“Stay put,” says Carol. “Be quiet.”

  You can manage that much, at least. Being silent means no long-distance radioing—no snitching to Central. Full send.

  Fine. You hunker down and wait.

  On your wireframe you lose a lot of data: sonar, mainly, and teammate radio pings, too. You only know Carol’s still next to you because she was there a moment ago, and because a slight shift in the tone of the nearly uniform gray-black around you shows where the water ends and the silhouette of Barracuda starts.

  Your blood rushes in your ears. You listen as another distant blast rocks you, then another.

  They’re closer now, or more energetic, or both. The next wave shoulders you squarely in the chest and nearly sways your hold; you lean into it, try to ride it, the way they taught you at Alcatraz. (See?—not wholly incompetent.) All the while you are haunted by the thought of what awaits you out there, and you itch to see for yourself, but you know that whatever kind of trouble you’ve gotten yourself into by following Carol out here, you’ll only double it by being hasty. So you stand still. You stay silent.

  The next exclamation is close enough that you hear it fully, a cacophony of frantic shrill pings that bounce off your hull, underlined by a deep, resonating thunder.

  “On my count,” says Carol, low, “brace up and step left.”

  Behind her you see the bronze skin of Buddha dimpling; the pelt of algae has shredded in places under the force of the traveling shocks. A moment later they will be reflected back at you.

  “Three,” says Carol. You breathe out.

  A glimmer pierces the gloom: a headlamp, slicing it open like a saber. “Two,” says Carol. Might be Mazu, or Sea Witch, or Fishhawk. It’s gone before you can tell.

  “One,” says Carol. “Shield.”

  The ocean erupts with sound and light.

  There is the cleonicerotid, its great white flank pebbled with barnacles, the shell heaving toward you like a mountain, your view of the face dominated by a single great eye, and under that the fleshy mass of the rest of its body; it must be a couple body lengths from you, but it fills your whole sight. You exhale and bring your left arm up—the actuators groan, you can feel the pistons working—and release your shield from its sheath: it blooms outward like a flower made of carbon sinter, deceivingly delicate lace stretched over steel fingers. You step to the side.

  The monster wails. You feel that wail in your bones: it travels into the metal skin of your body and up through the pistons and actuators and into the supports of your torso, right into your atomic heart. With your meat-body you strain; you command your iron limbs to hold fast against the shocks, and they do.

  The momentum of the beast is unstoppable, though, a great forward-surging charge, and that you cannot wholly sidestep, not in time, although you grit your teeth and dig your feet into the bed of the sea and pivot as hard as you can. The water around you heats; it translates into a bubbling itch along your spine and ribcage. You have reached the actuating speed limit on your chassis, and two hundred tons of steel can only accelerate so quickly.

  You collide, and your shield glances off the great spiral shell and sends you tumbling to one side, dizzy, whirling.

  Something flashes—a metal flank, or a piezoelectric spark. Mazu’s Tears rises above you and, with a fanning spread of blades springing from her right arm, drives down into the shell, finds purchase, cuts forward.

  The beast screams.

  It must have felt the added weight of her on its back, because there can’t be any real wound, any pain to have alerted it; her blades don’t even sink a quarter of their length into the shell, and there is no telltale gush of cryobloom into the sea. It isn’t enough. With a shudder the Meg wrenches its whole body—throws Mazu off, and Mazu, victim to her own momentum, soars sideways and over the head of the Meg. You see the bright flash of her thrusters, halting her arc, preparing to launch her back in the direction of the Meg. But behind the Meg rises another headlamp—Fishhawk, you think—and you can see it in a flash: the Meg knows, it’s ready for Mazu, it’ll send her right into her own shield.

  “Shit!” You scramble upright, attitude thrusters firing desperately. “Shirley!”

  Carol says over your paired frequency, “She can’t hear you.”

  And she rises from the murk behind the fallen Buddha, in the blind curve of the Meg’s great shell, and drives herself into the soft underbelly, still dark, lit only by the glow of her blazing steel spike.

  The spike sinks into soft flesh like butter. For an instant they spin together, Meg and Titan, and you can only see flashes of her—her and the beast in alternating flashes, barnacled hide and blue steel hull, over and over—and then a dull redness in the thing’s front grows and becomes a bright light, and you see the tip of her spike emerge from its beaked mouth.

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  There is the cryobloom wash, emerging in a torrent from the beast’s throat. The thing spasms the way an avalanche moves: slow and majestic, each throe sending jets of white bloom cascading out in clouds, like spume on coastal rock. Then it falls still.

  Carol says, “Heads up. Not done yet.”

  Since you’ve stopped playing at an ambush, I’ve helpfully turned your sonar back on, and thanks to that you see the flickering wake of the second cleonicerotid a breath before it comes into view.

  You don’t have time. You punch your second shield; it explodes out of its shell right as Mazu rockets past you, thrusters blazing like wings on your infrared, both her arms bright with blades and the shining blood of the Meg that Barracuda has just killed.

  Mazu meets the second Meg halfway and sinks right into the flesh of its face with both hands; on your wireframe, the collision is a nova of chemical activity, and you know without seeing it that cryobloom is already gushing into the water. The beast roars. The beak snaps—close to her chassis, too close—your heart leaps; you think for an instant that she’s miscalculated, that she’ll be torn in half. Then she scissors up and her legs come around and over her head, in a graceful arc you almost think can’t be possible for mere flesh, surely the machine will of her Titan has overcome her and snapped her spine in half inside the cradle—and blades scythe out from the slender steel calves and sink into the hide in a flurry of piezoelectric flashes, yellow and white and silver and blue.

  The thing keens, so high and sharp and loud that for a moment the pain it must feel is shared by the jelly inside your skull.

  Frantic, you switch frequencies. “Lau,” you say, “Lau, come in, status report—Mazu’s Tears, requesting biosign readout.”

  On the shared frequency, Lau says, “Shut up, Tokyo, and help me kill the motherfucker.”

  Oh, good, she’s alive, and pissed. What the hell are you meant to do to help? You’re a shield, a goalie, good for playing keep-away with the Megs, not for doing surgery once they’re already in killing range. But you raise your engines and push off the ocean floor; if she wants you there then you’ll goddamn well go.

  This isn’t protocol in the slightest—Lau’s just panicking, but you don’t know that, so I try to warn you for her: REINFORCEMENTS INCOMING. YOU’RE ADVISED TO FALL BACK.

  You ignore me. You tuck your barriers in; they’re worthless at this range—and then you stand in front of Buddha and plant your left foot back; your steel right gauntlet you lock into place over the armored expanse of your shoulders. You brace yourself for the strike.

  “Kanagawa,” says Venkatesh on the radio, “move.”

  Sea Witch explodes up out of the darkness, a blur of neon green, and passes you and the Meg alike in a meteoric path toward the surface. Move, she said, so you push every thruster to full and vent all your gases and manage to throw yourself sideways just in time: with surgical precision a harpoon comes tearing out of the murk above you, and then another, both glowing with thermal charge, and you watch them neatly bite into the broad flesh lip just under the chambered shell of the Meg, missing Mazu by bare meters.

  “Damn it, Venky!” Oh, Lau is pissed. Wounded, struggling, the beast has expelled a great jet of water that sends it tumbling head over heels: it’s trying the same thing the other one had done, to throw her off over her own head. With Sea Witch’s harpoons sunk into the Meg’s mantle, that makes the most majestic yo-yo you’ve ever seen out of Mazu and the beast put together. “I had it!”

  “Dare, Walz, you’re up,” says Venkatesh, unfazed. “Brace ten and six.”

  As she speaks, you see them bloom out of seemingly nothing: Fishhawk’s winglike shields, and the shimmering walls of Morgana, Sea Witch’s defense counterpart, Walz—not important. They go up like fire, spanning dozens and then hundreds of feet in milliseconds, sparkling blue and white under the energy of their own expansion.

  Only half of the cleonicerotid is underwater: its shell must rise mountainous from the sea; that’s how massive it is, and it seems impossible that even Fishhawk and Morgana, with their shields alone, can stop its momentum. But behind them is the whole mass of Lantau Island; surely, if they fail, the force of Sea Witch’s grasp and Meg’s own weight will carry it into the lower flanks of the island itself, and then—yes, they’re counting on it, they have to be. Except that Mazu is still hanging on.

  On the radio Dare says, “Let go, Lau.”

  “I can’t!” Mazu’s engines strain; you can see her distal thrusters flaring orange and white and blue, turning the water nearly to plasma—but there, in the searing beam of your headlamp, the Meg has two arms wrapped firmly around her waist, a death grip. When she severs them, two more take their place. “Tell Venkatesh to let go!”

  “Relax,” says Venkatesh, “stop moving. I’ve got a clean angle if you hold.”

  How is it still alive? Never mind. The cleo’s beak stretches wide, and Mazu’s cockpit is right in the way of each razor-sharp half.

  You act without thinking. You deploy your right shield over your gauntlet—self-shielding in this configuration, like bandages over a fighter’s fist—and you launch from the seabed, right into the Meg’s mouth.

  The beak clamps shut. Your arm flares nova white with absorbed energy. You roar, unthinking, and punch it with your other hand.

  On the radio, in disbelief: “Kanagawa, what the fuck—?”

  Right—bad move—Meg hides eat bludgeoning forces the same way your shields just took the brunt of that bite. You feel the energy of that punch deflect all the way back into your core, and your hundred thousand delicate internal bits shudder.

  Your arm grates; the steel bones move against each other, and something function-critical, something in your actuator, yields and bursts. But it’s enough. Out of the corner of your sight, you see Mazu twist around and, with both hands, drive her blades home, into the beast’s eye.

  The Meg screams, and in a flurry of cryobloom and movement, you fall away.

  “Good show, Kanagawa,” says Dare distantly, “wrap yourself up. We’ll take it from here.”

  Through the cascade of warning messages on your HUD you see Mazu vault up and over the great shell, drive a final blow deep down between the Meg’s eyes, and again, and again. You hear her scream, wordless, over the radio. Then the great body drifts, lifeless. It’s done, you think tiredly. It’s done.