Chapter 43
When the first wave of sponsors arrives, Clarke’s armor is in place.
She puts on her best smile and her most charming personality.
She laughs at the same jokes over and over.
When prompted, she fires up the zero G generators, gets in the cockpit, and does tricks.
She doesn’t have much room to work with, but she uses the tip of a wing to knock a slice of citrus off the rim of someone’s drink, rolls around her own y-axis, lifts her nose to the ceiling and bounces on her shells.
The sponsors aren’t all terrible. Some of them work for cool companies, or ask intelligent questions, or don’t let their eyes linger on Clarke’s ass when she hauls herself in and out of the ship.
But a lot of them applaud and exclaim like she’s a well-trained pet, and Clarke’s feeling fractious by the time everyone’s summoned to the Temple of Zeus for the banquet.
Her mood does not improve when she has to climb back up all those grand outdoor stairs.
The banquet starts with speeches while appetizers are served.
Clarke, seated at a table with Elemental’s second- and third-biggest sponsors, forces herself to eat a few bites and at least look like she’s paying attention while the FIC chairman of the board speaks about sportsmanship and the galvanizing spirit of competition.
This whole night is scheduled down to the minute.
There are three speakers, each allotted five minutes at the microphone with one minute of transition time between for applause and introductions.
When the chairman is three and a half minutes into her remarks, Clarke runs her thumb over her cuff and sends a short, simple message.
I know about the sale. Unless you want everyone else to find out tonight, follow me. Now.
She whispers to the closest sponsor that she needs to use the restroom and stands, moving swiftly toward the nearest door.
The room is huge, larger than Clarke was anticipating.
It takes almost a minute for Clarke to weave her way between tables and make it to the door.
That’s thirty seconds longer than she had planned, and Clarke’s night depends on a tight schedule, too.
She hikes up her dress and runs.
It’s not easy to run quietly in heels across a stone floor, but applause starts up almost immediately.
The first speaker is done. Clarke sprints until the noise trickles off, halfway down the same giant stairs.
She slows and throws her shoulders back, straightening her dress.
As she turns onto the footbridge to Ares, there’s a second, shorter burst of applause: the next speaker being introduced.
Across the bridge, past Julian’s ship sitting dark and quiet, up two flights of spiral stairs. She positions herself halfway between her ship and Raff’s, checks that everything is ready, and waits.
Night is falling on Mars. If Clarke peers between columns and strains her eyes, she can just make out the lights of the city far below, but all other signs of life beyond this castle in the sky are lost in the dusk and artificial clouds.
Yves and Anders emerge from the stairwell, about a minute into the second speaker’s speech. Right on time.
Clarke has spent her whole life shunting emotions to the side so she can get the job done.
It serves her well now as she takes her apprehension, nerves, and loathing by the throat and flings them into the abyss.
“Anders. Yves. Allow me to be the first to offer congratulations on being the new owners of Elemental Machines.”
“How’d you find out?” Yves asks.
“Naomi,” Clarke says, because it’s true if you squint and also because she figures she owes Naomi a migraine. “Interesting situation for all of us, isn’t it?”
“We’re not doing anything illegal,” Anders says. He’s the only one of them not in Elemental colors, instead wearing a dove gray suit with a black shirt. He’s here tonight not as an official member of the team, but as a part of the story they’re selling. “Teams change hands all the time.”
There’s a significant ownership change only once every fourteen years across the whole FIC, but Clarke’s going to let that slide. “You were awfully quick to follow me here. If you don’t have anything to hide, what are you so worried I might know?”
Anders looks at Clarke like she’s said something particularly idiotic. “It’s not about what you know, it’s about how the information is released. This has to be handled carefully, with—”
“Don’t waste your time, Anders.” Yves’s voice comes from behind her.
He’s been walking a slow lap of the floor, presumably to ensure they’re alone.
“What do you want, Clarke? For us to capitulate to all your contract demands? You pull a stunt like this, and you think it earns you something?” Yves circles around, movements harsh.
“If anything, this just proves that you require a firm hand.”
Two months ago, that would’ve been a crushing blow. Clarke would’ve backed down, shame eating her alive, and ceded more control of every aspect of her life.
Now Clarke looks at him coolly. “Is that what you call deliberately withholding fixes to my ship? Using a firm hand?”
Yves covers his surprise that Clarke knows about this, too, better than Anders. Guilt creases Anders’s face; Yves just curls his lip contemptuously. “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”
Clarke pulls the holoscreen out of her cuff. It’s already open to side-by-side parc fermé reports, with the discrepancies highlighted. “Are you sure? This is the version of the assessment you gave me at Hanoi, and this is the version the FIC released. Notice any differences?”
“Yves,” Anders says.
Yves ignores him. A vein throbs in his forehead. “I’m well within my rights as team principal to—”
“To abandon your duty of care?” Clarke asks.
During the silence that follows, like the men are too astonished by her audacity to respond promptly, she zooms in on one side of her screen.
“Because this is the start-up sequence glitch that resulted in me not getting off the line during the reset in Monza. It’s fixed in Raff’s ship. It’s not fixed in mine.”
Anders turns a dead-eyed glare on Yves. “You said what happened at Monza wasn’t planned.”
“It wasn’t,” Yves says. “We didn’t start seeing the glitch until Iskret, and we hadn’t worked out the solution for it by Monza. It was just luck that Clarke’s power unit failed at the reset and Raff’s didn’t.”
Luck. Not bad luck, just…luck. Saints, Clarke hates him. “But you did work out the solution eventually. And when you did, you implemented it for Raff and kept it from my side of the team.”
“Is that true, Yves?” Anders asks, voice taut. “A defect that significant?”
“Naomi wasn’t exaggerating about your sudden lack of a spine, was she?” Yves sneers. “You know how far we needed to move the needle. It was an opportunity.”
“It could have repeated after Monza. At any other race, it could’ve—she could’ve—that was not the agreement.”
“The agreement to make it look like I was the source of every problem at Elemental,” Clarke says.
The amount of tension in her body hurts; she forces herself to relax as they both whip their necks to stare at her.
“Come on, guys, I do pay attention. The way you’ve been talking about me to the press, the way you’ve had me talking about myself to the press.
Matthew’s article. Raff holding himself back, even though he should be placing higher now that his ship doesn’t have as many issues.
You’re tanking Elemental on purpose this year so that you can show miraculous improvement once you take over.
And to encourage the current owner to sell at a low price, because who’d want to keep a barely profitable team like Elemental in their portfolio? ”
Clarke changes displays on the holoscreen, bringing up the graph Julian gave her.
Elemental’s worth takes a sharp downward turn early this season, and continues to drop off at steeper intervals with each week that Clarke or Matthew DNF’d.
There’s a spike when Raff was brought in, but it didn’t last long.
The team’s current valuation is the lowest it’s been in twenty years, by a huge margin.
Clarke taps the final number, what the team is worth today. A calculation comes up in a pop-up box, showing what 52 percent—the majority ownership—of that number is. “Is this cheap enough for the two of you to afford? Have you moved the needle enough?”
Yves darts forward, snatches the holoscreen, and throws it.
It dissipates when it gets far enough from Clarke’s cuff, no damage done, but it brings him closer than she’s comfortable with.
His face is red, his shoulders tight. “I should have listened to Anders when he told me not to hire you. You’re more trouble than you’re worth. ”
Clarke anchors her feet to the floor. She will not be cowed. She will not allow this conniving, dishonest, jackass of a man who has bastardized the sport she loves to make her feel small. Never again. “Is that why you tried to kill me at Wonderland?”
She doesn’t actually think it was him. It happened higher up the food chain, according to what Maki found. Yves was probably just as confused as everyone else. But it seems there’s a fault line here with Anders, and Clarke’s going to exploit it.
“You knew I’d caught on to what you were doing with the assessments,” Clarke says. Her energy is building, gaining speed. “I was becoming a factor you couldn’t control. So you fucked with my air source order during parc fermé, hoping I’d die in the seat.”
Anders grabs the back of Yves’s jacket and yanks him away from Clarke. “You did what?”
Yves twists free and shoves Anders back a step. “I didn’t! She’s wrong.”
“Once I start telling people, how long do you think it’ll take for them to identify the FIC reviewer you paid off?” Clarke feels like her whole body is vibrating. “They’re probably here tonight, up in Zeus. Think we could just go ask?”