Archive of Our Own ^beta

The first time Raleigh sees himself in his copilot’s memories, he’s cutting down cigarettes with a pair of nail scissors, brushing the curls of scrap paper into a sink in the school bathroom. This isn’t the brand with the blue trim from the grocery store; this is a pack from the lodge, no barcode, handwritten price tags---the kind you have to buy the filters for separately. Raleigh figures if he rides home with the pack wedged in the seam of one of the bus seats, he can hide the imperfect tips of the cigarettes, disguise the sum millimeters he’s removed. He’s done it before. Out of three packs of lodge brand cigarettes, Raleigh guesses he can clip out one full smoke from the total. Baker’s dozen. Opposite of that. Different numbers. As he twists the faucet to begin cleaning off the scissors, he looks up at his reflection in the mirror.

The grey armor of the PPDC Ranger Interface pinches at his neck, the brace pushing his chin up at an angle. He’ll pull a muscle if he keeps trying to roll his shoulderblades, or keeps thinking about it. At least he doesn’t have an itch on his elbow this time. The face Raleigh finds in the glass---helmet gleaming in the artificial light--- looks a little worried, maybe, but in a way that Raleigh recognizes is the quality of an energy, a power.

The water streaks through the tobacco shavings, trickling in a color like liquid rust.

Raleigh doesn’t smoke, can’t stand how it wakes him up at odd hours, makes his breath feel like it’s a step behind that part of his brain you can’t think with. No one in Raleigh’s family---

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The cigarettes are for their mother, who lies to the clinic doctor and says she’s down to six a day. She lies again eight months later and is referred to a general physician who asks to listen to Yancy’s lungs and asks Yancy to spit into a mouthguard with sensors embedded in the wax.

“And I’d had to pee in a cup, but it wasn’t the sort of thing where you had to figure out real fast how to cheat it. They didn’t even have my name on file.”

Raleigh remembers. The doctor had had a nurse come back with a clipboard---with two clipboards---and had made a point of showing their mother the data they’d taken from the stethoscope, the cold dot that had settled on Raleigh’s chest. They’d talked about secondhand effects. They’d talked about switching to patches.

“I know,” their mother had said.

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Gipsy Danger manages to distract a kaiju long enough for a new kind of scram jet to put a missile in the creature’s eye. It’s a category 1, and its brain is leaking, but whatever passes for the breachling’s cortex has enough malice left in it to send the monster lurching towards the coast. Gipsy Danger’s hands are damaged, but the pilots don’t try to grab on to the ridges of alien exoskeleton. Instead, almost gently, Gipsy Danger hooks her arm under the kaiju’s neck and releases coolant through ports in her heels, digging into the seabed with anchors of chemical ice. In the same motion, the jaeger pulls the beast’s head backwards and lets it drown on its own blood.

Every velocity in the sequence is grace itself, movement translated out of a perfect drift. They play back the audio files from the log, and for the final four minutes, the pilots’ headsets are completely silent. The team from Brazil argues that it doesn’t break the record, but they concede that it’s one of the finest kills they’ve ever seen.

When Raleigh dreams that night, he’ll have a boy in a headlock, a knee on the boy’s back, a wretched bit of hair in his mouth as he bites to hold on. Yancy would step in himself if Raleigh was caught up in true violence---it’s just Yancy’s nature---but some older part of Raleigh summons up the sensation of trying to throw himself and another boy into the blacktop near the Phys Ed building. The boy must have said something, made some comment about Raleigh’s family, but there is no wrath in the dream; there is only the physicality of it---scraping his knees through his jeans, taking the hard edge of a boot heel on his ankle until his sock is wet, trying to end some fight he’d already lost.

Raleigh had hobbled home with a bruise on his jaw, nerves still white with adrenaline. Yancy had asked to feel his tooth---the one Raleigh thought felt loose---and had made sure Raleigh’s eyes could follow his fingers before he’d handed Raleigh something filled with pastel yellow fluid. An antiseptic? There had been pain all over Raleigh’s body, cuts scrabbing on his hipbones, but he remembers that Yancy had taken his arm and pulled him away before the fight had started. There had been something more important to take care of.

Yancy skips to the last part of the book he’s reading, but he stays up late paging through the other chapters when the ending doesn’t make sense.

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In the drift, the pilot to pilot connection is achieved through---

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Yancy’s orange backpack is on the north side of the fence, but if he tries to climb back over again Chelsea and Riley will spot him at the same time and he’ll be out. Chelsea and Riley always try to play to a tie. Raleigh is crouched a little ways off, waiting in the shade of the treeline. His armor shines where his weight tamps down the wet snow. He doesn’t understand this memory, but he is beginning to pick up on clues.

Yancy checks the readout hologram on his arm, blue glow looping over the ends of his plaid sleeves.

“Kaiju’s nine miles out and closing. Sats say it’s whatever surfaced near Panama a few days ago. Bright Thunder’s coming up from the south, should be a few minutes.”

“Yancy! They’re going to hear you!”

“This is a game. We’ve got a job to do, man.”

And with that, Raleigh accepts the memory, doesn’t try to figure out the rules of the strange snowball tag. You’re only out when two other people hit you within the same five seconds. That’s right. He’d been on the other side of the fence when he’d spotted the backpack, the out-of-place color on the pine boards. Raleigh had been one of the last three players. Yancy had been---

Marshall Pentecost’s voice comes from somewhere in the woods.

“It’s good to have you with us, Ranger.”

Raleigh shifts his hands into position one. He checks the pressure gauge and breathes in the scent of anti-fog spray in his helmet. He thinks about a game where you only win when you’re in pairs.

“Good to be here, sir.”

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A Category 2 comes up in the overlap between Shatterdomes 3 and 7. Gipsy Danger’s chopper team refuels at Alameda on the return arc, and there’s some radio chatter about an aircraft carrier, but Raleigh tells the officers at 7 that he’d like to arrive back at Anchorage at the same time their jaeger does. Raleigh is on speakerphone. Does Yancy want them to charter a plane?

Yancy says no.

The Gage twins have a private jet lined up to take them back to LA, but they stop by the hotel to say goodbye to the other pilots in person. The twins aren’t as tall as they are on television, and their voices sound almost totally different than they do on the comms frequencies.

“It counts as your kill, technically, but we’re going to get photos with the bones before they end up in Mexico.”

“I’d heard it was a big field out in Nevada.”

“They do tissue work in Nevada. Geeks spent a few million trying to find out whether kaiju had any natural allergies.”

“What happens in Mexico?”

“You didn’t see the documentary? Forget what it was called…”

“We were interviewed for a part of it.”

Raleigh and Yancy tell the twins they’ll try and track it down.

“Shame Google’s not still a thing. We’d be trending on the google for sure, a good shot of us with a skull fragment.”

The Gage twins ask if Raleigh and Yancy ever have trouble drifting.

“Who doesn’t?”

“I used to chase the rabbit pretty bad,” Raleigh admits. “If I was in a conn-pod with anyone other than Yancy I’d come out of it half asleep.”

“When were you in a conn-pod with anyone other than me?”

“Not in jaegers, in the sim tests. You know, ‘The Tunnel Of Love’, that two pilot rig they have at the academy.”

Yancy opens his mouth to say something, but Bruce asks:

“What about the link? You come off a mission like this one, full neural, how do you recover?”

“Bloody Marys.”

The Gage twins have the same laugh. They’re a little more talkative now than they were the last time Raleigh met them---back in Callao---but this doesn’t surprise him. Yancy and Raleigh had been part of the same group of candidates invited to the new construction yards, and the wait to see who’d actually be assigned to the Mark 3s had been tense. But there’s an ember of thrill in all four of them now as well, that makes them open and carefree. They have returned from battle victorious and alive.

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The two jaegers had converged on the Kaiju in the early morning, the greater bulk of Romeo Blue wading into the fight from a drop point less than six hundred yards from the creature. The best data had suggested waiting for low tide, but the kaiju had come up between Catalina and the mainland, and central command had written new tactics while the jaegers were still locked into the helicopter rigs. Deploy from Shatterdome 7. Drop 1 at one mile from target. Jaeger Romeo Blue will press the beast backwards towards the eastern shores of the island. Drop 2 at six miles from target. Jaeger Gipsy Danger will come over the island from the west and smash the kaiju on the cliffs.

There had been no permanent or seasonal residents on Catalina for more than five years.

Kaiju were the superior force in deep water, but placing the attack point on the island meant that Gipsy Danger would have both the advantage of territory and time to remain hidden behind the hills while making her approach.

Keeping pace with the countdown from the aerial teams, Raleigh and Yancy had brought Gipsy Danger trudging up onto the island dripping saltwater, wreathed in fog where the pistons ran hot. They’d had most of Romeo’s action playing in the holograms, but their first glimpse of the kaiju came on a high peak of the landmass, the scale of it impossible---like a mountain itself.

“Category 2?”

“Category 2.” Mission Control confirmed.

Yancy had felt it, then, in that extension of the senses, the number of two-thousand-ton steps it would take to leap upon the Kaiju in that next instant. The sound of Romeo Blue’s cannons had faded out, and the Kaiju had been close enough for them to make out the blue wounds on its hide. But that feeling had saturated through the drift, and Raleigh had cut in on the headset mic.

“You taught me better than that, Yancy!”

And as soon as it existed, Raleigh’s restraint---Yancy’s hand on his arm, pulling him away---had been part of the drift too.

“I never taught you anything! You would have gotten your ass kicked if you’d tried to take on that Kevin kid!”

“Oh yeah? How do you feel about this fight?”

Yancy had smiled, hands in the second stance, and brought Gipsy Danger down the other slope of the peak in a slow walk, Raleigh signaling to the A.I. to activate the plasmacaster. They couldn’t step away from this fight, but they didn’t have to forsake control.

The kaiju doesn’t even see them before its spine goes.

=========================================================

Afterward, waiting for the carrier hooks, they’d watched buffalo charging through the froth on the beach below, wild with fear---like the panic of animals before an earthquake.

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Hotel suites for pilots are always registered under the name “PPDC”.

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Raleigh wakes up in some hour of total darkness. He doesn’t look at the clock on the nightstand. He doesn’t check his phone. He runs his tongue over the tender spot on his gums---where two teeth had chipped against their own surfaces---and tries to hang on to his dream. He’d never laid a finger on the other boy, hadn’t broken some old grudge with his fists out by the equipment shed; Yancy had taken his arm and led him away. He can remember his eye and lip swollen, the taste of the boy’s hair when he’d bit it, screaming curses, but Yancy had taken his arm before that happened. Yancy had said something, and Raleigh had followed. There had been something more important they’d needed to do.

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Jaeger motion and sensor feedback is looped through---

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Yancy has his work boots on. He’s threading the chain latch through his fingers, idling in the doorway. The day is bright and clear outside. He wants to get going, but he’s waiting for something. The bookstore needs help dragging donated cars onto a hauler for scrap, and they’d been generous enough to offer the work to---

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The man at the table in the kitchen won’t be there when they get back. They haven’t seen him since this day---since this moment, actually. The memory doesn’t happen any other way. Raleigh’s armor is as constricting as ever, but he’s glad his peripheral vision is blocked off as he turns towards Yancy and the open door.

“Tell Mrs. Anagick thank you.”
“We will.”

“And come home safe.”

Raleigh doesn’t lumber back through in the foyer in his step-lock boots, doesn’t try to study the face of the man in the kitchen. He knows this is only a memory. But Raleigh listens to the space of the house, tries to find some aspect of the connected rooms, some presence that he could not see depart.

Yancy is fiddling with the chain on the door, but in the audio from the headset mic, Raleigh can hear that he isn’t breathing either.

When Raleigh opens his eyes, all kinetics and weapons systems are Go status. He feels for the grip pad without looking at it, the whole machine waiting for him to save the world.

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The drift is the key to jaeger control, crafting the shape and actions of a simulated body from the overlap of two others. The hemisphere to hemisphere connection had been easy. Jaeger’s didn’t need to be cross-wired. But pulling code for dynamic movement from the neuron paths of just one brain gave you meaningless noise. The proto-jaegers didn’t even move. Tests linking single pilots into machine feedback---attempts to coax brains into creating their own paths for motion control---triggered haptic hallucinations or symptoms similar to the effects of stroke.

The piston structures in Mark 3 jaeger units can convey motions as subtle as changes in pilots’ postures when ranking officers are heard on the comms.

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The man in the kitchen must have looked like an older version of Yancy, Raleigh decides.

He cannot remember his father’s face.

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When the care crew for the pilots from Thailand receive their transfer orders, their chef offers to spend his last days in Shatterdome 3 preparing a feast for the other rangers and staff. There had been a celebrity funeral on the networks, but the officers recognize that a celebration in the mess hall could serve as a rare and fitting memorial. The care crew is given a small budget. A new word in Thai goes up on the schedule.

Yancy comes away from the buffet line with a plate of fileted sweet onions that had been brushed with beef marrow and seared. Raleigh takes two for himself. They’re good. Raleigh and Yancy are both in the wrong sort of schedule to be hungry at that moment, but they’re happy to be a part of the Shatterdome’s special occasions. Raleigh had liked both of the pilots from Thailand. Yancy had been tested in PONS link with each of them---deemed incompatible---before the teams had been finalized.

“Last Christmas, didn’t they string lights on Chrome Brutus?”

“Tendo helped them, yeah. Got it through the budget by calling it a ‘deep sea illumination upgrade’.”

“How do you think they figured out that headbutt move?”

“No idea. You can’t even practice something like that in sim.”

Raleigh steals another onion. He bites through the core of it and closes his eyes, savoring the taste. One of the marshalls has stepped in to put a match to a flambé course, and the shine of it looks a little like spilled limb-rocket fuel. It is only Yancy that sees the centerpiece blaze as the alcohol flares off. It is only Raleigh that thinks about fuel blend burning on the ocean. The mess hall isn’t any different when Raleigh opens his eyes, but both of them know that the next drift will shimmer with that light.

A preservation boat had spotted the sisters floating in their escape pods, still sealed up six days after the PPDC had raised their jaeger from the ocean. Other boats had already come for the kaiju’s organs. None of the escape pods’ pickup systems---life support, GPS---had activated. The capsules were bubbles of carbon dioxide. With the conn-pod damaged, there was no way to tell who had ejected first.

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Jupiter is a beach ball. Saturn is a smaller beach ball, and the other planets are packaged finds from a sporting goods store. Most of the solar system is loaded into a shopping cart. Jessie had used a straw to blow saltwater into the RFID lock on the back wheel, but it still seizes at random, forcing Raleigh to push against the friction until the wheel goes loose again. They’re on their way to Jessie’s house to get red spraypaint. The lab partners assigned to the astro course in Mrs. Finton’s homeroom would be getting extra credit for including Pluto. Raleigh and Jessie’s own plan is to paint in Jupiter’s great storm.

“Neptune, right?”

Yancy catches the tennis ball, bounces it once on the sidewalk, tosses it up again. Jessie doesn’t pay any attention to him. She’s walking ahead of the cart, the hula hoop of Saturn’s rings slung over her shoulder.

“Yeah! The golf ball is Earth, and the ping pong ball is Mars. We’re gonna paint that red too.”

Yancy nods. Raleigh knew Yancy would approve. He has a good feeling about this project. It won’t help his grades much, but he’ll be able to have something in presentation fair at the end of the quarter.

Yancey looks at Jessie, then at Raleigh.

“You know, she’ll never know how you feel about her unless---“

Yancy stops speaking. His hands stop moving over the tennis ball. Raleigh tries to keep the cart moving, but the back wheel locks up again and he’s suddenly stuck.

“Do you know what a jaeger is, Raleigh?”

Raleigh doesn’t. Was it some special type of comet? Twelve sidewalk blocks ahead, Jessie is waiting for them, pale arms hugging her crate of paints.

“Close your eyes. Tell me the names of the planets, in order.”

This one was easy. “Mercury---“

“No. Close your eyes.”

Raleigh begins again.

“Mercury. Venus. Earth. Mars.”

There’s no audio on the comms, only the gentle rumble to the reactor beneath them, but Raleigh can hear Yancy finishing the sequence in his own voice, someplace familiar in his head.

“Jupiter. Saturn. Uranus. Neptune.”

“And Pluto,” Yancy adds out loud. Raleigh had been thinking it.

“Neural handshake at ninety-nine percent lock.” Tendo’s key buzzes in on the comms. “Don’t go too easy on ‘im, boys.”

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“First kiss?”

Raleigh knows Yancy’s humor well enough to make it his own now.

“Category 1, mouth with those rows on rows of teeth, like a shark. Bright full moon, and we’re in the water off Hawadax getting closer and closer and… well, the moment was right, and...”

Raleigh can taste peach on the girl’s lips as she laughs, her teeth nearly biting his tongue. She gasps, and then she’s laughing again, head bowed into his shoulder.

Raleigh is scheduled to report in at Shatterdome 3 in nine hours, or in twenty minutes if the alert phone in his pocket rings.

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Raleigh and Yancy don’t always play to a draw when they play chess. Sometimes they simply get bored and stop.

Raleigh first learned how to play chess when he was twelve. The first time he beat Yancy without losing his queen, he’d---

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They practice scramble drills at three in the morning. They practice exercises from Pentecost they hate too much to nickname---response drills that see one pilot out of bed and into the conn-pod and the other pilot narrating the eighty-five steps of interface prep their partner is experiencing. Every piece of armor, volt connection, channel check, in order. Do it from memory. Do it in synchronous time with your co-pilot with the narrating partner in another room. Switch pilots. Switch again.

Yancy narrating Raleigh, fourth run, breaks the Wei Triplets academy record.

On the night Raleigh is scheduled to narrate Yancy---fifth run---Shatterdome 3 goes on alert when a station in the Arctic picks up something seismic. It’s a false alarm, but by the time they’re ready to start again the next day, Raleigh’s energy is gone. When they reach the stage in the sequence in which the PONS is activated, the technicians ask Raleigh to describe going into the drift.

“Don’t worry about the timing, just answer in as much detail as you can.”

“But the memories… could be anything. And you’re not supposed to think about them, they’re just the medium for the pilot link.”

“And?”

“And I mean, you get bits of recent stuff, what you had for breakfast, the shampoo you’re low on, but that’s always different. The rest of it is mainly flashbacks from when we were young, before we were even in the program.”

“Tell us about the most recent drift, then.”

Raleigh thinks about this.

“Well, it was when we fought Swellergut, or maybe before that, I’m not sure. We’d always go through the same routine at the airport when I was a kid. That’s what I remember from all the trips we went on. Getting up way early in the morning, trying to beat the lines. Dad would always try to have the rental car station call ahead to the other terminal, even though they’d be in totally the wrong timezone to do anything. You’ve been to the Ted Stevens, right?”

Two of the technicians nod. The other two techs, Raleigh guesses, have probably only been in and out of Alaska by way of 3’s helipads.

“Yancy had this suitcase---I can remember him packing it, stuffing q-tips and bodywash bottles in one of those plastic pouches. It was dark green, with one of the…”

Raleigh makes a gesture with his hands.

“One length of zipper stapled shut with these construction gun staples so it wouldn’t unzip on its own, because it did that. I was in baggage claim, and I was waiting for that suitcase to come up on the carousel. In the memory, it wasn’t the first one out, and it wasn’t in the first ten, or the first twenty, and I kept waiting for it to appear, and bags kept coming out of the tunnel but none of them had those staples. But Yancy was there too, and I had to accept that the memory didn’t… that it didn’t have edges.”

“Edges?”

“I mean, I couldn’t follow it into the next memory, when Yancy would take his suitcase and we’d leave the airport and wait for dad to call the travel agency and so on and so on. I had to accept that it was just part of what the PONS was pulling from my head. That I was really in a jaeger.”

Each of the technicians has a coffee mug in a unique and different color: wards against accidental sharing. Whatever they’re pouring from the pitcher smells cheap and terrible.

The next technician looks up from her notebook.

“In your memory, did you take a suitcase from the carousel?”

“Yeah. Mine was the very first one off the conveyor belt. It was only once, but I’ve always remembered the time that happened.”

The other technicians stop writing.

After a little while, the same technician asks Raleigh to describe step sixty in the launch sequence.

“Mission control gives the word over the comms that hemisphere-to-hemisphere is go. Both pilots verbally acknowledge, and comms switches to dedicated channels.”

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The appearance of new island causes a glitch in a satellite system. Within three hours, Gipsy Danger is prepped for long range transport and locked into the air rigs. Raleigh and Yancy practice the specialized drop maneuver in sim. Their jaeger is tethered to altitude balloons for the last twenty miles, and then released high in the air to fall upon the kaiju in a precision strike.

The beast attempts to dive at the last moment, but Gipsy Danger’s first contact pushes its shoulderblade into its lung. The whole mass of it twists in the water but Raleigh and Yancy press plasma into the ocean and boil the liquid near the creature’s eyes.

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Raleigh is sitting in the back of a broken car. There’s a hole in the engine block where the engine should be, and he’d watched Mrs. Anagick remove the battery only half an hour ago, so there’s no heat, but he isn’t uncomfortable. Raleigh knows this is the best place for him to be if he wants to stay out of Mrs. Anagick’s way while she’s loading the booth in the main building. There are only a few flecks of silvery paint left on the exterior of the vehicle, but the ends of the seatbelts shine like new metal.

Yancy could try to call the hauler company on his phone, try find out why the truck is late, but he doesn’t. Is this because this is a memory?

The scrap chamber is open and enclosed all at once. The windows are smashed out, but Raleigh reaches over and tugs at the door lock, trying to feel the “thunk” sound it makes with his hands.

He can see himself in the rearview mirror, upgraded Ranger Interface armor smooth as ceramic plate, the PPDC crest in laser pattern on his shoulders.

Yancy pulls at the steering wheel, wrenching it clockwise. The deflated tires grind on the gravel outside. He is sitting in the driver’s seat, airbag draped in his lap. He taps on the cracked glass over the instrument panel and the hologram display for Gipsy Danger’s shielding comes up over the odometer. He scrolls through the checklists for the jaeger’s systems, pulling diagrams at random, testing circuit response.

The control grip pad is probably in the glove compartment.

Raleigh keeps his hands on the belt buckle. He’d climbed into the backseat through the space where the rear window would have been and had pulled the seatbelt over his chest. Most of the back end of the car had been intact, but the front half had been folded into itself. Raleigh’s current understanding fills in the memory, the picture of a front end collision, the violence of that anonymous car. He’d been sitting in the back, and had seen how the steering column had been pushed like a spear all the way through the upholstery.

He looks again, and the inside of the car is exactly as it should be. There is enough room for Yancey to lean back in the front seat, the tubes of his armor’s air exchange tangling in the bent headrest.

Why had Yancey climbed into the car?

“Establishing comms link. Pilots acknowledge.”

The voice does not belong to Mrs. Anagick. It belongs to the Parameters A.I.

“Ranger on hemisphere one acknowledges,” Yancy responds.

There is a woman in white standing just outside the car. Raleigh can’t see her face, but she’s holding a clipboard, and her clothes are immaculately clean.

“Ranger on hemisphere two acknowledges.”

Raleigh and Yancy are in a jaeger. Penetecost’s voice patches in on the audio.

“Reading you loud and clear Gipsy Danger. Drop is in fifteen seconds. Good luck.”

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The PONS link doesn’t just split the burden of contending with direct digital feedback from plates and pistons: it layers nerve signals into a coherent source for motion code. Allocating along the hemisphere division in human brains meant the PONS simply had to follow the brain’s own shape, but those residual signals had to be drawn from the cortex. They didn’t exist anywhere else. Trying to write out motion from the conscious lobes---even If your pilots were linked and layered---gave you code that lagged and tripped over itself, sometimes literally. So the pilot link took in nearly all of the brain, the connection initiated and maintained through a bond of other systems of the mind.

Jaegers are limited, but they can react instinctually.

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Raleigh knows to go for the rooks first, and he knows to play his knights like shrapnel before the pawns move out. He knows his knights are useless in the middle of the board---he’s never been any good with them.

He knocks a pawn forward with his thumb.

“You should defend against Jin’s bishop. He’s only moving his queen up as a distraction.”

“You definitely should.”

“You should stop helping him,” the third Wei triplet chips in over his brothers, drawing his bishop back three squares.

Raleigh grins and moves the same pawn one space forward again, but he looks over the board once more. A queen playing distraction is still a queen. The Tokyo Shatterdome is hosting both pilot teams while 7 is sealed for academy training, and chess is one activity that doesn’t strain the language barrier.

The first time Raleigh managed to take Yancy’s queen before losing his own, Yancy had asked him how to surrender early.

“You tip over your king.”

And then Yancey had tipped over his king. He hadn’t really been giving up, or depriving Raleigh of the chance to pin him in checkmate, they just hadn’t had time to finish the game. Raleigh had been fourteen the first time he’d beaten Yancy, and there’d been a monster outside that they’d needed to---

Jin taps twice, then suddenly remembers the word in English.

“Check.” His knight is menacing Raleigh’s side of the board.

Raleigh castles. Jin knows how to use his knights. Raleigh is going to have to his push his rooks up into war.

He can remember losing games, his armies stripped to a court of survivors. Yancy must have beaten him dozens of times, taught him how to make every piece count.

“What you should really do is teach your brother how to play.”

Raleigh is studying the board, so he’s not sure which of Crimson Typhoon’s pilots says this, but he knows how to respond.

“How to lose to you, you mean?”

He was right. The triplets think it’s funny. Raleigh doesn’t try to bring up that he and Yancy have both known how to play since---

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Before the senses link, and before nerve signals begin to loop through the code, the drift is built from the only neuron paths that are both part of the brain’s shaped structure and able to be consciously accessed.

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The teacher tells Yancy, in English, that his accent is terrible.

Raleigh pretends to be very interested in staring at a page deep in the textbook. Yancy is seated two seats up, and their sensei is conducting an impromptu spoken exam one student at a time.

“You know your articles at least. When you split up into groups of two today, try to listen to what the other person is saying. No. How they are saying it. Copy them. Get that cowboy out of your vowels.”

Yancy had studied those articles all night---on his own---and the memory burns with the embarrassment of being singled out for his mistakes.

Raleigh is retaking science, and won’t have a chance to choose a language course himself until next year. He flips to another page of the textbook, watching the minute hand move on the clock. Raleigh is younger than Yancy, which means that he isn’t in the same grade, and he isn’t in the same class; He’s in a jaeger, a twenty-six story tall robot named Gipsy Danger, and the countdown for the drop has already begun.

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A kaiju with skin like chalk tries to tackle their jaeger at the knees. Raleigh and Yancy are stationed in the Sydney Shatterdome for a month, and the great beast’s limbs have enough purchase on the lip of a coral reef to make the move work.

Gipsy Danger steps on its head.

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“Sir?”

“The kaiju is dead, and your jaeger sustained minimal damage. That doesn’t mean I don’t need to understand your thinking.”

Pentecost doesn’t lift his gaze from the terrain pins, or the holograms of jaeger, jaeger, and kaiju. The beast had been the color of the cold sea, and its projected version is a poor match for the lake of blue and clumped plastic that had surrounded it.

“We both thought it was trying to play dead.”

“The blood, you mean?”

“Well, we could see it had these… sacks, on its back, just like Houndjaw had when it came up near Russia. We thought it was like one of those toads, in the desert. The ones that can use their blood as a defense mechanism.”

“I think those squirt it from their eyes, actually,” Raleigh notes.

Tendo scowls at the little hologram. “I hate the kaiju that do that.”

Pentecost nods. “But why go to all the trouble to switch places with Echo Saber? Even if you didn’t think the kaiju could control its blood, you were putting the aerial teams at risk by bringing them back in for an unpracticed maneuver. The first re-hook and re-drop in the middle of a battle.”

“The helicopters are faster, sir.”

“And it had to look…” Raleigh searches for the word. “Deliberate. Like something special that was happening. Sir.”

Pentecost waits for the pilot team to continue.

“It wasn’t just playing dead for its own safety. This kaiju was trying to lure us in. It wasn’t smart, but it understood some aspect of that.”

“And as soon as we switched spots with the point jaeger…” Yancey presses a button and the holograms advance to their next marked spot. “It tried to go around Echo to catch us, because it thought we were more important.”

“Giving Echo a shot at its back.”

Pentecost’s fingers glide over a bump in the pins. The glowing constructs flicker.

“Is there a sim for this?”

Tendo shakes his head.

“Sir, it’s…”

Raleigh knows what Yancy is trying to say.

“The king castles by putting himself on the other side of the rook.”

“But this was a better plan, sir.”

“Because Echo was a rook.”

“But we were a queen.”

=========================================================

It is late in the afternoon, and the young sitkas that have regrown near the road are beginning to lose their boundaries in the fade, becoming groves---the border of the wilderness. Raleigh is nine years old, but he will be ten in only two months, and he is running away from home. The memory does not trace itself out from the reason why he is doing this, but he knows he is going to go to Chelsea’s house and give Chelsea’s father the fifty dollars he has saved so that Mr. Towarak will fly him in a plane to Seward. Chelsea says it’s probably fifty dollars. She says that the bus she rides makes ten stops on the way to Chugiak. The bus that Raleigh rides makes fifteen stops on the way to his house, so he is confident he can walk the distance in two hours. He has brought along a bottle of water, and a duffel bag.

He knows he might come out in Chelsea’s neighborhood if he verges off at an angle through the trees, but he also knows he isn’t supposed to do that.

The road branches into the woods in several places, along street names that Raleigh doesn’t recognize. There is nothing left of these names in his mind. In this memory, every sign is blank.

This section of the school district is totally unfamiliar to Raleigh. If he had a phone, he could text Chelsea and ask for directions, but he hadn’t known if his phone would work in Seward, and he doesn’t want see if he has any missed calls. He realizes---like he’s figured out some puzzle---that all he would have had to do would have been to get on Chelsea’s bus after school. The sun’s position is hard to anticipate in this season, and he isn’t wearing a watch. How much time has passed? Should he have turned off from the main road already?

“Have you ever been to Chugiack, Yancy?”

Yancy stops walking. Raleigh remembers this. Yancy had been there, in his armor. He’d taken a moment to look up and down the stretch of empty road, and then said:

“There’s a kaiju, Raleigh. We have to kill it before it gets any closer to the city.”

And Raleigh remembers this. Raleigh had said:

“I know I could have just ridden Chelsea’s bus home, but then the driver might’ve tried to have the principal call dad, and I don’t know if it’s---if I’m supposed to go past the river and the tracks, or just the river or---”

“You need to focus, Raleigh. Think about where you are.”

“But I don’t know where I am!”

Yancey lifts his head, and his helmet catches some color that has fled from the sky.

“Do you want to go home, Raleigh?”

Raleigh doesn’t answer. Yancey holds out his hand, and Raleigh hoists over the duffel bag. He thinks that Yancy will sling it over his shoulder and they’ll keep walking, but Yaney crouches down and unzips the bag. Raleigh remembers this. Yancey had pulled out a white helmet and set it on the ground at Raleigh’s feet.

“We’re still ten miles from Chugiack, I think. But I know where we’re supposed to be.”

This is a memory of being lost. But Yancy is there, and so this isn’t a memory of that at all.

=========================================================

A kaiju---Category 3, operations name “Knifehead”---comes up from the breach and begins crossing timezones towards Alaska. Shatterdome 3 goes on alert.

Yancy wakes up for the last time.

=========================================================

=========================================================

=========================================================

The Ranger Interface in the conn-pod recognizes and responds to twelve distinct hand signals. If for some reason comms channels are compromised or verbal communication becomes impossible, these signals can continue to convey pilot intent to the Jaeger OS. When Gipsy Danger was repaired, two hand signals in the order were recoded for upgrades in the arsenal, but the basic ten have always been the same.

Thumb in a counterclockwise circle for hatch release.

Four fingers against thumb---two taps---for reactor control checks.

Pilots are required to know these hand codes like a first language---to respond with them instantly. Any pilot advanced enough to have experience in the sims will know the signals almost before their spoken versions. They will not belong to thought.

In the rubble of Tokyo, Mako’s hand is raised in the tiger’s palm pose of signal five.

There is dust upon everything, concrete broken into powders, and the grid of road between the buildings has bulged into a crater. From just beyond the alley Raleigh can hear the steam of utilities lines being sucked into the monster’s lungs, the street an atmosphere of its breath. There’s no acid smell---little Mako’s dress is its own blue, but it’s in shadow. Everything is in shadow. The kaiju a walking eclipse.

Raleigh knows what Mako’s hand signal must mean on the outside, in the jaeger. They won’t have switched to dedicated channels, and he can hear in some other part of himself the noise in Central Command. Tendo is saying something, trying to shout over the men that are struggling to cut power to Gipsy. One of the techs is praying in Chinese.

Stacker Pentecost speaks directly into his headset.

“Describe the memory, ranger.”

“It’s Tokyo, sir! Event two of 2016. Category 2. Onibaba. Mako, she’s---“

“I know, ranger. Can you try to calm her down?”

Little Mako is shaking. Raleigh has never known fear like this, not in his own body, this terror that rages through the drift.

“Not if she was this scared in the memory, sir!”

The marshall is silent. Raleigh has taken the right hemisphere, and he can feel something hot in the middle of his hand. Then there’s a small sound as the channels switch, and Pentecost patches in on both headsets.

“Mako, can you hear me? I know there is a monster, but I’m here now. Can you hear my voice?”

Raleigh can hear Pentecost from somewhere above the buildings. Or from just around the corner. Or from some closed door on the other side of the street.

“The monster is dead, because I’m here in Coyote Tango. Can you see it, Mako?”

Raleigh can see it. There is something in the shadows that changes. It’s the kaiju’s body collapsing, the sun pouring in through its absence, bones like trees breaking against exposed steel girders.

There is a sound like an Olympic pool spiraling down a bathtub drain all at once---step and ankle articulation pistons latching---as two thousand tons of nuclear jaeger shifts into standby mode. Pentecost is standing on Coyote’s hatch platform, a silhouette in the open air.

“I can see you Mako. You don’t have to do anything else. You’re safe now.”

Mako steps out into the street to stare up at Pentecost. There is another feeling in the drift, now, a slow eddy of something that could never be afraid.

“Can you see me?”

Raleigh doesn’t say anything, doesn’t make a sound, but Mako turns as if noticing him for the first time. He meets her eyes, and without a word, offers her the helmet. There is still something frightened in her, but she nods and accepts what Raleigh must mean. Mako Mori, in her blue dress. Mako Mori, in the wound of the city. The relay fluid pours over her hands, but she holds her breath and slips the helmet over her head.

The Shatterdome crew are able to safely carry both rangers’ neural signs back to singular consciousness before they breach the hatch and deactivate the PONS.

Gipsy Danger’s plasmacaster powers down.

=========================================================

When Raleigh comes out of the drift, he is very, very quiet.

++++++++++++++++

++++++++++++++++

Mako’s armor is a gleaming black, an obsidian carving in the dell of evergreens. There is a scabbard at her hip, and the glass of her helmet holds her face like a picture, eyes lost in the reflection. She runs her fingers along a fissure in the bark, a mark of frost on the dark trees.

Raleigh knows this is a memory. There is the copper smell of new oil on the pilot harness, and the light of the display holograms casts the trees in a strange blue.

But before he can feel for the grip pad and ground himself in the jaeger, Mako calmly bends down, gathers a clump of white flakes near the pine roots into a ball and hurls it over the fence. Raleigh doesn’t see it land, but he hears Chelsea cry out in alarm and run east.

“I like this game,” Mako says.

Some distance off, in the forest, Yancy waits patiently, old armor the doubled color of the snow. But he does not speak now, only looks out from some more ancient part of the woods. It is just as Raleigh remembers.

++++++++++++++++

++++++++++++++++

What is true?

In 2016, the kaiju Onibaba surfaces from the ocean and cuts a path of ruin through Tokyo. Dust from the rubble of Minato ward clogs its gills, and it returns to the harbor, tearing at the beams of the shipping cranes in blind struggle before it dies. The city had neither sufficient warning nor time to evacuate, and the kaiju’s attack leaves many dead.

Mako Mori hides behind a dumpster for five hours.

=========================================================

In 2017, Marshall Pentecost assigns a team of two pilots to the jaeger Gipsy Danger. He tells them that they will be following jaeger Romeo Blue on their first assault pattern near Los Angeles, to provide backup and to be evaluated for subsequent drops. As a part of this strike force and in future operations, their call sign on the comms will be “Becket”.

Two boys from Alaska, already linked in the test runs nearly twenty times now, rated drift compatible in the range of ninety-six to ninety-eight percent. So close, you’d think they could be brothers.