18
“Eight hundred and twenty-three kilometers,” Luke announced as they rolled into the bivouac.
And Zoe could feel every single one of them tramping through her body like a centipede army bent on her destruction. Only a hundred and fifty klicks had been on a Selective Section, because Stage One was the easy one—six hundred something had been timing challenges on roads. This was the easy one? Someone shoot her now, please.
She and Luke hadn’t talked much through the rest of the drive beyond what was needed for the racing itself. But it wasn’t an uncomfortable silence, she hoped. They’d simply focused on the task at hand like the good soldiers they were.
On a couple of the longer straightaways, they talked over the import of Drake’s news about what had happened in Pakistan. While it was
