Why, yes. Clarkedoesfeel like hunting.
—
For twenty-six laps,Clarke stays mostly in her head. She’s aware that all the previous race leaders pitted for various lengths of time, a few of them even getting lapped, but she keeps her attention narrow. She picks off the people in front of her one at a time, working her way up to riding Raff’s air in P2. She’s waiting for the right opportunity to overtake and fantasizing about what she’d do if her ship had Melee-style attack capabilities when Hodge says, “You need to come in soon for a fresh battery and shells.”
Damn.
“Okay.” Clarke tries not to sound begrudging. “This lap?”
There’s a beat of silence. Clarke crests the top of one building and starts a corkscrew to the next. Hodge says, “Don’t you want to pass Raff first?”
“Of course I do, but you said to come in.” Clarke breaks off to grunt her way through the back half of the corkscrew. “And Raff needs to pit, too, and he’s faster than me in the box because our crew is still getting used to my setup, so passing him now—”
A new voice in her ear. Lennox. “Clarke?”
“Yeah?”
“Pass that asshole and get in here so we can see what the field looks like after you pit.”
Clarke snorts and shakes off the defeatist resignation she’d fallen into. Two weeks of being on a team that actually supports her, it turns out, isn’t enough to undo two years on a team that systematically tore her down. She’s working on it. “You get fined for swearing on the radio, you know.”
“Ask me how much I care,” Lennox says. “Hodge, back to you.”
Clarke passes Raff. It’s easy. She knows everything about his ship. Every issue, both fixed and still broken, she knows.
She boxes on the next lap. Raff does, too. He beats her out, and she follows him out of the pit lane as fast as the speed limit allows.
“Traffic ahead,” Hodge warns as the blue beacons marking reentry to the track come into view. “The normal race leaders have caught up. They’ll be at the exit right when you get there.”
Crap. Clarke steadies her breathing, readies herself to react quickly. “Behind or ahead?”
“Below.”
Out of time. She exits the pit lane at the shallowest angle she can manage, hugging tight to the topmost part of the barrier—
—a ship comes up from underneath, no signs of stopping, on a weird trajectory—
It’s not a decision, it’s a reflex. Rather than getting crashed into, she pulls up sharply and goes back through the barrier. Alarms blare. The ship drops hard, Earth’s gravity suddenly a factor again. She’s off the track.
Hodge’s voice, alarmed. “Clarke!”
“I’m okay. Ship’s okay.” She levels out, getting her bearings, ships whizzing past. Her deck points out where she can drop back in, and counts the seconds she’ll be penalized. “Dropping in. Is everyone okay? It looked like someone was spinning out.”
“That was Delphine. She was trying to get past Engel, and Raff either didn’t see the move she was making or decided not to cede the line. He clipped her. She’s still off.”
Clarke drops in. Her timer stops at 8.34 seconds. “Where am I?”
“P9. Gap to P8 is four-point-three, and that’s Thierry—no, sorry, he just took P7. P8’s David Lauer. Let’s—sorry, another update, Delphine’s retiring.”
Clarke’s far too well-trained to jostle her ship in surprise, but it’s a near thing. She flies through that stupid building with the hole again. “What?”
“No other details yet. Let’s focus, okay? Something tells me we haven’t seen the last of this track’s surprises.”
—
Hodge is right.In the next thirty laps, there are four more collisions, so many barrier breaches that Clarke stops keeping track, and multiple other incidents. Everyone gets to the checkered flag except Delphine, but Clarke doesn’t think anyone actually knows what place they got during the near-hour it takes for all the time penalties to be applied, appealed, reassessed, reapplied, and finalized. Julian crossed the line first, but ultimately gets knocked back to P2 courtesy of a hefty penalty he has to pay for a pit stop violation. It should mean that Thierry, who crossed second, wins, but he went off-track during that first big pileup and the time he has to pay back pushes him down to P3. One of the Barlowe Tech pilots, of all people, ends up taking P1. Clarke manages P7, sandwiched between the two Martian Motors.
Provenance only has 12 points on Chronicle. MartianMotors only has 12 points on Enclave. Delphine, after today’s DNF, only has 14 points on Julian.
