Chapter 43 #2
Clarke starts to move, like she’s going to march right into the banquet and demand for the reviewer to come forward.
Yves lets out a roar and rushes her, grabbing her arm with a bruisingly tight grip, pulling—her heel catches in her dress, her breath catches in her chest, she falls—he’s on top of her, pinning her, bigger and heavier than she is—
No. Fuck this.
She knees him in the balls.
Her dress rips, the slit ripping nearly to her hip. His face goes pale as a wheezing gasp escapes him. And then he’s gone, tackled off her, tumbling across the floor in a mess of limbs.
Anders hauls his arm back and slugs Yves across the jaw. “My daughter, Yves? My daughter?”
This is not the outcome Clarke was expecting, but she’ll take it.
She scrambles to her feet and takes advantage of their distraction to set herself to rights: hair, jewelry, clothes.
The tear in her dress is ugly, not the sort of thing she’s going to be able to hide, but that’s all right. This is just about over.
“Stop it. Stop!” Yves shouts, wriggling out from under Anders. His nose is bleeding. “She’s playing you, Anders! She’s playing both of us. I didn’t have anything to do with what happened at Wonderland.”
“You’ve taken this too far,” Anders says, breathing hard. His shirt is ripped open, collar flopping freely. “You always take things too far.”
Yves lurches to his feet. “I do what is necessary. And it can still work, if you’re not too chickenshit to follow through. She hasn’t told anyone.” He looks at Clarke with a wild sort of hostility. “ ‘Once I start telling people’—that’s what you said. No one else knows.”
Anders inserts himself between Yves and Clarke. “Back off, Yves.”
“I’m not going to hurt her,” Yves says, exasperated.
“We can compromise. You want a seat for next year, Clarke? I was hoping you’d bow out to save us the bad press around cutting Anders’s kid loose, but if you have so little self-respect that you’ll keep flying for me, fine.
You can have the seat next year. You can be Raff’s secondary. ”
Applause, from the Temple of Zeus. Perfect timing.
“Gee, thanks,” Clarke says, adjusting the rings on her right hand again. There are a lot of them. Much more jewelry than she normally wears. “That’s a generous offer.”
Yves’s eyes narrow. “What are those?”
“Borrowed them from a friend.” Clarke holds her hand out in front of her and flips her wrist, summoning Sara’s fleet of flying cameras from where Maki hid them earlier today during his long hours babysitting Clarke’s ship.
They materialize out of the columns’ shadows and form a neat circle overhead.
“They really pull the whole outfit together, don’t you think? ”
“Madeline,” Anders breathes. “What did you do?”
“Clarke?” says a quiet voice in Clarke’s ear.
Clarke holds up a hand to Yves and Anders and tucks her hair behind her ear, revealing the audio loop she’s been wearing the whole time. “Yeah?”
“This is the window, unless you want to wait for the next speaker.”
“We’ve got what we need. Do it.” Clarke ends the call, drops her hands, and looks at Yves and Anders again. “Sara’s about to start playback of the last four minutes on the big screen, up at the Temple of Zeus. Any final additions you’d like to make?”
Anders, coward that he is, starts running for the stairs.
Yves’s head swings back and forth between Clarke, the cameras, and the enormous temple on top of the highest hill. “You’re bluffing. You wouldn’t. You’ll be unhirable after this. With the reputation you have—”
“Sara’s got a fix for that, too,” Clarke says, pulling her holoscreen up again and accessing a new file.
“She never knows what footage will end up being useful—you know how fans are about behind-the-scenes stuff—so she doesn’t delete anything.
It wasn’t hard to find multiple examples of you being a dick.
To me directly, or in comments you’d make to Naomi about how to make me look bad, or the Legal team about how to stall my contract negotiations.
You really tend to forget that Sara’s cameras are around, don’t you?
That’s how I knew this would work, though, so I can’t complain.
Honestly, the hard part was figuring out what not to include, so we could make space for things like this. ”
A compilation of clips starts with Clarke confronting Raff in the loading dock before Monza.
This team might not give a crap about me, but they’re still my team, and I’m not going to let you shit all over them.
The next snippet is from inside Yves’s office the day after Matthew’s article was released, when Clarke learned Elemental wasn’t going to do a damn thing to protect her.
You could’ve saved yourselves some time and just written, “Yep, Clarke’s miserable to work with and we all hate her.
” The design meeting for next year’s ship, Clarke making suggestions and getting shut down over and over.
Clarke offering to fly last year’s ship in an upcoming race, to see if that’d yield better results.
Clarke in a racing sim late at night, only Amira by her side, the rest of the engineering factory dark.
Another clip of Clarke defending a team member from Raff. Another. Another.
“The angles aren’t great, but that’s what you get when the staff is filming from their personal cuffs and trying not to get noticed,” Clarke says conversationally.
“There’s more, but you get the idea. Turns out, quite a few people at Elemental aren’t happy with how things have been going.
With what you’ve been trying to do to me, specifically, and what you’re all too willing to let Raff get away with.
All we had to do was ask around to see if anyone had footage, and promise we were going to use it to nail you to the wall. ”
“So much for loyalty,” Yves says scornfully.
Clarke collapses the screen. “Loyalty is earned. And you haven’t earned a damn thing.”
The moment stretches, teeters on a precipice.
Yves looks like he can’t decide between fleeing like Anders or launching himself at Clarke again, and Clarke’s out of moves.
If it gets physical again, she’s just going to have to hope that—yes, there, if she looks between columns, there are people running down the big stairs.
She can’t tell exactly who, but Julian knew to come this way once Sara did her thing, so he’s probably leading the charge.
“I’m going to leave now,” Clarke announces, starting to move toward the stairs.
She goes cautiously, giving Yves a wide berth, but it’s like he doesn’t even hear her.
He’s just staring, eyes on Clarke’s ship.
Unsure what he did all of this for, maybe?
Stunned? Regretful? Wondering how it got this far?
Clarke will find a shred of sympathy for him later, she’s sure.
She’ll remember that he’s just human, and he was under an immense amount of pressure, and he probably made one small bad decision that led to a slightly larger bad decision, and before he knew it he didn’t recognize himself anymore. Clarke will, later, be able to relate.
For now, she just lets the hum of victory wash through her, and holds her head high while she walks away.