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Cassie takes a walk around the perimeter a couple of days after she and Rachel are posted to the L.A. Shatterdome, enjoying being warm again. Their jaeger is still under construction, nowhere near finished, and they won’t be allowed to see it until it’s seaworthy. Technically, now that they have graduated the academy, they hold full ranger rank, but until they have a drop under their belts, Cassie knows they won’t be seen as real rangers.
Cassie doesn’t quite think of herself as a real ranger, either. She’s not sure that will change, even after they fight their first kaiju. Cassie may have a shiny new set of dog tags, but she isn’t a soldier, not really.
“You traded those yet?”
Cassie blinks and looks up to find a man in PPDC-issue workout clothes coming to a stop. “I’m sorry?” The face is familiar—J-Tech?—but she doesn’t think they have met.
He laughs. “Your dog tags.”
She lets them drop from her fingers. “Have I traded my dog tags?”
“Yeah. All the ranger teams do it. Swap a tag, you know, like the drift. So that’s a no, then? Sorry, didn’t mean to pry, just to break the ice. You adjusting to the Shatterdome all right?”
Friends aren’t hard to make in the Shatterdome, and Cassie walks away with another new one.
His words stick with her. Her dog tags don’t feel natural yet. She knows they will, eventually. She’s seen them on the instructors at Kodiak Island, and she sees them all over the Shatterdome now, too. Nobody gives their tags a second thought.
Cassie doesn’t mind not quite feeling like a real ranger. She knows it bothers Rachel, though, so she breathes in the sun on her face and ducks back inside.
Rachel is in their shared room when Cassie gets there. “Hey,” Rachel greets absently as she rifles through the mix of civilian and standard-issue clothes in her closet. “When do you think we get the jackets?”
“Definitely not until after we get the jaeger.” Cassie has to admit that the ranger jackets are pretty cool. Maybe she’d feel like a real ranger wearing one of them. She’ll get her chance to find out, once their jaeger has a logo that they can wear.
Cassie reaches up and pulls off her dog tags. “So, I ran into someone outside who mentioned a ranger team tradition.”
Rachel looks up. “Yeah?”
Cassie removes one of her tags and holds it out. “Want to trade?”
Rachel takes her own tags off and looks down at them. “Oh,” she murmurs. “Yeah, definitely.”
Cassie slips Rachel’s tag onto her own chain and hangs it back around her neck, where it belongs. They might feel a little more natural than they did before.
“We’re real rangers,” Rachel says, and Cassie has to laugh. They’re drift compatible. She shouldn’t be so surprised.
Jake is honestly surprised that Marco doesn’t already know about this. It makes him wonder if this tradition is a secret or something. There’s not really any reason for it to come up, he supposes, since all dog tags look the same unless you get close. If it was mentioned in an interview somewhere, Marco would probably know.
It does seem kind of personal. Jake hasn’t had any interviews yet, but he probably wouldn’t mention it, either.
“You know you’re supposed to leave those on,” Marco says.
Jake rolls his eyes. “All the pilots do it. It’s a ranger thing.”
“What, not wearing your dog tags, as per regulations? Come on, Ranger Berenson, didn’t you read the handbook?”
“Okay, first of all, you know I read the handbook because you made me read the handbook.”
“False. I would never make you do schoolwork.”
“Oh yeah? What do you call signing up for the jaeger academy?”
Marco smirks. “Your idea. You asked me, Big Jake.”
Complete bullshit, even if it’s technically true, but that’s not an argument Jake is going to win. Besides, they’re off-topic. “Pilot pairs trade tags. One of theirs, and one of their partner’s.”
Marco blinks. “Huh.” He fiddles with his chain. “That’s some symbolism.”
“Thought you said you’d never make me do schoolwork.”
“No, it’s…I like it. In the drift, we’re one mind in two bodies.” Marco pulls off his tags. “It makes sense. We carry each other with us.”
It sounds a little corny out loud like that, but Jake agrees. “Yeah. I like it, too.”
“Besides, if they actually need our tags to identify us, I feel like that’s going to be the least of our worries,” Marco says casually, like he doesn’t find the prospect of violent death by kaiju even a little bit terrifying.
“Fair point,” Jake says. “And if they would need our tags to identify us, what are the odds that they’d even find our bodies?”
“Exactly.” They swap.
Jake puts his chain back on and gives Marco a disapproving look. Marco, still running his fingers over his tags, raises an eyebrow. “What?”
“You know you’re supposed to leave those on,” Jake says.
Marco laughs. “Oh, shut up.” He slips his chain around his neck.
Marco never takes his tags off.
He’s considered it. Thought about tucking them away in one of the empty drawers in the furniture that came with the apartment.
He’s pictured throwing them away. He never does it. He knows he’s never going to do it.
He doesn’t take his dog tags off for anything, not to sleep or to shower or to go out in public. He tucks them under his shirt so nobody spots him as former PPDC, even though he knows his training is written into his every move. He isn’t interested in discussing his past with strangers who will want some sort of political statement from him. Nobody gets to demand to know whether he left because he disagreed with the direction of the jaeger program. Anyone who asks isn’t thinking enough to realize that there are more personal reasons than that for someone to leave the PPDC.
He gets noticed anyway, sometimes. Mrs. Jung in the shop down the street has dog tags of her own that she wears in the same way. They never talk about it.
Even if he wore them openly, he knows nobody would get close enough to see that he’s wearing the names of two rangers. People don’t notice things like that, and he doesn’t let them get close enough, anyway.
Marco feels a little hollow even on his best days. There might not be enough left in him to get close to. He doesn’t want to find out.
He doesn’t look much like Marco Alvarez, celebrity pilot of Polar Adamant, anymore. For one thing, nobody expects to find him this far inland—other people’s assumptions, his old ally—but he also makes sure there are differences. He’s let his hair grow out longer than it has been since high school. These days, it’s probably longer than Rachel’s. He sees her in the background of official photos and news reports sometimes. She keeps her hair as short as she always did when she had to fit it in a drivesuit helmet.
He thinks he might understand her reasons. His aren’t exactly opposite, even if his course of action is.
Marco isn’t PPDC anymore, and he doesn’t look PPDC, except to a trained eye. He only owns civilian clothes these days. The handbook means nothing to him.
Still, he never takes his dog tags off. Ranger pairs carry each other with them.
(They may not have been conscious for it, but Jake died drifting. They still carry each other with them, in a way that the drift has always made more literal than figurative. Marco is still alive, but he isn’t sure which of them is the ghost.)
He would feel naked without them, anyway. He’s worn them for too long. He would have to find some kind of other necklace to keep the absence from distracting him, and while Marco could pull off any fashion statement, that isn’t really his style.
Nah. He knows exactly what he’s doing. No matter how much he’s tempted, he leaves his dog tags right where they are.
Rachel receives her new dog tags and strips one off the chain immediately. “Hey. Catch.”
Marco’s head jerks up, and he snags it out of the air. He doesn’t say anything. Rachel doesn’t either. She knows she doesn’t need to.
He reaches up and pulls the chain out of his shirt, where he is still wearing the same dog tags that he and Jake were issued all those years ago. He was wearing them when Rachel knocked on his front door. If Rachel had to guess, she would say he probably never took them off.
Rachel didn’t. She carries Cassie with her, with or without the tags, but she’ll keep Cassie’s name on her for as long as she wears her own.
Rachel and Marco are drift compatible. Rachel thinks her guesses about Marco are probably pretty damn good.
Rachel doesn’t need to be issued a new set of dog tags. Since Marco still has his, neither does he. They hold exactly the same information as the old ones. There is no difference, but Marshal Doubleday has seen a lot of rangers pass through his Shatterdome.
They are being given new tags for one reason and one reason only. It lights a fierce satisfaction in Rachel, knowing that others see its importance.
Marco picks up his own new dog tags and slides one off the chain to toss to her.
They slide each other’s names onto the chains they have already worn for years. He tucks his tags back under his shirt. She lets hers hang where they fall.
The drift is a strange and spooky thing, and it leaves every ranger a little fractured, some more than others. No one knows what they are signing up for when they take this job. Rachel hasn’t been whole in years, and she knows Marco is the same way. This time, they are both walking in with their eyes wide open.
Marco is her copilot. That has been true since she showed up on his doorstep, since he walked back into the Shatterdome by her side, since their sync tests confirmed what Ax had already told them. He’s her copilot, and pilot teams carry each other with them.
Marshal Doubleday sighs. “Are you two done?” he asks, as though he didn’t know exactly what was about to happen when he presented them with their new tags.
Rachel flicks a look at Marco. He’s looking back at her.
She grins. “Let’s do it.”
“Marshal,” Marco says. “We’re just getting started.”
There’s a war on out there. There’s always more to do.