The panel at the gate scans Clarke’s cuff, beeps a greeting, and asks if she’d like a ride up to the house. Clarke tells it no, dismisses the hovercar that brought her here, and walks.
She’s on the outskirts of Olympic City, the capital of Olympus Mons (the name of both a massive, long-dormant volcano and the country built atop it). It’s beautiful out here, the flatness of the terrain masked by thickets of the tall, reedy trees that do well in minimally terraformed Martian soil. Grass doesn’t thrive in areas like this, but many types of moss do, and it’s spongy under Clarke’s shoes as she pads up the long, narrow driveway to Valentina Dumond’s house.
She’s spoken to Val a few times since the last bye week, enough that Clarke was confident her request to talk in person again would be well received. And it was, after Clarke assured Val it wasn’t an inconvenience to come to her house on Friday afternoon. Elemental took the day off anyway (giving the team a long weekend after three weeks straight of workdays), and Val’s the one doing Clarke a favor by talking to her at all in this informal mentor-mentee relationship they’ve settled into.
The house comes into view between one clump of trees and the next. Clarke was expecting something like Anders’s mansion, but is pleasantly surprised to find that’s not the case. Val’s house is large, but clearly designed to work with its environment instead of standing out. It’s wide and flat, topped with half solar panels, half more of the moss underfoot. A suborbital ship and a hovercar are tucked under an overhang. There’s a sizable freestanding shed off to one side, and that’s where Val is, elbow-deep in what appears to be a household droid.
“You made it!” Val calls, waving Clarke over. “Thanks for coming out all this way.”
“No problem,” Clarke says. “Is this your workshop?”
Val smiles at the shed. “It is. Far enough from the house that I don’t keep my husband awake when I’m up late tinkering,close enough that he can call me in for dinner. And this,” she says, patting the droid on the chestplate, “is my latest pet project.”
Clarke didn’t grow up with household droids, and she hasn’t felt the need to get one now that she lives on her own (Ihaka drilled into both Clarke and Kuari the importance of taking care of the place you live with your own two hands). She’s also never been overly interested in tech that isn’t related to racing, so she can’t say for sure, but she hazards a guess. “Isn’t that model, uh, a bit outdated?”
“The challenge is half the fun.” Val pries a panel loose. “Not to rush into things, but it sounded like you had something important to discuss, and I’m not one for small talk when there’s an elephant on the space station.”
Clarke accepts the panel when Val hands it to her, cupping it gently in her palm. “I wanted to get your opinion on something.”
“I’m certainly not lacking in opinions. What’s on your mind?”
Clarke takes a moment to check in with herself and ensure she wants to do this, that she’s thought it all the way through, before asking, “If there was something wrong with this year’s Chronicle ship and you knew how to fix it, would there be a reason to wait to fix it until next year?”
“There are all sorts of reasons I might hold back a fix,” Val says promptly. “With how far we are into the season, most of our technical team is focused on next year’s ship already, so any resources I pull to work on this year’s model are to the detriment of next year’s. My pilots are used to this year’s ship, even managing its flaws. The fix might put us over the variance cap, or be prohibitively expensive.”
Clarke’s mouth is dry and her chest is tight. “Say you knew about the fix early in the season. Before the season even started, before variance cap or budget was an issue. And say the root problem wasn’t the sort of thing your pilots could compensate for.”
The tool in Val’s hand goes still. “Say the root problem was intermittent shimmy in the aft fuselage?”
Clarke swallows. “Say that it was.”
“Well, that’s another issue entirely,” Val says. “Are you sure?”
“No. But I can’t say it’snottrue with one hundred percent confidence.”
Val, hunched over the droid, straightens up. She’s dressed in oil-stained work clothes, red lines from safety goggles impressed into the skin around her eyes. This is the flip side of the coin Val presents in the F0 paddock, where she’s all clean lines and tailored outfits. “Why’d you come to me with this?”
“I need someone to explain to me, in detail, how parc fermé works. The timelines, the attestations, who exactly looks at what. I can’t ask anyone at Elemental.”
“You think something’s happening during parc fermé?”
Clarke’s suspension broke at Tempe Terra after parc fermé took place in team garages, not the normal separate display room. It might have been a coincidence. “All I’m asking is for you to help me understand what happens after I check my ship in. From the perspective of a team principal.”
She doesn’t know much about parc fermé, is the thing. All she’s ever had to do is attest that her ship is legal and wait for the inspection to clear. But team principals also attest to compliance, and then review a lengthy assessment from the FIC when the ship is released. If Clarke can get her hands on that report, with Yves’s sign-off at the bottom—thatmight be getting somewhere, because Clarke’s quite literally willing to bet her life onit not matching up with the spreadsheet of issues the Elemental team’s been working from all season.
The FIC trusts Yves to take their notes back to the technical team. The technical team trusts Yves to tell them everything the FIC found.
Clarke doesn’t trust Yves at all anymore.
Val reaches across the droid, reclaims the panel Clarke’s been tracing with her index finger, and begins securing it into place again. “All right. It starts with the pilot’s check-in.”
—
The hunt continues.
Clarke has been to Julian’s apartment in Olympic City before. Not often, because the rift between them was already widening during Julian’s first season in F0, but she knows where it is. She’s imagined making the trip from her colorless, catalog-ready house on Luna to his homey, lived-in apartment on Mars so many times that it’s laughably easy to get there from Val’s place, right up until the moment she’s standing outside his building.
She’s out of her mind.
