SOLARIS DAWN

CHOICES

Despite the supposed violence of the crash, Ody barely remembered anything after he came to. He was in his bed as if everything was just a bad dream. After his friends visited, however, he realized it was anything but.

His hovercar had been totaled and was towed away from the Salt Riverbed to be returned to the scrapyards from which it came. Instead of triumph, Ody was left with the bitter taste of defeat lingering in his mouth, knowing that he failed not only his friends and family but himself.

The two nights since then had been spent sleepless as the small wounds on his head and arms healed slowly, his stomach churning each time that the Orion Strider poster lingered in his vision for a second too long. He, Ody supposed, could never be like Orion. His dream was over.

Ody stumbled into the kitchen in the early morning of the third day after his loss and began to cook breakfast for himself and his Uncle. It was a small thing, but his eager hands needed to be occupied, lest he go mad. Eggs, bacon, and some cheap, concentrated apple juice were all they had stocked inside their desolate fridge, but it would be enough.

Tobias soon awakened to the smell of the crisp cooking bacon and swiveled his head around to spot his nephew. The boy was meek from behind, his thin body a terrible reminder of how he felt inside. His brown hair swung gently like drapes covering his sullen cheeks.

Tobias, in truth, had been awake throughout the previous night, scouring through footage on the television. Something had felt off about the race to him, a similar gut feeling to the one he often got when he watched the news editorials Ody loathed so much. His gut was never wrong, so he flicked the TV back on to continue to search.

Ody, startled by the noise, turned to see himself on the screen. He came to the corkscrew section of the track, flew wildly to one side, and then floated up and over his opponent. The rush of the moment came back to him but he refused to give in to it.

"Unc, please don't keep that on, I'm trying to-" Ody said, his uncle shooshing him before he could finish. He sighed deeply and turned back to complete the meals, plating them messily and setting them down on the coffee table in the living room before taking a seat next to his uncle.

"I'd rather we just watch the news at this point, wouldn't you?" He asked, his uncle scrubbing through the recorded footage quickly as it neared the fateful moment of the crash. Ody winced and turned away out of fear that it might kill him.

The house hung in silence for a single beat before Tobias let out a loud yelp and pointed desperately at the screen. He scrubbed back and replayed the exact moment before Ody's car had flipped, focusing intently on the screen in front of him.

"Look, right there! I've been thinkin' all night about this, about what really happened at your race, and it's right there. Do you see it?" He questioned while pointing at a spot directly between Kael and Ody's hovercars.

His nephew, against his better judgment, narrowed his eyes in a vain attempt to see better what his uncle wanted him to. It took a few seconds, a couple repetitions of the same scene, before Ody could finally see what his uncle was getting at. A small wave formation seemed to materialize to the right of Kaels hovercar in just a few seconds. It looked like a mirage, like the wavy lines of a road that had gotten too hot, except far more subtle. Even the most experienced hovercraft pilots might not have seen anything there unless they had slowed down the footage as Tobias did.

Ody questioned himself quickly, running through every explanation in his mind, but he found only one satisfactory answer for the anomaly; his car hadn't malfunctioned when he detected that gravitational anomaly, it was there plain as day, emanating from his opponent's hovercar.