“No.”
“So he was offering—”
“—to take me off the board as a threat. To keep me in Delphine’s shadow. He all but admitted that that’s where he thinks colony kids like me belong. And I told him I wasn’t interested, but he made agoodcase, Clarke. The offer was compelling, even knowing that he’d use it to keep me under his thumb. And when you came up, I…” He looks at her, helpless and earnest. “All I could think about was you telling me that you locked yourself into Yves’s cage. I didn’t want you to wind up in someoneelse’scage. Not when you deserve better than—when youarebetter than—”
“Stop.”
Whether it’s the word or her voice or the look on her face, Clarke doesn’t know, but Julian shuts up immediately, and that’s good because if he’d kept talking, Clarke thinks she might’ve screamed, and they’d have heard that back at the tent.
He thought he was protecting her. It’s not that he doesn’t respect her or lied to get the seat for himself. He lied because—
“You thought I wasn’t strong enough to take care of myself,” Clarke says, testing out how the words feel in her mouth and not liking the result at all. “You thought I needed you tosaveme from signing another bad contract.”
He grimaces. “I didn’t—it wasn’t planned.”
Scorn laces through her, cold and cutting. “Is that supposed to make it better? That your instinctive response when you thought I might make a choice you didn’t agree with was to take away that choice entirely?”
Julian tries to placate her. “I’m sorry. I know I shouldn’t havegotten involved. It’s what I wanted to talk to you about tonight. I was going to warn you.”
Clarke does not want to be placated.
“You were going to warn me that you shit-talked me to one of the most influential people in our sport,” she says, and watches the blood drop out of his face. “I’m glad to hear that you don’t think I suck, I really am, but Atreus does, and you validated that for him. Do you think he’s not going to tell anyone else what you said? By the end of next week, the entire damn paddock is going to know what Julian Casperi thinks of Madeline Clarke.”
Mortified defeat envelops her. She’s strong, she’s resilient, and she is going to figure a way through this, but she also knows her limit, and she’s hitting it. She needs to regroup somewhere safe before she has the willpower to face this.
Hersomewhere safeused to be Julian. For years, when they were younger, and for the past few weeks, when she—like an idiot—let herself believe they could do this again. But she trusted him, and he used something she shared in a moment of vulnerability to hurt her, and it doesn’t matter that he didn’tmeanto hurt her, because he did. The damage is done.
She thought she was going to come out of today with a job offer from a championship-class team. She has no job offer, an impending PR disaster, and will never be able to unhear Julian’s voice saying that Clarke’s not good enough.
She feels small.
Julian’s tone skews desperate. “I’ll talk to Atreus again. I’ll tell him—I don’t know, but I can fix this. Do you want the seat? I can—”
“Julian,” Clarke says, voice steady as she cracks right down the middle. “Stay the hell out of my life.”
She starts to pick her way back through the field. He calls after her, quiet and pained and then louder, more insistent. “We have to take pictures. Clarke! We have to—”
All her hurt rips loose. She yells, “I don’t care about thefuckingpictures, Julian!”
She walks away. He lets her.
This time, she has no intention of coming back.
27
Going back to work feelsimpossible, but Clarke does it. She stays home all day Sunday, wallowing and hiding, then gets up Monday and reports to Elemental Headquarters. She’s civil to Yves and Raff. She’s diligent about training, attentive in meetings. She doesn’t ask for anything. She waits for the other shoe to drop, for Atreus to let slip to some reporter that Julian thinks Clarke doesn’t have what it takes.
The shoe doesn’t drop. By Wednesday morning, as she’s getting settled in her cabin on the team transport, there’s still nothing about it in the press. Did Julian actually go back to Atreus and bargain with him? She hasn’t answered any of Julian’s (many) calls or messages, but the not-knowing is starting to wear her down.
Creeping remorse is also starting to wear her down.
She can see, in retrospect, that she wasmaybetoo harsh on him. Atreus had already decided he didn’t want Clarke before talking to Julian. Clarke would’ve gone into that meeting thinking Atreus took her seriously, then been horrifically disappointed in front of him. She was never going to get the job. What Julian said didn’t change that outcome. And Clarke hit prettyfar below the belt when she compared him to Anders. She’s stillfuriouswith him for trying to take the choice out of her hands, though. Too furious to call him back, at any rate.
Her cuff pings with a message from Rhynn.All set.
The relief Clarke feels knowing that her meeting with Atreus has been officially canceled is heady. She was worried that Rhynn would push her to try to talk Atreus around, but her manager didn’t hesitate to start cutting their tentative ties to Provenance when Clarke told them what she’d overheard Atreus saying.
Clarke finishes securing her luggage and heads for the conference room two decks up, where the team is gathering to review the schedule for the days ahead while the trip to Mars gets underway.
