Archive of Our Own ^beta

I have always been too sensitive, a weeper
           from a long line of weepers.

I am the hurting kind. I keep searching for proof.

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She hated her immediately.

“I don’t need a co-pilot.”

“Who said she’s here for you,” Ben called from across the training floor. Laughing, he missed Flavio charging him until he was colliding with his center. They went down in a racket of limbs, scrabbling. Flavio pinned him eventually, their hands knotted together and his forearms pressing down on his chest. Not enough pressure to bruise, yet. He grinned, oblivious to the squirmy, hunted look on Ben’s face. They’d be testing their compatibility at the end of the week, and Ben, the hypocrite, was hoping it’d go south.

“She isn’t here for you, I promise,” echoed Roddick, drawing her attention back. He held up his hands like the decision was out of them. “She’s here because she’s the best Europe has.”

Then why isn’t she in Europe, Coco thought but didn’t say. She couldn’t have Roddick reporting back to Serena or Venus that she had behaved like a whiny teenager over the prospect of a new recruit, not when they still hadn’t approved her request to solo pilot. Brad had called it a formality—best in your class, which meant the only one left—but it had been over a month since Jess left base and she hadn’t heard a word. When even Frances didn’t have the gossip, it usually meant bad news.

Recruits came and went—most from across the States and the Americas, some from around the Pacific, and sometimes, rarely, from further out. Most exited the program without seeing a kaiju in the flesh; others never made it off the training mat. They went home or came back with an engineering degree, but almost all of them left just like they had arrived: impressionless, a blank. It was unlike McEnroe or the Williams sisters to bring in someone who already had a reputation, good or bad. Something was happening, but for whatever reason, she was the only one looking it in the eye.

“I don’t need—”

The training room doors slid open with a rusty screech, and she stepped inside, oblivious to the stand-off happening in the middle of the floor. The one about her, because somehow everything had already become about her. She had her hair scraped into a stubby ponytail, flyaways pushed back by a clunky pair of headphones. Her hands were already wrapped, tighter than Coco liked her own. She had wondered, on that first day, how this girl was even able to flex her fingers. As if magnetized, her eyes followed her as she edged her way around the perimeter of the room and found a quiet corner to stow her bag. She refused to look at anyone else. Total focus, Evert would say, if she had seen her, if she were here, if she weren’t another black-and-white portrait hanging on the wall. Something was happening, but Coco didn’t want it to have anything to do with Iga Świątek.

Coco hated her, but then thought about what her mother would say if she suspected her daughter of hating anybody. Hate’s a hole in the heart. More like a hole in the head, drilled at the point where the spinal cord met the brain stem. Hate she felt controlled by, because when Iga did one thing, Coco wanted to do its opposite.

I’ll go one way, if you go the other.

Her fingers traced the outline of the cross around her neck. Across the room, Iga finally glanced up, and they locked eyes instantly. She nodded, once. Her mouth quirked, not quite a smile. In the two weeks she had been here, Coco had yet to see her teeth.

If Coco couldn’t hate her, she could hate the concept of her, a rival in the fight for the future of humanity. Too much was at stake for anyone to engage in a battle of ego, but Coco still felt the dangerous burn of desire, the desire to be greater, rise higher.

“What don’t you need?” Roddick asked, light and teasing, because he was an asshole but an asshole who was on her side in all the ways that mattered. He’d back her for the solo seat, unless it meant the end of the world.

Her eyes drifted again to the competition. Iga had taken off her headphones and jacket, her biceps flexing as she uncapped her water bottle and sipped. Coco might be faster than her, more evasive, but Iga was stronger and had proven it on day one, pinning Coco to the mat in the time it took to say let go. In the showers afterwards, Coco had cried without making a sound, because she couldn’t be sure Iga wasn’t in the stall next to hers.

Sometimes, everything felt like the end of the world.

Inventory: three pairs of socks, seven pairs of underwear, four sports bras, two training kits (this cycle’s sponsor: New Balance), a comb, her mom’s shampoo, a baseball card signed by her baby brother, her cross, headphones, an MP3 player inherited from her dad, a gold bracelet from Jess gifted to her on her twenty-first birthday, a blanket, an old sweatshirt with her name embroidered on the back, a bottle of sky-blue nail polish almost empty, two mismatched earrings, and a book that ends with everyone hopeful, and happy, and alive.

Jess told her before anyone else, but Coco had known for weeks already and pretended she didn’t. Pretended Jess could still change her mind, that she would change her mind with the right reframing. Her exhaustion, her homesickness, her disillusionment, all of it bled through their bond, but if Coco tried, she could staunch the bleeding, with her hope, with her stamina, with what she refused to put a name to, because if she named it, it would give Jess another reason to go. 

Their drops hadn’t been affected. Coco could drag them through this valley and to the next peak. She had time.

“We’re getting married in a month,” Jess reminded her. The photo Jess kept pinned on the closet mirror, the one of Taylor (not Fritz, who had an ex-wife, a son, and a girlfriend somewhere on-shore; her Taylor was a civilian, someone she met long before Coco), the man boxed in by two massive dogs, seemed to grow larger every day. Jess wasn’t looking at the photo, but at Coco, steady and persistent. “You have to come.”

Coco had promised she would five times, and also had her excuse locked in, just in case there wasn’t an emergency.

“And after…” Jess stepped in front of the door before Coco could escape their room and the conversation. It had only been a year ago when Jess admitted she hadn’t been thrilled at first, bunking with a kid. She didn’t look thrilled now, steeling herself as she said, “I don’t think I’m coming back.”

“You don’t think,” Coco repeated, edged with apprehension but lanced through with hope. There was time, the rift not too deep to close.

Jess shook her head, eyes cutting away. As calm as she would have seemed to anyone else, Coco saw she was frustrated. Maybe a little frustrated with Coco, for misunderstanding on purpose, but mostly frustrated with herself for not being able to do this cleanly. She felt so much more than people gave her credit for, and a familiar swell of affection rose in Coco’s chest, even as she fought to stay angry at her.

“I’m talking to Serena later,” she said eventually. Coco heard a door slam somewhere further down the hall, but it was muted by the blood pounding in her ears. “The resignation isn’t effective immediately, obviously, but—”

“You’re giving up.”

“That’s not what it is,” Jess said, pinching the bridge of her nose.

“What is it then?” Coco demanded. Already, her eyes stung. She hated how quickly bad feelings rushed over her—disappointment, humiliation, anger, frustration, grief. It was like that dumb cliche: it never rained but it poured. Her heart didn’t drizzle, it flooded.

Jess looked at her for a long time, her face doing something subtle but complicated. She couldn’t decide, it seemed, what about this hurt the most. Her hand reaching tentatively across the divide, she said, “No one can do this forever.”

Childishly, Coco ducked around her just as her fingers brushed her wrist and left the room, cheeks burning. She’d not cry in front of her, not over this. It didn’t matter that the only person who had seen her cry more than Jess was her mom. Her first night living on base, she had cried herself awake from homesickness, and Jess had climbed down from the top bunk and spent the rest of the night on the floor beside Coco’s bed, letting her talk about stupid things like Marvel movies, and baseball, and what was left of the Florida coast. When this was all over, they were supposed to vacation in Miami together.

She shrunk herself into a tucked-away alcove and rubbed her eyes hard with her fists, until the tears dried up and she saw stars spangled on the back of her eyelids. She felt doubly ridiculous, ridiculous for believing she could change Jess’s mind and ridiculous because she hadn’t known it until then but she had thought she could do this forever. Which meant, somewhere in a dark recess of her mind, she must not think they’d ever win.

Despite its age and labyrinthine architecture, the underwater facility of the Golden Gate Shatterdome had few places to hide. It reminded Coco of a colosseum—not that she had been to one but from the pictures she’d seen—in that the corridors were circular and endless, but you were still meant to see everything and everything was meant to see you.

“In the end, it’s a performance, isn’t it?” Federer had once said, to the adoring applause of a late night show’s studio audience. Beside him, Nadal had fidgeted, uncomfortable in the small seat and tight suit.

“So, you’re giving the people—us—what they want to see,” the host prompted. “Violence?”

Nadal cut in, answering as if it were obvious: “A fight.”

Coco liked to think she understood the distinction, and she liked to think she didn’t mind performing the part of a Ranger when needed. She wasn’t ignorant to the fact she was a popular figure around the States, the prodigy plucked from the general academy for Ranger training at just sixteen. Even Alcaraz hadn’t been so young. They paraded out her image to sell breakfast cereals, exercise regimes, and aggressive recruitment campaigns, and she went along with it because it all came back around, didn’t it? The more aspirational she was, the more kids she inspired to stay the course, stick to school, and believe they were born to save their world on fire, not just die in it.

She’d not let it overwhelm her, but sometimes she wanted a place to herself, one not haunted by the ghosts of a past quickly drifting away from her. She had found the spot after a humiliating training session, over three years ago now. Other than grunt mechanics, people rarely hung around the uppermost deck of the Dome long, not when it stank of dead fish and you always left damp. The dampness remained a drawback, but she had grown used to the smell; if anything, it reminded her a bit of home.

What sold the spot for her was the natural light, shafts of it pouring through a generous upper vent. The light was enough to read by if Coco angled herself just right, the pages of her book seeming to glow as if it weren’t a silly romance but instead some ancient fabled text encoded with the precious secrets of the universe.

An hour gone by, and she had read about a page and a half. Her mind kept wandering to tomorrow, the compatibility test.

Roddick had broken the news with his version of gentle: “Listen, we can’t risk you burning out in that single-seat. We need you too bad.”

Equally, they needed Iga. They hadn’t brought a pilot with her record here to have her sit on the sidelines. If the neural handshake failed tomorrow, they’d start the search for other options, greener pilots, a process that could take months. Time wasted, time no one thought they had. Maybe they’d put Coco in the single-seater in the meantime, or maybe they’d choose Iga.

She could stake her career on that coin flip, except that she wouldn’t be able to stand looking at herself if she purposefully tanked, and it had nothing to do with being a team player. She had given too much already to this project, and she didn’t know how to give anything less. If it came down to a partnership with Iga or never seeing the inside of a jaeger again, she’d stomach her.

Soft, padding footsteps down the walkway drew her out of her head and her eyes up.

“Oh.” Just as she had rounded the corner, Iga Świątek—because, of course it was Iga Świątek—stopped short. “Sorry, I didn’t know…”

Anyone else came up here, Coco filled in, even if she couldn’t be sure.

Iga shuffled backwards a step, subsumed by the murky shadows. She had on a pair of bike shorts and a t-shirt, looser than the one she wore to train but not much more. Her socks, patchy at the heels, bunched around her ankles. She didn’t look any different from how she showed up to breakfast every morning, but it seemed more intimate somehow, like she had lost a few pieces of invisible armor.

“It’s okay,” Coco said, even as she hugged her knees closer to her chest. She also felt underdressed. “I honestly didn’t know anyone else knew this place existed.”

“Yeah, I, uh…” Iga went to tuck a piece of hair behind her ear that wasn’t there. “I like finding places like this? You know, where other people…”

“Aren’t,” Coco supplied.

Iga nodded, flashing a small but relieved smile. This had to be the most they had spoken to each other since Iga got here, but Coco suspected they had already run out of things to say. Coco straightened a bit, preparing to cede the spot to Iga for the rest of the night and scope out the deck below for a new hideaway tomorrow, but Iga surprised her by saying something more.

“What are you reading?” she asked, eyeing Coco’s book curiously.

“Oh, it’s nothing.” She nudged the book beneath her bent legs, out of view. The cover, the colorful and cartoonish whimsy of it, suddenly seemed immature and garish. “I’ve probably read it, like, a million times. It’s not a good idea to have too many books around here. You probably know from Aran, not enough space and the waterlog…”

Coco trailed off before she could embarrass herself anymore. It both annoyed and confused her, how instantly defensive she got in Iga’s shadow.

“You can read something of mine, if you want.”

Iga held up her tablet, its black mirror catching the light. Coco had seen her with the tablet at dinner sometimes, but assumed she used it to review telemetry on the mechas. It shouldn’t have surprised her that they’d have something in common other than their job and rank, but a shared love of reading, seeking the comfort of a story in the middle of night, seemed of a greater magnitude than happening to both enjoy chocolate chip cookies or liking the color blue.

If Iga felt unsettled by the commonality like she was, she did a better job of hiding it. She smiled again, wider this time. “It is not all in Polish, I promise.”

“Thanks,” Coco said, stilted. She resisted asking how many other people she made a similar offer to. “What do you like to read usually?”

“A lot of things. I try to read classics, because I feel like I missed a lot, not being at a regular school.”

Iga shrugged, not as casually as she probably hoped it’d come off, and tapped the screen awake. Its soft glow illuminated her face, its unexpected symmetry. Early on, Coco had noticed how Iga never looked exactly the same from one angle to the next; something about her always caught Coco by surprise.

Curiosity getting the better of her, Coco asked, “When did you join the academy?”

“The one in Europe, it is twelve and up.” Iga shrugged again, even stiffer than before. “I got chosen for Rangers when I was sixteen, and after that…”

“School becomes less of a thing,” Coco said, speaking far too much from her own experience. She hadn’t known Iga had been picked at the same age she had been, and the revelation hit her with a fresh stab of irritation. “You could go back one day.”

“Maybe,” Iga conceded with a tempered nod. She edged a step further into the alcove, leaning against the wall but not sitting. 

They stared around each other for a long time, Coco thinking about whether finding out these little things they had in common would help or hurt them tomorrow. Drift compatibility was a tricky thing, far from a precise science. Having a shared background, like the Williams sisters or the McEnroe brothers, could prove key, but only sometimes. Friendship could be a good foundation for a strong neural connection, or it might not matter at all. Most often, it was the most disparate people who found themselves as two accordant halves of one massive brain.

“Well, opposites attract,” Jess had joked, not about them but about Emma Navarro and Qinwen Zheng, who had shocked everyone when their neural handshake held. Coco had been happy to think she wasn’t Jess’s opposite, but now she wondered, if looking from the outside, anyone else would have agreed.

Coco considered Iga again.

“Are you—”

“Do you think—”

Their voices sounded strange overlapping. They had different cadences, varying pitches. It wouldn’t be unlike how their minds sounded melded together once they entered the Drift, if they made it that far.

“You go,” Coco said, because she expected they were about to ask each other the same thing.

“Are you nervous about tomorrow?”

Coco nodded remorselessly. “But I feel like I shouldn’t be, right? We’ve both done this before.”

She had been nervous the first time, but that hadn’t had anything to do with Jess. Rather, it had everything to do with herself and how desperately she had needed to clear that final hurdle, prove herself the Ranger everyone expected her to be. Now, she knew belonged in a jaeger. She just didn’t know who belonged there with her.

“What is it like?” Iga asked in a breathy rush. “Being inside your head?”

It could have been how late it was or the strangely unguarded sight of Iga’s bunched up socks, but Coco found herself not wanting to lie. She was bad at it anyway. 

“Louder than I want it to be.”

Iga let out a noise like she had taken a hit too hard in the ribs, and Coco could tell she was just as bad of a liar. Good thing, probably, since there’d never be secrets between them again after tomorrow.

“Yeah,” she confessed in a murmur. “Me too.”

Jessica Pegula, senior pilot and right hemisphere of BJK 3, and Coco Gauff, junior pilot and left hemisphere: 36 drops and 33 kills.

Nowhere close to the record set by the Williams sister, but only Nadal and Federer had them bested in a two-seat, and no one expected anyone to rival Djokovic while he still dropped himself into his single-seat Borg 1 every time the alarm blared off the Irish coast.

33 kills. Better than Tsitsipas and Medvedev’s 27. Far-and-away above the triple-arm of Fritz, Foe, and Paul at 17. Rumors of a new pairing in Portugal who recorded the first two-mecha-one-drop kill since 2008 ran rampant around Golden Gate, but they still had the young Spaniard and Italian bested by 10. Only Swiatek and Sabalenka had been posting higher numbers, but Coco was sure they would catch them in the new year.

Jess had stopped her from keeping the tally on the wall by their bunks, too much like recording the days of a prison sentence. Maybe that had been the problem: Coco, counting up, and Jess, counting down.

33. If she had attended university like the majority of her academy class, she’d probably have a different kind of body count. Had she been an athlete, it would have been titles and trophies. She forgot—sometimes, often, in the day-to-day—that she was technically in the army; it took a higher-ranking officer calling her lieutenant or an engineer referring to the jaegers as weapons, nuclear and with the potential for mass destruction, to remind her.

She didn’t like to think too hard about how the BJK 3 needed her brain to operate, or that Billie Jean King had condemned the entire jaeger project six months ago in favor of the Sea Wall Initiative, a shift to defense instead of offense. She thought instead about the last time she had gone off base to visit her family, how she had stood in the stands at her brother’s Little League playoff, looked around at all the people smiling so hard their gums had to hurt, and realized how badly they needed to believe there would be a Little League world series next year, and the year after that, how badly they hoped to be saved.

Her count was stalled at 33, Swiatek’s at 39. Alcaraz and Sinner had 10 drops, 10 kills in the last three months alone. No one said it outside the confines of the Domes, but either the Rifts were getting bigger or the kaiju were multiplying faster. She couldn’t tell which was the more terrifying prospect. The oceans churned with their blood, painting the beaches an acidic blue. Each week, a new animal went on the endangered species list. Of the islands in the Pacific not yet evacuated, none had safe drinking water.

“We want this to work, kid,” McEnroe had said, a half-hour before their drop test.

Coco glanced at Iga and knew she heard it, too. Want had nothing to do with it. This had to work.

Inventory: a young girl with bangs in her eyes and dressed in wool pajamas, sitting cross-legged in front of a Christmas tree while assembling a floral garden Lego set; the girl, now a pre-teen who grew out her bangs but not her bob, lounging with a book in her lap, her legs hanging off a lake dock; her in a uniform, her smiling at a friend further down the line of cadets, her held close in her father’s arms as she cried; the girl—not a young woman yet, her mom would say, still just a girl—stepping onto the landing deck of the Aran Dome for the first time, the cold spray of Galway Bay spitting in her face; another girl, with a messy bun and a mischievous smile, shaking her hand; this girl, looming over her, sweaty and panting under her, across from her at the mess hall table, laughing with her head thrown back, swearing in in a creative mix of languages, rolling her eyes like the whole world had offended her, wiping her forehead, grinning sideways in the beam of a sun ray, squinting, walking shoulder-to-shoulder on their way to a different jaeger; this other girl, turning away.

More than she saw it all, she felt it—the itchy scratch of wool, the satisfying click of a plastic brick into the right place, the attention to detail, the soothing coolness of the water lapping at her shins, the moment’s peace from the outside-loud and the inside-loud, the beginning of a promise, the pride and the fear that came with it, the fear of disappointing everyone and no one more than herself, the bruised-rib ache of homesickness, homesickness you had to learn to breathe around, the terror and awe, and the want, the gnawing, belligerent, blood-singing want.

I want, and I want, and I want. Two syllables that became a credo if you weren’t careful.

Drifting with Jess, Coco had never paid much thought to how the bond felt from the other side; first, because she had been so focused on not failing, and later, she had fed on Jess’s calm, used it like a fire blanket to smother her own, more catastrophic feelings.

Now, it took every last scrap of her self-control not to blurt out, in the middle of their debriefing, what do I feel like? Is it half as much as you?

Iga, across from her at the table, maintained a neutral expression while she listened to Serena’s effusive praise. Her face had a light sheen of sweat to it, even though they had only drifted for ten minutes, if that. According to Anisimova’s post-test analysis, it had been the quickest neural handshake the base had recorded since the Williams sisters themselves.

Am I that loud? The questions ran through her head, looping like the stubborn outro to a too-long song. When you stepped inside my head, did it really not feel any different at all?

They were called up for their first drop a week later.

“Sector Five,” Amanda informed her as soon as the comm connected. “It’s a big boy. Don’t tell me I never got you ladies anything.”

Coco grinned stepping into the elevator, basking in the familiar rush of pre-drop adrenaline. She hadn’t realized how much she missed having Amanda in her ear, providing coordinates, weapon systems updates, target adjustments, encouragement, and play-by-play commentary all in equal measure. Amanda had been a Ranger once, the youngest solo seater in North America, before she burned out. It deteriorated the body and the mind much faster, flying solo. After a year off, she returned to a position in the Golden Gate control room, conducting the fight from a distance.

“Feeling alright?” she asked now, covering her bases before she instigated the drop.

“Good,” Iga affirmed before Coco could, her voice quiet but firm.

Coco wouldn’t have known how Iga felt before hearing that one-word answer, because Iga had been avoiding her. The avoidance wouldn’t have been obvious to anyone else, not when Iga still showed up for meals at the same times, went through the motions of her training, and kept to herself as she usually did. It was what she hadn’t been doing. If Coco looked, Iga refused to look back. If Coco chose one training group, Iga chose the other. They never passed each other in the halls anymore, and Coco suspected Iga had changed her routes on purpose. She also hadn’t returned to the reading spot. For six nights, Coco had waited there, foolishly thinking she’d want to talk. She had counted the time in drips from a leak in the ceiling and tried to finish her book, just to get stuck at the end.

A fear had taken hold, a familiar one: Iga had seen something or heard something in Coco’s mind, and it had changed how she saw her. Her envy, if she had to guess.

Despite knowing Amanda could hear everything, Coco cleared her throat to grab Iga’s attention and asked, “Are we good?”

She looked at Iga, who finally looked back.

“I think so.”

Their eyes held as the elevator shot down, and Coco saw what Iga wouldn’t say, not while about a hundred people in the control room and another few hundreds of thousands of people in San Francisco expected nothing but perfect synchronicity from them today. Whatever it was, it wouldn’t affect the drop.

During the neural handshake, Coco saw flashes of her again—Aryna Sabalenka, formerly the left hemisphere of the Graf 2. She smiled with a memory’s rose-colored tinge, and it was as though someone had wrapped their whole hand around her heart and squeezed.

In breaking news, CNN reported the first kaiju kill recorded by the reconstituted BJK 3, under the piloting of Lts. Gauff of the United States and Świątek of Poland. A knifehead, Category-3. Świątek had its head severed from its body in forty-six seconds.

With a touch of self-deprecation, the man at the news desk smiled and said, “We thank Europe for the transfer."

It crushed Ben when their compatibility test failed.

McEnroe had given them the courtesy of testing a second jaeger after the neural handshake misfired in the BJK 3, but that attempt had gone worse than the first. The connection fizzled within a second, less than the time it took to drop them into the mecha’s head.

When she tried to apologize, Ben waved her off. “It’s all good. C’mon, competing with Pegula? Nah, there’s someone else coming for me, bet.”

She had seen him later in the training room, bruising his knuckles on a punch bag. She could guess at what was running through his mind even without the Drift: that might have been his last chance. 

A year and a half on base as a Ranger, no co-pilot. He had tested and failed with both Tommy Paul and Emma Navarro before Tommy had formed a rare triple-link with Fritz and Foe, and Navarro had formed a tenuous connection with Zheng. It was never suggested he try to join Felix and Denis, and none of the recent recruits had been impressive enough to consider putting them in a seat. Coco suspected, though she’d never confront them about it, that the Williams sisters and McEnroe had believed in what Ben had been banking on: once Jess left, he’d step in as a natural fit.

She had let them down and couldn’t even diagnose why.

“It’s not a perfect formula,” Roddick reminded her. “You can be the best of friends with someone, doesn’t mean anything for drift compatibility.”

Even worse, she’d take the single-seat and leave him with nothing. While the Ashe 1 was classed as a last resort given the cerebral pressure of piloting a jaeger solo, the base couldn’t afford having two Rangers benched during a major attack. Between a pilot with a double-digit Kaiju kill count and a pilot who had never drifted for longer than a couple of minutes, they’d choose experience over giving everyone the chance to play.

“Johnny Mac’s trying to find him a spot in Boston,” Frances told them over breakfast, once it became clear Ben wouldn’t show.

Tommy pulled a face. “Why not Daytona? It’s way better.”

“Dude, how is that even something you’re thinking about right now? The whole thing is that they’re kicking him out,” Taylor said in his flat affect, which made it sound even more like they were mourning something that hadn’t happened yet simply because they couldn't do anything about it. He pushed the food around his tray morosely. “This sucks.”

None of them dared say, it isn’t fair. Fair never factored into it.

A few hours later, four Category-2 Kaijus emerged off the coast of San Diego. All three active jaegers were deployed, while she and Ben, the spare parts, watched the battle on the monitors in the control tower. 

Within a week, Iga and Flavio would arrive.

They argued—we do not argue, Iga insisted, out loud and in her head, we disagree, which Coco countered was just another word for arguing—constantly.

Coco blamed Brad and Wim. As their principal trainers and strategists, they should have detected the problem sooner: she and Iga had diametrically-opposed fighting styles. Had they been opponents, it would have made for a compelling dynamic, but they were supposed to be working together.

In battle, Coco favored a defensive tact. Feints, blocks, weaves, baits—if she had her way, she’d first lure a kaiju as far away from land as possible before seizing an opening to go in for the kill. Iga did not seize openings; she created them, often by brute force. She preferred overpowering the kaiju, pummeling them into submission. If a kaiju hit hard, she hit back harder, unless she had struck first already.

“It’s efficient,” Roddick pointed out.

“It’s dangerous,” Coco seethed. What did it matter if they took out a Category-2 in sub-thirty seconds if that kaiju’s body then folded in half and took down a sea wall?

It hadn’t been this way with Jess. She and Jess had matched each other in patience, and Coco could rely on her steady hand if the tide shifted away from their favor. 

Iga, for all her ruthlessness and dexterity, was not steady. She fought like she had to finish it off quickly, mercilessly. She fought like if she didn’t, her card house of control would collapse. I know, Coco thought afterwards, in the safety of her own mind, I know exactly. That was what frustrated her the most, how Iga had the same fragile hold on her emotions that Coco did but almost always managed to win before it got ugly.

On the rare occasion a kaiju refused to bend easily to her power, Iga had trouble switching tactics. She pushed harder and harder, swinging too wide, not blocking quickly enough. Her breathing shallowed. Waves of panic and bitter frustration crashed against the bridge connecting their minds. Those battles were long and brutal, and Coco and Iga rarely spoke for the length of the time it took to repair the damage they had done to the BJK 3.

“Another kaiju is dead,” Brad reminded her, with his annoying but familiar pragmatism. “That’s what people care about, not if the kill was pretty.”

Except if people didn’t care for the beauty of a clean kill, Roger Federer would not be the most popular Ranger in the world. Coco hated how it bothered her, when Iga’s light-speed takedowns were given the highlight reel treatment and her own were called close-calls, won by the skin of her teeth. Never mind how she had mitigated infrastructure damage or spared a naval fleet, had dragged the kaiju’s broken body to bleed out in the containment basin instead of on a public beach.

She had watched and read enough Billy Jean King interviews to know the quote by heart: we are fighting an environmental war as much as we are fighting an interdimensional one. Another aquatic species of shore bird had been declared extinct last week. It would take decades for the Galapagos Islands to become habitable again.

Selfishly, she wanted it both ways: to have the moral victory and the hero’s adulation.

“What’s one thing you want us to know about fighting these kaiju?” Stephen Colbert had asked them during their first televised appearance as a pair.

They had their make-up done backstage. The outfits had been bought and fitted for them the day before, a day spent shepherded around the city shaking hands with elected officials, touring buildings still recovering from the last major attack on Manhattan, posing for photos with kids who had been born after the first kaiju emerged from the Atlantic breach, receiving gifts they’d have to leave with the PR representatives, eating greasy slices of pizzas, and pretending they were not dazed and disoriented, walking around on dry land.

“I look so ridiculous,” Iga had said, analyzing her made-up face in the mirror. “But you look beautiful.”

Staring at her under the heavy stage lights, wracking her mind for a safe answer to Colbert’s question, Coco had thought Iga looked beautiful, too, in a surreal way, but that she looked better the moment after she took off her helmet, with her flyaways matted to her temple and a bit of blood pooling in the dip of her upper lip, and even if she had been crying before, she smiled because they were alive, that they weren’t such a nightmare together that they couldn’t post a perfect 6 kills in 6 drops within the span of three months.

“One thing, uh.” Iga had stalled, her hands twisting in her lap. “That it’s hard?”

The audience in the studio had laughed gamely at the understatement. They didn’t know, and that was the point. Iga made it look easy, right up until it wasn’t.

They had a reason for why it had to hurt.

During testing for the first-generation jaegers, the engineers and bio-techs experimented with a wide variety of different drivesuits. The armor classed as no-feel did not include the circuitry suit, so nothing connected the nervous system of the pilots to the jaeger. That meant the jaeger had to be operated entirely by hand, not by the human body’s immediate electrical impulses. Too slow, was what the designers determined. The addition of the circuitry suits won the day.

The circuitry suits could still be calibrated to experience minimal pain when the jaeger sustained damage, but the designers found that design lacking, too. Untouchable pilots had slower reaction times and often compounded the damage to the jaeger because they didn’t understand the full extent of the hit. It had to hurt.

“I don’t think anyone really gets it until they get knocked on their ass for the first time,” Roddick told her, a week out from her first drop with Jess, though of course they hadn’t known that. “It’s not like it is in the sim. It’s not Rock ‘Em, Sock ‘Em Robots anymore.”

During that first drop, the BJK 3 had taken a back hand to the chest. It hadn’t been much more than a glancing scratch, but Coco had thought her lungs collapsed until Jess, through the bond, coaxed her into breathing again. For days afterwards, she kept tugging the collar of her shirt, expecting to see three long scratch marks that were never there.

She got used to it, eventually. Bleeding without bleeding. Bruising, but with no bruises to show for it. Broken jaw, cracked ribs, shattered kneecap, nothing showing on the x-rays. Every pilot dropped again while nursing some invisible injury from the last time. They had to, not when it wasn’t a real busted nose or dislocated shoulder. Only the pain was real. The pain, and the monster that caused it.

Inventory: ten toes belonging to two feet attached to two ankles, shins, knees, thighs, all straining to hold her weight; a stomach, nauseous; chest, containing one or maybe two bruised ribs, and probably, still, a heart; a neck, holding up a head, filled with a brain rattled and throbbing; a nose, bleeding profusely and dripping into a mouth, dry; all her teeth, chattering; her tongue, heavy and desperate to call out a name.

Once the helmet was off, she dropped to the floor. She had a clear sightline for when Iga walked out, flanked by Madi and Flavio. Coco exhaled.

Secondary inventory: all limbs seemed intact; chest, rising and falling rapidly; when her helmet came off, she saw how Iga’s hair was plastered against her flushed cheeks, the bit of blood pooled above her upper lip, the spittle at the side of her mouth that she went to wipe away before remembering her hands were still encased in metal; red-rimmed eyes, fastening to hers.

She stared at Coco on the ground, didn’t smile. “Are you okay?”

Her heart—definitely still her heart—couldn’t quit kicking against her bruised ribs. “I’m good,” Coco answered, a lie they’d both let slide. Too tired, too close to an edge they wouldn’t come back from if they fell over it. “You’re okay.”

Though hers hadn’t been a question, Iga nodded.

It had been a whole lot more than ugly. The reader had been wrong: Cat-4 misdiagnosed as Cat-3. They had been sent out without a cannon gun—“New regs,” McEnroe had said disdainfully in an all-hands debrief two weeks ago, “under 3, nothing nuclear, clear?”—so that left them with just Iga’s broadsword and the mecha’s metal fists.

The kaiju—“It’s a fucking otachi,” had come muffled through the comm, Amanda barking viciously at someone in the control center—had been bulkier than the BJK 3 and taller when on its hind legs. Both she and Iga had studied every kaiju variant forwards and backwards, enough to recite each distinct feature in their sleep; with an otachi, the tail had to be neutralized immediately. Long like a whip and pronged with razor-edged talons at its end, the tail had been known to hold a jaeger under the water until all its systems shut down. A few lucky pilots were able to eject from the head; most either drowned because of a crack in their helmets or suffocated once their suits ran out of oxygen.

Caught off-guard and underprepared, they had been submerged for five minutes before Navarro and Zheng had blasted a hole through the kaiju’s chest. By that time, the water had been up to their waists. Both their helmets had been compromised. Before they had gone under, the kaiju had torn off the BJK 3’s right hand, the hand Iga kept curling and uncurling as a reminder her own was still there.

Her scream at the moment it happened replayed, over and over again, in Coco’s inner ear.

She had never had such a close call. It was past midnight by the time medical cleared her, but she wondered if she should call her mom, who otherwise would wake up to a dozen news alerts all describing the disastrous battle in lurid detail.

“You shouldn’t have a Google alert set up for me,” she had pleaded with her, well over two years ago.

“They barely let you talk to me! How else am I supposed to keep up with what my baby’s doing?”

It terrified her, more than she could put into words, that her mom might one day find out she had died via a push notification.

Tomorrow. She’d call her tomorrow, once Iga’s scream stopped following her down the halls in a ferocious echo. In her hideout, she had clapped her headphones over her ears and maxed out the volume on the loudest music from her dad’s MP3 player, but even that couldn’t chase away the sound. She found it impossible to focus on reading, so it came as a relief when Iga emerged from the shadows, in her loose t-shirt and bunched-up socks.

Without saying a word, she sank down in the spot across from Coco and hugged her knees to her chest. She had her right hand curled in a fist, cradled against her chest. Her face was splotchy and her cheeks puffy, like she had just finished sobbing. Her eyes glistened in the half-light.

Coco slid her headphones off, but other than the occasional sniffle, they sat in silence. The ceiling dripped, as consistently as their hearts beat. She couldn’t think of what to say to make any of it better, other than we’re alive. There had to be more than that.

At a certain point, Iga started soundlessly crying again. Coco’s own eyes burned. Never had she wished to be connected through the Drift more, so she could know what Iga needed from her without having to ask out loud.

Her eyes darting helplessly around the alcove, Coco spotted Iga’s tablet forgotten at her side. She glanced down at the book in her lap, an idea taking root.

She cleared her throat. “‘We aren’t here to answer your questions, Mr. Baker,’ the woman said sharply. ‘You are here to answer ours. Do not forget your—’”

Hearing her voice breaking the silence, Iga glanced up, her brow furrowing. 

Coco continued reading, “‘My place?’ Linus shook his head. ‘How can I, when I’m reminded of it constantly? I have done this job for seventeen years. I have never asked for more. I have never wished for more. I have done everything that has been asked of me without complaint. And here I stand before you, and you are demanding more from me. What more could I possibly have to give?’”

In the pause between paragraphs, Iga asked, stuffy, “Who is he talking to?”

“Extremely Upper Management.”

Iga laughed softly, though it sounded nearer to a shaky exhale.

“He broke the rules, I’m guessing?”

“Oh for sure, yeah,” Coco said, smiling. “But the rules were stupid.”

“What is the book called?” Iga asked, reminding Coco that she hadn’t let her see more than a glimpse of the cover the last time they had been up here together.

“The House in the Cerulean Sea.” Coco showed her the cover now, giving her a clear look at the illustrated house perched precariously on a seaside cliff. “I like that I know how it’s going to end. And that the ending is happy.”

“Spoilers,” Iga whispered as if it were a curse, cupping her hands playfully over her ears. As she brought them back down, she winced and flexed the fingers on her right hand. She brought the hand back to her chest, nestled by her collarbone. “Will you start it from the beginning? Please?”

Coco nodded, at a loss for any other words than ones already written.

She could leave at any time. Her mom reminded her of that at the end of every phone call—you can always come home. But she never wanted anything as badly as to stay, to fight, to put off seeing the sunrise through the window of her childhood bedroom for just one more year. She couldn’t stand to see the world end from a place where she couldn’t do anything about it.

What was the opposite of homesickness, she wondered, where instead of longing for home, you got queasy at the thought of having to go back, at least for too long? It seemed to her that it would still be homesickness, just another confusing English word with a double-meaning.

Iga was even farther away from home than she was, on the opposite side of the planet, but she never complained. A few times while waiting for her turn on one of the base’s satellite phones, Coco had overheard her speaking in Polish, presumably to her dad. She never ended those calls seeming down, not like the rest of them often did.

A treacherous voice whispered in her ear, because she’s stronger, more dedicated, more in control.

Except Coco, of all people, knew that wasn't actually true.

Creeping back to the bunk sector at quarter-past three, Coco caught Flavio slipping out of Ben’s room. He flashed her a smile, all boyish bravado, and moved along.

At the mess hall a few hours later, Ben slumped into the seat across from her, the hood of his sweatshirt drawn up and the sleeves folded like sock puppets over his fists. Sometimes, on mornings like this one where he looked so bare-faced and brand-new, she forgot he was older than her. He couldn’t look directly at her when he mumbled, “You won’t tell anyone.” His eyes sprung to hers and then down again. “Right?”

Flavio must have gotten to him in the showers. Across the mess, at a table with Felix and Denis, he was shamelessly staring at them, an attempt to eavesdrop on a conversation he was too far away to hear even in snatches. If Coco said the wrong thing now, it wouldn’t just be her who Ben shut out. It was an unfair amount of power to be given over a relationship she wanted nothing to do with. She found herself searching the room for Iga, for the only person she’d tell for the simple fact she lived half-inside her head.

She saw Amanda chatting at a table with Madi and Navarro, who was glaring daggers at the table where Qinwen sat alone, wrinkling her nose at a crusty slab of Canadian bacon. She saw Felix and Denis, conspiring around Flavio. She saw Taylor and Frances in the buffet line, Frances alternating between talking and shoveling food onto his tray, Taylor listening with distracted carelessness, his sunken eyes fixed on the back wall. She saw Roddick, rubbing his temples. Beside him, Brad and Wim were whispering, not about anything good. Still, she wondered what. When it came down to it, she wasn’t any better than Flavio, wanting to overhear even the things that might break her heart.

Coco turned back to Ben and poked his forearm with the blunt end of her fork. “Tell anyone what?”

What she meant as a joke, Ben seemed to take seriously. “You know.”

“What’s the big deal?” she asked. She understood not wanting to deal with the gossip, but the dire mood radiating off of him was beginning to freak her out.

“Seriously?” Ben gave her an incredulous stare that she’d have wiped off him if they were on the practice mat. “They’re not gonna let us drift again if anyone finds out.”

Something in her stomach dropped. “What? Why wouldn’t they?” Coco found herself looking for Iga again, but she still hadn’t turned up. “A bunch of married couples are co-pilots.”

“Married couples,” Ben emphasized. “Not two people who are just fu—just messing around.”

“Is that what it is?”

As soon as she asked, Coco realized she had pressed too hard on the bruise. Ben’s face shuttered.

“And you think it would have gone so well if you told Jess how you really felt?”

Coco would have preferred he had taken his fork and stabbed her with it. The cafeteria around them kept buzzing with business as usual, but now it felt as though everyone was staring at her, pitying her for what had been brutally obvious for far too long.

To his credit, at least Ben had the decency to look apologetic. “That was out of pocket, sorry.”

“Whatever,” she muttered at her tray, not interested in being the mature one right now.

Finally, Iga walked into the mess hall. Hair down, headphones on, she poured her coffee first before assembling a tray. She sat at the same table as Qinwen but on the opposite end.

While she considered getting up without saying anything, Coco knew that would only hurt Ben more. “I’ll see you at training,” she said, before crossing the room and sliding onto the bench across from Iga.

Iga glanced up, startled. She slid her headphones off one-handed, pausing her music with the other. Coco caught a quick flash of the screen: the blur of a lighter, you’re on your own kid.

“Taylor Swift?”

Her taste didn’t surprise Coco, just that she hadn’t known until now.

“She’s my favorite, so.” Iga shrugged, a touch self-conscious. “I know it’s not really what you listen to, usually…”

“Woah, I’m not a hater,” Coco said, pushing down the impulse to defend herself against the implication she was a music snob. “And it’s dangerous for you to imply that.”

Iga eased back a little, her mouth quirking in a slight smile. “I didn’t realize there are so many Swifties here. Will they come after you?”

“Oh yeah, McEnroe has all her albums signed in his office.”

“Really?” Iga’s eyes widened comically before she realized Coco had been kidding. She clapped a hand over her mouth as she laughed, her eyes scrunching at the corners.

Coco folded her arms on the table, leaning forward. She had seen Iga laugh in her memories before, but it was different to see it outside the Drift, to have made it happen. At the other end of the table, Qinwen observed them quietly, more curious than judgmental.

“I came over because—”

Because I’m mad at Ben for calling me out on something everyone already knows, and also because I feel bad for him, which I know he hates. And because the last time we dropped, you bisected a Category-4 kaiju like it had been made of paper, and it’s driving me crazy that I can’t do that, too. And because we’re still awkward, and it’s both our faults. But really, it’s because we’re not very good at being friends yet, but I actually think we could be.

“—I was wondering if I could take you up on that offer, maybe,” Coco said, and then clarified, “To borrow your tablet sometime. I’m kind of getting sick of reading the same thing over and over again. I think I could recite the characters’ dumb banter in my sleep.”

“Oh.” Iga looked pleasantly surprised. “Yeah, of course.”

“Do you have any recs?” Coco asked. “I haven’t really been keeping up with, like, any releases.”

“Have you heard of Elena Ferrante? She is this Italian writer. Here, let me show you…”

Coco leaned further in and listened while Iga sketched the basic outline of a novel called My Brilliant Friend. At one point, she locked eyes with Ben as he was dumping his tray. He mouthed, sorry, and she forgave him later, but not before wiping him out a few times on the mat, Flavio and Iga cheering her on from both corners.

What to say about the BJK 3. 

The outer plating was painted a waspish yellow, the color decided long before Jess or Coco stepped foot in the helm. (Idly, she sometimes wondered who did choose the color, what the thought-process was behind it; was it yellow like a traffic signal, or yellow like a warning, or yellow like sunshine, joy personified.) An older model, but it stayed in service because of its agility and deceivingly-thick armor. Jess hadn’t gotten around to naming the jaeger before Coco arrived, and it hadn’t been much of a priority for them once they were thrown into the thick of the fight. A few times, Jess called it Billie, but that had scratched at Coco’s ears in an unpleasant way. War machines shouldn’t have such human names.

She never thought of the jaegers as sentient beings, not like many of the others did. Frances always burst out of the elevator after a particularly thrilling fight and slapped the foot of the Ashe 3, hollering up, “Atta boy, baby, atta boy!” Denis called the Pierce 4 a beast and talked about it as though it obeyed its own rules. Superstitiously, Navarro and Qinwen helped clean the Goolagong 2’s interior every Sunday afternoon, working in charged silence. Even Ben and Flavio had taken to whispering about their jaeger as if it were a boss they had to please or a god they had to worship.

As hard as she tried initially, Coco couldn’t find another consciousness in the BJK 3. Sometimes, in those early months, she’d sit at the feet of the mecha as it rested in its bay and will it to talk to her. She wanted it to spill its secrets, tell her how to move faster or shoot with greater ease. It stood immense before her, silent and unmoving. Headless, because the heads were too precious to keep in the hangars. Without their heads and pilots, the jaegers were little more than nuts and bolts.

To Coco, the BJK 3 was her. The BJK 3 once was Jess. Now, it was Iga.

In the end, she went to the wedding. Not because she hadn’t tried to wriggle her way out of it, but because Madi had convinced her that she’d regret it forever if she didn’t show up for Jess. 

“I’m not saying this to make you feel bad or anything, but it’s harder than you think it is for her,” Madi had said as they waited for a helicopter to fly them off base, “leaving this behind.”

Coco had to put her sunglasses on to hide the tears welling in her eyes, at how after all this time she might not know Jess the best.

Somehow, she had soldiered through the vows without crying. During the first dance, she stood behind Fritz and Ben, so all she could see were the comet tails of a white silk dress, the brief glimpse of a smile. She spent the rest of the night drinking beers with Navarro and dancing with Frances, forgetting sometimes to feel devastated over everything she was losing. She had lost months ago, but it felt real tonight, because she’d be on another helicopter back to base tomorrow and Jess would not be on it with her.

Around midnight, Jess found her at a table of empty glasses, all alone, polishing off one of the last pieces of cake. She held out her hand, eyebrows raised. The band had begun packing up a while ago, but the guitarist had brought out an acoustic, and he and the lead vocalist were running through the most romantic songs in their catalog. Coco took her hand and let herself be led onto the dance floor, joining the last couples standing.

“Will you hate it if I say I’m going to miss you?” Jess asked as they swayed, neither of them leading.

Coco shook her head. “I’m going to miss you, too.”

“Be careful, okay?”

That wasn’t a promise Coco could make, so she said nothing.

“And don’t grow up too fast,” Jess said, which struck Coco as strange because Jess was one of the few people who never made her feel like a kid. She squeezed her hand, and Coco felt where the metal of her engagement ring dug into her palm. It wouldn’t leave an indent, not like the band did around Jess’s finger.

I’ll make the world better, Coco promised silently. The song only had one more chorus left. Like we said we would.

“With strawberries?”

Coco gagged. Beneath her cross-legged, the industrial dryer tumbled and shook.

“It’s good, I swear.”

Iga held up her hands, one sock in each. She bundled them neatly and set them beside her other two folded pairs. Unlike Coco, she never sat on top of the machines, though she agreed that the laundry facility was the best room in the Dome. If you ignored the puke-colored metal walls and the lack of windows, it could have passed for a laundromat: the orderly rows of washers and dryers, a couple of metal laundry bins, a damp pile of someone’s forgotten clothes on a long table by the door, the faint scent of lavender detergent hanging in the air, and the dry and pleasant warmth that you wanted to stay in, talk for awhile.

“You should try telling that to Flavio,” Coco said, imagining the Italian’s face when Iga told him that pasta with strawberries was one of her favorite Polish delicacies.

“I miss strawberries,” Iga said with a far-off sigh. “Are they in season soon?”

Iga could have asked her the date, and Coco still wouldn’t have been sure. Time moved at a slippery pace in the Dome, the days and nights interchangeable, weeks passing in a blink. Almost everyone tracked the progression by attacks; a few years ago, it would have been one month since the last attack, but now they got lucky if they could say two weeks.

For Coco, it had become three weeks until Jess left, two weeks, one, and then, a day without Jess, a week, a month. Yesterday, though, Coco had realized something startling over breakfast: it had been almost a year.

A year without Jess, and nine months with Iga. They ate most meals together now. Ben and Frances loved how generous Iga was with her laughter, and she and Madi could spend an hour talking exclusively about pop music. They did laundry together every Sunday afternoon, and Coco only teased her a bit for considering the folding process meditative. Every few nights, they met on the upper deck and traded off reading aloud, halfway through The House on the Cerulean Sea. She found it both strange and exhilarating how a book she had read six or seven times already could sound brand new. Certain turns of phrases sparking in Iga’s accent, the words she emphasized but Coco didn’t, when they laughed in different places, what struck each of them close to the heart—no one wonder people used to sit around a fire every night and read to each other.

And when they weren’t reading, or training, or eating, or sleeping, or fighting, they talked.

“I wanted to be a tennis player,” Coco was telling her now, not much of a confession but still not something she shared with many other people either. “I mean, I wanted to be a lot of things. My mom was this track-and-field star in college, so I thought maybe I’d be one, too. My dad played basketball, but I’ve never really been a team person, so”—she paused, subtly checking Iga’s reaction to that; her expression hadn’t changed—“Tennis just felt different, I guess, like watching Venus or Serena play, before everything, was just…”

“Amazing,” Iga finished.

“Exactly, but…” Coco shrugged and glanced around the empty laundry room, not nearly as glamorous as the locker room of a stadium court. “Now, I’m here.”

“Why?”

If Iga had asked her that not long after they first met, Coco would have been offended. Now, she heard the genuine curiosity in Iga’s voice. She really wanted to know why Coco was who she was.

“I guess it felt selfish,” she admitted, recalling how much it hurt to quit her tennis lessons and how painstakingly she prepared for her academy admissions test to compensate, “doing anything else.”

Iga nodded, like she understood exactly. “I thought about other things, like being a doctor or a journalist, but it takes so long before you are really helping people, you know?” She folded her last pair of shorts, folding a crease only she could see. “It doesn’t feel always, like we have that time.”

The dryer beneath Coco stopped with a jolt and a harsh beep. With an exaggerated groan, she hopped off the machine and said, “But we have time for laundry.”

“It is like all those poems,” Iga said, stacking her own laundry back in her plastic basket, piles with a rhyme and reason. “You know, the ones that talk about how the world is ending, but we have to eat still.”

“I was thinking more like that movie, Everything Everywhere All At Once. That’s what laundry always reminds me of now,” Coco said. She dumped her clothes into a heap in her basket, even though she knew Iga would stick around if she decided to fold them. “When the husband says, ‘In another life, I would have really liked just doing laundry and taxes with you.’”

Iga frowned thoughtfully. “I cannot see you just doing anything.”

“What’d you mean?” 

They walked out of the laundry room, leading with their baskets.

“You would always be one of the best,” Iga said, shrugging. “Best tennis player, or best runner, or—”

“No offense, but are you confusing me with you?” Coco tried to laugh it off while ignoring how hot her face flushed.

“I think it’s what we are both like.” Iga kept her eyes forward. “We don’t do things, like…”

“Halfway?”

“Right.” Iga smiled, a private one reserved for her.

Coco had to suffer an obvious blush.

Lately, between the late-night talks and mess hall meals, Coco would catch her idly daydreaming about Iga. She’d step between her open legs, hanging off the dryer, and have to rise up on her toes to kiss her. Iga’s hands, running up her thighs; Coco’s ankles, locking behind her back. Amanda would say she desperately needed to get laid on her next leave, and that might have been it had that been the extent of Coco’s daydreams, but she’d also imagine Iga pulling back to look at her, smiling in the same way she was smiling now. It wasn’t about anyone wanting her; it was about Iga wanting her.

In another life, Coco thought, I’d want to be a tennis player with you. I’d want to beat you. I’d probably want to be you, sometimes. I’d want to spend our careers trading Slams and the number one ranking. I’d want you to look at me like you are now, like we’re equal, like we’re made of the exact same stuff.

Iga couldn’t hear any of that, not outside the Drift. As painfully vulnerable and foolishly fantastical as it was, Coco wouldn’t have minded if she had.

Inventory: she missed windows with a backyard view; doors with latches that never locked right; the creak of wooden floorboards; sauce simmering on the stovetop; the basements and attics where she watched scary movies and won hide-and-seek; picking wildflowers in a field and getting stung by a bee; squirrels darting up a tree, moths fluttering around a porch light, blue jays at her mom’s bird feeder, geese crossing the road in a single file line; holding your breath while walking past a cemetery; grocery shopping, legs crumpled-up to fit in the basket of the cart; waiting for the school bus, her brother stepping off it; her stupid phone, and dumb videos on a loop, and a rainbow of heart emojis sent to a friend; dancing your heart out in front of an open garage; riding shotgun in an open-top Jeep; tennis shoes, the basketball court down the block, the track behind the high school she would have gone to; the view of the ocean from the shore; constellations, and bonfires, and fireflies; her family; the many other people she could have been.

Novak Djokovic hadn’t always been a solo pilot.

After the Laver 1 had been torn in half by a Category-4 Leatherback, no one expected him to step foot in a jaeger again. Videos of the aftermath had circulated everywhere—Federer and Nadal finishing off the kaiju, the naval search and rescue operation, the left hemisphere of the mecha’s head airlifted from the water, the body tangled in the wires like a puppet with too many strings, Djokovic strapped to a board with metal restraints because he kept fighting, thrashing, clawing to free himself. I can still feel him, he roared, he’s there, he’s there.

But it hadn’t been anything more than a phantom echo.

All Rangers learned about the phenomenon in their sixth month of training. If a pilot went down while in the Drift, the neural connection with their co-pilot didn’t sever completely. It lingered. For days, sometimes weeks, afterwards, the co-pilot could expect to experience flashes of their thoughts and memories, often of what they had been thinking in the moments before they died.

“Think of them like internet pop-ups,” the training video had supplied in a chirpy yet robotic voice, “or like an unskippable cut scene in a video game.” A few people in her class had laughed uncomfortably. By then, what happened to Murray had passed into myth.

Djokovic had disappeared for two years, no contact, before resurfacing at his old base in Ireland. Everyone agreed he had changed—the jokester had gone, replaced by a man with the same ruthless efficiency as his machine. His results in a single-seater were astonishing, and he used the numbers to bolster his case for more solo pilots.

“The problem,” he told an invested Jim Courrier, “is we are not fixing something because we refuse to ask if it is broken.”

“You’re saying co-piloting is more dangerous.”

“I am saying we are not asking enough questions. Do we belong in the head of someone else?”

Billy Jean King said no, but not because she wanted to raise a small army of solo pilots. In her view, the jaeger project had gone too far and without the results to show for it. Every year, the number of kaiju coming through the Breach increased. “Even if we had the capabilities and resources to build at the rate these kaiju are appearing, what does that get us?” she asked during her speech on Capitol Hill. “More toxic waste in our water? More coastal cities destroyed by kaiju and our own mechas? More of our children funneled into a program with a retention rate of 15% but a casualty rate of 50?”

Half of all Rangers died in their jaeger. For the most part, a pair of pilots went down together. Most of the time, but not always.

“What did it feel like, to lose your co-pilot?” Courrier had asked, the final question of the interview.

Djokovic answered as though it had happened yesterday: “I lost half my body.”

Felix and Denis had the Cat-2 kaiju all but sorted when two Hammerhorns burst through the Breach. The ambush had taken down two news helicopters, a carrier ship, the Pfeiffer Canyon Bridge, and Pierce 4. Double-digit human casualties reported for the first time in sixteen months.

“They fucking baited us,” McEnroe kept repeating during the debrief, his hands smacking flat against the table.

“We know the kaiju have been strategizing,” Venus said, with her steely calm. 

Roddick shouldered the blame. “It was a bad call on our part, only sending out one jaeger for a Category-2. We should have known it wouldn’t have been alone. We’ll mark it for next time, and—”

“Alexis thinks they’re building up something bigger,” Serena cut in. Her husband worked on base, nominally in the technological advancement department, but the crates of kaiju remains wheeled into his lab spoke for themselves. No one in the world knew the capabilities of the kaiju better. “They’re trying to pick off as many individual jaegers as they can before…”

“Before what?” Roddick asked, at the same time McEnroe said, “Define bigger.”

Under the table, Iga’s foot nudged against hers. As hard as she tried, Coco was having trouble following the conversation; she couldn’t stop thinking about how they had to drag the Pierce 4—the beast, Shapo would have corrected, if he hadn’t been unconscious—out of the water, because the hole punched straight through its stomach had disconnected its spinal wiring and its legs had stopped moving.

“I couldn’t feel anything below my waist,” Felix told her later, standing at the foot of Denis’s bed in the med bay. A heart monitor beeped steadily beneath their whispering. “We were all paralyzed.”

“He’s going to be okay.” Coco looked at Denis, his skin leeched of the little color it had. Heavy bandages had been wrapped around his left shoulder, his arm slinged. He had been fighting to wrench the mecha’s arm free from a kaiju’s clamped jaw and broke his own. Stealing a glance at Felix, she saw his eyes were shut tightly. “Right?”

Felix nodded, but there was little reassurance in it. “I keep hearing what he was thinking, right before.” He didn’t open his eyes. “I see it. He was scared I was going to die.”

His words, Denis small and quiet in a hospital bed, the ambush—all of it chased her on the way back to the bunk sector. She hadn’t even registered whose room she had landed in front of until she knocked.

Iga opened the door quickly. “Hi?”

“I know we usually meet on the upper deck, but can I…” Coco swallowed uncomfortably, studying her boots. “Can I hang out here for a while?”

“Yeah.” Iga stepped aside. “Of course.”

Her room mirrored every other one on the hall—a set of metal bunk beds pushed against the far wall, a sink to the left, a built-in closet to the right. Coco looked for the little touches, like the photostrip she had tacked on the closet door. In each of the strip’s three photos, two young girls were making silly faces at the camera. The second girl looked familiar, a face called up from Iga’s memories. Maja, her childhood best friend. Another photo, framed and placed prominently on the small vanity, was of Iga, her sister, and their father smushed together in front of their Christmas tree. Draped over their laps was the same red-floral quilt now draped over Iga’s bunk. On the right post, Iga had clipped a small reading light.

“Of course you brought one of these,” Coco said, flicking its switch. The glow spotlit Iga’s creased pillow.

“The overhead light is terrible, so.” Iga shrugged, seeming stranded in the middle of her own room. “I can take the top bunk, if you want to—”

“Or we could share,” Coco blurted out. “I just…”

I want to know you’re okay, she thought, willing Iga to hear it even outside the Drift. I’m stupidly scared we’re going to die any day now, but I can’t say that out loud, because then it’s like asking for it to come true.

“Okay.”

Iga moved around her carefully, as if she were a bomb about to detonate. Coco would have laughed if that weren’t exactly how she felt, seconds away from implosion. Falling apart when they had been the heroes of the day wasn’t befitting of a soldier, a pilot of one of humanity’s deadliest war machines. With her bruised knuckles, she scrubbed angrily at her cheek, stupidly sticky and hot to the touch.

“Here.” Iga, in an awkward half-sitting and half-lying position on the bed, tugged at her wrist. She shuffled over as Coco climbed in next to her. Trapped between the wall and Coco, she wriggled a bit until her head hit the pillow, bringing them face to face. “Is this…”

Her ragged exhale blew against Coco’s forehead. Necessitated by the narrow space, their legs overlapped. Coco brought both her hands to her chest, her fingers brushing against Iga’s. She blinked, and a tear slipped free, skating down her cheek.

“Sorry, this is so stupid.”

Iga stopped her hand before she could wipe the tear away, erase it like it was evidence she didn’t belong here. Her fingers curled around hers, holding tight.

“No, it’s not.”

Coco pressed closer, as if she could meld herself into Iga, as if they were drifting. 

Except, this was nothing like drifting. There, she felt everything Iga felt, but not the rapid beating of her pulse or the warmth of her hand clasped around her own. She couldn’t know what she was thinking down to the letter, but she could tilt her forehead against hers and simply breathe, together.

“I—”

Coco struggled to stay awake, hear what Iga wanted to say. It might have been the beginning of a dream, that singular syllable ghosting over her lips, the rest a blank to fill in. I need, I want, I love. All on the tip of her tongue. She fell asleep with her mouth slightly open, waiting for something.

In the morning—or the approximation of it—she woke up to Iga snoring lightly against her shoulder. She had never let go of her hand.

Andrea Petkovic had a theory about the Drift.

She saw it as a venn diagram—her brain one circle, Angie Kerber’s another. Drifting brought the circles together, thoughts and memories melding in the middle. 

I’ve read fellow pilots describe the overlap as a brain soup, or an ocean, or a kaleidoscope, she wrote in a landmark essay published in The Atlantic. I always found it funny but very human that we think we’re surrendering control to it.

Petkovic believed, with high enough compatibility, the overlap could be controlled. Rather than a locus where two minds connected, the overlap became something else entirely, strangely positioned inside past and present, outside of space. I like to imagine, if it hadn’t been life or death, she wrote, we could have sat on a beach somewhere, made entirely of memory (imagine: the Irish coastline on the Mediterranean Sea).

Sometimes, Coco thought about where she’d like to go, what she’d like to imagine into existence. Like a house, sitting impossibly on the very edge of a cliff, almost falling off the known world. Really, what she liked most about Petkovic's theory was how much it sounded like a dream.

The avoidance, once something only Coco picked up on, was noticeable now.

“Why isn’t she eating with us?” Ben asked on the third day, around a mouthful of artificial scrambled eggs. Snickering, Flavio poked at his stuffed cheek until Ben fought his hand back with the tines of his fork.

Rubbing at the stab wound, Flavio swore in Italian before turning back to Coco. “You fight?” he asked rather seriously, his wide blue eyes checking her for damage, more invisible wounds. With every passing day, Coco understood more and more why Ben would risk his dream for this, for him.

Equally, she wondered how much of a choice it was. Stepping into someone else’s head, how did you not come away half in love with the most intimate grooves of them, each tiny idiosyncrasy and strange thought pattern? Iga hated weak coffee but still would drink the worst cup of it in the morning to wake herself up. Across the mess hall, she was pursing her lips with each watery sip. She didn’t look over once.

She never showed up on the upper deck. During their training blocks, she chose to spar with Qinwen or Navarro. She switched her hour in the sim. Laundry, she skipped.

After a week and a half, Coco caved and called Jess.

“I don’t know what I did wrong.”

“Not that I know Iga at all, but I’m guessing it isn’t really about you,” Jess said, her voice coming through layers of static. It was nothing like communicating as two halves of a brain. “But you’re probably going to have to talk to her if you really want to know.”

“And if I don’t want to know?”

“Serena and Venus will be pissed,” Jess said, not unsympathetically. “It’s going to affect your drops eventually.”

It never affected us. Jess would have heard her through the Drift, but they were thousands of miles away from each other, and Coco could think all her worst thoughts as loudly as she wanted. I was in love with you, and you knew it, but look at all the things we still did together.

“I miss you, you know,” Jess said, as though she had picked it up long-distance anyway.

“I know.” Coco hoped she heard her smile. “But not enough to see a movie with me next time I’m on leave.”

“I’m the worst, okay?” Her quiet laugh rang over the line. “But we are going to see a movie together. And go to Miami. And play tennis.”

“I’m holding you to all these things.”

Neither of them mentioned how Coco had pushed off her leave three times in the last year. At nineteen, Coco would have been forced to take her leave by now, but Venus and Serena had worse things to worry about than one of their pilots working a little too hard. If anything, they must have felt relieved each time she chose to stay, and that relief outweighed the guilt.

“Talk to her,” Jess repeated before hanging up.

Easier said than done. Coco tried cornering her after their latest drop, but Iga had been saved by Wim showing up, wanting to discuss a discrepancy in some obscure data point. She would have accused her of using her trainer as a wall between them, but that would require Iga staying within earshot for longer than thirty seconds.

Amanda ended up finding her in the drivesuit room, still in her circuitry suit.

“You missed debrief,” she said, sitting beside her on the bench. “McEnroe was really on one.”

“He’s always on one,” Coco huffed. “Was it about me?”

“Not really.”

Coco took that to mean it was and it wasn’t. Complaining about her missing a debrief was underlined with the fear she was burning out. Discussing how to work around Felix and Denis still being out of commission was really about the fact the Golden Gate Dome would be overwhelmed soon. Bitching about the instant coffee: there was no money in the budget for a new jaeger, let alone real coffee beans. Talk of a merger between Golden Gate, Seattle, and Anchorage was swirling, and consolidation might mean the end of the line.

Worst of all, none of it had been registering much to her. She might be burned out after all.

“I’ve been doing some reading,” came Amanda, interrupting her spiraling thoughts. At Coco’s lightly raised eyebrow, she narrowed her eyes. “Whatever, I guess you don’t want to know.”

“You’re going to tell me anyway.”

“Yeah, obviously,” Amanda said, easy as. “But what I found out: their bond was always a fucking mess.”

“Whose?” Coco asked, like a coward who already knew.

“Sabalenka and Świątek. Don’t get me wrong, apparently they were great when everything was working, but it was still super unstable. Sometimes, it would take, like, five minutes for the neural handshake to work. Could you imagine McEnroe or Serena letting shit like that slide?” Amanda snorted at the thought, then bumped her shoulder against Coco’s. “Anyway, just thought you’d want to know.”

Coco hung her head between her legs, even though that was where all her blood had rushed to already. “You’re terrible.”

With some care, Amanda unzipped the back of her suit. “And you’re almost as unsubtle as Ben.”

Without lifting her head, Coco said to the dirtied floor, “I don’t know what to do.”

“Yeah, well.” Amanda stood. “I don’t think any of us do. Except we should probably eat something.”

Coco didn’t know if it was morning or night, time for breakfast or just past dinner. She also didn’t know if she could stomach much food right now, her body still feeling at sea, but Amanda was right that they should probably eat. It was like those poems Iga had mentioned to her once: the world is ending, but they’re serving mushy pancakes in the mess hall; the world is ending, but there’s laundry to do; the world is ending, but you’ve still fallen in love with another person who's in it.

If she were reading the story of her own life, she would have skipped to the end a long time ago. Not to miss out on everything that happened in the middle, but just to check the last page. Did her story end happily, or did it end in the middle of a sentence? Did she save the world? Did she get the girl?

Coco didn’t want to settle for tentative answers, the ones she’d shake out of a Magic 8 Ball—signs point to yes, outlook not so good, ask again later. Yes or no, did it all end well.

The alarm roused her from sleep. She had been dreaming she was lost in a house with infinite floors. Every time she made it to the top of a flight of stairs, she thought she had to have reached the roof, just to discover another hallway of locked doors. Something was chasing her, something she never saw but knew she couldn’t let catch her. She kept thinking, I have to find Iga; she’ll know what to do.

Walking the length of the bay dock side by side, Iga didn’t say anything. She had her headphones on. Her eyes were bleary and lined in red, and she sipped quickly from a cup of coffee. Someone had handed Coco a similar cup, but caffeine before a drop tended to make her queasy. Someone else took the cups and Iga’s headphones, replaced with earpieces and helmets.

“Sorry for the shitty wake-up call,” Amanda said in their ears.

“It couldn’t have been soothing ocean sounds,” Coco joked. Iga’s nose twitched, but that was the extent of her reaction.

“Well, you’re about to be outside real soon. Cat-3, Navarro and Zheng are also tapping in. We think they’re trying to poke at LA’s defenses.”

“Got it,” came Iga, so flat as to seem disinterested.

Coco would have asked what was wrong, but she’d get the picture in a couple of minutes. It had been a month since they had shared more than a five word conversation, which meant it had been a month since they last drifted.

“Initiating neural handshake.”

The memories flooded in, as always. In the head of a different jaeger, Aryna Sabalenka grinding her teeth. Why isn’t it working? Aryna at the other side of the mess hall, stabbing at her tray. Fuck, what do we do? Aryna, glaring up from the floor of the mat. Sometimes, I hate you. Aryna, dolled-up for an interview, meeting her eyes in the mirror. Most of the time. Aryna, biting her lip, scabbed over. It’s not like that. Aryna, chucking her helmet across the bridge. I’m not like that.

Then, the scene changed. Suddenly, she was met with herself—Coco, through Iga’s eyes. Standing at the edge of the landing deck, shielding her eyes from the sun reflecting off the water and the heavy air from the chopper’s blades. With the same hand, shaking with Iga. This is Lieutenant Cori Gauff. We think you’ll make a fantastic pair. Her memory missed Coco’s grimace as soon as she and the Williams sisters walked ahead. It had none of the spine-tingling jealousy.

Memory-Iga glanced back, to where Memory-Coco was laughing with Ben. Interest sparked through the drift. Iga had wanted to like her. She had wanted it to go differently.

Coco inhaled sharply.

“Connection established. Confirm.”

“Yeah,” Coco breathed out. “Confirmed.”

I was scared it wasn’t going to work. Iga kept her eyes locked on the internal screen, even as she spoke across the drift. I’m sorry.

You don’t have to apologize, Coco replied, wondering if Iga had overheard scraps of the conversation she and Amanda had from her memories. Her bond with Sabalenka might have been unstable, but theirs never had been, even when they could hardly agree on whether to step with their left foot first or their right. You’re not getting out of my head that easy.

Coco had expected a wave of relief, but instead she was startled at the burst of anxiety pulsing through the neural link.

“Let’s not worry about it now,” Coco said, out loud.

“Worry about what?” Amanda asked over the comm, immediately on edge.

“Yeah,” Iga agreed readily. “We’ll—”

The promise went unfinished, passing through the link as a faint thread of gratitude. Later, they’d talk. What about, Coco had a few guesses but nothing concrete, and she didn’t want to puzzle it out through snatches of memory and unattributed rumors.

By the time the kaiju had been neutralized, dawn had broken over Los Angeles. The trip back to home base was quiet, and Coco spent most of it with her eyes closed. She hadn’t fallen asleep while hooked up to the rig before, never while still drifting. If she had, she wondered if Iga would see her dreams, like a surrealist film running on a small projector in their shared mindspace.

“I was dreaming about you when the alarm went off.” As Coco said it, Iga’s head snapped in her direction. “Well, kind of. It’s more like I was looking for you in the dream and couldn’t find you.”

“Did you find me eventually?”

Coco shook her head, so heavy. “That’s the thing about dreams though, right? You’re usually waking up right before you get what you want.”

With the helmets on, Iga couldn’t see her flush, but she must have felt the hot licks of embarrassment racing up her spine.

Iga surprised her again, not feeling what she assumed she would. Instead of pitying, she felt wary. “Or you wake up right when the monster is about to catch you.”

“Isn’t that because you can’t die in your dreams?”

“Probably,” Iga conceded. “Why do you think it’s like that?”

“Our brains are probably trying to protect us,” Coco guessed, “or it’s a survival instinct thing. We can’t dream of ourselves giving up without a fight.”

“You definitely never would,” Iga said, achingly sincere. “You are the hardest fighter I know.”

“Even in my dreams?” Coco posed weakly.

“And in mine.”

Coco would have ripped off her drivesuit if she could and closed the short but impossible distance between them if she could. In her ear, she heard Iga’s gasp, and in her body, she felt the cold douse of Iga’s shock. It should have been impossible to surprise each other like that.

Did you not—

No.

How, Coco wanted to ask, how when she had never been anything but obvious. She had her heart tied like a red ribbon around her wrist, her heart held out in her metal palm.

The aircraft touched back down without either of them having said another word, out loud or across the Drift. Too many ears around to risk saying something that couldn’t be taken back.

Once back inside the Dome and out of her suit, Coco bypassed the mess hall and wove her way to the upper deck. The air stank of brine, and the early sun shone a light on all the slimy spots on the wall that the moonlight hid. Distantly, she heard the squawk of a lone gull. She settled on the floor, her weary legs thanking her. Her head tipped back. She should have suggested sleeping first, but she worried what would happen if she gave Iga too much time to think.

Iga joined her not long after, as dressed down as she had been the first night they met here. Instead of taking the spot across from her, she sat beside Coco, just distant enough not to touch. She hadn’t showered, so she smelled like sweat and something distinctly bittersweet. Coco leaned in a little.

“I’m sorry.”

Not brave enough to ask what Iga was sorry for, Coco said instead, “You don’t have to apologize.”

At the same time, they shifted and ended up pressed shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, a long line of warmth. They looked at each other and, as if a string had snapped simultaneously inside them both, started giggling.

“Do those conversations ever feel…” Iga paused, reaching for the right word. “Not real to you? The ones just in our heads.”

“Sometimes,” Coco admitted. “It’s like I’m talking to myself. Or more like arguing with myself.”

Iga pursed her lips, an obvious effort not to smile, but didn’t correct her. “It’s strange,” she mused, “knowing what someone is going to do right before they do it.”

“I don’t always know what you’re going to do.” Coco pressed her shoulder more firmly against Iga’s. “You’re too fast.”

“What’s the word?” Iga asked. “Impulsive?”

“It’s not that,” Coco protested, because Iga was too smart to act purely on impulse. “It’s your instincts. You just know exactly what to do.”

Iga laughed at that, but not happily. She tipped her head back, mirroring Coco. To the ceiling, she said in earnest, “I wish I did.”

Coco turned her head, studying Iga in profile. She loved her from this angle, her hair hanging carelessly over her ears, her eyelashes casting pale shadows on her cheeks, the downward pull of her mouth, and the soft curve of her jaw. She wanted to kiss her where she’d feel her pulse, and at the corner of her frown, and where her eyes scrunched when she laughed hard enough to cry good tears.

Quietly, she asked, “Did you really not know?”

After a deep breath in, as if to brace herself, Iga said, “I think I wanted it to be true.” Her eyes found Coco’s, and the longing in them left her momentarily stunned. There had been a part of her, same as Iga, that thought it could never get this far. “And then I got scared, because what if I was making it up?”

“I was in love with my last co-pilot, Jess,” Coco confessed, not seeing the point in holding this last piece of herself back. “She definitely knew, and she never made me feel, like, bad about it or anything, but it was really confusing because I didn’t always know if it was her I was in love with or if I was in love with—I don’t know, I had never felt anything like that before, knowing someone that well and having them know me.”

“I thought I knew her,” Iga said, her voice wavering, “but then I didn’t.”

“Aryna?”

“I ruined it,” Iga whispered. “She pulled away because I—it broke us. One day, we’re called to fight, and—and the handshake, it failed. The next time, same thing. It never worked again, no matter how hard I tried.”

Then why isn’t she in Europe, the bitter question echoing from a lifetime ago. This was why. She had lost her drift partner, but she was too valuable a pilot to lose completely, so they shuffled her here, to a base where another young pilot had lost her partner out of an excess of the wrong kind of love.

“I failed,” Iga emphasized. “I won’t again. I can’t.”

“You didn’t fail.” Coco rose to her knees, shuffling until she landed in front of Iga. “You’re, like, the best pilot in the world. Everyone says so. If anything, she—”

“No,” Iga said, insistent. “No, it isn’t—I know it’s me. Sometimes, I feel…” She tapped two fingers against her temple. “It is like everything inside me is falling apart, all the time. I try to hold on, bring it back together, but the more I try to control it, the more—you feel it. I know you do.”

Coco had felt it, every time they drifted. It had been the first thing that drove her crazy about Iga, and probably the first thing she had fallen in love with, because she knew for as long as they were together, Coco would never have to explain it to her, how hard it was not to let everything hurt.

“Well,” Coco said, with all the empathy and hard feelings she could muster, “join the fucking club.”

Again, they looked at each other, really looked, and began to laugh in disbelief. At some point, Iga had to cover her hands with her face, hiding her blotchy cheeks.

Gently, Coco took her hands off her face and tangled them in her lap. “Sometimes, it’s kind of hard to tell what’s my feelings and what’s yours.”

“Is that a bad thing?” Iga asked, her expression at once hopeful and guarded.

“I guess when we don’t talk about it for a month.”

Iga winced. “Sorry.”

“You don’t have to—”

“Apologize,” Iga cut in with a sheepish smile.

Into the quiet, the ceiling dripped, and birds continued to circle and cry out somewhere in the morning sky overhead. Iga’s legs, which had been drawn into a cage against her chest, loosened and splayed on either side of Coco. She moved forward a few inches, until her knees bracketed her hips and they were sitting a breath apart.

“I’m scared,” Coco admitted to the nest their joined hands made, and it encompassed so many things.

“Me too.”

What scared her most was that Iga would be right, and they’d ruin it, either by trying or by not trying, but if the ship was going down no matter what they chose, she’d rather go down knowing she had taken a stab at being happy, even in the middle of everything falling apart.

“But someone told me earlier I’m the hardest fighter they know, so…” Coco grinned, even as her traitorous eyes filled with tears.

Iga tugged at their hands, an impossible effort to pull her closer. “That is very smart of them.”

“Yeah, I know,” Coco said, untangling their hands so she could cup Iga’s jaw. “I love that about her.”

They moved forward in sync, Iga pushing up and Coco dipping down, meeting at the bridge where everything they wanted overlapped. It could have been hours or just a few minutes that they spent kissing on the floor of their hideout; she lost track of the time, the world at a distance. The first time she wove her hands into Iga's hair and tugged, she moaned into her open mouth. Coco didn't even have to read her mind.

Inventory: she wanted to hear her mom’s voice calling from the other side of the house; to feel the sun on the back of her neck; to be the greatest in the world at something no one should have to be good at; to make herself proud; to understand God’s plan; to know where she was going at the end of all this; to run her fingers through her hair; to hold her; to kiss her, everywhere; to fight her, beside her; to read out loud in a quiet room, head on her shoulder; to see the moonlight off the water reflected in her eyes; to win; not to die trying.

Off the coast of Anchorage, Alaska, the BJK 3—“Let’s call her Bumblebee, you know, since they’re important for saving the world,” Iga had suggested, and Coco had smiled while saying nothing about the concept of Transformers or referring to inanimate objects as her—finished off the flash-bang evisceration of a Cat-3 by depositing it safely in the Arctic containment zone.

Amanda patched through Michelsen, breathlessly babbling: “You’re lifesavers, seriously! Lifesavers!”

His comm picked up Tien telling him, with relief he was able to say it, “Breathe, man.”

Coco breathed in time, her body sore from the fight and her face sore from smiling. The screen across BJK 3’s visor projected the image of kaiju’s body sinking deeper into the underwater cage, back down into the abyss.

Reclaiming the comm, Amanda congratulated them on reaching double digits: 12 drops, 10 kills. Back on pace to catch up with Alcaraz and Sinner. “Not that it’s a competition,” Amanda added slyly. It shouldn’t be, and it was.

After muting communication temporarily, Coco reached across the Drift. Iga hadn’t said anything since cutting off the kaiju’s head.

Her foot stepped into empty space and landed on a wooden dock. It rocked languidly beneath her, rippling the water. On the other shore, the sun was rising over a treeline. At the end of the dock, a girl of eight or nine sat cross-legged, gazing out at the water. She still had a bob and a book at her side.

Then, Coco blinked, and the girl was standing, though not much of a girl anymore. She had her drivesuit on, same as Coco, the helmet tucked in the crook of her arm. They inhaled at the same time; her memory, or this amalgamation of them both, smelled of pine trees, freshwater, and the distant scent of sweat and copper wiring. When Iga turned her head, she looked directly at Coco. She smiled, so wide and bright it could have only been a dream. It should be, but it wasn’t.

I want—just the beginning of a thought, and Iga heard it, as though she had shouted at a sky that went on forever.

I know.

|||

I see the tree above the grave and think, I’m wearing
my heart on my leaves. My heart on my leaves.
Love ends. But what if it doesn’t?

— Ada Limón