She trails off, suddenly aware that pointing out that neither Delphine nor Oliver podiumed and his team just fell out of first place is rude, but he laughs good-naturedly. It’s a loud sound. He’s a loud person, with a commanding presence. “It wasn’t the best day for Provenance, true, but it could have been worse. Tell me, Ms. Clarke, are you unintelligent, or simply unrealistic?”
It’s so far from anything Clarke was even remotely expecting to come out of his mouth that words fail her. He spoke quietly, but it doesn’t matter that no one else heard. Clarke heard.
“Delphine said you declined meeting with me because you’re not interested in being her secondary,” Atreus goes on. There’s a kindly smile on his face, so at odds with his tone that Clarke’d be impressed by the paradox if she weren’t crumbling inside. “But youmustknow you don’t have the talent to be a primary.”
Clarke’s media training kicks in. She says, inanely, “I appreciate the feedback.”
He guffaws. Again, it’s loud, and more eyes turn to them. Cameras, too. “You’ll manage a half-decent result next week, I imagine.”
Clarke got P5 at next week’s site last year. Still on automatic, she says, “Wonderland is always—”
“I do hope Yves doesn’t take all the fun out of your last few races in Formula Zero.”
Ah,nowClarke gets it. He’s one of those. He wanted to see her face when he told her she wasn’t worthy. She robbed him of that, and Julian blocked him from getting his satisfaction another way, so now he’s humiliating her in public.
Unluckily for him, Clarke has recently decided not to let shitty men push her around anymore.
Clarke is still holding her mic. She fiddles with it, clicking it on as if by accident, and says, voice as flat as she can make it, “You don’t need to worry about me and Yves. You need to worry about Julian and Val. Your engineering is stagnant. What’s your variance this season, two percent? And only three between this season and last, right?”
If everyone wasn’t watching before, they sure are now.
Atreus’s eyes go sharp; a raptor spotting a rodent that ventured to leave its burrow. “There’s no need to improve upon perfection.”
“Perfection?” Clarke arches a brow. She’s vibrating in her skin. Saints, she’d almost forgotten how good it feels not to hold herself back. “You’ve only placed first seven times this season. Seven, out of nineteen races. And there’ve been eight races, including today, where your pilots haven’t even podiumed. Is that how you define perfection?”
Lennox is standing nearby, waiting on Thierry, and chokes on her drink again. She narrowly avoids splattering Naomi a second time, who swerves to the side with a dirty look while on her way to Clarke.
“Sorry, sorry, again, sorry,” Lennox coughs. “Haven’t seen Clarke wake up and choose violence before.”
“I’ve been telling you this is her default state,” Thierry says conversationally. “She’ll fight anyone.”
Naomi arrives at Clarke’s side. She takes the mic out of Clarke’s hand, tosses it onto the couch, and starts pulling Clarke toward the door. “We’re late for debrief. Let’s go.”
Atreus watches as they leave, passing Val and Engel on theway out. Val catches Clarke’s eye, looks meaningfully at the tight grip Naomi has on Clarke’s elbow, tips her head in a silent offer to step in. Clarke rolls her eyes and flashes a grin.
She appreciates the support, but she’s got this.
—
“Not yet.”
“Whynot yet?” Rhynn protests. “We have proof that Yves is hiding assessment results. If we leak it—”
“I still don’t have a seat for next season,” Clarke says. It’s Monday night. She’s in the bathroom of her Luna house, painting her toenails. The tiny bot doing the painting unlatches from one toe and moves to the next. Clarke stifles a giggle at the tickle. “One thing at a time.”
“We don’t know when the sale of the team is going to be finalized.” Rhynn is still at their sister’s house. There’s a baby asleep on their shoulder, tiny face nestled into the crook of their neck. “If you want to disrupt that, this is the best chance we have.”
“We’re missing something. Raff’s ship is better than mine now, right? But Ohars result aside, he’s still not doing well. He’s underperforming. Why? If bringing Raff over was supposed to be this great decision by Yves that increases shareholder faith in him so news of the sale goes over well, it’s really not working out the way they planned. I don’t want to play our cards until we know what’s in everyone else’s hand.”
Rhynn shifts the sleeping baby into one arm and starts poking at the screen with their other hand. “If we keep waiting, we might miss our window, and—oh.”
“Oh?”
Rhynn pulls the screen in close, treating Clarke to a view almost directly up their nose. “I just got a response from one of the teams I reached out to about you.”
Clarke deals with a brief internal schism in which half of her leans hard toward optimism and the other half cautions against getting her hopes up. “Good news or bad news?”
“I think that’s up to you,” Rhynn says. Clarke’s cuff lights up with a new message. “Well?”
