Chapter 42
The gala takes place in a floating palace.
It’s modeled after what Mount Olympus, the mythological home to the ancient Grecian Olympian gods, might have looked like.
There are twelve large, interconnected buildings, all columns and masonry in off-white stone, nestled among green hills that hover three kilometers above Olympic City in a bed of perpetual clouds.
The first portion of the night is a display of the ships and cars.
Each circuit is assigned to a different building, so the Formula E guys head off for the Temple of Demeter while Clarke, Delphine, Engel, and Julian make their way to the Temple of Ares.
Delphine leaves the rest of them behind without a backward glance, striding after the small droid sent to guide them (unnecessary, as they all had to study maps of the palace so as to be able to direct sponsors if asked).
Engel rolls his eyes and jogs to catch up with her.
Clarke and Julian walk more sedately down several flights of grand, elaborately carved stairs curving along a hill.
Julian offers Clarke his elbow. “Everything okay with Delphine?”
Clarke doesn’t need his elbow. She’s perfectly capable of handling herself in heels, and the bubble of breathable air held in place around the palace by the same type of force field used at the paddock keeps wind to a minimum.
She takes his arm anyway. She’ll talk to Julian about the concerns Delphine raised.
She will. Just not tonight. “She was helping with my hair.”
“Your hair looks perfect. You look perfect.”
“You clean up pretty nicely, too,” Clarke says, making a show out of looking him over.
It’s an understatement. The sleek lines of the black tux accentuate Julian’s build; the green of his accessories brings out the amber flecks in his eyes.
His hair is styled in that perfect balance of neat and messy, a few stray curls left to fall rakishly over his forehead.
“I know.” Julian preens, adjusting one of his lapels. The Chronicle logo is embossed on the fabric. “How jealous can I expect you to get when people flirt with me tonight?”
Clarke’s laugh carries, drifting out into the open sky. Other sounds catch her attention in comparison: people calling to one another between buildings, doing final preparations; the rumble of ships and cars as they’re moved into position; the hum of an orchestra warming up in the Temple of Zeus.
“Is that a no on the jealousy?” Julian pouts, then switches to a wheedling tone. “Could be fun to see which of us loses our cool first. There’s this portico off the back of the Temple of Apollo. We could sneak off there after dinner and—”
Clarke darts to the step in front of him and claps her hand over his mouth. “Julian. Behave.”
His eyes sparkle as he looks down at her. His tongue moves against her palm in a familiar pattern. Heat rushes through her, pooling between her legs as she jerks her hand back.
“You’re a menace,” she says, instead of asking exactly where that portico is.
“I do my best,” he says agreeably, and starts them walking again. They turn off the staircase onto an aerial footbridge leading to the Temple of Ares, a tall cylindrical structure set on its own hill, and Julian lowers his voice. “Is there anything else you need for tonight?”
“Just to check in with Maki. He’s been minding my ship all afternoon. Who’s here for you?”
“Graham. He insisted.” Julian tucks her a bit closer to his side. “I’m not going to ask if you’re sure about all of this, but I hate that I won’t be with you while it’s happening. If either of them reacts badly…”
“The point is to get them to react badly.”
“You know what I mean.”
“You’ll be heading this way when I need you,” she says, twisting away so she can walk backward.
She stretches one arm back the way they came, up toward the Temple of Zeus standing tall above them, and the other toward Ares like she’s measuring the distance.
“Think you could make it in one jump from up there, if you got a running start?”
“I fly a racing ship for a living, Mads. If I need to get somewhere fast, that’s what I’m using.”
“You going to have it on standby during dinner?”
She’s teasing, but Julian’s face is serious. “Should I?”
“It was a joke,” she says soothingly, turning around to walk at his side again. They’re nearly at Ares. She can see the Provenance and Chronicle ships between columns on the ground floor.
“I wasn’t joking. Graham’d let me take the ship. He wouldn’t even ask questions.”
“I don’t think he’d appreciate you making him an accomplice to grand larceny.”
“He’d get over it.”
The man in question stands when he sees them enter the temple. “What am I getting over?”
“I’m going to steal the ship and take it for a joyride,” Julian announces. “Any concerns?”
Graham yawns. He’s in comfortable clothes and looking rumpled after spending most of the day sitting in a folding chair next to Julian’s ship, making sure no one touches it.
A garment bag, presumably holding his own tux, is hanging from the back of his chair.
“So long as it’s here for the show. And Val doesn’t catch you. Hey, Clarke.”
“Hi, Graham. Bye, Graham.” Clarke leaves Graham and Julian discussing how much trouble they’d get in were Julian to abscond with the ship and crosses the round room, completely empty beyond the other three ships and attendant staff.
A staircase wraps around one of the columns on the far side of the building.
She climbs up to the second floor (Enclave and Martian Motors) and through to the third, which Elemental is sharing with Barlowe.
Maki is lying on his belly next to her ship, tabbing through something on a holoscreen. He rolls over and waves at her from the floor, half of his body inside the marked square that’ll become a zero-gravity field when the show starts.
“Anything to report?” she asks. She tries to squat to get on his level, but there isn’t enough stretch in the fabric of her dress for that.
“Just that Raff continues to be Raff.” Maki sits up, glaring a few columns over at where Raff is hissing at the team member watching his ship. “Do you think anyone would be sad if he tripped off the edge of the temple? It could happen. All these columns, no walls or railings.”
“It’d probably look suspicious, given everything else that’s going to happen tonight.”
“I guess you’re right,” Maki sighs. He gets to his feet and hands her a small bag. “Here’s the jewelry you asked for. And Amira said you wanted to go over something?”
“Thanks, and yeah.” Clarke digs into the bag and starts settling rings on her fingers. She lowers her voice. “I think you sent me the wrong thing. I don’t need the metadata from the Wonderland parc fermé assessment as released by the FIC, I need the edited version.”
He gives her a quizzical look. “What edited version? I only ever had the one copy.”
Clarke freezes. “But you said what you were looking at was weird.”
“It is weird,” he says. He opens the report and taps through to a secondary view. “See?”
Clarke knows how to read an editing record, but she can’t focus, brain too busy spinning through implications.
Yves has been modifying the report between when he gets it from the FIC and when he passes it along to select team members.
She has both versions of the document from Hanoi and Wormhole Wonderland to prove it.
But Maki’s saying there’s something strange about the report before it even gets into Yves’s hands.
Did he wise up after Clarke confronted him during the team dinner, start inserting his changes earlier?
How, though? For that to happen, he’d have to have sway with the FIC, and he doesn’t.
Saints know the FIC doesn’t trust Yves at the moment, Anders said, during that overheard conversation a month and a half ago.
“Tell me what I’m looking at,” Clarke says bluntly. In the back of her mind, she notes Raff getting louder, more incensed. She tries to tune him out. “Please, Maki. There can’t be any mistakes.”
His look of confusion turns into one of concern. “You said you knew about this already. The only reason I didn’t go straight to the Pilot Safety Chair is because you said—”
“Maki.”
“This is the inspector submitting the drafted report,” he says, pointing at a string of time stamps and Link IDs. “Here’s the reviewer opening the report. And here, almost an hour later, is the reviewer finalizing it. The review’s a spot check. It normally only takes a few minutes.”
“Okay? The reviewer did some extra due diligence. That’s not a bad thing.”
“There are no comments from the reviewer about why it took so long. And the version history doesn’t show any differences between what the inspector submitted and the reviewer released.”
Clarke’s head is starting to hurt again. “Help me out, here, Maki, because I can tell you’re trying to lead me somewhere but we’re almost out of time. What do you think happened?”
Maki shuffles closer. “Did you know that while the assessment is active, we get locked out of the ship’s systems? So the inspector and reviewer can have full access.”
No, Clarke did not know that. Val hadn’t mentioned it, when she was talking Clarke through parc fermé.
Maki keeps talking. “For that hour on Saturday afternoon at Wonderland, we were blind. And when you got in the ship on Sunday morning, the order of your air sources was wrong. We were never able to figure out how it happened. The user log in the ship’s controls didn’t have an entry that showed anyone touching the air source sequence. ”
A cold fist clenches around Clarke’s stomach. “Because someone made the change during the blind period. And edited the user log, too, probably.”
If Raff doesn’t stop fucking yelling—
Clarke pulls up the copy of the assessment she got from Yves and motions for Maki to back out of the metadata view so they’re both looking at the report itself. She scrolls to the Analysis section; Maki does the same.
Clarke already knows what she’s going to see. The six concerns that the FIC listed as fixed in Raff’s ship but not Clarke’s. The discrepancy in their variances that isn’t mentioned in Yves’s report. It’s new to Maki, though, and he swears under his breath as he reads. “Clarke, what is this?”
“This is what I thought you were talking about when you tried to warn me at Wonderland. Yves and half the team have been fixing Raff’s ship, not mine, and hiding it from us.”
“No. That’s—they can’t be—”
“Maki, focus. What you found—that’s something different, right? It wasn’t Yves?”
“I—I don’t think so? It could’ve been him, I guess, if he was working with the reviewer, but if he was already manipulating the report like this—”
Clarke can’t look anymore. She sends the Yves version of the report to Maki so he can keep comparing while she paces in a tight circle. “Did it happen at Hanoi, too? Earlier races?”
“No. That was the first thing I checked. The extended review window was only at Wonderland.”
Clarke’s brain reaches, grasps, weaves. There’s a conclusion staring her in the face, but she can’t quite—
Raff, across the room, snarls at his support crew member again. “You can’t even—”
Clarke’s control snaps.
“Raff!” she barks, voice echoing off columns and distant ceiling. “A word?”
Heads turn. Raff, after a second’s surprise, starts sauntering in Clarke’s direction, a slow smile on his face.
“Go,” Clarke says to Maki. “Show Amira.”
Maki looks nervously at Raff’s predatory approach. “But—”
“Now, Maki.”
Maki hightails it to the stairs. With a disdainful snort, Raff watches him go. “They’re all so jumpy around me.”
“Can’t imagine why.” Clarke leans against the side of her ship. “We’ve talked about you being an asshole to the team too many times for you to pull that shit in front of me. If you need more of my attention, you can just ask.”
“You’re the one who called me over,” Raff drawls. His tie and vest match Clarke’s dress. Clarke hates it.
“To remind you that—”
He puts his hand on her ship.
He puts. His hand. On. Her ship.
Rage consumes Clarke for half a second, then she takes a quick step forward and knocks his arm away. “There are rules about touching another pilot’s—”
“We’re on the same team. The rule doesn’t apply.”
“I say it does.”
He clicks his tongue. “Don’t know if you’ve noticed, sweetheart, but your word isn’t good for much at Elemental these days. I did try to warn you about the consequences of that pride of yours. There’s no support for a girl who can’t bear to ask for help.”
The sweetheart very nearly tips Clarke into violence, but the pride brings her back, because Raff is so fucking wrong that it’s laughable.
Maybe it was pride at one point, when Clarke was new to F0 and desperate to prove herself and keeping the people she now knows she can depend on at arm’s length.
Maybe Yves and Anders were able to isolate her further by playing on that insecurity.
But that’s not who Clarke is anymore. She might be standing here staring Raff down by herself, but she is by no means alone.
“You did warn me,” Clarke says. “And you helped me realize something important. So, as a thank-you, I’ll give you one chance. When Yves came to you with an offer, how much did he tell you about what’s really going on at Elemental? How complicit are you?”
The self-satisfied arrogance on his face flickers. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Not confusion, or a request for clarification. A blanket denial, as good as an admission.
A loud voice calls from the other side of the room; an event coordinator, giving them a five-minute warning. Raff shoots Clarke an unsettled look and returns to his ship.
Clarke takes a breath. Holds it. Lets it out. Puts what Maki just told her out of her head. Compartmentalizes.
Showtime.