Chapter 6
It’s not that she hasn’t thought about sleeping with Julian before, because of course she has.
He’s objectively attractive, has been since he came out of his first growth spurt with a jawline and shoulders, and he’s only gotten hotter since with the addition of tattoos and muscles.
He’s a few months older, twenty-three standard to her twenty-two, and they’ve been in each other’s pockets over this high-stakes sport for years.
Julian ticks every box on Clarke’s list of what turns her on.
Watching his hands manipulate the controls on a racing sim used to be enough to fuel a week of dreams from which she’d wake up sweaty and short of breath and unable to look him in the eye at breakfast.
He feels the same. She knows he does. There were moments, when they were younger. Moments where the air between them felt charged. He’d look at her, maybe even be touching her, and she’d think, Maybe we can do this. Maybe we can have this.
So, she’s thought about sleeping with him.
But she hasn’t let herself think about it anytime recently, not since they deliberately decided they could never be more than friends (and then watched that friendship fall apart under the strain of holding themselves back, and their careers, and Connor’s death).
Thierry didn’t know any of this when he made that joke last night. But he watered a long-dormant seed, and it’s been growing in Clarke’s mind ever since.
“Five-minute warning, Clarke.”
“Got it,” Clarke confirms over the radio to Amira, and shoves herself off the wall of the narrow alley that separates Elemental’s garage from Martian Motors’.
She shoves every thought that isn’t about the next lap on this track out of her skull, too.
What Julian Casperi may or may not be like in bed has no place in qualifying.
Qualifying sets the grid, which is the order ships will start in for the Grand Prix.
It happens in three rounds, starting with Q1: Twenty-four minutes, clock the fastest lap you can.
It doesn’t matter when you do it, just that you get it done and you’re not one of the five slowest, because they get eliminated.
Same goes for Q2, except you only have nineteen minutes to get your lap done.
In Q3, they’re down to ten pilots, fifteen minutes.
The fastest pilot in qualifying starts first on the grid on Sunday, the coveted P1 position.
Clarke hasn’t made it to Q3 very often this season, but she did today. She’s an off-planet racer, after all. And in five minutes, she’s going to take her ship out and prove to everyone—herself included—that she belongs here.
What does not belong here, in this alley, is Julian. And yet there he stands, helmet tucked under his arm. Looking at her.
“You looked good out there in Q2,” he says.
“I know,” Clarke says, because she does, and also because encountering Julian one-on-one unexpectedly has thrown her off balance.
This is not the first time they’ve seen each other since that tense post-press argument after Tiresias last week.
Race weekends are packed with events that bring all the pilots together, for fan work or media filming or the general pageantry that goes hand in hand with Formula Zero.
They’ve crossed paths in front of the same cameras half a dozen times in the past thirty-six hours.
Clarke is always aware of where Julian is in a crowded room, always feeling the skin on the back of her neck prickle when he’s close.
It’s different, when it’s just the two of them. Heightened. The ever-present din of the paddock gets turned down, like her senses are prioritizing input from Julian over everything else.
This is not what Clarke needs right before Q3. This is compromising her preflight headspace. She sounds annoyed when she says, “If you’re looking for the Chronicle garage, it’s three buildings up.”
“I was looking for you, actually.”
“Why? Q3 is about to start.”
“I know. And I don’t mean to—I’ve been getting an earful about needing a good result this weekend, after what I did and the points it cost me at Tiresias,” he says, shoulders creeping up closer to his ears.
“Val’s on my case about making sure I have my eye on the prize.
And I get it, that’s her job, but I couldn’t listen to it anymore.
So I started thinking about how you and me and Connor used to blow off steam when the pressure was getting to be too much, and how much better I’d feel after, and I wanted to see you for a minute. Sorry. I can go.”
“It’s fine,” Clarke says, an automatic response to Julian being stressed enough to show vulnerability in hostile territory.
The walls on either side of them are Elemental’s light, bright blue and Martian Motors’ rusty orange-red.
Julian, in his rich Chronicle-green racing suit, could not stand out more if he tried.
“But I don’t have any of Connor’s dumb jokes handy. ”
“I should’ve written them down.” Julian’s expression goes a little distant, a little wistful.
“Yeah, me too.” The tinge of shared melancholy softens Clarke further, and she swallows some of her pride.
Thinks about what Thierry said yesterday—not the sleeping-together part, the rest of it.
“Hey, listen. Thierry told me you think I’m mad at you, and I’m not.
I’m irritated about you prying into things at Elemental that aren’t your business, but I shouldn’t have said what I said.
We can be competitors without being enemies. ”
Relief brings Julian’s shoulders down from their hunch the longer Clarke talks. He waits, making sure she’s done, and asks, “But we can’t be friends?”
Exasperation smacks into Clarke like breaking the surface of an ice bath post-race. Is he constitutionally incapable of leaving well enough alone? “Okay, this? I can’t do this right now.”
“Then when?” Julian moves toward her, earlier patience nowhere to be seen. “If you’re finally willing to talk to me, then just give me a time and place, Clarke, and I swear—”
“Clarke? We’re ready for—oh.” Amira, who’s just poked her head around the edge of the garage at the end of the alley, takes in the scene: Julian leaning forward eagerly on his toes, Clarke leaning away like she’s about to bolt. “Everything okay here?”
“Perfect,” Clarke says, storming past Julian.
“Clarke,” Julian calls after her.
“Q3.” Clarke raises her voice, focusing only and exclusively on Amira. “Anything I should know?”
Amira pivots with Clarke’s movement. “No changes. You want to do a warm-up lap?”
Clarke doesn’t need to warm up. The rekindled frustration with Julian and the impossibility of their situation has her boiling inside her suit. “I’m warm. Let’s get going.”
—
Saints, Clarke loves racing.
The track opens up in front of her. It’s marked by beacons that glow gold, both in her actual vision and on the control deck, which is the holoscreen she uses to fly the ship.
The variables only move during the Grand Prix and practice sessions, not during qualifying, so she knows what’s coming and when.
The first element is a descent that starts right here—then a corkscrew here—the harness pulls tight against her chest, bringing out a faint twinge in her still-sensitive collarbone—then bottoming out before a sharp climb with a 180-degree rotation over the next two, three, four seconds, so she’s flying upside down relative to the cascade.
There’s nothing like this, she thinks as she does a hard wrench to the left and slows down to tackle one of the zigzaggy chicane sections.
Bits of starfall shatter and dance across her windshield.
All the heartache and disappointment, the long hours training, the invasive cameras, letting someone else tell her what to eat and how to work out so that her body is the perfect weight and build for this—it’s worth it.
She whips out of a turn and onto the first of what counts as a straightaway in off-planet racing, a section with a gentle vertical curve. She opens up the kickdrive again and nudges the jaw control for her radio. “How’s my pace?”
“Four-tenths faster than your Q2 lap” is Amira’s prompt response. “This is great, Clarke, keep it up. You’ve got Belette ahead at the curve; she’ll move to top-right relative.”
She’s averaging four-tenths of a second faster than she did in the previous qualifying round. Belette from Martian Motors is in front of her, not doing a timed lap yet, and will make space for Clarke to pass without contest.
Clarke flies, and flies, and flies.
Laps are longer for off-planet tracks than on-planet, both in distance and the time it takes to complete one.
The typical off-planet lap is twenty kilometers long, and can be completed in about three minutes if a pilot is maintaining a good pace.
Lion’s Head is a little lengthier than most. Clarke crosses the line for her timed lap at 3:08. 72.
“Nicely done, that’s P1 for now,” Amira says as Clarke eases back, breathing hard. “Faster than Provenance or Chronicle did in Q2, too. You want to stay out?”
There’s still more than ten minutes left in Q3. Clarke can call it a day and be done now, happy with her performance, or she can keep looping the track at a slower pace, monitoring how well the other pilots do and trying again if anyone happens to beat her time.
“I’ll stay out,” Clarke says. She’s grinning like an idiot inside her helmet, and hopes no one is watching the feed from her visor cam. “More time with the ship is always good.”
It’s a convenient excuse, but the truth is that she just doesn’t want to stop yet.
This is the best she’s felt in the seat in weeks.
She stays far away from the prime racing lines, leaving plenty of room for other pilots making their attempts to roar past, and just enjoys flying while the timer in one corner of her deck ticks down to zero.
“Okay, that’s it,” Amira says, when 00:00.00 flashes. “You’re P1 for tomorrow. Congratulations!”