One can imagine the chain of events that leads to a situation like this. A truck, airborne, between two animals the size of buildings, neither of them even acknowledging that the truck exists. It is the sort of image that sounds impossible until you are inside it, at which point "impossible" becomes a very lazy word.

The first worm had thrown him. Its body had been rising when his front wheels caught the surface, and he had ridden that for about four seconds before the worm dipped and let him go into a brief, unplanned flight.

The second worm was moving beside the first, its back thirty meters ahead and slightly below his current path. He had maybe one second before the question of whether he landed on it or beside it answered itself without consulting him.

He landed on it.

Roughly. The front wheels struck the scaled surface, the truck pitched hard left, and he steered before the tilt could become a roll. The truck skidded sideways across the segment surface with the kind of grip that suggested the worm’s back had not been made for driving on, which, to be fair, it had not been.

Then it stabilized. He was on it.

From there he could see the race field spread below him. Trucks were scattered through the dunes in various states of survival, while worm bodies cut through the sand in long traveling arcs that broke every path forward the course tried to offer.

He checked ahead without meaning to. The round pale truck was not there. Nyx had already cleared the zone, her start enough to put her in the vanguard of the race, and whatever came after the desert was where she currently was. He considered that, shrugged it away, and looked back at the two worms.

The second was under him, still climbing, its body moving forward and upward in a curve that had maybe three seconds before it peaked. If he hit that peak at full speed, the momentum off the surface would be much better than rolling off the back of something that had already stopped rising.

The first worm was to his left and ahead, moving side by side, its own peak arriving in about four seconds, a little forward of the second worm’s.

Two peaks, offset by four seconds. The plan was simple enough once he ignored the minor detail that it required driving a truck off one enormous animal and then off another.

He ignored that detail.

[ Overdrive ]

The truck hit the second worm’s peak with the full force of the burst behind it, and the absurd acceleration that had once tried to turn his spine into powder now made the truck leave the worm’s surface at a speed the virtual world seemed to take personally. 𝑓𝑟𝑒𝘦𝓌𝑒𝑏𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝘭.𝒸𝘰𝑚

The front wheels came free, then the rest of the truck, and suddenly there was no surface beneath him at all.

The first worm’s body was below and slightly left, still climbing, its peak rising toward him instead of waiting politely for him to fall to it.

The truck hit front-left-first, the impact redirecting momentum forward and upward the way a ramp does when you manage to hit it just the right way, and then the truck was airborne again, higher this time, carrying the speed of two worm backs and Overdrive behind it.

From here he could see the end of the desert.

He had not been able to see it from the ground. Up here it was the whole horizon, a line across the far end of the sand zone, and beyond that line, water.

He had no way to describe something as absurd as a waterfall that occupied the full length of a zone boundary, one continuous wall of falling water from one side of the visible world to the other, mist climbing from the base in a sheet that was still clear at this distance.

It was very large. He was flying toward it at a speed that left him no meaningful choice about whether to keep flying toward it.

"Well then," he said.

The truck passed over the end of the desert, and the waterfall received it.

The drop was unkind. The windshield filled with falling water at once, the sound became everything, and then the base arrived with the sort of impact that moved through the chassis, through the seat, and into his spine as a complete explanation of velocity. The truck went underwater.

For a full second there was nothing outside the windows except green-dark water and the shock working itself loose, and then the vehicle’s buoyancy hauled it back, but not to the surface. It leveled at depth, fully submerged. And a water current found it.

The current was leading forward. That was the first thing he noticed, a steady push carrying the truck forward the way a road carries a vehicle, except from all sides rather than only below.

He could see the lane structure in the particulate drifting around him, with distinct flows moving at clearly different speeds, the faster current to his right rushing visibly, the one he had landed in at a moderate pace, the lane far left sluggish by comparison.

And he was not alone.

He was still observing the multiple currents speed when something large crossed beneath the truck, its shadow sliding across the floor of the water road, longer than the truck and faster than any current. It passed under him, kept going left, and vanished before he had fully decided what it was.

Then it came from the left. A massive orca.

It burst out of the slower lane at a path that made the collision obvious a full second before it arrived, a black-and-white flank the size of a large corporate transport, moving at a speed it was born to move underwater.

The impact hit his driver’s side door with the full mass of whatever the corporation had decided an orca should weigh when they built one into a race course, and the truck slammed sideways across two water lanes before he had finished processing what was happening at all.