There was a lot of sunshine. A lot. Too much, in Kat's opinion. And accompanying the sunshine was an equal amount of heat and way, way more humidity than anyone ever needed.
She squinted against the headache that had been gnawing at her all day and wished for rain. Or at least a solar eclipse. "Whose brilliant idea was it to hold an event in Florida in June?"
Berto actually checked the managerial clipboard in his hands. "That would be... the city of Orlando."
Kat's squint turned into a scowl. "And whose idea was it for us to come?"
"Uh... Jefferson's."
"Right." She gave up being irritated and refocused her attention on the athletes, busting their guts out on the battleground of extreme sports competition. Of course Josh was one of them, and of course he was working twice as hard as anyone else, because the guy who couldn't be bothered to take the trash out of the stupid van was the same guy who was deadly serious about victory.
Dangle a first-place trophy in front of him and he turns into an unstoppable juggernaut, she thought, disgusted. And it was all the worse because her performance had been decidedly lackluster. It had, in fact, sucked. She'd been exhausted and in a really bad mood and she'd blown all of the events she was entered into. Now Team Steel was climbing up from dead last, but only because of Josh.
Josh - who was really pushing it out there on the motocross course. Who had lapped the guy in last place, but still had a long way to go to catch up to the lead. Who looked - tired? The unstoppable juggernaut, on his full night of sleep, tired? Unease tickled at the back of her neck.
"Think we'll have time to visit DisneyWorld?" Berto asked, a bit wistful. Josh failed to accelerate coming out of a curve and lost a few more yards to the lead.
That's not right.
"What?" she said, distracted, then mentally strung his words into a coherent question and replied, "Why, you want to ride the teacups?"
Josh took another curve badly, this time at their end of the track and close enough so that they could see his face through the curving shield of the helmet. Tired. Fighting.
"Not really. Actually, I guess I'd rather see one of the other theme parks -" He broke off, frowning. "Does Josh look okay to you?"
She scrubbed a hand across her forehead, trying to get rid of the sweat, or maybe the headache, or maybe the sense of impending doom. "He looks tired."
Berto fumbled for the PDA permanently attached to his hip and called up the remote link to his Josh-monitoring systems, which were still in the van. "He shouldn't be tired. He was operating at 85 this morning, and that was in Max mode."
And while he was just Josh, he used almost no transphasic energy at all. Unless... "You think he's cheating it?" she asked, worrying about how badly hyper-fair Josh would have to want a victory in order to cheat. She played it straight, but Josh was - well, a Boy Scout.
"Not consciously," Berto said, and then found the readout he wanted - or didn't want. Kat peered over his shoulder and couldn't make much sense of the data, but he sucked in a breath, and she knew it was bad.
The competitors had looped around and were coming back their way, but the race wasn't over. Except for Josh. She had kinda figured that part out already. "Time to get our boy off the field."
He nodded. "Now."
And then -
Josh took the curve and overbalanced, leaned too far - crashed. He hit the track hard and slid free of the bike, which flipped and crunched itself against the inner railing. Other bikes and riders ripped by, engines whining, missing him somehow.
Kat was already gone, sprinting for the sideline, vaulting over the railing onto the tire-chewed dirt of the motocross track. She hadn't thought about what would happen, about how she might've been flattened by a bike; very bad planning on her part, who had built a career on being carefully overprepared.
It didn't matter. The officials blew whistles and waved their arms and shut down the track long before anyone could get all the way back to Team Steel.
She dropped down next to Josh and, ignoring his attempts to do it himself, pulled his helmet off in a none-too-gentle gesture. He squinted up at her - glared - and he was tired and a little hazy but his brown eyes were, otherwise, as sharp as ever.
Not dead yet. Relief hit her gut, followed by a new fear.
"Get up," she hissed, tugging at his arm. "Smile and and wave and walk off the track like you're a million bucks. Or we'll have EMTs by the dozen taking a good, hard look at what makes you tick."
Josh glanced at the edge of the track and scrambled to his feet. He staggered a little, but she shoved the helmet into his hands, hard, and that seemed to steady him. Always a good sport, he flashed a broad smile at the crowd and the officials, gave a thumbs-up, and started walking. "Get my bike," he told her.
Screw the bike, she thought. The bike was just a bike. A couple thou out of their salaries, but nowhere as important as keeping Max Steel a secret. What she said was, "You first. Back to the van."
Berto was already doing his job: warding off the medicial establishment with his awe-inspiring credentials. Did the Dr. in "Dr. Roberto Martinez" stand for M.D.? Not a chance. Did anyone need to know that? No, emphatically.
The people who hadn't yielded to a Ph.D. gave way before her loud, repeated explanation that He's just going to take a breather! and Josh's manifestly cheerful good health. The latter was a facade, of course, and not a good one; she could see the lines of tension growing tighter, ready to snap, and the way he was ghost-white beneath the California tan.
The trio made it all the way across the parking lot, all the way to the foot of the van's steps, before Josh stumbled. Kat held him up and Berto held open the door, and somehow Josh reached the couch without collapsing onto the floor. He collapsed on the couch instead.
Berto fetched the generator; Kat grabbed Josh's wrist to open the biolink terminal. She caught a glimpse of his energy level in the process.
"Two percent?" she said, incredulous and sick all at once. "You're at two?"
"Feels like one," Josh said faintly. And then those brown eyes faded shut.
