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It came through the mist like a giant out of myth. Huge, hulking, its machinery creaking in a way that said something was wrong. With a whirring groan, the jaeger fell to its knees and collapsed on the beach.
When the emergency services arrived an hour later, they cut into the Conn Pod. Inside, they found the corpse of a dark-skinned woman in her late thirties, and a boy of sixteen.
When she turned the boy onto his back to examine him, the nurse screamed.
*
The first time they’d drifted together, Gwynplaine had made the mistake that every jaeger pilot was told not to make: he’d chased the RABIT. Random Access Brain Impulse Trigger.
He’d got caught up in the PTSD, desperately turning his mind back to the day when his mother had died, the day their jaeger had gone down, searching his memories. Dea had only been able to watch – seeing, for the first time, with eyes – as Gwynplaine and his mother were brought down by a kaiju, as Gwyn’s mother died, leaving him to the agony of piloting the jaeger alone, steering it away from the monster and towards land, collapsing into unconsciousness as the jaeger collapsed onto an Anchorage beach.
When he’d woken up, his face and body had been bandaged. He’d kept asking the doctors and the nurses what had happened to his face. They’d told him, sympathetically, pityingly, that it had been cut when the jaeger fell. Gwynplaine had replied that it wasn’t possible. The scars on his body could be explained by the strain on the pilot suit while he was piloting solo, but his face had been protected by the faceplate of the helmet he wore, the helmet that every jaeger pilot wore. They told him that his faceplate had shattered, causing the scars. But it hadn’t, it hadn’t, Gwynplaine was sure. It didn’t make sense.
But he couldn’t remember what had really happened.
*
After their failed first drift, things had been easier. Gwynplaine and Dea were completely drift compatible. They trained together, ate together, were rarely far from each other’s side. The Jaeger Program made improvements to their jaeger, Trelaw, so that it was faster and stronger, better in a fight.
Behind their backs, some of the people working with the Jaeger Program called Trelaw ‘Freak Show’. After all, it was piloted by a maimed man and a blind woman. Nobody had ever seen Gwynplaine’s scars in person – he always covered them with a scarf or a mask – but someone had found his ID photo on the database, printed out a copy, and handed it around the cafeteria.
Dea suspected David Dirry-Moir. He and his half-sister Josiana piloted the jaeger Duchess, and neither of them had any tact or subtlety.
She knew full well that Gwynplaine was plagued by the not-memory of his maiming. His other scars he was fairly comfortable with. He’d even shown them to her once, in his room, letting Dea run her fingers across the ridges on his left shoulder and the left part of his chest. She’d done her best not to get too carried away by the fact that she was alone in a room with a shirtless Gwynplaine.
He always insisted that he was ugly, that his facial scars meant that no woman would ever love him. After all, the scars on his body could be hidden away unobtrusively, but his half-concealed face made him a monster, and bred rumours among the member of the Jaeger Program.
Dea had her own opinions on Gwynplaine’s attractiveness, but she kept them to herself.
And in the meantime, Gwynplaine was plagued by the ever-asking question of what had happened to him.
*
In the end, Dea found it out. It took a lot of asking, and some exploring, which wasn’t easy for a blind woman, but she managed. She found out about Gwynplaine’s father, killed by a gang member, and how the gang leader had wanted not only the father dead but the mother and son too.
Conveniently, Ann Trelaw and her son piloted a jaeger together. A dangerous job. A job, where, for example, a faulty piece of equipment could be smuggled into the Shatterdome, replacing the equipment that worked correctly, so that the next time the Trelaw jaeger was sent out to fight a kaiju, their blaster ruptured at a critical moment.
Ann Trelaw was speared by shrapnel and died instantly.
Her son wasn’t so lucky.
*
The man’s name was Barkilphedro. He was relatively low down in the Clarence gang, but he put in the legwork. It was his job to check that both the remaining Trelaws were dead.
When he came upon the jaeger, half an hour before the first ambulance arrived, he found a dead woman and a boy who’d had his mind half torn apart by the strain of solo piloting.
He got on the phone to his boss and explained the situation: the woman was dead, but the boy lived. He was covered in blood and half-raving.
Clarence had sniffed and said, “The life support records in those jaeger suits are too damn good. We can’t risk killing him, but we still need to send a message. Slash his face, make sure he gets some big scars. The sort of thing that he’ll hate for the rest of his life.”
And the deed had been done.
*
Dea had told Gwynplaine everything she found out, and he’d wept. She’d held tight to his hand, stroked his head, held him close and pressed her face into his curls.
At first, all he’d wanted was revenge. Revenge on the men who’d killed his parents and scarred his body.
But Clarence was dead, Barkilphedro could be anywhere, using any kind of false name, and Gwynplaine couldn’t even remember what Barkilphedro had looked like.
*
The plan was a simple one: the Breach could only be entered by something with kaiju DNA, so the jaegers would be sent to the floor of the ocean to kill a kaiju, attach a bomb to the corpse, and sent it off through the Breach.
Just because it was simple didn’t make it easy. Three kaiju had come through. Trelaw had made quick work of the first, and Duchess had taken out the second, though they’d lost radio contact with David and Josiana after that.
Dea could only hope that the two of them had managed to jettison their evac pods before it was too late. In the meantime, she and Gwynplaine had to deal with the third kaiju.
Trelaw’s right leg was badly broken but it could still hold their weight, so they readied themselves and fought.
Drift compatible. It was something that the techs back in the Shatterdome talked about endlessly, but they didn’t really understand it. Nobody could understand being drift compatible unless they’d experienced it, that oneness of feeling with another person.
Gwynplaine and Dea, fighting side by side, fighting almost as one person, in each other’s heads, knowing what the other was doing almost before they knew it themselves. The kaiju came – Category 5, huge – and they ran to meet it. Cut and thrust. Coordinated punches. It sunk its teeth in and ripped, and they didn’t have a right arm anymore.
As one, Gwynplaine and Dea moved their remaining arm back, swung it down, buried their sword in the kaiju’s head, fried its heart out with the heat of their forward reactor, turned on their rear jets, and then kaiju and jaeger were both tumbling into the Breach. They didn’t have the bomb, but overloading Trelaw’s nuclear reactor would be just as good.
Something ripped.
There was something wrong. Dea felt sleepy. She was dimly aware of a mechanical voice reading out that her oxygen was at fifteen percent… ten percent… falling…
*
She came to in her evac pod. Instantly she was jettisoning the roof, sitting upright, pulling off her helmet. Gwynplaine must have put her in the pod, leaving himself to trigger the reactor overload on his own.
The sound of the sea rushed in her ears. She could hear the water lapping against the side of her evac pod. Dea listened for the splash of another pod breaking the surface, and heard nothing.
What if he hadn’t managed to overload the reactor?
What if he had managed to overload the reactor, but he hadn’t been able to get out of the Breach in time?
“Gwynplaine?” Dea called to the ocean, to the sky that she couldn’t see, “Gwynplaine?”
No, he couldn’t leave her here alone, she didn’t want to be alone in the dark.
The sweetest sound she’d ever heard: a rush of water as a pod broke the surface, the hiss of its roof being ejected.
“Gwynplaine?”
A brief moment of silence, then, “Dea!”
Another splash, then a series of smaller splashes that came closer to her, culminating in a slight tilt to her evac pod as Gwynplaine climbed in beside her.
They hugged.
“Dea, you’re alive… I wasn’t sure if you’d make it. I did it, Dea. The Breach is closed.”
The cloth he hid his scars behind was sodden with seawater from swimming over to her, cold against her cheek, and Dea told him so.
She heard Gwynplaine take it off and wring it out. “If I lay it out flat,” he remarked, “It might have dried a bit by the time the helicopters come for us.”
Neither of them said anything about the fact that Gwynplaine would be covering up his scars the second that rescue arrived.
After that, for a long, long time, all they did was hold each other. There wasn’t much space in Dea’s evac pod, so being close was both a choice and a necessity. They were both shaking from adrenaline, and Dea suspected that Gwynplaine was also shaking from the cold, soaked through as he was.
“I remember…” said Gwynplaine softly.
“Remember what?”
“The man who cut me. As the evac pod came up from the Breach to the surface… I was low on oxygen and I think I passed out a couple of times, but I started to remember. I can remember the face of the man who cut me. I remember what he looked like.”
“Are you going to try and find him?” This was what Dea was afraid of, afraid that Gwynplaine would get caught up in revenge and lose himself in the process.
“No,” said Gwynplaine quietly. “He – he looked like a man, Dea. After all this time, he was just a man. Like I’m just a man. Just a person. We’re all just people, in the end.”
Dea kissed his hand at that, then kept hold of it, their fingers linked together. With her free hand, she traced his jaw, brushed her fingers over his scars, pulled his face close to hers and kissed him.
He kissed her back. For months they had been skirting the line between friends and lovers, and now they’d firmly crossed it, because Gywnplaine was kissing her back, his mouth warm in the cold ocean air.
“Dea are you sure you want this?” he asked her hoarsely. “If you could see my face…”
She cupped his face in her hands. “I would still love you. I know that I would.”
He laughed with relief. “I’m very hideous, you know.”
“No you’re not. You’re too kind to be anything other than beautiful.”
They stayed like that until the helicopters flew over, holding each other close, sometimes kissing, sometimes whispering to each other, sometimes content to sit in silence, and when the helicopters finally found them, Gwynplaine didn’t cover his face.