaned forward slightly. “But logic doesn’t mean much when you’re twelve years old, crushed under half a ton of scrap, conscious, listening to your best friend declare you dead and run off.”
The words landed like physical blows. Vi saw it. Not from her memory, but from a new, horrifying perspective: Jess’s. The dust, the pressure, the fading sound of retreating footsteps. The silence after.
“She was alive,” Vi whispered.
“Barely,” Daya said. “Took a scavenge crew three hours to find her. The scarring on her back isn’t just from the beam. It’s from infection. From makeshift surgeries with dirty tools. By the time she was functional, the world had moved on. You were gone. Powder was gone. Silco was in charge. And the only thing that consistently numbed the pain, both kinds, was shimmer.”
Jess’s breathing had evened out. Her eyes were closed, but a tear escaped, tracking through the grime on her temple. She was listening.
Vi felt the walls of the small office pressing in, the smell of ozone and sweat suddenly suffocating. Caitlyn’s presence, a silent judgment from Piltover, made it worse. She’d come back to fix things, to find her sister, and instead she was being shown the wreckage she’d left in her wake, a wreckage that had learned to inject poison to survive.
“She hates me,” Vi said. It wasn’t a question.
“She doesn’t have the energy to hate you,” Daya corrected, rubbing her own eyes. “She resents you. That’s different. It’s a low-grade fever. Hate takes commitment. What she is, is addicted. To the shimmer, and to the idea that she has to be this hard, self-reliant thing to prove she survived you. That’s the real trap.”
Outside, the distant, rhythmic roar of the speedway kicked up a notch. A collective murmur from a crowd filtered through the glass. The next race was starting.
The sound seemed to pull Jess back. She blinked, wiped her face with a still-trembling hand, and pushed herself up to sit. She looked at Vi, and her gaze was clear now, just shattered.
“Daya makes it sound noble,” Jess croaked. Her voice was shredded. “It wasn’t. It is and it isn’t. At first, it was medicine. Then it was a boost for a tricky repair. Then it was the only way I could stand to be in my own skin for eight hours straight.” She looked at her own scarred arm with a kind of detached disgust. “Now it’s just the deal. The price of doing business in the lanes. You run on fumes, you lose.”
Vi had no answer. Every argument, every plea about Silco’s poison, withered in the face of the lived reality etched into Jess’s skin. She’d been prepared for a fight, not an autopsy.
Caitlyn cleared her throat softly. “The racer you spoke of earlier. The one who might know about the… blue-haired girl.” She couldn’t bring herself to say Jinx. “The race is starting. If we want to find him, we need to be there.”
It was a lifeline, a shift back to the mission. Vi grabbed it, grateful for the concrete task.
Jess let out a weak, coughing laugh. “Riko. Yeah. He’ll be in the pits right now, hyping himself up. Cocky bastard.” She tried to stand, swayed, and Daya was there, a steadying hand on her shoulder.
“You’re not going anywhere,” Daya said.
“I have to clock his glider’s signature for the betters,” Jess protested, but it was weak.
“I’ll do it. You’ll hydrate. You’ll eat the protein paste in the fridge. You’ll sit.” Daya’s tone allowed no debate. She looked at Vi. “You want to meet Riko? Follow me. But stay close, and let me talk. The pits aren’t a place for polite questions.”
Vi nodded, the motion feeling stiff. She glanced once more at Jess, who had turned her face toward the wall, shutting them out. The chasm between them was no longer just years or choices; it was physiology. It was chemistry.
“Jess,” Vi said.
Jess didn’t turn. “Just go find your sister, Vi. Some of us have actual work to do.”
Daya led the way out of the office, back into the cavernous garage. The roar of the distant crowd was a living thing now, vibrating in the air, throbbing up through the concrete floor. It was a sound of hunger, for speed, for violence, for release.
Vi followed, Caitlyn falling in step beside her, their previous unity strained by the raw, ugly truths of the office. As they neared a small personnel door that led out to the service alley and the track beyond, Caitlyn spoke softly, for Vi alone.
“It’s a disease down here,” she murmured, not unkindly. “It’s systemic.”
Vi watched Daya’s back, the set of her shoulders that bore the weight of a business, a friend, a ward. “It’s not a disease,” she corrected, her voice thick. “It’s an ecosystem. And we helped make it this way.”
Daya pushed the door open. The sound exploded inward—the scream of over-tuned engines, the shriek of a crowd, the pulsing, arrhythmic beat of Undercity anthems. The neon glow of the speedway painted the alley in garish, shifting colors.
“Stay close,” Daya repeated, her profile sharp against the electric chaos beyond. “And don’t touch anything.” She stepped out, and Vi moved after her, leaving the grim sanctuary of the shop for the hungry, shimmer-fueled heart of the lanes.