“We’re not doing anything illegal,” Anders says. He’s the only one of them not in Elemental colors, instead wearing a dove gray suit with a black shirt. He’s here tonight not as an official member of the team, but as a part of the story they’re selling. “Teams change hands all the time.”
There’s a significant ownership change only once every fourteen years across the whole FIC, but Clarke’s going to let that slide. “You were awfully quick to follow me here. If you don’t have anything to hide, what are you so worried I might know?”
Anders looks at Clarke like she’s said something particularly idiotic. “It’s not about what you know, it’s about how the information is released. This has to be handled carefully, with—”
“Don’t waste your time, Anders.” Yves’s voice comes from behind her. He’s been walking a slow lap of the floor, presumably to ensure they’re alone. “What do you want, Clarke? For us to capitulate to all your contract demands? You pull a stunt like this, and you think it earns you something?” Yves circles around,movements harsh. “If anything, this just proves that you require a firm hand.”
Two months ago, that would’ve been a crushing blow. Clarke would’ve backed down, shame eating her alive, and ceded more control of every aspect of her life.
Now Clarke looks at him coolly. “Is that what you call deliberately withholding fixes to my ship? Using afirm hand?”
Yves covers his surprise that Clarke knows about this, too, better than Anders. Guilt creases Anders’s face; Yves just curls his lip contemptuously. “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”
Clarke pulls the holoscreen out of her cuff. It’s already open to side-by-side parc fermé reports, with the discrepancies highlighted. “Are you sure? This is the version of the assessment you gave me at Hanoi, andthisis the version the FIC released. Notice any differences?”
“Yves,” Anders says.
Yves ignores him. A vein throbs in his forehead. “I’m well within my rights as team principal to—”
“To abandon your duty of care?” Clarke asks. During the silence that follows, like the men are too astonished by her audacity to respond promptly, she zooms in on one side of her screen. “Because this is the start-up sequence glitch that resulted in me not getting off the line during the reset in Monza. It’s fixed in Raff’s ship. It’s not fixed in mine.”
Anders turns a dead-eyed glare on Yves. “You said what happened at Monza wasn’t planned.”
“It wasn’t,” Yves says. “We didn’t start seeing the glitch until Iskret, and we hadn’t worked out the solution for it by Monza. It was just luck that Clarke’s power unit failed at the reset and Raff’s didn’t.”
Luck. Notbadluck, just…luck. Saints, Clarke hates him. “But you did work out the solution eventually. And when you did, you implemented it for Raff and kept it from my side of the team.”
“Is that true, Yves?” Anders asks, voice taut. “A defect that significant?”
“Naomi wasn’t exaggerating about your sudden lack of a spine, was she?” Yves sneers. “You know how far we needed to move the needle. It was an opportunity.”
“It could have repeated after Monza. At any other race, it could’ve—shecould’ve—that wasnotthe agreement.”
“The agreement to make it look like I was the source of every problem at Elemental,” Clarke says. The amount of tension in her body hurts; she forces herself to relax as they both whip their necks to stare at her. “Come on, guys, Idopay attention. The way you’ve been talking about me to the press, the way you’ve had me talking aboutmyselfto the press. Matthew’s article. Raff holding himself back, even though he should be placing higher now that his ship doesn’t have as many issues. You’re tanking Elemental on purpose this year so that you can show miraculous improvement once you take over. And to encourage the current owner to sell at a low price, because who’d want to keep a barely profitable team like Elemental in their portfolio?”
Clarke changes displays on the holoscreen, bringing up the graph Julian gave her. Elemental’s worth takes a sharp downward turn early this season, and continues to drop off at steeper intervals with each week that Clarke or Matthew DNF’d. There’s a spike when Raff was brought in, but it didn’t last long. The team’s current valuation is the lowest it’s been in twenty years, by a huge margin.
Clarke taps the final number, what the team is worth today.A calculation comes up in a pop-up box, showing what 52 percent—the majority ownership—of that number is. “Is this cheap enough for the two of you to afford? Have youmoved the needleenough?”
Yves darts forward, snatches the holoscreen, and throws it. It dissipates when it gets far enough from Clarke’s cuff, no damage done, but it brings him closer than she’s comfortable with. His face is red, his shoulders tight. “I should have listened to Anders when he told me not to hire you. You’re more trouble than you’re worth.”
Clarke anchors her feet to the floor. She will not be cowed. She will not allow this conniving, dishonest,jackassof a man who has bastardized the sport she loves to make her feel small. Never again. “Is that why you tried to kill me at Wonderland?”
She doesn’t actually think it was him. It happened higher up the food chain, according to what Maki found. Yves was probably just as confused as everyone else. But it seems there’s a fault line here with Anders, and Clarke’s going to exploit it.
“You knew I’d caught on to what you were doing with the assessments,” Clarke says. Her energy is building, gaining speed. “I was becoming a factor you couldn’t control. So you fucked with my air source order during parc fermé, hoping I’d die in the seat.”
Anders grabs the back of Yves’s jacket and yanks him away from Clarke. “You didwhat?”
Yves twists free and shoves Anders back a step. “I didn’t! She’s wrong.”
“Once I start telling people, how long do you think it’ll take for them to identify the FIC reviewer you paid off?” Clarke feels like her whole body is vibrating. “They’re probably here tonight, up in Zeus. Think we could just go ask?”
Clarke starts to move, like she’s going to march right into the banquet and demand for the reviewer to come forward. Yves lets out a roar and rushes her, grabbing her arm with a bruisingly tight grip, pulling—her heel catches in her dress, her breath catches in her chest, she falls—he’s on top of her, pinning her, bigger and heavier than she is—
No.Fuckthis.
She knees him in the balls.
