The speed felt unreal.

It was not like running in the wind on an atmospheric planetside. It was not, as she remembered from childhood, like riding a bicycle without a helmet. And yet, she knew that if she crashed, the consequences would be the same, if not worse. It felt wrong. Unreal.

No breeze in her hair. Her hair, too, was unreal. Blonde, not black. Her eyes, blue, not violet. Her dress, light, not dark. Her hood, missing. Everything was unreal. Wrong.

The race ring blew past her rented Hayabusa. She expected to hear a sound, a whizz of the Doppler effect hitting her eardrums, but there was nothing except a ding that the system emitted for completing a checkpoint. The pressurised cockpit insulated her from the soundproof void of cold space and the consequences of finding oneself on the other side.

She focused on the turns, the meandering path between the asteroids. But that, too, was different from what she had been used to. No sharp turns, no engine kills, no dodging tachyon flying her way, no fingers on the trigger. Instead, calm movements and steady pathfinding between the rings of the Suzuka race track. Nothing to evade.

The location itself was a peculiarity, too. In some ways it was civilized Kusari space, in others it was still a frontier system. The sprawl of interstellar infrastructure that connected everything in Sirius reached it, but just barely. As if it was still in its infant years. Perhaps in a generation it would be just like another Shikoku or Kyushu, crisscrossed with trade lanes, an outpost for exploration of further, unknown space.

She readjusted her fingers on the controls and turned sharply to the right, towards a gap in the rocks. In these unnatural formations of asteroids, with holes that looked like enormous gates to other realities. The rock rushed dangerously close to the fighter as she flew through the gap.

Laying low for a few weeks, here, on the outskirts of the Empire. She was an alien here. Not only to the Hogosha who ran the place, but also to herself. A new life, created on the ashes of an old one. This time, she had to do everything right. It was a single shot at a clean slate.

And yet, somewhere in a nether region of her brain, there was this demon. A demon that always wanted more, that rewarded her with every credit earned. She spent years of her life feeding it, but it always wanted more. This insatiable greed, not just for credits, but for adrenaline, for novelty, for danger. For something that would fill the gaping void that was not in her brain but in her heart.

The void left by John Wellington, left by the years at Newgate, by the dream of the white coffin. By that jolt of electricity. And now, the void left by Jennifer Haze.

She clutched the controls.