Chapter 23
There’s a red flag during the Monza Grand Prix.
It happens two-thirds of the way through the race, when the vigilance required on a crisscrossed track like this has worn everyone thin.
Umeko doesn’t pull up quickly enough after a steep descent and bounces the bottom of her ship off the barrier.
Clarke sees it happen, the portion of the track Umeko’s on right above the section Clarke’s on.
She sees the sparks, the smoke, and Umeko’s ship tumbling tail over nose until it crashes into another barrier.
Clarke’s on the radio before Amira. “Is Umeko okay?”
“We’re not sure yet. It’s going to get flagged. Safety ship’s coming out.”
Clarke slows down. Gaps close all across the order; Clarke in P13 catches up to P12, and P14 catches up to Clarke. “Anyone else involved?”
“It doesn’t look like it,” Amira says. “She was P17. There were only two ships behind her, and they both avoided collision.”
Clarke flies past the timing line. She’s going slow enough to pick out faces in the grandstands. “Anything on Umeko?”
“Nothing yet, but it’s now a red flag. Repeat, red flag. Come to the pit lane.”
“I see it,” Clarke says as the track beacons and her deck border turn red. “Coming in.”
A red flag indicates that the session has been suspended. Given the circumstances, it probably means that the remains of Umeko’s ship are blocking the track, so much so that others can’t pass the wreckage safely. Everyone must return to the pit lane and wait for a decision about how to proceed.
It doesn’t necessarily mean that Umeko’s seriously injured. That’s not the sort of thing they’d signal with flags. Flags are about track conditions, not pilot status. But there’s an awful lot of correlation between the two.
There was a red flag when Connor died. Does Julian think about Connor whenever this happens, too?
The ships at the front of the pack were already past the pit lane entry when the red flag came out.
They stop on the course and wait for the ships behind them to box, then spin in place and backtrack.
Clarke’s already taken her one mandatory pit stop this race, but there’s no penalty for working on a ship during a red flag, so her crew comes out to top up the battery and swap the shells again.
Amira’s on the pit wall, on the opposite side of the pit lane from the garage. Clarke watches her, trying to read her body language. She leans back into the pit lane a few times, looking down the row to where the race director sits.
There’s a clock on Clarke’s deck that counts the seconds she’s stopped in the box. It’s at 0:23 when Amira says, “Umeko’s okay. Broken leg, they think, but she’s okay.”
Tension seeps out of Clarke’s muscles. A broken leg can be repaired in Medical in an hour or two. If there are no complications, and with the bye week coming up, Umeko will be back in the seat for Tempe Terra. “Thanks. And the red?”
Amira makes an unhappy noise that sends static over the line. “At least thirty minutes. They think the impact damaged one of the beacons.”
Clarke lets out a low whistle. The type of force it takes to damage a track beacon is astronomical, literally. Umeko’s lucky to have gotten away with only a broken bone. “I’m good to get out, then?”
Some pilots stay in their ships during prolonged red flag stoppages.
Clarke’s not one of them. If she has to sit in the ship for more than a few minutes without moving, she gets jittery, and that does more harm to her headspace than having to psych herself up all over again once they get the signal that the session will resume soon.
After confirmation from Amira that she can, she collapses her deck, unlatches her harness, and unclips her air tube.
She climbs out awkwardly, limbs stiff. Amira comes across the lane to steady her and guides Clarke to a stool. “Something to drink?”
Clarke shakes her head, cracking the seal on her helmet and shoving it up to her forehead. “I don’t want to have to pee when we get back out there.”
Chief Engineer Timothy comes over with a holoscreen in hand. He shows it to Amira and points at a spike in a graph. “We’re going to replace the diffuser.”
Amira’s forehead creases. “Now? In the middle of the race?”
The diffuser was the piece that started smoking near the end of the Iskret race. Clarke asks, “There’s something wrong with the diffuser again?”
Amira taps, scrolls, taps, frowns. “Looks like it, yeah. But we have to do a full shutdown to get to it. The power unit’s in the way.”
“We have the time,” Timothy says. “They can’t just replace the one beacon. They’ll have to run diagnostics on the whole network. The pause will go long.”
The track beacons mark the course, generate the zero-grav environment, and emit the protective barrier. If the beacon network isn’t flawless, ships can fall out of the sky or crash into spectators. It’s not something the FIC is willing to cut corners on.
Amira doesn’t look convinced. “We’re still seeing that data glitch on power unit start-up. Doing a full power cycle is a risk.”
“We’ve done a dozen full power cycles since that bug was logged, and there’s no noticeable impact,” Timothy argues. “It’s more of a risk to leave a faulty diffuser in place.”
Amira drums her nails on her biceps and looks to Clarke. “What do you think?”
Clarke’s surprised to be asked. “I—”
“We’re doing it,” Timothy interrupts. “I already cleared it with Yves.”
“He really does not like me,” Clarke says, after Timothy turns on his heel and starts barking orders at the crew.
“He certainly does not seem to,” Amira agrees, and goes to oversee the work.
There’s nothing for Clarke to do except stay out of the way. She steps out into the pit lane, stretching her arms overhead. Five garages up, Julian’s doing the same thing.
He sees her, too. He waves, and makes an up-and-down motion with his palm, as if cuing a calming breath.
Clarke can breathe just fine on her own, thank you very much. But it’s nice that he cares.
—
Ninety minutes after Umeko’s crash, they’re back on the track, lined up on the grid.
Clarke goes through a truncated version of her mental routine, sinking back into that place where this is all she needs to think about.
Atreus’s gift and if it means what she might think it means: irrelevant.
Anders’s judgment: irrelevant. Yves’s refusal to engage in contract negotiations, Raff’s animosity, Matthew’s silence: irrelevant.
The blues go out. The reds go out. Clarke shoves her hands and feet forward.
Nothing happens.
She doesn’t get slammed back into her seat by familiar thrust. The power unit doesn’t roar through her bones. The kickdrive behind her seat doesn’t kick.
Step one of surviving a Formula Zero crash is shutting off the power unit.
Clarke can’t do that, because the power unit isn’t responding.
And there are three ships directly behind her that are expecting her to move forward, and don’t wait to confirm that she is before engaging their own power units.
She feels the first impact. She doesn’t feel the second.
—
“Sorry,” she says when the door to Medical slides open. “I’m fine, really, I just—what are you doing here?”
“I’m your father,” Anders says, following Imogen into the room.
“You are not who I was thinking of when the doctor said that my parents wanted to see me.”
He shrugs and leans against the wall, eyes on one of the screens showing post-race coverage.
Imogen comes to the side of the cot Clarke’s sitting on. “You’re really okay?”
“I’ll be sore for a few days, but I wasn’t actually injured,” Clarke promises. “It looked worse than it was.”
“It looked bad.”
“I know.”
“That part never gets easier.”
Clarke returns the squeeze of her mom’s hand. “I know. Is Kuari okay?”
Kuari wasn’t as close to Connor as he is to Julian, since Connor never lived with them, but he still knew him well.
Connor’s death shook him badly. He used to not be able to watch Clarke’s and Julian’s races live, distracting himself until it was over and Ihaka and Imogen could tell him that they were both okay.
The first time Clarke got in an accident after Connor, Kuari was inconsolable.
Watching her crash today can’t have been easy.
Shame bubbles in Clarke’s chest at the thought of what she puts her family through.
“He was worried, but he’ll be fine. He’s with your dad.” Imogen clears her throat and turns her head, looking across the room to where Umeko is still in a healing pod, asleep. “She’s all right, too?”
“She will be.”
“No family here?”
Clarke looks over at Umeko. The Medical ship at an F0 paddock isn’t very big, just two healing pods and a couple cots with equipment-lined walls.
If someone needs more advanced care than the pods can provide, the whole thing picks up and flies to the nearest hospital.
“I don’t know. She doesn’t talk much. Her team will take care of her, though.
Enclave’s good like that, Thierry says.”
“Enclave is the team Rafferty St. Sebastian came from,” Imogen says, injecting more disdain into the syllables of Raff’s name than Clarke might’ve thought a name could hold.
Raff said some unkind things at dinner last night while Clarke was in the room, and she wonders what else might’ve come out of his mouth when she was outside with Julian.
“You can’t blame Enclave for Raff,” Anders says unexpectedly. “He’s just…like that. Always has been.”
Huh. Clarke’d been assuming that Raff learned his bad habits and attitude from Anders, but maybe that’s not the case? Not that Clarke’s willing to take Anders at his word, but it’s something to think about. Another thing to think about. Clarke’s getting pretty full up on things to think about.
“I don’t recall asking for your opinion,” Imogen says to Anders without looking at him. If there was disdain in her voice before, there’s ice in it now. Needles of ice, maybe. Anders doesn’t reply, just keeps watching footage.
Clarke doesn’t think she’s ever been alone (unconscious Umeko doesn’t count) in a room with both of her biological parents before.
It’s like a glimpse into an alternate reality, one where Imogen and Anders stayed together.
Except Clarke probably wouldn’t be in F0, because Anders doesn’t think she’s good enough to be here, and if she’d grown up living with him she might not have had the strength to go against what he wanted.
He would’ve crushed the dream out of her.
“Do you need anything?” Imogen asks Clarke, knocking her out of her musings.
“My cuff?” Clarke asks hopefully. “The doctor said I have to stay another hour for observation. It’s in the garage, in my prep room.”
Imogen stands, pressing a gentle kiss to Clarke’s forehead. “You got it.”
She drags Anders with her when she goes, leaving Clarke alone with the steady beeps of the monitor array and the whooshing of Umeko’s healing pod.
Clarke matches her breathing to the whooshing, letting the rhythm of it keep her steady as she replays the collision in her mind.
Crash recovery protocols advise a pilot to relive the moment until they’re desensitized to it.
To acknowledge the fear and the helplessness, and decide to keep going anyway.
“What repetition are you on?”
Clarke rolls her head to the door. “Twenty-seven.”
Julian is leaning against the doorframe, still in his racing suit. He’s drenched, a combination of sweat and the champagne they spray during podium ceremonies. “Is it helping?”
He must’ve come here right after getting off the podium. It warms a spot behind Clarke’s ribs that he prioritized checking on her even when he’s absolutely supposed to be somewhere else right now.
“Does it ever?” Clarke wiggles into less of a recline. “Congratulations on P2. Would’ve been P1 if you stopped letting Delphine beat you on straightaways.”
“Anders told me the same thing when we passed in the hall.”
Clarke shudders and makes a face. “Don’t compare me to him.”
“Come up with better commentary, then.” He looks her over, eyes dragging from head to toe and back again. “You’re okay?”
“I’m okay.”
“I can’t stay.”
“I know.”
Julian scans her again, then does the same to Umeko. “I think about Connor. Every time.”
Clarke’s heart climbs into her throat. “Me too.”
Julian winces and pries his earpiece out of his ear. “I really have to go. Val’s threatening to drag me to debrief by my hair.”
She doesn’t want him to go. The hollowness that took up residence in her when they fell out of each other’s lives doesn’t ache when he’s next to her, and she feels it all the more acutely now when he’s not.
But it’s important, that they continue to be able to do their jobs while they navigate their new normal.
Part of Clarke is deeply worried that the closer they grow, the higher the likelihood they’ll lose the ability to prioritize the work the way they have to in order to stay true to who they are.
In order to not resent each other for the eventual consequences of putting something or someone other than winning at all costs first.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, right?” Clarke says, squeezing the words out around the flood of feelings. “Beach day?”
His smile looks like home. “Wouldn’t miss it.”