Chapter 38
“—Mars. You are recovering from injuries sustained while competing in a Formula Zero Grand Prix. Please remain calm and still. Staff members will arrive shortly to assist you. Good afternoon, Madeline Clarke. You are in Olympic City Medical Center on Mars. You are recovering—”
Sound comes back first, a set of short, clear sentences on a loop. They float around in her brain like leaves on running water, finally making sense somewhere around the tenth repetition.
She crashed. Badly, if she’s at a full hospital, not just in-paddock Medical. A hospital on Mars? Wonderland’s closer to Earth than Mars, why would they—
Vision, smell, and taste all come back together. Dim light filters in through her eyelids, the crisp scent of sterility tickles her nose, the backs of her teeth leave a heavy staleness on her tongue. She slits her eyes open warily.
Healing pod. A full-size one, like she’s inside a giant bubble, as opposed to the smaller models they seal around injured limbs to repair more localized damage.
The curved walls are a shade of blue that’s probably supposed to be soothing, but is too close to Elemental blue to have that effect on Clarke.
There’s no gravity; she’s floating, suspended mid-bubble.
Her body, the parts of it she can see, is dotted with adhered sensors between the modesty wraps around her hips and chest. An IV access line is secured to her inner elbow.
There’s a holoscreen in front of her face. The words she can hear are displayed there in the six most common written languages.
She’s missing a sense. She can’t feel anything.
It’s probably drugs. She’s probably not paralyzed.
She closes her eyes.
—
There’s a flurry of activity that Clarke experiences in bits and pieces, once the hospital staff realize she’s awake.
A nurse and a doctor enter the healing pod, run her through a series of tests, and transfer her to a gurney.
Gravity reasserts itself on her body the instant she’s out of the pod, and while she’s relieved to find that she’s not paralyzed, the pain is—
A noise tears out of her, primal and wounded. The doctor bursts into motion, ready to up the dosage on her painkiller, but the nurse stops them. “Give her a second to adjust. This pain will pass, Ms. Clarke. Your partner said to remind you to breathe like you’re in the seat.”
In for four, hold for four, out for eight. Yes. Yes, she can do that.
Her first exhale is choppy. A wheezing cough that racks her whole body forces itself free of her lungs right after, but the next cycle of respiration is smoother.
The next is smoother still. The sluggish-spiky-gnarled sensation starts to fade, receding along her limbs, centralizing in her chest and head.
It’s manageable there, at least. She can build walls around the pain, cordon it off.
“Well done,” the nurse says. “Would you like stronger—”
“No,” Clarke croaks, fragmented thoughts going to the next race and eligibility to compete. Strong painkillers can take days to filter out of the body, and she can’t fly if there’s anything impairing her system. “I’m fine. It’s better. I’m fine.”
—
Visitors are allowed once Clarke’s situated in a normal patient room. Her mom is escorted in, looking rougher than Clarke feels, and wastes no time pulling a chair as close to Clarke’s bed as she can without actually sitting on the mattress.
“How’s Kuari?” Clarke asks the minute they’re left alone.
“Trust you to ask about your brother before you’ve asked about yourself,” Imogen says, rubbing at the red rings of her eyes. “It was rough, but he’s been better since they told us you were going to be okay.”
“I am going to be okay?” Clarke latches on to the phrasing. “Full recovery? That’s what they told you? The pod emergency team wouldn’t say. What even happened?”
It takes Clarke a second to place the emotion on her mother’s face, because she’s so rarely seen Imogen display cold fury. “There was an issue with your air supply. You weren’t getting enough oxygen.”
That explains the headache. She’s feeling ten times better than she was when they first pulled her out of the healing pod, but her head and chest are still tender, and her limbs still feel heavy.
It’s taking longer than expected to adjust to normal gravity again.
Her first few steps in 1 G after a race always feel clumsy, but only those first few steps. How long was she in the pod?
Frowning makes the headache worse, but she can’t help it. “How, though? There’s redundant air supply, and the recycler besides, and—”
“You’ll have to ask your team, Maddie.”
“Yeah, of course, but they must have already found the problem and are fixing it for next weekend, right?” Next weekend is the Olympic City race.
It’s Chronicle’s home track, and the last non-Terran site of the season.
That’s probably why they brought her to Mars, now that she’s thinking about it, so she’d be close by and can get right back into the swing of things.
“Maddie,” Imogen starts, sounding like she’s bracing for something, but the door slides open suddenly and two people enter the room in a rush. It’s Julian and—
“Matthew?” Clarke asks, confused. “What are you doing here?”
Matthew smiles sheepishly. He’s wearing Elemental-branded clothes. “They needed someone to fly your ship.”
The monitor hooked up to the sensor on Clarke’s chest starts beeping louder. “What are you talking about?”
Matthew’s grin falters. He looks to Julian. “You didn’t—uh, Clarke, it’s—”
“Honey.” Imogen rests her hand on Clarke’s forearm.
“The damage to your organs, especially your lungs, from being without oxygen as long as you were was extensive, and that’s not to mention the ribs that broke on impact.
The pod fixed the damage, but it needed time to work. It’s been four days. It’s Friday.”
“Friday afternoon,” Julian clarifies, cutting to the point. He knows what matters most to Clarke. Saints, she’s glad he’s here. “You missed Olympic City practice. You’re medically ineligible for qualifying tomorrow, and the race Sunday. Matthew’s flying for you.”
Clarke slingshots through reactions, confusion and denial and disappointment and anger all fuzzing together. She gets stuck on anxious worry, eyes going to Matthew. “You can’t. You can’t fly for me.”
He winces. “I know it’s not ideal, and they could’ve pulled up one of the reserves, but when Yves called to see if I’d fill in, I figured you’d probably rather it be me than anyone else.”
“Not that.” Clarke struggles to sit up. The monitor whines louder. She ignores it, and the flare of pain in her torso. “The ship isn’t safe. You can’t fly it, Matthew, it’s dangerous!”
“Maddie, please stop,” Imogen says, getting her hands on Clarke’s shoulders to try to press her back down onto the bed. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”
Julian tries to help. “They fixed the air supply. There was—”
“It’s not about the air supply!” Clarke tries to shout, but her lungs aren’t having it.
A coughing fit takes over, this rasping bark of a sound.
Her ribs shake where they’re joined to her spine and sternum, and she gets light-headed and the monitor is shrieking and more people run into the room and it takes several long, embarrassing moments for her to be able to breathe on her own again.
Eventually, the various medical professionals leave, Imogen steps out to call Ihaka with an update, and Julian and Matthew bring Clarke up to speed.
A membrane in Clarke’s primary air tank wasn’t filtering properly.
It happens. That’s why there’s a secondary air tank, ready to automatically take over if an anomaly in the first tank is detected.
The order of air sources is supposed to be primary tank, secondary tank, in-helmet CO? recycler.
Somehow (the sarcasm Clarke feels thinking somehow cannot be overstated) that order got changed to primary, recycler, secondary in Clarke’s ship’s central systems brain at Wonderland.
When the primary tank’s membrane failed, the ship switched Clarke to her recycler.
It’s a valid option, so there wasn’t a need to alert or alarm until an hour later, when the recycler’s reserve ran out.
Clarke did eventually get switched to the secondary tank, but it was too late.
Clarke’s surprised that all of this is public knowledge right up until she learns that it’s not public knowledge by choice.
Elemental initially tried to be coy about it, saying only that Clarke’s oxygen levels dropped unexpectedly, but then the radio recording was released.
Everyone heard Amira telling Clarke that there was a problem with the air supply, and then Elemental was obligated to provide an explanation.
It’s the second time this season Clarke’s radio recording has been leaked, she muses as Julian, too, steps into the hall to field a call. This also happened at Lion’s Head, after Yves didn’t give Clarke good guidance during the race. Coincidence?
With Julian out of the room, Clarke takes her turn explaining recent events and fills Matthew in on her suspicions about what’s happening at Elemental. He’s pale under his freckles by the time she’s done. “Clarke, that’s—you could’ve died. Yves knew, and he didn’t—you could’ve died!”
“I think that was the plan, yeah,” Clarke says, glad for once that she’s able to keep her voice flat through years of hiding how she really feels from the press. Otherwise she’d either be crying or screaming, and she’s genuinely unsure which would win out right now but neither would be productive.
Yves and Anders tried to kill her.
“You don’t have to fly this weekend,” Clarke says, backing away from the rabbit hole she could fall down if she keeps thinking about it now. “It’s just me that they want to fail, so I doubt they’d sabotage you directly, but I don’t know for sure. You could get hurt.”
Matthew picks at the blanket at the foot of Clarke’s bed. “But why don’t we just tell someone? Why haven’t you told someone?”