You find that you cannot muster up sleep. Instead, you toss and turn and stare up at the ceiling, cursing yourself silently, until at last you give up. Beside your bed, still on the stack of cardboard boxes you haven’t bothered to break down and get rid of yet, is the console, with all the protocols and records and other boring things loaded on it—good distractions from your ever-present shame. You sit up, settle into the lotus position, pull the console onto your lap.

  It has been three-and-some weeks since that fateful morning when you found lube in your toothpaste bottle. In that time you have given yourself a haircut, trimming back the limp brown mop of your hair, and the baby fat has already begun to slough off—unlike Meng’s advice, which has not worn off on you yet. In the mirror after dinner, mouth full of toothpaste (not lube), you’d turned your jaw this way and that, inspecting the soft curve of it. Still softer than Rachel ever looked, even at your age, or when she left. You hate that about yourself. You’re the youngest girl on the team, two years under Gutierrez, who’s next oldest; and you look it—but at least not as much as you did before.

  Now you push the bangs from your face—a holdover from when they really were in your eyes—and squint down at the console, a holdover from when you had to wear glasses, when you were even more pathetic than you are now.

  “Tokyo,” you say, “are you there?”

  ALWAYS, answers the screen of your console.

  You forget that we machines do not need your weakling mortal sleep, and that I am imprisoned in your head eternally—or maybe you don’t care and only ask me because it gives you the comforting semblance of etiquette offered to real company. Either way: “What’s a good protocol for learning about genetic hierarchy?”

  THAT DEPENDS ON THE SCOPE OF YOUR QUERY, I say (subtitles still scrolling across the console, just in case you’re still bad at reading my raw intracranial output—you are).

  “Something appropriate for someone who only ever took Megafauna 101,” you say, “and got a C-plus in AP Biology.”

  I RECOMMEND GOING BACK FOR MEGAFAUNA 102, I tell you.

  “Funny,” you say. “Fuck you. Give me a protocol.”

  IT WON’T BE FUN FOR YOU.

  “I didn’t ask for fun.”

  Fine. I pull up AVY-001392: Civilian Bulletin for Identification of and Response to Megafauna Incidents by Event Class.

  At least it isn’t totally foreign to you. You weren’t lying about having taken courses. You know the classes and their sizes; that there is roughly an order of magnitude in mass difference between each consecutive class, A and B, B and C, C and D. And the greatest category yet encountered is F.

  F was the class your sister met when she—

  Well. Anyway. Six classes, arranged in increasing likelihood of destruction, alike in dignity.

  This hardly helps with genetic ordering, because each class describes only rough size of specimen, not species. There are as many different types of Meg as there are stars in the sky, it seems, or dickwads in the pilot program. Okay, not quite that many.

  Which do you remember? Cleos, sure, the ones you faced most recently: mollusks, with great shells like mountains, most closely related to the hoplitids—an ancient family of ammonites—aren’t those the ancestors of nautiluses? Hey, biology never was your strong suit. All you know is they’re tough to pierce, thanks to their shells, but slow as Megs go, and shy, also as Megs go. Last time one breached a city wall was—well, probably fifteen years ago, San Diego.

  Then there are the plate-heads, the neoradiodonts, the hydras and serpentines and sovereign rexes -

  You shut your eyes and growl in frustration. Six years ago you might have been good at this; now it just hurts your head.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  Why bother with this anyway? You’re just pilots, not lab techs. Sure, in academy it made sense to learn—when is school not full of theoretical bullshit you don’t end up using in your career—but now? You shut your eyes and think briefly, stubbornly, of being out there instead, floating in the cradle.

  “Tokyo,” you say, eyes still shut, “pull up a map of Lantau for me.”

  BLACK-AND-WHITE OR FULL COLOR? I ask you.

  “So help me God,” you say, having mistaken my helpfulness for the sort of cruel joke you’d pull, “I will lobotomize myself if that’s what it takes.”

  So I deliberately delay the console process by a full five hundred milliseconds, and the flicker of impatience that registers in your prefrontal cortex brings me what passes for great joy in my own system.

  At last, there it is: a full map of Lantau Island, above and below water level. Sonar has mapped the below; it is, thus, rendered in false color. What are you looking for? The dignity you lost when you pulled that stunt with Carol? Buddha’s head, decapitated and rolling in the deep? No, you aren’t looking at all. You’re staring blindly into the topography of it. (If you just wanted another look at your face, you could’ve turned the console off again.)

  There’s the peak, Ngong Ping, still above water like a dog treading in shallows; the dredged depths of the harbor are dark pits around it. There’s the upraised hand where you discovered the traces that Carol says your leviathan targets mistook for family—do you believe her? Never mind; it doesn’t matter; you’re just the mook, the hand, and Meng is the brain, the head. No need to think. Speaking of thinking: it takes you longer than me to realize (seven hundred fifty milliseconds late) that you are crying.

  Violently, without a sound. You lift a hand to your face to stifle the flow and find that you are biting your lower lip tightly between your teeth. It doesn’t hurt. You don’t hurt. You are angry.

  Angry the way you were when Carol came to your room with your uniform, not yet having apologized for what she’d asked you while undressing in the antechamber; angry the way you might have been when you’d discovered the lube, the fucking lube in your stupid fucking toothpaste, the way you should have been, the way you deserved to be. Angry the way you were when you punched Gutierrez. When you told them all at the party what you really thought of them.

  Because, fuck, you were angry, under all that feel-good, all those artificially released neurotransmitters—no amount of them drugging you changes that. You should be angry. Fucking lube in your toothpaste? Really, Gutierrez?

  Only—and I’ve known this from the beginning, from the swelling in your hypothalamus—you’re not really angry at them. You’re angry at you.

  Gutes told you, Sometimes you have to piss people off to say what you need to say. And Meng said, Act like a pilot—and, Keep your head down. So which is it? Does it matter? You don’t belong here. The crushing loneliness of that truth takes up half your brain-space whether you believe it or not, and I do, because I live in that space, and the weight of it nearly flattens me.

  At the academy, you recall, you’d been lonely too. Before Rachel left she’d been your best friend, and after, nothing filled the hole in her wake; you didn’t want anything to fill the hole. Even six years later, when you got the news, long after you’d gotten over her leaving you, you hadn’t wanted to fill it. You thought you’d gotten over the loneliness by now. Guess not.

  So what, you repeat your academy career? Talk to nobody and alienate everyone around you? Just smile and let Lau keep shouting you down? Sink straight to the bottom as surely as if you’d gotten in your Titan’s cradle and stepped out into the sea and zeroed your engine, all the way into the Rift?

  You told yourself you can’t go back to being nothing—and that’s true. But you have to be more than just something. You have to be more than this, too.

  You stare a moment longer without comprehending at the wireframe map of Lantau, the Buddha, the outstretched hand where Carol told you to sit and wait against orders. Then you shove the console violently aside and get up, storming over to the sink. You fold it down from the wall and white-knuckle the rim and grab the scissors from the alcove under the mirror—and you stare at your reflection, lit in green-white by the running lights around its edges, and your panting, furious, contorted face stares back at you, and you realize:

  You’re not special; you’re not the only person on the team the rest don’t like. More importantly, not everyone on the team seems to hate you.

  It’s obvious, of course. It’s been obvious this whole time, and you’ve been aware of it ever since she apologized and, yeah, then what followed on your bed, not that that helped much of anything. But you haven’t wanted to confront it, have you? You’ve been ignoring it the way you ignore everything, like your grief back then: as if not looking it in the eye will make it go away. Because you are a coward, and you’d rather run from unpleasant things than face them head-on.

  Everything is unpleasant about the idea of trying to make friends with your dead sister’s sworn sword.