You’re dreaming.

  In the dream you are somewhere deep and dark and cold: your mortal eyes reveal no light to you, but through other means you see in shades of bass and tenor and soprano. What you see is a cathedral, the soaring ceiling made of ice, buttressed with long smooth fingers of it, the hanging pendant bosses like anglerfish eyes, all still and soundless but for the noise of your own resounding footsteps.

  Somewhere here in the forest of ice is a monster. You have been tracking it steadily over fifty miles of seabed, from McMurdo eastward, by the bright plumes of scent and piss and excrement that it leaves streaked across your display.

  There is fire in your heart. You exhale, and it drives you forward.

  You’ve been here a dozen times before, and a dozen times you have failed. Now, dogged, you bear down on the trail of your prey and think only that you should have made more certain which monster you hunted before you waded knee-deep into the thick of it.

  It’s big, this one. Not as big as the one you (your team) took down in the waking world, but big still, not easily grappled, hungry, ravening. It won’t be an easy kill for you and your sword alone. The Barracuda warned you of this before you went in. The first few times you ignored her. You know better now.

  You’ll have to be smart.

  Your team is not with you. Your team should be with you. Your team was with you, but you don’t know where they are now; it doesn’t matter; you are here, and you must move. There is a monster afoot, and you are here to hunt monsters.

  You move slowly, breathe slowly. No hurry. Radio silence keeps you cloaked. You can trace this part with your eyes closed, your sonar mouth shut: the cardiform ice phalanges, the stooped passage underneath. The monster has been here; you know from the gashes scored across the walls of each pillar, and the wake of its passage has left patterns of waves that echo back and forth between each surface—if you call up data analyses, run regressions, you can triangulate where it’s gone, and so you have. (How naive of you to think that this is not mere misdirection—that the monsters do not sing siren songs on purpose to trick your sonar and lead you the wrong way. In past dreams you knew better than this, but you seem to have forgotten what you learned then.)

  And what of your sword? Where is she? How like you to go charging off without her; you must have taught her that habit, didn’t you; she loved you, you know, like her own breath and water. You’ve forgotten her again. In the dream we are at once old and young and you see through two eyes—yours, and mine, which are colored by the dreams of before. (You have been here a dozen times and also a hundred.) And though you haven’t noticed it yet, I know the before dwells anyway in your hindbrain, leaks into your muscle memory, makes you unconsciously better at what you are doing—but only a little better, like, really bad instead of catastrophically bad.

  Take now, for example, where you have gone exactly in the opposite direction from your target.

  You haven’t realized this, of course. You sense the confluence of several primary wake patterns; you think, There she is, and you bear down. You can nearly taste the exoskeleton already, feel your great steel fists sink into the soft underflesh. You take a deep breath and round a corner and there it is, as tall as you, with shoulders like mountains and a single red eye, rising out of the depths before you. Too close to strike; too final to run. Mark the thirteenth failure.

  The monster says, in a voice like an earthquake, as though it’s a choice: “Mind if I join you?”

  -

  So you say Sure, of course, and the sim runs to completion, this time 5% closer to success, because Carol has left you mainly in charge of strategy, preferring to hang back and observe you, since otherwise what’s the point of all this practice. Fair play. Still sucks. You never even glimpse the target.

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  SESSION ENDED, says your HUD. The sudden release of your helmet feels like opening your eyes. The chamber of the sim pod is draining out by your feet; you hear it gurgling through the darkened walls. I relinquish you from your restraints, and you slip (a little awkwardly) out and down, and step forward and out, through the irising door into the light. That makes the sixtieth time you’ve run this scenario now, one submitted by Christchurch: a class A/B, smaller than 2941 C but bigger than the one that destroyed Monterey. Carol thinks Christchurch had a girl put into a coma for twenty days over it. Lau thinks Christchurch is soft.

  Carol is already in the antechamber when you reach it, still dripping wet with saline. She doesn’t look at you as you go for your kit. “Your form’s off,” she says.

  “What form,” says Lau from the floor. “Mou la, Carol, seriously.”

  “Don’t be a dick,” says Carol. “Kanagawa, show me your neutral stance.”

  “Not being a dick,” says Lau, “just saving you grief.”

  In sim it’s easier to avoid snipes like this—with Carol there, you can just focus on the other’s comms; without her, Lau falls blessedly silent besides what callouts are mandatory. This time you just say, “Thanks, Lau,” and fall into position: knees bent, spine straight, weight forward, painfully aware of how silly you must look.

  Carol circles around you. Then her fingers are on the back of your neck (you remember unbidden, flickering, this same touch in another context; quickly you shove the memory back and focus on the now). She says, “You hunch too much. You’re going to want more tone in your back. Burns less fuel when you go active.”

  “More time in gym will help,” you say.

  Carol tips her head. “Yes,” she says, “it will. You going now?”

  “Sure.” It’s as good an excuse as any to leave Lau behind—to sulk, or scheme, or whatever she does when you’re not around.

  “Gym alone won’t be enough,” says Lau behind you. “You need to learn. Instruction.”

  “Sure,” says Carol, “feel free to volunteer.”

  “Fuck you, Carol,” says Lau. “You know I’m leading evening patrol with Venkatesh today. You do it.”

  Carol shrugs gracefully. “You say I don’t get it right.”

  “You don’t,” says Lau. “You’re a horrible teacher and your stance sucks.”

  “Thanks,” says Carol. “I do my best.”

  Lau makes a noise that might be a hiss or a snort and shoves the wet bulk of her suit into her bag. Were she any taller you might have been afraid; as it is, when she draws herself up to her full height, you are put in mind of nothing so much as a soggy honey badger. “Good luck,” she snarls, and is gone. The door slams shut behind her.

  A moment passes. You say, “If she doesn’t like me, I can try—”

  “Don’t bother,” says Carol. “Not worth it. Just stay cool.” And, “Let’s look at your form again.”

  You shrug and assume your stance. Hey, maybe she’s got a point—and even if she doesn’t, you’re starting to figure out that it’s more comfortable not to care.

  Afterward, every part of your body sore and drained, you eat dinner alone in the cafeteria, hunched over by the barren lunch counter. It is strange to be in your civvies after so long in the saltwater chamber. You’ll get used to it. (In your days at the academy you never spent this long at once in sim, and it has been years; still, if you got used to it then, you can surely manage it again.)

  You have noticed that nobody besides the pilots ever uses this cafeteria, with the digital mural of Hainan at the far end, and when B-Team uses it it’s only ever when your team is out. Mostly, anyway. Today there are a couple of the juniors in the corner—well, not so much younger than you, twenty maybe, but to you they seem like children—and in between bites, from the corner of your eye, you catch them stealing glances at you.

  You lower your head and focus on the food. Better not wonder if they’ve seen you before, or what they think of you, or if that subdued laughter is because of you. (You’re not that important, I’d remind you, if only you were listening.)

  When dinner is done there is time to go for more sims—but you are already exhausted from the hours earlier with Carol, and so you go to your room instead and shut the door and shuck off your fatigues and stand under the shower head, the water off, unmoving. Now you can breathe again. In the silence comes the slow, steady drip of water from the faucet in your bathroom and the hum of the vents above you.

  Alone at last. Except, of course, for me.