Chapter 20
It’s a day and a half from Iskret to Luna.
Clarke spends the first part of the trip in media training, practicing answering questions about Matthew and Raff.
Once Naomi deems her acceptable, she’s sent to actually answer those questions, repeating phrases like grateful for everything Matthew taught me and looking forward to seeing what Raff and I can do together so many times that she starts to sound robotic.
The Elemental team transport docks late on Tuesday. Clarke goes to her house and falls into bed. When she wakes up on Wednesday morning, the first of the Julian Julian’s drawing. Without looking at each other, they both reach for their drinks, take sips, and set the pouches down in unison.
A half-green, half-blue title card shows. Julian can Clarke talk to him then?
Right, because that’s exactly what Clarke wants. To chitchat about her contract prospects at her own birthday dinner.
Clarke almost yells. Right there, in the hall outside Yves’s empty glass-walled office, she almost yells at Yves’s poor droid, who is blameless in all of this.
Her fuse is getting shorter. Or maybe it’s just been burning slowly for so long that she’s finally near the end of it, and Raff’s attitude is acting as an accelerant.
He hasn’t said anything remotely complimentary about Clarke in the press (why he’s getting away with that when Clarke gets scolded if a single word out of her mouth is less than effusive, she has no idea) and she keeps overhearing that he’s being a jerk to Matthew’s old support crew.
She sees it in person Thursday morning, when they’re loading the trailers that will be driven to the team transport, which is waiting at an extraorbital dock outside of town.
Raff snaps first at the mechanics packing his ship, then the livery intern handling his suits and helmet.
Clarke keeps waiting for Raff’s race engineer to step in. When he doesn’t, and when it looks like the intern is about to burst into tears under Raff’s verbal abuse, Clarke does.
“If you’re so unhappy with the quality of the team’s work, you could always do it yourself,” Clarke says mildly.
That’s what she’s doing: sitting at a table in the loading garage, wrapping her own helmet.
She always packs her personal gear, helmet and racing suit and fireproofs.
It’s not because she doesn’t trust the interns; she just prefers to do it herself.
“It’s their job,” Raff says. “They’re supposed to be qualified for this.”
“They are qualified. You’re the one with the problem.
And it’s a problem with a solution.” Clarke kicks at the empty chair across from her, scooting it back from the table.
She gently pries Raff’s helmet out of the intern’s shaking hands and sets it on the table in front of the offered chair.
“So you can fix it yourself, or I can make it my problem, too.”
The loading garage, normally a riot of overlapping sounds as crates get shoved around and people call out instructions and updates, has mostly gone quiet.
Clarke’s peripherally aware of a lot of surreptitious elbows in sides, but keeps her eyes on her helmet, not even looking up as Raff slowly drops into the open chair.
“And what would that look like?” Raff asks. “You making it your problem.”
“I don’t know. But I’m pretty creative.” Clarke nudges a roll of protective wrapping across the table.
“Is this how things worked for you at Enclave? Thierry hasn’t let too much slip, but you know him.
He takes team loyalty seriously, and wouldn’t have felt comfortable saying a bad word against you since this is his rookie season. He wouldn’t have wanted to make waves.”
Raff picks up the wrapping, turns it over in his hands. “And you do? With an expiring contract, fifty-five total points to your name, and your management just having brought in someone who’s gotten P1 twice this season?”
“You’re right. There’s a lot working against me right now.
” This isn’t the contentious discussion Clarke thought she’d be having today, but damn if it doesn’t feel righteous to stand up to one of the men making her life hell.
“You’re implying that I’m on thin ice with Yves, with the organization, and I should, what, know my place?
Maybe instead you should consider that with everything going on, I might not particularly give a damn about staying in my lane.
What I’ve been doing this far obviously isn’t working, so maybe I’ll try something new.
Maybe I’ll try not letting yet another arrogant, self-serving jackass bully the people around him. ”
Raff is furious. It’s all over his face, from his red-blotched skin and grinding jaw to the chill in his pale blue eyes. He doesn’t seem to have a response yet, but that’s okay. Clarke’s not done.
“I’m not scared of you, Raff,” she says. “And 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 just because you are incapable of processing your inadequacy like an adult.”
That gets him moving. “You want to talk about inadequacy? Yves only gave you a chance as a favor to your daddy.”
Clarke’s heard it so many times that she’s able to let it roll right off her back. “Anders found out that I was his kid after Yves had already offered me the contract. Everyone knows that.”
Something smug spreads across Raff’s features. “He lied. I was your dad’s teammate for a while, remember? He didn’t talk about you, but he knew. No pro racing pilot follows Juniors that intently without a damn good reason.”
“Even if you’re telling the truth, that doesn’t prove anything,” Clarke says, trying not to show that she’s rattled.
Anders never mentioned paying attention to the youth circuits when Clarke was in them, and it should’ve come up back when Clarke was signing with Elemental and Naomi was drafting the announcement about Clarke and Anders being related.
“He could’ve just been keeping an eye on future competition. ”
Raff snorts. “He was in his last years on the track before retiring, and you weren’t even semi-pro yet. You weren’t something he needed to be concerned about.”
Clarkes forces herself to shrug. “That doesn’t mean he went to Yves about it.”
Raff stands. He hasn’t so much as touched his helmet. “You know, everyone else trying to make it in this sport, they take every advantage they can get. Exploit every connection.”
Clarke’s not short, either for a woman or for an F0 pilot, and Raff is not particularly tall. But he’s broader and thicker, and he’s standing and she’s sitting, and when he plants his hands on the table and looms over her, an animalistic instinct to flee kicks in.
Clarke looks up at him steadily, not allowing an ounce of that hindbrain fear to bleed through. “Your point?”
“No one would’ve cared if you’d been up-front about Anders helping you get your foot in the door. That happens all the time at this level. You would’ve taken some heat for it at first, but they would’ve let it go once you proved yourself actually capable of competing.”
“Anders. Didn’t. Know,” Clarke grits out.
“It doesn’t actually matter. It doesn’t matter if he knew, or if you knew he knew, or if he intervened.
You decided to build the perception of who you are on a foundation of having gotten this far without help, so now you can’t have gotten help, and you can’t accept help moving forward.
You think it’s independence, but it’s not. It’s pride, and it makes you weak.”
He straightens up. The roll of wrapping is crushed flat, where it’d been pinned between his palm and the table. He leaves.
After a moment, movement and conversation resume in the garage. The intern, still sitting next to her, reaches out to take Raff’s helmet back.
Clarke drags it next to her own helmet instead. She needs to turn her brain off before she starts crying in front of this whole room of people, and the methodical process of preparing a helmet for shipping will do that.
Clarke knows she didn’t get here without help.
Every coach and trainer she’s ever had, the limitless support from her mom and Ihaka, the teammates who’ve challenged her and the mechanics who’ve worked on her ships and the engineers who’ve built them.
Clarke’s able to do what she does because literally thousands of people have contributed to boosting her up to this opportunity.
Clarke knows that. She’s grateful for that.
She consciously tries not to take that for granted.
Wanting this to be something she’s achieved without Anders’s influence, and wanting people to know she did it without Anders’s influence, doesn’t make her prideful.
Does it?
She’ll talk to Julian about it, she resolves. Or Val, maybe. She has people she can talk to about shit like this now, who can help her get out of her head and look at things objectively.
See, Clarke can accept help. Raff can go screw himself.