“You going to be okay for Lion’s Head?”
That’s the next race, a week from now: Lion’s Head Cascade. It’s the traditional last site of the first half of the season. After Lion’s Head, it’s mid-season break, a chance to regroup and recover before tackling the remaining twelve races.
Lion’s Head is a beautiful track. It’s also dangerous, and Clarke doesn’t trust her ship.
Clarke’s not sure she trustsherselfat this point. Matthew’s got the same ship she does, minor setup differences notwithstanding, and he’s only DNF’d once so far this year. He hasn’t been placing well, but at least he’s getting across the damn finish line.
“I have to be okay.” Clarke stands up and collects her bag. “It’s Formula Zero.”
“It’s Formula Zero,” Matthew echoes. He walks with Clarke as she leaves the room, pacing her step for step. “I was thinking,during break—there’s that design meeting for next year’s ship. What if we met up beforehand to talk about our ideas? I know Yves doesn’t always—I mean, it’s not that he doesn’t listen to you, but it sometimes seems like he’s more receptive to me, so I thought that—IpromiseI’m trying to be helpful, not condescending, please stop looking at me like that.”
“I’m not looking at you like this because of you,” Clarke says, trying very hard not to cry. “I’m looking at you like this because I’m not invited to the meeting. There’s nothing on my calendar from the team over break except the normal media days, and standard training when our shutdown’s over.”
Matthew looks distinctly uncomfortable. “I’m sure it was just an oversight?”
“No, it wasn’t.” They reach the hospitality level and stop around the corner from the lobby. Yves and Anders are still talking, voices light and casual. “My contract expires this year. You don’t invite a pilot to talk about next year’s ship unless you’re planning on that pilot being around to fly it. They’re not renewing me. I’m getting fired.”
“That’s one possibility,” Matthew says, trying to smooth over having accidentally brought this to light. “And it’s always a possibility with the jobs we have, but it really could have just been a mistake. Ask Yves.”
It’s good advice. She needs to know, one way or the other, and she doesn’t think Yves will lie to her face. But getting it confirmed is a body blow she can’t take tonight, and definitely not in front of her father.
She’ll ask after Lion’s Head. And if Elemental doesn’t want her anymore, she can have that identity crisis by herself during break while the only team she’s ever wanted to fly for leaves her behind.
4
When Imogen Clarke got pregnantwith Anders Dalsing’s child unexpectedly, she told him he could be as involved or as uninvolved as he wanted to be. His response was to send papers terminating his parental rights along with a substantial sum of money to keep quiet about the situation. Message very much received, thank you.
Clarke grew up knowing who her biological father was and that he wasn’t interested in being anything other than her biological father. Imogen always told Clarke that she could give racing a try if she was interested or not, that she didn’t owe Anders either participation or refusal, and Clarke was happy to exist in that ambivalence until a friend had his eighth birthday party at a go-kart track. She fell in love with racing the instant she felt that tiny motor rumble.
The friends she made in the sport knew who Anders was (he was at the peak of his career around then), but they didn’t know that he was her father. Some of them had relatives who were in racing, too, and she saw the pressure and the teasing they endured. She told Julian and Connor, once she knew she could trust them, but otherwise she kept her mouth shut and pointed at her stepdad when people asked who her father was.
When Elemental offered Clarke a rookie contract in F0 after a few years in one of the lower circuits, her first thought was that Anders had realized who she was and pulled strings to give her the opportunity. It turned out that he hadn’t, but she’s never quite been able to forgive him for tainting what should’ve been one of the best moments of her life, even though he had nothing to do with it.
She doesn’t feel bad about the misdirected resentment. He’s done plenty of other crap in the nearly two years since for Clarke’s opinion of him to solidify based on personal experience.
Case in point: She could’ve gone to bed early last night in a hotel, seen one of F0’s doctors this morning, then ridden halfway around the planet with the media team mostly leaving her alone. Instead, Anders critiqued every aspect of Clarke’s performance during the flight, she spent half the night unable to sleep because she was too busy thinking about how badly she always sleeps here, and then Anders’s personal physician arrived at the crack of double-dawn to make displeased faces at her bruising and ask if she wants something more powerful for the pain.
Clarke doesn’t want painkillers. Forced to watch Anders showboat as a proud parent, Clarke wants a drink. Or six.
“Two racing simulators in the home office, huh?” asks Sara, who runs all of Elemental’s social accounts and moderates what Clarke and Matthew post to theirs. “For a retired pilot, some might call that—”
“Obsessed?” Anders cuts in, laughing. The room has enormous windows looking out over the property; sunlight, real and fake, floods in to line everything in gold. “That’s one of the milder words that’s been used to describe me.”
“I’ve used stronger words just this morning,” Clarke adds from the doorway. It’s only true if you count what Clarke’s beenthinking within the confines of her own skull, but this is who they are for the cameras. Anders plays the father making up for lost time, teaching his long-lost child everything he knows, reentering the racing world with grace and self-deprecation. Clarke plays his headstrong daughter.
Notice how it’s more about Anders than it is about Clarke? Yeah, Clarke noticed, too.
Sara wears a ring on each finger that controls a thumb-size, flying camera. She twists and flicks like the conductor of a symphony orchestra while working, sending the cameras to new vantage points while monitoring footage live on the implant behind her left eye.
She directs two of the cameras to Clarke now. “What was the problem this morning? A little too overbearing after last night’s incident?”
Sara’s great at asking questions that get her the answers she wants, so she can piece together the narrative that will do best. Clarke appreciates that about her. “You have no idea. It’s like he’s never seen someone crash before.”
“It’s different when it’s your kid,” Anders says. “I think I might still be having the heart attack that started when I got the call yesterday.”
Sara clacks all the rings on her right hand together, something she’s explained drops a mark in the recording she can easily find later for editing. “I wouldn’t say you ‘got the call.’ It implies that you weren’t watching the race live.”
“People understand that I’m a busy man, Ms. Cohen, but sure. Ready?”
