Chapter 44
She reaches the ground floor of the Temple of Ares just as the first few people make it across the footbridge. It’s Maki and Amira, which is expected, but they have Graham Grayson in tow, not Julian.
“Why’s Graham here?” Clarke asks.
“Julian sent me with them,” Graham says, looking confused. “They didn’t even let me finish watching the video. Holy shit, Clarke, are you okay?”
Amira talks over him. “We found the FIC reviewer. Well, Maki did, but—”
“I know someone who can reverse-search Link IDs,” Maki explains, like that isn’t a crime in most planetary jurisdictions. “We got in touch with the reviewer, told them what was happening, said we’d vouch for them helping if they told us who accessed your ship’s systems during the blind period.”
An FIC official sprints past, demanding to know where Yves is. Clarke points to the stairs. They keep running, others following close behind. “It was Val, wasn’t it?”
“Wait, what?” Graham exclaims. “What are we talking about? What did Val do?”
Amira has no time for Graham to play catch-up. She talks over him again, focused only on Clarke. “You already knew?”
Engel said something to Clarke once, during press. He said that there wasn’t a line Val wouldn’t cross to beat Atreus Skordi.
“I…suspected, maybe?” Clarke says, rubbing her forehead as her glow starts to fade.
She got what she wanted out of Yves and Anders, but there are still parts of Val’s involvement she doesn’t understand.
It comes out in a single, rambling breath.
“She’s been talking to me, and I thought she was my friend, and I didn’t want it to be her.
But it had to be someone with the technical ability to mess with my ship, plus enough influence in the FIC to not get reported, and she told me she has friends on the board, and I told her that I thought Yves was messing with my assessments, so of course she knew exactly what I knew about parc fermé and where I was likely to look because she’s the one who fucking explained it to me, and she’s a gods-damned engineer. ”
“That cleared up absolutely nothing, thank you,” Graham says.
“Why are you even here?” Clarke snaps, drowning in all the emotions that’ve slammed into her in the last fifteen seconds. She feels bad about it immediately, because none of this is Graham’s fault, but he waves it off.
“Julian sent me,” he repeats.
“But why isn’t Julian here?” Clarke asks, hearing the whine in her voice and hating it.
“We weren’t sure who to go to, when the reviewer told us it was Val,” Maki says. “You and Sara were busy, and we didn’t know who to trust, but—”
“We went to Thierry, who knew literally nothing about any of this,” Amira takes over. “You have really got to work on your communication issues, Clarke. Thierry sent us to Julian. And Julian—”
If you come for someone Julian loves, he’s going to do his level best to make you regret it.
“Julian went after Val,” Clarke realizes, stomach suddenly home to a dozen tiny creatures with claws and teeth. “Where? Where’d they go?”
Amira shakes her head. “We got to Julian barely a minute before Sara started the video. He pulled Val out of the room right when things were getting crazy. We didn’t see where they went.”
Clarke’s audio loop dings with an incoming call. Clarke lifts her cuff to check, heart flipping at the name she sees.
“Julian,” Clarke says when the call connects. “Where are you? What—”
“—incentive, I wouldn’t have had to do it,” comes Val’s voice, a little distant.
“You can’t use other people’s lives as incentive.” Julian sounds as angry as she’s ever heard him. Clarke twists her fingers to bring Sara’s cameras in close and transfers the audio to speaker so the others can listen.
“It’s what you respond to,” Val says. “You got to Formula Zero and choked. All that potential, all that promise, and you were barely in the points your first season. I was going to fire you, that’s how disappointing you were.
But then your friend died, and all of a sudden you were flying the way you’re meant to fly.
And I couldn’t fire you without looking like a monster, so I kept you around, and you raced the start of the second season like you were born for it. ”
“You’re attributing my sophomore year success to Connor’s death.”
“There’s no shame in it. Everyone’s motivation comes from somewhere. You fly better when you’re flying for someone else, not yourself. But then you stopped performing as well, so I had to intervene.”
“Shit,” Graham exhales, eyes wide, and Clarke wholeheartedly agrees. That’s when Val started manipulating Delphine. The tail end of Julian’s second season, a year after Connor’s death.
“How inconvenient of me to work through my mourning so quickly,” Julian says.
“I’m glad we agree,” Val says, amused, and then, “Careful there, Julian. Wouldn’t want you to fall.”
Clarke’s heart stops.
“If you think I’m going to let you walk me off this edge, you’ve got another thing coming,” Julian says.
“I’m the one who introduced you to boxing, Julian,” Val says. “You train at my gym. You really think you’re going to win this fight?”
“Where the hell are they?” Graham asks helplessly, spinning in a circle to look around the room, like they might be hiding behind one of the ships.
The ships. Somewhere Julian’d take someone for a private conversation. Somewhere with an edge someone could fall off.
There’s this portico off the back of the Temple of Apollo.
“Julian’s ship,” Clarke says, grabbing Graham by the wrist. Val and Julian are still talking, still arguing. “Julian’s ship, Graham, come on!”
“What about Julian’s ship?” Graham asks, letting himself be pulled into a short dash to the machine in question. “What are we doing?”
Graham’d let me take the ship. He wouldn’t even ask questions.
She hopes Julian was right. And that Graham’s willing to extend his unequivocal trust in Julian to Clarke, at least for the next few minutes. There’s no time to get to Clarke’s ship, and it’s probably chaotic up there anyway right now. She’d never get out in time.
But she has Julian’s ship, and Julian’s race engineer.
“Julian needs help,” Clarke says, skidding to a stop and kicking her heels off. She jumps onto the wing of the ship.
Graham makes a strangled sound. “You can’t just—”
“Graham!” Clarke shouts. She sinks into a crouch and grabs him by the tie, jerking him forward until they’re nose-to-nose. “Julian. Needs. Help. They’re in the Temple of Apollo. You’ve seen the maps of this place, it’s on the other side of the whole damn palace. We won’t make it on foot.”
She sees it turn over in Graham’s head, sees the instant he makes a decision. He shrugs out of his jacket. “Prime the deck.”
Julian’s gloves are on the headrest, in the same place Clarke left hers.
She snatches them up and hops over the safety bars.
The drop into the seat is longer than Clarke’s used to; she lands with an oomph on what feels like an already-bruising tailbone.
The ship rumbles awake under and around her at Graham’s coaxing.
“I didn’t want to do it this way,” Val is saying as Clarke slides Julian’s gloves on.
They’re big, but they’ll do. “I thought you and Clarke repairing your friendship might be enough to get you back on track. But the closer the two of you got, the worse you performed. You went four straight races without a podium! In what should be a championship year for you!”
Clarke claps her palms together. The control deck glows to life between her fingers.
Shit, shit, Julian uses such a weird arrangement of data fields.
She can’t fly an unfamiliar ship with a control deck she can’t read.
She needs to make changes, but she also needs to bring the foot pedals closer, but she also needs to strap in—she doesn’t have time for all of this!
The ship rocks as Maki launches himself onto the wing and shoves his hands down into the cockpit. He grabs the harness and starts buckling Clarke in.
“No helmet,” he says, grim and getting grimmer as he keeps talking. “No neck brace. No fireproofs. No earpiece.”
Clarke’s not thrilled, either, but she can do something about one of those. She pauses rearranging the deck long enough to add Graham to the ongoing call with Julian. She hears him swear from under the ship, then hears him in her ear. “Clarke?”
“This is the best we can do for radio,” Clarke says, cranking the pedals forward. “Add the others when you can. Ready?”
“I stepped up,” Val snarls in response to whatever Julian said while Clarke was multitasking. “You were failing, again, so I stepped up. And you’ve been P1 twice in a row!”
Graham’s face comes into view between safety bars. He’s blanched and frazzled. “Clarke. I didn’t—none of us knew that she was—”
“Not now,” Clarke interrupts, impatience making her terse. Maki tugs sharply on her harness and retreats, jumping back to the floor and backing away. “Am I ready, Race Engineer Grayson?”
He flinches but takes the cue for what it is, ticking things off on a checklist. “It’s going to be rough. You don’t know this ship, and it’s full-grav out there.”
“I’ve done the drills,” Clarke says. The FIC insists pilots practice performing basic maneuvers in normal gravity, in case they blow through a barrier on-planet. “I’ll get there.”
“He won’t forgive me if you get hurt trying.”
“I won’t forgive you if you keep talking,” Clarke says. “Am I fucking ready, or do I need to go one deeper on this coup and have Amira kick you out of your job?”
Unbelievably, he smiles—but, then, he’s used to dealing with Julian. Managing a highly strung pilot is nothing new. “All clear. Happy hunting.”
Clarke lifts off.
It’s strange, flying an F0 ship in normal gravity. It’s like the ship knows it’s not made for this and resents being used this way. Clarke has to hold for a second in a hover to get her bearings, to feel the balance.
“If she’d died at Wonderland, you would’ve won every race for years to come because you would’ve been doing it for her,” Val says.