Clarke leaves Val’s office and loops back to the stairs. They spit her out next to the pit lane. She shakes out her shoulders and rounds the corner, walking toward Julian’s box and waiting to be noticed.
It doesn’t take long. She’s in her normal trackside outfit, and the blue stands out among all the green.
“Um,” says someone who’s probably a junior mechanic, judging by the fact that he’s still here packing up tools when more senior members of the support crew would’ve been released already. “Can I help you?”
Clarke offers a winning smile. “I’m looking for Julian. Do you know where he is?”
There aren’t many people in the Chronicle garage, not with both their ships in parc fermé. The couple others doing final tidying of the space startle when they see who Junior Mechanic is talking to, then quickly try to look like they didn’t. At least two of them start typing on their cuffs’ holoscreens.
“Um,” repeats Junior Mechanic. “I think he’s in his prep room?”
“Cool.” Clarke points at a door at the back of the garage. Every prep room’s in the same place. “Can I go back?”
“Sure?”
“Thanks,” Clarke says, stepping around him. The door she pointed to swings open before she gets there, and Graham Grayson, Julian’s race engineer, steps through. “Hi, Graham.”
“Go ahead through, Clarke, J’s waiting for you,” Graham greets warmly, then turns to the crew with a sigh and holds up his cuff. “Guys, I appreciate this, I do, but Itoldyou. They’re friends. Clarke visiting is not the sort of thing every single one of you needs to high-priority message me about.”
“It’s never happened before!” says Junior Mechanic, and Clarke snorts a laugh as Graham launches into a meandering explanation with a strong undertone ofMind your business.
It’s nice, that the people on Julian’s team rushed to sound the alarm. They care about him. Amira’d message Clarke if someone unexpected showed up at the Elemental garage. Maki, too.The others might message Yves, and Yves’d probably let Clarke know. If the Grand Prix or a qualifying session was about to start, anyway, and he needed Clarke’s head in the game.
There are only three doors in the hallway, just like in the Elemental garage: an exit, and the two prep rooms. Julian’s teammate’s room is dark and empty inside. Clarke knocks on the remaining door, echoes of all the times she’s done this before tripping over themselves in her mind.
PK opens it at once, smiling and stepping back so Clarke can enter. “Right on time! Come in, come in.”
“Thanks, hi, good to see you,” Clarke says. “Should I—where’s Julian?”
PK points and busies himself adjusting a camera on the desk. Clarke turns just as Julian emerges from the bathroom, yawning and scratching at his stomach under his shirt. “Hey, Clarke.”
Hey, Clarke. Casual, comfortable, easy. Something she thought she’d never get back.
“Hi,” Clarke says, the simple word bittersweet on her tongue. Julian drops his hand. His shirt stays rucked up, exposing a strip of tan, flat abdomen right above the waistband of his sweats. Clarke unsticks her tongue and averts her eyes, choosing to look instead at PK. “What are we doing today?”
“Nothing,” Julian says. He steps around her. The entryway to this room isn’t large; he brushes against her as he goes, his chest skimming her shoulder.
“Nothing?”
“Nothing,” PK confirms. He checks the angle the camera has on the main area of the room, where a squashy-looking couch takes up one wall. He checks again using a feed to a holoscreen, and nods, satisfied. “The two of you are going to sit in here foran hour and do nothing. Dick around on your cuff. Read. Take a nap. The goal of today’s exercise is to coexist peacefully in the same space.”
“And no talking.” Julian drops heavily onto the couch and stretches to open the tiny fridge that’s just within arm’s reach, pulling the hem of his shirt up even farther. “Right?”
“Limited conversation is okay, but nothing heavy,” PK says. “It needs to look like this is something you guys do: spend enough time together that you run out of things to talk about, and not feel compelled to fill the silence.”
Clarke gets to fulfill her obligations to Elemental by sitting still in relative privacy and not doing anything for an hour, when she normally barely gets five minutes to herself the whole weekend?
“Do I owe you or Sara a gift basket for coming up with this idea?” she asks, depositing herself onto the other end of the couch. Clarke has a small side table next to the couch in her prep room; Julian’s sacrificed that for a longer sofa, so there’s a swath of open cushion between them. Julian claims a yellow sports drink for himself from the fridge, then hovers his hand over a shorter row of blue pouches with a questioning look at Clarke. She scrunches her nose and jerks her head to the left. He moves his hand over to snag an orange pouch instead and passes it to her.
“Neither. All credit to Julian,” PK says, smiling at his holoscreen. “And he was right, this is going to be easy. Okay, I’m going to go hang out in Engel’s room so you two can unwind. I’ll be watching, though, so just speak up if you need anything. Otherwise, be good little grossly overpaid superstars and I’ll be back in an hour.”
He leaves. Clarke takes a swig of the drink and settles back farther into the couch, pulling a holoscreen out of her cuff. Julian does the same, detaching an audio loop from the underside of his cuff and hooking it onto the shell of his ear so he can listen to music without disturbing Clarke. He roots around under the couch and comes up with a sketchbook and set of pencils. He’s always liked to keep his hands busy when he’s decompressing. Clarke’d put money on the sketchbook being filled with drawings of ship components. Or lizards, maybe. There’s no native wildlife in the colonies, but several species of Terran lizard had flourished there after the terraforming and some genetic modification, and Julian has a fondness for them. He and Kuari used to spend hours discussing lizards and bugs and all manner of small creeping creatures that Clarke preferred not to think about.
While Julian draws, Clarke catches up on messages. Thierry’d sent her a string of them, starting by saying that he felt he should be thanking Clarke for taking Raff off his hands and ending with a lament that Umeko doesn’t think his jokes are funny. Umeko herself had thanked Clarke for reaching out, short and to the point. Matthew still hasn’t responded.
She confirms her family’s travel arrangements for next week’s race. She interacts with a bunch of fan posts cheering Elemental on this weekend, careful to avoid the ones that mention Raff’s less-than-impressive qualifying performance. She replies to a bewilderedYves still hasn’t said anything about your contract, even with this Agresta-St. Sebastian mess?from Rhynn.
The couch is comfortable. She sinks deeper and deeper into it, Julian’s steady breathing and theskritchof his pencil against paper the only sounds beyond the occasional rumble of distant conversation or footsteps on the floor above them.
