Chapter 9
It’s Clarke who ambushes Julian in the hallway behind the stage this time.
“What is wrong with you?” she asks, holding herself back from shoving him into the wall only because someone could round the corner any second.
He settles against the wall anyway, hands in his pockets, one ankle kicked over the other. He looks stupidly hot, all relaxed and languid, while Clarke’s wound so tightly that normal breathing is out of the question. “I didn’t say anything that wasn’t true.”
“Of course it’s true! Of course it—” Clarke realizes she’s halfway to yelling and hurls her voice into a harsh whisper instead. “My ship’s a piece of shit, Julian, but sometimes that’s just how it is. Sometimes the ship’s crappy.”
“The Clarke I know wouldn’t accept that. She’d demand better.”
“The Clarke you know? Well, the Julian I know would—oh my gods,” she says, an incredulous laugh popping loose as she realizes how the Julian she knows would be thinking about her situation. “That was you trying to help, wasn’t it? You thought calling out my team like that was going to help me.”
He sets his jaw. “Val said Yves would never step up unless forced. Someone has to, if you’re not going to do it.”
“So you swooped in to save the day? Gosh, Julian, thank you!” Clarke clasps her hands over her heart and steps in close, looking up at him through her eyelashes and laying the sarcasm on thick. “Whatever can I do to repay you?”
His gaze goes molten, and a corresponding ember settles low in Clarke’s belly. “I have a few suggestions.”
Thierry’s voice echoes in Clarke’s mind. Just sleep with him already.
There are reasons having sex with Julian is a bad idea. A lot of reasons. She’s having trouble remembering any of them.
She sways toward him. His eyes drop to her mouth.
A door opens and closes around the corner. Clarke goes cold and jumps back, putting space between them, and reminds herself that she’s mad at him. “You told me at Tiresias that Elemental’s not good enough for us to be enemies. Don’t try to make us enemies.”
She feels good about that as the last word. She turns for the exit, channeling her fury into stomping as she goes.
“Handle your shit, and I won’t have to,” Julian calls after her.
How much trouble would someone get in for strangling a fellow pilot while half the press corps is still packing up one room away? Clarke’s asking for a friend.
She whirls and stalks back to him. “My contract ends this year, Julian. Now is not the time for me to be a problem for my team.”
Julian blinks. “Your renewal’s not finalized yet?”
Crap. Crappy, crapping crap.
Most teams with expiring pilot contracts announce renewals during season break, as a way of keeping the fans excited during the off month.
For a pilot a team wanted to keep, conversations would’ve normally started weeks ago, hoping to get all the details worked out in time for the typical announcement window.
If you don’t announce during break, everyone assumes one of two things: Either negotiations aren’t going well, indicating a rift between team and pilot, or negotiations aren’t going at all.
Julian thought Clarke was already locked in for another few years at Elemental. Clarke just handed him her biggest vulnerability on a silver platter.
“No, that’s—that’s good,” Julian says, adjusting on the fly. “You can still ask for better terms, then. A ship that’s actually designed for you, for starters.”
“I’m not you,” Clarke hisses, jabbing him in the chest. “I’m not Julian Casperi, future interplanetary champion. I don’t have a winning record I can leverage in negotiations.”
Julian catches her wrist, holding fast when she tries to poke him again. “You’re never going to have one if Yves doesn’t figure out how to use you. The shitty hardware’s one thing, but the strategy decisions—”
Clarke jerks her arm. “What do you know about Elemental’s strategy decisions?”
He doesn’t let go. His fingers are cool against her overheated skin.
“Same as the rest of the system knows, since someone in your camp released your entire cockpit recording. We all heard Yves cut off your race engineer early on to tell you not to take risks, which made no fucking sense because you’re magic on tracks like this, and then tell you to push to catch Delphine later which also made no fucking sense given the state of your ship and biofeed at the time. ”
Clarke is starting to hate the pleased tingle that spreads over her when Julian slots a compliment in between statements that make her want to kill him.
She wants to just be angry. It’d be easier that way.
“Two snippets of radio conversation and you think you know everything? I don’t always agree with or understand his orders, but—”
Julian’s wearing his I will die on this hill face. “Go on, explain to me how it’s okay that Yves doesn’t listen to you. Has not once admitted that the ship’s seriously flawed, and it’s not all on you and Matthew. Overrules your engineer, constantly.”
“He’s the team principal! He’s allowed to overrule us!
” How unfair is it that Julian’s making her defend Yves, when she agrees with most of what he’s saying?
Not all of it, because he’s making it sound like there’s something underhanded going on and Clarke doesn’t find that realistic (Yves is a jerk, not evil), but she does wish Yves handled a lot of things differently.
She can’t admit that to Julian, though. That glance he shared with Val earlier, Val offering to talk to Clarke yesterday—Chronicle’s up to something, although even thinking it makes Clarke cringe at the melodrama. “Let go of me.”
Julian does, dropping her arm so quickly that she stumbles back half a step. He lunges forward, like he’s going to catch her. She withdraws farther, suddenly sure that if he touches her again, she’s going to do something she’ll regret.
They freeze like that: Clarke with her shoulders against the far wall, Julian with his hands outstretched. Time stops.
“Clarke.” Naomi stands at the end of the hall, sleek ponytail and brittle smile. Time starts again. “The team’s waiting for you, for debrief.”
Clarke does not like Naomi, but she’s happy to see her in this moment. She sidles away from Julian with relief. “Okay, sorry. Have a good break, Julian.”
Julian doesn’t do empty platitudes. He’s silent as they leave, and Clarke feels the heat of him watching until the door shuts behind them.
The paddock feels both calmer and more excited than usual at this point in a race weekend. There’s less of a rush, because there’s no hurry to get everything shipped off to the next race site, but everyone also wants to get their jobs done fast, so they can turn their brains off for break.
Naomi is radiating displeasure that slices through everything else. “What the hell was that? ‘Take this outside and settle it on the track,’ honestly—approachable, humble, dedicated. That’s what you’re supposed to be. Not antagonistic toward the Galilean Golden Boy.”
No one from the colonies on Jupiter’s four largest satellites, collectively known as the Galilean moons, has ever been the F0 champion.
Part of it’s that they’re the youngest and smallest human settlements in the solar system, part of it’s that life in the colonies doesn’t leave a ton of spare time for recreational activities, and part of it’s that transit through the asteroid belt, while a good deal safer today than it was even fifty years ago, still isn’t something done on a whim.
Julian had a lot of hurdles to get over to compete at the level he did in the youth circuits, faced a lot of barriers inner-rim kids like Clarke didn’t.
There’s a Grand Prix held in the reigning champion’s home nation every year.
If Julian wins, there’ll be a Formula Zero race in the Galileans for the first time ever.
The prestige, money, and tourism an F0 event brings would go a long way toward accelerating the colonies’ development.
Julian carries that weight every time he gets in his ship.
“Is that how it looked?” Clarke asks. “Like I was antagonizing him?”
“It looked like you were contemplating tearing his throat out with your teeth.”
Clarke thinks about Julian’s throat, and getting her mouth close to Julian’s throat. “How bad is it?”
“There’s already backlash. You set yourself against the fan favorite to dethrone Delphine, with no actual reason to do so beyond a childhood rivalry you apparently can’t get over.”
Clarke needs to throw something. Break something. Put on her favorite boots and go kicking through a patch of wild crystal back on Mars.
The team debrief doesn’t change that need for catharsis via violence.
In some sports, if you don’t know why something’s going well, you don’t talk about it for fear of jinxing it.
In Formula Zero, you talk about everything.
Endlessly. And then you talk about it again.
And then someone makes a spreadsheet of how many times you’ve talked about it, and you talk about the spreadsheet.
There’s a purpose to it. Most sports don’t run as high a risk of someone dying if every single element isn’t performing to precise expectations.
Clarke’s ship was supposed to fail today, but it didn’t, and since they don’t know why, they can’t say if it’ll happen again.
They can’t replicate a success they can’t explain.
“It’s got to be the compounder,” says one of the mechanics. “Nothing else makes sense.”
“We have checked the compounder eight times. This week,” start crew engineer Maki says tiredly. “Tomás, pull up the spreadsheet and show them how many times we’ve checked the compounder.”
“Eight on Clarke’s ship, only seven on Matthew’s,” confirms Tomás. “Think that’s significant?”
Clarke’s going to rip all her hair out, right here at the table. Would that be significant?
“We’re not making any more progress tonight,” Yves says, putting an end to the squabbling and, hopefully, this meeting. “It’s been a long four months. We’ll come at it with fresh eyes when our shutdown’s done. See you in two weeks, everyone. Clarke, stick around.”
Clarke, already halfway out of her chair, drops back into it. Matthew makes eye contact across the table and quirks his head, offering to stay.
Matthew had an awful race, fighting his ship for every inch. He’s pale and drawn under his supportive smile. Clarke’s been in his shoes, knows exactly how exhausted he must be.
She jerks her chin to the door. Matthew needs to rest, and Clarke doesn’t want witnesses to whatever dressing down Yves is about to give.
She checks her cuff while the others trickle out.
There’s the usual pile of unread post-race messages from people Clarke knows well enough to have given them her Link ID.
There’s the handful of fan comments Sara’s curated that she’d like Clarke to react to directly.
There’s a brief video from her family, Clarke’s brother shrieking with glee in the background while her mom and stepdad shout “Congratulations” over and over.
Thierry’s sent THAT WAS AMAZING, YOU DID AMAZING, also happy break and remember that you said you’d come to my birthday party.
“I’ll make this quick,” Yves says when the room is empty except for the two of them.
Clarke braces.
He pulls a holoscreen out of the table, logs in, swipes at something. Clarke’s cuff dings. “Just wanted to make sure this didn’t get lost in the post-race madness.”
The new message at the top of Clarke’s cuff is a calendar invite to a meeting two and a half weeks from now, at Elemental HQ. EM-83 Design Session.
The EM-83 is the model of next year’s ship. They’re inviting her to the meeting about next year’s ship. Hope gallops through Clarke’s heart.
“Any questions?”
“Does this mean my contract’s getting renewed?”
It’s out of her mouth before she can decide if she’s ready for the answer.
That’s what this has to mean, though, right?
That Clarke’s P2 today convinced Elemental’s leadership to keep her around?
Unless she really was supposed to have been invited all along, like Matthew said, and this was just Yves correcting that mistake, and he’s about to tell her that she needs to look elsewhere if she wants to keep racing.
The doubts grow, stifling that heartbeat of hope. She shouldn’t have asked. If he says no right now, after everything that’s happened today, Clarke’s not sure how she’ll react.
Yves slides the holoscreen back into the table. “We’re considering it.”
Clarke nods. Swallows. Not the answer she wanted, but not a no. “What can I do to help with the consideration process?”
Yves rises from the table. “What you should’ve been doing all along. Win.”
Win. In this ship. Under this team principal.
Clarke’s a professional. She keeps the outrage that’s threatening to tear her apart off her face, tells Yves she’ll see him at the meeting, and leaves.