When you next wake it’s in the medical wing, and you’re dry and clean and warm and wrapped in blankets and fresh clothes that aren’t yours.

  “Hey,” says Tagouri. She’s sitting next to you in a very nurse-approved chair, towel around her neck, crew tee on top—pilot suit below that, the red-blue-white sleeves tied around her waist. “Welcome back.”

  In answer you lean over and dry heave. Holly doesn’t miss a beat; she produces a steel bedpan from her lap and generously proffers it to you. When nothing comes up, she sets the pan down beside you (you don’t say thanks) and fixes you with those hawkish eyes, a look that might be reproach or pity or contempt or contrition, or maybe the promise of your impending doom, hard to say.

  Now you remember: passing out. Gutierrez hauling you up like a sack of potatoes.

  You rasp, “Thought you said I was a cadet.”

  Holly raises a stormy brow.

  “You are,” she says. “Why?”

  “You fuckers sure aren’t,” you say. “Why add me to your drill patrol?”

  Holly nods slowly. “You’ve been out of it for a while,” she says, “six years, strictly, so I’m going easy on you here. You’re a cadet in rank. We can’t afford the luxury of excluding you from the team after what happened when we lost your sister.”

  She says this delicately, like euphemisms will ever make things easy on you.

  “Right,” you say, “I’m only here because I kind of look like her. If you squint. Like Lau said.”

  Holly purses her mouth.

  “Lau was being an asshole,” she says.

  “No shit,” you say. “Okay, so I’m a cadet on paper and a pilot in the field because nobody else, what, fits the onesie Ray left behind—“ obviously not, since you’re a near full head shorter, obviously it was the psych traits test match with me that necessitated bringing you here, but close enough, you’re in a flippant mood—“and you toss me in the deep end day one because you need me so bad. So you couldn’t be fucking bothered to get me a decent uniform before dumping me in to freeze to death?”

  Holly sighs.

  “You’re fine, soldier,” she says. “Little bit of sync sickness, little bit of hypothermia, nothing an adrenaline shot and an electrolyte booster couldn’t help. You didn’t die. Come on.”

  “Oh, fuck you,” you say, rising from the bed, shrugging off your blankets, “you know that’s bullshit. You know I’m at a disadvantage here. You didn’t take thirty seconds to tell me to suit up before I got out there, or that we would be in long enough to merit a suit, or that I’d be railroaded into sorties with you fucks instead of regular cadet induction procedure. You didn’t say a word to Lau yesterday—or Gutierrez—and you sure as hell,” leveling a pointed finger at her, voice shaking, “never told me I’d be out there with Carol fucking Chang.”

  Holly, to her credit, looks back at you without flinching. “You didn’t think we brought you here for your dashing good looks, did you?”

  “Fuck off.”

  Holly raises her hands.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  “Alright,” she says after a moment. “Fair enough. Meng said not to tell you you’d be cleared immediately for active duty, let alone paired with your sister’s teammate, because it might spook you. Was she wrong?”

  She wasn’t, but she didn’t have the right, you want to scream. Even you, however, are smart enough to realize: this is something Holly probably isn’t meant to tell you. Surely she knows what she’s doing. An olive branch, then? It’s enough to make you shut up and listen.

  “So here we are,” says Holly. “You want to go home?”

  And admit you’re a little bitch? Hell no.

  You say stubbornly, “Press said Carol retired when Ray got killed.”

  “And yet here she is,” says Holly evenly. “We went through a lot of trouble to get you, you know. Wasn’t easy. You were pretty serious about tossing out our letters.” She stands, underlining how very fucking small you feel. “Look—I’m sorry nobody got you a suit before we went in. Drills are supposed to be as real as possible. We may not get time to suit up, or call home, or pray. Not if the big one comes.” That’s reasonable. She seems genuine about the apology. You’re still not totally mollified. “We’ll get you that suit as soon as possible,” she says. “Lau and Gutierrez have already been disciplined. We’re not out to get you, Emma, I swear.”

  You bite your lip and say nothing.

  “Come on,” says Holly. “Gutierrez has been hovering over you like a mother hen for two straight hours now. Really gonna leave her hanging?”

  You follow her gaze to the big window across from you—the big wraparound floor-to-ceiling pane Holly toured with you earlier—and see, to your horror, Gutierrez’s big dumb face floating in it, and next to her the other pilots: Venkatesh and Lau, both dimly recognizable from the old press conference videos, and Carol Chang, her back to you, only a long thick fall of black hair visible.

  As you watch Carol turns, looks back through the window at you—you see her face for the first time, and it’s both terribly familiar and not at all. At your sister’s side in all those press releases she’d been a quiet, skinny little girl, and now that you see her in person—six years older—it’s like the softening the cathode ray tubes inevitably did to her on TV has all bled away. She’s sharp, angular, pale and flat-browed; the set of her jaw, the slash of her mouth, is hungry and lean and hollow enough to put her somewhere north of pretty. And her eyes are black, black, black, and so intense you find yourself recoiling like it’s another million-watt headlamp.

  She looks at you for a moment longer, then away. Something inside you relaxes—or coils—or both. (Maybe she’s gossiping with the rest of them about you out there. Sure thing they all already know how the first thing you did out of your unit was fall over and puke. Gutierrez’s big mouth wouldn’t have it any other way.)

  “Yeah,” you say. “Yeah, sure. Whatever.”

  “Thanks, Emma,” says Holly, sounding for all the world like she means it. She looks like she does, too. Makes it worse.

  Your cheeks burn. “What else should I know?”

  There it is again—the ghost of a smile on her stern, straight lips.

  “You’ll learn,” she says. “Just relax. Stick to your training. Oh…and try not to talk to Carol about your sister. Our condolences, by the way.”

  What the hell is that supposed to mean? You’re fuming—about that, and about being kept in the dark, and about fucking Lau and Gutierrez—about the fact that you still don’t feel like you’ve gotten even for all of it, but frankly, you don’t have it in you to follow through, not now, still shivering and worn from the stupid fucking hypothermia. You rise, ease your bare feet onto the floor—cold enough to make you startle and hiss—and look back at the window, where Holly has just come out.

  There they all are, the ruins of Hong Kong Station’s defense force, six years older, six years wiser, six years stranger. Gutierrez is grinning; so’s Venkatesh. Lau hangs somewhere behind them, watching. And Carol—Carol -

  Carol doesn’t look at you. And you can’t stop looking at her.

  Because the ghost of your sister has hung over you for six years; when you gaze into the window at her old teammate you see, in your reflected face beside her, the pale, tired, lesser imitation of her. Is this how she looked the night she died? Did she think you’d be hunted down, later, to take her place? Did she really think she’d destroy the rest of the monsters and save the world by blowing herself up? Did she think of you first?

  You don’t know, and the absence of knowing has gnawed at you for six long years. But you know who does know: You know she was there, too, at the Rift when your sister killed herself, the closest unit to the blast when it went off. More, you know that Barracuda is the sword to Tokyo Calling’s shield. Helms entangled. Till death do they part. Carol knows.

  There and then you decide: To hell with Holly. You’re going to ask Carol. You’re going to find out.