Gold by Chris Cleave

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    Kate hesitated. Was she being too cautious? She was only five meters short of her judgment point now, and the light was still amber, and there was a pretty good chance she could carve through the left turn while the light had only just turned red. She flicked a glance right, across the face of the junction to where the traffic waited in the last second of its own red light. It was a dual carriageway. There was a black Volvo and ablue BMW at the front. There was a courier motorbike filtering up the outside. Kate watched the cars tinted orange in the overhead lights of the junction. They looked okay. Neither of them stood out as obvious psycho wheels. Odds were that they wouldn’t go dragsters off the amber light.
    Kate stamped down hard for two pedal strokes, then hesitated again. She thought about Sophie. Suddenly the zone into which she was traveling seemed as starkly demarcated as the painted stop line on the carriageway suggested. She was the mother of a young child. Was she seriously assessing the risks involved in riding out at full speed onto a T-junction that was about to be overrun with traffic? She pictured Sophie’s face, and her daughter’s eyes connected so forcefully with her tendons and forearm musculature that without even thinking about it, she was braking so hard that her wheels almost locked.
    When the lights went amber, Zoe noticed Kate’s hesitation and upped her pace instinctively. She was thirty meters short of her own decision point, but she wasn’t thinking about that. She was thinking about Adam. Here, at her physical limit, she felt her dead brother watching her with the same curious, unabashed gaze that Sophie had shown her earlier that day. Here was this ripple in time again, widening from their shared point of origin, keeping pace with her however fast she tried to outride it.
    As Kate slowed, Zoe swerved and whipped past her. She flashed across the hard white stop line and ran the red light at twenty-five miles per hour, leaning hard into the perpendicular left turn with her wheels squeaking on the wet tarmac, at the very limit of adhesion.
Thirty-meter cordoned-off section of the nearside carriageway, Great Ancoats Street, at the junction with Ashton New Road, Manchester
     
    The driver of the blue BMW told the investigating officer that he hadn’t had anywhere to go. He was three-quarters of the way acrossthe intersection and accelerating through maybe fifteen miles per hour when Zoe appeared in his lane, a wheel-length ahead of his bumper. He’d had less than one second to react. To his left there’d been the black Volvo; to his right, the motorbike courier. He’d managed to get a touch on the brakes but he’d still clipped Zoe’s back wheel. He’d felt something go under his tires and he was pretty shaken up because he’d thought it had to be her.
    “I don’t know what to say,” he told the investigating officer.
    The officer had an incident form on his clipboard and a ballpoint pen on a string. “You could say she turned into your braking distance,” he said. “That way it’ll be clear for your insurance.”
    Measuring up the scene, and judging from the marks on the road surface and the detritus of shattered registration plates and indicator light housings, the investigating officer was inclined to endorse the male motorist’s account. The female pedal cyclist had come off her machine and rolled across the carriageway, probably passing fractionally ahead of or fractionally behind the motorcycle before coming to rest against an illuminated bollard on the central traffic separation island. She’d been fortunate to walk away with cuts and bruises.
    Her pedal cycle—this is how he described it on the road traffic incident form—her pedal cycle had come off worse. He lifted the wreck of it into the back of his patrol car, its frame snapped and the rims twisted. It had gone under the wheels of at least three vehicles. The cyclist was sitting upright now, wrapped in a