Chapter 49
“Gap to Thierry ahead is three-point-oh,” Hodge says. “Pace is good. Need anything?”
There’s a section of this track that plays leapfrog with the piers in the port, soaring up over one row of extravagant boats only to swoop down and skim the water before hopping into the sky again. Clarke bounces her way clear. “What’s happening behind?”
“Gap behind is one-point-eight. It’s Raff, but he won’t be there long. Julian’s behind him, and Delphine.”
It’s the last three laps of the Monaco Grand Prix. The last three laps of the season. Three laps to decide everything. If Clarke and Thierry keep this up, they—
Clarke cuts the thought off at the root, then digs up the roots and burns them for good measure. She needs to stay in the moment, not think about hypotheticals.
It’s hard not to think about hypotheticals when she’s nine minutes from finishing P2.
For forty-seven laps, the order was stable with Delphine in P1 and Julian in P2.
Then Julian made his move, and Delphine didn’t cede the line.
The actual contact wasn’t bad, but they were in a fully impermeable part of the course.
Delphine rebounded off the barrier and ended up partially blocking the track.
There wasn’t time for a flag or a safety ship to come out before she was moving again, getting out of the way, but it slowed Julian, Engel, Oliver, and the Martian Motors pilots down.
Thierry and Clarke were just far enough back to miss the obstruction, far enough back that they didn’t have to reduce their speed.
They zoomed around the cluster of slow-moving race leaders, and now they’re the race leaders.
“Julian’s passing Raff. He’s through,” Hodge reports. “And Delphine…yeah, there she goes. It’s Thierry, you, Julian, Delphine.”
Clarke enters the part of the track that whips through city streets. “Think Delphine’ll go for it? She doesn’t need the P3 points, but Provenance might.”
The math is simple. If they finish as they are right now, Delphine wins the individual trophy. She could sit tight, not risk another conflict with Julian, take home her fifth interplanetary championship. But the team trophy might still go to Chronicle, depending on how Engel and Oliver finish.
Lennox joins Clarke and Hodge’s channel. “Atreus will make her go for it. He wants the team win.”
Clarke takes a tight corner. The harbor comes into view again, all endless, shimmering blue. Oceans, ugh. “Badly enough that he’ll risk Delphine’s win to get it?”
“Without a doubt. Let’s hope she keeps Julian busy,” Lennox replies, and clicks off the channel.
Clarke crosses the timing line. Two more laps.
Straightaway paralleling the main pier. Turn, turn, vertical climb. Pivot, chicane, loop-the-loop. Bouncing over boats. Entering the city.
“Delphine’s attempting to overtake,” Hodge says. “Ah! She’s in the water!”
Clarke just about swallows her tongue. “She’s what?”
“She tried to pass, Julian blocked her, she went through the barrier and into the water. Okay, she’s flying again. She’s heading back to the track, moving slow.”
“Glad she’s okay,” Clarke says, and makes herself not ask the question she dearly wants to ask.
Is Delphine going to be far enough back in the order that Julian might win?
She wants to know, but that information isn’t relevant to her in this exact moment.
She and Thierry are a lap and a half away from Enclave’s first ever 1-2 finish.
Clarke doesn’t need to be thinking about what’s happening farther back in the order; she needs to be focused on defending her position from the immediate threat.
The immediate threat is Julian. He’s less than two seconds behind, and Clarke’s seen the stats sheets. The Chronicle ship, all other things being equal, averages 0.6 seconds per lap faster than the Enclave ship. He’s going to catch her.
Numbers and scenarios present themselves for evaluation. Clarke doesn’t have much brainpower to spare, so she jumps to what matters: She could let Julian through. Enclave would still finish third overall, and Julian’d have a better chance of taking the individual title.
“Gap behind is one-point-one and closing,” Hodge says as Clarke starts her final lap. “Get ready.”
Straightaway. Turn, turn, vertical climb.
Would Julian want Clarke to let him through? They’ve never given each other help on the track before, not when they’ve been on different teams, but they’ve never been in a relationship before. What if he doesn’t get the points he needs, and he blames Clarke?
Pivot, chicane, loop-the-loop.
Julian can go to hell if he tries to blame Clarke. She has a job to do. She does not owe Julian her spot, and she is not the kind of person who lets people take things from her. Not anymore. Not even Julian. And if he doesn’t respect that, tough shit.
Bouncing over boats.
If the situation were reversed and Julian let Clarke through, she’d be furious with him.
She’d be rip-his-spine-out-and-beat-him-with-it furious, as her fourteen-year-old self once said.
And Julian, about to be pushed out of a temple in the sky by his former team principal, had once said that if he didn’t win honestly, there was no point in winning at all.
They enter the city. Julian moves to overtake.
Clarke moves, too—directly into his path.
He spirals up, trying to invert and pass overhead instead, but Clarke knows that trick. He honed it in the canyons behind Clarke’s mom’s house when they were seventeen. She cuts in front of him again.
They corner. Corner again. Corner again. He darts down and left, trying to sneak through, but Clarke knows that play, too, because he always uses it in racing sims. She boxes him out.
They take the last corner, emerging onto the final section of track.
It’s a horizontal loop that rings the harbor, then a short straightaway on the main pier.
Clarke hits the loop and curls up the outside edge, skimming perpendicular to the water, vision blurring as the accumulated force saps her blood pressure.
Julian takes the inside edge, curving up the barrier opposite Clarke. It’s a shorter distance, the inside edge, but harder to get into and out of at this speed because it goes against the ship’s natural momentum. It’s the last play of a determined, daring pilot in the last few seconds of a race.
They’re flying in parallel, mirrored reflections, safety bars nearly close enough to touch.
If Clarke’s neck brace allowed the movement, she could tilt her head back and see him.
But it doesn’t, and Clarke wouldn’t take her eyes off the track even if it did, so she’s looking ahead as they come out of the loop onto the straightaway.
The checkered flag is waving. Thierry is crossing the line.
Clarke levels out and gives it everything. Everything she has, everything the ship has, she gives, and Julian—
—the lag from taking the inside edge is too much for him to overcome. If this section of the track were even a second longer, he’d be able to catch up and try to overtake again, but it’s not. Clarke crosses the line, and Julian crosses twenty-eight hundredths of a second behind her.
—
Clarke parks in the slot reserved for P2, right in front of the podium.
Thierry’s already out of his ship, standing on it, arms spread, howling his victory at the sky.
He tackles Clarke when she climbs out, too, and together they run to the cheering mass of Enclave staff waiting just behind the railing.
P1 and P2. They did it. They’ll take home third in the team bracket, the highest Enclave’s ever placed, and get all the increased funding and support that comes with that level of success.
Next season’s ship is mostly locked in, but they’ve got variance to play with, and the season after they’ll be true challengers for the crown, and that—
Months ago, Val asked Clarke what she wanted to do in Formula Zero, and Clarke didn’t have an answer. She’d lost sight of what she was trying to accomplish, so accustomed to having to make herself small that she’d made her dreams small, too.
No fucking more.
Clarke is flooded with elation, hope, and pride as Lennox claps her hands on Clarke’s and Thierry’s helmets and pulls all of their foreheads together.
Clarke is crying, smiling, shaking, and laughing as Julian rolls into the P3 slot and has a similar celebration with Graham and the rest of his team, because even though Julian didn’t win, Chronicle did.
Engel managed to get around Raff in the last lap.
By 5 points, Chronicle has won the team championship.
Clarke is her own personal zero-gravity generator, floating high off the ground, and it lasts until a harried-looking marshal gathers her, Thierry, and Julian together behind their ships.
They should be going up to the podium, not staying down here. What’s going on?
The marshal motions to take off their helmets and uses a holoscreen to bring their earpieces onto a merged radio channel so they can hear over the roar of the crowd. He talks mostly to Julian. “Sorry for the delay. We’re waiting on confirmation of Engel’s, Delphine’s, and Oliver’s placements.”
Julian runs a hand through his sweat-soaked hair, breathing hard. He looks incandescently happy, although there’s a tightness in the corners of his mouth from missing out on the individual trophy. “Why? Chronicle won.”
“It’s not about the team championship,” the marshal says, and Julian’s face goes bloodless as Clarke’s heart lurches. If it’s not about the team, then it’s about—
“Delphine came in tenth,” she says. “She has 332 points. Julian has 330. Right?”
She’s been thinking about it since crossing the finish line. Two points. It came down to two points. If Clarke’d let Julian through, he’d have won. How is she supposed to feel about that?
“Delphine incurred a time penalty during her dip in the harbor,” the marshal says, casually opening the door for F0 history to be altered. “It’s under review.”
Graham hops the railing and jogs toward them. A series of hand motions later, he’s added to the channel. “What’s happening?”
Julian doesn’t seem capable of speech anymore, eyes on the giant holoscreen hanging overhead with the pilot leaderboard displayed. Delphine is listed in first, he’s in second. Both names are blinking.
The marshal’s right earpiece must be tuned to a different channel, because his mouth is moving but they can’t hear him. Clarke takes it upon herself to explain. “Delphine’s got an unresolved time penalty. They’re not sure how far it knocks her back.”
Graham’s eyes get big. He brings up a holoscreen and taps at it rapidly. “By our count she was off for four seconds, maybe five. The grouping was tight when she dropped back in.”
Engel runs up the lane to join the festivities.
He slows when he sees their huddle standing around, staring at the marshal and watching the leaderboard.
Everyone else in the stands and at the railing is starting to realize something’s happening, too; the overall noise level is going down.
It’s quiet enough for Engel to be heard without radio assistance when he asks, “Uh, guys? Why aren’t we celebrating? ”
Before anyone can start filling him in, the marshal says, “And that’s the absolute final answer? Unanimous decision?”
The man’s shoulders are tense. Delphine, Atreus, and the rest of the Provenance contingent are nowhere in sight. Lennox clambers over the railing, pouches of water in hand, and distributes them to the pilots. Julian grips his so hard Clarke’s amazed it doesn’t pop.
Thierry stretches his arms overhead. “Is this going to take much longer? Because if I miss my cooldown bike—”
When the marshal speaks again, his voice is amplified through the paddock’s sound system. “After review, Delphine Hart’s adjusted final position for today’s Grand Prix is P13.”
A wall of sound comes from the crowd. The marshal grimaces and holds up his hands, asking for quiet with minimal effect.
P13. You only get one point for P13. Delphine had 329 points coming into today, so she’s at 330 now. Julian’s at 330, too.
“They tied?” Graham asks, his voice coming loud and clear over the radio. “How is—does the normal tiebreaker rule apply?”
The normal tiebreaker rule: your teammate’s points. Everyone’s familiar with it, because Delphine and Julian have been tied before this season, but Delphine was still ranked first because Oliver had more points than Engel. But now?
The tears that Clarke only just got under control start welling up again.
Engel can’t have heard what Graham just said, but he’s on the same wavelength. He yells, gesturing up at the leaderboard for proof. “I’m third for pilots! I have seven more points than Oliver after today! Is that—did I—”
The crowd simmers enough for the marshal to go on. “In accordance with Formula Zero and FIC rules, in the event of a tie between pilots, the win is awarded to the pilot whose teammate has the higher ranking. Everyone, I present your Formula Zero Interplanetary Individual Champion, Julian Casperi!”
Julian does not kiss Clarke as fireworks explode and the anthem of the Galilean colonies plays and his team breaks down the railing to get to him.
But he looks at her like she’s everything, and she smiles at him with her whole heart, and for one brief second they’re nine years old again and climbing out of their banged-up bumper cars, seeing each other across the track for the first time and feeling something in the universe click into place.
The radio channel’s dead. Clarke holds up her index finger, makes a fist, and salutes. You’re P1. You won’t be for long. Here I come.
Julian laughs with his entire body, head thrown back, joy written all over him.
Just before an exuberant Engel pulls him into the celebration, he finishes the call-and-response they started with Connor all those years ago: index finger up, down, and a salute.
I’m P1. I’m staying right here. Bring it on.