Chapter 37
Stupid question, really. She shows it by racing.
Clarke is a racer, down to her core. Her building blocks are competition and speed and finding the next limit so she can break through it. Wormhole Wonderland is a great place to showcase what Clarke can do, and she wakes up on Grand Prix day with a fire burning in her belly.
The fire roars higher when she realizes that Yves doctored the FIC parc fermé assessment again.
He must think she’s a total idiot. That, or he’s praying that because she didn’t say anything about the discrepancy last time, she doesn’t know there’s a discrepancy at all.
Maybe he doesn’t realize that she cross-referenced against the full report?
He’s got to be able to tell something has changed based on how Clarke’s been acting, but maybe he thinks it’s about the failing contract negotiations?
Clarke puzzles over it during breakfast. She spins it around in her head during warm-up laps. She marinates on it while docking her ship at the grid in P9, to be tended to by mechanics until the anthems play and the marquee lights come on.
Then she goes to her prep room and puts it out of her mind.
Off-track drama has no place in the immediate run-up to a race.
She clears out everything but thinking through the course, hands up in front of her and feet jamming into the floor, mocking the controls she’ll use during each element.
Turn 1; a banked descent; chicane at a 110-degree angle; turn 2; wormhole 1; quick, hard hairpin into a quicker, harder, spiraling ascent.
Someone knocks on the door. Clarke swings it open, mildly peeved at the interruption, and is surprised to find Maki waiting in the hall. “Shouldn’t you be with the ship?”
Maki looks markedly uncomfortable. “I still have a few minutes. I just—you said that you always wanted to know, if there was something weird.”
Clarke freezes midway through wiggling the top half of her racing suit up over her fireproofs. The split second of surprise and terror she’d had at Monza before other ships crashed into her seizes her lungs in a tight grip. “The start-up glitch?”
Maki gnaws on his lip. “It’s still there, yeah, but this is something else. I think something happened during parc fermé.”
Clarke forces her remembered fear away and zips up her suit. “What sort of something?”
“The assessment. There’s something weird about it.”
Relief washes over Clarke like stepping into a warm shower after being out in the cold. “Oh. Yeah, that’s okay, Maki, I already know about it.”
“You do?”
“I do.” Clarke pokes her earpieces into place. “Wait. How do you know about it?”
“I got, uh, curious? After things got super weird between you and Yves at team dinner last week over the report? And then when nothing came of it? So I got a copy, and the administrative metadata on it is all messed up.”
Clarke’s no data architect, but she knows what he’s getting at.
Administrative metadata includes a document’s editing record: who’s touched it, and what they’ve changed.
It’s what she’s planning on looking at for the bullshit reports Yves has given her to further prove his guilt.
It sounds like Maki’s done that work for her.
“Send me what you have? I’m handling it, but you may have just saved me a lot of time. ”
Maki taps at his cuff. Clarke’s, already sitting on its charging pad on the desk since she can’t wear it while racing, dings.
He looks up, still obviously nervous. “You’re not going to—I mean, we should tell the race director, right?
Ask for the start to be delayed, so we can do another check?
If something’s wrong with the assessment, there could be something wrong with the ship. ”
“There’s nothing wrong with the ship. Nothing we don’t already know about, anyways.” Clarke pulls her balaclava up and settles it around her eyes. “Thank you for telling me, but you don’t need to worry about this.”
Maki doesn’t look convinced, but he follows her out to the garage. Clarke pulls her helmet and gloves on, checks her CO? recycler, and walks to Amira. Maki hitches a ride to the grid on their liftpad and gets Clarke set up. She primes the deck. He verifies her biometrics. They trade All clears.
Blue lights. Red lights.
Racing.
Clarke comes off the line in what she’s sure will be one of her best reaction times this season.
She has to pull up hard immediately so she doesn’t make contact with P7, and she passes over the top of them.
The banked descent comes up fast after the first turn, and Clarke battles sidewash and dirty air from their tight grouping of ships all the way down.
Someone goes off the track behind her, forced through the top part of the tunnel by a ship beneath them refusing to give way.
She flies through a cloud of smoke entering the first patch of chicane; someone ahead must be having a problem.
Turn 2, then straight into the opaque blue disc of the first wormhole entrance. It goes against every instinct Clarke has to fly right at it, her training screaming at her to engage dampeners, reverse thrust, and swerve, but she stays the course.
Passing through a wormhole feels unnatural.
No time at all passes from a spectator’s point of view, and technically no time passes for the pilot, either, but it seems like time slows down.
It seems like seconds stretch long between the thumps of Clarke’s heart, enough for her to register a perceived difference.
Then she’s out and through, onto the second section of the track, a half kilometer from where she was.
The race goes on.
She rises steadily through the ranks, picking off people in front of her as variables start changing and others slow to tackle them.
The order is mostly stabilized by lap eight with Delphine at P1, Belette in P2, Oliver in P3, and Clarke in P4.
Julian’s back in P8, having received bad information about what variable to expect on the fifth lap.
It was Engel’s ship spitting smoke on the first lap; he has to retire.
“This lap’s variable is shortened chicane after the upcoming descent,” Amira says as she’s starting lap nine. “Expect five cutbacks instead of seven.”
“Got it.” Clarke curls up the wall of the track around turn 1. “Gap to Oliver?”
“Two-point-eight. You were even pace with him, last lap.”
Clarke slides into the descent, thinking. She’s not losing ground, that’s good, but she already feels like she’s pushing pretty hard. If she asks for more from the ship and shimmy becomes a problem again—
She weaves into the chicane. The harness digs into her chest and hips. Her vision unexpectedly grays out at the edges. She loses sight of the line she’d been flying.
She jerks hard at the control deck, but can’t adjust her trajectory in time and blows through the side of the barrier, thankfully at a permeable section. A timer appears at the top of her control deck, ticking up the seconds she’ll have to pay back in penalty.
“Clarke?”
She’s out in the void, fully off the track. Fear and frustration lift their heads; she shoves them down. She knows what to do when this happens. Find the track, drop back in as quickly as she can without hitting another ship. Simple.
Not simple. Her orientation is shot to hell, and her vision isn’t all the way back yet. She cranes her neck around as much as the brace will allow, sees the track sort of behind-above her, and aims for a patch of barrier her deck says will let her through. “Dropping back in. Three, two—”
She reenters near the end of the chicane. Turn 2 is coming up fast. She’s breathing hard. Why is she breathing this hard? “Amira?”
“You’re P6, with four-point-four seconds in penalty time. It’s Thierry ahead, David behind,” Amira says immediately. “And you’re on warning from the medics for low oxygen levels.”
Clarke’s stomach churns as she barrels around the turn and toward the wormhole. “It’s too early in the race for that.”
She jumps to the second section of track. There’s a tiny hitch in the radio connection when she’s between planes that resolves into Amira’s voice saying, “—reading.”
Clarke takes the hairpin. Her vision hazes again, but she manages to stay away from the barrier. “Say that again?”
“Might just be a bad biofeed reading. How do you feel?”
She assesses as she exits the hairpin into the spiraling climb. “Not good. Vision’s graying out. Short of breath. Nauseous. The ship feels heavier than it should.”
“Okay.” Amira sounds worried. Amira doesn’t get worried, not on the radio during a race. “Do you want to keep going?”
She has to keep going. She can’t DNF again, not with Val’s interest hanging in the balance. No, wait, that’s not right—not Val, Lennox—Atreus?—wait—
The bottom drops out of Clarke’s gut, replaced with rising fear. She can’t think straight. She’s a danger to herself and everyone on the track. She’s—
“We think there’s something wrong with your ship’s air supply.” Who’s talking? “Pull to the top-right relative.”
Clarke’s dizzy. There’s a curve up ahead. She takes it.
“Clarke?”
There’s blood in her mouth. What track is this? Where is she?
“Clarke, if you can hear me, you need to slow down.”
She tries. She really does. But she forgets that the spiral was last lap’s changed variable, and it’s a loop longer now. Her oxygen-starved brain can’t compensate in time. She tries to straighten out while the track keeps curving, and her perception splinters further.
A streaky view of a spectator platform, and—
Her control deck goes red, and—
The barrier’s impermeable in areas where there are spectators, and—
The first rule of surviving a Formula Zero crash is to kill the engine, but—
Impact.