The fear comes back, and this time, Clarke lets it. If she’s going to die, she might as well be honest with herself about how it feels, and it’s terrifying on a visceral level.
“Okay,” Amira says. “We’ll try to—what thehellis—Grayson,control your pilot—”
Clarke’s not sure if it’s ironic or pathetic that the last few seconds of her life will be spent listening to her race engineer yell at someone else’s race engineer. At Julian’s race engineer, no less. Maybe it’s neither ironic nor pathetic, actually; maybe it’s just fitting. It still feels unfair, though, and she’s opening her mouth to—to—she doesn’t know, ask Amira to tell Clarke’s family that she loves them or something, but her ship rocks to the side before she can get the words out.
“What was that?” she asks, still desperately scraping at the track with her gloved fingertips. She can’t see anything, just orange and gold and shadows, and Amira’s end of the radio is distant, unintelligible shouting. “Amira? What’s going on?”
The ship rocks again. It keeps going this time, rolling fully onto its side, and then boots drop onto the nose of her ship.
“Eject!” Julian Casperi, Clarke’s childhood best friend turned professional rival, shouts at her. His helmet is off, sweat-drenched dark hair on his forehead, eyes darting over Clarke’s ship, the track, the fire. His voice is muffled through Clarke’s helmet and the ringing in her ears, but she hears him. “Now, Clarke, move!”
There’s no time to be surprised. Julian’s given her an option that isn’t dying trapped under her ship, and Clarke takes it. Her seat detaches with a jolt of propulsion behind it. Julian snags her by the five-point harness the instant she’s clear, rips the air tube connected to her helmet out of its socket, braces his feet against the mangled fuselage, and launches them away from the wreckage. Clarke focuses on keeping her limbs close so she doesn’t impede their progress. She has to use her right arm to keep her left from flopping around.
She also focuses on not vomiting.
Julian aimed well. He catches them on the wing of his own ship and releases Clarke so he can climb back into his cockpit and jam his helmet on. Clarke gets with the program enough to snag one of his safety bars with the toe of a boot and uses it to reel herself in. It’s awkward and painful as hell, and she winds up with her knee pinned between her seat and Julian’s hull, but she gets her right elbow locked around the bar.
Julian looks up at her as they get moving. They can’t talk to each other with their helmets on, not over the collective roar of the fire and Julian’s engine competing with the wailing sirens of the incoming emergency team, and Clarke can’t see Julian’s eyes through his visor, but there’s a distinct tilt to his chin as he checks to make sure she’s hanging on while he flies them out of the blast zone.
Amira ends a string of creative, multilingual swears. “You’re okay?”
“Left arm’s a mess,” Clarke says, relief starting to cascade through her. “Shoulder, I think, or collarbone. But I’m okay. The ship is—”
Clarke’s ship doesn’t completely explode. The kickdrive is shielded, to mitigate collateral damage in just such an event as this. But the atmospheric pressure that’s been mounting suddenly snaps with a sound like the sky splitting in half, and a wave of force rips Clarke away from Julian’s ship. The airbags built into the sides of her seat deploy and she goes limp again, calling on every minute she’s spent getting flipped around in a multi-axis trainer so she doesn’t puke in her helmet as she tumbles in what feels like all directions at once.
She’s still spinning when the airbags start popping. Shecomes to a sharp halt in the next second, and she can’t hold back the groan that tears out of her chest. Hands wrangle the deflating airbag material out of the way, making space for a yellow-suited medic to start cutting her out of her harness.
“Talk to me,” the medic says, loud and clear through Clarke’s earpiece. Amira must have patched him onto the Elemental channel.
“Gonna throw up,” Clarke says honestly.
This is an on-planet track, one that cuts in and out of the heart of a city. Clarke’s lucky. If they’d been off-planet, up in the vacuum of space, removing her helmet wouldn’t be an option. The air on Mars is breathable after centuries of atmoforming, though, so the medic helps Clarke get her helmet off just in time for her pre-race meal to make a second appearance.
It puddles and clumps in midair. The medic produces a bag from a belt pouch, shakes it out, and neatly traps the vomit inside.
“Clarke?”
That’s Amira again. Clarke swallows against the appalling taste in her mouth. “Yeah?”
“We’re going to have to retire the ship.”
Clarke mutes her mic so her hysterical laughter won’t be recorded. Julian got them around a bend in the track before the explosion, so she can’t see the wreck with her own eyes anymore, but there are massive screens projected along the course so spectators on the ground and in the surrounding buildings can watch. The one she’s got the best angle on right now is showing her ship’s corpse, billowing blue-black smoke through the foamy clouds of suppressant being dropped on it by another emergency team. Definitely not the type of damage the crew canrepair in time for Clarke to finish the race. She hates this year’s ship, but guilt still pangs through her, thinking about how much work the team will have to do to rebuild for next week.
It’s her fifth Did Not Finish of the season. Eleven races in, only thirteen to go, and it’s already her fifth DNF. Elemental was supposed to be competitive this year.Clarkewas supposed to be competitive this year.
The medic has a small propulsion system strapped to his back. He flies Clarke to the waiting ambu-ship. Just before he closes the doors behind them, Clarke sees Julian hovering along the side of the track.
Clarke waves. Julian turns the nose of his ship forward and flies away. Clarke lets her head fall back against her neck brace and closes her eyes.
Shit.
2
“Well, that was certainly exciting!”
Julian levels the offending reporter with the flat glare he’s become infamous for. “Delphine’s win? I don’t see how that was exciting. Pretty expected, actually, if you ask me.”
“I can understand losing to me would be getting dull for you at this point,” says Delphine Hart, winner of today’s race and reigning interplanetary champion. “But we should give the people what they want, no?”
