“It’ssomeone’sfault,” Delphine says. “People designed every millimeter of your ship, Clarke. They built it and tested it. They’re responsible for it. So either someone made a mistake and your team isn’t good enough at their jobs to find it and fix it, or…”
“Or?”
“You sure you want me to say it? Because it sounded really stupid in my head. I’ve been watching a lot of telenovelas.”
Not the type of downtime entertainment Clarke might’ve guessed Delphine enjoys, but sure. “Now you’ve got me curious.”
“About the telenovelas? It’s Belette’s fault, she loves them. I’ll send you a list.”
Clarke shoots her a flat look as they emerge from the overgrown section onto a wide, flat field. There’s a cluster of secondary school–age kids kicking a ball around nearby.
Delphine drops her voice and starts jogging again. “Fine, but don’t say I didn’t give you a disclaimer. Either it’s a mistake your team can’t fix, in which case Yves should be firing at the very least your chief engineer and technical director, or it’s not a mistake at all. It’s a feature, not a bug, and someone high up in your program is putting in overtime to make sure no one else can solve it.”
Clarke stumbles to a stop barely ten steps into the resumed run.
Delphine pulls her back into motion. “I told you. It’s just telenovela brain. There’s no reason someone would be doing that.Things might not be perfect at Elemental, but you’re a team. Win together, lose together.”
Clarke has come uncomfortably close to dying more than once this season as a direct result of mechanical failures. There’s losing, and then there’slosing, and Clarke’s the only one at risk of the latter.
There was a lot of context missing in the conversation Clarke overheard between Anders and Naomi. But with the knowledge she does have, and the theory Delphine’s just posited?
Yves might be setting Clarke up for bad race outcomes on purpose.
Anders intimated that Elemental will perform significantly better next year. Naomi has been instructing Clarke to take personal accountability for her poor placements and DNFs, even if the cause was mechanical and out of Clarke’s control, ever since she got to the grid. If they’re going to blame Clarke for all of Elemental’s issues, they must have a way ofresolvingthose issues once she’s gone.
Yves knows why the ships have shimmy. He knows, and he is sending Clarke out there to fail, and to crash, and to sit trapped in her ship counting down the seconds until the kickdrive shreds her spine to pieces or the pilot behind slams her into the barrier and—
She should probably be feeling fear. She has to fly a ship this weekend that her own fucking team principal might be willfully sabotaging.
She’s not scared. She ispissed.
“You okay?” Delphine asks, tentative. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to make it weird.”
“It’s not weird,” Clarke says automatically. She drags herbody into a jog once more. “Come on. I need to get my legs under me.”
—
She still hasto race, which is insane.
She could fake being sick, have them bring up a reserve pilot for the weekend, but Clarke feels ethically gross about putting someone else at risk. She could confront Yves, but he’d probably fire her on the spot and then still put a reserve pilot in her seat. She is, ironically, the person in the solar system with the best odds of flying the current Elemental Machines F0 ship without a catastrophic outcome. Saints know she has the most experience. She hates the ship, but she knows it.
What Clarke needs is proof of what Yves and Anders are doing. And she thinks she has an idea of how to get it, but she needs time. She only gets time if she keeps acting like nothing’s wrong, so that’s what she does.
She finishes thirteenth at Ohars.
There’s not much else to say. It’s a fun track, and a marvel of orbital mechanics between the ever-moving asteroids and the ever-changing variables, but she can’t enjoy it. Her shells crap out three times, which means she has to pit three times, and each time she sits in the box looking at her mechanics and wonders if she’s wrong to trust them. Wonders if they’re in league with Yves. Wonders how much you have to pay someone to make them build a flaw into a ship that might kill its pilot.
It’s occurred to her that Delphine might’ve been playing a mind game, purposefully sowing doubt to destabilize a pilot from another team. Clarke can be rational. She’s willing to entertain that possibility.
She’s having a really hard time entertaining that possibility as she sits in the debrief room with her measly single point from today and watches on-screen as Raff, who placed third, does the post-race press conference.
“You should come with me.”
Clarke doesn’t look away from the screen at Sara’s voice. “What?”
“You should come with me. Now.”
Her tone is serious enough to tear Clarke away from the coverage. She hasn’t seen Sara much recently; this weekend’sJulian & Clarkefriendship session (setting up their prep room boxing droids) was exclusively PK-coordinated. “Is everything okay?”
