Turns out you’re the first out of your Titan. The ready room atop the hangar (blank little coffin in orange and gray) is empty when you arrive. You get to work quickly—your kit has been moved here, so you peel the dusty off and get your clothes back on before anyone can see—and then you lean back against the cool wall and close your eyes and go still, and you listen to the thump of your heart and the strange buzz in your right arm, right where the Meg had bitten you.

  (In the hangar, you’d waited for the saline to drain from your chamber and then dropped out of the harness and onto the catwalk, the sudden smallness of your form jarring, water streaming from your wetsuit, and you’d stumbled, vision blurry, and let the techs swarm over you like bees upon their queen. You hadn’t stopped thinking, the whole time, about the Meg floating still in the bay—about the way its shell had sunk skyward like a new island drawn from the sea—about how it had very nearly made paste out of you and Mazu, or so you imagine.)

  The door swings open. Gutierrez bursts through it, a storm of brown curls and dimples, Enika behind her. Gutierrez sees you first; her smile widens. “Hey, speak of the devil—our triumphant hero, back from her first dragon-slaying! Regretting the move with the arm yet?” Then she frowns. “Smalls, you wear undies with your suit?”

  You’ve only gotten the suit zipped down to your waist, so, fittingly, she’s looking at you with your shirt on and, yes, your underwear beneath that. Good thing you don’t wear patterns. Or bows.

  “Whatever.” Gutierrez shrugs and plops onto the bench opposite you. “Just don’t come knocking when the rashes show up.”

  Your face heats. Not advice you were looking for—but you can’t think of a witty retort before the door opens again, and Holly pushes through, stiff, followed by Shirley—Lau, that is—and Carol.

  “I don’t care,” Lau’s saying, “you fucked up.”

  Carol, unrepentant: “It worked.”

  “Nothing worked,” snaps Lau. “You didn’t have to be out of position. We had it covered, and you risked everything.”

  “Wasn’t out of position if the target was headed there anyway,” says Carol.

  “Bullshit! What if you’d been wrong? God, Carol,” says Lau, stalking across the room to the bank of lockers at the back, “you’re just like Kanagawa! You always do this, this—lone wolf, prodigy princess horseshit, and it’s going to get us all killed someday. You’re still doing it, six years after the fucking fact. You could’ve told us! We could’ve planned!”

  “I wasn’t wrong,” says Carol evenly. She stops by you and leans herself against the locker opposite Lau, arms folded loosely. “You wouldn’t have listened if I’d told you.”

  “Well,” says Lau viciously, “we’ll never know, will we? Would’ve been nice if you’d given us the chance, huh, Chang?” She wrenches the door of her locker open and turns—and sees you. “Oh.” Her face drains of color; her mouth trembles. Her jaw is taut. Then she says, “Talk to fucking Meng about it.” And, as you stare back at her like a deer in the headlights, still half-dressed, she shuts the locker—it echoes around the little gray room like a thunderclap—and storms past you and Carol, her compact figure radiating murder from every red-white-black-blue vertex, and then out the door.

  Silence. Then Enika says admiringly, “Joyless little bitch, isn’t she?”

  “She’s right,” says Holly tiredly. You look at her; she’s settled on the bench next to Enika, hands steepled, legs spread, brows knit tightly together. “Carol, what the hell were you thinking?”

  Carol shrugs. “It worked.” Sounds a little less convincing than the first time, but still.

  “Hey,” says Gutierrez, “sounds like it was fun, at least.”

  “We would have believed you,” says Holly, almost sadly.

  “Was it really even necessary?” says Enika, working the zipper of her suit down (hastily you avert your eyes). “Yes, we weren’t ready for the big brutes to be quite that lively about hauling ass westward, but we’d have caught up. And, anyway, if you’d let us plan beforehand—”

  “Well, you could’ve brought her with us to talk with Meng, if you wanted planning,” says Gutes, chewing her lip, having stilled midway through unzipping her own suit (and she’s naked under that—muscular, even; she’s not your type, anyway, but damn, you still really need to look anywhere else).

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  “Oh, yes,” says Enika, “excellent idea. Carol, tell me, why didn’t we bring you to Meng yesterday? What did you say when we asked you to join us for that, again?”

  “That you’d do a better job of working it out yourselves,” says Carol. “You wouldn’t have believed me.”

  “Oh, darling,” says Enika, “Shirley’s got a point, you know—how can you say we’d not believe you if you never told us in the first place?”

  Carol shrugs. “Labs disagreed.”

  “Labs are usually right,” says Holly, “but that doesn’t mean we don’t appreciate your input anyway, Carol. Serious.”

  “At any rate,” says Enika, “you didn’t have to bring the new girl into it, did you?”

  All eyes turn open you, and you feel both cornered and mightily grateful that at least you got your suit the rest of the way off and your pants on (and that you chose to wear undies—rashes be damned) while the rest of Unit 49 squabbled.

  You say, “I volunteered.”

  Gutierrez laughs. Holly shakes her head.

  “Fuck’s sake, Chang,” she says. “Look—Debs and Hannah will be back from cleanup duty in an hour, tops, and then you’re gonna want to get your ducks in a row with everyone. Meng wants to meet with you in the morning.”

  Carol says, “I’m busy then.”

  “Not for Meng, you’re not,” says Holly. She looks at you. “Kanagawa, why’d you gag the target with your arm? What was the point?”

  The hell sort of question is that? Defensively—“You prefer it was Lau’s head instead?”

  “Yen had a harpoon lined up into the beak,” says Holly, “and Mazu’s got the standard emergency cockpit module release if that fails. You’re lucky the shot didn’t release and strike you instead.”

  Right. Titan bodies aren’t your puny meat-forms; they have utilities and redundancies and fail-safes built in. Important to remember that part of protocol when you’re helmet-deep in the cradle. Feel stupid now, don’t you?

  “Sure,” says Gutierrez, “but the kid couldn’t have known that.”

  “Maybe,” allows Holly, “so consider it a teachable moment. Kanagawa—don’t pull that shit again. Carol—you can walk her through the standard protocols for a refresher. Consider it a group project.”

  Carol doesn’t answer, just unfolds her arms and silently unwinds herself from where she leans beside you. (Is she displeased? Does she think you’re as much of a clumsy, bumbling child as you feel like right now?)

  “Lau wanted help,” you say, not a little stubbornly, “so I helped. Survival over protocol.”

  “Right,” says Enika gently, “but that isn’t helping, dear, that’s getting in the way. And Shirley isn’t a fan of martyrs, besides.”

  You don’t give a fuck what Shirley’s a fan of, but that’s beside the point. “Sure,” you say. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “Alright.” Holly peels her suit down to her waist in one long motion, matter-of-fact, and reaches into the neat pile under her bench for her clothes. “Anything else? I’m hungry.”

  “Yeah,” says Gutierrez, “I want to know when Debs is coming back with that souvenir she promised us, and what it’s going to be.”

  “Samples,” says Enika primly. “The usual.”

  “Oh, goody,” says Gutierrez, “do I get to watch this time?”

  “Same answer as always, I’m afraid,” says Enika. “You know labs doesn’t like you getting your dirty paws in the process.”

  While Gutierrez protests, you glance sidelong at Carol, who has taken advantage, evidently, of the other pilot’s big mouth to settle into a corner and start in on changing: eyes fixed floorward, hands working the rim of her cowl. You don’t blame her. You’d love to flatten yourself against a wall and disappear into the patterning, too. (Even now you remember that moment underwater when you decided to follow her, to see what would happen. You can still throw her under the bus when it comes time to talk to Meng, you know.)

  “Kanagawa?” Holly’s looking at you. Damn; looks like disappearing into the wallpaper didn’t work out after all.

  “Sorry,” you say, “what?”

  “Tomorrow,” says Holly, “at oh-six-hundred in the cafeteria—we’d like to make sure everyone has their story straight before we meet with the big boss. You good for it?”

  Sounds horrible. You’d rather the cleo had bitten your head off. “Yeah,” you say. “I’m good.”

  “Look,” says Holly, “we’re not trying to be sadists about this. Lau may be joyless, but she’s also right: you fucked up going out of position. Meng’s not going to be happy.”

  You understand. Holly’s warning you, not threatening you. “Right,” you say. “Be ready for that. Got it.” Don’t be a pussy.

  “Cool,” says Holly. She jerks her chin at Gutierrez and Venkatesh, who are already by the door, kits over their shoulders (does Gutierrez wink at you? You pretend not to have looked). “Expect everyone sans Hannah. And please, for the love of God, Kanagawa, don’t stay up in sim all night this time.”

  “Right,” you mumble, “sorry, will do.”

  “Great,” says Holly, with the tone of a dentist who’s been promised you’ll floss. “See you then.” And then she’s gone, and Venkatesh and Gutierrez follow her out, but not before Gutierrez throws another horrible wink over her shoulder at you through her bird’s nest of brown hair. Fucking hell.