“Sorry, just, that’s not what I meant,” Silver Sight says, speaking louder to be heard over the chuckling. He shifts his gaze to Clarke, and Clarke knows it’s rude to focus on people’s physical appearances but he’s had both his eyes replaced with full metallic implants and really does look like the villain from a kids’ show she used to watch. “Clarke. What happened out there?”
Clarke’s left arm is in a sling. She went to Medical while the race finished, and her broken collarbone isn’t broken anymore, but the limb is swollen and tender. She would give anything to be in bed right now, but there’s a clause in every pilot’s contract about doing the post-race press conference when tapped.
Clarke’s media persona is carefully cultivated. It’s easier for her to be approachable, humble, and dedicated when her entireskeleton doesn’t feel battered, though, so she lifts the microphone to her mouth and says, blunt, “Wasn’t it obvious? I crashed. Again.”
There’s a burst of tense laughter, cut through by someone coughing loudly at the side of the room. It’s Naomi, who manages PR for Elemental. She arches a no-nonsense eyebrow when she sees that she’s caught Clarke’s attention.
That eyebrow means miserable things for Clarke, like another of those day-in-the-life-style interviews where she has to let a reporter follow her around for twenty-four hours. She brings the mic up again. “There was a mechanical failure headed into the vertical loop. It was unexpected and unrecoverable. I’m grateful to the emergency teams for mobilizing so quickly, and Amira for talking me through it, and Julian for intervening when he did.”
She gestures at Julian as she says his name, and he looks up from fiddling with his own mic to give her a short nod.
They’re seated at opposite ends of the couch, Delphine in an armchair set a bit apart. That’s how these press conferences always go: winner in the armchair, and the two other pilots the press most wants to talk to on the couch. Clarke’s never been in the armchair, but she’s willing to bet it’s more comfortable than the couch.
“Things could’ve ended very differently today,” Clarke continues. “Incidents like this remind all of us to be careful.”
“It’s your third big crash this season, and you lost a friend in a crash just a few years ago,” the reporter says. “Did you need another reminder?”
Clarke goes cold everywhere but her face, which heats up so quickly that sweat beads at her hairline. More than one person sucks in a breath, and more than one person looks at Naomi.Most team PR people won’t let the press talk to their pilots like that.
Naomi frowns, but doesn’t say a word.
Clarke takes a sip of water to buy time, pretends it doesn’t feel like swallowing sand. Pretends she didn’t hear the reference to Connor. “No, I didn’t need another reminder. I was being careful. Like I said, it was an unexpected mechanical failure.”
“Not your first of those this season, either.”
Accountability,Naomi has stressed with Clarke.You’re one of the faces of Elemental. There’s a team of hundreds behind you, but when things go well, you get all the glory. When things go wrong, you get all the blame. If you can’t take that—
I can, Clarke has said, and she’s meant it every time. She just didn’t think that things would go this wrong, this often.
There are three clear groupings of Formula Zero teams. Provenance, whom Delphine flies for, and Julian’s Chronicle Racing have been at the front of the pack for the past several years, trading the team and individual pilot champion trophies among themselves. There are four teams historically at the back of the pack who might put a pilot on the podium every now and then, but lack the budget to do so consistently. The remaining four teams are in the middle, jockeying for third place and the hundreds of millions in additional funding it brings.
Elemental Machines is supposed to be a mid-pack team, one lucky streak away from being right up there with Provenance and Chronicle, but neither Elemental’s ships nor pilots have been performing the way they need to. Elemental finished sixth out of ten in the team championship last year. Clarke finished ninth out of the twenty pilots, her teammate Matthew eleventh. They’re on track to do even worse this year.
It’s not Clarke’s fault that her shells jammed today, or thatthe dampener crapped out in Rio de Janeiro, or that the power unit froze in Copernicus, but no one wants to hear Clarke shift blame.Accountability.
“You’re right, it’s not my first challenge of the season,” Clarke says. “I’m working closely with our technical team, and I’m committed to improving. Elemental deserves better, and I’ll do whatever it takes to be better.”
Two couch cushions away, Julian makes a disgusted noise in the back of his throat. His mic is still in his lap, so the sound doesn’t get picked up, but Clarke hears it. Delphine does, too, going by the chastising look she shoots him.
It’s a special kind of mortification, being humiliated in front of one’s idol. Delphine, at twenty-nine standard, is six years older than Clarke and Julian: enough of an age gap that they never competed against her in the youth circuits, but not so much of one that she felt untouchable the way some of the more senior pilots did. It took Clarke multiple preseason F0 social events to be able to hold a semi-normal conversation with Delphine now that they are, in theory, peers.
“I think I speak for everyone when I say we’re just glad you’re okay, Clarke,” says a different reporter, smoothly covering the silence left behind by Clarke’s rote words. “And Julian, it was quite a bold move on your part to not wait for the safety ship.”
…Julian didwhat?
“I saw the yellow flag and slowed accordingly, but I was already in front of the safety ship by the time it deployed,” Julian says, nonchalant. The bright lights cast his angular features in profile and bring out the bronze of his skin and the loose curl of his black hair. “I didn’t break any rules.”
“The FIC clearly felt that you didn’t follow thespiritof the rule, since they penalized you five positions.”
Naomi coughs again. Clarke schools her face back into something that hopefully looks less gobsmacked, but she feels like the dumbfounded expression was justified.
She’d seen footage of the crash in Medical. It was unnerving to watch, especially when all the ships that had been behind her went rocketing past and she was left alone at the bottom of the loop. That’s when the yellow flag came out, telling all the other pilots to slow down and stop trying to overtake one another, and the safety ship was deployed immediately after. The safety ship normally comes out at the front of the pack, right on the nose of whoever’s P1 (in first place), and everyone has to stay behind it and in the same order until it leaves the track. But Julian was P1 at the time, and he didn’t slow enough for the safety ship to deploy in front of him.
It’s a nearly unforgivable breach of decorum. If Julian wasn’t the only pilot to give Delphine a run for her money in the past few years, he probably would’ve been disqualified. But the competition between him and Delphine is the hook that Formula Zero’s riding to mind-boggling levels of viewership and sales, so instead he just gets knocked back five places in the final rankings. Perks of being Julian Casperi, Clarke supposes.
“The Fédération Interplanétaire de les Courses and I have different interpretations of the rules,” Julian says, the Terran French name for the Interplanetary Federation of Racing rolling smoothly off his tongue, and Clarke’s jealousy spikes further. Julian’s a colony kid, born and raised in one of the settlements on Jupiter’s moons, but he’s lost the accent and now sounds like a native Terran. Clarke’s Martian and sounds Martian, no matter what language she’s speaking.
“Your interpretation is different thaneveryone’s,” Delphine says, rolling her eyes. “Sometimes I wonder if you have a differentrule book out there past the belt, and Val just never bothered to give you the one the rest of us use.”
