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“We select jäger pilots by drift compatibility, and drift compatibility most often stems from similar ideals, similar cultures, similar genetics down to the replicating helix of soul bound up in our cells,” the head of the jäger Project is saying, her hands gripping the microphone tightly while her husband, Marshal Bradley, sits in the front row. “And with Ling Yao temporarily iced until his mental state can be addressed, please welcome our newest pilot and ranger, his half-sister May Chang, flown in this morning from Nanjing, as the new co-pilot of the Empress Immortal.”
The others clap loudly in welcome. The jäger engineers, Winry and Paninya, swing their arms around the eighteen-year-old girl in a pink dress and white kneesocks. Al and Ed of the Fullmetal Wildcat respond with encouraging chatter from the former and inappropriately invasive questions from the latter. Mustang and Hawkeye of the Blaze Runner Eta clink glasses of champagne: She’s of legal drinking age at the Shatterdome.
Lan Fan barks at her in Cantonese. May answers in the soft lilt of a girl who grew up speaking Mandarin, not unlike Ling himself, and Lan Fan responds with a frown. “Empress Immortal?”
“I requested the name change,” May replies patiently, bowing at the waist. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Lan Fan. I admire your achievements greatly.”
Lan Fan snorts. Narrows her eyes at the not-Ling. “Let’s see how good you are in the drift before I say anything of the like.”
They train together. They eat together. They sleep together. For all of the time Lan Fan has to herself, the officers in charge might as well have locked the two women inside of one room and told them to play around until they were drift compatible. Like two children shoved into a corner with a pair of dunce caps so that they made up. On one hand she understand the need perfectly: With the kaiju attacks coming more and more frequently, with level four kaiju popping out two at a time now a normal skirmish instead of an international disaster, with the funding worldwide drying up at the lack of recent battles, every available jäger filled with every available pilot would prove a godsend.
On the other hand, May is not Ling.
May is: tea, meditation, that infernal stunted panda of hers, oodles and oodles of books on every imaginable subject, excitable chattering in her ear at night, martial arts skills that admittedly impress Lan Fan if only on a superficial level of one admiring the work of an expert, and a million braids. Lan Fan finds hair strewn everywhere and can only hazard a guess as to its origin from either the panda or the girl. Both of them equally annoying.
“Except,” Lan Fan says, hovering at the very edge of the hospital chair, her voice ringing out indignantly over the beeps and blips of the various machines monitoring Ling’s vital systems, “when she’s fighting me. Then I can feel a connection of sorts.”
Ling grins and she’s relieved to see that the grin is his. Not the teeth-baring snarl of the kaiju about to spring. And tear its IV drips out for the third time in as many days. “Sounds like I’ve got competition. Should I be worried?”
Her arms pressed into her stomach, Lan Fan struggles to cease the laughing bubbling out of her throat. “You’ve got to be kidding me. I’m just keeping the PPDC’s higher-ups happy until you can get back in commission.”
His smile betrays his amusement. “A girlfriend would do you good,” he observes innocently. to avoid punching the smirk from his face, Lan Fan dents the chair.
“Lan Fan! My apologies for interrupting you!” Hands at her hips, May bows low. Lan Fan lowers the bowl from which she’d been eating and arches an eyebrow in the direction of the girl who seemingly alternates between excessively polite and excessively excitable: It’s not so much that Lan Fan dislikes her as it is that the officials are forcing them together despite a lack of connection beyond the halfway genetic point between Ling and May, and as far as Lan Fan knows, Ling has more cousins than Xiao Mei has furs.
When May lifts her chin, Lan Fan pales at the ferocious glint in her irises. Then matches with narrowed eyes of her own: While playing house isn’t her forte, smashing apart kaiju is. “They’re calling us in for training,” May blurts. “In the jäger. The Empress Immortal. Come come come they told me to get you so we could start up compatibility even this early!”
“At last.” Chucking the bowl onto the counter, Lan Fan snags May’s hand; the owner of said hand blinks, apparently surprised by the turn of events. “It’s been far too long since I returned to the drift. Nothing makes you feel more powerful than a jäger.”
May laughs. “Even the Empress Immortal?”
Lan Fan smirks. “Particularly the Empress Immortal.”
The Empress Immortal, Lan Fan discovers to her absolute horror, has been repainted an amaranth pink.
“I kept the black, and added a bit more black even,” May explains over Xiao Mei’s excited chirruping, “since I know you like it.”
Sniggering, Paninya claps the flabbergasted Lan Fan on the shoulder. “Let’s get you two into the jäger, shall we?”
Winry gratefully accepts the quote-unquote honour of owning Xiao Mei for the duration of the practise run in the jäger. Lan Fan squints. May entrusts Winry with Xiao Mei.
When did the two of them suddenly gain a friendship, she wonders, and should she be scared?
A pull on her wrist jerks her from her musings: May tugs her towards the towering beauty of the jäger with which Lan Fan has gutted more jägers than any other ranger in the program save for the legendary Mustang-Hawkeye duo and the terrifying couple of the Russian woman and Ainu man. Adults, all of them. Compared to a twenty-year-old half-child.
As the elevator lifts her to the jäger, she corrects herself. A child no longer, but a soldier.
As usual Lan Fan takes the left side, prepared to flex the steel arm resonating with her half. May takes right, as they’ve done in the simulations. “Ready?”
Lan Fan beats the centre of her palm. “Ready.”
Lowering her eyelids against the fireworks of light and sound from the inside of the Shatterdome as the analytics machines sync into their cortexes, Lan Fan readies herself for immersion into the drift. Readies is the wrong word: Mentally she bends her knees to wait for the signal to dive headfirst into the waves. The drift flickers over her synapses, like a long-lost friend returning home after lengthy separation, barely endured. Sights, sounds, smells, sensations. Her life. May’s life. Neither one truly distinct but blurring at the edges, teardrops of ink feathering and melting into one another.
Hot tea burning the tongue, boiled goose eggs wrapped in paper handed to a tiny girl by an elderly man stooped and small as she is, pet’s fur soft and dry as dandelion fluff, muscles burning pleasantly after a sparring sessions of hours, muscles burning pleasantly after a training session of hours, tea, goose eggs, fur, training, memories mixing at the seams.
She opens her eyes. Shifts her arm back to test the range of her shoulders, of her knees, of her elbows. As the drift progresses and her mind processes the conflictory senses the women separate from one another. Peel away. Still firmly connected at the root, May and Lan Fan swirl into disparate wisps curling about one another, sharing memories, thoughts, emotions.
“This is easier than I thought,” May whispers through the drift.
Having removed herself from the grounding tug of May’s conscience, Lan Fan sorts out her mental processes, stringing those that might interfere with her concentration further than the processes that would help. Rabbits in particular. Or rabbit-holes that might swallow her whole. Or any . . .
No. She focuses. Scans May closely for signs of succumbing.
On the observation deck she hears Gracia Hughes, the officer in charge of drift compatibility, and Bradley exchange embraces and congratulations. The Emperor Immortal is back online.
“Empress Immortal,” May corrects.
This time, Lan Fan snickers. Snickers. And in the process astonishes herself so dramatically that May bursts out into giggles and laughs and piggish snorts: Instead of snapping back in anger, Lan Fan feels nothing but bemusement. Affection.
“It’s been a long few months,” she gripes over the drift, and May nearly breaks the connection in her mirth, bidding Lan Fan to catch her in the mental safety nets and drag her to shore in her arms. When Lan Fan speaks again her voice has transmuted to stone. “Don’t chase rabbits. Even live ones.”
May beams. Lan Fan more feels than sees the grin, barely suppressing a laugh, parting her lips. “Not even you?”
Lan Fan conceals the blush with an audible request to run the gamut. Taking the Empress Immortal through her paces of the menagerie of weaponry and tools in her kit, she finds the movements and motion almost as easily as with Ling.
May. May Chang. Ling’s half-sister, flown in from China six months ago.
Maybe, just maybe, Lan Fan can handle this after all.
“So I should be concerned,” Ling concludes. Sitting on his cot this time with her hip grazing his with an unprecedented comfort, Lan Fan holds out the ice cream cone to him to munch on.
The last time the kaiju snapped his mind, he mauled a nurse so badly the security had to break one hand and tranquilise the other; until further notice both have been tied behind his back.
May, currently relaxed over Lan Fan’s knees and thighs in a decidedly sensual manner, the position of the fingers of her right hand languidly curled over the dip between her thighs in particular burning into Lan Fan’s concentration and right on through, waves lazily at Ling with her left. “Nah. I mean, is the losing side of an army concerned once victory has been decided?” She ticks off substitutes on her fingers: “Heartbroken. Upset. Pissed off. Melancholy. But not really . . .” She wriggles her pinky at him. “Concerned.”
Ling sniffs with an air of faint indignance. “Well, I am the one she’s holding an ice cream for. Not you.” His gaze shifts to Lan Fan’s face and she can’t help but quirk her mouth up. “Ah! Made you smile. My first victory today. Er, I hope your arm’s not numb.”
It is. But switching arms would require altering May’s warm weight in her lap, or Ling’s heat on her side, or any of the above. “I’m fine,” she says, because she is. Here, sandwiched between her girlfriend and her best friend, she is.
“Told you a girlfriend would do you good.” Ling winks. To avoid punching the smirk off his face, Lan Fan kisses May.
And also, maybe, because she likes to.