“I got, uh, curious? After things got super weird between you and Yves at team dinner last week over the report? And then when nothing came of it? So I got a copy, and the administrative metadata on it is all messed up.”
Clarke’s no data architect, but she knows what he’s gettingat. Administrative metadata includes a document’s editing record: who’s touched it, and what they’ve changed. It’s what she’s planning on looking at for the bullshit reports Yves has given her to further prove his guilt. It sounds like Maki’s done that work for her. “Send me what you have? I’m handling it, but you may have just saved me a lot of time.”
Maki taps at his cuff. Clarke’s, already sitting on its charging pad on the desk since she can’t wear it while racing, dings. He looks up, still obviously nervous. “You’re not going to—I mean, we should tell the race director, right? Ask for the start to be delayed, so we can do another check? If something’s wrong with the assessment, there could be something wrong with the ship.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the ship. Nothing we don’t already know about, anyways.” Clarke pulls her balaclava up and settles it around her eyes. “Thank you for telling me, but you don’t need to worry about this.”
Maki doesn’t look convinced, but he follows her out to the garage. Clarke pulls her helmet and gloves on, checks her CO2 recycler, and walks to Amira. Maki hitches a ride to the grid on their liftpad and gets Clarke set up. She primes the deck. He verifies her biometrics. They tradeAll clears.
Blue lights. Red lights.
Racing.
Clarke comes off the line in what she’s sure will be one of her best reaction times this season. She has to pull up hard immediately so she doesn’t make contact with P7, and she passes over the top of them. The banked descent comes up fast after the first turn, and Clarke battles sidewash and dirty air from their tight grouping of ships all the way down. Someone goes off the track behind her, forced through the top part of the tunnel by a ship beneath them refusing to give way. She flies through a cloud ofsmoke entering the first patch of chicane; someone ahead must be having a problem.
Turn 2, then straight into the opaque blue disc of the first wormhole entrance. It goes against every instinct Clarke has to fly right at it, her training screaming at her to engage dampeners, reverse thrust, and swerve, but she stays the course.
Passing through a wormhole feels unnatural. No time at all passes from a spectator’s point of view, and technically no time passes for the pilot, either, but itseemslike time slows down. It seems like seconds stretch long between the thumps of Clarke’s heart, enough for her to register a perceived difference. Then she’s out and through, onto the second section of the track, a half kilometer from where she was.
The race goes on.
She rises steadily through the ranks, picking off people in front of her as variables start changing and others slow to tackle them. The order is mostly stabilized by lap eight with Delphine at P1, Belette in P2, Oliver in P3, and Clarke in P4. Julian’s back in P8, having received bad information about what variable to expect on the fifth lap. It was Engel’s ship spitting smoke on the first lap; he has to retire.
“This lap’s variable is shortened chicane after the upcoming descent,” Amira says as she’s starting lap nine. “Expect five cutbacks instead of seven.”
“Got it.” Clarke curls up the wall of the track around turn 1. “Gap to Oliver?”
“Two-point-eight. You were even pace with him, last lap.”
Clarke slides into the descent, thinking. She’s not losing ground, that’s good, but she already feels like she’s pushing pretty hard. If she asks for more from the ship and shimmy becomes a problem again—
She weaves into the chicane. The harness digs into her chest and hips. Her vision unexpectedly grays out at the edges. She loses sight of the line she’d been flying.
She jerks hard at the control deck, but can’t adjust her trajectory in time and blows through the side of the barrier, thankfully at a permeable section. A timer appears at the top of her control deck, ticking up the seconds she’ll have to pay back in penalty.
“Clarke?”
She’s out in the void, fully off the track. Fear and frustration lift their heads; she shoves them down. She knows what to do when this happens. Find the track, drop back in as quickly as she can without hitting another ship. Simple.
Not simple. Her orientation is shot to hell, and her vision isn’t all the way back yet. She cranes her neck around as much as the brace will allow, sees the track sort of behind-above her, and aims for a patch of barrier her deck says will let her through. “Dropping back in. Three, two—”
She reenters near the end of the chicane. Turn 2 is coming up fast. She’s breathing hard. Why is she breathing this hard? “Amira?”
“You’re P6, with four-point-four seconds in penalty time. It’s Thierry ahead, David behind,” Amira says immediately. “And you’re on warning from the medics for low oxygen levels.”
Clarke’s stomach churns as she barrels around the turn and toward the wormhole. “It’s too early in the race for that.”
She jumps to the second section of track. There’s a tiny hitch in the radio connection when she’s between planes that resolves into Amira’s voice saying, “—reading.”
Clarke takes the hairpin. Her vision hazes again, but she manages to stay away from the barrier. “Say that again?”
“Might just be a bad biofeed reading. How do you feel?”
She assesses as she exits the hairpin into the spiraling climb. “Not good. Vision’s graying out. Short of breath. Nauseous. The ship feels heavier than it should.”
“Okay.” Amira sounds worried. Amira doesn’tgetworried, not on the radio during a race. “Do you want to keep going?”
She has to keep going. She can’t DNF again, not with Val’s interest hanging in the balance. No, wait, that’s not right—not Val, Lennox—Atreus?—wait—
