Chapter 2
“Well, that was certainly exciting!”
Julian levels the offending reporter with the flat glare he’s become infamous for. “Delphine’s win? I don’t see how that was exciting. Pretty expected, actually, if you ask me.”
“I can understand losing to me would be getting dull for you at this point,” says Delphine Hart, winner of today’s race and reigning interplanetary champion. “But we should give the people what they want, no?”
“Sorry, just, that’s not what I meant,” Silver Sight says, speaking louder to be heard over the chuckling.
He shifts his gaze to Clarke, and Clarke knows it’s rude to focus on people’s physical appearances but he’s had both his eyes replaced with full metallic implants and really does look like the villain from a kids’ show she used to watch. “Clarke. What happened out there?”
Clarke’s left arm is in a sling. She went to Medical while the race finished, and her broken collarbone isn’t broken anymore, but the limb is swollen and tender.
She would give anything to be in bed right now, but there’s a clause in every pilot’s contract about doing the post-race press conference when tapped.
Clarke’s media persona is carefully cultivated. It’s easier for her to be approachable, humble, and dedicated when her entire skeleton doesn’t feel battered, though, so she lifts the microphone to her mouth and says, blunt, “Wasn’t it obvious? I crashed. Again.”
There’s a burst of tense laughter, cut through by someone coughing loudly at the side of the room. It’s Naomi, who manages PR for Elemental. She arches a no-nonsense eyebrow when she sees that she’s caught Clarke’s attention.
That eyebrow means miserable things for Clarke, like another of those day-in-the-life-style interviews where she has to let a reporter follow her around for twenty-four hours.
She brings the mic up again. “There was a mechanical failure headed into the vertical loop. It was unexpected and unrecoverable. I’m grateful to the emergency teams for mobilizing so quickly, and Amira for talking me through it, and Julian for intervening when he did. ”
She gestures at Julian as she says his name, and he looks up from fiddling with his own mic to give her a short nod.
They’re seated at opposite ends of the couch, Delphine in an armchair set a bit apart.
That’s how these press conferences always go: winner in the armchair, and the two other pilots the press most wants to talk to on the couch.
Clarke’s never been in the armchair, but she’s willing to bet it’s more comfortable than the couch.
“Things could’ve ended very differently today,” Clarke continues. “Incidents like this remind all of us to be careful.”
“It’s your third big crash this season, and you lost a friend in a crash just a few years ago,” the reporter says. “Did you need another reminder?”
Clarke goes cold everywhere but her face, which heats up so quickly that sweat beads at her hairline. More than one person sucks in a breath, and more than one person looks at Naomi. Most team PR people won’t let the press talk to their pilots like that.
Naomi frowns, but doesn’t say a word.
Clarke takes a sip of water to buy time, pretends it doesn’t feel like swallowing sand. Pretends she didn’t hear the reference to Connor. “No, I didn’t need another reminder. I was being careful. Like I said, it was an unexpected mechanical failure.”
“Not your first of those this season, either.”
Accountability, Naomi has stressed with Clarke. You’re one of the faces of Elemental. There’s a team of hundreds behind you, but when things go well, you get all the glory. When things go wrong, you get all the blame. If you can’t take that—
I can, Clarke has said, and she’s meant it every time. She just didn’t think that things would go this wrong, this often.
There are three clear groupings of Formula Zero teams. Provenance, whom Delphine flies for, and Julian’s Chronicle Racing have been at the front of the pack for the past several years, trading the team and individual pilot champion trophies among themselves.
There are four teams historically at the back of the pack who might put a pilot on the podium every now and then, but lack the budget to do so consistently.
The remaining four teams are in the middle, jockeying for third place and the hundreds of millions in additional funding it brings.
Elemental Machines is supposed to be a mid-pack team, one lucky streak away from being right up there with Provenance and Chronicle, but neither Elemental’s ships nor pilots have been performing the way they need to.
Elemental finished sixth out of ten in the team championship last year.
Clarke finished ninth out of the twenty pilots, her teammate Matthew eleventh.
They’re on track to do even worse this year.
It’s not Clarke’s fault that her shells jammed today, or that the dampener crapped out in Rio de Janeiro, or that the power unit froze in Copernicus, but no one wants to hear Clarke shift blame. Accountability.
“You’re right, it’s not my first challenge of the season,” Clarke says. “I’m working closely with our technical team, and I’m committed to improving. Elemental deserves better, and I’ll do whatever it takes to be better.”
Two couch cushions away, Julian makes a disgusted noise in the back of his throat. His mic is still in his lap, so the sound doesn’t get picked up, but Clarke hears it. Delphine does, too, going by the chastising look she shoots him.
It’s a special kind of mortification, being humiliated in front of one’s idol.
Delphine, at twenty-nine standard, is six years older than Clarke and Julian: enough of an age gap that they never competed against her in the youth circuits, but not so much of one that she felt untouchable the way some of the more senior pilots did.
It took Clarke multiple preseason F0 social events to be able to hold a semi-normal conversation with Delphine now that they are, in theory, peers.
“I think I speak for everyone when I say we’re just glad you’re okay, Clarke,” says a different reporter, smoothly covering the silence left behind by Clarke’s rote words. “And Julian, it was quite a bold move on your part to not wait for the safety ship.”
…Julian did what?
“I saw the yellow flag and slowed accordingly, but I was already in front of the safety ship by the time it deployed,” Julian says, nonchalant.
The bright lights cast his angular features in profile and bring out the bronze of his skin and the loose curl of his black hair. “I didn’t break any rules.”
“The FIC clearly felt that you didn’t follow the spirit of the rule, since they penalized you five positions.”
Naomi coughs again. Clarke schools her face back into something that hopefully looks less gobsmacked, but she feels like the dumbfounded expression was justified.
She’d seen footage of the crash in Medical.
It was unnerving to watch, especially when all the ships that had been behind her went rocketing past and she was left alone at the bottom of the loop.
That’s when the yellow flag came out, telling all the other pilots to slow down and stop trying to overtake one another, and the safety ship was deployed immediately after.
The safety ship normally comes out at the front of the pack, right on the nose of whoever’s P1 (in first place), and everyone has to stay behind it and in the same order until it leaves the track.
But Julian was P1 at the time, and he didn’t slow enough for the safety ship to deploy in front of him.
It’s a nearly unforgivable breach of decorum.
If Julian wasn’t the only pilot to give Delphine a run for her money in the past few years, he probably would’ve been disqualified.
But the competition between him and Delphine is the hook that Formula Zero’s riding to mind-boggling levels of viewership and sales, so instead he just gets knocked back five places in the final rankings.
Perks of being Julian Casperi, Clarke supposes.
“The Fédération Interplanétaire de les Courses and I have different interpretations of the rules,” Julian says, the Terran French name for the Interplanetary Federation of Racing rolling smoothly off his tongue, and Clarke’s jealousy spikes further.
Julian’s a colony kid, born and raised in one of the settlements on Jupiter’s moons, but he’s lost the accent and now sounds like a native Terran.
Clarke’s Martian and sounds Martian, no matter what language she’s speaking.
“Your interpretation is different than everyone’s,” Delphine says, rolling her eyes. “Sometimes I wonder if you have a different rule book out there past the belt, and Val just never bothered to give you the one the rest of us use.”
“I didn’t,” calls Valentina Dumond, Chronicle team principal. “I like him better like this.”
There’s scattered laughter before the next question, which brings everyone back to familiar territory by getting into the points gap between Delphine and Julian.
Silver Sight tries to circle back to Julian getting Clarke out of her ship, but Val steps in with a curt “We’re here to answer racing questions from racing journalists.
If your question is not about racing, you will be asked to leave. ”
Clarke is exhausted and stiff by the time they’re released. She didn’t get a chance to cool down properly after the accident, and sitting still for so long has made her muscles lock up. She makes it to the back hallway, then props herself against the wall to take a fortifying breath.
All she has to do is get to Elemental’s garage. She can collapse in her prep room until it sounds like the team is mostly packed up outside, then go to the hotel and just…stop functioning until tomorrow.
She peeks back into the main room. Naomi left twenty minutes ago, when it became clear that Clarke wasn’t going to get any more questions, and Yves almost never comes to press, but maybe Amira’s here?
Or anyone from Elemental, who could help Clarke stagger to relative privacy without making any more of a fool of herself?
No luck. Lots of faces she knows, but no one from the team.
She turns back to the hall, steeling herself, and recoils when there’s suddenly a person standing half a step away. Their hands shoot out to steady her, one gripping above her right elbow and the other ghosting over her sling before landing on her hip.
“Saints, Julian, make a sound when you move,” Clarke gasps, heart thundering in her ears at the surprise and his sudden proximity.
Julian releases her the instant she’s stable but stays close, like he doesn’t trust her to keep her balance. “What happened out there?”
“I already answered that question from Silver Sight.”
“Silver Sight?”
“The reporter. With the eyeballs.” Clarke tries to wave at her own eyes, but accidentally uses her bad arm and ends up doubled over with pain.
“You’re hurt.”
“No kidding,” Clarke deadpans. It comes out on a hitched wheeze.
“No, I mean—you’re in pain.”
“I’m fine.” Clarke forces herself upright, suppressing a wince.
“Sure you are,” Julian says, and silence falls between them.
It feels precarious, as silence between them so often does these days.
They only spend time together when it’s mandated by their jobs, and every second of that time needs to be filled and scripted, otherwise they end up at each other’s throats.
A rude So did you need something, or…? is on the tip of Clarke’s tongue, but Julian did pretty much save her life earlier. “Thank you. For what you did on the track, after I crashed. I already confirmed that Yves isn’t going to push for you to be fined for touching another team’s ship, so—”
“What’s going on with you?” he interrupts, low and intense. Everything about Julian is intense. He does things fully or not at all. It makes him a great racer, a loyal friend, and a pain in the ass.
She misses him so much that she feels physically ill, sometimes. Especially when she’s standing right in front of him, looking across the chasm between them, and has to take a step back from the edge so she doesn’t fall in.
She summons a bland smile. “Just some bad luck. Strategy decisions that didn’t pan out the way we’d hoped. I’m working on it.”
His brow creases. “I’m not a reporter. You don’t have to give me the company line.”
“You’re worse than a reporter. You’re the enemy.”
“Elemental’s not good enough for us to be enemies.”
He’s right, and they both know it. It still stings. And where Julian’s concerned, Clarke’s never been capable of not retaliating when provoked, so she gets right up into his face and snaps, “Then what are we? Because you’ve made it really clear that we’re not friends.”
Julian’s eyes darken to a brown so deep it’s like looking into the void. “I’ve made it clear? You’re putting this on me? If you would just—”
“If I would just what?” Clarke demands, threading her words with indignation to hide the underlying pain of having this dredged up again. “We’ve had this conversation eight thousand times, and nothing has changed, and nothing is going to change. Thank you for saving my life. Good night.”
She takes a step. Julian’s blocking her path to the exit, but he moves to the side and lets her leave.
He always lets her leave. It’s what’s defined their entire relationship.
Clarke always pulls back, and Julian always lets her, and somewhere along the way the line they wouldn’t cross turned into a chasm that can’t be bridged.
She’s familiar with the weight of his eyes on her back as she walks away. It doesn’t make it any easier to bear.