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You awoke, blinking, in a place that smelled clean.
Shapes in the distance, and the faintest impression of light. Mountains, you thought, and for a moment did nothing but idly track their silhouette with your eyes, the rolling ridges receding into middle distance, each smoke-blue sheaf hazier than the last.
A name came to mind: Blue Ridge. You could not remember learning it.
All quiet, the grass tickling your face. You turned your head and saw that someone sat beside you: a girl of about twelve with mousy brown hair and a pinched, too-serious face. Absently she twirled a dandelion; you watched as she blew. The tufts drifted upwards, toward the slopes, and the first frosted traces of amber light that seeped from beyond turned their feathered outlines into tinder.
Something else was different, too, a quality to the world you could not put to words, like a muscle you had not flexed for years.
For a moment you wondered what it was—before you realized that you could see.
And that meant…
We did it, thought Alexandrovich in the back of your mind, disbelievingly. You could scarcely believe it yourself. So this was his memory, and that must be his famous sister, the hard-eyed adolescent who now piloted Steel Striga.
The light and color were suddenly overbearing. You had not seen like this since—
Dawn over Seattle: the huge smoking shape that blocked out half the mountain and scattered the birds in terror across the sky. Bainbridge already leveled and wading across the bay. Simurgh Cry incapacitated and Aureate Lance still limping along, but only barely. Vasily’s fear—for the city and for you but never himself—and then the icy calm that wiped it from both your minds, his hand steady on the throttle when you all but screamed at him through the drift to go, now, for fuck’s sake idiot what are you doing—his sad smile you could feel as if it were your own—one last moment when you were one mind and one heart before he slammed the button and propelled you from Dawn Augur—
A spike of jagged feedback roiled the drift, and you felt Alexandrovich recoil. But he didn’t pull back. The link held.
In the distance, wind pushed fog through the silent hills.
Is that why you hate them so much.
The thought crossed his mind before he could stop it. Lying would have taken more effort than it was worth. Yes, you thought bitterly. Luminous Susanna Vsevolodivna with only one maimed arm, and Noureddin’s too-sweet sorry’s—how many hours had you spent cursing their selfishness and incompetence? Not just them but their copilots, Vitaliy that self-righteous twit and airhead Nasrin, Jahanara who had unfeelingly paid her stiff respects at the funeral. It should have been you, all of you. An ugly thought but you would not foreswear it. He was worth ten of you—a hundred, a thousand.
Another thought from Alexandrovich, poorly suppressed:
…but was it really meant for them?
His inexperience was showing. But it was the thought that floored you—the image flickered, and Dawn Augur shivered around you like a tent in the driven snow. Before you could stop it you were plunged, together, into that wellspring of bile at the core of you that seemed to have no end.
You were too tired to deny it.
How many times had you replayed the memory, futures spiralling out before you like fractal webs? If only you had moved a second sooner, seen what he had been trying to do. If only you’d ejected him first. But you hesitated, still thinking like a naive idiot there was some way you could make it out together—
Useless, useless, useless.
Alexandrovich grasped it then, and you with him, with all the bitterness of a fate foretold, the punchline of an old nightmare that woke you sweating in the dark.
It was all meant for you.
Hassanovich…
You waited for it to unravel. For him to flinch, for you to pull away. It was reflexive at this point, required no conscious effort.
But the moment held.
In the distance, the sun was rising slowly, driving the last fog from between the tree-thick slopes. No Vasily, no kaiju, no Space Needle toppling with deadly grace over the waiting sea. The last dandelion seeds floated lazily on the wind.
It’s not your fault.
A hopeless cliché. Yet you did not find it as loathsome as you’d expected.
It was the damned woolly calm of Alexandrovich’s mind, you told yourself, his stolid and unyielding hope, this idyllic childhood pastiche. Infecting you. But whatever made him stay held you there too, as though suspended in one bright bubble.
When we were kids, me and my sister… we liked to sneak out here before school and watch the sun come up.
Nothing you couldn’t have inferred from context, but he thought it into the silence almost shyly, and you let it pass without comment.
Well, almost without comment.
Anyone ever tell you you’re a massive sap?
You felt a bubbling of affront, a thought forming. And then—
A shadow in the drift.
You felt the wrongness of it before you could see it, like a note off-key, something worming into the marrow of your bones. You narrowed your eyes.
Something was off about the sky in the distance. Dawn-colored just moments ago, it had darkened back into a twilight color. Then midnight. As though ink had poured over the horizon, blotting out the light in one curtainlike wave.
Billowing streamers in aurora colors washed over the black, reflected unevenly from the mountains: red, green, rose. Somehow, you doubted this was a regular occurrence in West Virginia.
Something’s wrong.
Alexandrovich felt it too, finally—just in time for the blaring alarms to jolt you from the drift. Darkness again, and through it Susanna’s voice over the intercom, tense beneath the cool:
“Hassanovich, we have a category III incoming from the north. Steel Striga and Simurgh Cry have already been deployed. You’re needed on the field.”
Wonderful. You felt your mouth flatten into a grimace.
“We got a name on this thing?”
“How nice of you to ask, Hassanovich. We’re calling it Apostle.”
Without delay you plunged back into the drift, the world blooming anew around you: Dawn Augur from the inside, the battered and familiar cockpit. You looked over at Alexandrovich through your linked eyes, realizing it was the first time you had really gotten a good look at him: some ginger kid with a scruffy beard and mess of freckles, looking like he should’ve been playing ice hockey instead.
His face was pale and grim behind the helmet—but those grey eyes shone with a steadiness that belied his white-knuckled fingers. It almost impressed you.
Grinning despite yourself, you put hand to throttle.
“Let’s go give Paul over there a piece of our mind, huh?”