20
It’s a day and ahalf from Iskret to Luna. Clarke spends the first part of the trip in media training, practicing answering questions about Matthew and Raff. Once Naomi deems her acceptable, she’s sent to actually answer those questions, repeating phrases likegrateful for everything Matthew taught meandlooking forward to seeing what Raff and I can do togetherso many times that she starts to sound robotic.
The Elemental team transport docks late on Tuesday. Clarke goes to her house and falls into bed. When she wakes up on Wednesday morning, the first of theJulian & Clarkevideos is live.
It’s not the one from the boxing gym, but instead the one from this past weekend in Julian’s prep room. This must’ve tested better with the focus groups or something? Clarke doesn’t know the reasoning and doesn’t particularly care. She makes herself breakfast while it plays.
There’s no explanation of what the viewer’s about to see. It just starts, with Clarke and Julian relaxed on the couch. Clarke’s on her cuff; Julian’s drawing. Without looking at each other, they both reach for their drinks, take sips, and set the pouchesdown in unison. A half-green, half-blue title card shows.Julian & Clarke.
The whole video is less than thirty seconds. Clarke shows Julian something that makes him laugh. Julian shows Clarke something in his sketchbook. She takes the pencil out of his hand, scribbles for a second, hands the pencil back (the camera can’t see it, but Clarke’d drawn a stick figure Kuari above Julian’s lizard sayingBut none of the Galilean lizards have venom, J, they’re so boring). Clarke makes herself more comfortable on the couch. Julian rearranges his legs to give her room. They fall asleep like that. Not touching, but without much space between them, either.
PK’d said the goal of this video was to coexist peacefully in the same room.Mission accomplished, Clarke thinks, if only because the last few minutes of footage didn’t make the final edit. They look comfortable with each other. Intimate, even. Clarke wants to live in that moment.
She resolutely decides not to look at the comments. She’s been doing this long enough to know what she’d find if she did: speculation that Clarke and Julian are dating, requests for Clarke or Julian (mostly Julian) to acknowledge the commenter, accusations of this being fabricated. That last one’s accurate, of course, but none of it’s required reading, and time is short. They only have one full day at headquarters this week. The team transport leaves again at noon tomorrow to head down to Earth for opening festivities at Monza.
Clarke is determined to talk to Yves before they leave. She didn’t win at Iskret or Mare Imbrium, but making that a condition of offering her a contract renewal like he tried to right before break wasn’t realistic. And the Matthew–Raff situation hasonly muddied the waters further. Raff’s contract with Enclave was set to expire at the end of this season. When Elemental took Raff on, they took on those terms, too, so as of right now, neither of Elemental’s pilots is secure. They’re the only team with unassigned seats for next year with the exception of Enclave, who haven’t announced yet if Umeko will stay up or be replaced.
Clarke is going to talk to Yves. She is. She can’t keep living in limbo. She’s going to get her answer, one way or another.
—
Yves isn’t onLuna.
Clarke doesn’t figure it out until Wednesday afternoon, when her butt’s asleep from spending hours in the Monza sim. Amira and the rest of the technical team dismiss her, saying they’ve got enough data to make the necessary tweaks (going off-planet to on-planet in the span of a week is always tight), and Clarke goes looking for Yves. He’s not in his office, he’s not at the test track, he’s not in the engineering factory, and he’s not answering Clarke’s messages. She finally loops back up to his office and asks his droid assistant, and that’s when she finds out that Yves didn’t come back to Luna between races. He went straight to Earth. And sorry, Miss Clarke, but his schedule is packed, and he won’t have time to fit in a call with her. He’ll be at her birthday dinner on Saturday; can Clarke talk to him then?
Right, because that’s exactly what Clarke wants. To chitchat about her contract prospects at her own birthday dinner.
Clarke almost yells. Right there, in the hall outside Yves’s empty glass-walled office, she almost yells at Yves’s poor droid, who is blameless in all of this.
Her fuse is getting shorter. Or maybe it’s just been burning slowly for so long that she’s finally near the end of it, and Raff’sattitude is acting as an accelerant. He hasn’t said anything remotely complimentary about Clarke in the press (why he’s getting away with that when Clarke gets scolded if a single word out of her mouth is less than effusive, she has no idea) and she keeps overhearing that he’s being a jerk to Matthew’s old support crew. She sees it in person Thursday morning, when they’re loading the trailers that will be driven to the team transport, which is waiting at an extraorbital dock outside of town. Raff snaps first at the mechanics packing his ship, then the livery intern handling his suits and helmet.
Clarke keeps waiting for Raff’s race engineer to step in. When he doesn’t, and when it looks like the intern is about to burst into tears under Raff’s verbal abuse, Clarke does.
“If you’re so unhappy with the quality of the team’s work, you could always do it yourself,” Clarke says mildly. That’s what she’s doing: sitting at a table in the loading garage, wrapping her own helmet. She always packs her personal gear, helmet and racing suit and fireproofs. It’s not because she doesn’t trust the interns; she just prefers to do it herself.
“It’s their job,” Raff says. “They’re supposed to be qualified for this.”
“They are qualified. You’re the one with the problem. And it’s a problem with a solution.” Clarke kicks at the empty chair across from her, scooting it back from the table. She gently pries Raff’s helmet out of the intern’s shaking hands and sets it on the table in front of the offered chair. “So you can fix it yourself, or I can make it my problem, too.”
The loading garage, normally a riot of overlapping sounds as crates get shoved around and people call out instructions and updates, has mostly gone quiet. Clarke’s peripherally aware of a lot of surreptitious elbows in sides, but keeps her eyes on herhelmet, not even looking up as Raff slowly drops into the open chair.
“And what would that look like?” Raff asks. “You making it your problem.”
“I don’t know. But I’m pretty creative.” Clarke nudges a roll of protective wrapping across the table. “Is this how things worked for you at Enclave? Thierry hasn’t let too much slip, but you know him. He takes team loyalty seriously, and wouldn’t have felt comfortable saying a bad word against you since this is his rookie season. He wouldn’t have wanted to make waves.”
Raff picks up the wrapping, turns it over in his hands. “And you do? With an expiring contract, fifty-five total points to your name, and your management just having brought in someone who’s gotten P1 twice this season?”
“You’re right. There’s a lot working against me right now.” This isn’t the contentious discussion Clarke thought she’d be having today, but damn if it doesn’t feel righteous to stand up to one of the men making her life hell. “You’re implying that I’m on thin ice with Yves, with the organization, and I should, what, know my place? Maybe instead you should consider that with everything going on, I might not particularly give a damn about staying in my lane. What I’ve been doing this far obviously isn’t working, so maybe I’ll try something new. Maybe I’ll try not letting yet another arrogant, self-serving jackass bully the people around him.”
Raff is furious. It’s all over his face, from his red-blotched skin and grinding jaw to the chill in his pale blue eyes. He doesn’t seem to have a response yet, but that’s okay. Clarke’s not done.
“I’m not scared of you, Raff,” she says. “And this team might not give a crap about me, but they’re stillmy team, and I’m notgoing to let you shit all over them just because you are incapable of processing your inadequacy like an adult.”
Thatgets him moving. “You want to talk about inadequacy? Yves only gave you a chance as a favor to your daddy.”
Clarke’s heard it so many times that she’s able to let it roll right off her back. “Anders found out that I was his kid after Yves had already offered me the contract. Everyone knows that.”
Something smug spreads across Raff’s features. “He lied. I was your dad’s teammate for a while, remember? He didn’t talk about you, but he knew. No pro racing pilot follows Juniors that intently without a damn good reason.”
