Chapter 48
Las Vegas is wild.
It always is. It’s a chaotic track, weaving tightly to and through the city’s ridiculous architecture with only enough room to overtake if you’re borderline reckless, and it’s fast and loud and bright despite being a night race.
Vegas is always dramatic, messy, and one of the most heavily attended races of the year, even though the final leaderboard is typically already set.
This season, the leaderboard isn’t set. Delphine and Provenance are probably going to win, and Martian Motors will probably take home third, but nothing’s guaranteed.
The points spread is close enough that any combination of outcomes is still possible.
Instead of the typical lighthearted, low-stakes atmosphere, the Vegas paddock is brutally tense right up until the marquee goes dark and the Grand Prix begins.
“Big crash,” Hodge says in her ear. “Good job avoiding it. Yellow flags are coming out, but it’s probably going to be a full reset.”
Clarke slows down, heart pounding. “Who was involved? Is everyone okay?”
“No official word yet, but it looks like P1 through P7,” Hodge says. “So both Chronicles, both Provenances, both Martian Motors, and Thierry.”
The chasm Clarke always gets in her gut when there are possible injuries opens up. “Thierry?”
“He’s talking,” Hodge says promptly. “He says it doesn’t seem like anyone’s too badly damaged. Oliver made contact with Julian, which set off the whole cascade. Okay, there’s the reset decision. Finish the lap and bring it back to the grid. Current order is reset order.”
Clarke loops up and through a building that has a big hole cut out of it. She can’t have heard that right. “Say again? Current order is—”
“—reset order, yes, and no red flag,” Hodge confirms. “This is going to be interesting.”
No fucking kidding. With the original P1–7 stuck extricating themselves, all the people who’d normally lead the race will be at the back of the grid when it starts up again.
And without a red flag to suspend the session, no one can pit during this lap, so any of those pilots needing repairs will have to pit immediately after the restart instead.
They’ll fall even farther behind, then have to battle their way forward.
The so-and-so’s okay, will not be retiring updates roll in over the rest of the lap. Clarke glides into P6 on the grid. Hodge talks her through an abbreviated restart checklist as the other ships fall into place behind her. And in front of her…
“So, that’s Raff in P1,” says Hodge, who was Raff’s race engineer until a few months ago. “You feel like hunting, Clarke?”
Why, yes. Clarke does feel like hunting.
—
For twenty-six laps, Clarke stays mostly in her head.
She’s aware that all the previous race leaders pitted for various lengths of time, a few of them even getting lapped, but she keeps her attention narrow.
She picks off the people in front of her one at a time, working her way up to riding Raff’s air in P2.
She’s waiting for the right opportunity to overtake and fantasizing about what she’d do if her ship had Melee-style attack capabilities when Hodge says, “You need to come in soon for a fresh battery and shells.”
Damn.
“Okay.” Clarke tries not to sound begrudging. “This lap?”
There’s a beat of silence. Clarke crests the top of one building and starts a corkscrew to the next. Hodge says, “Don’t you want to pass Raff first?”
“Of course I do, but you said to come in.” Clarke breaks off to grunt her way through the back half of the corkscrew. “And Raff needs to pit, too, and he’s faster than me in the box because our crew is still getting used to my setup, so passing him now—”
A new voice in her ear. Lennox. “Clarke?”
“Yeah?”
“Pass that asshole and get in here so we can see what the field looks like after you pit.”
Clarke snorts and shakes off the defeatist resignation she’d fallen into. Two weeks of being on a team that actually supports her, it turns out, isn’t enough to undo two years on a team that systematically tore her down. She’s working on it. “You get fined for swearing on the radio, you know.”
“Ask me how much I care,” Lennox says. “Hodge, back to you.”
Clarke passes Raff. It’s easy. She knows everything about his ship. Every issue, both fixed and still broken, she knows.
She boxes on the next lap. Raff does, too. He beats her out, and she follows him out of the pit lane as fast as the speed limit allows.
“Traffic ahead,” Hodge warns as the blue beacons marking reentry to the track come into view. “The normal race leaders have caught up. They’ll be at the exit right when you get there.”
Crap. Clarke steadies her breathing, readies herself to react quickly. “Behind or ahead?”
“Below.”
Out of time. She exits the pit lane at the shallowest angle she can manage, hugging tight to the topmost part of the barrier—
—a ship comes up from underneath, no signs of stopping, on a weird trajectory—
It’s not a decision, it’s a reflex. Rather than getting crashed into, she pulls up sharply and goes back through the barrier. Alarms blare. The ship drops hard, Earth’s gravity suddenly a factor again. She’s off the track.
Hodge’s voice, alarmed. “Clarke!”
“I’m okay. Ship’s okay.” She levels out, getting her bearings, ships whizzing past. Her deck points out where she can drop back in, and counts the seconds she’ll be penalized. “Dropping in. Is everyone okay? It looked like someone was spinning out.”
“That was Delphine. She was trying to get past Engel, and Raff either didn’t see the move she was making or decided not to cede the line. He clipped her. She’s still off.”
Clarke drops in. Her timer stops at 8.34 seconds. “Where am I?”
“P9. Gap to P8 is four-point-three, and that’s Thierry—no, sorry, he just took P7. P8’s David Lauer. Let’s—sorry, another update, Delphine’s retiring.”
Clarke’s far too well-trained to jostle her ship in surprise, but it’s a near thing. She flies through that stupid building with the hole again. “What?”
“No other details yet. Let’s focus, okay? Something tells me we haven’t seen the last of this track’s surprises.”
—
Hodge is right. In the next thirty laps, there are four more collisions, so many barrier breaches that Clarke stops keeping track, and multiple other incidents.
Everyone gets to the checkered flag except Delphine, but Clarke doesn’t think anyone actually knows what place they got during the near-hour it takes for all the time penalties to be applied, appealed, reassessed, reapplied, and finalized.
Julian crossed the line first, but ultimately gets knocked back to P2 courtesy of a hefty penalty he has to pay for a pit stop violation.
It should mean that Thierry, who crossed second, wins, but he went off-track during that first big pileup and the time he has to pay back pushes him down to P3.
One of the Barlowe Tech pilots, of all people, ends up taking P1.
Clarke manages P7, sandwiched between the two Martian Motors.
Provenance only has 12 points on Chronicle. Martian Motors only has 12 points on Enclave. Delphine, after today’s DNF, only has 14 points on Julian.
There’s one more race this year, and first place is worth 25 points. Anything could happen.
The podium ceremony is raucous. It’s Barlowe’s first win of the season and their pilot’s first win ever; there’s a veritable sea of people in vivid orange clamoring to celebrate.
Enclave and Chronicle show up in force, too, jubilant over having closed the gaps to their respective competitors.
Clarke screams for Thierry and Julian until her voice gives out, then screams some more.
Her vocal cords still haven’t recovered hours later, when she’s waiting outside the Chronicle garage for Julian. She’s sitting on a storage crate that’s awaiting pickup, looking out at the bright lights of the city, and her voice comes out raspy when she sees who’s approaching. “No.”
“Figures I’d find you here instead of with your actual team,” Anders says, emerging from between garages. “I’m only here to apologize.”
“There is no planet in this solar system or the next on which I am interested in your apology,” Clarke says, wishing she had the volume to yell.
He turned himself in a few hours after the gala, and negotiated the reduction of his punishment for defrauding Elemental’s shareholders down to a fine by telling the authorities everything about Yves.
Clarke’d say she’s curious to see what the partnership between the two men will look like next season, but she’s really just…
not. She’s given them more than enough of her time and energy.
Anders sighs. Sighs, like Clarke’s being difficult. “Madeline. You don’t need to make this more unpleasant than it already is.”
Oh, he hasn’t seen unpleasant. Clarke slides off the crate.
“Anders, you and I haven’t been honest with each other a day in our lives, so let’s start now.
You’re a shitty father, a bad person, and—and I’m saving this for last, because I know it’s the only one you actually care about—a second-rate pilot. ”
Anders comes toward her, anger on his face. “You don’t understand what—”
Clarke’s too busy planning to use the quick jab to the throat Julian’s been making her practice ever since he saw footage of Yves attacking Clarke at the gala (A knee to the balls is great, Mads, but let’s try to avoid getting taken to the floor if we can) to hear someone coming up behind her, but the presence that makes itself known at her side is familiar.
“Anders!” Julian says, fake-cheerful. “Miserable to see you, as usual. Are you here to congratulate me on P2? Because I can’t think of a single other reason you’d come around.”
Anders grinds his teeth. “This is between me and my—”
“There’s nothing between us,” Clarke interrupts. She’s glad Julian’s here, but doesn’t need him to speak for her. “And you’re nothing to me.”
“We’re going to be in each other’s lives. It’s Formula Zero,” Anders tries. “We don’t need to be enemies.”
Julian’s torso tenses up as he holds in a laugh, knowing what Clarke’s going to say. It won’t mean to Anders what it means to the two of them, but that’s okay. It’s not about Anders.
She looks her biological father up and down. They could, in another life, have been a team. They could have made Elemental a force to be reckoned with. They could’ve been champions together.
Clarke wouldn’t trade that life for this one in a million years.
She smirks. “Elemental’s not good enough for us to be enemies. And you might be in my life now, but you’ll slink back into obscurity once the embarrassment of losing to me in every single race next season sets in. Goodbye, Anders.”
She puts him behind her and walks away down the pit lane. Julian, of course, goes with her, still tight with suppressed laughter—
—or not laughter, as he takes the first available opportunity to pull her into a slightly concealed spot behind Martian Motors and crowds her against the wall.
“Julian! What are you—”
“My prep room or yours?” he asks, voice sounding nearly as rough as hers.
Clarke laughs when she realizes what he means. “Really, that did it for you? Watching me tell Anders off?”
“Look, I’m surprised, too, but my prep room or yours, Clarke—”
The paddock hums around them as Clarke takes Julian by the hand and leads him back to Chronicle’s garage, still laughing.
Anticipation is palpable in the air. This race might be over, but there’s another one in seven days that will decide the individual and team champions, and set the stage for the following season all throughout the order.
Vegas has been a spectacle in more ways than one, but it all comes down to Monaco.