Chapter 24
“My mom’s going to be sad she missed this.”
Clarke’s stretched out on a towel, sun on her face and toes in the sand. She cracks one eye open at Julian’s approach, squinting. It’s bright at the beach. “My mom didn’t call her, when she was scheming with Ndira and Elise?”
“Oh, she did,” Julian says. He plants his butt on the towel next to Clarke’s, loops his elbows around his knees.
His warm brown skin is glowing in the sun, and there’s so very much of it on display with him only wearing swim trunks.
His tattoos glisten. His hair is wet, shining blue-black, and dripping onto his nose and shoulders.
“But the belt’s transit time’s a nightmare right now, and the orbital alignment is bad, too.
My mom didn’t want to be away from work for that long. ”
It’s a long trip to the Galilean colonies.
If Jupiter’s on the other side of the sun, which it is right now, it takes two weeks to get from there to Earth, and that’s not even taking into account extra time needed to navigate the asteroid belt.
There are patches of the belt that are less fraught and patches that are impassable; if you have to go out of your way to cross at one of the former, that adds to your travel time.
Luana Casperi took a few years off when things were getting serious for Julian in Juniors so she could be inner-rim with him at the best programs, but when her company offered her a directorship, Julian insisted she go back to work.
Julian’s dad offered to quit his job, but that’s when Clarke’s parents cleared space for Julian in their home.
“She’s good, though?” Clarke asks. “Your mom? And your dad?”
“They’re good. They ask about you. A lot, actually.”
“Tell them I’m glad they’re doing well? And I miss them?”
“I will,” Julian promises.
They’re quiet for a few minutes. Clarke can’t think of anything to say, but she doesn’t feel pressure to fill the silence. It’s okay for them to just…be here, next to each other. She’s as content as she can be, given everything that happened yesterday.
Julian rolls onto his side, propping himself up on an elbow. “What are you doing during the rest of bye week?”
“Work. Until Graham’s party, that is.” Their next Julian Naomi calling again. She dismisses it. Dread is building in her stomach.
Matthew drops his face into his hands. “You haven’t seen it yet?”
“Seen what?”
Julian can’t hear Matthew’s half of the conversation, but he must be getting enough from Clarke’s to connect the dots.
He pulls the screen out of his cuff, expression going somber.
The adults and Kuari are, thankfully, busy ribbing a just-returned Ndira for exercising on what’s supposed to be a vacation day, and haven’t picked up that something’s going on yet.
“I did an interview,” Matthew says into his palms. “About Elemental, and how I—left. And they took everything I said out of context, I swear, they made it look like I’m blaming you, and that’s not what I was trying to do.”
“Hang up, Clarke,” Julian says.
Clarke looks to him. Matthew’s words aren’t making sense, and she’s not sure she wants them to. “What?”
Julian holds his screen where she can see it. It’s open to the headline of an article.
A Toxic Element: Matthew Agresta on his abrupt departure from Elemental Machines, what he’ll do next, and why Madeline Clarke is the worst thing that’s ever happened to him
“Matthew, I have to go,” Clarke says, hanging up. The Popsicle is dripping, running down the side of her wrist.
“It’s bad,” Julian says. He’s scrolling further down the article, furrow in his brow deepening with each swipe of his thumb. “This is really going to be a problem.”
The dread in her stomach curdles. Clarke gives herself five seconds to mourn the loss of this day in the sun surrounded by people who love her, and starts preparing to deal with all the people who don’t.
—
“We’re trying to get them to publish a retraction,” Naomi says.
“If they don’t, we have a strong case to sue for defamation,” says someone from Legal whose name Clarke can’t remember. There are three of them, the women from Legal, and they didn’t bother introducing themselves when this meeting convened.
“I don’t want to sue Matthew,” Clarke says.
“It wouldn’t be you suing Matthew, it would be Elemental suing the outlet,” says one of the women. She has blonde hair in a bob so sharp that Clarke’s surprised it doesn’t slice her jaw open on contact.
“But you should consider suing Matthew,” adds another one, whom Clarke’s been calling Pink Suit in her head for obvious reasons. The suit is fabulous. If this wasn’t a shitty situation all around, Clarke’d be asking where she got it.
Julian was right. It’s bad. The outlet took everything Matthew said, chopped it up, and pieced it back together to paint a damning picture.
Matthew’s quoted as saying She didn’t even have the design meeting for next year’s ship on her calendar, and while real-time Matthew (present at this meeting as one of many faces in the holoscreen array on Yves’s office wall) explains that he went on to say that no one told Clarke about the meeting until the last minute and she rearranged her schedule to be there as soon as she got looped in, none of that’s in the article.
Matthew’s quoted as saying She accepted one set of terms for her initial contract, and she’s hoping for a big change with the renewal, but nothing else now-Matthew claims he added (that it’s good that Clarke wants better terms this time around, that her initial contract is exploitative and controlling) made the final cut.
Clarke comes across as demanding. Self-absorbed.
Interested only in being a star, uncaring of how many people she has to step on to get there.
Elemental, somehow, comes across as a supportive, team-oriented place to work.
Yves did me a favor, buying me out, Matthew says in the article, making it sound like he couldn’t wait to get away from Clarke (now-Matthew: “I meant because if he hadn’t bought me out, he’d have bought Clarke out, and then I’d have been stuck partnered with Rafferty St. fucking Sebastian.
That’s what I said but that’s not what they printed! ”).
“How does Elemental have a case for defamation?” Rhynn asks, from a neighboring screen to Matthew’s. “The article doesn’t cast Elemental in a bad light. My client is the one being libeled.”
“Your client’s image is tied to Elemental’s brand,” says the original woman from Legal, who has a shiny piercing in her nose. “We could lose sponsors.”