'That's not what I said. I never said that.'

'A friend, Loki! Your very first! Finally I can arrange a playdate for you.'

'I said he told me-'

'I'm so excited. I'm so happy. I need to meet his parents before you visit his house, though.'

'Listen, he's a, he's a peer. I have plenty of friends, but-'

'Oh? This is new. Last time-'

'-Thor is someone my own age, who, shut up, who I can, can share notes and things with. And I can network! He's popular, you know, he has friends, maybe I can-'

'OK, OK. I'm sorry. I can be serious. One quick question though. Would you describe yourself as fun and quirky, or more the kind and quiet type? For your OkCupid profile, which I'm setting up right now. And then it's going to be facebook, speaking of networking. Welcome to the social sphere.'

Loki closed his eyes as if to send out a silent prayer for strength. What made is worse was that it was actually something she would do to pass the time.

Stopped at a red light and with his cellphone clamped between his cheek and the inside of his helmet, he could flex both palms around the handlebars in front of him, taking out his frustration through his grip on the bike instead of by groaning out loud.

'You're not making me an OkCupid profile.'

'I really am. I've dedicated myself to it entirely,' said Angie. 'You want to make a bet?'

'Oh! Seriously?' Loki grinned as he took off again, though no one could see it. He turned his head as if to look at the person sitting next to him. 'You want to make a bet with me? Honestly?'

'Absolutely, because, as you know, I am always nothing but sincere. I'll bet you-'

'That worthless porcelain fairy your receptionist gave last November?' There was no reply. 'Thats was what you were going to say, wasn't it? Shame on you, trying to fob off a heartfelt gift like that.' Loki practically purred with contentment. 'So predictable, Angie. Done. Now. I could do some serious elaboration here, but the crux of it is: you're on your phone, talking to me using the microphone on your headphones in favour of speaking into the phone directly. A five year old could tell the difference between the sound quality. The reason that you're on your phone, using the screen, but not using a computer is that you're actually playing Candy Crush Saga, because the eloquence and skills your sophisticated, sheltered upbringing gave you came at the cost of a lifestyle too oppressive for a child.'

'Oho, Mr Psychoanalysis! Such venom! You're down two stars in my patient of the month stakes.'

'But up one fairy figurine,' Loki countered, logically. 'I'll take it as a win. And I'm not your patient any more.'

Angie didn't reply for a while, and when she did, it was with a surprising sincerity. Although it didn't last long. 'I know. Sorry. I do consider myself to be your friend, Loki. Well, I guess that'd be your other friend now.'

'Shut up.'

'Honestly though, I realize this Thor thing's been troubling you, and it's great you two reconciled, but… I know that's not why you called me. What's making you so nervous?'

Loki blinked and stared out at the road ahead of him. he hadn't been expecting that. He knew Angrboda was astute, but… was he making it that obvious?

Then again, it was only fair that if her took her on in his own field, he should expect her to do the same to him, and with a similar ease.

He didn't know what to say to make her change the topic again. And a small part of him also wanted to confide in her.

He was nervous.

Things would have been bad enough if it had only been the case that today was his first actual race, in a car he had little experience in. But there was something else. Two things, in fact.

The first was that it'd emerged that Thor didn't at all realize what he'd signed up for today. Loki'd assumed that Freya had already taken care of that, but no, apparently it had slipped her mind somehow. So Loki was going to have to do some serious explaining in a few minutes.

The second thing was this:

He'd slept better last week than he had in living memory, despite his anxiety about the race. In fact, Loki had spent almost the entire week dreaming about flying. But on Thursday night, old habits had had him trawling through ownership records and forum interactions and local news sights and he'd found something that made his stomach flip – exactly what he'd been looking for.

It wouldn't have been hard for him either way, but there'd been no attempt to conceal it, so it caught his attention almost immediately.

Today's other driver was a man called Michael Howard, and it'd become apparent to Loki that he had connections with a reasonably wealthy ex-banker called Letitia Lane. Further investigation revealed that Howard was, as Loki'd suspected, a relative of Lane's – her nephew in law – and therefore most likely on the elder woman's payroll.

All of this would be of no consequence whatsoever. Was Loki not going to be sitting in a few hours behind the wheel of Letitia Lane's 2008 Nissan 370Z.

The pair's objective wasn't so complex. Rookie driver, plus a mediocre car, meant higher chances for Howard. They'd obviously surmised that Loki hadn't a chance, which was probably more or less accurate, and hoped to get nothing more out of the interaction than to win what'd been payed for the renovation back in prize money. This is what Freya had said, and Loki agreed. It didn't actually change anything for him at all, but it certainly wasn't reassuring to know how convinced they were of his incompetence.

Loki had enough faith in himself, though, that he wouldn't let it phase him. After all, if anyone could find the silver lining in a horrid situation, it was him. So they're kicking back and waiting to watch you fail? Let their false confidence be their hubris.

But Loki'd gone back to the track yet again on Friday, considering the surface quality and the Nissan's terrible tire roar, which they'd done all they could to minimize by altering the car's suspension. He thought about how it handled and how Howard's car handled in comparison (better), and about every single thing that could go wrong on Saturday. Even in class he made notes on how the going would be affected by weather condition. He couldn't help himself.

He was hideously nervous.

'Loki?' Angie was asking him. 'That was a big pause. Are you with me?'

Loki blinked and shook his head. He was drawing up outside of Thor's apartment, right on time. He'd barely even realized he'd arrived, or that Angie was still on the line. Oops.

'I'm fine,' he muttered, 'and I need to go. Sorry-'

'You've arrived? …Or am I just getting the cold shoulder? Where are you?'

'Thor's.'

Loki parked, haphazardly but out of the way, and walked onto the sidewalk. He really wanted this conversation to end. Call it a mixture of guilt and frustration.

'… He's quite important to you, isn't he? Just-'

'Angie-'

'Just promise me you're not about to do something stupid, Loki. Or illegal. God knows I-'

'You know I don't do "stupid," Angie,' Loki said, and hung up the phone.

Thor was waiting for Loki on the doorstep, leaning against a pillar and twirling the Chevrolet's keys over and under his good hand. 'Ready to go?' he asked.

Loki frowned and ground his teeth silently. He glanced around, tapping his forefinger on his thigh in agitation, and then sighed. 'Actually,' he said, 'that depends. Can you keep a secret?'

Loki drove Thor East into the countryside with the roof down. Every new town they drove through was washed in spring sunlight, and Thor marveled at the waves playing across the crop fields, at the fjords and the open expanses that came as suburbia fell away. It'd been so long since he'd been outside of a city, or not travelling between two of them in a train.

Today was the sort of day that just made you want to stand at the center of it for as long as you lived, basking. Forgetting everything.

Except…

Street racing.

He shouldn't be surprised. Not that he really minded – in fact the prospect was quite exciting – but still, it wasn't quite how he'd been expecting to spend the day.

It wasn't his deal. Thor had spent a lot of his childhood in and out of police stations, in fact, so now... he felt horribly out of place.

He wondered if he should even be here at all. The nervous, almost hysterical energy that'd driven the beginning of their... tentatively, Thor would call it a friendship - had fizzled out, and now they were both left in the 'we've broken the ice but I still don't really know you but I sort of want to but I don't really know how to go about it, because, you know... we don't know each other, so I don't want to impose' stage of their relationship. Thor already loved spending time with Loki, and was more than happy to get to know him more, but this whole thing had sort of thrown him off-kilter. Thor was out of his depth, and Loki was obviously too agitated thinking about the race to make much conversation, so Thor was left to stew in the passenger seat.

He tried to make the most of it and just relax.

It explained a lot, though, really, the street racing thing; Thor'd spent hours trying to figure out why he couldn't find a single hint about today's race online. At the time, he'd just supposed it wasn't big enough to have any media coverage. Or information for competitors, or anything, at all. In hindsight, maybe it was all a bit obvious.

Thor was also going to go ahead and assume that Loki didn't realize that his uncle was a cop, and he was also going to hopefully never bring it up. Ever.

He alternated between gazing over the windshield at the sky ahead, and using it to watch Loki's reflection, so that he could see the way Loki's slim fingers curled around the wheel. He watched his face as he focused on the road. It was calmer like that – when Loki forgot, temporarily, that he wasn't alone - than at any other time. Unnoticed, Thor could see how Loki's hair looked when the wind took it, and the perfect way the collar of his leather jacket curled around his neck.

Then Thor realized what he was doing, blushed and turned back to the scenery, picking at his hands. Loki hadn't seemed to notice.

They stopped on the outskirts of another, smaller city that Thor'd never seen, perhaps an hour and a half out of Midgard, to pick up Freya and exchange cars at the shop.

Freya was a Hollywood beauty. She sported effortless golden tresses and, usually, absolutely filthy overalls, complete with a hick checkered button-up. Today was no exception.

Because Loki's race car had already been taken away, they piled, along with assorted snacks and machinery, into Freya's beat up Mini Cooper. Loki was going to drive them (he needed to get in the mood, Freya said) to the race track. Or… whatever it was that street racers street raced on. A street somewhere, presumably. Oh my God, Thor thought, whatever you do, keep this fascinating monologue to yourself.

As they started off, he was reassured that it wouldn't be more than another hour.

Gradually the road became winding, taking them up between hills and along the side of a loping valley. The methodically aligned fields gave way to forests, with trees with chapped bark that arched protectively over the one-lane road to allow only dappled patches of sunlight onto the car as it passed beneath them. The barns and towns fell away. Soon there was only the filtered light and silence, broken by Loki sucking in breath as he narrowly missed potholes. It was almost mesmerizingly peaceful.

Loki had to slow down as the quality of the surface deteriorated, careful not to damage the Mini's underside. Thor looked out into the woods, almost completely absorbed, but he could hear by the clacking of Loki's nails on the wheel that he was getting agitated. 'We're going to be late,' Loki finally said.

'Mm, so's he, darling,' said Freya. 'And we're almost there. Don't worry.'

Loki banked sharply to the left, following the snaking road. Around the bend there was nothing but more forest. 'Where are we going?' Thor asked, curiosity finally piqued enough to tear him from the view. He leaned forward into the gap between the two front seats. 'We're in the middle of nowhere. How can we be "nearly there"?'

Loki chose that exact moment to slam on the breaks so hard that Thor went tumbling over the gearbox, slamming bad his forearm against the dashboard.

Picking himself up, Thor swore vehemently and glanced forward. Across the road was a lazy barricade, complete with an unhelpful 'closed' sign, that had come practically out of nowhere.

Loki tried to put the car into reverse, but Freya whipped her hand onto his forearm before he could reach the gearstick, not taking her eyes off of the road ahead. 'This is us,' she said.

Loki glanced at Freya, and then Thor. Then he drove forwards, veering up onto the verge to get around the road block. Thor waited a beat. Hm. No, they really were serious. 'Hang on,' he said, and then was bucked unceremoniously back into his seat as the Mini dropped back onto the road again. In the front, Loki sighed. 'Look, Thor,' he began apologetically, but stopped almost immediately. Because, as they completed the bend the barricade was on, two men in bright yellow tabards came into view on the side of the road.

Thor decided to keep quiet as the car drew up beside them. They'd only be turned around, he supposed.

But what happened instead was: one of the men lifted a walkie-talkie and said something into it (before the window was down, so Thor couldn't hear it), and the other waved them on. And the car drove off.

Ah. Of course. Street racing.

After they'd driven around the barrier, the terrain evened out; the section of road they drove on recently renovated. And up ahead, the forest ended. Abruptly. Thor could see through the mouth of the trees that the path was flooded in sunlight, and suddenly the sky was there again, piercingly blue.

When they came out into the open, Thor saw that they'd entered what was essentially a massive valley, miles and miles across, so expansive that there was practically no inclination towards the centre at all, punctuated with knolls and sections of forest and untilled fields. On every hazy horizon was another hill, boxing them in. But the essential part was that every building – every old barn, every lot, all of them nucleating around what was obviously an abandoned quarry – was completely empty. It was obvious that whatever business had been here however many years ago had upped and left one day, and the people had joined it.

Now, however, the place was quietly teeming with life. Shady, non governmentally sanctioned life.

They drove into the centre of it, just above the quarry. Loki and Freya spoke business with some official looking triplets in their late twenties and the bureaucratic stuff was taken care of. Guiding fingers were pointed, names were ticked off. There were different places for people serving different purposes, and for competitors contending at different times – apparently Loki's race wasn't the only one that day. The whole set-up was surprisingly methodical, Thor noted.

He mused stonily to himself in the back of the car, slightly grumpy with the fact that he felt like even more of a dead weight now that they were actually here.

There was a hill near the starting line – or what was being passed as a starting line – where the spectators were, and after they parked, Freya guided Thor towards it before she went to join Loki in the competitors-and-crew section.

'I bet you're wondering what you're doing here, sweetheart,' she purred sympathetically to Thor when they got there.

'I… yes,' he admitted, surprised and also sheepish. Freya grinned wolfishly at him, and delayed her answer to snag the arm of a passing teenager laden with various drinks. She scooped up as many champagne flutes between her fingers as she could, and then turned back to Thor.

'For moral support, you see. So you have to trot over when I holler at you later. Until then, stay here, relax, meet the team.' She gestured towards several waving crowd members, obviously the Vanir Motors party who'd arrived earlier with Loki's car (or, at least, those members who weren't with Loki right now). 'They'll tell you more about what's going on, who we like... who we don't like, and who you don't even want to make eye contact with,' she explained. 'And as well as all that, you can fulfill your primary duty. Hold my drink.'

So saying, she handed two of the flutes to Thor and whirled away.

How glamorous, he thought, for someone dressed like an urchin, and then he berated himself for actually fitting the word 'urchin' into a sentence. When he turned to find the crew in the crowd, he'd already lost them. So he climbed to the top of the hill, where he could see the drivers, and waited.

Thor remembered the last time he'd seen Freya: thanksgiving. She had been, giggling and tipsy, complaining about her ditzy tendency to burn cooking, and apologizing on behalf of her hideously boring accountant brother, who was tied up with his job in America and so couldn't make it. In short, she'd been a completely different person.

Now, Thor was sitting by himself, champagne(s) in hand, watching various people congregate around the starting line, Freya one of them. He wondered if Freyr was secretly a Formula One driver, or maybe a masked justice vigilante who scoured alleyways in the dead of night, hunting evildoers.

Thor narrowed his eyes at Freya, mentally willing her to give him something to do. Loki seemed preoccupied, and had done the whole day, understandably – and so Freya was his only bet, but she hadn't even glanced in his direction, so he picked at the rim of his plastic glass and let his eyes roam the congregation instead.

More men and women in black shirts were walking around taking bets indiscretely on the hill, whilst offering beer, champagne and snacks. And of the several hundred people he'd seen so far today, maybe 40 were absolutely dripping with technical equipment, walking to and from a stand set up around a camper van, which was covered in jumbled wires, laptops, satellite dishes, and – well, Thor was no bank robber, but he'd seen enough action films to know what a police radio scanner looked like.

On the hill, there were several people for whom it was obvious to him that this was merely a day out, a chance to picnic in the midst of what was obviously one of the worst kept secrets in… Berkshire, was it? Those who didn't fit into that category and weren't officiating in some way either represented one of the parties racing, or intended to place bets. That was obviously how this whole arrangement made a profit. Some of them were oddly well-dressed; suited and turning up their noses at scruffier crowd members. Others looked like they might be Hell's Angels on a day off. Thor remembered Freya's comment about eye contact, and for the first time wondered if she might not have been joking.

Beside the hill there were tents and lorries, for betting and for food, he supposed. All of the action nucleated around the starting line, but it sprawled out, too, in every direction, up and down the quarry. Further off there were still people walking around hurriedly, meeting contacts, slipping into the backs of vans, using the day as an opportunity to do other business. The place almost felt like a literal black market.

Directly on the other side of the start line, falling into the quarry, was the competitors' section. Cars lined gravel pits, crews huddled around themselves, and massive semis trailed in from the east, bringing more people, more cars.

Thor was in the middle of wondering, for maybe the 28th time, how it could be that no one knew about any of this, when he caught Freya in his peripheral vision, down on the track (which was really, as he'd predicted, just a wide, unmarked road).

She had her hand on her hip, and she was beckoning him.