Your momentum carries you tumbling out of what remains of the minefield, back onto the sand around Lantau, and you are still moving too fast, and your barriers are too weak now to act as a drogue, no matter how you stretch them out. Then out of the darkness streaks the long white pillar of Barracuda’s lance, and you hear her on the radio, blessedly tinny: “You’re overspeed—” Instinctively (your instinct this time, not mine), you reach out and grab the spine of her lance; the force of this catches you immediately, nearly strips the teeth of your shoulder servos, but by the gods, you stop.

  For a long moment there is only dust. In the pitch dark you are not sure if you are floating or falling, which way is up or down; there is only you and your helmet and the wild drumbeat of your own heart (and me, still nestled within your brainstem). You are panting; your breath is strange and tinny; you cannot feel your limbs, and then you realize your limbs are not what you thought they were, and then it strikes you all at once—the weight of two bodies in one brain. Your shoulder’s throbbing to match the overextension in mine. You look at Carol—Carol-as-Barracuda, Barracuda-as-Carol—and she looks back at you, and the silence is broken only by the ragged, sharp sound of your own breathing.

  Then Carol says, “Hey.” And, “Welcome back.”

  The dust is slowly settling, and in the negative space left behind is Barracuda, looking down at you, a faint red moon through the turbid gloom, her lance like a pillar of Buddha himself. And you are you, small and fleshy and full of pain. She looks at you; you look at her. You key the mic. Nothing comes out.

  Well shit, that’s embarrassing. Carol notices, obviously. The radio crackles: “You good?”

  There is a ringing in your ears. Still, you have to say something. Something wet is trickling down your philtrum, probably blood; you lick it away and swallow and taste copper—definitely blood—and that brings you back enough into awareness for you to remember what words are. You say, hoarse, surprisingly steady: “Yeah,” and, “Great—nominal. You?”

  “Fine,” says Carol. “Wasn’t sure you’d get back on your own, though. Was going to come get you.” A pause. “Sure you’re good?”

  Is she surprised? Is that a bad thing? “Yeah,” you say. “Why?”

  “Well,” says Carol, “your readings are kind of high. Thought you might have burst something.” And, “Biosigns are a little fucky.”

  Shit—she’s not wrong. (Meanwhile your system is nudging urgently at you, a tug from somewhere behind your navel: your HUD says BARRIER INTEGRITY LOW, with a list of analytics under that, and L1 TURB COMPROMISED, L2 SONAR COMPROMISED, L1 TEMP 2 COMPROMISED, URGENT MAINTENANCE ADVISORY. Your core is all but burning, human and machine alike.)

  You can tell her you’re not okay, you know. You should, really. You should take five, or ten, who knows how long; you can let the fans in your helmet dry the blood on your face, wait till your blood pressure has settled back down to average again; you can look the red light in the eye, say you need time, and never mind that the shushing of the sea sounds like the drone of the air conditioner in a little white plaster-slathered room ten thousand miles away, on the other side of a wall.

  “I’m fine,” you say. “Let’s go.”

  The red eye looks at you. “We can take a moment if you want.”

  “I said I’m fine,” you say.

  Silence. Is she suspicious? Surely, you think. For a moment there is only you and the sea and that singular red eye. Then Carol says, “Alright,” and you exhale. “We can vector for Chek Lap Kok, then. If you want.”

  And she releases her lance with a hiss and a plume of steam: it sinks back into her arm and the gauntlet closes smoothly around it like waters cleaving together over a body.

  Even the little force of letting go causes you to stumble a little, and you do not fight this: you allow the movement to send you staggering forward, half-bent, to catch your breath. Inwardly you are a live nerve, a frayed wire; you’re trembling like a rabbit in the snare. When you’d put your whole arm into the beak of that cleo it had hurt, sure, but nothing like this; that was a love bite: this was a thorough testing of the limits of every part of your body, and though it is not that rigorous by Titan or pilot standards (you will come to learn this later on) it is still enough to make you groan.

  You’ll close your eyes only for a moment, you tell yourself, thirty seconds and then you’ll sort through the alarms in detail—and suddenly the red light is back on you, so harsh that even with your eyes shut, you squint against the intensity. The radio crackles. Fuck, you think wearily.

  “Your heat sig’s way up,” Carol says.

  She’s not wrong here either. It is. You say, “I came out a little fast.”

  “I noticed,” Carol says. “How’s your ambient doing?”

  You say, “What about going to Chek Lap Kok?”

  “Changed my mind,” says Carol. “We’ll go together. In a bit. So?”

  You don’t answer, which is partly because you are too overwhelmed right now to focus on ambient readings and partly because you are not even sure which, among the array of sensor datapoints clamoring for your attention right now, those are, and partly because you still do not wholly trust yourself to speak. And partly, maybe, because you are resentful, but you are not ready to consider that yet. Instead you focus on shutting your eyes and breathing in, then out, and then you open your eyes again and find that she’s still looking at you.

  “So nothing,” you say. “I’m working on it. Why are you here?”

  Isn’t it obvious? Carol says, “Thought you could use the company.” And, “Your heat sig is really high.”

  “I liked you better when you were beating me up,” you say.

  “Funny,” says Carol, “didn’t think you’d be into that.” And she settles into a kneel, slow and graceful as a tree falling. The baleful red eye does not move at all; it is as a searchlight upon you, pinning you in place. (Even now some small part of you fights to quail back.) She says, “So. I feel like you might be pissed.”

  What does that mean? You say, “Why would I be pissed?”

  “I don’t know,” Carol says. “Barracuda says Tokyo’s worried.”

  Oh, I know what you’re thinking here: so your little pet fax machines have tea parties with each other and exchange gossip without you listening? Yes, in fact, we do, thank you very much. No, you will never be cool enough for an invite.

  “Maybe Tokyo’s wrong,” you say. “Or dramatic. Maybe Tokyo hasn’t acclimated to my moods yet.”

  “Doubtful,” Carol says. “You’re pretty easy to read.”

  “Oh, really,” you say, “so what, you’ve acclimated to my moods? Tell me how I’m feeling, O All-Seeing Eye of Buddha.”

  “Sure,” says Carol. “You’re not happy. Maybe because I threw you into the open ocean and left you to die.”

  “I’m fine,” you say. “I’m not unhappy.” Then you stop and take a deep breath. “Okay,” you say, “yeah, you did kind of leave me to die. But you did say Tokyo wouldn’t let me die, so it’s fine—and honestly, it was really me throwing myself out there, so—” there’s blood seeping into your mouth again; you pause a moment to swallow— “I don’t think I get to be pissed about that. Probably.”

  “I mean,” says Carol, “you get to be pissed about whatever feels right to you. I don’t mind.”

  Your thrusters whine when you command them beyond idle. “So you do own up to leaving me there to die,” you say.

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  “Well,” says Carol, “yeah. I mean, not really, because I was going to come for you, but then you were out before I could do that. I mean, threading the needle is pretty complicated. It would have taken time. I was going to warn you, but the radio was just noise.”

  “Yeah,” you say. “I believe you. It’s cool.” And you briefly flirt with the idea of telling her about it, how you managed to do it anyway, alone, without training, except you can’t even think about that right now, not really: you don’t really know how you did it on a conscious level; you are still trying to piece it together in the mundane forward part of your brain, the part that reels away from things as fractal and terrifying and huge as an alien mind butting into yours and taking over what you have been told is your body, even if it is not literally your body, because the little embedded chip in your brain and the accompanying flickers of light down the tube between helmet and cradle shell tell you it’s your body, so it may as well be (brain in a vat, shadows on the cavern wall, and so forth). You cannot put into words, not yet, what it feels like to be jammed wholesale into a vessel and then torn apart from it—you can barely even recognize that some part of you, in the id basement beneath the ego, helped yourself be torn, willingly participated in the horror of it. It is like describing a color you have never seen. Your nose is leaking again.

  Into the silence Carol says, “So you’re not mad about that.”

  “I thought you said I was easy to read,” you say.

  “Okay,” she says, “mea culpa. I lied.”

  “Wow,” you say. “Well, now I am mad. You should be honest with your own damn shield. I’m hurt.”

  Carol snorts.

  “I’m kidding,” you say. “So.”

  “So.” She says, “It’s something else.” You don’t answer. “Let me try again,” she says. “I took things too far. I made you drink from the firehose after promising not to. If that’s it, then I’m sorry.”

  “Wrong,” you say. “You didn’t go far enough.”

  For a long moment you both look at each other. Your cooling system is finally able to handle the overflow from your boiling reactor—barely, but able. You allow it to sop up heat for a second, five, ten. There is something dreamlike, you think, in this, the distant push-pull of the tides complementing the hum of distal actuators coming slowly back online: the flicker of hull sensors, the soft red of her eye, the breathless quiet.

  Silence. Then Carol says, slowly: “You wanted me to keep going.”

  “I want you to keep going,” you agree.

  “Hm,” says Carol. “Ah. You’re not mad. You’re foolhardy.”

  “Yeah,” you say. “Yeah, maybe I am.” You are easy to read, after all. “So?”

  “Your system’s, like,” Carol says, “half in tatters.”

  “Still online,” you say. “You tapping out?”

  “That’s how you want to do this?” says Carol. “Cool.” And she rises, just as gracefully, and her thrusters flare; she moves toward you until she’s within melee range, a mere ten meters away, perhaps. “Alright, go ahead,” she says. “Hit me.”

  “But I’m half in tatters,” you say. “Like you said. Really going to pick on the wounded kid?”

  “Wow. Okay,” Carol says. “Then I promise not to dodge.”

  You say, “I don’t think your opponent can ask you to checkmate them.”

  “Technically that would be a resignation,” Carol says.

  “Okay,” you say. “I don’t want you to resign. I want to win, fair and square, or die trying.”

  “That’s a little extreme,” says Carol. “I’m not going to kill you.”

  “Sure,” you say, engaging your calf thrusters gingerly, “and you didn’t have your lance pointed at me earlier.”

  “Tokyo would’ve saved you,” says Carol again. “Tokyo did save you. It’s not that bad.” Then: “Okay—I get it. Fair enough. You don’t want me to just give it to you.”

  “I did make you promise not to sandbag,” you say.

  “Right,” says Carol. “So do you want to try to hit me again, now, for real? No sandbagging.”

  “Nah,” you say, “my biosigns are fucky, and I think I’ve burst something. Give me a minute.”

  “Ha. Right,” Carol says. Then she holds out one vast and gauntleted hand, thrusters flickering, an aurora of sound blooming violet around her all the way from elbow to fingertips. You stare dumbly at her for a moment before you realize she’s offering to help you up, an unexpectedly human gesture here.

  When you reach out your whole body groans, both outwardly and inwardly; your flesh arm endures echoes of the damage to your metal one, an old spandrel of pilot nervous coupling that sends residual signals both ways through the link. (And is it really so bad doubling up on system alarms anyway, your organic pain receptors and my synthetic warnings? Twice the lesson learned.) Carol probably hears the grunt you let out between your teeth; you are endlessly grateful that she doesn’t comment on it—it is a quiet and brutal kindness.

  “So if you’re still fucky enough that you don’t think you can hit me, fair and square,” Carol says, “but you also don’t want me to just let you do it, what’s your goal here? Guilt-tripping?”

  “Good guess,” you say, “but no, I’m just stalling.” And, rallying your other arm, you hit her.

  Which only even connects because to her it looks like you’re taking her hand, so she isn’t prepared. Even so, she almost dodges you, but you are too close—her thrusters are all idling when you begin the hit and would take too long to spool up—you have the advantage in nearly every way, for once, and the side of your hand grazes her gauntlet and reverberates through both of you, your whole chassis.

  You fall back, and Carol says “Damn!” and cants sideways and back in languid slow motion. You are paying for it already: the cooling loops are whining again, your reactor stutters for a millisecond—long enough that even your molasses-slow human perception picks up on that, no need for me to tell you. And Carol is upright, still, but you know you hit her, you know it, you know from the way that paint flecks are swirling off your forearm to match the piezoelectric buzz in your still-wrapped barriers, from the triumphant reverberation that echoes underneath them.

  Breathless, your whole body singing with pain and adrenaline alike, you say, “Does that count?”

  For a long moment she just looks at you. You wonder, briefly, dazedly, if she is not angry with you. Then she says, “Jesus,” and she doesn’t sound angry at all—surprised, maybe, quietly so. “You planned that.”

  It isn’t a question. You answer anyway: “Since I came back,” you say, “and figured you felt bad enough to get close, and let your guard down.”

  “Wow,” she says, and falls silent for another moment, in which your Van Attas receive only the sound of the water still settling around you. Then: “Deceiving and attacking your own senior during a training mission, huh?”

  “Not a training mission, and you didn’t have a problem ambushing me earlier,” you say. “Megs are dicks, you said. I’m just helping you practice. Besides”—you take a moment to swallow back the blood leaking down your philtrum again; somehow you find yourself relishing the awful, heady, electric taste—“isn’t this what you’re getting at? Slowthink—long-term strategy. Outplaying the enemy. Checkmate,” you say. “Right?”

  “Yeah,” she says, and oh, she’s definitely smiling. “I mean. Throwing yourself into the mines just to get me to let my guard down is—”

  “Stupid?” you say. “Unnecessary? Overly dramatic?”

  “I was going to say unorthodox,” says Carol. “But yeah, that works too.” She lets her engines fall back to idle. Barracuda draws near again in your visuals. “One point to Kanagawa,” she says, “ceasefire until I say so.” She’s holding out her hand once more: the same one, you notice through blurry viewports (or maybe your own eyes are swimming, or both). “Deal?”

  “I don’t think I trust my systems to move right now,” you say, and she snorts over the radio.

  “You can move,” she says. “Tokyo will step in if you do anything really stupid. You’ll be fine.”

  “Sure,” you say, and before she can nag you any more you fire off both calves and drag yourself upright: the pain is worth it. No hand needed, because even here you are stubborn. At the last minute you stagger; good thing she takes you by the wrist, keeps you from falling, screech of metal on metal, but it works.

  “So I win,” you say, “right?” She just looks silently at you. “Say it,” you say. “Say it or I’ll keep going.”

  Carol says, “Let’s call it a draw,” and, “I think you’d stall halfway through the punch if you tried,” but she’s still smiling, you can hear it—and your heart is racing in your chest, thundering, really; for all that you hurt, maybe because you hurt, you feel so very, very alive.

  “I think you’re just afraid of me. I think you don’t want to risk a rematch. I’m naming this the Kanagawa Gambit, by the way,” you say, and it’s amazing how you can picture her face without seeing it at all; “I think you’d better start brushing up on your chess before it’s too late.”

  “Thought you said you were bad at chess,” says Carol.

  “Maybe that’s a gambit too,” you say. “Chek Lap Kok?”

  “Yeah,” says Carol. “Chek Lap Kok. You lead the pace.”

  “So you are going to baby me,” you say.

  “If you act like a baby,” says Carol, “sure.”

  “How much older than me are you, again?” you say.

  “Old enough to know when you’re blustering to impress your elders,” says Carol. “So?”

  “Oh, fuck you,” you say. “You’re just a sore loser.” But you go without complaint, anyway; and every step, each fresh well of metal in your mouth, all the echoes of lapsed alarms, whispers more, more, more.