Chapter 16
It must. Right?
“I know you like this off-planet stuff, but I’ve gotta say—”
“This is psychotic,” Clarke agrees, gazing down the pit lane next to Amira. “I mean, it seemed psychotic in the sim, but in person…wow.”
It’s early Friday morning, the start of the open practice session.
The normal atmosphere has taken on a nervous edge.
There’s a lot of staring past the veil, a lot of sidelong glances to see who’s going to be the first to cross it.
The session’s been open for five minutes, and usually there are at least a couple people out there by now wanting to take a quick lap with minimal traffic to test a recent modification, but no one’s left their garages yet.
Clarke’s not scared, to be clear. She’s trained every stretch and curve and variable of this track into her muscles.
She knows where the barriers are permeable and where they’re not.
She crashed and flew off the track on purpose in the sim over and over.
She is not going to get sucked into a black hole.
She’s, like, 80 percent certain she’s not going to get sucked into a black hole. And for a normal person, looking out over this course that looks like something a demon god of the void might dream up, 80 percent wouldn’t be anywhere near enough.
Clarke is not a normal person.
“Okay,” she says, grabbing her helmet from the stool she’d set it on and making for the ship. “Let’s do it.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Amira says, scrambling to keep up. “Were we just having the same conversation? You said psychotic. And wow!”
“I didn’t mean that those were bad things,” Clarke says. She hops up onto the wing of the idling ship and lowers herself into the cockpit.
“What did I do in a past life to earn this?” Amira grumbles, waving the support crew into position. “If you fly my ship into a black hole, I will find a way to make your ghost miserable.”
Clarke beams at her while buckling in. “This is why you’re my favorite.”
“I’m your favorite,” Maki says, appearing in Clarke’s line of vision and taking over the preflight routine. Clarke’s air tube gets connected and clipped, her radio and biofeed checked, her holodeck primed.
Clarke doesn’t quite hit the same headspace for practice or qualifying that she does for an actual race, but it’s pretty close.
She tunes out everything that isn’t how the ship feels under and around her.
There’s a lot of conversation happening over her head and on the various radio channels, but she doesn’t listen to them until Amira gets her attention. “Clarke?”
“Amira?”
“You’re clear. Take it easy, all right?”
Clarke grins.
—
She does take it easy for a few laps. She’s not an idiot.
Sims are hyperrealistic, but they’re not real, and Clarke doesn’t have a death wish.
She trundles through inversions, loops the loop at a snail’s pace, takes the double hairpin with its odd z-axis exit so slowly she almost stalls.
She talks it all through with Amira, explaining the elements she’s concerned about, how she’d prefer to approach them, and how the ship’s handling.
If Amira disagrees, Clarke defers. She is behaving herself.
She is a professional. She is coachable.
Yves had better be watching.
By the time Amira tells her she can open it up a little, there are more pilots getting their bearings on the track and the race director’s starting to play with variables.
They all get plenty of warning when an element’s about to be changed and what the change will be.
Clarke takes the double hairpin too fast after a steep adjustment to the angle, loses control, and flat spins for a second, only keeping her ship out of the barrier because she’d made that exact mistake a dozen times on the sim and her reflexes took over.
She idles for a moment after the spin, waiting for her heart rate to settle. She makes sure she’s far enough to the side that no one coming through at speed will hit her, and points the nose of the ship toward the nearest black hole.
Clarke gets why people come to Iskret.
It’s a captivating view, that’s for sure.
The black hole resembles a giant eye: a whirling gold-orange-red iris made of gas and dust surrounding a pupil singularity of a black so black it makes you realize you’ve never actually seen true black before.
A thin ring of bright light—the photon sphere—separates the pupil and iris.
It hurts to look at. You can’t stop looking at it. You find yourself wondering how close you could get without falling in, and if you’re brave enough to find out.
“Clarke.”
Clarke blinks back to herself. “Yves?”
“Want to explain why you’ve been ignoring Amira and staring into a black hole for five minutes?”
Startled, Clarke checks the practice session clock. It hasn’t actually been five whole minutes, but it’s certainly been longer than she thought. She reorients herself and gets moving again. “Just taking in the view now so I don’t get distracted later this weekend.”
“Finish the lap,” Yves says, obviously not buying it. “Take element twenty-three with ten percent sharper pitch, ten percent less roll than last time, then bring it in. The techs want to adjust something in the drivetrain before the afternoon session.”
“Got it,” Clarke says, and spends the rest of the lap berating herself.
—
“You won me a bunch of money for being first onto the track today, so thanks for that,” Thierry says, offering Clarke a water from the fridge in his hotel room.
“Who bet against me?” Clarke rolls over where she’s flopped across Thierry’s bed to stretch for the handoff.
She probably should’ve just gone back to her own room when she was finally released from team duties a bit ago (after the morning practice session, lunch with fans, a press event, the afternoon session, team dinner, and two hours spent with her trainer, Clarke’s running on fumes), but she didn’t get a chance to catch up with Thierry at all at Mare Imbrium, and the rest of this weekend is even more packed than today.
“Lennox.”
“Redfoot? Your team principal?”
“She never believes me when I tell her you’re only pretending to be well-behaved and sane. Easy money for me.”
Clarke yawns. “The track isn’t that bad.”
“The track is a nightmare. You on this track is a nightmare. I’m going to ask the FIC if they’ll let the rest of us forfeit and just give you the win so no one else has to race it.”
Clarke shrugs magnanimously. “If that’s what you think is best.”
“I think,” Thierry says, sitting down on the other side of the bed, “that there’s something going on with you and Julian. You smiled at each other during pilot roundup. Actual smiles.”
“Your bar for our interactions is concerningly low.”
“And yet, you’ve struggled to clear it until this weekend, so…”
Clarke reaches over her head for a pillow and chucks it at Thierry. He bats it away and lets it fall onto his still-unpacked suitcase.
With the amount they travel in F0, everyone’s got their own hotel routines.
Thierry digs specific things out of his suitcase as he needs them.
Clarke unpacks immediately, even if she’s only going to be somewhere for one night.
Delphine, according to interviews, brings her own pillow.
Several of the older pilots travel and stay in their personal cruisers, not bothering with hotels at all.
Does Julian still sleep in a pair of ratty old sweatpants and long-sleeved T-shirt when he’s in a hotel? He used to. He claimed that the hotel sheets, no matter how soft, didn’t feel right on his skin.
Clarke could ask, she realizes with a swell of happiness.
Their message thread isn’t sitting fallow anymore.
After they left things on good terms last weekend, Julian sent a picture of Graham falling asleep in a team meeting.
In exchange, Clarke shared Kuari’s latest bug acquisition (no legs, lots of wings, entirely horrifying).
The back-and-forth’s been steady ever since.
Nothing particularly meaningful, nothing serious, but it feels like a lifeline.
“Yeah,” Thierry says, drawing the syllable out and looking at Clarke’s face.
“There’s nothing going on with you and Julian at all.
I’m just going to go ahead and credit myself with fixing it, since I invited both of you to my birthday, and hey speaking of, are you sure you don’t want to do anything for your birthday? ”
“I am doing something for my birthday. I’m racing at Monza.”
Monza is the next course on the schedule, located on Earth.
Monza and Monaco, the site that traditionally hosts the last race of the season, are the two F0 tracks with the most legacy in motorsport.
F1’s been racing at Monza and Monaco, off and on, for nearly a millennium.
F0’s first ever race was at Monaco. The other twenty-two locations in an F0 season may vary, but not Monza and Monaco. They’re the absolutes.
Clarke’s twenty-third birthday falls on the Monza Grand Prix this year.
She’s bringing her family out for the weekend.
She’d love to have her mom, stepdad, and brother at every race, but they have their own lives and she tries not to ask them to sacrifice more than they already have to support her.
For her birthday, though, they insist, and Clarke’s not going to say no.
She’s carved some time out of the schedule between team events to spend with them, and there’s a big Elemental-hosted birthday dinner on Saturday night after qualifying.
Anders, unfortunately, will also be in attendance.
Monza is also Clarke’s self-imposed deadline for telling Rhynn that they can start poking around to see if other teams would be interested in making Clarke an offer if Elemental doesn’t come to the table. Three races after break, that’s what Clarke said.
She’s trying not to think about it.
Thierry gives Clarke a flat look. “That’s not a birthday celebration, that’s work.”
“It can be both. I’m efficient like that. And I’m doing a day with my family at the beach after.”
“If I have to talk to you any more while you’re in this mood, I’m going to commit atrocities,” Thierry announces. He lunges across the mattress to get to the control panel for the wallscreen and pulls up their entertainment options. “What are we watching?”
Clarke reclaims the tossed pillow and squashes it into a comfortable shape under her chest. “I’m behind on that baking show. The one with the droids, not the swords.”
Thierry tabs to Baking Bots. They watch until the contestant who built this week’s worst-performing droid (its pastry confection is an underproved mess) gets kicked off the show, then Clarke says good night.
Matthew and Yves are in the hall when she makes it to the Elemental section of the hotel.
Matthew’s standing in the doorway to his room, arms folded tight across his chest, unhappiness written on every line of his face.
Yves looks over at the noise made by Clarke’s arrival, irritation at the interruption on every line of his.
“Sorry,” Clarke says automatically, although if they wanted to have a private conversation, they could be doing it actually inside Matthew’s room with the door shut. Or on a call. “Everything okay?”
It’s a rhetorical question. Matthew’s practice session sucked. He’s as far from being an off-planet racer as it gets, and everyone could see that he wasn’t comfortable on this track.
“It’s under control,” Yves says. Matthew glares at the carpet. “We’ll see you in the morning, Clarke.”
“Sure,” Clarke says, edging around them cautiously to get to her room, farther down the hall. “See you in the morning.”