In the Bay—after you’d received news of Rachel passing from the somber white-uniformed Atlas representatives who had arrived on your doorstep that spring—everyone had been so kind to you, at the funeral and afterward, too.

  Your father had always liked to tell you about the things he researched, things from home, in Takarazuka, from places you’d only ever known as names. Kintsugi was one of his favorites: the art of piecing broken things back together in ways that did not hide how they had broken, using gold and other bright metals mixed in as powder with the lacquer used to mend the subject, brushed carefully over each fractured edge and left to highlight those edges once the pieces had been joined again.

  You felt like that then, except nothing about it was pretty. They saw you as something delicate and shattered and treated you accordingly: soft voices, always, as if raising them too much would cause you to shatter all over again. Little furtive glances. You hated it. You hadn’t seen Rachel by that time in six years, anyway, so what did they expect? What was there to mourn? You’d been eleven by the time she left to go to the academy in Sendai, seventeen when news reached you of her death. She was all but a stranger to you, you told yourself, not least because when she left you’d been angry, and you hadn’t really bothered to say goodbye then, and it was too late to make up for that now.

  So, kintsugi, because you weren’t broken after all, but to them it evidently looked like you were, even though you were perfectly whole and still held water. Or maybe you were broken, but not the way they thought you’d be. You didn’t cry without end, like your mother did in the days after the visit and the funeral, only here and there, in silent fits and spates that were strange because you didn’t feel like you were crying. You felt nothing at all when it came to her, and that scared you more than anything, and so did the way everyone around you treated you as if you were something you were not.

  Stop whispering around me, you wanted to say. I don’t need your condolences. I’m fine. Look at me! Talk to me! And when they refused you wanted nothing more than for them to shout at you instead of whispering, to hurl you against the wall and make of you the shards they so badly wanted to see in you.

  Negative space—the absence of feeling. Broken in the way of being not broken when you were supposed to be. If anything, you were guilty that you didn’t feel more than you did. And when you did start to feel again, you only felt anger: Anger at them for treating you like that, anger at her for leaving and then staying gone. For never coming back.

  And when you asked them all why she’d done it, nobody ever knew the answer, so what did it matter anyway?

  -

  You lie on the little bed in your cramped dorm and stare at the inside of your elbow, and push past your simmering feelings to think about what’s happened and how much trouble you’re probably going to be in.

  Because there’s no way you don’t get in trouble for ditching orders on your very first mission, Carol’s fault or not. And you weren’t exactly upfront to Meng’s aide about it—didn’t tell her what Carol told you, what led up to ditching orders—and that can’t score well in Meng’s eyes, either, particularly not after you refused to meet with her in person. And apparently Holly thinks you didn’t perform well on the mission itself. And you back-talked her about it because—what? You couldn’t stand Lau bitching about how you’re not ready? She’s right.

  You told Meng’s aide that you’d have liked a better briefing, sure, but you and I both know a better briefing wouldn’t have helped. You’re a fish out of water, or a bird in water, or whatever metaphor works better for that, you got a C in English. No amount of filling in context for you would have helped you do it right.

  Because the real problem here is about how to be. It’s about how you fit in with the team—how to move around them, how to slot yourself into a waltz they’ve been dancing for twelve years now, that you’ve had three days to pick up, and at that only in glimpses. It barely helps that you have me in your head when it comes to this. I can assist in regards to the technicalities of piloting—learning your engrams and smoothing over jitters and quirks in the way you pilot, reading all the little tremors and hiccups your muscles output and discarding them as noise when I turn them into motor commands for my own steel joints and parts—transforming incoming sensor data into things you’ll understand, like sight and smell and taste—advising you, even, on strategy. But in understanding other people, a robot is not much help. Not even one who spent six years listening in on your sister’s head.

  Why not pick someone else? looms the obvious question. But this you know well: pilot candidates who are relatives of the retired or deceased get priority on taking over the spot because they work far better with the helms, even more so if they have already been trained, of course, but even without. Because after your sister, after I had been shaped by her engrams, after they put me into her head and turned a blank slate into a figure, a form, I could not just adapt to someone else’s thought patterns and motor quirks without being wholly erased and retrained, and then they might as well start from scratch with some other helm and some other pilot. It’s the reason that no amount of training in the most vivid of sims can equal real combat experience with a real helm, and the reason that pilots seldom change helms once they’re on the force. And maybe lesser helms would have simply been replaced by a whole new pilot-helm-machine unit, but I am Tokyo Calling, survivor of the Rift, one of the foremost helms in existence thanks to your sister’s brilliant mind and—we’d hoped—her genetics, too.

  So it’s you they picked, graduation certificate be damned; better you with your passable training and your well matched brain structure than some even less qualified idiot from among the hoi polloi. You they picked, for all that you’re an ungrateful, sniveling whelp. You’re welcome. But then the corollary: Why Tokyo Calling? Why, after everything—after my whole body was decimated, reduced to a plasma sigh at the bottom of the ocean—why fight so hard to keep me on the team?

  I am a good helm, yes, but to want to bring back both a helm and a body from the dead, and as good as resurrect its pilot too, is a great deal even for me.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Well, Lau seems to think it’s because of Carol. Carol wanted you; Carol was your sister’s sword, so Carol wants to keep her shield, and that’s me. So, then, why Carol? What makes her so special? Why keep her around before this, off active duty while I still lay dormant? Why would Meng let her drag the whole team around by the nose like this, waiting six years for their last pair to get a replacement? Why does she insist upon Tokyo Calling and no other shield in the world?

  Because she’s a prodigy? That’s the obvious answer, but it isn’t a good one. So Carol’s tactically skilled, so she won fame for her performance (with your dead sister) at Sydney ten years ago and Hainan before that, and countless sorties after, all still as a child, a teen; so she’s supposed to be the reason the remaining half of the team came limping back at all from the Rift Disaster, the reason the team didn’t lose more than they did. So what? There are other good pilots out there, and even if she’s the best by some measure, she’s not exactly any use if she’s sitting on her ass without joining in—that’s what Lau said, isn’t it, after so many years off the force.

  And, bitterly: If she’s such a great tactician, if that’s really why Meng loves her so much, why keep her benched for so long? Why do they all answer to Holly, and not her?

  Okay, fine, so maybe she’s just rusty. Whatever.

  Or maybe she’s just fucking with you—maybe they’re all, somehow, fucking with you. The thought has crossed your mind. But that’s one hell of a prank, dragging your dead teammate’s sister in from across the ocean and sticking her in the cockpit of an entire Titan just to make a fool of her (and not even very well, hardly more than you’d already made a fool of yourself).

  You roll over and groan into your pillow. Moping about it isn’t going to help. You could fucking ask.

  So you wind up in the little artificial courtyard, a hoodie thrown over your tee as a halfhearted nod to dressing up, since for once you’re not needed in uniform. No, this time the mission is purely personal—and you’re doubting it the moment you step out of your room. But hey, sunk cost fallacy: might as well go through with it now that you’re up. Anything to distract you.

  Turns out Carol’s not an easy woman to find. You meander up and down the gray hallways that border the courtyard like a cheap motel—there are several floors of them, and each is full of dorms assigned to pilots: not just seniors but juniors and cadets, too. Dozens and dozens in all. Below you the fake olive trees are utterly silent and still, and the doors swim by in butter-yellow pools of artificial light.

  So you wander the mezzanines, hood up, head down, looking for all the world like some loitering delinquent, and in furtive glances read each name (cute, giving each pilot a dorm, putting names on them; makes it feel like you matter, like you’re bigger than the average grunt in the true military programs next door). E. YANG, R. T. LIAO, Z. W. XU—every one wrought in ugly little black letters on a gray placard. Some are decorated with stickers (cadets, surely, you think with more than a little contempt, forgetting how you yourself had decorated your own room at the academy). And then, somewhere on the third floor, all the way across the square from where you’d started in your own room: C. CHANG. Not decorated at all.

  Finally, you think, relieved to have succeeded. But when you knock (after a reluctant pause), once and then again, you get nothing. To your shame, you pull back your hoodie and press your ear against the door, very briefly; you hear nothing on the other side. Either she’s asleep, or not there, or insanely quiet. Avoiding stalkers, who knows.

  Well, this has been pointless. You slump against the wall beside her door and tuck your head into your knees and think, rather pathetically, that you should have just asked Oladele to send you back right away and spare yourself this tragic embarrassment.

  A voice says, “Smalls, that you?”

  Oh great, Gutierrez is here to witness you moping. Belatedly you remember that her door had swum past you some dozen meters down the same hallway (the placard punctuated by little sticker likenesses of some cartoon character). Well, shit. You have at least the grace to lift your face and look at her and say, “Maybe. Who’s asking?”

  “Me,” says Gutierrez, and drops into a crouch so you can actually see her; she’s wearing fatigues, same as you, but slung over one shoulder is a big puffy jacket trimmed in brown leather, emblazoned with team colors and a few other patches you don’t read. “Why? Hoping for someone else?”

  Yes, kind of, not least because you frankly don’t like Gutierrez. But you just shrug.

  “I take it you’re not here looking for the bathroom,” she says. “Carol’s not in right now.”

  “Yeah,” you say, flushing, “I gathered.”

  She raises her eyebrows. “Surely you’re not trying to give her what-for,” she says, “for getting you in trouble earlier.”

  Close enough, but you just say, “Holly said we were supposed to go over protocols together.”

  Gutierrez grins. “True,” she says, “but why track her down for that now? All work and no play makes a pilot a dull girl.”

  “So you’re, what,” you say, eyeing the jacket, the clotty mascara smeared over her lashes, “trying to get me to come party with you?” (It is obvious now to you that leaving your room tonight was a terrible mistake.)

  She grins, all teeth. “That’s exactly what I’m doing, yeah.”

  God you hate her.

  “Come on,” she’s saying. She’s looking at you, eyebrows raised—shit, you didn’t know such a big mean woman could look so much like a puppy. “Don’t tell me you’re gonna make me fireman carry you, Kanagawa, my muscles are still shot from sortie.”

  Fuck, you know this look. Past the smirk, behind the teasing, you feel it in your bones—she feels sorry for you. It’s obvious even to someone as giant and dumb as she is that something’s wrong with you, isn’t it. That by itself is enough to make anger rise in you again—and it is all I can do not to give you a shot of endorphins to your pituitary just to make you see reason for half a breath.

  I mean—get over yourself, frankly. So she’s asking you to a party. With whom? Out of what, pity? Are you going to reject the offer out of sheer pride? I mean, what else are you going to do anyway? Stalk Carol more? Wallow in your room? Come on—even Rachel knew this well enough when she was around to do things like this: an unhappy pilot, a lonely pilot, is one unsuited to perform.

  I’m right, and I know you know it.

  For a moment you and I both think you’re going to turn her down. Then you think, Fuck it, or maybe some flicker of me finally gets through to you—and you reach out and take her hand. “This had better not be some weird reverse-psychology, new-recruit-hazing test,” you say, as some kind of weak attempt at baring your teeth. “Or, I don’t know, a sacrifice to the cult of the god of Titans. Or partying. Or Rachel.”

  She throws her head back in a laugh. “Oh, innocent lamb—ye of little faith,” she says, “you have no idea.”