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: Midnight.

Additional notes: None.

Kingmaker

Caitlin Lightcap stands in a small and underutilized ladies’ room, head bowed, arms crossed, touching nothing, staring at her shoes. She waits here with herself because it’s not time to go. She’s never early. She’s 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. She has an intimate relationship with time. She calls it by its first name and it ticks back at her second by second by second: cait, cait, cait, cait, cait, cait. It’s who she is. How she is. Those Protestants. It’s their fault, probably. She’ll have to ask her father about that one. The Calvinists, maybe. Or maybe just the person who first invented an accurate timepiece.

Lightcap wishes she was a sailor, tackling the problem of arcseconds of longitude. Different seas, different problems.

She would have liked to be a pirate. She’s a nerd. She probably would’ve had to be a pirate’s smartass whore, whispering good ideas in his ear. That’s depressing. But if she’d been good enough with a sword…she’s pretty fucking sure she would have been good enough with a sword. Mutiny! she thinks. 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 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 skipped. 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. 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. 

The album’s shaping up pretty well. It’s no Abbey Road. It’s no The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust. It’s no Lift 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 allocated 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. You’re better than this. You’re better than this. You’re better than this. You’re better than this; you’re better.

She’s afraid.

No no no no. Erase that thought. Count to four, erase it. 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, so that’s not what this is; this is something else. Categorically, it’s not fear because fear isn’t a thing she feels. She jumps into the teeth of anything that might consume her and so this thing, this thing she feels, well, it’s excitement, it’s pressure, it’s a hyperbaric chamber of the consciousness, it’s familiar, it’s appropriate.

This is so important. That’s why she needs to go.

She’ll 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. She’s beautiful. She’s as beautiful as she gets and she gets very beautiful. Her hair is swept into a tight twist 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 pretend to be the person who can do this. The person who can leave this bathroom.

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

She goes.

Lightcap dries her hands, straightens her spine, pulls herself to her full height and strides out of the bathroom, 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’s 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 Lightcap’s hair in the dark. I won’t say 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 perfect 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. You have to do it. No one can do it but you. No one. No one but you. She’d 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’d 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 a cyclone, making an entrance, making heads turn, making conversations waver and stop with her sexy librarian outfit, her milk and crystal beauty. She smiles into the entrance she’s made; it’s who she is, how she feels comfortable, a way to lever a crowbar underneath a waiting weight. She’s the last to arrive and she scans the room, identifying her seat just as Jasper says, “Cait,” like she’s a long-lost friend, an academic rockstar, and the most important person he knows; not the woman who’d 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 by not thinking very hard about anything, letting time grow over the past like ice thick enough to go skating on. 

She rounds the table with its warm wood paneling, its built-in lights. “You magnificent bastard,” Lightcap says, striding like a man, speaking with the faux jocularity of a man, extending a hand like a man so that Jasper can’t hug her. “This is all it takes to get you to DC, then? A California-sized apocalypse?”

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

“Hello, room.” Lightcap pulls her tablet from her purse. “I hear you’re looking for non-nuclear anti-xenobiological options; shall we get right to it?”

There are wary looks but she’s winning them over all the same, keeping 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’s taking risks, she’s swinging for the outfield; if she comes back from this it’ll be crowned with laurels or on her own shield; they’ll love her or they’ll hate her attempt to make them love her. 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 can’t be selling here, there’s only giving. They’ve given her half a day and in return she’ll give them everything she has, everything she is, all she can or 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 she’ll need to be to pull this off. She holds her best self together. 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’d told them, I’ve never failed. And it’d been true because they’d never asked her about pain, about metabolizing the uncontrollable in a war against her own body, her own mind.

It’s like in the book, her mother had said to her, sitting in the closet, knee-to-knee. It’s not your fault. It’s 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 himself. It’s not his fault 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 does his best anyway. Like you. Do you know what I mean, little bug?

She runs ninety minutes over, fielding questions. They like the idea of robotics. They like the idea of the Jaegers. They like her: the strength of her message, the chime in her voice, the ambition of her ideas, the curve of her ass, the complete package she comes as. They’re concerned about the limits of the human nervous system, but only because she’s concerned. They envision what she already sees—the towering outline of a machine that will combat a xenobiological lifeform on its own terms, without nuclear fallout, without risk to existing military investments. An addition. Not a replacement.

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

No one speaks, and she feels the weight of their collective attention focus, narrow, bore down on her. 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 holds their attention with the roving magnet of her gaze, feral and monstrous. “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 never 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, a pretty girl again. “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 heel and her toe in near simultaneity, walking that perfectly straight line that only stilettos allow.

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 to 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 you can’t let it go, her mother had said. It’s okay if you can’t. We all live with who we are.

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

“Dr. Lightcap.”

It’s strange, it’s not a question, it’s not a command, it’s delivered in a circumflex of warning that makes the back of her neck prickle with portent—propitious or ominous; it’s impossible to say. It’s a man who speaks, and his tone gives the impression he’s about to append something to her 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 doesn’t wait for dismissal.

She stops walking and 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, 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 couldn’t 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 it would take days for her to recover. But there’s an unmistakable gravitas to this man that doesn’t come from his height or his uniform but that comes 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. Between the river 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 of her local star 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?”

The sun doesn’t care. It burns and burns.

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

The screen says “Jasper Schoenfeld,” white against a decade-old picture of him, the wind in his hair, on the deck of a small sailboat he’d named Parity.

Even now, even after the long shattering break and the longer shellac of a repair job, his name makes her mouth go dry with a mix of ash and honey. Anger and desire. 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 pretends, as she always does, that she’d erased his number ages ago.

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

“I didn’t see a reason to stay and glad-hand the room,” she says, all sweet-faced irk. “That’s what you’re for.”

“Thanks,” Jasper replies, too much of a beige carpet to show any irritation at her words. “Anyway, I called to tell you that you did a phenomenal job.”

“I know.” She watches the last sliver of red sun sink beneath the jagged line of the DC cityscape.

“Well,” Jasper says, at a loss. “Good. We’ll have 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.

“Goodnight,” Lightcap says. 

At the same time Jasper asks, “Are you 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 lab years ago. That’s not her. That person is dead inside her, wisteria creeping over her lonely little grave, replaced by Lightcap 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 she’d 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 execrable humanity, 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. Keep me company and understand 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, though I wish I could, that it’s the thing that I have had to ride and tame for my whole life long, never quite banished by pharmacology and reason, the shadow I’ll wrestle with for all of my days. Please come. Please come every day. Never leave me. We’ll talk about science and art while I keep a silent count of little things. You’ll cook and I’ll clean and we’ll be together, together always, the way we should’ve 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 won’t happen; she doesn’t speak from the rotting graves of her dead selves.

“It’s a kind offer, Jasper.” Lightcap feels atmospheres of pressure in the bones of her face. “I’m grateful for your efforts to maintain our 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 know I asked a lot of you on short notice, I know how destabilizing that can be—”

“Goodnight,” she says, and ends the call.

She stares at her phone. She should have told him she was meeting someone in the tradition of 90s conspiracy movies. A man named Pentecost. It’s a propitious name. The book of 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. Very very good. She likes it. It’s a great name. She doesn’t think she’s in any 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 latest 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 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 4.3-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 over-engineered and named after chemical compounds.

After twenty minutes, he walks through the door. 

His uniform is gone. He wears a blazer, casually unbuttoned. He carries 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 whole life? No reason not to enjoy the 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. The sound.

She stands and offers her hand.

Pentecost glances at her hand then looks into her eyes as if he knows, as if someone’s told him. Sensitive. Rude. Her permission is inherent in the extension of her hand and it isn’t fear of physical contamination that makes her wash; 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 and waves are clean, the ocean is clean, she’s clean. She’s okay.

Pentecost takes her hand. “Dr. Lightcap.”

“Please, call me Cait,” she says.

“Stacker,” he replies.

They sit. He reads through the drink menu, amused and tired and skeptical all at once.

“The Dopamine Dream is particularly good.” Lightcap smiles. “Packs quite the punch, though. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“Can one just get a whisky here?”

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

“I can’t pronounce half of these.” Pentecost gives her an assessing look, maybe trying to determine if she’s flirting.

“And I can’t tell a general from a sergeant.” She turns brusque. “Yet.”

He rotates his menu and points at the cocktail that’s second from the bottom.

“Salicylated Sorrow.” Lightcap smirks. “Just tell them you want the ‘Painkiller’.”

“Right,” he replies, dry and self-contained and British.

They struggle through small talk about the city and the bar and the weather in Washington until they’ve ordered their drinks, at which point Lightcap says, “I can’t help but notice 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 unusual to encounter you behind closed doors in the five-sided heart of the American military hierarchy?”

He smiles—a brief, bright flash of teeth.

“American interests are a part of what I’m meant to represent,” he replies, “but only a part.”

Lightcap sips iced tap water while reconsidering her preconceptions. She’d assumed she was speaking to a junior member of the collection of brass-adorned men in the room, because he’s younger than most, and because his uniform wasn’t as ostentatiously decorated as others she’d seen.

Thinking back, she’s not sure he’d been wearing an American uniform at all.

She sets her water on the table. “Well. You have my attention.”

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

“Why are we speaking at all?” Lightcap asks him.

“I believe in your proposal,” he says. “I believe in you. But 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 dozens.”

“The resources for a project of that magnitude would be…” Lightcap trails off.

“Global,” Pentecost finishes. “It’s not just America that has a stake in what might be coming.”

“I know,” Lightcap says.

A waitress brings their drinks. Lightcap slides the frosted pink glass towards her and takes a sip. It’s cool and sweetbitter, candyflood fading to an astringency that requires another sip, a chase, like the best of her dreams.

“I want you to leave your job at DARPA,” Pentecost says. “I want you to work for the organization I represent. I want you to come immediately. Let’s leave tonight, if you can. We’ll modify your proposal and you’ll present it again, this time in New York City. At the UN.”

Lightcap sips her drink, sweetbitter, sweet. Bitter. “I won’t sign my life away to an unnamed group with an unnamed ethos.”

Bold words, but the claim they stake is weak. She trusts this man. The weight of his gaze. The weight of his words. God wants this. He must.

“The non-disclosure clause is only until the organization goes public,” Pentecost says. “A few more weeks. Then 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 want. 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. 

“Why not Jasper? He has more experience.”

“Don’t think I need Dr. Schoenfeld.” Pentecost smiles, small and polite, masking real amusement. “But you can bring him if you want him.”

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

She wants this. She wants to surf the cresting wave into all that’s coming. She wants to turn her vision into something she’ll touch with her hands, feel with her mind. She wants to trust Stacker Pentecost, the weight of his gaze, the sorrow in his chosen cocktail. She wants to build machines, to fuse the fire of Prometheus to the mind of man to whom he gave it, she wants to find the person who will stitch the torn threads of string theory back together, she wants robotics and neuroscience, coders and chemists; Jaeger Tech, Kaiju Science, she wants everything she can have so she can give it all she is.

She’ll take it all into herself and reform it into a dynamic shield for her whole species. Something that makes children feel safe at night.

“I have no experience organizing something of this magnitude,” she says, low and tight and too fierce for a trendy little bar. “I can build you the machines you need—but what you’re describing is also 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 scrap of metal we can mine, every semiconductor we can buy. You’ll get them to work. Anything you don’t know how to do, you hire someone to do for you. This is your DARPA project, scaled up.”

“What if there’s never another K-day?” Lightcap presses. “You’d distort global industry and commerce for decades to build a collection of these things.”

“We know,” Pentecost says. 

Lightcap lifts a brow and sips her drink, silently demanding more.

“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 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, filterless, thinks of the news, of a beautiful woman with a serious face, a warm smile, her Sidewinder missile, her RAF jet, sliced in half by Trespasser. “Luna Pentecost.”

“My sister,” he confirms.

Lightcap puts her elbows on the table, offering him her open hands.

He takes them.

She closes her fingers, squeezing his hands in silent solidarity. 

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

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

“And you?” Lightcap asks.

Pentecost shakes his head. 

“A made dragon slayer then.” Lightcap squeezes his hands for emphasis, then lets him go.

Pentecost picks up his Salicylated Sorrow. “I’d feel more optimistic if you’d build me some armor.”

She 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 you’re better? Do they know you slept with him? Do they mean to reach out a bureaucratic hand and pull you from beneath him? How unusual. But do they have any idea who you really are? Do they know all they need to know?

Another sweep of four.

And Stacker does not say, “Tell me what you’re thinking.” He waits.

He waits for Cait.

Waitin’ for Caitlin.

Everyone dies, she thinks. Everyone dies. Everyone dies, everyone dies, so how will you 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 too, 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 growing rents in your civilization or you could grab what you can and hold the tapestry of the only existence you’ll ever know with your own hands and with mechanical hands you build. But if you step up, you can’t hit pause. You can’t. It might consume you—the endless groove of the non-progressing needle you can’t always control, can’t always repress. They’ll need to understand.

“I have OCD,” Lightcap throws three words and three letters down in perfect neutrality. They feel unfinished. Waiting for a fourth thing.

Algorithmically banish all your guilt, she thinks. 

“I know that,” Pentecost replies. “It’s part of your classified file.”

“But you’d choose me anyway?”

“Your record speaks for itself.”

And the four-month leave of absence I took in the spring, Lightcap thinks. Does that speak for itself as well? What she says is, “It’s controlled. But I’ll need people around me who can step up were my performance 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 takes a sip of his sad, vodka-laced, ice-in-milk drink.

“Do you?” Lightcap says. “I’m difficult to work with. 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’ve achieved what I’ve achieved by force of will and it shows in my personal leadership style. No one likes me.”

“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 planet than the one I’m proposing you take. If you don’t want 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, low and fierce. “I can do it. I just want you to understand what it will be like if you choose me rather than Jasper. We’re very different. Very.”

“Thanks for the warning.” Pentecost 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’s pen hovers above the page. “I’m bringing that cat. This is non-negotiable.”

“You can keep your cat,” Pentecost says.

“Non-negotiable,” Lightcap repeats. “The cat comes with me always.”

“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 go get your cat right now.”

“I love that cat,” Lightcap informs him with maximum poise, then uncaps 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 someday,” Pentecost replies. “After we’ve built our Jaegers.”

“Jaegers. Plural. Ours. I like the sound of that, Stacker, I do.”

“Me too,” he says. 

“Well let’s get going.” She threads her arm through his. “My car is this way.”

They walk into crisping air of a September night. Pentecost matches her stride. Lightcap counts silently in her head in time with her steps, 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’ll say, how she’ll say it; already adjusting the flow of her presentation, scaling things up, growing them organically from already overwhelming beginnings—she’ll need quantum physicists to study the anomalies in the Pacific and she’ll need biologists to study Trespasser’s corpse, and she’ll need Jaeger pilots: people ready to look death in the face on behalf of their whole species.

Maybe she’ll get to do it herself.

She swallows a fierce longing 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.