The surface imperfections of the track was visible from here — a patch near Turn 1 where the tarmac was lighter in colour, repaired recently, the grip there fractionally different from the rest of the straight.

He catalogued every necessary information and filed it in his head.

’Albert Park is a semi-street circuit,’ he thought. ’Average corner speed lower than Suzuka. Higher than Monaco’s tightest sections. Surface is smooth but the layout has fast direction changes in the middle sector.’

’The car will want to understeer here in the high-speed left-handers. The rear will be active in the short straights where the braking zones come up fast.’

He had studied the circuit layout for six minutes that morning. That was all he had needed. The framework had done the rest, cross-referencing the geometry with everything Suzuka and Monaco had built in his nervous system and producing something that felt less like knowledge and more like recognition.

He had never driven Albert Park. But his hands already knew the shape of it.

---

Inside the garage, the atmosphere tightened. The thirty-minute board had gone up in the pit lane. Teams were rolling cars out, mechanics pushing them toward the exit with the urgent, efficient calm of people who had done this hundreds of times and still treated every single one like it mattered.

Leo walked back in. A junior engineer named Sam — twenty-two years old, had been with Arcadia for eight months, always slightly too eager to help — handed him a printout of the session strategy.

Leo glanced at it once and handed it back.

"I won’t need this during the lap," he said. Not unkindly. Sam blinked, opened his mouth, and then thought better of it.

Anya was watching from across the garage. She had seen Leo hand back the strategy sheet. She didn’t say anything. She had stopped questioning the small strange things he did — the way he sometimes described corner conditions before the sensors confirmed them, the way his lap times in FP1 had shown an input pattern that the senior engineer had called "inconsistent but never wrong" — and had started simply watching where they led.

Where they had led, so far, was two tenths faster than Berg on the same compound on the same lap.

She turned back to her tablet.

---

Leo stood beside the car and looked at it one more time before climbing in.

The number 24 on the nose. The Arcadia livery, deep indigo and matte black, the kind of colour combination that disappeared into itself rather than demanding attention. The team had chosen it because it looked expensive. To Leo, it looked like the pod.

He thought about the headlines he had imagined earlier.

"ROOKIE KAITO CRASHES OUT IN Q1 — TECH DREAM ENDS EARLY."

"ARCADIA’S GAMBLE FAILS: BERG ADVANCES, KAITO DOESN’T."

"I THOUGHT IT WAS A VIDEO GAME" — KAITO’S QUALIFYING NIGHTMARE.

A low, dark sound came out of him. Not quite a laugh. The sound of a man who knew something the rest of the room didn’t.

He pictured Alessandro Rossi’s relaxed smile freezing when the timing screens updated. He imagined Rafael Vega’s dismissive wave turning into a slow stare. The entire paddock, including the journalists, engineers, and the rival drivers had already filed him away.

One hundred laps of Monaco. One hundred laps of Suzuka Level 1. The simulation’s maximum obstacle load on lap ninety-five. SSS reaction speed. Racing Instinct at 9.1%.

They had filed him away. They had no idea what had been built in the dark.

"Car’s ready," the chief mechanic said.

---

"Freedom Units at 25," Leo whispered to himself.

The blue notification from earlier still burned behind his eyes. Twenty-five days until the pod demanded proximity again. Ten days to claw back enough life-force to keep the clock from hitting zero.

A podium here wasn’t ambition. It was survival.

The Super Licence points were secondary now. The system’s hunger was the real timer ticking behind everything — behind Anya’s briefings, behind Berg’s territorial posturing, behind the paddock’s quiet dismissal of a technician who had no business being in a racing seat.

He closed his eyes briefly for one final mental lap.

’Turn 1: brake at 78 metres, trail brake to 52, apex at the second marker. Sector 2: maintain 4.8G through the sweeper — use the kerb feedback. Sector 3: short shift to protect the rears, then full attack to the line.’

The track curves and angles now lived in his bones, not because he had memorised it. But because he had felt it die and be reborn a hundred times in the void. Albert Park wasn’t a new circuit to his nervous system. It was a translation — Monaco’s walls replaced by open run-off, Suzuka’s flowing sections compressed into shorter bursts, the same physics wearing a different face.

His hands already knew it. They had known it before he arrived.

"Leo, radio check." Elias’s voice crackled through the garage intercom.

Leo picked up his helmet from the stand and walked up to the car. The glossy shell caught the garage lights and threw them back. Deep indigo and matte black. These were his colours now, for the 2025 F2 Championship Season.

He slid it over his head, the world narrowing to the familiar smell of fireproof fabric and the cool press of padding against his temples. The balaclava followed. The HANS device clicked into place with a mechanic’s practiced hands.

"Radio check, loud and clear," Leo said.

His voice sounded different through the helmet comms. Detached. Mechanical. He noticed it every time and every time he found it appropriate. The man inside the helmet wasn’t the same man who had climbed into the pod at Silverstone at 3 AM with a laptop on the floor and no plan beyond wanting to go ’just a few laps.’

"Copy, Leo," Elias replied, voice lively and filled with anticipation. "We’re live. Telemetry green. Pit lane opens in four minutes. Sighting lap first, then straight into the push. Fuel load is good for three hot laps if needed."