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Charles was fifteen when his dæmon settled.

It was a perfectly average age to settle, and it happened so quietly and naturally that neither he nor Moira even noticed at first. They had other things to think about: today, they were aiming to beat out Ben Barnicoat and Max Verstappen at Val d’Argenton.

It wasn’t until they were getting into the kart that they realised. Moira normally transformed into an insect to race, something small enough that she could crawl inside Charles’s race suit and be protected as he drove. Today, she didn’t even try to change; they both just looked at each other, and knew.

“A mouse,” he said.

“Never mind that, where am I going?” she asked.

There was no time to construct a safe enclosure on the body of the kart, no time to fashion a harness to attach to the outside of his race suit, no time even to seek advice from Papa or anyone else. In the end, she had to go back inside his race suit, but curled up as small as she could manage as a lump resting by his pelvis, inside his hip bone.

He tried to forget about her as he raced. Getting behind the wheel, getting his feet on the pedals - normally, that was enough for him to forget everything that wasn’t winning. During a race, winning transformed in the blink of an eye from a dream into an obsession. Like a child’s dæmon, flicking between forms in an instant, becoming bigger, weightier, impossible to ignore.

Like Moira never would again.

A mouse! The ultimate prey animal, the very symbol of timidity and fear. He was a menace on the track, he knew this, his competitors knew that he would push them to the edge and beyond, that he would do anything to win, and now they would never believe it again! They would take one look at his dæmon and see someone small. Someone to be pitied or stamped upon.

Max Verstappen was leading. Charles didn’t have the space to pass - he knew it. But he couldn’t be this, he couldn’t be a tiny little rodent to be ignored. He pushed.

Verstappen pushed back.

Charles went off the track, and lost two, three, five - normally Moira might be counting the karts for him, holding tight inside his collar as an ant or a fly or a wasp, but now there was just Charles to look around, to watch as ten karts breezed by before he could recover. The race was lost, Charles’ composure along with it. He was fifteen years old, terrified and furious with his dæmon, with himself for being who he was, and when he came alongside Verstappen during the cool-down lap, the other boy’s dæmon became a hawk, swooping down towards Charles’ kart as if it meant to attack.

What happened next would still be talked about a decade later.

After the race, after Charles had pushed Max off the track into an almighty puddle, after Charles had been interviewed hastily in English by an Italian reporter, leading Charles to mix up the two languages in his head as he tried to say the word “incident”, both Charles and Max were disqualified: Charles for pushing Max off the track after the race, and Max for unsportsmanlike behaviour from his dæmon. The boys were pushed into a tent together by their respective fathers to apologise.

“I’m not sorry,” said Charles.

“Neither am I,” Max spat. “Herz wasn’t even going to do anything!”

The dæmon was a cat now, a bristling wildcat pacing back and forth restlessly in front of Max’s feet.

Charles refused to step back. “You pushed me off first!” he argued.

“You pushed me before!”

“Not off the track!” Charles insisted.

Max’s cheeks were ruddy and blotched with anger. His dæmon hissed. “Do you know how much my father will have to spend to mend my kart?” he asked. “The whole engine was underwater, practically!”

Charles did not know. Nor did he particularly care. He was ready to shout back when Herz transformed, becoming a large Alsatian. He sniffed pointedly, and asked, “Where’s your dæmon?”

Charles stared. He didn’t think another person’s dæmon had ever spoken to him directly before, other than perhaps his parents’. But Moira was already answering, in her own way, climbing out of the collar of his race suit where she had been hiding in the hollow of his collarbone.

“You settled,” Max blurted out.

“How did you know?” Charles demanded.

He intended the question to be for Max, but it was Herz who answered: “We’ve fought before,” he said.

Children’s dæmons fought all the time, small scuffles to determine who should be ‘it’ in a game of tag, or whose fault it was that a parent’s priceless ornament had been knocked from a counter, or generally who ranked higher in the feudal hierarchy of the playground. There was no reason it should be different around the karting tracks of Europe, and Moira had roughhoused with the best of them. She had a habit of getting herself pinned and then transforming into something smaller and slippier, squirming her way out to turn the tables on her opponent.

She would never be able to do that again.

If either Charles or Max had been older or more mature; if at any stage thus far either had considered the other to be something approaching a friend rather than a rival; if they had not got each other disqualified from a race that day, Charles might have bared a little of his soul. He might have said “I don’t know what to do,” or “I didn’t think she would be a mouse,” or “I’m scared.” But they were angry fifteen-year-old boys, and so Charles just turned on his heel.

“Stay away from us,” he hissed, and went to storm out of the tent.

But Herz was more mature than either of them, and spoke up again:

“Hide her,” he said.

Charles turned around. “What?”

“You could hide her,” Herz repeated. “She’s small enough. Keep her in a pocket, no one would know.”

“Would you want that?” asked Moira from her perch atop Charles’ shoulder. “Hiding, always?”

Herz looked up at his human. Max shrugged. “If that’s what it took to win,” he said.

And Herz changed again, became a polecat and wound his way around Max’s ankle. If Max moved even an inch, he would step on him.

But of course no one would ever do that. Imagine, not knowing exactly where one’s dæmon was at all times, not feeling them just as easily as you felt where your hand or your foot might be.

“You won’t tell?” Charles asked.

Max glowered. “Whatever I say, you won’t believe me.”

Moira reached up and bit Charles’s earlobe, prompting him to say, “I will.”

“Then I won’t tell,” said Max. “I’m still not sorry.”

“And nor am I,” said Charles.

Moira squeaked and Charles knew what she wanted. He picked her up and set her down on the ground so she could skitter her way over to Herz, who stepped forward to meet her. They touched noses.

“I’ll beat you next time,” said Charles.

Max almost smiled. “No, you won’t.”

After all of that, it felt quite unfair that Charles had to explain his actions all over again to his father when they got into the van with Lorenzo to start their journey back to Monaco. Moira balanced herself on Charles’s lap, her tail twitching self-consciously.

“It could be worse,” was Lorenzo’s take.

This was the sort of comment that did not help at all. Charles made as much clear by glaring at his big brother.

“At least she’s not too big,” Enzo continued. “Since you’ve got your heart set on single seaters.”

That was true: many a karting champion had their future career decided by the size of their dæmon. If you wanted to make it into single-seater racing, your dæmon had to fit in the cockpit with you; anything larger than a rat would rule you out. There was more flexibility in other series, touring cars, rally cars and the like.

“At least she’s not a horse,” said Papa.

“That is just a rumour,” Charles muttered.

Papa shrugged, jostling Charles’ arm. “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t,” he said.

The rumour in question was more of a legend: an Italian karter who had his heart set so firmly on driving for Ferrari that his dæmon settled as an Arabian horse, jet black, and much too big to fit into any sort of car. The very emblem of the Scuderia prevented him from ever fulfilling his dream; he had to live out the rest of his days without ever driving again, travelling only in horse boxes or on the back of his own dæmon.

“But a mouse!” Charles complained. “I am not a coward!”

“Neither are mice,” said Papa. “But look, leave it for now. When we get home tomorrow, we will get the encyclopaedia out and we will find out what type of mouse she is, and learn about them properly. And Charles,” he said warningly, “I never want you to use her as an excuse for your behaviour again.”

“Yes, Papa,” said Charles grudgingly.

“No, I’m serious,” said Papa. He glanced away from the road to catch Charles’ eye. “Moira is who you are. Never use who you are as an excuse. Do you understand?”

Charles wasn’t sure. But he could see that his father meant it, so he said again, “Yes, Papa,” and settled into sullen silence as the French countryside trundled by.

That night, in a B&B in some nondescript town Charles would never remember, he and Moira looked at each other with new eyes. She had been a mouse before, but it had never seemed important until now to examine exactly how fluffy her tail was, measure the size and weight of her, to identify the exact hazelnut shade of her fur.

“A dormouse,” he decided.

“One of the smallest,” Moira pointed out. “That’s good.”

Charles stroked a finger down her back. Her fur was soft, but she felt - tiny. Fragile. She felt like she could be crushed in between his big, clumsy fingers.

“What do you think about what Verstappen said?” he asked.

“What Herz said,” Moira corrected.

Charles swallowed. “Yes. About hiding.”

Moira wrapped her tail tight around her body. “I don’t know,” she said. “Who are we hiding from?”

“Not family,” Charles said immediately. “Or friends, you know, proper friends.”

“But the other drivers?” Moira asked.

Charles paused. He thought about the boys he was fighting against, week in, week out. He liked most of them well enough, but he wouldn’t hesitate to push them off the track if it gained him a couple of places. He thought about the quieter side of the competition, the vying behind the scenes for places in driver academies, Formula Regional teams, GP3 teams. He considered what he himself would do, if he knew that, say, Barnicoat or De Vries had a mouse for a dæmon.

“Yes,” he said. “We hide from the other drivers.”

“For how long?”

“Not forever,” said Charles immediately.

“But until… GP3?” Moira asked. “GP2? When we have an offer for F1?”

Charles swallowed. “Ferrari,” he said.

“What?” Moira squeaked.

“Until Ferrari make us an offer,” Charles repeated.

“That might never happen!” Moira protested. “We might never even get to F1, let alone Ferrari!”

“Well, then we can stop,” said Charles. “But while there’s still a chance…”

They stared at each other, a boy and his dæmon. Of course they had dreamed of their future in Formula 1, but never before had they planned for it in quite such an aggressive way. They had given up social events, birthday parties, trips to bowling alleys and friendly padel matches, but they had never before given up something like this.

Had anyone?

“Okay,” said Moira, her voice small and frail. “While there’s still a chance. I will stay hidden.”

And so it went. From karting to Formula Renault, Formula Three, Formula 2. He found himself growing colder, more isolated, excluded from every gathering and conversation with his fellow drivers. He felt - under attack, sometimes, when Antonio Giovinazzi’s pipistrelle swooped over to try and greet his dæmon for the first time, only to dive away when there was no one there. When a collection of butterfly and moth dæmons in the GP3 paddock fluttered together, a little convivial conference, swerved as a unified cloud to avoid the dæmonless teenager walking through. When he and Antonio Fuoco, both FDA members, both Italian speakers, became Prema teammates in Formula 2 and Fuoco refused outright to speak to him, his skittering gecko dæmon fleeing from Charles at every opportunity.

But he was winning. He won GP3. So what if Moira was growing more fearful with every passing day, too scared to venture out of Charles’s pocket or backpack even at home, even with just his old schoolfriends around? He won F2. What did it matter if Charles himself was becoming brittle, unsure of how to interact with the people around him?

He was offered a seat in F1.

What did it matter, the sacrifice he had made?

~

When Pisti settled, Pierre was, briefly, devastated.

Many drivers he knew made sure that their dæmons were small at all times, in the hopes that it would lead to them settling that way. Esteban certainly did - Pierre never saw him with a dæmon that wouldn’t fit in a shoebox. When Ataksia settled as a ferret, Pierre was actually surprised that she was so large, but Esteban adjusted his race suit to allow her to fit alongside his leg, and that was that.

At a distance, Pierre felt another small death in the ongoing battle between them. Ataksia hadn’t taken Esteban out of driving. Now it was Pisti’s turn.

She kept up appearances on race weekends, of course; a tiny bat, a scorpion, a black widow. But at night, when the lights were out and there was no one there to see, Pisti became a black bear and pressed her whole weight on top of Pierre’s body.

It was silly. It was almost shameful. But there was no one to know except his boarding school roommates, and Anthoine promised never to tell that Pierre Gasly couldn’t sleep without a life-sized teddy bear.

When she settled as a newt, therefore, petite and perfectly sized to fit into the cockpit of a single-seater, it was briefly the saddest moment of Pierre’s life thus far.

“It’s okay,” Pisti said. “We’ll get you a thick quilt, one of those weighted blankets. We could even get you-”

“I am not getting a stuffed toy,” Pierre interrupted. “I am not a child, Pisti.”

She flexed her body, getting accustomed to her new form. “Well then. We had best get used to this.”

~

In a household with so many cats, it was somewhat ironic that Alex’s dæmon settled as a rat.

His sisters laughed at him, but not too much, because he was the oldest and none of them had settled yet. Anyway, it would have been worse if Opsti had been a cat herself. Instead, she was a sleek black rat, quite large, to the extent that both of his Formula Renault teams got a bit anxious about how much weight she effectively added to the car. Alex found himself adjusting his own diet and exercise plan to compensate for her.

“That’s not on,” said George when Alex told that story a couple of years later, over the terrible food that was always served in the F2 hospitality. “That’s discrimination.”

Alex openly laughed at him. “Of course it’s discrimination,” he said. “But, you know, go tell that to everyone not based in Europe. Or any black guy who isn’t Lewis Hamilton. Or-”

“Alright, alright,” said George. His own dæmon, an honest-to-god ladybird called Lepida, fluttered ineffectually on his shoulder. “Still, it’s not-”

“It’s just not cricket,” Alex filled in, his voice deliberately mocking. “Right you are, old boy.”

“Shut up,” George muttered. “Oh, here’s trouble.”

Trouble was Lando Norris, still in his teens and in his rookie year of F2 but looking like their main challenger for the 2018 title. He slid onto a stool and dumped his dæmon, a colourful dart frog, onto the table. “What are we eating?”

“God knows,” said Alex. “I think this is supposed to be a casserole.”

“Or a stew,” said George.

Alex stabbed at something approximating a root vegetable. “Maybe a hotpot?”

Lando wrinkled his nose. “Gross,” he said. “We’re literally in Italy, couldn’t they do pizza?”

“Tell that to your trainer,” said Alex. He squinted at his fork. “What do you reckon, turnip or potato?”

Lando ignored this question in favour of asking another: “Did you hear about Leclerc?”

It was a potato, Alex decided. “What about him?”

“Press finally got a shot of his dæmon,” Lando revealed.

The potato fell off Alex’s fork. It splashed into the casserole or stew or hotpot, splattering sauce all over the plastic table and Alex’s shirt.

“What?” he said.

“Yeah,” said Lando. He gave a cocky little grin. “Wanna see the photos?”

“Do I,” said Alex. He reached for Lando’s phone, but Opsti scuttled forward and nipped at his wrist. “Ow! Opsti!”

“She’s right,” said George. “We’re better than this. He wants to keep her private, that’s his business.”

“Not any more it’s not,” Lando pointed out. “It’s in La Gazzetta. And get this,” he crowed. “She’s a mouse.”

Alex pushed his bowl away. “Say that again.”

“What?” said Lando. “He’s FDA, of course La Gazzetta’s on it.”

But George had caught on. “Alex,” he said warningly. “A mouse - that’s different.”

Lando still looked confused until his dæmon croaked at him, pointing her head in Opsti’s direction. Opsti hunched down against the table.

“Oh, yeah, I didn’t mean anything against you!” Lando protested. “Rats are clever, everyone knows that. And aren’t they supposed to be good luck in, like, China?”

George coughed. “He’s from Thailand.”

“My mum’s from Thailand,” Alex corrected. “I’m from Suffolk. Anyway, I’m not angry at you, I’m angry at him.

“At Leclerc?” asked Lando. “Why?”

“Cos I thought we were friends,” said Alex. “Once upon a time, anyway.”

They’d been on a karting team together: Alex, Charles, and George. In that order, too - Alex was the oldest, racing in more senior categories to the others. But they’d hung out together, played Pokémon or Mario Kart on their Nintendo DS’s together, posted silly dance videos on Snapchat together, their dæmons skittering around their feet or fluttering above their heads.

“You’d moved up to single seaters before she settled,” George reminded him. “People fall out of touch.”

“You were still his teammate,” Alex countered. “Did he ever tell you?”

Lepida buzzed from George’s shoulder up to sit on the shell of his ear. George sighed. “No.”

“And we were all back together in F3,” Alex continued. “I was teammates with him in GP3, for Christ’s sake.”

“And you didn’t ask?” said Lando.

Of course he had. The very first day all the F3 drivers met for the first time, Alex had tried to welcome Charles with literal open arms.

“Sharl!” he’d called out, dodgy French accent in full swing. “How’ve you been, mate?”

But Opsti had drawn up short and Alex felt her discomfort twinge in his own heart: she had no one to greet.

“I’m good,” Charles smiled. “It’s been a while!”

Opsti was backing away, drawing closer to the safety of Alex’s feet. He had to ask: “Hey, where’s Moira?”

The smile froze on Charles’s face, and then disappeared altogether. “She is fine,” he replied. “We are keeping her private. Since she settled. That is all.”

“Private,” said Alex. “From everyone?”

“Most people, yes,” said Charles. “Not family, of course.”

By this stage, Opsti was sitting on top of Alex’s shoes, digging her claws into the cheap, thin material. “No, right,” said Alex. “Er. Right. Um. Well, I guess we should go in?”

Perhaps George had a point. They’d not really been friends since that day.

“I just don’t get it,” said Lando. He had his phone back out, scrolling through the images. “I mean, it could be worse, couldn’t it? You know, Schumacher had that ugly great hornet. Hamilton goes around with a snake wrapped round his neck. All Leclerc’s got to hide is a cutesy-wutesy, teeny-weeny-”

“Yellow polka-dot bikini,” George finished, exasperated. “Well, maybe that’s exactly what he’s worried about, everyone judging him. Sod it, show us the article.”

Lando proffered his phone, and George and Alex leaned in.

The photo was not what he was expecting. He’d thought that perhaps a paparazzo had followed Charles out and about in Maranello, or that he had been careless inside the paddock this week in Monza. What he got, however, was a very zoomed-in photo from Spa the previous week.

“That’s his crash,” said Alex. “Why is this a photo of his crash?”

“Don’t you remember, he refused to leave the car,” Lando said. “He was standing next to the car for ages, like he thought he could get back in it and drive.”

“And that wasn’t why?” asked George.

Lando shook his head. “His dæmon was stuck. The box didn’t open.”

A small box attached to the interior of the cockpit was one of several FIA-approved mechanisms to keep a dæmon safe during a race. Teams were granted complete discretion to tailor them to their drivers’ needs, with padding or safety harnesses or whatever else might be required. Other options might be special pockets within the drivers’ race suits, adaptations to the seat belts to strap the dæmon directly to the driver. Esteban Ocon drove with his ferret dæmon stretched out along his left leg, inside the race suit, with only a small air vent visible at the crease of his knee.

But Leclerc’s dæmon had been in a box above his thighs, and when Alonso soared over the top of the car, taking the paint off the halo, the impact had caused the spring mechanism inside the box to jam. There had been so much going on at the time, so many cars involved in the collision, that no one had initially noticed this particular hold-up. The press focus had been on Hulkenberg’s penalty, the halo’s success at saving Leclerc’s life, the weird way that Alonso had been in an almost identical crash at the same race six years earlier. Only now, a week later, had someone identified the other piece of breaking news.

Charles Leclerc, standing next to his stranded car, clutching a tiny dormouse in his hands.

Opsti snuck under Alex’s arm to look at the screen. “I hope she’s alright,” she murmured.

“He was fine, right?” Alex replied. “So she must be.”

Lepida had buzzed down to take a look too, perching on Opsti’s head. “It’s weird seeing her,” she whispered.

Lando’s dæmon, clearly feeling left out, lolloped forwards. Opsti took an automatic step back from the poisonous frog, and Lando snatched his phone away.

“You’re right,” he decided. “He must have been worried about what people would think. I mean, mice pretty much just exist to get eaten and run away from things. I’d be embarrassed too.”

“That’s a little rude.”

A stag beetle landed on the table, and Alex looked up to find another old teammate, Nyck de Vries. He was regarding Lando with something approaching disdain - or perhaps just disappointment. “Dormice live in family groups,” he informed the younger driver. “Their young are born helpless, like humans, so they’re very devoted parents.”

The beetle reared up, raising her stubby mandibles, and the dart frog stepped back.

Lando flushed. “Yeah, whatever. I’m going to try and find some better food,” he decided. He picked up his dæmon and deposited her on top of his head. “We’re in Italy, there must be some pasta somewhere.”

“Good luck,” said Alex as he walked away. Lando did not look back.

Nyck sat down. “In all honesty, I didn’t think dormouse though,” he admitted. “I mean, the way he fought you in GP3.”

“Tell me about it,” said Alex. “I’d have guessed a bloody tiger before I guessed mouse.”

George hummed thoughtfully. “He did change, didn’t he?” he mused. “He was a lot more standoffish in F3.”

“I always thought it was probably quite stressful keeping your dæmon hidden,” offered Nyck. “How often do you look at yours, check on what she’s seeing or feeling? I wasn’t surprised he didn’t want to hang out so much. Even before the GP3 battle got heated.”

Alex rolled his eyes. “So, do you think he and Verstappen had some sort of pact going?” he asked Nyck. “Like a bet. Who can keep their dæmon hidden the longest.”

Nyck made a face. “I doubt it.”

“Well, they’re the only two drivers who hid their dæmons,” George reasoned. “And they’re the same age, right? They were in karting together.”

“Yes,” Nyck agreed, “but you don’t know Max Verstappen. He… I mean, Charles changed a bit when his dæmon settled, sure, but Max…”

He reached out for his own dæmon and she stepped into his palm. He ran a thumb over her smooth back.

Alex and Opsti looked at each other, unnerved.

George cleared his throat. “He’s quite stilted in interviews,” he offered.

Nyck shook his head. “You have no idea. These days, I don’t even know how I would describe Max Verstappen.”

~

When Lewis’s dæmon settled, he was sent straight to the school nurse.

A snake! What healthy happy child settled with a snake as their dæmon? And how disturbing, that she spent most of her days coiled around his neck. Was it a sign of self-loathing, of self-harm?

Lewis, aged thirteen, was bewildered by these questions. “She likes to stay warm,” he pointed out. “Snakes are cold-blooded.”

“Exactly,” said the nurse.

It was a little bit of a problem. Ibada really did need to stay warm, or Lewis found himself getting lazy. He couldn’t be lazy, not if he wanted to drive for McLaren one day.

Nico’s dæmon hadn’t settled yet. She started spending time as a Siberian cat, with lots of thick fur that Ibada could settle into, warm and comfortable. At less than half a metre, the snake could lay herself in sinusoidal curves down the cat’s spine, cosy and safe.

“She’s beautiful,” Nico said, looking down at their dæmons together. “Ignore everyone else.”

And Lewis did. Sometimes the reputation of being a cold-blooded killer helped, anyway, sometimes it meant that he was taken seriously despite his age and his skin colour and his background. And when it didn’t, he could go to Nico, who would remind him that the cape wolf snake was non-venomous, harmless to humans, considered docile, really.

“You’re not what they say you are,” Nico would tell him.

Many years later, he would say the exact same things as an insult. By that stage, though, Ibada would have stopped seeking heat from anyone who wasn’t Lewis himself.

~

Max Verstappen was a freak.

Daniel didn’t mean it in a bad way - although was there a good way to call someone a freak? A freak of nature, rocketing through the junior categories in a way that wasn’t supposed to be done, a way that was quickly outlawed after Helmut Marko put a literal child into an F1 car. Seventeen and racing in Formula 1 - that was freaky. The way that he drove: even freakier.

“Crashtappen,” the media called him, when he made it up to the Red Bull team. He was an expensive kid, to be sure - and he was still a kid, with a spotty face and lanky limbs he hadn’t quite grown into - but the way he drove was compelling to watch. He pushed the car to the limits, found new ways to test the boundaries of the sport until the FIA came stumbling after him to say no, never again. He drove like he didn’t care about sportsmanship, or safety, or anything really - anything other than winning.

“He’s got a bloody death wish,” Girasole whispered in Daniel’s ear.

“Come on, Gee,” he protested. “He’s just trying to prove himself. He’s got balls, anyway.”

“I don’t like him,” she declared.

Daniel frowned. “Why? He’s a little awkward and all, but-”

“I just don’t,” she interrupted. “There’s just something about him.”

That was a common thread. People just felt uneasy around Max, in a way that couldn’t fully be explained by his freakish rise through to Formula 1, or his overbearing father hovering at his shoulder. It was, at least partly, because he kept his dæmon hidden at all times, even within the relative safety of the factory, or hospitality at the track. No matter how many times Daniel burst into Max’s driver’s room unannounced, he never caught so much of a glimpse of her.

“Yo yo Maxy,” he said by way of announcing himself. “You ready for media?”

“Of course,” said Max.

Daniel waited, but nothing else was forthcoming. Max just set down the tablet he’d been using and got up to follow Daniel out towards the media pen and the press conference room.

This was the other reason that people didn’t warm to Max: he didn’t seem to want to engage with anyone, at all, ever. Max Verstappen didn’t do casual conversation, didn’t do small talk or even really learn people’s names, let alone all the little details which helped build up relationships. Daniel had always been good at that kind of thing, remembering that Sandra from HR had two kids, Alec who was doing well at uni and Gina who was constantly threatening to run away from home to go and live with her flaky boyfriend from Swansea. Sometimes it took people a hot minute to warm up to Daniel, finding his tiny spider dæmon offputting, but Daniel worked hard to overcome that. Mark Webber might never forgive him, but Daniel was determined that everyone else at Red Bull Racing would love him forever, and he was willing to put in the effort to make that happen.

Max, on the other hand, occasionally needed reminding that his press officer was called Vicky.

“It’s the same name as your sister,” said Daniel, after he caught Max checking out her name badge once again.

“Yes,” Max agreed.

Daniel gave him a second.

“So, you’d think you’d remember it,” he prompted.

“Oh,” said Max. “I suppose.”

Daniel officially gave up.

Vicky was largely ambivalent towards Max, too. In an interview about racing, he was perfect: he could happily monologue about the most minute details of tyre degradation or performance analysis, and never ever got drawn into making an emotional statement after contact with another driver. It was like he didn’t even care whether or not he ruined someone else’s day, or someone else ruined his. He would just start talking about numbers, the points he would need to make up, the number of races left in the season, the tenths and hundredths he could shave off to make up for any penalties he was given.

From that perspective, he was a press officer’s dream, but times were a-changing and a poker-faced interviewee wasn’t what was needed in the world of twitter and YouTube. The social media burden was getting heavier with every year that Daniel spent in F1, and Max really wasn’t pulling his weight there.

“And cut,” called Vicky, for the umpteenth time. “Max, you don’t have to just read the questions off the cards. You can make a joke, have a chat.”

Max just blinked at her.

“Do you know any jokes?” Daniel asked. “Like, any?”

“Of course,” said Max. “Why did the chicken cross the road?”

Daniel and Vicky shared a look of absolute despair.

“Maybe he can just be my straight man,” Daniel suggested. “He can do deadpan.”

“Thank you,” said Vicky. Her dæmon, a brightly coloured cockatiel, bobbed on her shoulder. “Tell you what, let’s have a coffee break, back here in fifteen? Daniel, maybe you and I can have a chat?”

Max seemed completely unbothered to have been left out of this invitation. He stayed right where he was on the sofa as Daniel headed off to the cafe with Vicky.

“I don’t want to be mean, but what the fuck is wrong with him?” he complained. “I mean, I know he’s not a normal eighteen-year-old, but seriously, that is not a normal eighteen-year-old. He doesn’t even laugh at dick jokes.”

Vicky sighed. “I know all you guys have tiny dæmons but I really wish I could see his sometimes. I can’t decide if he’s pulling a really long con on us.”

“No way,” said Daniel. “There’d be pigs flying in frozen hellfire first.”

“So what is it?” Vicky asked. “Is it just how he was brought up? His dad’s a pretty serious guy.”

“Serious about racing,” Daniel agreed. “But there’s serious and then there’s - like, constant robo-mode.”

The cockatiel nipped at Vicky’s ear and she sighed. “Oh, we are being mean,” she said. “We’re just going to have to work around it. And thank you so much for playing ball, I really appreciate it.”

“Nah, sure,” said Daniel. “So how are we gonna play this?”

They rewrote the script, with Daniel asking ever more ridiculous questions, and Max answering them with his eternally straight face. Eventually, Vicky decided they had enough.

“We’ll see what they can make of it in the edit,” she said. “Thank you guys, you’re free to go. I’ll plan better for next time.”

“You’re a gem,” said Daniel. He blew a kiss at her. “Come on Max, let’s get you back to your handlers.”

Sometimes, however, Daniel could not just hand Max off. One of the occupational hazards of being a driver in Formula 1 was taking copious long flights, with only your fellow drivers up in first class with you, and Max was not exactly the most gregarious travel companion.

Daniel, more practised at long-haul than most, generally found those flights pretty relaxing. Occasionally he got bits of work done. Once or twice, he actually tried to read a book. Mostly, he just listened to music or slept.

Surprise surprise, Max did not follow suit.

On the way to a grand prix, Max usually practised the race in his head. Daniel could tell because his feet would twitch on imaginary pedals, his fingers tapping at imaginary gear paddles. If Daniel paid attention, he could track Max’s progress around the circuit, following his hands as they turned through corners. He would complete - whatever it was, 58 laps of Melbourne, 61 laps of Singapore, take a short break, and then start all over again.

On the way back from races, Max just stared into space.

It was proper fucking creepy, looking up from the screen of his phone to find Max sitting across the aisle and just watching the wall of the aircraft - not even looking out the window or watching the cabin crew go about their business, just staring at the back of a seat or a literal piece of wall. He wasn’t, like, meditating as far as Daniel could tell, he was literally just staring at nothing, head completely empty.

“Fucking weird,” Girasole hissed.

On one occasion, Daniel could stand it no longer and did something he’d long ago given up on with Max: he started a conversation.

“So, how come we never see your dæmon, huh?”

Max blinked. “Oh. Because we are keeping him hidden.”

“Him?” Daniel asked. “Really?”

“Yes,” said Max.

Daniel sat back in his very comfy seat. “Huh,” he said. “That’s pretty rare, right?”

“Four per cent of the population,” Max answered.

His face, as ever, was completely blank. Daniel waited just in case a miracle happened and Max offered some additional information or - even less likely - an opinion, but there was nothing more forthcoming.

“Right, can I give you some advice?” he said.

“Yes,” said Max.

Gira snorted from her customary spot atop Daniel’s ear. “Factually correct.”

Daniel pressed on. “When someone’s talking to you in, like, a social situation,” he started, “it’s good manners to try and keep the conversation going a bit. Not forever, but like, if someone asks you a question, you’d usually ask the question back. You know?”

And now there was an expression on Max’s face, although Daniel couldn’t fully interpret the way his eyebrows had drawn ever-so-slightly together.

“Oh,” he said. “But we do see your dæmon.”

“Uh…”

Gira saved him. “Because you asked why we don’t see his,” she filled in.

Daniel rolled his eyes. “Okay, so ask something related,” he suggested. “People normally want to know what kind of spider she is.”

Max nodded. “What type of spider is your dæmon?” he asked, obediently.

Well, now he had to answer. “Peacock spider,” he answered. “And then people normally say something like, ‘but she isn’t very brightly coloured’.”

“Should I say that?” Max asked.

Daniel sighed. “Sure.”

“But she isn’t very brightly coloured,” Max said.

“That’s because the males are the brightly coloured ones,” Daniel said. “And Gira’s female. So there you go.”

Max nodded, and then they went back to silence. Girasole crept inside the shell of Daniel’s ear. “Let’s ask for business class next time.”

“You don’t have to worry about legroom,” Daniel hissed back. “You don’t get a say in this.”

And despite all of the weirdness, the blank faces and complete lack of social skills, Daniel didn’t exactly dislike Max. He felt a bit like a pet goldfish, whenever he wasn’t in a car or a strategy meeting. So long as Daniel kept his expectations just about as high as he would for a goldfish, Max was entirely inoffensive.

He was also, as it turned out, capable of learning.

“You good?” Daniel asked by rote, a day where they were both in at the factory for some sim training.

“Yes,” said Max. “And you, you are also good?”

Gira nearly fell to the floor in shock. Daniel had to take a moment to wipe the surprise off his face before saying, “Yeah, never better, mate. You ready for the sim?”

“Of course,” said Max. “Are you?”

Oh shit, this could get tiresome. “I’m always ready,” said Daniel. “Let’s get going.”

He didn’t really bother trying to teach Max any other conversational tricks - he wasn’t a parent or a therapist, after all, he was the guy’s most direct competition. And Daniel wasn’t thick - he could feel the atmosphere of the team shifting, focusing on their young superstar in the making. He beat Max on points in 2016 and 2017, and tried not to look too closely at whether that would still be true once Max stopped punting the car into the wall, or once the godforsaken power unit stopped blowing up every other race.

And, as history and Drive To Survive would tell, it all came to a head in Baku.

Of course it was Max’s fault, but Daniel probably shouldn’t have expected anything different: Max blatantly didn’t care if his behaviour was sporting or safe, just that it kept him ahead. That wasn’t the issue. The issue was that Christian and Marko and the rest of the whole goddamn operation were turning around and looking at Daniel to say: you should be compensating for this. You should be falling back to let this weird little robo-driver pass you.

And that wasn’t Daniel fucking Ricciardo’s style.

“Finally,” said Gira, once they signed with Renault. “I don’t think I could stand another day with that creep.”

She didn’t mean Marko.

“I still don’t know why you hate him so much,” Daniel said. “He is what he is.”

It sounded like something his mother would say, and Gira scoffed derisively. “He’s a psychopath,” she said. “It’s a good fucking thing he’s into racing, because if he’d decided he was into serial killing, there would be dead bodies all over Europe.”

“Come on,” said Daniel. He reached up to his ear and let her step delicately onto one of his fingers so they could see eye-to-eye. “He’s not, like, actively malicious.”

“But that’s exactly what I mean!” she protested. “He just doesn’t care. About anything, anyone. He certainly doesn’t care about us.”

“Aw, we don’t know that,” said Daniel. “Who knows what’s going through his head? Maybe he’s got a soft spot for us. And anyway, have a little heart, it can’t be easy going through life like that.”

She waved one of her miniscule legs at him. “It’s his own fault,” she snapped. “If he would just let his dæmon out once in a while, surely he could help.”

That did make Daniel’s heart twinge a bit. “You think that’s how it is?” he asked. “Like, he’s keeping him sort of captive in his pocket or whatever?”

“You don’t look at that guy and think that’s someone keeping his soul locked up?”

That conversation stayed with Daniel over the next few days and weeks. It stayed with him as he watched Max forget Vicky’s name for the millionth time, as he blanked a pit crew mechanic who was worried about having screwed up a pitstop, as he completely failed to greet his own race engineer after any individual race.

It stayed with him when Max’s mum visited the garage, his dad for once nowhere in sight, and Max had to be prodded and prompted into going to say hello to her.

“Maybe you’re right,” he said to Girasole.

And when Daniel finally got round to telling Max that he was switching teams next season, his only reaction was to say:

“I do not understand. Red Bull are better.”

“Like, yeah,” said Daniel, “but that’s not the only factor in picking a team, is it?”

Max blinked. “Is it?”

Daniel wished he’d never taught Max to echo questions.

“No, it’s like - I wanna be part of something, of building something. Something where they might want to build around me. Do you - is that something you can understand?”

Max considered. “You mean that they could tailor the car to you.”

“Not just the car, the whole-” But there was no point. He shook his head. “Whatever. Look, if you want to get ahead in life, you need to start working on learning how people work. Like, real people with emotions and relationships and shit.” He was getting angry now. “It’s bad manners, you know? You can pay attention to tyre deg data, you can memorise ERS percentages ’til the cows come home, but you don’t even bother to remember people’s names. It’s fucking rude, that’s what it is. Do you even know your engineer’s name?”

Max shook his head.

“The fuck!” Daniel shouted. “That’s like the single most important relationship you could have at work and you don’t even know his name. What is wrong with you? Why can’t you just be normal?”

“Because-”

But Max cut himself off. He looked shaken for a moment, and then his face settled back into its normal, expressionless repose. “Sorry. I cannot answer that.”

Many years later, Daniel would wish that he had dug further into that weird non-response. In the moment, he just yelled, a small wordless roar that elicited no reaction at all in the man in front of him.

“You’re a freak, Max,” he hissed. “This is why no one fucking likes you.”

“Yes,” Max agreed, completely unbothered.

Daniel stormed out.

~

“Dart frog,” said Max.

Lando looked up from his phone.

Max - Fewtrell, not Verstappen - had insisted on doing it the old-fashioned way, getting out the big encyclopaedia that sat on his family’s bookshelf to find out what sort of frog was now lolloping behind Lando. He had found the answer more quickly than Lando’s attempt to google “orange black frog”.

“Okay,” said Lando. “What does that mean?”

“Er, they’re toxic,” said Max. “That’s what’s up with the colours. Telling other animals not to get too close.”

“Oh,” said Lando. He looked down at Vevaios, the representation of his soul. She ducked down and looked away.

“But they’re toxic because of their diets,” Max went on, reading further down the page. “Because they eat termites and stuff. I mean, dæmons don’t eat. So…”

His dæmon was creeping closer. Vevaios let out a little noise and tucked herself under her chin.

“You’re fine,” said Max.

Lando swallowed. “But that’s what everyone’s gonna think. That I’m poison.”

Max laughed once, bitter. “Could be worse,” he said, laying a hand on the back of the large crested porcupine by his side.

~

Charles was fairly sure that Sebastian hated him.

From their very first team meeting at Maranello, there was just a sort of… sense of frustration. Irritation. It didn’t help that his dæmon started by sweeping across the room to get a proper look at Moira, getting uncomfortably close with her small but sharp talons. Moira squeaked and darted for Charles’s sleeve. Charles tried to hide his own wince behind a pleasant expression as Sebastian stepped up to greet him.

“Hello,” said Charles. “I’m looking forward to working with you.”

Sebastian smiled. His expression was gentle and mild, even as the black-thighed falconet returned to dig her claws into the reinforced padding at his shoulder with a shriek.

“And you, Charles,” he said. “Welcome to Ferrari.”

It was perhaps a silly thing to say: Charles had been part of the Ferrari Driver Academy for three years already, had done sim work for Sebastian’s own races. Charles wondered if it was a tactic to make him doubt his own place, and then wondered if he was stupid for imagining such a thing.

“Thank you,” he said.

Moira was shivering inside his sleeve. The falconet cocked her head, looking at the trembling lump. Charles swallowed.

“I should, erm,” he said, and Sebastian waved a hand.

“Of course,” he said. “You have very important things to be doing, I’m sure.”

Sarcasm? Charles had no idea. The falconet certainly wasn’t giving anything away. It seemed safest to beat a hasty retreat.

Ferrari was - not everything that Charles had ever dreamed. The controversy over the engine cast shadows over his podiums, his wins. The team castigated him over his behaviour with Sebastian, slapped team orders on them from race one onwards. Even the silly little teammate challenges were an absolute nightmare: often Charles would find himself getting slightly carried away, a bit over-excited, genuinely having fun, only to find that once again, Sebastian had absolutely smashed him to pieces. His dæmon would shriek in triumph, like she always used to do on the podium, and Moira -

Well. It had only been a year that Moira had been out and proud, as it were, and her first instinct in all those moments was to scurry to safety, leaping for Charles’s pocket or collar or just out of sight of the camera.

“Codardo,” said the YouTube comments. “Fifone.” Coward. Scaredy-cat. The engineers, the strategists looked at his driving and said he could be their next world champion. The tifosi looked at his dæmon and said: really?

All of it might have been bearable if he’d had friends around, family, but Arthur was in F4 this year and Lorenzo with him. Andrea was a support, but how much could you lean on the person who was constantly judging your fitness? All his schoolfriends, the tight-knit group he’d once had, seemed to fall away over the years. Even Joris, who Charles went as far as employing, had gradually become distant. He said he understood why they had to hide Moira away, but his own dæmon had betrayed his real feelings: the beautiful Russian blue had gradually stopped meeting Moira’s eye, stepping daintily over her and keeping her head and tail aloft.

But he was with Ferrari. He was getting podiums, getting wins, getting records already: Ferrari’s youngest ever pole-sitter after only two races with the Scuderia. There were regulation changes coming in a few years - Mercedes might not dominate forever.

Wasn’t it worth it?

In China, Ferrari asked him to yield to Vettel.

Charles had jumped him right at the start, thinking ha! Call me a coward now! Later, he would remember Sebasatian’s own words after the Multi-21 debacle: “I was faster, I passed him, I won.” Still, he knew better than to be surprised when the call came over the radio a few laps later.

So what should he do? It wasn’t the same as Malaysia 2013: lap 10, not lap 46, and Charles was the rookie on the team, not their reigning world champion. He had known coming into the team that Vettel had priority - at least this year - and he had obeyed team orders in Australia to stay behind. More importantly: he had disobeyed the same order last time out in Bahrain.

Most importantly: Charles intended to be at Scuderia Ferrari for a very long time.

He yielded.

The tifosi howled.

“Are you a man or a mouse?” they demanded. A particularly ruthless cartoonist drew Vettel’s falconet clutching Moira between her talons; another drew her being crushed underneath the hoof of the prancing horse.

“Ignore it,” Moira told him at night, perched close to his face on his hotel pillow. “We were faster. We will be faster. We are going to beat him.”

“I know,” said Charles. “I do know, really. It’s just…”

“Perhaps we should try dating,” Moira suggested. “It would be nice to have someone, wouldn’t it?”

“We could just try making friends,” Charles grumbled. “Or calling our family more.”

Moira turned away, preening her fur.

With a huff, Charles rolled over, pressing his face into the pillow.

It was a start, he reminded himself. The more ridiculous Ferrari made themselves look, the more Charles pulled out a performance that forced them to enact team orders, the better his position would be. Next year, he could be the team leader, and then the cartoonists would have to come up with something really clever.

Still. It would be nice to have someone - someone other than his dæmon - to commiserate with. Someone to buoy him up a bit, someone who would believe in him, support him.

And really - at least he wasn’t having the same year as Pierre Gasly.

~

Lance’s dæmon was too big to race in Formula One.

He knew it. The engineers knew it. Every single journalist in the whole fucking world knew it.

His dad disagreed.

“She is barely bigger than Ocon’s,” he would say.

“I mean, she is, Dad,” said Lance.

Ocon’s dæmon was a ferret - long, but lithe, and could just about be accommodated by slipping inside his trouser leg and going limp. Amitie was almost twice her length, just under a metre.

When they met a few years later, Esteban lit up at seeing Ami.

“We are family, non?” Esteban asked. “She is a - mustélidé, c’est ça?”

Lance nodded. Ataksia bounded forward to meet Ami. “What type?” she asked. “I have never met anyone like you before.”

Ami glanced up at Lance before answering. “A fisher,” she said. “Pretty common in Canada, but not in Europe, I guess.”

“Cuddly,” said Esteban. From anyone else, Lance would have taken it as an insult, but there was absolute glee in Esteban’s face, pure simple delight at meeting someone like him. “How do you race?”

Lance shrugged. “Well, you’re not wrong.”

Because this was the best solution his father’s engineers could come up with: during the race, Ami pressed herself against Lance’s chest, holding on as if cuddling. It was nothing so gentle, of course: they would be pressed together by the G-force, Ami blindly trusting Lance’s driving, feeling every spin and shunt but unable to turn her head and look. In turn, Lance spent every race contorting his arms around her to grasp the steering wheel and focusing on his breathing, putting physical effort into expanding his lungs despite the weight of his dæmon on his ribs. She was enclosed in her own fireproof race suit, complete with hood: blind and trussed up in harnesses which attached her securely to Lance’s body.

They did love it, really. And everyone had put so much effort into keeping them in single seaters, all the engineers struggling with Ami’s shape, and Lance’s trainers working to counteract her weight, and his dad’s lawyers forcing through contracts, and Lance himself throwing all of his effort into proving the world wrong. He knew exactly how much work he was putting in. He knew they deserved their seat.

He also knew that Ami was too big to race in Formula One.

~

Red Bull had not expected to lose Daniel Ricciardo.

This was made abundantly clear to Pierre at every turn. Whether they were scrambling to replace promo shots or hastily reprogramming the sim as he walked into the room, it was always brutally obvious that the team just hadn’t expected this additional workload.

He almost didn’t notice that the sign on his driver’s room was in the wrong font. It was Pisti who nudged his neck and said, “Did they just steal the signs from Toro Rosso?”

Pierre drew back. He looked from his door to the one next door. The blue was just a little too bright.

But still - he was a Red Bull driver now. He had made it. And if he did his job right, no one would be talking about Daniel Ricciardo at Red Bull any more.

This impression lasted just about as long as it took to get to the Australian Grand Prix.

Seventeenth was not an acceptable place to qualify. Still, his race engineer clapped him on the back and said “ah, track evolution was a bit more than we expected, eh? Chin up,” and Pierre took it to heart. After all, if Kubica hadn’t cut off the last couple of minutes of Q1, Pierre would have had another lap and who knew what he could have done? He could have been right up there in Q3 with Verstappen, maybe.

But the race.

Christian had been so encouraging beforehand. “Have fun!” he said. “Get out there and battle. You’re in a bloody fast car, if I may say so myself, and we all know you’ve got the skills to get past the cars in front of you. Go and put on a show,” he advised.

“Thank you,” said Pierre with a smile. It did help, having such a supportive team principal. “I will at least try and get Kvyat, hey?”

And then he didn’t.

He made up only six places, and two of those were due to other cars’ DNFs. He crossed the line staring at the rear wing of a Toro Rosso car, as Daniil Kvyat scooped up the last available point for the grand prix.

At least Ricciardo had retired with damage.

Still, it was only the first race. They went home to Milton Keynes and Pierre got back into the simulator, putting in the work. He had a whole team of people trying to help him succeed, trainers and engineers and strategists. The session he had with David Coulthard and Helmut Marko watching his entire onboard for Australia was painful, but ultimately helpful.

Until he failed to make Q3 at the next race in Bahrain.

As the season progressed, the supportive atmosphere at Red Bull started slipping. The words of encouragement and targeted support started to feel more like interventions and attempts at problem-solving. A team-wide briefing before Paul Ricard felt like a public forum to air the problems which all seemed to occur on his side of the garage.

Christian and Dr Marko had been held up, so Pierre was chatting with a gaggle of mechanics. They were about the only people who still felt like they were firmly on his side although that wasn’t necessarily a good thing, as Pisti had pointed out. Perhaps if he were more audacious in his overtakes, less afraid of causing expensive damage, he might be performing better in the races.

Verstappen was sitting completely alone.

“Weirdo,” muttered Ed, his front end mechanic. His squirrel dæmon chittered in agreement. “I was on his car last year, glad I got the transfer. He’s a driving machine - no offence, mate, but at least you’re bloody human.”

Pierre half-smiled. “None taken,” he said.

“I don’t know,” said Olu, who was on the pit crew. “It’s not like we have to like him to work with him.”

“Thank god for that,” said Ed. “We’d never get anything done if we had to like him.”

Pierre couldn’t help snorting at that.

Verstappen, in Pierre’s opinion, was an absolute bastard. He hadn’t done the slightest thing to help Pierre settle in, hadn’t reached out at all, hadn’t lifted a finger to make life easier for Pierre in any way. Every time they sat next to each other at a press conference, a sponsor dinner, whatever else, Verstappen had ignored him entirely, speaking only when spoken to in sullen petulance. Every engineering meeting, every feedback session, he had been entirely focused on his own driving style, his own needs, without ever once considering that maybe he wasn’t the only driver on the team. 

Every driver was a bit of a bastard, of course, and particularly the champions - Lewis could be ruthless towards his teammates, Vettel had been a rampaging bull back in his winning days, uncontrolled and uncontrollable, and everyone knew about Schumacher, the vicious hornet of Ferrari. But they would still chat to the other drivers before briefings, would still smile for the cameras and throw their arms around their teammates for photo ops.

Verstappen did none of it.

Bastard.

“So what do you think?” asked Ed.

Pierre frowned, bringing his attention back to the conversation. “Sorry?”

Ed gestured at Verstappen. “His dæmon. What do you think it is?”

“What do you think it is?” Pierre returned.

“A headlouse,” Ed said confidently. “No, no, don’t laugh - it’s got to be something that lives on his body, otherwise it wouldn’t be safe in the car. Under his helmet - safe as houses.”

Pierre pursed his lips. “I can’t see it.”

Olu laughed. “Well that’s the point, isn’t it,” he said. “But I’ve got my own theory.”

“Mm?”

“A tick,” he said. “You know, one of those insects that bite in and never let go.”

Pierre considered Verstappen, still completely alone, apparently just staring blankly at the wall. “Like him and this team.”

Ed guffawed. “Well, at least he won’t go bugger off to Ferrari.”

“Ah, I know,” said Pierre, “but I need to google the word, hang on.” A few taps on his iPhone gave him the translation. “Tapeworm,” he announced. “Don’t you think?”

“Ugh, that’s grim!” said Olu. “Like one of those worms that lives in your guts?”

“Exactly,” said Pierre. “It would explain his - weirdness, no? Headlouse is too normal. Tick is good though,” he said to Olu.

Someone behind them coughed, and they looked round to find Hannah from the strategy team leaning forward. “Guys,” she said sternly. “We’re getting dangerously close to bullying in the workplace with this discussion. Do I need to get HR involved?”

Pisti ducked her head in shame as Pierre blushed. “Sorry, Hannah,” he said.

The other guys muttered apologies too, but it was Pierre who Hannah caught on the way out of the briefing.

“You have a lot of influence here,” she said sternly, “and that means you could cause an unholy mess if you tried. Whatever you may think personally of Max, you will not turn this team into an inter-garage warzone, am I clear?”

Her dæmon was a monkey, a little capuchin leaning forward from her shoulder, swinging dangerously close to Pierre’s body. Pierre swallowed. “Yes, Hannah.”

The monkey chittered and swung back around Hannah’s shoulders, peeking at him from her back. She softened a little. “I know you haven’t had the easiest start with the team,” she said. “And it’s good to see you making friends with the mechanics. Just not at Max’s expense, okay?”

She waved him off, and it was only then that Pierre noticed Dr Marko standing behind her. Blind in one eye he might be, but he always seemed to overhear the worst possible conversations.

“Putain,” Pisti spat in Pierre’s ear.

At the French Grand Prix, Pierre qualified seven tenths behind Verstappen, and finished a lap down on him with one measly point to show for it. If it hadn’t been for Ricciardo’s penalty, it would have been no points at all.

He stopped sleeping. It was a problem he had long since adapted to after Pisti settled, but as the metaphorical pressure built up in his waking hours, he felt like he really needed the physical pressure to sleep at night. After all these years, he finally caved and bought a weighted blanket, but although that helped him sleep in his own apartment, he couldn’t cart it around to race weekends.

Pisti was no help. She grew depressed even faster than Pierre, feeling useless, feeling like a hindrance. Her shiny skin grew dull, and Pierre started to make sure he had a water bottle with him at all times, so he could dip his fingers into it and stroke them soothingly over the little newt’s back.

By the time they got to Austria, having finished a lap down on the leaders for the third race in a row, it felt like there was nothing to be done.

Of course, Verstappen won the fucking race.

Leclerc came second.

Charles Leclerc had, once upon a time, been something like a cousin to Pierre. They had never been as close as brothers, not like Esteban or Anthoine, but they had run into each other enough around the karting tracks of France that some sort of a bond had been built. Leclerc was younger, of course, but very serious when it came to racing. Pierre had liked him immediately.

But somewhere around Leclerc’s last year of karting, his dæmon had settled and suddenly it was like nothing they had shared was worth anything at all. Leclerc had stopped seeking him out when they were in the same place, had retracted his invitation to watch the Monaco Grand Prix from his apartment balcony, and had utterly refused to disclose his dæmon’s form.

I promise I won’t judge , Pierre had told him via text message. Whatever she is. I swear.

Leclerc never responded.

When Pierre bumped into him in a slowly-emptying paddock after that dreadful race at the Red Bull Ring, he fully intended to just walk on by. He had enough shit to be worrying about without trying to find something sympathetic to say to the guy on the second step of the fucking podium.

Unfortunately, Leclerc had other ideas.

“Hey,” he called out. “You okay?”

Pierre rolled his eyes. “None of your business.”

Leclerc held up his hands. “Woah. I was only asking, mate.”

“Well don’t,” Pierre snapped. “I’m not your mate, am I? I’m not even your fucking competition, so you can piss off.”

“Pierre!”

“You and fucking Verstappen,” Pierre continued. “This stupid thing where you pretend to be inhuman, you try to be these racing robots, well it hasn’t worked, has it? Neither of you has any friends, your teammates can’t stand you-”

“That’s not fair-”

Even Leclerc’s dæmon had emerged to protest, it seemed. She sat on his shoulder, rearing up onto her hind legs as if she wasn’t a tiny fucking mouse. Pierre was seized by a sudden, violent wish that Pisti was a falcon like Vettel’s dæmon, or a scorpion like Rosberg’s, or even the bear that she used to be at night. Something that could swipe at the loathsome little rodent.

“Fuck off,” he said instead. “We aren’t friends, Leclerc. And you and Verstappen can fucking wipe each other out next race.”

He would regret saying that later. He regretted it even in the moment; he didn’t really mean it. Normally Pisti would be chastising him already, but she was lying limp in his pocket, uncaring of the hole Pierre was digging for himself.

Fuck, he needed a drink. He needed to get Pisti somewhere comfortable, somewhere he could cradle her and stroke water over her skin. He needed to get a handle over the Red Bull.

Two out of three would have to do.

~

A chip off the old block.

That’s what they said about Mick, when his dæmon settled, and there was no point trying to kart under his mum’s name any more. The insect buzzing around his ear was too much of a giveaway.

“I’m not even the same,” Kliro protested.

And the world knew that, really, as soon as anyone got close enough with a long lens to properly identify the queen bee. His father’s dæmon was, famously, a hornet: the largest and most aggressive member of the wasp family. Mick had never seen it like that: he had always been taught that hornets were defensive, protective. Still, when Kliro settled, he couldn’t help but feel…

Well. He wished he had never learnt that hornets preyed upon honey bees.

~

When Alex joined the Red Bull team, he was taken aside by Christian first thing.

“You need to know that Max has - well, you might call it a social communication disorder,” he said. “He may come across as rude, but it’s not intentional. He just doesn’t have the same instincts that other people have when it comes to speaking to other people.”

Alex sort of knew this - he hadn’t been at Toro Rosso long, and hadn’t been a Red Bull Junior before, but he’d been in the same room as Max enough to notice that the guy never just went over to people to say hello.

“I didn’t realise it was a condition,” he admitted. “I kind of thought it was - you know, mind games.”

Christian grimaced. “Well, maybe we could have encouraged him to put more effort in with his teammates,” he said. “He’s got a personal assistant for most things now, but - well, Pierre found him quite abrasive. Just - try not to take it too personally.”

“Okay,” said Alex.

And maybe the warning worked, or maybe an innate British awkwardness helped him empathise, but somehow, Max mostly came across to Alex as hopelessly sweet.

The first time they met as teammates was a press thing for instagram, a thirty second story and a series of photos. Max attended with a smiley young woman followed by a trotting pomeranian dæmon. She spotted Alex before Max did and leaned in to say something to him, a prompt of some sorts.

Max frowned, then took a breath, and then stepped forwards.

“Hi,” he said. “It is nice to see you. How are you?”

“Good, thanks,” said Alex. “Bricking it a bit.”

Max nodded seriously. “I am well,” he informed Alex, and then he seemed to flounder. He looked over to the smiley woman, but she was looking down at her phone. Alex took pity.

“So, tell me about the car,” he said. “Anything in particular I should know?”

And that was it, Max was off. Of course, he told Alex, the development of the car had been quite pronounced this year and it was quite heavy towards the front end, but it was very precise into the turns so of course it was just a matter of control, and of course the downforce was going to be a bit variable at the next few circuits, but of course…

Of course, of course, of course. Where had Max picked up that phrase? He used it like a filler, but also like an apology, like he was aware that perhaps he was saying the wrong thing and needed to smoothe over it. And when the photographer called out that they were ready now, he cut himself off mid-flow.

“Of course,” he said. “I am sorry.”

Just like that - a full sentence, ‘I am sorry’, although he sounded nothing of the sort. It was something he was saying by rote, something that had been drilled into him.

Alex was completely flummoxed.

“Yeah, sorry,” he called. “Where d’you want us?”

The smiley lady - Max’s assistant - came back for the instagram stories.

“Have we got the script?” she asked, and was handed an iPad. She scrolled through it once or twice and then turned back to her charge.

“Okay Max, let’s do this sentence by sentence.”

Another woman, with a cockatiel dæmon, came over and touched Alex’s arm.

“They’ll be a few minutes,” she said. “Do you want a break? I can introduce you to a few of the team? I’m Vicky, by the way, I’m one of the press officers.”

“Er, sure,” said Alex. Opsti was twisting back though, watching Max. Alex’s steps dragged. “Erm, what’s she - er - Max’s assistant doing?”

“Intonation,” Vicky explained. “Max has got quite a monotone voice naturally, and it helps him to hear someone else say the script for him, so he can imitate. Sally will go through it bit by bit with him, help him say it a bit more naturally.”

“Right.”

Opsti was still staring. Alex bent down to scoop her up. “Come on,” he hissed. “It’s not that weird.”

“Yes it is,” she hissed back, but she settled into the crook of his arm and let him catch up with Vicky.

“How are you with media, in general?” she asked.

Alex tried not to wince too obviously. “It’s not… my favourite part of the weekend,” he admitted.

The cockatiel ruffled its wings a little. Vicky smiled. “That’s okay,” she said. “Do you work better with a lot of preparation, or do you prefer to work off the cuff?”

“Depends what it is,” Alex said. “I’ve got a good memory, so if it’s like, an extended interview or something, I can memorise the things you want me to hit. I’m just not very good at - acting, I guess? Apparently it’s kind of obvious when I want to be somewhere else.”

“So you’re telling me I’ve got one driver who can’t show how he’s feeling, and one who can’t hide how he’s feeling.” But she didn’t seem too bothered. She patted Alex’s arm. “That’s fine. Just let me know really honestly what works for you, what doesn’t. We know how to get the best out of Max, how to make it easy as possible for him. We can do the same for you.”

For the first time since pulling on the Red Bull race suit, Alex relaxed. “Thanks. I appreciate that.”

If only the engineers could have made the same promise.

The car was - Max hadn’t been lying, it had a lot of front. It felt like he could sneeze on it, like Opsti could sneeze on it and the car would change direction. It twitched and jerked like a marionette, but once it was out of control, it was Alex who felt like the puppet.

“Fuck,” said Opsti, after their first session in the Red Bull sim. “That’s gonna be a challenge.”

But of course when the engineer switched it off and called out, “How was that?” Alex had very little choice but to say, “I can work with it.”

“Can we?” asked Opsti.

Alex prodded her flank. “Oi, where’s your fighting spirit? We’ve never given up before. We’re gonna keep fighting - we’re gonna fight this car if we have to.”

She hummed. “Okay. Okay.”

They bumped into Max on the way out. He was alone, no Sally to be seen. Alex guessed there was no need for a PA when he was just going into the sim - if Max knew how to speak to anyone, it was engineers.

But meeting Max in a deserted corridor was different to meeting Max in a crowded room. Opsti was suddenly on edge, freezing in place.

“Hello,” said Max.

“Hey,” said Alex. “You good?”

“Yes. And you, you are also good?”

Alex grimaced. “Just tried the sim for the first time. It’s, uh, a challenge.”

“Yes,” Max agreed.

And then he seemed to run out of words. He looked evenly at Alex, just waiting for something else to happen.

It was - decidedly odd. Slightly unnerving. Alex wished he could see the guy’s dæmon, get some sort of a read on him, but since that was clearly a pipe dream, he settled for clearing his throat.

“I’m gonna - go,” he said. “I guess you need to get in there?”

“Yes,” said Max. “Goodbye.”

Without waiting for Alex to leave, he walked past him into the sim room, like he’d suddenly been given permission. Like he knew that it was polite to wait until the end of a conversation before leaving, but had no idea how to end it himself.

“Poor guy,” Alex breathed.

Down on the floor, Opsti shivered. “Odd guy,” she corrected. “There’s something about him. I don’t think I like him, Al.”

“Shh,” Alex said, glancing over his shoulder. He bent down to scoop her up before heading away from the sim room. “It’s not his fault. It’s a condition, Christian said.”

“It’s more than that,” Opsti said. “It’s… I don’t know. Maybe it’s trauma. I don’t know. I just…”

“We’ll be nice,” said Alex. “He’s not a threat, except on track. Maybe he just needs a friend. You know, I think he’s trying.”

Opsti was still trembling a little in the crook of Alex’s arm. He held her tighter. “Right, gym. D’you remember what time Patrick’s meeting us?”

~

Sebastian and Efthyni were slightly odd.

Bird dæmons had that old superstition attached to them anyway, from the days where witches had - maybe - roamed the Earth. Seb didn’t believe in witches, although he would have liked to. Somehow the witch trials would have seemed fairer if there really had been magic available to its victims.

But birds did unnerve people, because they tended to stretch just that slightest bit farther away from their humans. It wasn’t unknown for bird dæmons to reach almost three metres from their people, and that just looked wrong .

Efthyni settled young, when Seb was barely twelve, and they felt the difference immediately. She had an itch - a pull towards the sky. She yearned to soar, to be untethered from her cumbersome human counterpart. It was noticeable too; others glanced askance at the dæmon who flew ahead of her human, preceding him out of every room, only barely held back by the bond between them.

Seb paid them no mind.

When it came to driving, every series had its own way of keeping Effie safe. In karting, some custom jesses sufficed; in single seaters, teams worked their way around harnesses, perspex boxes, different ways of concealing her inside the cockpit. It was the Toro Rosso design which lasted: strong steel bars carefully contoured to support her small body, enclosing her wings entirely but giving her something solid to grasp in her talons.

“It is somewhat ironic,” she said one day, “that I had to be caged so you could fly.”

~

Charles beat Vettel in the 2019 championship, finishing just behind Max Verstappen. Somehow he felt like he’d been there before.

And then the pandemic. The scramble from Melbourne to retreat to Europe, the McLaren team stuck in quarantine, the pictures coming out of northern Italy terrifying everyone who had intended to return to the factories in Maranello and Faenza, only a short journey away from the red zones. The language - Charles felt like he was learning more English vocabulary every day, discussing social distancing and LFTs and PCRs and the novel coronavirus.

Personally, Charles found it difficult to be too scared. The case incidence in Monaco was small, and Charles had never been an anxious person anyway - if he were, he would never have gotten back into a car after any number of incidents in his life. His mother on the other hand -

“No,” she said firmly, when Charles suggested coming round for dinner. “Don’t think I don’t know that you’ve been out and about, Charles Lerclerc.”

“Maman-”

“And if I catch it?” she asked. “You want me to pass it on to Arthur? Or to your great-aunt? No, you will stay in your apartment and I will stay in mine. It can’t last too long, can it?”

And so he stayed. It helped when F1 started sorting out the Twitch things, the streams with the other drivers. The stupid races they held against each other, crashing into each other with gay abandon. It was the most he’d socialised with his old karting team, George and Alex, since - since they were his old karting team. Even Lando was becoming something approaching a friend.

“Who knew you were funny, mate?” he snorted. His dæmon, flopped atop his hair, croaked loudly enough to be picked up by the microphone.

“I am very funny,” Charles protested. Moira chittered in loyal agreement.

“Well, we wouldn’t know, would we?” Lando pointed out.

The four of them had all ended their streams and were now just video chatting on discord. Alex’s rat dæmon usually sat on his desk, hiding from the cats that prowled the Albon household, but now she slipped into Alex’s lap, out of sight of the camera.

Charles grimaced. “Do we have to?” he asked. “It is history, no?”

“Of course, mate,” said George. “Anyway, we’ve all done some stuff to get into F1, right?”

Alex raised his eyebrows. “You sound like you’re doing sexual favours,” he said.

“Only for you, darling,” George batted back.

Lando pushed his wheelie chair back from the desk. “Eww,” he grimaced. “Shut up.”

George laughed at his own joke. “Anyway, seems the sort of time to let bygones be bygones,” he said. “Global crisis and all.”

“Don’t,” said Lando. He reached up for his dæmon and cradled her in his hand. “It’s fucking scary, alright.”

“You’re on your own still?” Alex asked. At Lando’s nod, he continued: “Are you bubbling?”

“Bubbling?” Charles asked. “What is this?”

“Ah, British government thing,” George explained. “Single adult households can bubble up with another household. So no one’s completely on their own.”

“Cos we were all cracking up,” Lando muttered.

Charles added another word to his ever-expanding COVID lexicon.

“Speaking of,” said Alex, “and this is hush-hush, right, but Charles, is there any way you could do, like, a welfare check on Max?”

“Max?” Charles repeated. “Why, is he unwell?”

“I don’t think so,” said Alex. “But - whenever he does a Zoom call with the team, he’s like, sitting on the ground somewhere with his laptop on his knees.”

“So?” asked Lando. “Maybe he likes sitting on the floor. He’s a weird dude.”

Alex rolled his eyes. “He’s a weird dude with some kind of social disorder who’s completely on his own. You guys don’t know him - he doesn’t know how to start conversations. He wouldn’t be able to reach out for help if he needed it. It worries me, okay.”

Charles shrugged. “I don’t mind,” he said. “I am so bored. Do you have his address?”

“I can get it. Thanks, Charles.”

“No problem.”

“Don’t you two know each other?” asked Lando. “You and Verstappen.”

“We used to,” said Charles. “He was - well, he was the only person who knew about Moira, except for my family and the engineers and the mechanics. He was there, the day she settled.”

“Ha!” George exclaimed. His little ladybird skittered into the air. “We said, didn’t we? We said you two must have had some kind of a pact.”

“No, no,” Charles demurred. “He knew about Moira. I never knew about Herz.”

“Herz?”

It took Charles a second to place the voice: Alex’s dæmon had poked her head back up above the desk. “That’s her name?”

“His name,” said Charles. “But yes. He hadn’t settled, when we were in karts together. I never saw him after that.”

“Well, he can’t hide in his own home,” said Lando. “Maybe you’ll finally solve the mystery.”

Charles wasn’t so sure about that, and wasn’t sure that he wanted to find out at all. After all, Verstappen had kept Moira’s form a secret all those years; it didn’t feel fair to repay that by deliberately trying to uncover Herz’s. Still, he was bored out of his mind staying at home on his own, so when he got Alex’s text, he pulled on his shoes and headed right out.

Monte Carlo was preternaturally quiet. Charles wound his way through deserted streets, Moira leaping ahead of him, enjoying the opportunity to run.

“What do you think?” she asked. “You think he’s okay?”

“Oh, for sure,” said Charles. “He’s a big boy. Max is fine.”

And when they arrived, buzzing themselves into the building, that theory seemed at first to be borne out. Max answered the door quickly, looking just like he always did in a plain white t-shirt and clean grey sweatpants.

“Oh,” he said upon seeing Charles.

Charles waited, but nothing more seemed forthcoming. “Hi,” he said. “Sorry to show up unannounced. You buzzed me in?”

“Yes,” said Max.

Another awkward pause. “Who did you think it was?” Charles asked.

“Groceries,” Max answered.

Moira sniffed pointedly right next to his ear, and Charles took the cue to get back on track. “Alex is worried about you, mate,” he said. “He asked if I could come check on you.”

“Oh,” said Max. He blinked once, slowly. “Of course, he didn’t need to worry.”

Charles waited, but Max clearly didn’t feel the need to elaborate. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “So, can I come in?”

Now there was a reaction: Max’s eyebrows twitched together and he glanced over his shoulder.

“Unless you have company?” Charles offered.

“I do not have company,” said Max. “So I suppose you can come in.”

“Very gracious, mate,” Charles muttered, but Max had already turned around and wandered off down the hallway. Charles considered taking his shoes off, but the floor was carpeted in really awful stuff, thin and ratty at the threshold where some animal had torn it up. His pristine trainers were hardly going to dirty it.

Odd, though. This was a nice address, a nice penthouse suite in a nice part of Monte Carlo. Charles had never really asked himself whether Max Verstappen was the sort of person to have hardwood floors, but the more he looked about, the more the apartment didn’t make sense. For one thing, the internal doors had clearly been removed, with marks on the frames showing where the hinges had once been. They walked past a large bedroom which Charles could see straight into: in its centre, a large but low bed, barely higher than a mattress on the floor, covered with messy, half-shredded sheets. Next, a bathroom with again no door to speak of, and the floor was not slate or tile but linoleum, the sort of cheap plastic material that Charles associated with staff kitchens. It, too, curled up at the doorframe, and its surface was pockmarked all over.

“Do you have cats?” he asked.

“What?”

“Cats,” Charles said, following Max through another open doorway into what had to be the kitchen diner. “You know, small, fluffy-”

His voice died.

The cat lying in front of the balcony doors was neither small, nor fluffy. The lion - because it was a lion - was massive, but gaunt, with bald patches of inflamed skin on its flanks, and a thin, tangled mane. When it lifted its head, its eyes were crusty and its nose cracked and dry. It looked like something from a World Wildlife Fund advert, about poor abused animals from circuses.

And it was-

“Herz?” Moira gasped. She scrambled down from Charles’s shoulder and fled across the room to one massive paw - it had two broken claws. “Herz, mon dieu, what has happened to you?”

And as Moira went to Herz, so Charles had to follow her lead, reaching out for Max. He grasped his arm with clutching fingers.

“My god,” said Charles. “Have you been ill? What is-”

But that was not the right question, he realised. Max looked just the same as ever: toned muscles and clear skin, bright blue eyes and his perpetual look of mild confusion at the antics of the other humans around him.

“You can’t be here,” said Herz. His voice was low, coarse with disuse, and he addressed his words only to Moira. “You should not be here.”

“Well we are here now!” Moira protested. “What is this? Have you had COVID?”

And without waiting for a response, she scampered up Herz’s foreleg, hopping up and over his shoulder to run back down the other side. He made no move to dislodge her, merely tilting his big head to watch as she arrived back on the floor and leaned up, holding onto one of his toes with both her little front paws.

But Charles - for once - was ahead of his dæmon. He looked down at Herz and up at Max and for the first time in his life thought: this is not one person.

He staggered.

“Moira,” he said.

And now Moira was catching up, the horror in his heart spreading to hers. She squeaked and stepped back a little, but couldn’t quite draw herself away from the sickly, skeletal -

- severed -

Charles gagged. He spun away from Herz and Max and ran over to the kitchen sink to vomit up the remains of his breakfast, his berry and spinach smoothie now acidic and rough as it spattered in the stainless steel basin.

“Charles, Charles,” said Moira - he had moved almost too fast for her, and she had needed to flee from Herz’s side to his, now hopping atop his trainer to crawl inside his trouser leg. It wasn’t enough; he needed her closer. He wiped his mouth with the back of one hand and then collapsed on the floor, picking her up and pressing her into the hollow space between his collarbones, below his Adam's apple. She whimpered and dug her claws into his fingers, and every stab of pain was dear to him.

“Jamais,” she was saying. “Never, never, never.”

“Never,” he agreed. “Mai e poi mai.”

Max stood exactly where Charles had left him, a few metres away. He watched this display of emotion with his customary detachment, as though Charles and Moira’s distress was mildly interesting at best. Charles wanted to vomit again.

“How could you?” he asked. “How - why -”

Max shrugged. “Because he is too big for the car,” he said simply.

~

Herz settled in the middle of a fight.

Not a serious fight, not a situation where Max had ever been in any real danger, but some boys they vaguely knew from schooldays of old had cornered them in town, had decided that Max Verstappen was too big for his boots now that he was dropping out of education to go racing full time.

It was a bad day. He was the youngest driver ever to win the KZ world championship, but his youth was against him: no one wanted to put an unsettled driver in a single seater just in case. He needed an F3 seat, but even his father couldn’t make them see sense, couldn’t make them see that Max could not take a year out to wait for Herz to settle. It was something Max could see as clearly as a racing line: in motorsport, if you stop, you die. He had to keep driving.

That tension was bleeding over at home as well - in both of his homes. His mother said she understood, but how could she, when she had stopped? His father of course knew exactly how important it was, but kept throwing irritated little glances at Herz. It was of course not Herz’s fault that he had not yet settled. It was of course not Max’s fault that the F3 teams would not see sense.

And so on the day that Herz settled, they had their hackles raised. They stalked into town to get away from their family, Herz swooping overhead as a fierce-looking falcon -

- until those stupid, idiotic, useless boys cornered Max. He was gawky still at fifteen, lanky and small compared to these hulking imbeciles who were going to hurt his Max, put Max’s training in jeopardy, put Max’s preparation and hard work and career in jeopardy -

Herz dived as a falcon and landed as a lion.

~

“It was our idea,” Herz told Moira. His words were slow, his dry tongue lolling out of his mouth between sentences. “We - you know how it is. All the work. All our lives. We couldn’t let that go to waste.”

Moira couldn’t even look at him; it was down to Charles to ask: “But you were - what, fifteen, sixteen?”

“There was of course not much time,” Max explained. “This is why I did the Florida winter series. I needed to test if I could still drive afterwards, before I went to F3.”

Charles cast his mind back. “So in between - you won KZ1 in March, and then Herz settled, and - but how long did you have?”

“Before the surgery or after?” Max asked.

“The surgery!” Charles exclaimed. “Like a - like an excision, c’est ça?”

But Max did not seem to realise the horror of this. “Yes, exactly,” he said. “It is a special clinic, they make you sign lots of papers. I of course had to wait until I was sixteen and could decide for myself.”

“And all this time,” Moira said, still curled into the hollow of Charles’s collarbone, “you left Herz alone. And you just - pretended he was hiding with you.”

“Yes,” said Max. “You were hiding Moira well enough. I never saw her after Val d’Argenton.”

“But she was with me!” Charles protested. “Always. It was like - Lauda and his ant dæmon, she was too small to be photographed back in those days and no one worried about it. Daniel’s little spider, no one would ever see her if he did not dangle her in front of the cameras. But we did not - I could never -”

“No,” said Herz. “But - you showed it could be done. I could be hidden.”

“The teams asked, of course,” Max continued. “But we told them that he did not put any additional weight in the car and did not require any structure to keep him safe. That is all they really need to know.”

“And your family?” Charles asked. “Your parents. They must know. They must have known.”

“Our dad knew before we did it,” Herz confirmed. “He didn’t like it. He wanted to see if there was another way. But no one has ever stretched that far.”

The way that the two of them told this story was a perfect study in contrast. Max related the events like he might give a race report: fact after fact, statement upon sterile statement. Herz gave his account like a eulogy. His head was bowed, and his rough, scratchy voice was heavy with emotion.

Moira whimpered. She crawled down Charles’s body and back towards the sickly lion, hesitating before climbing once more onto Herz’s paw. She curled up, a tiny circle of warmth and connection.

Charles watched her go, helpless. If he concentrated, he could feel as she felt: the grief and horror, the sympathy and yearning. She wanted, more than anything, to fix this.

“But,” he said, still on his knees, meeting the lion eye to eye, “you agreed?”

Herz sighed, one heavy breath like a death rattle. He nodded.

~

They went to the clinic alone. His dad was busy. He would pick them up later.

“Hello Max,” said the kindly nurse. “We’re going to have one more session with the counsellor, alright?”

“Yes,” said Max. He knew this, he was expecting this. They knew what they were doing.

Herz said nothing, pressing himself tightly against Max’s side. Max curled his fingers into his mane.

The counsellor was a man with an owl dæmon who sat on a custom perch to the side of his desk, like a hat stand. He stared at Herz with a piercing look. Herz glared right back.

“Right, Max,” said the counsellor. “We’ve gone through this a few times. So today, I want you to tell me about the procedure you’re about to undergo. I want you to talk me through the risks. I want you to explain it all to me.”

Max shifted in his chair. “Why? You know, you told me.”

“I want to be very, very sure that you understand what you’re doing,” said the counsellor. “So. Tell me about this procedure.”

And Herz sat there, listening, as Max went through it. They knew that there was a risk of personality change, of physical disability, of death. They knew that some patients had suffered immediate heart attacks at the shock of severance, even when sedated. They understood that even if everything went perfectly, they would no longer be one person. They would be two, separate people, never again able to feel each other, help each other, support each other.

His voice shook a little as he finished. He took a deep breath. “We know the risks,” he said. “We still want to go ahead.”

“Thank you,” said the counsellor. “And now Herz. You have talked this through together, so I want you to explain why you have made this decision.”

Herz shook out his mane. He swallowed. “For our career. This is the only way we can progress.”

“No.”

It was the owl dæmon who had spoken from her perch. She looked down on him with the preternatural stillness of a predator. “Not your career,” she corrected. “His.”

Herz nodded, taking the correction. “For Max’s career, yes. But it is still worth it. This is everything he has ever wanted. It is everything I want for him. He needs to progress. He will never be happy if he cannot progress. We know this - I know this.”

“And you?” asked the owl. “Will you be happy?”

“Not if we stay together, and I am holding him back,” said Herz. “Not if he hates me.”

Max was chewing on his lip. They had tried to discuss this seriously and sensibly together, but it was so difficult. How could they know how much they would come to resent each other? Herz believed it more than Max, was convinced that Max would grow to detest the great lumbering lion stopping him from ever getting into a racecar again. He didn’t really believe that Max would go so far as hurting him, but he did worry about Max hurting himself.

This was the right decision, Herz reminded himself.

“We’re not quite sure what I’m going to do yet,” he told the owl. “To start with, I’ll stay at home. I might see if there is a way I can do some work using voice recognition, maybe.”

“But we will see how we react, first,” said Max. “And first, I need to get back into a car.”

So they talked themself back into the decision, led the counsellor to believe there was a risk of suicide if they did not go through this procedure, convinced him that they had thought this through, that they understood what they were doing.

How could they ever understand?

~

“And now,” Charles said, “you let Herz stay here? All the time?”

He looked again at the apartment: the ruined carpets, the doorless frames. He thought of the lowered bed, with the rumpled sheets. He saw, now that he was looking, the lowered light switches: waist height for a human, nose height for a lion.

It was not Max’s apartment, he realised. It was Herz’s.

“Where else can I go?” Herz asked. “A dæmon on my own.”

Moira was making small distressed noises. She couldn’t settle where she was; she crawled up Herz’s foreleg again to find her way to the top of his head and start grooming his mane, one tiny ineffectual strand at a time.

And Charles - Moira was a part of him. She wanted to care; he wanted to care too. He wanted to reach out for Max again, but it wasn’t Max who was hurting. It went against everything Charles had ever known, every teaching, every taboo, but it was what Moira had in her heart, so -

He was still slumped on the floor by the kitchen sink. He stood only to take three shaky steps forwards and kneel again, throwing himself towards the frail, formidable lion and burying his face in that tangled, threadbare mane.

He felt nothing.

Everything he had ever heard or read said that it should have been a shock, an emotional surge that would squeeze his heart and steal his breath. Touching another person’s dæmon should have been the most intense intimacy he could ever expect to feel in his life.

It was just like hugging another human.

“What are you doing?” Max asked.

Charles looked up. Max hadn’t moved. He stood by the window, implacable, indifferent. His voice was perfectly even, only the barest inflection marking the intonation of a question.

Charles ignored him.

“Is this alright?” he asked Herz.

Herz was shaking now, panting shallow and quick. But he nodded, and rasped out, “Yes. Please.”

So Charles stayed, stroking firm hands over the lion’s back, feeling the brittle bones beneath the ragged fur, the calluses on his hands catching on patches of irritated skin. He found himself saying silly things, things like: “chut, hush, it’s okay, it’s okay.”

It was not okay. It was up there with the least okay things Charles had ever dreamed.

“Max,” he said, and felt Herz tense underneath him. “He can’t stay like this. This is cruel.”

“No,” Max disagreed. “We have set up things. He has a smart speaker and things.”

“But who do you see?” Moira asked Herz. “When he’s away, who visits you?”

“Victoria and Yiros,” Herz replied. “But - they have children now. I told Yiros, their children cannot know.”

“No,” Charles agreed immediately.

It felt harsh to say aloud, in front of Herz, but the thought of a child, any child, seeing this sight was horrific. It felt like - it felt like exposing them to dead bodies, or gross mutilation. It felt like putting them in front of the worst sort of car crash, the sort that people could not walk away from.

“How did you even come up with this idea?” he continued. “Why would it even occur to you? To make such a sacrifice, to sacrifice - yourself.”

Max blinked. “We all make sacrifices.”

Charles shook his head. “Not like this.”

Herz sighed again. “No. But we told ourselves - think of the Australians and the Kiwis, who give up their homelands. All the internationals who end up at boarding school in England. Before the minimum weight, there were the drivers who practically made themselves ill with their diets. And of course we grow up knowing Senna’s story.”

“In the seventies, twelve drivers died,” Max chimed in. A statistic, something he could understand. “More than that the decades before. To be in Formula 1, you have to be ready to sacrifice yourself.”

“No, but we change those things,” Charles protested. He stroked his hand over Herz’s poor, straggly mane. “The weight thing, that has stopped. The safety - the halo -”

“Ocon’s family made themselves homeless to keep him in karts,” Herz said quietly. “You were in a car three days after your father’s death. You hid Moira -”

“But I did not cut her away!”

“Everyone cuts away parts of themselves,” Herz said. “How else could you all go racing at Spa last year?”

Charles recoiled. He pulled back from the lion, scrambling backwards. “How can you say that?”

“Charles!” Moira snapped. “This is not the point!”

With effort, Charles tamped down his emotions. “Yes. Yes. The point is that - you cannot stay like this, Herz,” he said. “You are not well.”

“He is here now,” Herz said. “It is not so bad.”

“So it was worse?!” Moira exclaimed. “Putain, Herz, this cannot continue.”

“It can,” said Herz. “Anyway, I don’t have a choice. Where else can I go?”

Charles looked to Moira. Moira looked back at Charles.

“Well,” he said. “When this pandemic is all over, when Max leaves again. Maybe we try to think of something?”

“And you set a date,” Moira said. “When this stops. When you live together properly again.”

“A date,” Max echoed.

“Like we did,” she continued. “We said, when Ferrari makes us an offer, I could come out of hiding. We got away with it earlier in the end, because the press got a photo.”

“But you would have to retire,” Charles told Max. He stood up, finally, and met Max’s eye. “You cannot - there is no way to explain this, so you cannot go public.”

He looked at the scene in front of him: an athlete at the peak of his physical fitness, standing tall and strong before a lion that looked to be on the edge of death. They did not go together, the pair of them; they could not walk out of this apartment building like a normal person. If Herz took his rightful place at Max’s side, it would take the general public no longer than Charles to guess what must have happened, the dreadful, awful truth of it.

And god forbid, for some young karter out there to think: well, he did it. Why can’t I?

“So when I retire,” Max concluded.

“No!”

Charles and Moira had shouted together: his lower voice pierced through by her high-pitched squeak.

“That’s too far away,” Charles said. “We are too young. Herz will not survive that. And he is your dæmon, you will not survive that either.”

“Actually-”

Herz growled, and Max shut up. The lion stood for the first time, on spindly legs. Despite his weakness, he was tall; the top of his head was level with Max’s chest.

“A championship,” he said. “When you win the championship. That’s when it ends.”

He pushed his head against Max’s chest, nuzzling into him very much like a domestic cat. Max did not respond, standing just like a mannequin, just as if nothing was happening. It was Charles who reached out and ran a hand over one of Herz’s ears.

“Max?” he said. “You agree, yes?”

Still Max hesitated. “Is that the right thing?”

Moira was still balanced on the back of Herz’s neck. She squealed in outrage.

“The right thing was not to do this to him in the first place!” she said. “The least you can do now is agree.”

But apparently all Max had needed was confirmation: he nodded easily. “Alright. When I win the championship.”

Charles felt like there should be a second clause on that agreement: winning the championship or in five years, whichever came first. But perhaps there was time to negotiate that.

“And look, we’ll come and visit,” said Moira. “We will help, won’t we Charles?”

What could he say, except, “We will try.”

~

When they - no. Start again.

When Herz woke, he screamed.

He was wild, he was mad, he was alone - Max, where was Max, he needed Max Max Max -

“Shhh,” said a small voice. “Shh, Herz, it’s okay, calm down. It’s okay. You’re alright.”

“Max,” he roared. “Max!”

“Max is fine,” said the voice, the nurse’s dæmon, a field mouse. “He woke up before you, he’s alright. He’s just in the next room, you can see him, look, look.”

But Herz had never had to look for Max before, had never had to think about where he was. He was always just - there, as surely as Herz’s own paw or tail. To see him through a window, separated by a wall, and not to feel him as an extension of himself -

He roared again. He threw himself at the window, full body slamming into it. He had to get to Max, he could not be without Max, he could not exist without Max.

“Ready with the sedation,” said another voice.

Max turned around.

He was holding a glass of water, perfectly steady in his hand. He was a little pale, perhaps, but his expression was completely calm. Too calm. He looked at Herz with nothing more than mild curiosity in his eyes.

And then, just before the blowdart hit, he turned away again.

~

Charles tried. He did. The first few times they visited Herz’s apartment, the lion was glad to see them. He started greeting them with soft touches for both Moira and for Charles, a gentle nuzzle for the tiny mouse, stronger pressure as he pushed against a human who was not his own. Charles spent one strange afternoon with Herz’s head resting in his lap, just letting him bask in sustained contact from a human being.

Max, on these occasions, was decidedly disengaged.

Red Bull had sent him a home simulator by now, and Max seemed to spend most of his time either in it, or exercising. He didn’t reach out for Herz, ever. He seemed to have no instinct whatsoever to comfort his dæmon.

“Why stay?” asked Charles quietly. Max had his headset on, and did not react.

Herz lifted his head. “You don’t understand,” he said. “I love him.”

“But he doesn’t love you,” Charles protested.

Herz swayed his head from side to side. “No. But that is not his fault.”

“It is,” Charles disagreed.

“No more than mine,” said Herz. “We were one person when we made that decision.”

Moira was cleaning the fur around Herz’s claws. “I understand,” she said, and later on refused to say anything more on the topic to Charles.

But Charles could not be there forever: the championship resumed, and he left. Lando moved to Monaco, and Charles put proper effort into making and keeping that friendship, repairing old bonds with Alex and George in the meantime. He put effort, too, into caring for his family, suggesting family vacations, trying to support Arthur’s career as much as he could. He even did manage to start dating in the break between the 2020 and 2021 seasons, reconnecting with a girl he’d known some years ago.

And - although he would never admit it out loud - he couldn’t help but find afternoons with Herz disconcerting. Snuggling up with another man’s dæmon - it was wrong. He could never tell anyone where he went either - how on earth could he explain? So, gradually, the visits slowed and stopped. Moira nagged him occasionally, but even she was distracted by their career. They might have successfully seen off Sebastian Vettel, but his replacement was another beast altogether. Another Red Bull graduate he might be, but this one came in speaking Italian already, without a championship to his name but with considerably more race wins than Charles under his belt.

Yes, Charles would have to concentrate to fend off Daniel Ricciardo.

“Enchanté,” he said winningly, the first time he came to Maranello. To the rest of the room: “Ciao, ragazzi. Scusate per il dialetto.”

Dialect or not, none of them could help but be charmed by him. On paper, it shouldn’t have worked: he was too wild, too informal for the Scuderia, but he was sharp too. He had a perfect knack for people, for knowing when he could make a joke and when he needed to be polite. He seemed to learn names as easily as corners, and though the car was very different to the Renault and the Red Bull before it, he was adapting relatively well.

Of course, he had not had to drive the shiny red tractor of 2020.

“Sheesh, I lucked out there,” he said quietly to Charles when they got him in the SF1000 on a testing day. “Seriously, kudos for the points last year.”

“Thanks,” Charles said drily.

Perhaps Daniel sensed that charming Charles would be more difficult; he wandered off to the mechanics. “Ragazzi!” he crowed. “Avete fatto una macchina fantastica quest’anno! Che miglioramento!”

Moira scoffed in Charles’ ear. “So to us he says well done for driving it, to the mechanics he says well done for improving it.”

“Mind games,” Charles muttered. “He wants to be number one.”

It didn’t help that Daniel’s dæmon was so small, giving nothing away. She lived usually in the shell of his ear, whispering to him constantly. Perhaps she was the one who remembered all the people around him, leaving Daniel to concentrate on driving.

And he was a fantastic driver, there was no doubting that. “Last of the late brakers,” they called him, and for good reason: his overtakes were audacious, venturing on risky. Charles would never stoop so low as to ask a teammate for advice on mentality, but he got the answer anyway, sat side by side with Daniel in an extended interview ahead of the Hungarian Grand Prix.

“Aw, I think I’ve got a natural, let’s say, advantage there,” he told Sky Sports. “Cos my dæmon is right there inside my helmet with me, it’s easy for me to feel safe. I really - like, I really have to respect the guys whose dæmons are fixed in the cars with extra harnesses or boxes or whatever. Or like - when I was teammates with Esteban last year, his dæmon’s got like a little air vent in his race suit, but that means he’s got just a little bit less fire protection.”

“That’s really interesting,” said the interviewer. “Charles, would you say that affects you at all? You’re - we’ve often said, you’re outrageous in qualifying, for example -”

Before Charles could try to summon up an answer, Daniel was laughing. “Yeah, nah, Charles trusts himself a lot more than he trusts the rest of us,” he jibed. “Am I right?”

“I do not trust you at all, mate,” Charles said. He tried to make it lighthearted, tried to smile. Failed. Moira, curled up in the palm of his hand, reached out and bit the skin between his thumb and index finger. “No, no, I’m kidding. We feel safe in the car because we trust the engineers and the mechanics who put it all together. When I get into the car, it is - it is almost like it becomes part of you, like another dæmon almost. You cannot worry about being unsafe. We know - we know…”

But that was getting into dangerous territory, and he didn’t protest when Daniel took over again. “We know there’s a risk, we’ve all seen it. I mean, we saw it last week at Silverstone when Verstappen and Hamilton came together. But yeah, Charles is right, you can’t think about it.”

The interview wrapped up soon afterwards, and Charles and Daniel were soon in the back of a car, heading away from the beautiful Budapest piazza where the interview had been filmed back to the familiarity of the paddock for the proper F1 press conferences. Something was playing on Daniel’s mind; he reached up to his ear and let his dæmon step onto his index finger.

“You know, no one mentioned Verstappen’s dæmon after the crash,” he said.

“He is fine,” said Charles.

And he knew that: after the race, he had made it a point to go and visit Herz, knowing that Max might not. The apartment had been a wreck, deep scores in the back of the front door, the blankets in the bedroom shredded to pieces, but by the time Charles arrived, Herz had calmed down.

“I called Victoria,” he said. “She told me he’s okay.”

Because it hadn’t occurred to Max that his dæmon would want to know.

Herz hadn’t been in the mood to curl up with Charles that day: instead, it was Moira who settled between his front paws, looking up at him, murmuring words of comfort and reassurance. Charles borrowed Max’s sim, completing mindless laps around the Hungaroring to let Moira concentrate on her own conversation with Herz. It was always difficult to fully focus on something if your dæmon had their attention on something else; he made no effort to hit apexes or push his speed, just driving around as if he were cruising to protect his tires. He felt, at close remove, a deep well of emotion, so profound and complex that he couldn’t even guess what the two dæmons were discussing.

After some hours, Moira had come over and climbed up into his lap, running up the front of his t-shirt to nip gently at the bottom of his jawline.

“Time to go,” she said, and later she refused once again to tell Charles what had been discussed that day.

Now, Daniel was looking at Charles with incredulity. “You know his dæmon?” he asked.

“He is fine,” Charles repeated.

“Fuck,” said Daniel. “I thought like, literally no one knew his dæmon.”

“They don’t,” said Charles. “It’s not their business.”

Daniel whistled. “Fucking hell. Right, just tell me, where the fuck does he keep it? Because me and Gira thought he had to be keeping it in like a fireproof box in his pants or something, like completely locked up.”

“Shut up!”

Daniel blinked, because it wasn’t Charles who had spoken. But even a mouse could stand up to a spider, and Moira was dangerously close to the edge of Charles’ lap, her tiny teeth bared at the other dæmon. “You don’t know!” she snapped. “You know nothing about him, so you shut up.”

The spider crouched down against Daniel’s finger and he returned her to the safe space in his ear. “Alright, chill,” he said. “It’s just. Well, you know how he used to drive. Like he didn’t care about crashing. Like his dæmon wasn’t even in the car.”

What could Charles say? He remained silent until they had almost reached the Hungaroring, and then, just as they were about to pull up, he spoke.

“Let’s get something straight,” he said. “You are going to stop making comments about my dæmon in the press. You stop saying that I don’t trust people, or I’m scared. And you don’t talk about Max’s dæmon. Capisci?”

He didn’t give Daniel a chance to respond, getting out of the car and slamming the door behind him. Moira’s little claws were digging into his fingers.

“Teammates,” she said.

Charles sniffed in agreement. “Fucking Danny Ricc.”

They took a few more steps before he asked, “Herz is alright, isn’t he?”

He could feel Moira’s thrumming heartbeat in his fingers. “He will be,” she said. “Soon.”

~

Ah, didn’t I mention? Carlos Sainz Jr had a little white terrier for a dæmon; he followed his father into rally cars and never quite lived up to his namesake. Or perhaps you were waiting to hear of Fernando Alonso, wily old fox - for a man who never raced single seaters, he ran the best karting academies, managed at least three drivers at any one point who would soon make it to F1. He had fingers in every pie, contacts in every team, the brains to be a strategist and the politics to be a team principal. He might even have made a good driver, they said.

But it wasn’t all so bad - Yuki Tsunoda realised early on that his chances were better with his secondary dream, and by the age of twenty one was chafing under the limitations of the head chef at the high-end Tokyo restaurant where he worked, sketching out menu ideas on his dinner breaks. Surely he would make it with his own restaurant soon. And at least he had never had to move to Switzerland to struggle with the language, or to England to struggle with the weather.

His dæmon was a tiny, shining dragonfly, but she settled two years after he’d given up on driving.

Or perhaps we could speak of Victoria Verstappen; even as a small child her dæmon was always big. He trotted after the toddler as a Shetland pony, swooped over the schoolchild as a mighty albatross, planted himself in front of the young girl as a fearsome Alsatian, showing his teeth. But she was more like her brother than her parents thought: Yiros settled as a majestic tiger, only weeks after Herz took on his final form. To see him with their children was a powerful thing.

No one had ever put Victoria in a go-kart.

She wished, often, that the same could be said for the man who had once been her brother.

~

On the day that Max Verstappen won the 2021 World Championship, an old lion watched from his apartment in Monaco.

“Alexa,” he called, “turn off the TV.”

The screen went dark.

When Max won KZ1 - no. Start again.

When Max and Herz won KZ1, they had felt such potent triumph and relief. They had felt dizzy with it, wild with it. Youngest ever winners, a boy and his dæmon, champions.

Today, Max would feel very little. He would say the right things to the camera because his little assistant Sally would have planned them with him in advance. Herz had never met her, knew her name only because she was a contact in Max’s phone, but he hated her. A qualified speech therapist, according to the credentials he could find online, but not qualified enough to realise that Max was not like any other disabled person she had worked with. Herz wondered occasionally how she had misdiagnosed Max, what incorrect label she had attributed to him in her head.

He wondered what resources she would need in order to guess correctly what they had done.

The literature on severance was lacking. Max had read up before they did it; Herz had read up on it afterwards. There simply wasn’t a large enough sample for any reliable study. There were studies on the mortality rates of severance, but they focused on immediate mortality, those who died as a direct result of being severed.

No one had ever documented whether a severed dæmon’s death would trigger the death of his human.

“Alexa,” said Herz, “call Max Verstappen.”

“Calling Max Verstappen,” said the smart speaker.

Max didn’t pick up, of course. He was still in the cooldown room, probably. He might not even be on the podium yet. The call went to voicemail.

“I love you,” said Herz, to an empty room. “I’m so proud of you. I love you.” And then, “Alexa, end call.”

He considered calling Moira, too, but there was no way to do that without speaking to Charles.

He did not want to speak to Charles.

He padded slowly to the front door. The handle was not suited to being opened by feline teeth; it took him a few minutes of trying to get purchase enough on the smooth rounded doorknob to turn it.

It was mid-afternoon in Monte Carlo, weak December sunshine saturating an uneventful Sunday. There would be people out and about on the streets: tourists, shoppers, locals going about their daily lives. People who would not expect to see a lone lion loping about. People who would…

Herz stepped outside.