The Race by Nina Allan Read Free Book Online

gants – like a charm or a curse – is just something that helps strong thoughts take on a definite shape.
    This was something that seemed clear to me from the first. I remember one Saturday when I was down at the track as usual with Dad and Del, waiting in line at the kiosks to get a kebab. From where I was standing I could see the dogs that were in the next race being led past on their way to the traps, their runners standing back from the trackside as the gates were closed. The video screen at the far end of the stadium stopped displaying an advert for 7-Up and started to show live footage of the smartdogs instead. The favourite for that race was a three-year-old parti-coloured male called Space Cadet. His runner was Kayleigh dos Santos, and when she went up to receive her start card I had my first clear sight of her.
    Her hair was cropped close to her skull in a style I envied but that Mum had already said it was pointless for me even to think about. Dos Santos wore zip-up silver gants with a cerise leather cuff. Instead of the traditional knee-high boots, she wore a tatty pair of hi-top sneakers bought from Ku-dam or Primark. The contrast of the cheap chain store shoes with the designer gants did something peculiar and thrilling to my insides. There was such daring in it, something so unexpected and so rude it made my heart flip up in my chest like a bush cricket.
    What I didn’t know at the time was that Kayleigh dos Santos had done time in prison for dealing glass. Runners are pretty evasive on the subject of glass. Most who have tried the drug won’t admit to it, those who do talk about their experience often say there are no words to describe it anyway, so why bother trying? The compound makes the implant work better, apparently. It can’t enhance the performance of the hardware – that would be impossible – but what it does do is put your brain into a state where it can engage more fully with the software processes and at a higher level.
    The drug glass, like the implant clinics, is something that is supposed not to exist. It was developed by the police and the military as a coercive, to be injected into the brains of prisoners who were about to take a lie detector test. The cops claim a prisoner under the influence of glass is physically unable to lie, that the truth gets hardwired into every brain cell like a piece of computer code. The drug became known as glass because it supposedly enables you to see the world more clearly. Habitual users say that when you’re high on glass the insides of things and even invisible things become revealed to you, clearly in focus, as through the lens of a microscope.
    The downside of glass is that it soon begins to erode brain function rather than enhance it. Use glass long enough and hard enough and your mind gets cut to pieces from the inside. People have died raving in police cells through being overdosed on glass. Not that the cops would admit culpability in a hundred years.
    Del always said that glass was shit in capsule form, that he’d known good runners ruined forever with just a single hit. Any of his runners caught in possession were sacked on the spot.
    Like all the Class A Classifieds, glass has a high street value. For those of a criminal persuasion, dealing glass can generate a lucrative income.
    “The dopeheads say glass takes them to the magic mountain, “Del said to me once. “Too bad when they can’t come down again. More fools them.”
    ~*~
    All runners are funny about their gloves, but in different ways. For some it’s a trophy thing, a way of showing off how much money they’ve won. Jocks like that get a kick out of being photographed in a new pair of gants every week of the year – they collect them the same way they collect winning tickets. Others are just the opposite: they get fixated on one pair of gloves and won’t race without them. I heard of one guy who had his gloves stolen or lost them or something and went completely berserk. He