“Even if you’re telling the truth, that doesn’t prove anything,” Clarke says, trying not to show that she’s rattled. Anders never mentioned paying attention to the youth circuits when Clarke was in them, and it should’ve come up back when Clarke was signing with Elemental and Naomi was drafting the announcement about Clarke and Anders being related. “He could’ve just been keeping an eye on future competition.”
Raff snorts. “He was in his last years on the track before retiring, and you weren’t even semi-pro yet. You weren’t something he needed to be concerned about.”
Clarkes forces herself to shrug. “That doesn’t mean he went to Yves about it.”
Raff stands. He hasn’t so much as touched his helmet. “You know, everyone else trying to make it in this sport, they take every advantage they can get. Exploit every connection.”
Clarke’s not short, either for a woman or for an F0 pilot, and Raff is not particularly tall. But he’s broader and thicker, and he’s standing and she’s sitting, and when he plants his hands on the table and looms over her, an animalistic instinct to flee kicks in.
Clarke looks up at him steadily, not allowing an ounce of that hindbrain fear to bleed through. “Your point?”
“No one would’ve cared if you’d been up-front about Anders helping you get your foot in the door. That happens all the time at this level. You would’ve taken some heat for it at first, but they would’ve let it go once you proved yourself actually capable of competing.”
“Anders. Didn’t. Know,” Clarke grits out.
“It doesn’t actually matter. It doesn’t matter if he knew, or if you knew he knew, or if he intervened. You decided to build the perception of who you are on a foundation of having gotten this far without help, so now youcan’thave gotten help, and you can’t accept help moving forward. You think it’s independence, but it’s not. It’s pride, and it makes you weak.”
He straightens up. The roll of wrapping is crushed flat, where it’d been pinned between his palm and the table. He leaves.
After a moment, movement and conversation resume in the garage. The intern, still sitting next to her, reaches out to take Raff’s helmet back.
Clarke drags it next to her own helmet instead. She needs to turn her brain off before she starts crying in front of this whole room of people, and the methodical process of preparing a helmet for shipping will do that.
Clarke knows she didn’t get here without help. Every coach and trainer she’s ever had, the limitless support from her mom and Ihaka, the teammates who’ve challenged her and the mechanics who’ve worked on her ships and the engineers who’ve built them. Clarke’s able to do what she does because literally thousands of people have contributed to boosting her up to this opportunity. Clarke knows that. She’s grateful for that. She consciously tries not to take that for granted. Wanting this to besomething she’s achieved without Anders’s influence, and wanting people toknowshe did it without Anders’s influence, doesn’t make her prideful.
Does it?
She’ll talk to Julian about it, she resolves. Or Val, maybe. She has people she can talk to about shit like this now, who can help her get out of her head and look at things objectively.
See, Clarkecanaccept help. Raff can go screw himself.
21
Clarke feels like a traitorto all of motorsport for thinking it, but she doesn’t really like Monza.
The course is…fine. It’s on-planet, obviously, so it’s already not going to be one of Clarke’s favorites, and it’s not even built through a city or over water, which are in Clarke’s opinion the main draws to zero-grav racing on-planet. It’s a purpose-built stadium. It’s basically just a condensed version of an off-planet track, but without the fun of changing variables.
And Monza’s not even quick! It’s forty-five laps of a fifteen-kilometer track at an average speed of 350 km/h (they can’t go faster than that here, the straightaways aren’t long enough). It’s a marathon, and a dangerous one at that. The course stretches tall instead of sprawling long, to keep the ships in view from the grandstands, and loops over and around itself to make the best use of the space. You can see ships on other portions of the track while you’re flying, not just the bit immediately in front of you. There’s a section toward the end that fully corkscrews around an earlier straight section, moving in opposing directions. It’s disorienting. A split-second loss of focus can have you flinching, or trying to jump from where you are on the track to the sectionyou’re close to. The barrier’s mostly impermeable here, to protect spectators. That jump’s not going to end well.
You’d think that this makes Monza exciting. You’d be wrong. Monza’s just exhausting. You come out of Monza needing a toilet, a massage to deal with the cramping in your lower back from being in your ship that long, and twenty hours of sleep.
That’s what Clarke feels like she already needs, and they haven’t even flown the actual Grand Prix yet.
It’s Saturday, early evening. She got eliminated in Q2, and will start P12 tomorrow. It is what it is. It’s Monza, and Clarke hates her ship. P12’s honestly better than she was expecting.
Clarke’s in a hovercar with her family, on their way to her Elemental-hosted birthday dinner. It’s not going to be a fun night. The guest list is Clarke, Imogen, Ihaka, Kuari, Anders, Yves, Raff, and half a dozen Elemental execs that Clarke rarely interacts with. Also Sara, but she’s working, not eating, because saints forbid Elemental doesn’t milk every event for views.
It’s a bye week, the one weekend a month they don’t race, after this. Clarke’s going to a nearby Terran beach with her family on Monday, and the plan after that is to return to Luna and work straight through until they leave for the back-to-back Martian races that are coming up next. But she could take a night off. Pop back down to Earth, where Thierry’s team Enclave is based. Do something small, just the two of them, or maybe see if some of her lower circuit friends are around.
She’s hoping to waylay Yves tonight when dinner’s over and everyone’s heading back to their hotels. She’s going to give him a copy of the drafted renewal that Clarke’s been working on with Rhynn in every spare minute of this past week, whereinClarke asks for what she wants: less team control over what she does during her downtime, a guarantee that she can use a biometrics patch instead of a chip next season, assurance that Clarke will be included in discussions about designs for future ships. She’s not expecting him to accept it on the spot, but it will start the conversation (or end it, if he flat out tells her that she’s not going to be with Elemental next season, but at least then she’dknow).
“You’re quiet.”
Her mom’s gentle observation pulls Clarke out of her thoughts. “Yeah, sorry. It’s been a long few weeks.”
Imogen’s dark blue eyes trace the circles under Clarke’s. “Should we cancel? Go back to the hotel?”
“I don’t think Yves would appreciate that.”
