And with that, she'd spun on her heel with the grace of a ballerina - leaving Barnaby speechless - spotted Jason, and waltzed over.

By the time she sat down, Jason was grinning from ear to ear.

RACE 43.

Two days later, Jason was back in the driver's seat for Race 43. If he was going to finish the year in the Top 4, he needed to finish in the points today.

He ended up finishing 7th, garnering four points, having spent the greater part of the race staying well clear of all the other cars. It was a timid drive - and both the Bug and Sally noticed it.

That said, there was one hairy moment very early in the race: in the hurly-burly of the start, with all the cars jostling for position, Jason could have sworn that Joaquin Cortez had tried to ram his tailfin.

Jason had swerved wide, clipping some demag lights for his trouble, and the two cars had missed each other by centimetres.

Just racing? Jason thought. Or was it something more? Or was he just getting paranoid?

Either way, he thought, he had to do something about this confidence thing.

The next race was on Tuesday. So he had three whole days to work out a solution.

He started on Sunday morning...at 5:30 a.m.

Before first light, he got up and, leaving the Bug fast asleep in his bunk, went down to Pit Lane and in the silence, pushed the Argonaut out of its garage.

He clamped some new mags on her, and attached a little hover-trailer to her rear hook. Then he jumped in, and blasted out of the pits, heading inland, up toward the forested northern end of the island.

And there he ran loops around a course of his own design, a tight winding track around the upper forests and islands of Tasmania.

At first he did his laps alone, just timing himself with the Argonaut's digital stopwatch.

Later, he pulled eight mechanical objects from his hover-trailer - hover drones.

Bullet-shaped, superfast and extremely nimble, hover drones were training tools usually used to train very young hover car drivers, giving them a taste of other racers flying all around them, but without risking anyone's safety, since they were equipped with proximity sensors - meaning they couldn't actually collide with a car. For a racer at the Race School to be using them was like an Olympic swimmer using floaties to swim. They were only at the School for Open Days when young kids came to race around the School's tracks and get tips from the teachers.

Jason, however, reprogrammed his drones to race the course with him in a hyper-aggressive manner, darting and swooping all around the Argonaut as it raced - giving him the sensation of closely-moving rival cars, retraining himself. That said, he still kept their anti-collision proximity sensors switched on.

At first, the drones whipped across his bow as they raced, cutting dangerously close - then they started zinging across his tailfin, missing it by millimetres.

And Jason drove...and drove...and drove.

Indeed, he was concentrating so intently that he never noticed the pair of people watching him through digital binoculars from a nearby hilltop.

Monday morning.

And he went up north again, and raced alone in the dewy green forests of Tasmania.

This time he disengaged the drones' anti-collision sensors, and at one point in his racing, one of the drones bounced hard against his tailfin, denting it, creating a loud bang, shocking Jason.

He immediately pulled to a halt.

He was hyperventilating.

'Don't do that!' he yelled aloud to himself. 'Start your car again, and get back up there.'

He keyed his power switch and flew back out onto his track. Immediately, the drones were swarming around

him like a pack of killer bees.

Bang! He was. .h.i.t on the side.

He clenched his teeth, kept driving.

Bang! Again. Other side.

Kept racing.

Bang! This time it was in the tailfin, and the Argonaut lurched violently to the side, losing control...

...but Jason righted her...

...and regained control.

In his helmet, he breathed again.

And he smiled.

The two people watching him from the hilltop did not. He was back at his apartment before eight. The Bug was

still snoring.

Tuesday morning. Race Day for Race 44.

Again, Jason headed north before sun-up.

Only this time, when he reached his start point with his trailer full of drones, two people were already there, waiting for him, the same pair of people who had watched him practise by himself the previous two mornings.

Sally and the Bug.

'Hey there, Champ,' Sally said, illuminated by the winglights of the Argonaut. 'Shouldn't you be in bed?'

Jason froze. 'I...I just wanted to practise on my own...'

'On your own?' Sally frowned. 'Why?'

Jason winced. 'I just...I was...I mean - ' he sighed. 'I've been a wreck ever since the Italian Run, Sally. That crash freaked me out. And then when Wong hit me in my first race back here, I just cracked. I've been coming up here trying to get my nerve back.'

'We know,' Sally said. 'We've been watching you. The first morning you came, the Bug heard you leave. He followed you, to see where you were going, and then he called me. Why didn't you ask us for help?'

Jason shook his head. 'I didn't want to let you guys down,' he said. 'I wanted to figure it out...and fix it...and I thought...I thought that was my responsibility.'

Tears began to form in his eyes. He bit his lip to hold them back.

Sally saw this, and she stepped forward.

'You know, I screwed up once, and some little punk gave me some good advice. He said, "We win as a team, and we lose as a team." He was right, Jason. We're all in this together. And whether we win or we lose, the members of Team Argonaut back each other up. You don't ever have to go it alone, Jason. If you've p.i.s.sed me off in any way by doing this, it's sneaking off and coming up here all by yourself.'

'But I have to be the best...' Jason said.

'No, you don't,' a quiet voice said.

Jason started.

So did Sally.

Because it wasn't Sally who had spoken.

It had been the Bug, standing beside her. It was the first time Jason had ever heard him speak to two people at the same time.

'You don't have to be the best. You just have to do your best,' the Bug said quietly. 'If you do your best,' he shrugged, 'I'll follow you anywhere, Jason. I love you.'

'Me, too,' Sally affirmed, smiling. 'The follow-you-anywhere part, not the love-you part.'

And Jason laughed.

'Now then,' Sally clapped her hands. 'The whole world's against us, our backs are to the wall, and we need to win some races if we're gonna make the Top 4. But our fearless racer is a little nervy. The question is, what the h.e.l.l are we gonna do about it?'

In the end, it was the Bug who came up with the answer.

CHAPTER SEVEN.

RACE 44.

Race 44 saw Jason lead from start to finish, the win earning him ten beautiful points on the Championship Ladder.

That was the Bug's plan.

Win the start - and lead all the way, thereby staying out of range of any would-be a.s.sa.s.sins - and thus winning the d.a.m.n race. Simple. Then in the days between races, Team Argonaut would work together, helping recharge Jason's broken confidence.

It helped that Race 44 had been a Super-Enduro, meaning that lapped racers (like Horatio Wong in Race 41) hadn't been a problem.

It also helped that Xavier Xonora had sat out Race 44, choosing to rest, since he was so far out in front of the rest of the field on the Championship Ladder.

Every morning from that day on, Jason and his team could be found practising up in the far northern forests of Tasmania from sun-up to breakfast time. Then they would return to the Race School and commence their daily cla.s.ses.

Word got around.

The locals and their families - business owners and workers on the School-owned island - many of whom lived up on the northern islands, would come out onto their balconies with their morning cups of coffee and watch the Argonaut get harried by its drones in the light of the rising sun.

Soon the local kids would come out and watch, cheering as the Argonaut clashed with its drones.

A series of tiny dents now pock-marked the Argonaut's tailfin. It looked shabby, but as far as Jason was concerned, every dent was another brick in his wall of confidence.

He was rebuilding himself.

He was coming back.

He charged through Race 45 like a demon, coming third behind Xavier and Barnaby. Eight points.

More early-morning practice.

Race 46 was a gate race, and guided by a brilliant strategy from the Bug - a course that kept him well away from any a.s.sa.s.sins - he won, albeit in a tie with Xavier, the two of them ending the race on an equal amount of gate points. Ten Championship points.