Chapter 15
They shouldn’t run. It’s pitch-black in here, and the room is full of stuff they could trip into or over. This should be a game of stealth, not speed.
Julian barks a laugh as the grace period timer starts.
Clarke pivots and sprints the other direction for as long as she dares, then slows and fumbles until she feels the raised edge of a ring.
She wiggles under the rope and lies on her front, hiding her glowing forearm under her belly, slowing her breathing until four streaks of light come into view, and then she attacks.
It goes like that for several minutes. They come together and break apart over and over, leaving bigger and brighter marks as they get easier to spot. They’re aggressive, but not vicious, and it’s ridiculously fun, and Clarke has missed this dearly.
She fakes right, goes left, and manages to streak some light across his ribs.
Instead of breaking off for the grace period, he hooks a knee behind hers and twists, bearing them both to the floor.
She lands on her butt, one of his hands behind her head to cushion the fall.
He has her pinned in seconds, his knees squeezing her wrists tight against her hips.
“Are we done already?” Clarke asks, squirming, searching for the leverage to throw him off. She hasn’t been trying to keep track of time, but that didn’t feel like fifteen minutes.
“Just taking a breather,” Julian says, and lightning tickles her spine at how close his voice is. She can only see the parts of him that are glowing, but she can feel how they’re positioned: his palms flat on either side of her head, his torso suspended over hers.
Clarke was already warm from exertion, and the awareness of his body feeds oxygen to that fire. Her heart hammers, so loud she’s sure he can hear it. “You should talk to my trainer, if you’re already out of breath. Get a better conditioning plan.”
His weight shifts, one of his hands dropping down her side to get to her left forearm, still trapped against her hip. “That the same trainer who’s monitoring your heart rate right now?”
The heat takes another turn, this time toward anger. “Is that why you set this up? You want to talk about the chip again?”
“We didn’t talk about it at all the first time. You shut me down.”
Clarke plants her heels and bucks her hips hard to the left. “Because it’s none of your business.”
Julian lets her shift him, takes a seat on the floor alongside her. “If a pilot’s being mistreated by their team, it’s—”
“Oh, fuck off,” Clarke snaps, sitting up.
She’s well and truly mad now. Mad at him for bringing the chip up again when Clarke’s been trying not to think about it, for ruining what had been a surprisingly enjoyable outing, for approaching it so loftily.
“I read the relevant section of the F0 Pilot Welfare handbook. The chip isn’t against any rules. And I agreed to it, so—”
“Did you know you had another choice when you agreed?”
Yes. No. Sort of?
Clarke knows her contract is shitty. It takes the normal conditions and restrictions several steps further than usual, and the penalties Clarke incurs for violations (fines, taken out of her salary) are severe.
Clarke thought it was a joke, when she first saw that she’d have to ask permission to attend non-F0 events with pilots from other teams. When she saw that she’d be implanted with a chip.
She thought there was a camera hidden somewhere, recording her reaction so people could laugh about her trying to stay professional while reading the increasingly absurd constraints.
It wasn’t a joke.
Rhynn didn’t want her to sign the contract.
Rhynn wanted to negotiate terms. And they did, a little, but the deadline to fill the seat was looming, and Clarke started hearing whispers that Yves was talking to a backup pilot, and Naomi suggested announcing that Anders Dalsing was Clarke’s father to stoke excitement about an Elemental family legacy in the making, so Clarke was dealing with that shitshow.
Clarke and Julian hadn’t spoken in nearly a year. Connor had been dead for over a year.
Clarke had lost enough. She didn’t want to lose her shot at F0, too. She signed the contract, agreeing to the chip and the social limitations and the meal plan and everything else.
It’s August, now. Teams have to file their rosters for the upcoming season by the end of January.
Technically, there’s still plenty of time for Elemental to make Clarke an offer, and for Clarke and Rhynn to try to make the next agreement less dictatorial than the current one.
But Clarke’s blinked in this game of chicken before, and Yves knows it.
She feels wrung out, all of a sudden. She’s fighting battles on too many fronts.
Something’s got to give, and she can give with Julian, can’t she?
He has more than enough ammunition to cause a lot of problems for Clarke, but he’s not using any of it maliciously.
He’s not trying to hurt her. He’s never tried to hurt her.
It’s easier to be brave in the dark. She’s not sure she could say this if she had to look at him, or feel him looking at her. “Yves built the cage, but I walked in and locked it myself.”
Julian exhales a long, slow breath. It ruffles the fine hairs on Clarke’s arm, and a tingle ripples all the way up to her neck. “Okay. How do we get you out of the cage?”
Clarke smiles, rueful and appreciative. It’s very Julian, to immediately put himself on the team and hop into problem-solving. “I’ve been asking myself that question for months.”
Something touches the side of her face. It’s startling in the dark, her heartbeat lurching into high gear, but he just cups her cheek gently. The heel of his hand brushes the corner of her mouth. “Sorry. I thought I heard you smiling, but I couldn’t see it. I just wanted to be sure.”
The front door opens, blinding them with sunlight before Clarke can do something irretrievably stupid like turn into his hand and kiss his palm.
He’s slow to pull away as PK and Sara enter, calling out for them, and Clarke is, too.
She gave him an opening to turn this nasty, to heap blame and shame on her for being a pushover, and he didn’t.
He might, in the future. He could make her regret showing him this bit of her soft underbelly.
She doesn’t think he will, though. So when he stands and reaches out to pull her to her feet, she puts her hand in his and trusts.
—
In the hovercar back to the hotel, Sara asks offhandedly, “You seem different. Did something happen?”
Clarke doesn’t answer, unsure how to put into words that she feels like her skin fits for the first time in years.
That trusting Julian is more natural than breathing.
The silence, broken only by an arrival time update from the car’s autonomous driver function, stretches out long enough that Sara blinks out of the interface in her head to focus on Clarke.
“Oh, I didn’t—I’m not recording, promise.
I just—if you wanted to talk about it, you could.
With me, I mean. You could talk about it with me. ”
It’s the least self-composed Clarke’s ever seen Sara. Sara moderates comments on social media posts as part of her job. The woman’s nigh unflappable, but extending this offer has her thoroughly flapped.
Clarke considers it. Sara’s proven herself reliable and competent.
She’s disappeared footage of Clarke crying, of that time Clarke put a hole in the wall of her prep room in frustration after a bad race, of Clarke getting lectured by Yves or Naomi.
She smooths the Clarke-and-Anders relationship over for public consumption.
A reporter tried to pay Sara for access to Clarke’s personal camera roll last year.
Sara said no, reported the reporter, and got him banned from all FIC press assignments.
Clarke’s never talked to Sara about anything private. She could. That’s what Sara’s telling her right now, that they could be friends outside of work instead of just friendly colleagues.
But it’s only a matter of time before someone offers Sara an amount she can’t say no to, especially if Clarke stays in the spotlight. Clarke won’t blame her, when that happens. Sara’s on Clarke’s side for now, but professional loyalty only goes so far.
“Thanks,” Clarke says. “But it was just a long day. There’s nothing to talk about.”
—
Clarke’s P12 coming out of qualifying, and finishes P12 in the Grand Prix.
Julian finishes third, Delphine second. Thierry’s teammate, the other Enclave pilot, takes first, and that’s what most of the press is about—how the race for third overall is really starting to heat up between Enclave and Martian Motors.
Elemental isn’t even in the conversation.
Clarke’s P2 at Lion’s Head is all but forgotten, an outlier quickly pushed out of mind.
You’re only as good as your last race, after all.
Clarke can’t change her last race, so she looks ahead to the next.