The dune split before she reached the top.

The sand shoved outward from below, as though the surface had finally been reminded that it was only a surface and had taken offense too late, and something forced its way through the hole.

It was a worm. It was also enormous.

Each segment of its body was wide enough that she could have parked the truck on it and still had room left over. Its surface was pale and scaled where it broke into open air, catching the sourless light the way wet stone does.

It was already moving when it emerged, body curving out of the sand and back in again thirty meters ahead, the whole thing in one continuous motion, like a problem that had somewhere to be.

"What in the actual fuck," Nyx said.

She said it with genuine appreciation.

The corporation had put sandworms in the race course, and that made the game suddenly way more interesting, which was impressive in the way only complete insanity can be impressive. She wanted whoever designed this to know she respected them and hated them very much.

A second worm burst up to her left, farther out, its body sliding through the hole between two dunes with the ease of something that owned the terrain. A third one was already building to the right, sand lifting along a long moving line.

"Okay," she said, to herself, to the course, to whoever was watching from wherever they were watching. "Fine. That’s fine. Let’s fucking do this."

She hit the accelerator.

The first worm was still raised, that long arc of its body hanging above the sand and moving forward that was going to meet Nyx whether she liked it or not. She had about two seconds to figure out a plan before it happened.

She hit the base of the curve, and the truck climbed the side, front wheels catching the scaled ridge and dragging the rest of the vehicle up after them, and then she was on top of it.

It wasn’t like a road, because roads at least pretends to behave. This thing shifted under her tires, each segment moving on its own while the worm kept going. The truck slid sideways three feet, and she steered hard to not fall down.

From that height she could see the race field below, trucks scattered through the dunes in various stages of panic and improvisation, and she had exactly three seconds to take in the whole thing before the worm dipped and the truck dropped back into the sand and the dune came up fast to meet her.

She landed at absurd speed.

"Hell yeah!" she shouted out the open window into the wind, to nobody and everybody. "Come on! More of that! Give me more of that!"

Somewhere behind her, somewhere in the mess she had just ridden through, an explosion burst upwards and into the sky. She wondered if the sandworms liked the taste of metal and gasoline.

The ram truck came into view on her left, which meant it had survived Feint and the sand bank from earlier and forced its way back into her vicinity, because of course it had. Ram made it obvious enough how stubborn the driver was.

I have identified a vehicle approaching on your left flank.

Clippy appeared near the passenger seat with the timing of something that considered punctuality a virtue.

I recommend-

"I see it," Nyx said.

You’re doing wonderfully.

"Of course I am," she said, and Clippy retreated to the corner of the dash, apparently satisfied with the exchange.

The third worm was crossing ahead of her now, across her path in a way that left a narrow opening on the right between its flank and the nearest dune. The ram truck was closing from the left. The opening was going to vanish in about three seconds.

She took it.

Not by asking the ram truck for permission, because that would have been a strange sort of racing philosophy.

She just went, forcing the choice between following her through an opening barely wide enough for one truck or slamming into the worm’s flank at the speed it was on.

Her right panels scraped the worm’s side as she threaded through, the vibration running all the way through the cab frame, and she made to the other side into open sand while behind her the ram truck made the wrong choice.

It crashed against the worm’s scaled hide.

The worm did not care. It kept moving with the indifference of something twelve times larger than whatever had just annoyed it. The truck lost its momentum, found a dune bank, and hit it with a familiar motion.

"That’s what you get!" Nyx shouted back through the window. "That’s exactly what you get for picking Ram! Pick an actual ability next time, you absolute trash!"

The second worm had been side by side through the whole event, its passage visible as a traveling disturbance in the sand.

Then it shifted.

The worm cut inward toward the dunes, rushing toward where one of the contestants had drifted wide during the confusion. The truck was there. The disturbance was heading straight for it. The driver was either looking the wrong way or still had not learned that moving sand during a worm causality is a bad thing to stand next to.

The disturbance reached the truck.

The worm came up underneath it.

The truck rose with the worm, lifted clean off the surface on the back of the emerging body, and for one full second it hung there above the spray of displaced sand, engine still running, completely weightless.

Then the mouth opened around it, and she had one clear instant to see the head of one of these things before the maw closed back over everything, and then the worm was underground again and the truck was gone.

"Holy shit," Nyx said.

She said it quietly.

"Okay, that’s one less, excellent, moving on," she said, and moved on.

The worm mayhem thinned in volume ahead. The walls of dunes started to disappear. The ground flattened, and the sourless sky opened wide enough for her to see the actual end of the desert, the transition line where the corporation had decided one zone ended and whatever came next was somebody else’s problem.

[ Boost ]

The ability wasn’t an absurd increase in speed, but it lasted for a significant time. The engine roars changed into something more ferocious. She covered the remaining distance with the sandworms and desert dropping behind in the mirror and she reached the zone end, and when she saw what lay beyond it.

"Oh, you have got to be fucking kidding me," she said.

The water became vividly engraved in her mind.