Chapter 25
Matthew releases his statement, explaining that the article misrepresented what he said and he loved working with Clarke.
Elemental releases their statement, explaining that Clarke is only tolerable so long as she’s producing results.
Clarke’s being hounded for comments she refuses to give everywhere she goes.
Her address on Luna isn’t public record, but Elemental HQ’s is, and there’s a gaggle of people just past the property line every morning when she arrives and every evening when she leaves.
She doesn’t go anywhere besides work, which feels more hostile than ever, and her house, which feels emptier than ever.
She cries about it, then feels stupid for crying about it.
She’s in what would be the menstruation phase of her cycle if she didn’t have an implant that keeps her from menstruating, though, so she thinks the extra emotion can be forgiven (this phase is carefully scheduled to occur during each month’s bye week, of course).
She talks to Julian every day. He is supportive and steady.
He listens when she rants and when she gets quiet.
It helps so much that she’s almost embarrassed by it.
She has Julian, and the meeting with Atreus, and Graham’s party to look forward to.
Her stomach is a mess of excitement and anxiety, but there is more to life than Elemental Machines, and Clarke is bound and fucking determined to remember that.
On Saturday, she takes her hovercar one city over to a dock for privately owned ships making the hop between Earth and Luna.
She waves her cuff at a turnstile near the dock’s entrance and is given instructions to a specific berth.
The path takes her deep into the dock, past rows and rows of slumbering ships in varying shapes and sizes, and her mind drifts.
She hasn’t told Julian about this meeting.
She’s thought about it half a dozen times, but kept holding back.
Chronicle and Provenance are rivals, the contention between them thick and historied, and Clarke and Julian just got back to a good place.
She wants to protect that. If he’s not happy for her, if he sees it as her setting herself against him…
she thinks he’ll understand. She thinks he’ll be able to see what an incredible opportunity this is.
But if he doesn’t, she doesn’t want to know ahead of time.
It would shake her, and she needs to be solid for this.
She’ll tell him when it’s a done deal, she decides as she nears Atreus’s berth. That way, she doesn’t have to face telling him that it didn’t work out, if it doesn’t. Not that it’s not going to work out, but—
The sound of a ship’s hatch opening startles her. She ducks reflexively, concealing herself behind the loading dock of the neighboring ship.
“—next season,” someone says.
It’s Atreus, his voice familiar after years of watching team principal conferences.
He’s speaking to someone at the entrance of his ship.
He must’ve had a meeting before Clarke’s, and is walking that guest out.
Clarke feels better about her silly instinct to hide.
No one can know that she’s talking to Provenance, even for a preliminary discussion. She stays where she is.
“Still, you have to know that I’m flattered,” says another voice, and surprise and confusion root Clarke to the spot.
What’s Julian doing here?
“Any pilot would be,” Julian goes on. “It’s an honor to be considered by Provenance.”
Clarke’s heart falls off a precipice. That almost sounds like—is he—Atreus made Julian an offer? Julian wants to leave Chronicle? Since when? Why hasn’t he told Clarke? For the same reasons she hasn’t told him, or—
“Of course,” Atreus says. “I can only hope the other talent in the field agrees with you.”
“Right, other talent.” Julian sounds…weird.
Uncertain. That could just be the roaring in Clarke’s ears, though.
The knots in her stomach are weaving a tapestry, and she really doesn’t like the picture that’s forming.
“Are you talking to Clarke, then? And St. Sebastian? They both have expiring contracts.”
“St. Sebastian, no. He’d resent being Delphine’s secondary even more than Oliver does. I’m trying to solve a problem, not re-create it. I do have a meeting set up with Clarke, but it’s a formality. She’s not Provenance material. I’m sure you agree?”
Clarke sucks in a breath that doesn’t make it to her lungs.
Tears burst against the backs of her eyes.
All the hope she’d been carefully stockpiling for this meeting gets torn down in an instant, leaving only embarrassment and dejection in its place.
But Julian—surely Julian will defend her?
He’s called her one of the best pilots of their generation, said that she’s magic on the track.
“Yeah, you’re right,” Julian says. He still sounds odd. “She’s no champion. She’s just not good enough.”
Clarke accidentally brushed her hand against a ship’s unshielded kickdrive once.
Hearing Julian say those words reminds her of the fraction of a second she’d had before the surge blew through her: long enough to acknowledge that she got too close to something exceedingly dangerous, but not long enough to do anything other than brace for the pain.
She braces. She’s already crouched; now she wraps her arms around her head, pressing her face against her shoulder.
It doesn’t help, but at least it keeps her quiet as devastation tears through her mercilessly.
She sobs silently into her elbow. She trusted him.
After everything, she chose to trust him, and—
Anders thinking Clarke’s not good enough hurts. Julian thinking Clarke’s not good enough shreds her into pieces so small that she knows she’ll never be the same, even if she manages to put herself back together.
“It’s a shame, really.” Atreus sighs. “She seems like a nice girl. Someone should’ve stopped her from dreaming this dream years ago, to spare her the pain.”
Julian takes a long time to respond. “She can take it. She’ll be fine.”
Atreus makes an unconvinced noise. They leave it there, trading goodbyes and see-you-at-the-next-races. Two sets of footsteps: Atreus’s receding as he goes back into his ship to wait for Clarke, Julian’s approaching as he walks up the aisle toward the exit.
He passes her hiding spot. He’s walking quickly, head down, typing furiously on his cuff. Clarke watches him go, a yawning emptiness expanding in her chest.
A mad sense of urgency grips her. She has to get out of this. She can’t go into this meeting and act like everything’s okay and listen to Atreus let her down gently.
She’s been digging her fingers into her shoulder blades so hard that blood rushing back into the indentations when she lets go is painful.
She gets her cuff in front of her face and writes a rough message to Rhynn, asking them to reschedule with Atreus.
She holds her wrist with white-knuckled fingers, still crouched, still compressing her body like she can minimize the emotional fallout through physical containment.
She can’t. Betrayal defies containment. It’s bleeding out, everywhere. Clarke is bleeding out everywhere.
Rhynn writes back within a minute. Done. Is something wrong?
Clarke sends, Feeling sick.
It’s the truth, just not all of it. She waits until she’s sure Julian’s long gone, then slinks toward the exit. Her cuff pings again, and she checks it expecting Rhynn to be asking if Clarke needs anything.
It’s from Julian. Looking forward to seeing you tonight.
Tonight. Graham’s engagement party, just a few hours from now.
She messages Sara, asking to be excused from attending, but Sara writes back that Naomi says Clarke needs the feel-good publicity now more than ever in the wake of Matthew’s article.
If Clarke skips the party, there will be consequences.
Naomi-via-Sara does not elaborate on what those consequences will be.
Fury doesn’t hurt as much as heartbreak.
Clarke embraces it. She uses it to get back to her house without being a wreck in public.
She uses it to keep her hands steady as she does her hair, a simple twist she learned from Imogen that leaves soft pieces free to frame her face.
She uses it while she puts on a flowy dress in pale silver, and during the short trip over to where Graham’s fiancée’s family lives near Kepler Crater, and as she gets out of her hovercar near the long driveway at the address Julian gave her.
She’s obviously in the right place; cars line the road on both sides, and there are a few ships in the field of Martian crystal growing off to the left of the house.
It’s the end of August. Luna doesn’t naturally get seasons the way Earth does, but terraforming efforts have more or less matched lunar weather on the near side of the moon to Terran France, so it feels like the end of summer. Clarke stands in the heat with her face to the sun.
She has decided that this will not break her.
It hurts, yes. Even at their worst, she knew Julian respected her as a competitor.
Knew he considered them equals, on the track and off it.
Losing that is very, very hard to come to terms with.
She both wants and doesn’t want to know exactly when it happened.
It’s like the instant after a sudden injury, when you clamp your fingers over the cut on your arm.
You want to pull your hand away and find out how bad it is, but what if it’s really bad?
What if Julian has never thought of Clarke as his equal?
He might’ve been lying. He might’ve said it because he really wants to fly for Provenance, and he saw an opportunity to reinforce Atreus’s assumption that Clarke isn’t a valid option.
Clarke could…she could live with that, she thinks.
It’s cruel, but it’s onetime cruelty in service of Julian’s goals, not potential years of Julian deceiving her.
She has to know.
A large ship drops out of the sky, lands in the field, and spills out a collection of happy, laughing people. Julian’s with the group, a broad smile on his face, and the grin only grows when he sees Clarke and beelines for her. “You look great.”
Clarke knows she looks great. This dress does excellent things for her, creating the illusion of curves she doesn’t really have. People stare when Clarke wears this dress. She picked it for a reason. “Thanks.”
Julian’s smile dims in wattage. “What’s wrong?”
The rest of the group is getting close. Clarke thought she’d put on a happy face and go into the party until there was a good moment to pull Julian aside, but now that she’s here looking at him—she can’t. She can’t pretend with him anymore.
“We should talk.”
He goes blank just in time for Graham to catch up to them and sling his prosthetic arm around Julian’s neck. “Clarke! You’re here! I’m married!”
Clarke gives a strained smile. “Hi, Graham, I—wait, what? I thought this was—”
“We eloped!” A tiny woman in a blush pink dress appears under Graham’s other arm, beaming. “Are you Clarke? Like, Julian’s Clarke? I’m Graham’s Hailey!”
It’s a dagger to the heart, but there’s so much joy emanating from Hailey and Graham that Clarke finds herself laughing weakly anyway. “Congratulations! Julian told me this was just an engagement party, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to crash your wedding—”
“Oh, no, it is excellent that you’re here,” Hailey says. “Graham’s mom is about to be extremely annoyed at us, so I’m just gonna plop you in front of her as a nice, shiny distraction. This is the best wedding present you could’ve given me.”
“I’m the one that brought her. Credit for the distraction should go to me,” Julian says, his own smile just as forced as Clarke’s. “Go on, you two go make your grand entrance. Clarke and I will catch up.”
The newlyweds dash hand in hand toward the large tent set up in the backyard. The rest of the wedding party follows them, leaving Clarke and Julian alone at the edge of the field.
“They eloped?” Clarke asks, watching Hailey and Graham burst into the tent to raucous applause (and then a lot of gasping). She feels rent apart, happy for them and upset with Julian and sad about Provenance all at once.
“They were going to get married after the season, but the planning was getting really stressful, and they didn’t want to wait anymore. This party was coming up, and pretty much everyone who got invited to the wedding was already planning on being here, so they decided to just do it.”
“That’s sweet. They seem really in love.”
“They are.” He looks at her. “What happened? Why are you—what happened?”
The ship that brought the wedding party takes off. They’re alone at the front of the house, but more guests could arrive anytime. Clarke doesn’t want to ruin Graham and Hailey’s day, and definitely doesn’t want to do this with an audience.
Without a word, she walks deeper into the crystal field.