Chapter 10: The Price of Freedom and the Weight of a Mother Left Behind

The podrace ended before Arthur had fully understood what he was watching.

One moment there were machines screaming past in clouds of sand and ignited fuel, and the next the crowd had become a single organism with a single throat, and in the staging area below a boy in an orange helmet was standing in his pod with his arms raised, and the sound that washed up from twenty thousand beings hit Arthur somewhere below the ribs like a physical thing. He had heard victory roars before. He had stood in them, had been their cause, had learned to wear them without being altered by them. But those roars had been human, had been British, had carried inside them the names of people he knew.

This one carried only the boy.