Chapter 17
In the morning, Matthew Agresta is no longer a pilot for Elemental Machines.
“What the hell, what the hell, what the hell,” Clarke chants to herself as she gets dressed one-handed, scrolling through headlines and posts she’s been tagged in with the other.
Insanity at Iskret: Agresta gets the boot, St. Sebastian switches boats in unexpected mid-season contract shake-up
How Rafferty St. Sebastian’s Enclave–Elemental Move Impacts the Team and Individual Brackets, and What It Probably Means for Madeline Clarke
Clarke would very much like to know what it means for Madeline Clarke, too, but she doesn’t want to read some journalist’s speculation. She grabs her gear bag and tears out of the hotel room.
Elemental terminated Matthew’s contract, more than a year early. The buyout for that is huge, and it’s not like Elemental’s swimming in excess cash. Raff’s good, but inconsistent, and the points he’s earned to date for Enclave won’t transfer to Elemental’s team bucket. What’s the logic here?
She slows as she passes Matthew’s door. Should she knock?
Clarke wouldn’t want to talk to Matthew if the situation were reversed (Clarke wouldn’t want to talk to anyone if Elemental dumped her overnight during a race weekend), but Matthew’s a more well-adjusted person than Clarke.
Clarke can’t fix this for him, but she can express sympathy.
She can let him vent, if he needs to. He’s got to be hurting.
He came to Elemental from Enclave. Now Yves is washing his hands of Matthew in favor of a different Enclave pilot, and to make matters worse, Enclave obviously doesn’t want Matthew back if they’re already posting about activating their reserve pilot.
She knocks. He doesn’t answer within a few seconds, and Clarke doesn’t have any more time to spare. She sends Matthew a message as she waits for the elevator, bouncing her weight heel to heel. Just saw the news. Yves is a bastard. Hope you’re okay.
The elevator’s slow. She flips to Thierry’s contact, sends a quick You’re the vet on your team now!
Congrats/sorry, lmk if you need anything?
She then finds Umeko Agawa, Enclave’s reserve pilot turned Thierry’s new partner, and sends her a message, too.
She doesn’t know Umeko at all, but Clarke remembers the nerves before her F0 debut well, and she had months to get used to the idea.
Glad to have you on the grid. I’m around if you need anything.
She responds to one message, too, from Julian. His simple Saw the news. You okay? brought her a moment of peace, and now she writes back. Confused. Pissed on Matthew’s behalf. I’m okay.
The elevator arrives. It’s empty, thankfully, and Clarke leans against the wall and hovers her thumb over Raff’s contact. She should make a public welcome-to-the-team post, but Sara and Naomi probably have specific language she should use. A private message, though, she should be able to do.
She can’t come up with the words. Rafferty St. Sebastian is an asshole, and Clarke’s not happy about this.
The elevator door opens. Clarke pulls the brim of her cap down and books it across the lobby, keeping to a fast walk only because sprinting would draw attention.
The lobby is crowded, the path to the paddock is crowded, the paddock itself is crowded, but Clarke miraculously makes it to Elemental Hospitality with just a few strained smiles at people who try to rope her into conversation.
On a normal qualification day, there’d be a handful of people in the suite right now.
True prep on the ships doesn’t start down in the garage level for another hour, so there’d only be a few admins around doing admin things while the breakfast bar staff get set up for service.
Today is not a normal qualification day.
There are easily fifty people packed into the space, huddled into small groups.
Sara catches Clarke’s eye from across the room, holds up her cuff, and grimaces while drawing her hand across her throat.
Good thing Clarke didn’t post anything public, then.
Clarke doesn’t quite know what to do next.
Her instinct was to get here as fast as possible, assuming she’d be swarmed upon arrival with tasks and instructions, but other than Sara’s tacit warning no one really seems to care that Clarke’s in the building.
But then again, these aren’t Clarke’s people.
The upstairs crowd are the executives, the marketing and PR teams, the operations staff.
They’re a key part of the business, but if they don’t have marching orders for her right now, she’s not going to hang around waiting to be noticed.
She sidles through the crowd to the stairs and heads down to the garage.
Amira’s on her in seconds, seizing Clarke’s arm. “Nice of you to finally show up.”
“I’m not even supposed to be here for another hour!
” Clarke protests, letting herself be herded to the engineering station, where they can press up against the workstations and be out of the way.
Her ship is still under the protective cloth they drape it in overnight.
Matthew’s ship (Raff’s, now) is uncovered and there are a dozen people working on it.
Yves and Raff are watching from the wall with Raff’s new race engineer.
“Right, because I’m sure you didn’t wake up to a million messages from Yves and Naomi to get here—oh.” Amira notes the look on Clarke’s face. “They didn’t call you?”
“They did not,” Clarke says, just now realizing how weird that is.
It’s so normal for Yves to leave Clarke out of discussions, for Clarke to not even know discussions are happening, that it didn’t occur to her that, yeah, someone in team management should’ve talked to her about this.
Mid-season switches are always super cloak-and-dagger, but someone should’ve told her something this morning when the news broke.
Although, come to think of it, Clarke’s very clearly demonstrated that she can keep her mouth shut when it comes to contracting conversations.
Yves could’ve told her that they were dropping Matthew long before today.
Clarke could’ve kept that to herself, and not been blindsided three hours before she has to qualify on a course that’s got the other pilots freaking out.
“Okay. Well. This is a mess, but at least it’s not our mess,” Amira says. “You feeling good about qualification?”
Clarke gives her a dubious look. “Really?”
“There’s nothing we can do about…that,” Amira says, waving her hand at Raff’s side of the garage. “And it’s not our responsibility. Our responsibility is getting you as close to P1 as we possibly can. So that’s what we’re going to focus on.”
It sounds so clear, when Amira puts it like that.
So simple. Clarke understands when Amira talks to her.
It’s what makes them a good pilot–race engineer pairing.
Clarke deals with the ship, Amira handles everything else (Clarke herself, input from the other engineers, the race marshals) and relays critical information so Clarke gets everything she needs from one source.
That’s how it’s supposed to work, except when Yves steps in because Amira refuses to give Clarke an order she doesn’t agree with.
Clarke, privately, thinks that Amira could do Yves’s job better than he does. But Yves has the role, which means he’s ultimately in charge.
“Right, focusing,” Clarke says, taking a seat in front of a screen showing telemetry data. “I’ve got another idea to address the power loss we’re seeing on ascending banks.”
—
Yves brings Raff over ten minutes later. Clarke puts on a smile as she stands, annoyed that she has to pull her brain out of what she and Amira were doing. They were getting somewhere with the power loss issue, Clarke could feel it.
That’s the story of the whole season, really.
If Clarke’s working on one of the ship’s many problems with just Amira, or just Maki, or spreadsheet whisperer/controls engineer Tomás, they make headway.
But the second someone higher up the food chain gets involved, all forward progress comes to a halt while a million reasons that solution wouldn’t work are brought to light.
Clarke’s mind brings up a memory of something Julian said. Back at Lion’s Head, after the post-race press conference, he’d implied that there was something going on at Elemental. Something insidious. Clarke dismissed it, then.
Now, she looks over Yves’s shoulder to where a tech is painstakingly removing the Agresta decal from the back of the other ship. A St. Sebastian one, in Elemental’s color and style, is waiting on a nearby counter to take its place.
How long had this switch been in the works? What else doesn’t Clarke know about?
“Welcome to the team,” Clarke says, offering her hand. “We’re glad to have you.”
Raff shakes. His grip is firm, just shy of being painful. “I’m sure you are. Not exactly having a great season, are you?”
Like Clarke said: Rafferty St. Sebastian is an asshole.
He’s been in F0 for twelve years and hasn’t managed to stay with any one team for more than three consecutive seasons.
He’s rude and abrasive. He has moments of brilliance on the track, but he also goes through long dry spells.
He acts like anyone younger than him has to earn the right to be spoken to as an equal.
Clarke’s pretty sure he picked up that and several of his other charming habits from her father, when the two of them were teammates for a while toward the end of Anders’s career.
“It hasn’t been the smoothest season, no,” Clarke says. She exerts careful pressure in the handshake, giving him back every iota of squeeze. “But it’s getting more interesting every day.”
“Play nice, children,” Yves says, just as someone calls his name from upstairs. He glances toward the stairwell, harried. “Clarke, I’m leaving Raff in your hands. Pilot-to-pilot, tell him what to expect, okay?”
He’s walking away before he finishes talking, not waiting for Clarke’s response.
She stares after him for a second, wishing she were surprised by the assumption that she’s fine with sacrificing her own prep time to help Raff settle in.
Wishing that Yves hadn’t spent this whole year setting the expectation that Clarke would, without question, do whatever was asked of her.
Wishing she’d drawn firmer boundaries, or been less willing to compromise them.
She can’t feel the chip in her arm, not physically. But for a moment, she thinks she can, and she thinks about asking if Raff has a chip or a patch.
She pushes the thought away and closes out of her ship’s diagnostics, flipping the screen to the neatly ordered list of known issues with the EM-82. “Okay, pilot-to-pilot. First thing to know is that you’ll get shimmy on—”
“Tell you what,” Raff interrupts. “If I have questions, I’ll ask. Otherwise, let’s just save ourselves some time and not pretend that there’s anything you can teach me, okay?”
Amira, who’d moved a few steps away when Raff and Yves approached (the traitor), chokes on her coffee.
Clarke’s temper has a quick spark, but a long fuse.
She gets mad easily, but it’s low-level anger, something she can stew in for hours without blowing up.
Yves’s bullshit, Anders’s condescension, every interviewer and fan who thinks they’ve identified what Clarke needs to do differently after ten minutes of thinking about it when an entire team hasn’t been able to figure it out in a year and a half—Clarke can tolerate it all without losing her cool.
Julian’s remarkably proficient at triggering premature detonation, but that’s Julian-specific.
Raff is just another in a long line of jerks who’s going to fail to get the reaction he wants out of Clarke. He wants her to be offended or humiliated? He wants her to lash out, to validate whatever belittling characterization he’s built in his head?
Tough shit.
Clarke sees red, and then she swallows it. She tamps the rage down into something manageable and sets it to simmer, where it can either burn itself out or get fired up again if she needs it. She smiles blithely at Raff and his stupid, grungy-looking beard. “Okay. I’ll be here if you need anything.”
He scoffs and walks across the garage, presumably to lurk over the shoulders of his new mechanics.
Clarke imagines picking up the nearest semi-sharp object (this is a working garage, there are a lot of implements that could double as weapons), disemboweling him, and strangling him with his own intestines.
The mental image is comforting. She uses it as fuel all through qualifying, fairly breezing through Q1 and Q2.
The other pilots seem to be playing it safe on this intimidating track during the first two rounds, but competition picks up in Q3 when top starting spots for tomorrow are on the line.
Clarke finishes in P8, and she’s happy with that.
She’s even happier that Raff had to retire his ship in Q2, after telemetry started detecting shimmy in his fuselage.
If he’d let Clarke finish talking earlier, he would’ve known how to mitigate the effects, but he didn’t, so his race engineer eventually had to tell him to pull off to the side of the track so he didn’t do serious damage to the hardware.
What a shame. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. Clarke’s torn up about it. No, really.