He wouldn’t tell her, if she asked. Anders and Yves are part of their own little club, and neither of them care about Clarke beyond what she can do for their legacies in the sport. Until Yves wants Clarke to know, Anders won’t tell her, so there’s no point asking. Butthis—there’s something about Elemental’s leadership that Anders wants her paying attention to.
“Ownership can’t be happy about the team’s recent performance,” Clarke says, irritated that she’s been reduced to guessing but not willing to lose the chance to learn something that might help her. “It’s been decades since Elemental’s last championship,and years since the team’s been truly competitive. We’re not keeping up with the other mid-pack teams in terms of technical development.”
If there was a single camera in the vicinity, Anders wouldn’t let Clarke say something negative about Elemental without correcting her (He’sallowed to criticize the team. She’s not). But it’s just the two of them, so he simply nods. “And if you were the majority owner of a team that was steadily falling behind their peers, what would you do?”
Bring in new leadership, which Clarke absolutely cannot say to this man who is good friends with Elemental’s leader. There are some others in the mix—a director of operations, a technical director, a racing program director—but Yves is the team principal. Ultimately, success or failure rests on Yves’s shoulders. If he can’t get the job done, ownership should be looking for someone who can.
Clarke goes for something inoffensive and middle-of-the-road. “Depends, I guess.”
“On?”
“You’d have to make a choice. Are you going to stick it out, have faith in your organization and the path you started down however many years ago, or are you going to shake things up and try something new?”
He turns to face her. “Is that all? Those are your only options?”
Shit. Clarke’s missing something. She’s failing this impromptu quiz, and Anders doesn’t give credit for attempts. Bizarrely, she wishes Julian were here. He has a deeper understanding of the politics at play in F0, and would probably see in a heartbeat what Anders is getting at. “You could do nothing, I guess, but that’s functionally the same as the first one, so—yeah, those are your options. Both are risky, in their own way. There’d be a lot of factors to consider.”
“Are you a factor?”
“What?”
“Have you done enough, as a pilot, to make yourself a factor in how Elemental’s ownership should proceed? Have you proven that they can build a future around you?”
Embarrassment rushes in her ears. “It’s only my sophomore season.”
“In Julian’s sophomore season, he came within forty points of taking the championship from Delphine.”
It’s a low blow. Not an original one, not something Clarke hasn’t heard (or thought) a million times before, but it’s more brutal coming from the mouth of the man who provided half her genetics. She’s never needed his approval, but sometimes she can’t help wanting it, and moments like this make her hate herself for being so weak.
“We have different teams,” she tries. “Different machines. It’s not the same.”
“Clearly,” Anders says, a dismissal and a condemnation all in one, and leaves Clarke alone on the patio once more.
5
There are two types ofpilots who fly for Formula Zero: those who excel at on-planet racing, and those who prefer off-planet tracks.
On-planet courses go over, around, and through cities on Earth, Luna, and Mars. They’re hairpin turns between the eightieth floors of skyscrapers and tight loops around bridges. On-planet racing requires precision, dexterity, and the innate ability to judge exactly how fast you can take each element of the course without losing control.
F0 had exclusively on-planet courses for the first couple decades it existed. Then one team looked at their ship, which would be capable of flying in hard vacuum with just a few adjustments, and all the available space in the void, and thought,If we can, shouldn’t we?They invited a bunch of roller coaster designers and some astrophysicists to a weeklong retreat, plied them with alcohol, and came out of it with a proposal for off-planet tracks.
That team was Elemental Machines, and Clarke is an off-planet racer.
Off-planet racing is a beast all its own. The paddock is a space station, the course gets built around it, and because thedesigners don’t have to respect the physical landscape of a city, the track moves during the race. After every lap, the race director changes something: the angle of a turn, the length of a straightaway, the number of cutbacks in a chicane. There’re a finite number of variables, and the teams get a chance to practice them all ahead of time, but it’s thrilling to start a new lap not knowing exactly what lies ahead.
Clarke finds it thrilling, anyway.
“Doesn’t matter how many times we do this, it’s still weird,” Thierry says, standing outside Clarke’s bay in the Elemental garage and peering down the pit lane, toward the wall of silvery light that divides the pit, garage, and paddock from the vacuum that surrounds Lion’s Head Cascade track. “I could just walk through that, and I’d be dead. There’s nothing stopping me.”
“Common sense?” Amira offers from her spot at the engineering station, the long row of computers down the middle of the floor dividing Clarke’s and Matthew’s halves of the garage. “No, sorry, forgot who I was talking to.”
“Hey, I’m not the one who actuallylikesracing out here.” Thierry steps back into the garage with a shudder. “Clarke’s the lunatic. I’m having a situationally appropriate reaction of fear and awe.”
“You don’t have to like it, you just have to fly in it six times a year without looking like you’re going to crap your pants. You might want to do something about that, by the way.”
Thierry scowls and tosses himself into the chair next to Clarke. “I don’t have to put up with this.”
“Wish you were putting up with it somewhere else,” Amira says. She’s one of the only other people still hanging around this late on a Friday night, tinkering before tomorrow’s qualifying session.
