Chapter 10
Clarke’s house is fifteen minutes from Elemental Headquarters on Luna, Earth’s moon, and that’s all there is to say about Clarke’s house. The distance from HQ is why she bought it. It’s perfectly nice, but it’s not her home. When Clarke wants to go home, she goes to Mars.
Imogen Clarke has lived in the same two-story redstone in Sinai Planum Clarke’s entire life.
It’s at the edge of the city proper, close enough to Valles Marineris that you can see the canyons on a clear day.
Clarke and Julian honed their agility in those canyons, sneaking out after dark to weave among the arches and needles.
They used to compete to see who could stay closest to the irregular walls without losing speed in cobbled-together ships that would make an FIC safety coordinator whimper with despair.
Inside, Imogen’s house is an explosion of color and textures and stuff.
Imogen’s never met a fuzzy blanket or decorative bowl she didn’t want to keep forever.
Her husband, Ihaka, is more purposeful but no less voluminous in his collecting, and their son, Kuari, is a thirteen-year-old boy.
Every surface is layered three-deep with items that caught the eye of someone who lives here.
Everything in this house is loved by someone Clarke loves.
When Clarke is here, she remembers that she is loved in return, too.
She doesn’t doubt it when she’s somewhere else, but her life of high-stakes racing and planet-hopping and endorsement deals sometimes seems impossibly out of sync with her family’s life in a way that no number of calls or messages can fix.
But she comes here, and among the hundreds of photos scrolling across holoscreens is Clarke’s face from infancy up through the Lion’s Head podium ceremony.
A jacket she forgot during her last visit is hung on a hook, waiting for her, and the pockets have been stuffed with a hand-painted set of playing cards her mom found at a market, several new recipes Ihaka swears by, and some drawings of neat bugs Kuari’s seen on his walk home from school.
Her childhood bedroom is mostly the same as she left it, but not quite—the sheets have been cleaned, the curtains swapped out for a different pattern, some new shelves hung on the wall.
Clarke’s family holds space for her when she’s not here, and they tend to that space. If that’s not love, Clarke doesn’t know what is.
There’s a park near the house that Clarke goes running in while she’s home.
Running is not Clarke’s favorite form of exercise (It’s boring and slow.
Everything is boring and slow compared to Clarke’s day job), but it keeps her trainer off her back.
Plus, it’s full Martian summer, so she has to get up early to get her run in without sweating to death.
It’s a good way to make sure she doesn’t sleep the day away.
Mid-season break it may be, but Clarke can’t afford to slack off.
“You’re pushing yourself pretty hard.”
Clarke sits up from where she’d been sprawled on the porch. Her outline stays behind, a silhouette in sweat on the boards. She accepts the glass her mother is offering, something iced and tangy. “I have to. I told you what Yves said.”
Imogen settles onto a swinging chair, pressing her own glass against the side of her neck. The suns are barely up, but the heat is already formidable. “Sure. What Yves said.”
Clarke narrows her eyes. “Mom.”
“Your inability to sit still has nothing to do with what they’re saying about you and Julian.”
Clarke doesn’t read her own press. That’s why Elemental has Naomi.
And the mandatory fourteen-consecutive-day shutdown each team must take at some point during the five-week break only applies to ships and conversations about ships, not press, so Naomi has been keeping Clarke apprised of the fallout from Lion’s Head.
Clarke wishes she weren’t.
Clarke’s no stranger to vitriol. She’s been hated by people she’s never met since she started winning when it mattered in the youth circuits; parents of kids Clarke beat, mostly, furious that Clarke was taking what they saw as their child’s rightful spot.
Every step she’s taken forward in her career has been met by an increased level of loathing, from competitors and people who support her competitors to the occasional archaic bigot who still thinks women don’t belong in racing. She knows how to tune all of that out.
It’s different, when people are hating Clarke because of Julian.
When they’re writing her off in comparison to him, or slamming her for saying he’s only winning because Chronicle’s well-funded.
She’s being called bitter, spiteful, and immature.
Naomi highlights those words in the summaries she sends.
“I’m not supposed to feed the beast, or whatever,” Clarke says, bending one leg up and folding over the other for a stretch. “But if I don’t respond, all I can do is hope people understand it was just me and Julian being me and Julian, and that doesn’t feel like enough.”
“What would feel like enough?”
Clarke drops her forehead onto her kneecap. “I don’t know. But I don’t want Julian to…We just keep getting further apart.”
“The two of you were never the same, after Connor.”
Clarke makes an assenting noise, feeling just as shitty about blaming the fracture between her and Julian on Connor as she always does but unwilling to try to explain.
Clarke and Julian’s other best friend, Connor Bennett, was killed two and a half years ago during a lower circuit race. There was a multi-ship collision, and Connor was in the middle of it. He died instantly.
Clarke and Julian didn’t handle Connor’s death well, but that’s not what broke them.
No, what happened between Clarke and Julian was death by a thousand cuts.
They’d been digging the chasm between them for years, in love with each other and aware of it, but Clarke wasn’t willing to cross that line and Julian wasn’t willing to pull her over it.
He wanted her to choose him, he always said, not just go along with it because he pushed hard enough.
And Clarke chose herself. Her career. Her independence.
She was already going to be Anders Dalsing’s daughter; she didn’t think she’d survive being Julian Casperi’s girlfriend, too.
There was no big, dramatic confrontation.
No one got betrayed. Nothing came to a head.
There’s no one moment Clarke can point to and say, That.
That’s when it changed. And that’s so much harder to explain, so when people ask what happened between Clarke and Julian, she says Connor because that makes them stop asking questions and the timing was mostly right, and she pretends she can’t sense Connor’s ghost flicking her off for using him as an excuse.
Imogen hums. “And what do you plan on doing about it?”
“We’re not kids anymore, Mom. You don’t need to mediate like we’re still living upstairs.”
Julian lived here for three years, from age sixteen until he got called up by Chronicle.
He came back to visit regularly until things started falling apart.
Clarke’s family has held space for Julian, too, with some of his clothes still tucked safely into a drawer.
He haunts this place just as much as Connor.
Imogen and Ihaka care about Julian. Not like he’s their child, and that’s not what Julian ever needed from them—his own parents are loving, kind people—but he’s important to them, and Imogen’s as displeased about the rift as anyone.
“Someone needs to mediate, clearly, because it’s not getting any better. ”
“It might not get better.”
“That,” Imogen says, taking a serene sip of her drink and waving to a neighbor who’s leaving for work, “is some bullshit.”
It startles a laugh out of Clarke. “Yeah?”
“Yes. The Council of Moms has discussed it.”
The Council of Moms: Imogen; Julian’s mom, Luana; and Connor’s moms, Elise and Ndira.
The four of them used to stay up late on youth circuit race weekends, crammed into the kitchen of the Bennetts’ cruiser, wheezing with suppressed laughter so they wouldn’t wake up their kids—except Clarke, Julian, and Connor would inevitably still be awake, poring over track maps and debating tomorrow’s conditions.
Clarke is hit with a wave of wistfulness so strong that she has to consciously breathe around it. “How are they? The moms?”
“They’re good. Worried about you and Julian.”
Clarke groans. “You are not going to let up, are you?”
“My darling, darling girl,” Imogen says. She kisses her fingers and smacks them against the brim of Clarke’s hat. “Where do you think your stubbornness comes from?”
—
Clarke doesn’t stop moving for the next two weeks.
She goes bug-hunting with Kuari, spending hours crouched in damp caverns waiting for the hand-size, crystal-encrusted beetles he’s currently obsessed with to hatch.
She cooks with Ihaka, marveling at how the same activity with one father figure feels impossibly different from doing it with the other.
She follows her mother to work one day, visiting Mars’s northern lowlands to see how the terraforming operation’s going.
She catches up with the couple nonracing friends she hasn’t fallen out of touch with.
At Naomi’s instruction, she spends an afternoon with Anders at a nearby youth racing exhibition that thankfully features very little actual interaction with Anders but a lot of press-pleasing fan photos.
She cleans out the closet in her childhood bedroom, passing over the drawer of Julian’s clothes like it’s sacred or cursed or both.
If she keeps herself occupied, she won’t have to think about the second half of the season.
But the second half of the season is coming up fast.
On the day Elemental’s shutdown officially ends, Clarke hugs her family and boards an interplanetary shuttle.
It’s almost a full-day trip, orbital alignment between Earth and Mars being what it is at this time of year, so Clarke pays for a private cabin.
She watches a movie. She reads part of a book. She takes a nap.
When she’s put it off as long as she can, she calls her manager.
“Clarke!” Rhynn picks up immediately, although they appear to be on an actively sinking boat. A small one. In water. “Hang on, just one sec.”
“I can call back later,” Clarke offers, as she always does. Rhynn despises scheduling meetings, and also despises sitting at a desk, so calls often catch them mid-activity.
“Don’t be silly, it’s fine.” Rhynn deliberately tips their canoe over. They splutter up out of the water, sling their arms across the overturned hull, and adjust the camera angle. “There we go, that’s much better. How’s your break going?”
“Good. I’m on my way back to Luna now. That design meeting is the day after tomorrow.”
“The one about next year’s ship.” Rhynn kicks along in the water, calling out to whoever else is in their canoeing party that they’re perfectly fine, just taking care of a bit of work.
“I agree that it’s a good sign, but I still think it’d be in your best interest to start letting other teams know you’re open to discussion. ”
It bounces around in Clarke’s brain. She lets it, hoping it will settle somewhere clear and unsurprised when it doesn’t.
When Clarke first set her sights on F0, she promised herself that she’d fly for any team but Elemental, because Elemental was where Anders spent the bulk of his career. She didn’t want to follow in Anders’s footsteps any more than she already would be by racing at all.
Connor didn’t push her on it. That’s how Connor was. Amiable, agreeable, willing to take what you told him at face value. Julian, on the other hand, told her in no uncertain terms that she was being an idiot.
You don’t want to follow in Anders’s footsteps? Don’t, he’d said. Eclipse them. Anders never won the pilot bracket. If Elemental makes you an offer, take it, and then drag them to the top of both championships. Make them remember your name, not his.
Clarke can’t do that if she’s not with Elemental anymore. She isn’t ready to give up yet, and she definitely isn’t ready for everyone to know how close Elemental is to giving up on her.
She wishes she could talk to Julian about this.
She’s almost called him a dozen times since break started, going so far as to pull up his contact and stare at their last message exchange.
A year and a half ago, when Elemental announced they’d signed Clarke to a rookie contract.
Julian: Congratulations. Connor’d be proud. Clarke: Thanks. See you out there.
The gap between now and then is daunting.
How is Clarke supposed to start the conversation again, when their only interactions in the interim have been forced socialization for work?
When the last two times they’ve spoken privately, they’ve dragged each other’s sore spots into the light?
They know each other well enough to know how to hit where it hurts, and any conversation about Clarke’s future with Elemental is going to be painful enough to begin with.
She hasn’t called him. She’s not going to call him. She is strong enough to do this on her own, no matter how much she misses him.
“I want to see how the meeting goes,” Clarke says as a notification scrolls across the wall of her cabin.
All the passengers who want to go to Luna, not Earth, need to make their way to the breakaway cruiser.
“And the first few races back from break. If we’re still in this position then… yeah. We’ll talk about it.”
“If you’re sure,” Rhynn says.
“I am,” Clarke lies, and ends the call quickly with excuses about getting to the breakaway cruiser.
(A traitorous voice in her head adds: What if Rhynn puts out feelers, and no one responds? What if no one wants Clarke at all?)