Yves brings Raffover ten minutes later. Clarke puts on a smile as she stands, annoyed that she has to pull her brain out of what she and Amira were doing. They were getting somewhere with the power loss issue, Clarke couldfeelit.
That’s the story of the whole season, really. If Clarke’s working on one of the ship’s many problems with just Amira, or just Maki, or spreadsheet whisperer/controls engineer Tomás, they make headway. But the second someone higher up the food chain gets involved, all forward progress comes to a halt while a million reasons that solution wouldn’t work are brought to light.
Clarke’s mind brings up a memory of something Julian said. Back at Lion’s Head, after the post-race press conference, he’d implied that there was something going on at Elemental. Something insidious. Clarke dismissed it, then.
Now, she looks over Yves’s shoulder to where a tech is painstakingly removing theAgrestadecal from the back of the other ship. ASt. Sebastianone, in Elemental’s color and style, is waiting on a nearby counter to take its place.
How long had this switch been in the works? What else doesn’t Clarke know about?
“Welcome to the team,” Clarke says, offering her hand. “We’re glad to have you.”
Raff shakes. His grip is firm, just shy of being painful. “I’m sure you are. Not exactly having a great season, are you?”
Like Clarke said: Rafferty St. Sebastian is an asshole.
He’s been in F0 for twelve years and hasn’t managed to stay with any one team for more than three consecutive seasons. He’s rude and abrasive. He has moments of brilliance on the track, but he also goes through long dry spells. He acts like anyone younger than him has to earn the right to be spoken to as an equal. Clarke’s pretty sure he picked up that and several of his other charming habits from her father, when the two of them were teammates for a while toward the end of Anders’s career.
“It hasn’t been the smoothest season, no,” Clarke says. She exerts careful pressure in the handshake, giving him back every iota of squeeze. “But it’s getting more interesting every day.”
“Play nice, children,” Yves says, just as someone calls his name from upstairs. He glances toward the stairwell, harried. “Clarke, I’m leaving Raff in your hands. Pilot-to-pilot, tell him what to expect, okay?”
He’s walking away before he finishes talking, not waiting for Clarke’s response. She stares after him for a second, wishing she were surprised by the assumption that she’s fine with sacrificing her own prep time to help Raff settle in. Wishing that Yves hadn’t spent this whole year setting the expectation that Clarke would, without question, do whatever was asked of her. Wishing she’d drawn firmer boundaries, or been less willing to compromise them.
She can’t feel the chip in her arm, not physically. But for a moment, she thinks she can, and she thinks about asking if Raff has a chip or a patch.
She pushes the thought away and closes out of her ship’s diagnostics, flipping the screen to the neatly ordered list of known issues with the EM-82. “Okay, pilot-to-pilot. First thing to know is that you’ll get shimmy on—”
“Tell you what,” Raff interrupts. “If I have questions, I’ll ask. Otherwise, let’s just save ourselves some time and not pretend that there’s anything you can teach me, okay?”
Amira, who’d moved a few steps away when Raff and Yves approached (the traitor), chokes on her coffee.
Clarke’s temper has a quick spark, but a long fuse. She gets mad easily, but it’s low-level anger, something she can stew in for hours without blowing up. Yves’s bullshit, Anders’s condescension, every interviewer and fan who thinks they’ve identified what Clarke needs to do differently after ten minutes of thinking about it when an entire team hasn’t been able to figure it out in a year and a half—Clarke can tolerate it all without losing her cool. Julian’s remarkably proficient at triggering premature detonation, but that’s Julian-specific.
Raff is just another in a long line of jerks who’s going to failto get the reaction he wants out of Clarke. He wants her to be offended or humiliated? He wants her to lash out, to validate whatever belittling characterization he’s built in his head?
Tough shit.
Clarke sees red, and then she swallows it. She tamps the rage down into something manageable and sets it to simmer, where it can either burn itself out or get fired up again if she needs it. She smiles blithely at Raff and his stupid, grungy-looking beard. “Okay. I’ll be here if you need anything.”
He scoffs and walks across the garage, presumably to lurk over the shoulders of his new mechanics. Clarke imagines picking up the nearest semi-sharp object (this is a working garage, there are alotof implements that could double as weapons), disemboweling him, and strangling him with his own intestines.
The mental image is comforting. She uses it as fuel all through qualifying, fairly breezing through Q1 and Q2. The other pilots seem to be playing it safe on this intimidating track during the first two rounds, but competition picks up in Q3 when top starting spots for tomorrow are on the line. Clarke finishes in P8, and she’s happy with that.
She’s even happier that Raff had to retire his ship in Q2, after telemetry started detecting shimmy in his fuselage. If he’d let Clarke finish talking earlier, he would’ve known how to mitigate the effects, but he didn’t, so his race engineer eventually had to tell him to pull off to the side of the track so he didn’t do serious damage to the hardware.
What a shame. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. Clarke’s torn up about it. No, really.
18
“You enjoyed that,” Amira saysin a low voice when they’re checking Clarke’s ship into parc fermé with an FIC marshal. Parc fermé (closed parkin Terran French) is a holdover from ground-based racing, although the application has evolved over the years. Nowadays in F0, it refers to the period of time between qualifying and the Grand Prix when a ship can’t be worked on besides standard maintenance. It gives the FIC time to inspect the ships and run legality checks.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Clarke says airily. “He’s my teammate. I’d never be happy that he had a less-than-ideal outcome.”
The marshal holds out a small holoscreen. Clarke waves her cuff over it, attesting that the ship meets all regulations to the best of her knowledge, and walks away so the inspection can start. Clarke won’t be able to engage the control deck of any ship or racing sim until parc fermé ends, so the afternoon schedule of a qualifying day is media work, fan events, and glad-handing VIPs until an early curfew.
Today, another friendship session with Julian’s been added to the docket. That’s where Clarke’s headed next; she’s due at Chronicle in twenty minutes. She once again has no idea what they’regoing to be doing (Sara’s been understandably too busy today to answer Clarke’s messages requesting details, and Julian keeps dodging giving a straight answer), but she’s looking forward to it. To seeing him. Plus, her contract prospects seem shakier than ever, and she told Yves and Naomi she’d do this, so she’s doing it.
After a short detour of her own devising, that is.
