Chapter 32 #2
Clarke swallows. “Say that it was.”
“Well, that’s another issue entirely,” Val says. “Are you sure?”
“No. But I can’t say it’s not true with one hundred percent confidence.”
Val, hunched over the droid, straightens up.
She’s dressed in oil-stained work clothes, red lines from safety goggles impressed into the skin around her eyes.
This is the flip side of the coin Val presents in the F0 paddock, where she’s all clean lines and tailored outfits. “Why’d you come to me with this?”
“I need someone to explain to me, in detail, how parc fermé works. The timelines, the attestations, who exactly looks at what. I can’t ask anyone at Elemental.”
“You think something’s happening during parc fermé?”
Clarke’s suspension broke at Tempe Terra after parc fermé took place in team garages, not the normal separate display room. It might have been a coincidence. “All I’m asking is for you to help me understand what happens after I check my ship in. From the perspective of a team principal.”
She doesn’t know much about parc fermé, is the thing.
All she’s ever had to do is attest that her ship is legal and wait for the inspection to clear.
But team principals also attest to compliance, and then review a lengthy assessment from the FIC when the ship is released.
If Clarke can get her hands on that report, with Yves’s sign-off at the bottom—that might be getting somewhere, because Clarke’s quite literally willing to bet her life on it not matching up with the spreadsheet of issues the Elemental team’s been working from all season.
The FIC trusts Yves to take their notes back to the technical team. The technical team trusts Yves to tell them everything the FIC found.
Clarke doesn’t trust Yves at all anymore.
Val reaches across the droid, reclaims the panel Clarke’s been tracing with her index finger, and begins securing it into place again. “All right. It starts with the pilot’s check-in.”
—
The hunt continues.
Clarke has been to Julian’s apartment in Olympic City before.
Not often, because the rift between them was already widening during Julian’s first season in F0, but she knows where it is.
She’s imagined making the trip from her colorless, catalog-ready house on Luna to his homey, lived-in apartment on Mars so many times that it’s laughably easy to get there from Val’s place, right up until the moment she’s standing outside his building.
She’s out of her mind.
Julian’s not expecting her. He’s probably busy. He might not even be on the planet. He might have company. He might have company. Clarke really should’ve just gone back to Luna or over to her mom’s, but—it just—
This week felt like driving down the pit lane toward the veil.
You’ve done everything you’re about to do a million times before, and you’re sure it’s going to be fine, but what if it’s not?
What if a mechanic didn’t fully secure a thruster shell?
What if your air line is crimped? What if your wheels don’t retract, what if the semipermeable force field suddenly turns nonpermeable, what if, what if, what if?
All of Elemental HQ has been tense. No one’s supposed to know about Clarke’s extension offer, but it sure seems like most of the team does and has jumped to the obvious conclusion that if Clarke was happy about what Elemental brought to the table, they’d have made an announcement by now.
Clarke mostly kept her head down, drilling sims for the upcoming races ad nauseam, emerging only to step in when Raff was going too far berating team members again.
By the time everyone was dismissed on Thursday night, she knew she needed to throw herself into something else instead of going back to her house and stewing all weekend.
Something where she felt like she was taking action, not waiting for someone else’s decision.
She went to Val’s. She has a plan. There are holes in her plan she could fly a neighborhood-size cruiser through, but she has a plan. The plan does not include pacing outside Julian’s apartment.
Her pacing brings her close to the building’s front door. The scanner chimes. She backs away on instinct, sure it’s going to flash an Access denied message and tell her to leave the property, but instead the light bar goes green. Access granted. Welcome back, Ms. Clarke.
Julian still has her listed as an authorized guest?
The door opens for her. She steps across the threshold. There’s a bank of elevators; another scanner sets her destination to the tenth floor.
Julian’s waiting when the elevator lets her out. He’s standing in the open door to his apartment, an inscrutable look on his face. “I thought the system was erroring. What are you doing here?”
“Talking to you, hopefully,” Clarke says. “Can I come in?”
His apartment is as she remembers. Two stories, tidy but not clinically so, a pair of racing sims tucked into the corner, a display case of trophies and helmets and model ships against one wall.
A picture of Julian and Connor in racing suits, arms across each other’s shoulders.
The floor-to-ceiling window running the length of the living room looks out over a lake.
There are traces of Clarke’s family everywhere she looks: a brightly colored blanket that must’ve been a gift from Imogen, a book about arthropods Kuari was reading a few months ago, a pot simmering on the stove that smells familiar.
“Is that Ihaka’s boil-up?”
Julian brushes past her, moving to the kitchen and stirring the pot. “It’ll be ready in thirty minutes, if you’re staying for dinner. I always make enough of this to feed everyone.”
“You should probably hear what I have to say before inviting me to stay for a meal.”
“Ominous. Should I be worried?” When Clarke doesn’t answer right away, Julian speeds up his motions, resetting the pod’s lid and crossing quickly to where Clarke is at the window. “Clarke?”
“You shouldn’t be worried,” Clarke says. “Well. Not. It’s—there’s a situation. There’s possibly a situation.”
“Let’s sit,” Julian says.
“I can’t sit. I’ve been sitting all day. I need to—” Clarke holds up her hands and kind of flaps them, trying to wordlessly articulate that she’s got too much pent up inside her.
“Okay.” Julian tilts his head toward the sims. “Race me?”