Chapter 32
Rhynn is livid, and Clarke hasn’t even told them about the impending team ownership change and potential sabotage yet.
“This is insulting,” they say, visibly seething. They’re at their sister’s house today. Various tiny children keep wobbling through the frame. “Keeping your salary flat, at the level you agreed to for your rookie contract? What a joke.”
“It’s not about the money.”
“It’s a little bit about the money. You wouldn’t do this for free,” Rhynn says, oblivious to how Clarke immediately starts mentally calculating how long she would and could do this for free based on her current savings. “It’s a signal of disrespect. They want you to turn this down.”
“I know,” Clarke says, rolling into a different stretch. She’s on the floor of a private cabin on a shuttle to Luna, working through some tension in her hips. They haven’t felt right since the suspension failure at Tempe Terra.
“They’re going to—wait, what?”
Clarke laughs at the flabbergasted look on Rhynn’s face.
“They want me to walk away. I’m not allowed to disclose the terms, per my NDA, so they control the public’s perception.
They’ll be able to say that they made an offer, and I won’t be able to say how shitty it was, so it’ll come off looking like I’m unrealistic about what I’m worth.
They don’t want me back, they just don’t want to take the flak for not wanting me back.
Fans punish teams that aren’t loyal to their pilots. ”
She explains, in broad strokes, that Anders and Yves are planning to buy Elemental, and her theory about Yves purposefully making this year’s ship a shitbox.
By the end of it, Rhynn has sequestered themself in a coat closet for privacy from their sister’s kids and looks about five seconds from committing aggravated assault.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” they say, shredding a scarf they found in the closet into wisps. “I’m not going to physically harm anyone. I’m just going to destroy them. Legally. Thoroughly. Gleefully.”
“They’re not technically doing anything that breaks the law, or violates FIC rules and regulations,” Clarke says. “Teams get bought and sold. It happens. And Yves doesn’t have to deliver the best machinery possible. He doesn’t have to try to win every race.”
“He has a duty of care to you. What he’s doing is gross negligence.”
“Only if I can prove it, which I can’t.” Clarke can’t stop a small smile breaking across her face. “Yet.”
Rhynn’s eyes narrow. “What does that mean?”
Clarke breathes into a deeper twist. A whim of a thought flits through her head: She wishes Julian were here to help with the stretching, like he did after Tempe Terra. “It’s nothing you need to worry about until after the Sponsors’ Gala.”
Rhynn flings the hem of a coat out of their eyes. “That’s a month from now! You are not going to go out there and risk your life during another three races to prove a point!”
“I risk my life every race, which I’m seeing from your face is not the right argument to make, but it’s the truth. And I doubt they actually want me dead. It’s not nearly as charming of a ‘full-circle story’ if Anders’s daughter gets killed.”
Or maybe it is, Clarke thinks, a bolt of terror spearing through her.
Sympathy for Anders and Elemental would be at an all-time high if Clarke died.
That’s how it goes when someone dies in the seat.
There’s an investigation, and so long as the results don’t show fault, the entire community rallies around the affected team and family. That’s how it worked after Connor.
Clarke folds over her legs again, hiding her face. She doesn’t want Rhynn to see that fear, doesn’t want Rhynn focused on that possibility. She needs Rhynn doing something else. “It’s time to start talking to other teams.”
That derails Rhynn’s mounting rant. “Really? You’re going to actually let me do my job?”
There are just as many voices telling Clarke she can’t do this as there are telling her she can. Everyone has an opinion.
Clarke is done valuing anyone else’s opinion over her own. “Let’s see what else is out there.”
“Hell yeah.” The image of Rhynn’s face jiggles as they start taking notes. “Are we being flashy or trying to keep it quiet?”
“Quiet if we can. I’d prefer Yves not find out yet.”
“I take it that means we’re not telling Yves to shove this piece of absolute shit extension where the suns don’t—”
“I want to negotiate with Elemental in good faith. At first, at least,” Clarke relents at Rhynn’s dubious scoff. “Let’s give them a reasonable list of changes and see what happens. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m being paranoid and jumped to the wrong conclusion.”
“Clarke, I’m going to flagrantly violate the boundaries of professionalism for a second. You okay with that?”
“Uh. Sure?”
“You stopped fighting, somewhere along the line,” Rhynn says bluntly.
“You used to fight tooth and nail for what you wanted, and now you are letting other people tell you what you can have. This, today? This is the most you I’ve seen you in years.
You are worth what you think you’re worth.
Don’t fall back into doubting yourself.”
Clarke knows they’re right. She’s been making herself small off the track, complying with every order given to and restriction placed on her, nervous she’d be dropped the instant she put a toe out of line.
And when she didn’t start winning, when her first season was lackluster and her second was even worse, she bent further and further.
She told herself it was the price she had to pay to be an F0 pilot, and she was willing to pay it, because a future in which she wasn’t an F0 pilot was a future she wanted no part in.
She didn’t come to F0 just to fly. She came to F0 to win.
“On the track, when we go to chase someone down and take what we want, we call it going hunting,” Clarke says. “Fuck it, Rhynn. Let’s go hunting.”
—
Clarke’s hunt takes her to Mars.
The panel at the gate scans Clarke’s cuff, beeps a greeting, and asks if she’d like a ride up to the house. Clarke tells it no, dismisses the hovercar that brought her here, and walks.
She’s on the outskirts of Olympic City, the capital of Olympus Mons (the name of both a massive, long-dormant volcano and the country built atop it).
It’s beautiful out here, the flatness of the terrain masked by thickets of the tall, reedy trees that do well in minimally terraformed Martian soil.
Grass doesn’t thrive in areas like this, but many types of moss do, and it’s spongy under Clarke’s shoes as she pads up the long, narrow driveway to Valentina Dumond’s house.
She’s spoken to Val a few times since the last bye week, enough that Clarke was confident her request to talk in person again would be well received.
And it was, after Clarke assured Val it wasn’t an inconvenience to come to her house on Friday afternoon.
Elemental took the day off anyway (giving the team a long weekend after three weeks straight of workdays), and Val’s the one doing Clarke a favor by talking to her at all in this informal mentor-mentee relationship they’ve settled into.
The house comes into view between one clump of trees and the next.
Clarke was expecting something like Anders’s mansion, but is pleasantly surprised to find that’s not the case.
Val’s house is large, but clearly designed to work with its environment instead of standing out.
It’s wide and flat, topped with half solar panels, half more of the moss underfoot.
A suborbital ship and a hovercar are tucked under an overhang.
There’s a sizable freestanding shed off to one side, and that’s where Val is, elbow-deep in what appears to be a household droid.
“You made it!” Val calls, waving Clarke over. “Thanks for coming out all this way.”
“No problem,” Clarke says. “Is this your workshop?”
Val smiles at the shed. “It is. Far enough from the house that I don’t keep my husband awake when I’m up late tinkering, close enough that he can call me in for dinner. And this,” she says, patting the droid on the chestplate, “is my latest pet project.”
Clarke didn’t grow up with household droids, and she hasn’t felt the need to get one now that she lives on her own (Ihaka drilled into both Clarke and Kuari the importance of taking care of the place you live with your own two hands).
She’s also never been overly interested in tech that isn’t related to racing, so she can’t say for sure, but she hazards a guess. “Isn’t that model, uh, a bit outdated?”
“The challenge is half the fun.” Val pries a panel loose. “Not to rush into things, but it sounded like you had something important to discuss, and I’m not one for small talk when there’s an elephant on the space station.”
Clarke accepts the panel when Val hands it to her, cupping it gently in her palm. “I wanted to get your opinion on something.”
“I’m certainly not lacking in opinions. What’s on your mind?”
Clarke takes a moment to check in with herself and ensure she wants to do this, that she’s thought it all the way through, before asking, “If there was something wrong with this year’s Chronicle ship and you knew how to fix it, would there be a reason to wait to fix it until next year?”
“There are all sorts of reasons I might hold back a fix,” Val says promptly.
“With how far we are into the season, most of our technical team is focused on next year’s ship already, so any resources I pull to work on this year’s model are to the detriment of next year’s.
My pilots are used to this year’s ship, even managing its flaws.
The fix might put us over the variance cap, or be prohibitively expensive. ”
Clarke’s mouth is dry and her chest is tight. “Say you knew about the fix early in the season. Before the season even started, before variance cap or budget was an issue. And say the root problem wasn’t the sort of thing your pilots could compensate for.”
The tool in Val’s hand goes still. “Say the root problem was intermittent shimmy in the aft fuselage?”