“I didn’t know until recently, and I didn’t get proof until even more recently. It’s just me and a few documents right now, and the second I come out against them, they’ll try to bury me. I need more.”
“You’re probably right. Elemental will throw every resource they have at making this go away.” Matthew tilts his chair onto its back legs and exhales heavily. “There are days Ireallyregret leaving Enclave when Yves came knocking.”
Clarke had almost forgotten that Matthew was at Enclave before last year. This is a serendipitous opportunity to get someone’s insight on what it’s like to be a pilot under Lennox; she hasn’t had a chance to talk to Thierry yet. “Whydidyou leave Enclave? Weren’t you happy there?”
“I was. It’s a great team. But Lennox was up-front with me that she didn’t think I was a long-term match for them, and once I got over myself I realized she was right. They move fast. Faster than I’m comfortable with, if I’m being honest. I want a ship I know inside and out. Enclave’s ship is different week to week.”
“So you came to Elemental, where the ship is…” Clarke makes a sort of exploding motion with her hands.
“Yeah, well, I didn’t know that at the time, did I?” Matthew says dryly. “Didn’t know that there was this wholeschemein the works. Although I guess this explains why the interview I did for that article after Yves fired me went the way it did.”
“Probably, yeah.” Clarke’d come to that same conclusion a while back. She’d thought that the news outlet misrepresented what Matthew said to drive traffic, but now she’s thinking theydid it at Yves’s request. “I’m serious, though, you shouldn’t race. I don’t want anyone else to be at risk.”
“Someone’s going to be at risk regardless. If you’re not ready to go public with what you have, I’ve got a better chance at managing the ship than anyone else until you are.” He drops the front legs of his chair back to the floor. “Youdohave a way of getting whatever else you need, don’t you? Before you have to get back in the seat for Abu Dhabi?”
Abu Dhabi is the site after Olympic City, and the first of the three consecutive Terran races that end the season. It’s the weekend after next, which is a bye week and the FIC Sponsors’ Gala.
Clarke has a lot riding on the Sponsors’ Gala, and she just lost almost a week of planning time. Not having every second of this weekend scheduled with race events might actually be a blessing, if she’s able to talk her way into getting released from the hospital soon. She’s going to have to take a few leaps of faith, though. “I think so.”
“Not exactly a resounding vote of confidence.” Matthew squints at her, then looks to the window from Clarke’s room to the hall. Julian’s been pacing while on his call, wandering in and out of view. “He’s here, but Sara’s cameras aren’t. Are you guys friends now? Actual friends?”
“We’re…something,” Clarke says, because there’s a time and a place for explaining to your former teammate that the boy in the hall saidHave been, will bethree weeks ago like being in love with you is incontrovertible, and this isn’t that time or place. “I’m going to deal with that after I deal with this.”
“He’s defying team orders to be here.”
“He’swhat,” Clarke says. Julian, with his typical impeccable timing, chooses that moment to end his call and reenter the room. “You’re hereagainst team orders?”
Julian shoots Matthew a betrayed look. “Really?”
“She was going to find out eventually, and if I’ve learned anything in the last fifteen minutes, it’s that I want to stay on her good side,” Matthew says. “I’ve never seen her like this. It’s terrifying.”
“I know,” Julian says, tone making it clear thatIsn’t it great?would be the next words out of his mouth if Clarke wasn’t trying to glare a hole through the side of his skull. “Don’t, Clarke. I wanted to be here.”
“It’s Chronicle’s home race! There are a million things you’re supposed to be doing!” She gets sidetracked when Matthew tries to slink out of the room unnoticed. “Matthew! You don’t have to—”
Matthew wraps his fingers around the doorframe and swings from it. “If I scared easy, I wouldn’t be a Formula Zero pilot. Feel better!”
He disappears, leaving Clarke to turn her full focus on Julian. “Team. Orders.”
Julian doesn’t even have the decency to look mildly chagrined. He crosses the room in a few long strides and sits on the side of Clarke’s bed, hip resting against her thigh. “I’m not missing anything critical.”
“You’re an idiot. I’m fine.”
“You are now,” he agrees. “And when I saw you crash—because I saw it with my own eyes, Clarke, I was just one ship behind you—I assumed you were fine. The pilot walks away, almost always, and I know you’re capable of getting yourself out of wrecks like that. So I flew past you, and I asked Graham if you were okay, and he couldn’t give me an answer. The race got yellow-flagged, and thenred-flagged, and he still couldn’t give me an answer. The emergency team was pulling yourunresponsive body out of your ship while I was pulling mine into the pit lane. I thought you were dead.”
Clarke knows that feeling. The impossibility of it. The fear, the helplessness. She reaches for Julian’s hand. He lets her thread their fingers together.
“They told us you were alive, but that it was bad,” he continues, voice thick. “We all stood at the edge of the veil and watched Medical take off. And then they told us to get back in our ships and finish the race.”
All the muscles along Clarke’s spine tense up. She hadn’t even thought about—
“I did it,” he says, like he’s confessing to a crime. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but I got back in my fucking ship, and I won the fucking race. I did my fucking job. So Val can fuckingdeal with itif I decide that being here with you when you’re finally awake again is more important than entertaining some Chronicle exec this afternoon.”
Clarke has to kiss him. Shehasto. She’s going to tell him she loves him if she doesn’t, and she can’t say that to him yet.
She’s been sitting fully upright with her ankles crossed under her for a while, so she doesn’t have far to go. An easy lean to the side is all it takes to press her lips to his, simple and gentle.
He’s surprised, just like he was the last time she kissed him, but he gets with the program quickly. His hand comes up to cup the back of her neck and he deepens the kiss just barely; a hint of his tongue against hers, so quick she might’ve imagined it if not for the tingle that stays and spreads.
