“It wasn’t a fight.”
“Did you or did you not call him your enemy?”
Clarke is both embarrassed that she said it and ticked at Julian for repeating it. “Yeah, but it’s—heis. We all are.”
Thierry opens his eyes. “We’re competitors. There’s a difference. And I know you know that, because you’re friends with me, and our teams are way more directly competitive with each other than either of us is with Chronicle. If you can manage it with me, you can manage it with Julian.”
“You and me don’t have years of history.”
“No, because you and Julian were so wrapped up in each other—and Connor—when we were all in Juniors that you barely noticed the rest of us existed.”
He’s teasing, but it sends a bolt of shame through Clarke. “I’m sorry. I never meant to make you feel like—”
“Oh, stop. I didn’t pay attention to the kids who were younger than me, either,” Thierry says as the train glides to a halt. The doors open, letting Clarke and Thierry out into the lobby of their hotel. There are a handful of people scattered about in pairs and trios, all in F0 colors. “My point is that I think you still care about him, because I don’t see how you couldnotafter everything you’ve been through together. And right now he kinda thinks you hate him, and that’s hurting him, so you should do something about it.”
They walk toward the elevators. Clarke tries to shove her thoughts into order, but she wasn’t planning on having to grapple with this today. Her brain’s full of tomorrow’s qualifying rounds, her unpredictable ship, and the state of her contract.“It’s not something I can justfix. Every time we try to talk, it hasn’t gone well. Historically.”
Thierry rolls his eyes as his elevator arrives. “You were friends for more than ten years. You were friends across the damn asteroid belt when he was still living in the colonies. Don’t tell me you can’t have a conversation with the guy.”
Clarke’s heart twists, thinking of those days before everything got complicated. “We’re not those kids anymore.”
“Well, good.” Thierry steps into his elevator, pivots on his heel, and gives Clarke a devious look. “Because my next suggestion is to just sleep with him already and get it out of your system, but that only works now that everyone’s an adult.”
“Thierry!”
“What? It’s what I would do. Gotta break the tension somehow. Okay, good night!”
The door closes on his cheery farewell. Clarke resolutely keeps her face turned toward the elevators so no one can see the shocked heat in her cheeks until her own lift arrives and she can scurry out of sight.
6
It’s not that she hasn’tthought about sleeping with Julian before, because ofcourseshe has. He’s objectively attractive, has been since he came out of his first growth spurt with a jawline and shoulders, and he’s only gotten hotter since with the addition of tattoos and muscles. He’s a few months older, twenty-three standard to her twenty-two, and they’ve been in each other’s pockets over this high-stakes sport for years. Julian ticks every box on Clarke’s list of what turns her on. Watching his hands manipulate the controls on a racing sim used to be enough to fuel a week of dreams from which she’d wake up sweaty and short of breath and unable to look him in the eye at breakfast.
He feels the same. She knows he does. There were moments, when they were younger. Moments where the air between them felt charged. He’d look at her, maybe even be touching her, and she’d think,Maybe we can do this. Maybe we canhavethis.
But she’d known—at sixteen, when Julian started living with her family; at seventeen, when he started dating someone and Clarke got jealous; at nineteen, when he got the call from Chronicle and Clarke was full of joy for this boy who meant sovery much to her—she’d known all along that if she ever made it to F0, the truth about her biological father would come out, and everything she’d achieved would be called into question. And if she got linked to Julian as anything more than friends and competitors, they’d use him against her, too.
So, she’s thought about sleeping with him. But she hasn’t let herself think about it anytime recently, not since they deliberately decided they could never be more than friends (and then watched that friendship fall apart under the strain of holding themselves back, and their careers, and Connor’s death).
Thierry didn’t know any of this when he made that joke last night. But he watered a long-dormant seed, and it’s been growing in Clarke’s mind ever since.
“Five-minute warning, Clarke.”
“Got it,” Clarke confirms over the radio to Amira, and shoves herself off the wall of the narrow alley that separates Elemental’s garage from Martian Motors’. She shoves every thought that isn’t about the next lap on this track out of her skull, too. What Julian Casperi may or may not be like in bed has no place in qualifying.
Qualifying sets the grid, which is the order ships will start in for the Grand Prix. It happens in three rounds, starting with Q1: Twenty-four minutes, clock the fastest lap you can. It doesn’t matter when you do it, just that you get it done and you’re not one of the five slowest, because they get eliminated. Same goes for Q2, except you only have nineteen minutes to get your lap done. In Q3, they’re down to ten pilots, fifteen minutes. The fastest pilot in qualifying starts first on the grid on Sunday, the coveted P1 position.
Clarke hasn’t made it to Q3 very often this season, but shedid today. She’s an off-planet racer, after all. And in five minutes, she’s going to take her ship out and prove to everyone—herself included—that she belongs here.
What does not belong here, in this alley, is Julian. And yet there he stands, helmet tucked under his arm. Looking at her.
“You looked good out there in Q2,” he says.
“I know,” Clarke says, because she does, and also because encountering Julian one-on-one unexpectedly has thrown her off balance.
This is not the first time they’ve seen each other since that tense post-press argument after Tiresias last week. Race weekends are packed with events that bring all the pilots together, for fan work or media filming or the general pageantry that goes hand in hand with Formula Zero. They’ve crossed paths in front of the same cameras half a dozen times in the past thirty-six hours. Clarke is always aware of where Julian is in a crowded room, always feeling the skin on the back of her neck prickle when he’s close.
It’s different, when it’s just the two of them. Heightened. The ever-present din of the paddock gets turned down, like her senses are prioritizing input from Julian over everything else.
