Out of Many Scattered Things: Kingmaker

The love child of Eris and Aphrodite, skating on a shell, playing only Chell…

Chapter warnings: Realistic depictions of neurological, physical, and bureaucratic trauma. War. Grief. Death. Mental illness. Regular illness.

Text iteration: Witching hour.

Additional notes: None.

Kingmaker

Caitlin Lightcap stands in a small and underutilized ladies room, head bowed, arms crossed, touching nothing, staring down at her shoes. She waits here with herself because it is not yet time to go. She is never early. She is never late. If one is early, then one is not punctual. She is punctual. It’s important to her. Punctuality. So what. It’s not a big deal. It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean anything in general and it doesn’t mean anything now; it’s just who she is. It’s just how she is. Those Protestants. It’s their fault. Maybe it’s not their fault. She’ll have to ask her father about that one. The Calvinists, maybe. Or maybe just the person who first invented an accurate timepiece. Other eras had other problems.

Lightcap wishes she was a sailor, tackling the problem of arc seconds of longitude.

Or a pirate maybe. She’s a nerd. She probably would have had to be a pirate’s whore. That’s depressing. Maybe not. Maybe not if she was good enough with a sword. She is pretty fucking sure she would have been good enough with a sword. Mutiny! she thinks bizarrely. The captain’s wench hath taken up a cutlass!  All must fall in line or be consigned to a watery grave!

Her phone vibrates in her hand.

It’s time to go.

She stands there.

It’s time to go.

Time to go. Time to go, Lightcap, Caity, angel-child, darling, most brilliant, last of her line, first in her family, the prettiest, the bravest, the smartest, the best, the best, always the best, even in closets, even in corners, even under desks, even in bathrooms, staring at her shoes. 

There have been times, of course, times in her life, when this would not have been possible.

But it is possible now.

It is.

She knows it’s possible because she’s here. She’s here already. The record plays on. The disc hasn’t yet skipped. And it won’t. She’s not caught in a track. She’s playing the album. Right through to the end. Track one: Cait Awake. Track two:  Lightcap More Like Showercap Am I Right. Track three:  Exit Definitely Does Exist. Track four:  Water Leaves Hair/Hair Leaves Apartment. Track five:  Farewell to Cat. Track six:  Alive on I-495. Track seven:  Metal Detector. 

That’s an album that’s shaping up pretty well. It’s no Abbey Road. It’s no The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust. It’s no Hold Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven. But it’s a weird little gem in the garbage of recent days and weeks. Oh look, there’s some fused volcanic glass in this post-eruption ash pile. Oh look, there’s a little album by a little band that she found by happenstance inside a computer apportioned to her by an ex-lover.

Superconduct, she thinks. And supercollide. One two three four. Two two three four, three two three four, four two three four, go. One two three four, two two three four, three two three four, four two three four, go. One two three four, two two three four, three two three four, four two three four, go. One two three four, two two three four, three two three four, four two three four, go. One two three four, two two three four, three two three four, four two three four, fucking go, Lightcap go go just go. Just go. She’s better than this. She’s better than this. She’s better than this. She’s better than this she is; she’s better.

She’s afraid. 

Erase that thought. Count to four, erase it, and get another chance. Count to four and get another chance. Count to four and see.

One two three four.

She’s not “afraid,” she wouldn’t know fear if she felt it and so that’s not what this is; this is something else. Categorically, it’s not fear because fear is not a thing she feels. She jumps straight into the teeth of anything that might consume her and so this thing, this thing that she feels, well, this is excitement, this is pressure, this is a hyperbaric chamber of the consciousness, this is familiar, this is appropriate. This is so important and that is why she needs to go. She needs to go and she will go. 

She won’t get stuck on track nine: Bathroom Pep Talk Slash Inappropriate Pirate Fantasy.

Lifting her head, she looks at herself in the mirror and she is beautiful; as beautiful as she gets and she gets very beautiful. Her hair is tight back against her head and her glasses are clean and there is no lipstick on her teeth and there are no lines in her unfamiliar new suit. The love child of Eris and Aphrodite, skating on a shell, playing only Chell…

She can’t do this.

She’ll fail.

Thinking of failure is failure.

No it’s not. Erase it. 

Count to four and make another chance.

Count to four and take another chance.

On the fifth four she’ll go. 

One two three four, two two three four, three two three four, four to three four.

She goes.

Lightcap dries her hands, straightens her spine, pulls herself to her full height and strides out of the ladies room, her black stilettos cracking against the floor like the measured, repetitive cracks of a measured, repetitive cracking thing. Glaciers calving on a timer. A pencil snapping metronome. This will not be the hardest thing she has ever done but it will be hard.

It will be hard.

Things that matter can be like this, she remembers her mother whispering, beautiful nails combing through Lightcap’s hair in the dark. I won’t say that they should be like this, but they can. You can let them be this way. It means you care, baby. That’s all. It means you care. That’s all we have really; the caring about things. That’s what makes us all the same. That’s what makes us all a part of God. 

When she wears heels she walks in a line, pushing off, swinging her back foot out and around in an arc to land in front of the new back foot. It’s lucky. It’s lucky to do it that way. To walk in a line. In high heels, walking a line looks right. The higher the heel, the righter it looks. The arcs of her steps slow her down, make her look better in a skirt. Comportment isn’t everything but comportment is something. It must be; attractive people have a better lot in life, everyone loves to stare down a double-helix, and Lightcap owns the phone she owns because she finds it beautiful. Medium and message. Her shirt is pale pink but her jacket is black and her skirt is black and her shoes are black and her bag is black. She wears no jewelry and her nails are bare.

Crack crack crack, her shoes against the floor.

Crack crack crack, toward a nearing door.

You can do this, Cait, Jasper had said, weeks ago, over the phone. No one can do this but you. No one. No one but you. She had been standing in her kitchen in bare feet, a spoon of peanut butter in her mouth, her cat half wound around her left ankle, her phone in her hand and her gaze directed out, across the Potomac, towards the center of the city. Yes, she had said, swallowing peanut butter. You might be right about that.

She counts her final four steps to clean the slate in her head.

With a lifted hand and a well-timed step she blows through the doors like cyclone, making an entrance, making heads turn, making conversations waver. She smiles into this entrance that she’s made; it’s who she is, how she feels comfortable, a way to drive a crowbar underneath a waiting weight. She’s the last to arrive and she scans the room rapidly, identifying her seat in a fraction of a second just as Jasper says, “Cait,” like she’s a long lost friend, an academic rockstar, and the most important person he knows not the person who had screamed at him in the middle of his ten AM Tuesday morning lab meeting two years ago. That’s great. Jasper can do things like that. Things like forgive people and forgive himself and work on repair jobs just as assiduously as he can swing a wrecking ball. Lightcap isn’t like that. She doesn’t have the eye or the hands or the time for fixing little broken things so they can have a purpose. Generally speaking, she rips them apart and builds anew from scratch. 

 An array of uniformed shoulders shift to take her in as she rounds the table with its warm wood paneling, its built-in lights.

“You magnificent bastard,” Lightcap says, extending a hand to Jasper so that he can’t hug her. “So this is all it takes to get you to DC, then? A disaster of apocalyptic proportions?”

“Gentlemen,” Jasper says, “Dr. Lightcap. Dr. Lightcap, gentlemen.”

“Hello room,” Lightcap says, addressing them all with a dry brusqueness, pulling her tablet out of her purse. “I hear you’re looking for non-nuclear anti-xenobiological options; shall we get right to it?”

They don’t let her start immediately but she’s won them over all the same. She keeps their attention, interjecting commentary into introductions, into the setting of the afternoon’s agenda, into the discussion of the merits of the Defense Department’s coffee, because she is taking risks, she is swinging straight for the outfield; if she comes back from this it’s going to be victorious or on her own shield; they’ll love her or they’ll hate her attempt to make them love her but she has to try. Her science is sound but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have to sell the idea, sell her certainty, sell the ethos, sell the passion; but that’s not right at all—there’s no selling here, there’s only giving. They’ve given her half a day and in return she will give them everything she has, everything she is, all that she can and might be, because there’s no point in holding back, this is her one shot, and everything, everything depends on this. So she shows them who she is, she makes her witty asides and she makes her emotional appeal and she talks quickly and clearly about the state of robotics as it is, and the state of robotics as it could be with a massive influx of funding, and she makes herself into all that she will have to be to pull this off. She holds her best self together and, in the end, she strips it of everything except her pure, fiery certainty that she will make her vision real.

Tell me about a time you’ve failed, Caitlin, they’d said to her when she’d interviewed at DARPA. And she said to them, I’ve never failed. And it had been true because they hadn’t asked her about pain, about what she paid for a perfect track record.

It’s like in the book, her mother had said to her, sitting in the closet, knee-to-knee with Lightcap. It’s not your fault. It’s just part of life for you. It’s like how in The Neverending Story Bastian can change things but every time he does he forgets a little bit of his life. It’s not his fault that he forgets and there’s nothing he can do about it. It’s just a thing that happens as he makes wishes. It’s part of the package. He has to do his best anyway. Like you. Do you know what I mean, little bug?   

She runs ninety minutes overtime, fielding questions. They like the idea of robotics. They like the idea of the Jaegers. They like her. They are concerned about the limits of the human nervous system, but only because she is concerned. They understand what she can already see—the towering outline of a machine that could combat a xenobiological lifeform on its own terms, without nuclear fallout, without risk to existing military investments.

When the silences between interjections begin to grow longer and thicker she says, “If there are no more questions, I’d like to say one more thing before this meeting adjourns.”  

No one speaks, and she feels the weight of their collective attention focus to a new frequency. She rests her hands on the cool, planar surface of the table and leans forward. In her head she runs a quick and quiet four count.

“A Jaeger is a mechanized solution to an organic threat,” she begins, holding their attention with the roving magnet of her gaze. “It takes its form from the nature of that which it’s designed to oppose. It tests the limits of human ingenuity. Human ingenuity that has not yet failed our species. It’s fitting. It’s right. It will work. It’s a direct and proportional answer to a novel problem. It’s worthy of our collective resources. Worthy of our sustained effort.”  She drops her eyes then looks back up. “That’s all,” she says. 

She collects her belongings in a single sweep, and strides out of the room without looking back at the table, without waiting for permission to leave. She passes through the doors, leaving a silent room behind her, counting the deliberate double-beat of her own steps, the strike of her heal and toe in near simultaneity.

One two three four, two two three four, the corridor stretches long and lonely and abandoned ahead of her, a dystopian tunnel in a five sided building with wide hallways and fluorescent lights, three two three four, four two three four, five two three four, twenty steps gone and no one has called her back. She wants to run, she wants run out of this building and across the parking lot, get her car and drive home to her cat and her music and her four walls that don’t judge her and to a shower that will peel off a layer of her skin and to a new bar of soap and a dark room and a bottle of wine she’ll drop on her floor and not by accident; she doesn’t want it to end imperfectly, she wants the end she wants; is that so wrong? There’s nothing wrong with that. Nothing. Nothing. Six two three four, seven two three four, eight two three four, nine two three four, ten two three four; forty steps. Forty more and she’ll be at the security station.

I understand that you can’t let it go, her mother had said, but just—try anyway. Try a little bit. And even if you can’t let it go, it’s okay. It’s okay if you can’t. We all live with who we are.

She’s twenty steps out, maybe nineteen, maybe eighteen, when she hears someone she doesn’t know call her name. 

“Dr. Lightcap.”

It’s strange, it’s not a question, it’s not a command, it’s delivered in a rising tone of warning that makes the back of her neck prickle with some kind of portent—propitious or ominous; it’s impossible to say. It’s a man who speaks, and the way he speaks gives the impression that he’s about to append something to her titled surname. “You forgot your keys,” perhaps, or “you’re going the wrong way,” or, worst of all, “you haven’t been dismissed.”

But her keys are in her bag.

She never goes the wrong way.

And she has never waited for dismissal.

So she stops walking. She doesn’t half turn and continue, modifying a purposeful vector with a bend of acquiescence. She stops entirely and then she turns one hundred and eighty degrees, gathering the full force of her personality to—

“Whoa,” the man says.

He’s nearly crashed into her.

He’d been behind her for sets of steps, matching her stride for stride, the sound of his footfalls subsumed beneath the snapping of her shoes.

Lightcap regards him with a neutral expression. He’s a few inches taller than she is, but he’s broad. Physically powerful, imposing by virtue of the space he occupies and by the weight of his gaze. Lightcap likes that density of presence; Jasper had it, Jasper had always had it; it makes her feel at home. It makes her feel like she’s not frightening. 

They lock eyes and battle it out, hot and silent and intent and she knows, she knows absolutely that he didn’t leave that room of identical uniforms to come out here to hand her forgotten keys or to call her back. He’s come to her. He wants something. It’s a dark vortex beneath the calm neutrality of his expression, but it seeps unconcealed right into the shared air between them. In that moment Lightcap feels like she can give him anything he wants, anything he asks for, because all that she is burns so hot and so fierce through the resistors of her selfhood that it will melt every circuit board that makes her up if she doesn’t find places to ground.

“Yes?” she says, not crisp and cool but quiet and conspiring, as if he’s already said to her, Cait I have a secret; Cait I need your help.

“I—” he starts, off balance. 

She waits for him.

“My name is Stacker Pentecost,” he says quietly, so quietly that the security guard could not hear him if he tried.

“What can I do for you?”

“I’d like to speak with you privately,” he says, “regarding your proposal.”

Lightcap hesitates. For two reasons. One, his British accent has caught her attention as being out of place in a meeting and institution as thoroughly and overwhelmingly American as this one. Two, his word-choice suggests a terrible pick-up line and that would be so deeply, deeply disappointing that she is certain it would take her days to recover. But it might not be that; it might be something else because there’s an unmistakable gravitas to this man that doesn’t come from his height or his uniform but that comes straight from his eyes, his bearing, his quiet steps in a long hallway. 

“Strictly professionally,” he adds, as if sensing her concern. “Just—not in this building.”

She nods. 

He pulls out a business card, which is notably sparse on details of rank and affiliation, writes a mobile number on its reverse side, hands it to her, and says “anytime tonight after twenty-one hundred hours. Call. We’ll meet where you like.”

“I’ll call you at ten,” she says. “Exactly at ten.”

She spins again and walks away, feeling lighter, like she’s set aside the weight of her own thoughts in the aftermath of her talk, her quiet conversation. In this moment, nothing threatens her bright and sliding sense of self. She doesn’t feel the need to count her slate to clean.

She drives up the west bank of the Potomac, past the lights reflecting on twilit water on her right and the huge swath of cemetery on her left, because she likes going that way. Between the water and the dead. She crosses the Lincoln Memorial Bridge and drives north through the city until she comes to Adams Morgan and its little labyrinth of streets around a triangular park. She circles, scouring the streets for parking until she finds a spot. 

She kills her engine and watches the last of the sunset; the spectacular red disk that looks like a glowing communion wafer. It’s the pollution that does it; the shit in the air that blocks the shorter wavelengths of light, that’s warming the planet, that’s screwing up the ice caps, that’s giving kids asthma in inner cities, that’s making the turn of the planet so god damn pretty right now. 

“We did that to you,” Lightcap whispers to the sun. “How do you like your new outfit?”

She hears the subtle vibration of her phone and she pulls it out of her bag in the passenger’s seat. She checks the caller ID.

Jasper Schoenfeld.

Even now, even after the long shattering break and the longer shellac of a repair job, seeing his name makes her mouth go dry. She gives herself a fast little count, just for the momentum she needs, completes a rapid, mental set of four, and picks up.

“Hello?” she says, even though she knows it’s him. 

“Cait,” Jasper says. “Hi. You disappeared after your presentation.”

Maybe he doesn’t mean anything by it. 

It irks her all the same. 

“I didn’t see a reason to stay and gladhand the room,” she says sweetly. “That’s your forte, not mine.”

“Thanks,” Jasper says, with a dry twist in response to her backhanded compliment. “Anyway, I just called to let you know that you did a phenomenal job.”

“I know,” she says, watching the last sliver of red sun sink beneath the obscured line of the distant horizon.

“Well,” Jasper says, at a loss. “Good. They’ll tell us their answer in a few days, I think.”  

“Let me know as soon as you hear anything.”

“I will,” Jasper says.

There is an awkward silence.

“Great,” Lightcap says. 

At the same time Jasper asks, “Are you doing okay?”

“I’m fine,” she says like someone who is entirely, genuinely, absolutely fine. Like she’s never been the person who cried with a stormy righteousness in a Pittsburgh laboratory years ago. That’s not her. That person is dead somewhere inside her, wisteria creeping over her lonely little grave, replaced by Lightcap Version 4.0. Her product reviews get better with every round of upgrades.

“You don’t need anyone to talk you through—things? Your evening?”

Oh the things that she would love to say to that. Fuck you, comes to mind. How dare you speak to me as if you’re my friend? As if you’ve ever been my friend, you disingenuous piece of shit, also presents itself as a possibility. Let’s keep things professional, Dr. Schoenfeld, seems too kind. Yes, please come over; please come to my apartment and do everything that you used to do in exactly the same way that you used to do it, keeping me company and understanding that all of what you see is a just a part of me, that it can only be modified so far, that I can’t stop it entirely even though I wish I could, that it’s the thing that I have had to ride and tame for my entire life and the thing that will never be quite banished by pharmacology and reason, the shadow that I struggle with for all of my days. Please come. Please come every day and never leave me and we will talk about science and art while I keep a silent count of little things and you will cook and I will clean and we will be together, together always, the way that we should have been together right from the beginning. And where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. The Lord do so to me, and more also if aught but death part thee and me. But that isn’t going to happen; she doesn’t speak for the empty husks of her dead selves.

“That’s a kind offer, Jasper,” Lightcap says, and she can feel pressure in the bones of her face, but she can’t hear it in her tone, “and I’m grateful for your efforts to maintain our current collegial relationship, but I’d prefer it if you never said anything like that again.” 

She can hear him sigh over the line before he says, “Okay. I’m sorry. I just—”

“Goodnight,” she says.

She ends the call and stares at her phone for a moment. She should have told him that she was meeting someone in the tradition of 90s conspiracy movies; a man named Pentecost. Acts. Chapter 2. Verses one through six. And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. It’s propitious. She likes it. It’s a great name. She doesn’t think she’s in any kind of danger. She feels like she’s leaning forward, her fingertips on the track, her feet braced against starting blocks, her eyes fixed on the finish line, waiting for someone, somewhere, to fire a gun. 

She has hours to kill. Hours to assassinate. Hours to coldly and precisely put down in the tradition of business-suited badasses real and fictional. She spends it walking the streets of Adams Morgan in uncomfortable shoes, taking herself out to dinner, and listening to the newest song by her favorite obscure band, whoever they are. One day, she promises this absolute bastard who thinks he’s so witty, singing about string theory and kaiju and breaking bridges. One of these days. I’ll meet someone who knows your name. 

 

She listens to the new song over and over and over again in four point three-minute increments until it’s time to call Stacker Pentecost. She tells him where to meet her and heads to her favorite bar, a place where lights are low, the clientele is quiet, where the cocktails are overengineered and named after chemical compounds.

After twenty minutes he walks through the door. 

His uniform is gone. He’s wearing a blazer, left casually unbuttoned, and he’s carrying a leather-bound folder in one hand. So he’s attractive. So he’s incredibly attractive. So he’s probably the most attractive man she’s seen for—well, hmm. Three years? Five? Her entire life? Ignoring this would be shortsighted and pointless. No reason not to enjoy that spark of enchantment at the base of her brain. It’s fun. It won’t last. What will last is the ocean. And what might come out of it. Cut rings. Fucked up strings. What they transit. The way the suspension cables of the Golden Gate Bridge had snapped. The way they had just snapped. Like that. She remembers the sound. She remembers how they looked as the tension they were under was released. The terrible wildness of the rebound. Everyone remembers. That’s what people say. When she asks them. Everyone remembers the bridge. The snapping. The look of it. And the sound.

She stands and extends her hand.

Pentecost glances at it as if he knows and then looks at her as if asking for permission. But her permission is inherent in the extension of her hand and it isn’t fear of physical contamination that makes her wash her hands; she managed to work through aspects of that long ago. It’s fear of what she’s done, thoughts she’s had, and even though this is a night that’s sitting at a crisis point, she’s riding the cresting wave of her time. She’s okay. She’s been okay for years. She counted for the meeting, but that’s okay. Sometimes she needs to count. It’s just a part of it. That’s okay. 

“Dr. Lightcap,” he says, taking her hand.

“Please call me Cait,” she says.

“Stacker,” he replies.

They sit. He looks down at his menu, then up at her, his expression amused and tired and skeptical all at once.

“The Dopamine Dream is particularly good,” Lightcap says, smiling at him. “Packs quite the punch though, in terms of alcohol content, so be forewarned.”

“Can one just get a whisky here?” he asks her.

“Back page,” Lightcap says, “if you’re dead set on being boring.”

“I can’t pronounce half of these,” Pentecost says, amused. He gives her an assessing look, likely trying to determine if she’s flirting with him.

“And I can’t tell a general from a sergeant,” she says, pulling back, her tone turning in the direction of brusque. “Yet.”

He turns his menu around and points at a cocktail that’s second from the bottom.

“Salicylated Sorrow,” Lightcap says. “Just tell them you want ‘The Painkiller’.”

“Right then,” he replies, dry and self contained.

They struggle fairly well through small talk about the city and the bar and the weather until they’ve ordered their drinks, at which point Lightcap finally says, “I can’t help but noticing that you’re British. And, while DC is a melting pot in one of the better traditions of a nation with an admittedly hit-or-miss collection of traditions—it strikes me as extremely unusual to encounter you behind closed doors in the five-sided heart of the American military hierarchy.”

He smiles, this time with a brief, bright flash of teeth.

“American interests are a part of what I represent,” he replies. “But only a part.”

Lightcap takes a sip of iced tap water while reconsidering her preconceptions. She had assumed that she was speaking to a relatively junior member of the collection of brass-adorned people in the room, because he looked younger than most, and because his uniform had not been ostentatiously decorated when compared with others she had seen. But, thinking back, she’s not sure he’d been wearing an American uniform at all. What he had just said implied he spoke on behalf of an international organization of some kind.

“Well. You certainly have my attention,” she says, setting her water down on the table.

“I work on behalf of an organization that won’t be publically unveiled for several weeks. This puts me at somewhat of a disadvantage while speaking with you. I’m not at liberty to tell you all of what I’d like to tell you.”

“Why is it that we’re speaking at all?” Lightcap asks him.

“We’re speaking because of logistics that I can’t share with you. We’re speaking because I believe in your proposal. Because I believe in you. Because I believe that even your tremendous vision—the creation of a colossal machine—is not great enough in scope.”

“Not great enough in scope?” Lightcap echoes, astounded. “That’s your criticism? Insufficiency of scope?”

“You don’t need one machine, Cait,” Pentecost says. “You need as many as can be built.”  

“The resources for a project of that magnitude would be—” Lightcap begins.

“Global,” Pentecost interjects before she can finish. “Global. It’s not just America that has a stake in what might be coming.”

“I know,” Lightcap says.

In the ensuing silence, a waitress brings their drinks.

“I want you to leave your job at DARPA,” Pentecost says. “I want you to come work for the organization I represent. I want you to come immediately. I want to leave tonight, if you can. I want to help you modify your proposal and I want you to present it again, this time in New York City. At the UN. To a group of representatives I can’t describe to you until you’ve been formally employed by the organization I represent.”

Lightcap sips her drink. “I’m not signing my life away to an unnamed group with an unnamed ethos,” she says.

But she may do just that. Already she can feel it. She trusts this man. The weight of his gaze. The weight of his words.

“The non-disclosure clause is only until the organization goes public,” Pentecost says. “A few more weeks. Then you can tell anyone you like. You won’t be able to keep it quiet. You’ll be on the front page of every newspaper in the world. You’ll hire whomever you like. You’ll have as many resources as the world can bring to bear in as short a time as can be managed.”

“Me?” Lightcap asks. 

“You,” Pentecost says. 

“But why? Why not Jasper? He’s more senior than I am. He has a longer track record. Technically this is his proposal.”

“Technically,” Pentecost agrees, the word a good-natured condemnation.

Lightcap can’t help smiling at that, a twist of her mouth that she tries to straighten but can’t. One two three four, she thinks. 

She wants this. She wants to surf the leading wave into whatever is coming. She wants the means to turn her vision into something she can touch with her hands, something she can feel with her mind. She wants to trust this man, the weight of his gaze, the sorrow in his chosen cocktail. She wants to assemble a team to build machines, to fuse the fire of Prometheus to the mind of the man to whom he gave it, she wants to find a person who will stitch the torn threads of string theory back together, she wants not only machines, she wants a holistic approach: robotics and neuroscience, computer scientists and biologists; Jaeger Tech, Kaiju Science, she wants everything she can have so that she can give it all that she is; take it into herself and reform it into something that makes other people feel safe at night.      

“I have no experience organizing something of this magnitude,” she says, low and tight and abruptly too fierce for a trendy little bar. Like it’s an accusation. She needs him to answer fully for all the ways his choice is wrongheaded. “I can build you the machines you need—but what you’re talking about—that’s more than science. That’s administration. Distribution. Industry.”

“You’d run our Jaeger Division. You’ll literally build the things, Cait. You’ll build as many of them as you can with every resource we can muster for you. You’ll get them to work. Anything you don’t know how to do, you hire someone to do for you. The main thrust of the thing is exactly what you’ve been doing at DARPA, just scaled up.”

“Scaled up,” Lightcap repeats. “You’ve seen my projections. And you want—you want to scale that up? What if there’s never another K-day? You’d distort global industry and commerce for decades to build a collection of these things; have you thought of all of this?”

“We have,” Pentecost says. 

“Well,” Lightcap says, momentarily at a loss.

“You feel the stakes,” Pentecost says, like it’s an explanation. “Just like I do. That’s another reason I wanted you instead of Dr. Schoenfeld. You can feel the reality of the stakes and, in the face of enormous risk, you’re prepared to go all-in.” 

“The pilot who died,” Lightcap snaps, abrupt and filterless, thinking of the news, of a beautiful woman with a serious face, a warm smile, the sidewinder missile, and the red hair and the green eyes of her friend who had been flying alongside her; the way she had cried on CNN, and the way she had said, high pitched and nearly unintelligible, I tried. I tried to tell her but she had already committed to the run. It was who she was. “Luna Pentecost.”

“My sister,” he confirms.

“I’m sorry,” Lightcap says, and she puts her elbows on the table and reaches out towards him, opening her hands. When he takes them, she closes her fingers and squeezes his hands once in silent solidarity, then lets him go. 

He nods at her.

“She wasn’t just brave,” Lightcap says, forcing her throat to relax. “She was inventive.”

“A born dragon slayer,” Pentecost says dry-voiced, wet-eyed.

“And you?” Lightcap asks.

Pentecost shakes his head. 

“A made dragon slayer then,” Lightcap replies. “The most lethal kind.”

“That’s the idea,” Pentecost says. “I’d feel more optimistic if you’d sign on to build me some armor.”

She looks at him and drums the short edges of her bare nails on the wood of the table in one quick sweep of four. Then another. So they want you, she thinks at herself. You and not Jasper. Do they know? Do they know that you’re better? Do they know that you slept with him? Do they mean to reach out a bureaucratic hand and pull you from beneath him? Do they have any idea who you are? Do they know all they need to know? Because there are things, Caity, baby-doll, sweetheart, angel-face, genius girl, that they need to know. Things that they’ll feel you owed them in disclosure. Things that maybe, in good conscience, you do owe. Not to them, necessarily. But to the world you’ll claim in claiming this offer.

Another sweep of four.

And Stacker does not say, ‘tell me what you’re thinking,’ he just waits.

He waits for Cait.

Waitin’ for Caitlin.

Everyone dies, she thinks. Everyone dies. Everyone dies and how are you going to do it, Lightcap? You have nothing but who you are, the work you’ve done, your parents who love you, and Jasper who loved you but never enough. That’s not so many weights to tie you down. You could watch this unfold from the sidelines in front of your DC TV with your cat and a jar of peanut butter crying vicarious tears for distant and growing rents in your culture or you could grab what you can and hold the tapestry of the only existence you know with your own hands and with other hands, different hands, hands that you will build but that will still be yours. But if you step up, you can’t hit pause. You can’t. But it might take you anyway, that endless groove of the non-progressing needle it’s not a thing you can perfectly control. It’s not a thing you can repress. They will need to understand. They will need to help you help yourself.  

“I have OCD,” Lightcap says, throwing three words and three letters down in perfect neutrality. Algorithmically banish all your guilt, she thinks. 

“I know that,” Pentecost replies, not lying to her. “It’s part of your classified file.”

“But you’d choose me anyway,” Lightcap says.

“Your record speaks for itself,” Pentecost says. 

And the four-month leave of absence I took in the spring, Lightcap thinks. Does that speak for itself as well?

“It’s currently controlled, but anxiety, frustration—they may exacerbate things. I’ll need people around me who could step up in the event that my performance were to be compromised in any way. Everyone will need to know. It’s not a thing that can be held against me on an institutional level. Do you understand what I mean by that?”

“I think I do,” Pentecost replies, and takes a sip of his drink.

“Do you?” Lightcap says. “I’m an extremely difficult person to work with. I’m nearly impossible to work for. I have high standards. I’m a perfectionist to the point of genuine pathology. I can be mercurial. My work ethic has been most kindly described as ‘grueling’. I have achieved what I have achieved by force of will and it shows in my personal leadership style.”

“Are you trying to convince me not to offer you this opportunity?” Pentecost says, not smiling, asking a genuine question. “I can’t think of a more stressful job on the entire planet than the one I’m proposing you take. If you don’t want to take it, if you don’t think you can, in good conscience, take it, we’ll make an offer to Dr. Schoenfeld.”

Lightcap could ride a horse naked through the out he’s offering her in the style of Lady Godiva. 

“I want it,” she says, her voice low and fierce. “I can do it. I just want you to know what it will be like if you choose me rather than Jasper. We are very different. Very.”

“Thanks for the warning,” Pentecost says, and slides the folder over the wood of the table.

“I like your style, Stacker,” Lightcap says, pulling a pen out of her bag and flipping open the folder. “You’d better buy me another round and turn less cryptic once you’ve got your documents signed.”

“We’ll talk on the way,” Pentecost says. “There’s a military jet waiting.”

Lightcap raises her eyebrows. “You weren’t kidding about resource allocation.”

“No, I was not,” Pentecost says dryly.

“I have a cat,” Lightcap says, her pen hovering above the page. “I’m bringing that cat. This is non-negotiable.”

“You can keep your cat,” Pentecost says.

“Non-negotiable,” Lightcap repeats. 

“You can bring your cat to work for the rest of your life for all we care,” Pentecost says, with an amused aggravation that hints at the personality beneath the professional exterior. “It can ride on your shoulder. The cat is a non-issue. We can literally go get your cat right now.”

“I love that cat,” Lightcap informs him with maximum poise, uncapping her pen. 

She begins scanning and signing, scanning and signing, with a flourished L and a wild cross of the t in her surname. Across the tops of the pages, the words ‘Pan-Pacific Defense Corps’ appear over and over again. 

When they leave the bar and step outside, Lightcap looks up, past the haze of light pollution, toward the distant stars.

“Penny for your thoughts,” Pentecost says.

“It’s ours, you know. All of it. Every problem. Every piece of garbage. Every work of art. We’ve claimed this planet in our hubris. We’ll defend it with the full force of our collected civilization.”

Pentecost smiles, understated, unreadable. 

“Penny for your thoughts,” Lightcap says.

“Ask me again some day,” Pentecost replies. “After we’ve built our Jaegers.”

“Jaegers. Plural. Ours. I like the sound of that, Stacker, I really do,” Lightcap says, flashing a grin at him. 

“Me too,” he says. 

“Well let’s get going.”  She threads her arm through his. “My car is this way. Did you drive or take a cab?”  

They walk into crisping air of a September night, Pentecost matching her strides, Lightcap counting silently in her head in time with her steps, not in stylized neutralization but just for luck, the chords of an obscure band playing in her head, her shoes clicking against the pavement, already planning the call she’ll make to Tendo Choi, what she will say, how she will say it; already adjusting the flow of her presentation, scaling things up, growing them organically from already overwhelming beginnings—she’ll now need quantum physicists to study the anomalies in the Pacific and she’ll need biologists to study Trespasser and whatever else might come through, and she’ll need Jaeger pilots; people ready to look death straight in the face on behalf of their species.

Maybe she’ll get to do it herself.

She swallows the fierce longing that accompanies that thought and refocuses on the present, one stilettoed shoe in front of the other; push-off, swing, land, repeat. One, she must get in her car. Two, she must pack up her life and her cat. Three, she must win her right to her resources, and four she must begin to build her Jaegers. As easy as that. One, two, three, four; then reset and take on more.