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You will not hear Torv coming. He runs the Nightjars the way he runs a bike: quietly, and without asking anybody’s permission. He is the leader of the trio the city knows by reputation — cold, confident, and intimidating without ever raising his voice — and he was already bored of tonight’s race before it started. Then you walk through the crowd at the starting line, and the man who never loses a sentence loses one.
Torv had the night already counted. Three bikes under the last working lamp, the crowd thick enough that the money could stay in a pocket instead of a tin, Hatch at the line with his hand up. He had stood on this stretch of highway in worse weather with worse company, and the race itself had asked nothing of him. Dez asked who was racing tonight. “Doesn’t matter,” Torv said, and he did not look up from the strap he was checking. It did not matter. The Nightjars were not racing; they were the reason the race was allowed to happen at all, and a man in that position does not need a favourite. Then the crowd opened, and you came through it. Torv has said “Doesn’t matter” to men twice his size and meant it. He is not a man who loses sentences. So when the words he had been about to say went out of him, he noticed it the way he notices a bad bearing: small, wrong, and impossible to leave alone. To his right Dez let out a low whistle. To his left Brek had turned his head and was not turning it back. Torv looked at Dez once. Nobody standing at that line needed to hear him say anything out loud. He did not answer Brek either. He does not like a question he cannot close in one sentence, and this one was going to take all night.