Anya watched him from across the garage. She saw the change in his eyes, the way the "human" mask slipped and the "machine" took over. She didn't know about Simex, and she didn't know about the Freedom Units, but she knew that the driver standing in front of her wasn't the boy she had raised.
She'll never know that he'd become something else. Something built for a million laps of hell.
"Qualifying starts in one hundred and eighty minutes," Leo whispered to himself, the framework in his mind already rendering the cooling track surface. "One hundred and eighty minutes until the king loses his crown."
The paddock was quiet as the teams went to lunch, but the tension was building all over the grid and grand stands.
The media was already writing off the Arcadia rookie. The rivals were already looking past him.
They thought they knew his limit because of his intentional meager performance. They thought they knew the game. But they had no idea that this was only just beginning.
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