Out of Many Scattered Things: Lady Stardust

“I can’t believe I drove a metacognitive car into your brain like a total badass,” Lightcap says.

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

Text iteration: Midnight.

Additional notes: None.

Lady Stardust

Inside a close room with bright lights and dark metal walls, Lightcap kneels, her eyes fixed on the contacts adherent to D’Onofrio’s exposed left calf. Tiny electrodes penetrate the tibial and common peroneal nerves. Her knees burn and her back aches, deep and heavy. She spends too much time torquing herself around setups rather than levering her setups around herself. She needs to stop doing that. She widens her crouch, ducking her head to track the course of the most distal electrode.

Everything looks correct.

But everything had looked correct last time, and it hadn’t been.

Still crouching, she stabilizes herself with a tripod of fingertips, kicks a foot out, plants it, and shifts her weight sideways to check the other leg.

“How do you do that?” D’Onofrio asks the air.

When Tendo doesn’t answer, Lightcap realizes his question was directed at her.

“Do what?” Lightcap traces the silver trail of electrodes with her eyes. The alignment in the right leg looks good. Looks right. (Ha.) If this works, she’ll design an easier setup. She’ll make a suit, where misalignment is impossible. If this doesn’t work, maybe she’ll still make a suit; manual alignment is a pain in the ass. Literally.

“Don’t move,” Tendo snaps at D’Onofrio. “You can talk, Serge, just don’t move your head.”

“Got it, got it,” D’Onofrio replies, all good-natured patience. Then, “you’re really good with those things,” he adds.

“Microelectrodes?” Lightcap counters. “I sure hope so.”

“He means the shoes, Cait,” Tendo says.

“Oh.” Lightcap looks down at her stilettos—black, closed-toe, high, narrow, with a bright red sole—and has a twin urge to snap a humorless, “Watch it,” and to stand, lift a foot, and plant it directly on his thigh, while purring, “These shoes?”

She does neither. D’Onofrio walks a mostly respectable line on the border of friendship and flirtation, admiration and attraction. He’s never called her a bitch. (Admittedly, this is not a high bar.) He’s got a cute face, a smile that’s as transmissible as a pathogen, and he’s built like a stack of bricks, but—honestly? If she didn’t spend so much of her day obsessing over the complex topic of keeping him the fuck alive, she’d find him forgettable.

Well, that isn’t quite fair. There’s one thing about him she wholly admires: his good-natured panache when shouldering a real risk of death. 

“It’s just impressive,” D’Onofrio continues. “Physically. As a physical feat. That’s all.”

“The stiletto squat?” Tendo clarifies, a tiny pair of calipers between his teeth.

“We’re not calling it that,” Lightcap says. “That’s not its name, assholes. It doesn’t have a name.”

“Spinal alignment confirmed.” Tendo straightens, pulls the calipers out of his mouth and drops them into a pocket. “And, for the record, I have zero opinion regarding Cait’s footwear. I don’t even see it. Heels? What heels? I see only the science. Speaking of, I’ll head to the console and start the final checks.”

“Page Jasper if he’s not there,” Lightcap says, as Tendo heads for the door.

“I’m here.” Jasper’s voice echoes over the in-room speakers.

“Creepy,” D’Onofrio murmurs.

Lightcap grins where he can’t see her, a full-wattage smile at D’Onofrio’s boot.

“Not creepy,” Jasper’s disembodied voice replies. “Safe.”

The door shuts hollowly behind Tendo.

Lightcap stands. Her eyes sweep the room—the shining walls, the gleaming floor, the dark window that separates the lab from the bulk of the still-skeletal Jaeger frame waiting for human neural input, and, finally, the forbidding silhouette of her first rig, folded like a spider several feet away.

It had killed Adam Casey a month ago.

It wasn’t the rig, Cait, Tendo had said, his eyes shut, a can of hellshit beer pressed against his forehead even though it’d been cold in the room, cold in the bar, cold in the city, cold in the state, cold for huge arcminutes of degrees everywhere around them. The alignment was good. It was something else. His brain couldn’t take it. Synchronized waves of current. There was some oscillation there. A standing wave of building charge. And then—

Lightcap had been crying, her tears coming hot and trailing cold over her face in little clusters of four, falling onto the insides of her glasses. I still don’t know what’s wrong. We only have one data point. I can’t fix it from that. We need more.

“Hey,” D’Onofrio says, “Dr. L.”

She looks away from the first rig’s dead trail of abandoned electrodes, the too-new helmet, the awful emptiness of the seat. She’d been the one to restore it after Casey died. The one who’d cleaned it off, the one who dipped electrodes into the decon solution, the one to drape them in a loop over the dark metal frame.

“I got this,” D’Onofrio says, not able to see her without turning his head, but knowing somehow what she’s looking at. “No problem.” 

Lightcap walks into his line of sight and braces her hands on her knees, bending so they’re eye to eye, shallow sea to clearest sky. 

“Don’t push,” she says. “Do NOT push. Just—withstand. Okay? This is your first time. We just get our readings and jack back out.”

“You need to demonstrate viability,” he returns, way too earnest, just a little bit defiant.

I wouldn’t choose D’Onofrio if I were you. Jasper had said. There’s something about him I don’t like. Don’t trust. It’s almost that I like him too much. He’s too willing to throw everything away, his entire life, like it’s nothing. There’s something behind that. Something problematic.

“Captain,” she snaps. “Don’t. Do not.”

“Yeah yeah,” he says. “I got ya.”

She looks at him like a level and he looks back at her like a lathe. “Are you afraid?” Lightcap asks, because if he is, he doesn’t carry it on his face.

“I have enough brains for that, at least,” D’Onofrio says, like he’s letting her in on a secret.

“Oh yeah?” Lightcap smiles.

“Don’t tell anyone,” he says.

“Serge, I like your taste, brother,” Tendo says over the in-room speakers.

Lightcap looks up expectantly, just as the opening track of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust begins to play.

“Nice pick,” Tendo says over the speaker system. “Topical.”

“Morbid.” Jasper sounds distant like he’s speaking over Tendo’s shoulder.

“Love it,” Lightcap mouths at D’Onofrio.

“You told me once,” he replies quietly, spine and skull held unnaturally aligned by the rig, “that you can never go wrong with Bowie.”

“So true.” Lightcap waits, hands on knees, eyes ceiling-ward, until the chorus comes.

We’ve got five years, stuck on my eyes

Five years, what a surprise

We’ve got five years, my brain hurts a lot

Five years, that’s all we’ve got.

“Think I can negotiate for ten?” she asks.

“You?” D’Onofrio says. “Oh yeah.”

“You good?” Lightcap asks. “Feel okay?”

“I’m good. I’m ready,” D’Onofrio replies. “Let’s get this show on the road.”

“You heard the man.” Tendo’s voice comes from everywhere. “Get up here, Cait.”

She winks at D’Onofrio, straightens, walks out of the room and down a short span of hall, her heels clicking against the floor. She wipes damp palms on black dress pants, turns a corner, climbs a set of steps, and throws open the door to a cramped control room. It’s small and dark and smells like Tendo’s coffee. She slides into place in front of the control console as Five Years transitions to Soul Love. Jasper is already there, leaning against the back wall, a handheld drill holstered at his belt like a weapon, his arms crossed over his chest. When she looks back over her shoulder, he gives her what’s supposed to be a smile of encouragement, but looks more like commiseration over a deep and horrible shared anxiety.

She grimaces in return. “Ready?”

Jasper pats the drill on his hip with one hand, prepared to begin the unbolting process at the first sign of neurological or mechanical trouble. “I have to admit—I do like his style.” He flicks his eyes to the control console where Soul Love plays over the in-room speakers.

“Doesn’t everyone?” Lightcap’s voice is dry, her mouth is dry, and a sheen of sweat films at her temples and along her spine. One two three four, she thinks to herself. One two three four.

“I heard that.” D’Onofrio’s voice is only slightly distorted in the transmission to electronic signal and back.

“Don’t let it go to your head.” Lightcap scans her screens for any indication of trouble. There’s the EEG on her left where D’Onofrio’s brainwaves flux and shift in noisy lines of green and purple and blue. There’s the video feed on the skeleton of the prototype. There’s the bright screen that tracks resistance, current, voltage throughout the rig, throughout the Jaeger. There’s the interface terminal window, its yellow-on-black text waiting for Tendo’s input.

“We’re green across the board,” Tendo says. 

“Let’s get it on,” D’Onofrio says. “I’m dyin’ to meet this lady you’ve told me so much about.”

“Dying?” Jasper echoes over the open channel. “You didn’t just say that, D’Onofrio.” 

“Shut up,” Lightcap snaps, as Soul Love turns to Moonage Daydream. If anything goes wrong, she’ll never be able to listen to David Bowie again.

That would be a crime, so it’s not allowed. 

“My count, kids.” Her throat is tight. “It’ll be: one, two, three, go.”

“Keep your ‘lectric eye on me babe. Put your ray gun to my head.” D’Onofrio sings along with the album. 

Lightcap listens for the beat and counts, One two three four, two two three four, three two three four, four two three four—

“One, two, three, go.” Lightcap doesn’t break her internal rhythm. She jacks him in as the guitar solo starts.

Tendo flicks switches on his side of the board as Lightcap starts her slow fade of analog resistance. Just a little current, she thinks. Just a very little current, sliding into the right places, sliding in at the right time.

“How we doin’ brother?” Tendo asks.

“This guitar solo is killer.” D’Onofrio’s voice is full of strain.

Jasper leans over Lightcap’s shoulder. “Cut it out with the death puns.”

“You people. No sense of fun. Terminally boring. Lethally dull. Killjoys.”

“Stop,” Lightcap tells Tendo, “we’ll hold here.”

The dissonant opening of Starman plays over the open channel. Lightcap clears her throat and says, “Sit tight for a minute, D’Onofrio. We’re holding here.”

“Why? What’s wrong?” He sounds like a guy who’s just been told he can’t tailgate before the Sunday afternoon football game.

“Nothing’s wrong. We’re easing into it is all. A slow ramp. Relax. Listen to David Bowie’s album about killer aliens, ya weird kid.”

Jasper arches a brow, then turns back to the EEG. “What?” Lightcap demands.

“Nothing.”

Lightcap gives him a stormy glare he might or might not deserve and that’s wholly wasted on the eyeless side of his lead-lined, impenetrable skull. She battens down her focus and follows the line of Jasper’s sight to watch D’Onofrio’s EEG, which is a reassuring scramble of lines waving their jagged way across a dark screen.

“I can almost feel her,” D’Onofrio says, quiet and revelatory over the open channel.

“You can?” Lightcap asks. 

“I think so,” he confirms.

“Describe it.” Jasper leans over Lightcap’s shoulder like he’s trying to climb into the mic. “Try to describe what you’re feeling, if you can.”

“It’s hard to put into words. When I’m talking to you I feel a strange resistance to moving my mouth. As if there’s something in between wanting to move and the movement itself. Does that make any sense? There’s a barrier between me and my body where no barrier was. I think that might be her. Our Jaeger.”

“It’s possible.” Lightcap hears a note of awe in her own voice. “Your brain may be feeling the electrical resistance between your circuits and hers and trying to parse it. We don’t really know how the mind will interpret our input.”

“How do you feel otherwise?” Tendo asks. 

“Fine. Little bit of a headache. There’s an ache in my hands and feet.”

“Not bad,” Jasper murmurs. 

“Another minute, I think.” Tendo glances at Lightcap. 

She nods. 

“We’ll hang out here for another minute, Serge,” Tendo says, full volume. “You tell us if anything changes.”

“Sure,” D’Onofrio replies.

Lightcap scans every screen, left to right across the dark/bright expanse of the console. She hooks a stiletto heel around the rung of her chair, fighting to keep her mind busy, to keep out the intrusive negative thoughts gathering the way they always gather. Go away, she thinks at them. Live in exile and die there. 

“So how about that local hockey team, huh?” D’Onofrio says into the heavy silence.

No one replies.

“There’s a local hockey team?” Lightcap asks.

“You people,” Serge says. “You’re hopeless.”

“We’re not hopeless.” Tendo toggles between screens. “We’re focused.”

“Focused. Sure.” D’Onofrio says. “Speaking of the work half of the work-work balance you guys have going on, what’s the story with the new K-science hire? Dr. Anderson? When’s she coming?”

“Can we talk about this later?” Lightcap snaps.

D’Onofrio ignores her. “Y’think she’ll be a decent poker player? I’m tired of dominating Shatterdome Hold’em.”

“‘Dominating’ seems like an optimistic way of describing it,” Tendo says. 

Lightcap sighs. “She’s not.”

“Dr. L. How could you do this to me. I told you you needed to hire someone with a decent poker game.”

“No—I mean she’s not coming. At all.”

“What?” D’Onofrio says. “Since when?”

Lightcap sighs.

Jasper grasps her shoulder and gives it a supportive shake.

I can’t be involved with the kind of operation you’re running, Anderson had said over the phone, poised and clipped. Little to no ethical oversight, risky human trials. I’m not comfortable with your lax standards. JET Force doesn’t operate that way, and our work is at least as dangerous as yours, if not more so. 

You don’t have a timetable, Lightcap had said, her voice still raw from weeping, her cuticles cracked and bloody, Casey’s death sticking in her craw. You deal with corpses. I deal with living monsters. This approach is necessary. As head of Kaiju Science you wouldn’t be involved with—

It’s never necessary, Anderson had cut in. You demonstrated your operating philosophy with what happened to your first Jaeger pilot. I wouldn’t be a good fit.

“Since two weeks ago,” Lightcap says. “We’re getting her deputy director instead. He gave a fantastic keynote in Geneva a few months ago.”

“Green Hair Guy?” Tendo asks.

“Green Hair Guy,” Lightcap confirms.

“Just what we need,” Jasper says. “We have enough personality in the Shatterdome to write a post-modern novel.”

“He any good at poker though?” Serge asks. 

“You never know,” Lightcap replies, a musical sing-song. 

Jasper huffs. “Is he any good at his job?”

“He’s still alive, and in JET Force that’s a surrogate endpoint for skill,” Lightcap says. “Plus—Dr. Gottlieb adores him, so…actually, I have no idea what that means.”

“Wait. Dr. Gottlieb—likes someone?” Serge asks. “There’s a human on God’s green earth that Dr. G likes? And that human has green hair? The words that came out of your mouth weren’t in the right order, I don’t think.”

“Ah ah.” Lightcap lifts a finger as though Serge can see her. “I didn’t say ‘likes’. I said ‘adores’. Intellectually. Probably intellectually. Don’t spread that around. It’s just a personal opinion that I and any other thinking human would form after listening to Gottlieb indulge in a twenty-minute rhapsodic soliloquy regarding the guy’s credentials, then turn around and tell me I shouldn’t hire him because he’d be wasted on practical troubleshooting and should stay in realms of higher thought. We’ve also gotta be past the one minute mark, Tendo, what’s happening?”

“Thought you wanted a slow ramp,” Tendo says.

“Not this slow. I said a minute and I meant a minute. Can we focus, please?” Lightcap asks. “Rather than salivate over the interpersonal drama coming our way?”

“Hey,” Tendo says. “I’m focused, yet also attending to peripheral detail. This is an essential part of my job description.”

“I’m trying not to focus,” D’Onofrio says. “That was a central point in Dr. Schoenfeld’s four hours of instructions, if you’ll recall.”

“I did tell him that,” Jasper admits.

Lightcap ignores their attempts to lighten the mood. She resettles her shoulders, relaxes the tension in her thighs, and looks critically at the data set they’ve recorded. She sees no problems in the ebb and flow of electrical signals.

“Okay,” she says, after a propitious little four-count. “We’ll go a little further. On my count—I’ll give you a ‘one, two, three,’ then go on ‘four’.”

“Yup,” Tendo confirms.

“Aces,” D’Onofrio says.

She gives them their count. Tendo’s channels are already live, so he watches the readouts as she slides the resistance down in a slow even pull. 

“Talk to us, Serge,” Jasper says.

“I’m getting something. No pain. No temperature. No pressure. Just—a sense of where she is in space. Her arms. Her legs. I can feel mine. I can feel hers. Together at the same time.”

“Proprioception,” Lightcap says, her eyes fixed on D’Onofrio, her throat tight. “Perfect. Just—just hold here.”

When you climb to the top of the mountain, David Bowie sings, look out over the sea.

“The EEG,” Tendo says, one hand over the mic. “Look.”

At first Lightcap notices nothing out of the ordinary. Then, small and quiet within the background noise, she sees it. A sinusoidal wave. Small. Coming and going. Oscillating amplitude within static.

The same thing that had risen up to kill Casey midway through their first trial.

She swallows. 

“I’m gonna try moving my fingers,” Serge says.

“No.” Lightcap cracks the word like a whip. “No,” she says again, quietly this time. Calmly this time. “Not yet. Just stand by, please.”

Tendo leans in. “What do you want to do?”

Lightcap stares at the little static snake. “It’ll happen every time.”

“Don’t jump to conclusions, Cait. Let’s abort the trial,” Jasper says. “We’ll take time to think about this. We’ve got new data to work through.”

“Not enough,” Lightcap whispers, hating herself, hating the world, hating Jasper, hating that little static snake in the grass of neural noise. Identify the automatic thought. Identify the feeling that comes from that thought. Identify the reflexive response. Automatic thought: I’m a terrible person. Feeling: Guilt. Reflexive response: handwashing. Later. Maybe never. One two three four, two two three four, three two three four, four two three four, nothing’s gone wrong yet. Nothing’s gone wrong. Not yet. Save it. Save it. You can save it. You’re the only one who can. You can save it. You.

“What’s going on up there?” D’Onofrio asks.

“We’re seeing an oscillatory pattern in the leads coming from your cortex,” Lightcap says.

Tendo grimaces, looking worriedly at the camera close-up of D’Onofrio’s face on the rightmost monitor.

“The same pattern that killed Casey,” D’Onofrio says. It’s not a question.

“That’s very likely,” Lightcap says. “Yes. It’s small, it’s waxing and waning, but it’s there. We’re discussing how to proceed.”

“Do I get a vote?” D’Onofrio asks.

“You always get a vote,” Lightcap says. “What are you thinking, kiddo?”

“Casey tried to do too much,” Serge says. “Let me try moving a finger. We know it can be done. Pentecost did it and lived.” 

The three of them consider his words in silence. Lightcap looks at Tendo, then at Jasper. There is no certainty to be found in either of their expressions. 

I need you to come, Lightcap had said to Jasper, standing in his familiar office, in his familiar lab. I need you to come because I need you as the brakes to my engine. I know you can do it. You’re the only one I know can do it. So if you can live with the fact they chose me rather than you—or even if you can’t—I need you to come with me. He’d looked at her, quiet and powerful behind the wide expanse of his desk, the sun picking out the gray in his hair. All he said was, I’ve always wanted to see Alaska.

“Is this too far?” She asks, her words silent. 

Jasper looks up at waving colored lines, then over at the video feed of D’Onofrio’s face.

“You tell me if it’s too far,” she hisses, quick and quiet and vicious. 

“No,” Jasper says, a rock in a stream.

Her guts untwist and with a lucky little four-count she says, “All right. Try your right index finger. One tap. When you’re ready. Don’t rush it.”

They lean forward, Jasper’s eyes on Serge, Tendo’s gaze on the snaking current readout, Lightcap’s jockeying the camera feed from the Shatterdome floor into a closeup of the prototype’s right finger. She waits like a coiled spring. Next to her, Tendo inches forward in his chair. Jasper’s breath is warm on the back of her neck.

Onscreen, the Jaeger’s finger twitches.

“You did it!” Lightcap, elated, watches voltage weave through neural noise.

“I know I did it.” Serge says. “No need to scream in my ear about it, Dr. L.”

“Sorry.” Lightcap is instantly contrite, instantly quieter. “Sorry. No visual change in your pattern. Can we mathematically confirm that, Tendo?”

After a pause, “No change,” Tendo confirms.

“Let me try it again,” D’Onofrio says.

“Hold up,” Jasper snaps. “You bleeding, Serge?”

Lightcap watches in horror, her mouth opening, her vocal cords freezing as D’Onofrio, unthinking, moves his right hand to his face. 

A room away, a giant metal arm lifts into the air, shoulder joint opening, elbow joint flexing, wrist joint rotating. It’s more than they’ve ever dared.

“Shit,” Tendo breathes as the EEG destabilizes. “Shit shit shit—”

“Freeze,” Lightcap says, low and powerful, every tyrannical impulse she has poured into that one word.

Serge freezes, his arm in midair, his fingers just beginning to extend toward his own face.

No one speaks. 

The Jaeger holds her position.

The snake on the readout settles back into static.

“Did I just kill myself?” D’Onofrio asks, as It Ain’t Easy plays quietly into the air.

“No.” Lightcap’s eyes are still on his EEG. “You’re doing it. We see the oscillation, but—it’s not changing.”

“He’s bleeding,” Jasper says. “You are bleeding, Serge. That can’t be good.”

“Don’t touch your face, brother,” Tendo says. “Just put that arm down. Nice and slow.”

Lightcap watches as man and Jaeger lower their arms in perfect tandem. D’Onofrio exhales, shaky and long, then pulls in another slow breath. A thin trail of blood trickles down his face and runs over his lip, staining his teeth. He looks terrible. He looks amazing. He looks like the best thing that’s ever happened to Lightcap, that ever will.

“Let’s jack out,” she says, her mind buzzing with elation. “Captain, you did an amazing job.” 

“Wait,” D’Onofrio says. “I want to try something.”

“What?” Lightcap replies, but then, right on top of the question she adds, “You tell me with words, buddy.” 

“I want to try standing up.” 

Tendo and Lightcap exchange a speculative look. 

“No.” Jasper makes the word flat and final, doing what Lightcap pays him to do. “No way. Not yet. We’ll look at the data. Wait a few days. Build up your tolerance to the load.”

“But what if I never spike out of range, like Casey did? I don’t think I will. I feel her. I feel her tight. Right with me. We need more than arm movement. That’s nothing. You guys have a site review tomorrow. Let me bring her up.”

“Yeah. A site review. And I need another dead pilot like I need a hole in the head,” Lightcap says.

“I have a hole in my head.” D’Onofrio grins, his teeth bloody. “Live a little, Dr. L.”

Lightcap glances at Tendo, who shrugs and makes an equivocal hand gesture that echoes the uncertainty in Lightcap’s own mind. She looks at Jasper, who shakes his head, sober and solid. She sharpens her face into an urgent appeal and he relents, opens a hand, and steps back, out of her peripheral vision. 

Lightcap drums three sets of four with bare nails on the edge of a metal console, listening to the sound of Ziggy Stardust on the rise. Ascending. He ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. From thence he will come to judge the living. And the dead. And He was all right. The band was all together. I believe in the Holy Spirit. The holy Christian Church. The communion of saints. The forgiveness of sins. The resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. Yes, He was all right. The song went on forever. One two three four; four three two one.

As Lady Stardust ends, Lightcap leans forward and speaks into the mic, low and quiet. “Stand when ready.”

With the grinding sound of metal-on-metal, the Jaeger rises to its full, skeletal height as D’Onofrio stands, pulling the frame with him, dragging cables behind where they’re fastened to his calves, his thighs, his arms, his spine, the helmet bolted to his skull.

Lightcap feels the hot rush of tears as she pans the camera to look at the standing Jaeger, the tiny cheering figures of J-tech at its feet. She presses her fingers against her mouth and hunches in her seat, trying to contain all she’s feeling. It beats against her insides like a tropical storm in a woman-shaped jar.

“Maybe it’s him.” Tendo watches Jasper stand, trembling, blood trickling from his nose. “Maybe he’s a natural. Maybe Pentecost was as well. Maybe some people are just—strong enough. Neurochemically robust. Maybe Casey wasn’t. Or maybe he pushed too fast.”

“I don’t know.” Jasper replies, slow and cautious. “Run another round of analysis on that pattern will you? Just to be safe?”

Take a step. Lightcap longs to bury the idea in Serge’s mind. Step forward. But she says nothing, staring at the unarmored Jaeger on the monitors. She wants to run into the next room. She wants to see it move with her own eyes, feel the vibration in the floor as it does. Let it knock her off her feet. 

“How we lookin’, team?” D’Onofrio asks, sweat running into his eyes, his voice almost even under astronomical strain.

“We are lookin’ good, brother,” Tendo replies. 

“Well, in that case,” D’Onofrio says, and steps forward. 

Lightcap’s hand flies to her mouth.

The prototype Jaeger lifts a foot in a high, uncontrolled arc and slams it against the floor. The control room shudders. Jasper falls into Lightcap’s shoulder. She and Tendo grab their consoles for support. A distant alarm sounds. Yes, she thinks, triumphant, elated, it will work. It is working. 

Jasper’s lips are against her ear. “We have a problem.”

She knows him so well that she can feel what he means, know what he’s looking at, see what he’s already seen.

“Go!” She shouts. Only then does Lightcap look to the monitor to see the oscillatory pattern rise in every goddamn lead. “GO,” she shouts again, but Jasper hadn’t waited. He’s leaving the room, ripping the drill off its clip at his hip.

Lightcap slams the heel of her hand on the button that will summon a medical team to the interface lab.

“Serge.” Tendo is speaking, tight and afraid. “Serge. Serge. Can you hear me? Talk to me, brother. Say something.” 

This is not happening, this is not happening, undo it, start over, it was going so well. One two three four, two two three four, three two three four, four two three four, undo, unmake, restart, negate, she thinks, this is my fault, she thinks. I have to fix this, she thinks. I have to fix this. Think, Caity, think think think. You can do it. You can. Think. One two three four, two two three four, three two three four. Solve this. Pull him out. Cut the connection. Too late. Too late. Too late.

“Cait,” D’Onofrio says, choking through clenched teeth. 

“Cut the connection!” Lightcap tries to dial up the resistance, to block the open channel between D’Onofrio and the Jaeger. “Cut the connection!”

“I can’t,” Tendo shouts back. “It’s too tight. I can’t separate the feeds. He’s in there.” Tendo points at the oscillating death snake growing in a sea of noise.

Visible on the security camera, Jasper darts into the room, sprinting across the floorspace, and skids to a stop behind D’Onofrio. “Hang on.” She hears him on the in-room mic. “Serge, hang in there.” The drill revolves, a high-pitched crescendo that phases lower as Jasper starts at the base of D’Onofrio’s spine. 

Serge tries to speak again, through a clenched jaw, his back arching against the frame he’s bolted to, the Jaeger flexing with him as far as its spine allows.

“We’ll get you out, Serge,” Lightcap says, her voice so high it doesn’t sound like hers.

Tendo shakes his head.

Lightcap thinks her promise might leach into her lungs and drown her. 

One two three four, she counts with David Bowie, two two three four, don’t count, think. Don’t count, think. Don’t count, think. New track. The load is too much. It’s killing him. Manual unbolting is too slow. You can’t get it off him before he dies.

“He’s strong.” Lightcap clamps her hands on the edge of the console. “Stronger than the others. He can hold through the unbolting if we help him. We have to help him hold out. But how?”

“Resistance is already jacked as high as we dare take it.” Tendo catches her train of thought and runs with it. “Gain is down. We can turn on her systems, try to drain power from the neural network.” As he speaks, his hands are moving over touchscreens.

Lightcap stares at the oscillating wave on the monitors, watches its amplitude open up, watches its frequency narrow down. Jasper’s a quarter of the way up D’Onofrio’s spine when the Jaeger crashes to one knee, bringing D’Onofrio with it. There’s the terrible sound of a misaligned drill screeching to a halt, then starting up again. Help him hold it, Lightcap thinks. How can you help him hold it? How? If it were a literal weight, I would—

“God,” Lightcap whispers, rocked by fear. By elation. 

Tendo looks over at her.

“Tell Jasper to stop.” She stumbles to her feet, tripping over the heel she’d hooked to her chair, but not falling. Blind to everything but her best option. Her fingers are numb; her heart is pounding so hard it feels like something a person could die of.

“To—to stop?” Tendo asks.

 But Lightcap is already across the room and out the door. She runs through the halls, not dressed for this, never dressed for this, sprinting on heels that crack against the cement of the hallway floor in an echoing staccato, risking a fall, a broken ankle—a broken ankle that might kill a man, that might doom a coastal city. When she gets to the lab, she plants a hand on the open doorframe, swings herself through it, and staggers into the room. 

“Stop that drill,” she shouts.

Jasper stops the drill. 

D’Onofrio is dying. Right in front of her. Back arched, kneeling on the floor, still mostly bolted into a duplicate of the rig that killed the pilot before him. It’s her rig. It’s hers. She knows it inside and out: its dark frame, its streamers of electrodes, where the screws go, where the bolts fit, where the microelectrodes snake along their proper courses. It’s complex, a detailed web that can’t be yanked out of the human nervous system. She can’t get him out in time to save his life. It’s impossible. She cannot get him out.

But she can get herself in.

She’s crossing the room. She’s spinning in front of her original rig. She’s reaching up and behind, she’s groping for the rim of the helmet, she’s pulling it down and into place, crushing her hair to her skull, knocking her glasses off her face. 

“Just the brainstem, port please, Jasper,” she says, like she’s ordering a glass of wine.

Lady, she thinks. Lady whose shrine stands on the promontory. Pray for those who are in ships.

“Cait,” he says, understanding but unmoving.

“Bolt me in.” It’s not a request. Pray for those who are in ships. Those whose business has to do with fish.

“Cait,” Jasper says, quieter this time.

“Bolt me in.” she hurls the words at him, like a rain of burning oil, like arrows fired thick enough to block the sun, like something so dangerous he’ll remember why and how she’d forced him into killing her.

He starts toward her, drill in hand, his face pale. As he goes for her lumbar spine she snaps, “no. No. There’s no time. Start with the brainstem.” 

“Kill the music,” Jasper calls to Tendo.

“No,” Lightcap says. “I need it.”

“Okay.” Tendo is stressed and stressed and sharp and right in her ear. Coming through the helmet. “Serge, hang in there, brother. Cait’s coming for you.” 

The drill begins. Her face is numb, her hands are cold, her eyes are bright and wide and hot. One two three four, Lightcap thinks. Two two three four. Pray for those who are in ships and those whose business has to do with fish. Those concerned with every lawful traffic and those who conduct them. Repeat a prayer also, repeat a prayer also, repeat a prayer also, repeat a prayer also—one two three four, two two three four, three two three four, four two three four. Superconduct. And supercollide.

“There’s no time for a local anesthetic,” Jasper says. “It’ll hurt.”

“I know,” Lightcap breathes.

“You have to hold still anyway.”

“I know,” Lightcap mouths the words. Starts her count.

“One two three four.” Jasper counts with her over the whine of the drill. “Two two three four, three two three four—”

The opening chords of Ziggy Stardust are loud in her ears.

“—four two three four,” Jasper says, slowing down to count right along with the new rhythm, doing it for her, doing it because it will make it easier. Easier for her. 

She feels the hot shock and the deep burn of metal breaking skin, the prick and pressure of electrode extension, the danger of a waiting precipice before sliding over a nonexistent edge in an avalanche, bright and burning, four three two one— 

She cascades into a space that isn’t a space. The wind is in her hair. The sun is in her eyes. Somewhere, tires scream over asphalt as a car she is and isn’t driving spins in a tight arc. Her four-count ignites.

Ziggy played guitar

Jamming good with weird and Gilly

And The Spiders from Mars.

She and Serge are together. 

They are not together.

They are the same.

They’re looking up in wonder toward stained glass in a church and at contrails in the twilight. A little girl. A little boy. The locks he picked; her bloody, coltish knees. Beneath his bed he keeps a box of fireworks. She counts inside of closets, crouched behind her mother’s shoes. The ice where they’re skating is cold and thick in winter; the summer that their arm breaks is dark and full of crickets. They accelerate in unimpressive cars down unimpressive streets, windows always open, drifting back and forth in a sea of history that wasn’t shared but is, that somehow is; it’s both of them that cry hot and silent tears when basic training’s over and both of them that shudder when Jasper (young and brave and certain) drags a shirt over their head. 

He played it left hand

But made it too far—

Somewhere someone shouts, Cait, can you hear me? Cait, can you speak? There is no “her” to call to anyone; there’s only them. The water is too hot. Their hands are dry and cracked, rough under soap that stings and burns. Red and yellow, green and blue, spring and summer, halfway new. Stop, baby, stop it now.

Became the special man

Then we were Ziggy’s band. 

They fall, knocked off their feet in a flying tackle to hit springy turf, but landing on the ball, curling around it. Praise God from whom all blessings flow; praise God all creatures here below! Alleluia! Alleluia! Praise God the source of all our gifts! Jesus Christ whose power uplifts! Praise the Spirit, Holy Spirit—

Lightcap: a blaze of blue eyes and white lab coat, highest heels, longest hair, a laugh like a tray of crystal dropped on a floor of colored tile.

D’Onofrio: a dark doxological rock of a man, bowed head and eyes the color of the sea above the continental shelf, where one day, together, they’re sure they’ll walk. 

Ziggy really sang, 

Screwed up eyes and screwed down hairdo

Two people as one. A little girl. A little boy. Balanced with clasped hands in the slurring, drifting, cracking space they’ve made of themselves between shared sets of circuitry. What’s happening, they ask, but no one knows the answer; they think to pull away, back inside themselves, but there no place to pull to, no place only one of them can go. Each wisp of thought is shared, a thing possessed by both of them. Evangeline, they whisper to themselves, looking at the prototype they built. Evangeline. She’s with them too. Quiet, heavy, waiting. What’s happening, they ask again, but no one knows the answer.

He could lick ‘em by smiling

He could leave ‘em to hang.

They’re alone and weeping in their car, the kind of crying that can rip apart hydraulics in the chest, some essential tubing they could name if they were better with anatomy and not so good at math. This memory feels realer than the rest and, We can’t stay here; don’t follow it, don’t follow it down, they think. The wheel feels real beneath their hands and Evangeline. Evangeline. I’ll lose everything to this, is Lightcap and, We can’t stay here, is Serge but there’s a tearing feeling in their heart in their mind in her heart in her throat in her eyes in her chest and this at last is how they fly apart. It’s Lightcap’s throat that’s closing, Lightcap is the one who hears the words as words: Don’t follow it; don’t follow it down. But she already has. It isn’t real, Serge says, now beside her in the car; the space between them growing. It isn’t real, Cait. None of this, none of this is real. There are electrodes in his skin and Lightcap barely hears him over endless, endless counting.

So where were The Spiders

While the fly tried to break our balls?

Cait, Serge shouts at her. Cait! The car stretches in a way cars don’t stretch. Serge’s fingers clamp around her wrist, Serge’s fingers claw at her shoulder. Serge’s nails dig through her blouse and Lightcap is screaming, screaming, SCREAMING in past and present agony.

Just the bier-light to guide us.

She reaches for Serge and they snap back together: tight, realigned, and drifting through a landscape of memory they don’t understand.

So we bitched about his fans

And should we crush his sweet hands?

They hold together, cut off from their bodies, watching drifting ghosts of separate pasts form and fade and fail around them. Don’t follow, they think, letting Caitlin in her car slide into the dark, allowing Serge to break his ankle. A brush runs through their hair. Little pictures flare like sparks, bursting all around. Lightcap fails to hook a bra clasp. Serge encounters the word “fuck.” Try to hear the here and now, they whisper. Try to open eyes you closed. Move your mouth to ask a question. Make your questions from words.

He took it all too far

But boy could he play guitar.

Four eyes, all closed, snap open. A room away, a set of simple sensors come to life. 

A shift in their perspective leaves them looking out of Lightcap’s eyes, then Serge’s eyes, then seeing with the sensors they don’t know how to parse, studying a field of static grays and static reds. 

“Cait,” Jasper says, right there, afraid. “Cait—can you hear me?”

They hear him.

Speaking is harder.

“We hear you,” they say in tandem monotone, and they don’t flinch when Jasper jumps. 

They try again and only speak as Lightcap. A little more inflection this time. Impatience and kindness mix. “We can hear you, Jasper.” 

They look around the room with Lightcap’s eyes. Her pain is duller, hotter, deeper, higher than the cold agony in Serge’s spine. 

Making love with his ego

Ziggy sucked up into his mind.

“What’s happening?” Jasper asks.

“We’re together,” they say. “All three of us.”

“Cait.” They hear Tendo through their helmets. “Can we cut the connection? Is it safe to cut it?”

Like a leper Messiah—

“Not yet,” they say. “Serge is on the floor.”

“What?” Jasper says. “What does that mean?”

They stand as Lightcap, they stand as only Lightcap, and step forward.

“You’ll kill yourself,” Jasper hisses. “You’re not bolted in Cait, you’ll pull this thing right out of your skull with any pressure.” He’s grabbed the port behind her helmet and has dragged the rig to follow. 

Lightcap slowly (slowly) kneels.

“She’s matching them,” Tendo says. “Jasper, she’s matching them. She’ll bring the prototype up and redock it.”

Yes, that’s exactly what they’ll do. They’re so glad he’s understood.

As Serge, they find their balance. The Jaeger frame is shifted. And then, in perfect synchronicity, the three of them stand together—Lightcap, Serge, and the prototype Jaeger. They step back. And then they sit. Three as one. Father. Daughter. Holy Ghost.

When the kids had killed the man

I had to break up the band.

“Tendo,” they say with Lightcap’s voice. “Cut the connection.”

Their self is torn apart.

Someone passes through a dark and shrieking portal of perception before Lightcap is alone, alone in her own head, back in her own body, her head aching in a strange and terrifying way, her expression contorting in panic, her breathing whistling in her own closing throat, gasping for air, high and ragged.

“Tendo!” Jasper has a hand on the back of her helmet, a hand pressing down on her shoulder. “Get down here and help me!”

People boil through the door, the med team, her techs, the engineers. Behind a human wall she hears Serge and it sounds like he’s choking on something; she feels sick, she feels like she’s going to throw up, her back is soaked with sweat and the drill is loud in Jasper’s hand right next to her ear.

Ziggy played guitar.

Stay calm, she tells herself. Stay calm, it’s okay. It’s okay, Caity, it’s okay. One two three four, she counts to herself. One two three four, two two three four, three two three four—but it doesn’t feel the same. She doesn’t feel the same. She’s not sure how she’s different but she is. She’s missing a hand or a leg or an eye or a brainstem. She’s missing something she can’t see. 

David Bowie starts Suffragette City.

“Cait,” Jasper says, quiet and close. “Here it comes.” He grasps the electrode he’s screwed into her helmet and into her skull. She feels his grip somewhere where no human should ever feel anything. “Take a deep breath,” he says.

She tries.

“Not good enough, Caity,” Jasper says. “Try again. More air. Less tension.”

She does it, her eyes wide, her vision blurring.

“Let it out,” Jasper says. And as she does—he yanks the brainstem port out of her head. 

She wants to scream but she’s out of air. She gasps and bends forward, her hands struggling with the helmet, her vision flaring and fading, flaring and fading. 

“Oh god,” Jasper breathes. 

She pulls the helmet off, feeling her hair fall stiffly and incompletely out the twist she’d put it in that morning. The back rim is warm and sticky.

“Cait,” Jasper says, trying to pull the helmet out of her hands. “Cait, give me that. Let go. Put your head down. Or, shit. Maybe not? Can I get a doctor over here? There were two of them bolted in!”

Lightcap looks for Serge. She can’t see him behind the wall of people separating them. She calls to him silently, with only her thoughts, an unreasoned act of pure instinct, but he’s not there. They aren’t connected anymore. She is only herself.

“Look at her back,” Jasper hisses at someone, one hand on her shoulder, pushing her down, one hand at the base of her skull, holding her hair. “It’s all down her back. I must have hit something going in. It’s not like the fucking skull has anything important, right? Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ, she could be bleeding into her brain. She probably is.”

“Serge,” Lightcap calls into the knot of people between them. “Serge!” 

But he doesn’t answer, or, if he does, she can’t hear him.

Lightcap wakes in sunlight on a Sunday morning, surrounded by sunflowers, her parents in the room, crosses around their necks, watching a livestream of their morning church service. The sermon is on the Book of Esther. Lightcap listens, watching them, waiting for them to notice her open eyes.

During her recovery, Pentecost visits every night, Tendo brings her tea, and Jasper lurks in corners. Five days pass in a blur of medical exams, data analysis, and conversation after conversation—with Stacker and Jasper and Tendo, with Serge while they’re both still in medical, undressed and monitored, electrodes on their heads.

“They had to drill a hole in your skull,” is the first thing Serge says to her. “Another hole. A second one.”

“I noticed.” Lightcap runs her fingers over the side of her head where they’ve shaved away her hair in a narrow strip. There’s a neat line of stitches beneath a thin bandage. “Think I should copy your buzzcut?”

“Nah, wear it down,” Serge advises. “Move your part, comb it over, twist it around, and pin it up. No one will be able to tell.”

Lightcap lifts an eyebrow.

“That was weird,” Serge says. “Sorry. I know a lot about your hair, Dr. L.”

“Call me Cait,” she says, “and find me a comb.”

They don’t talk in earnest for ten days, not until a cold night when she’s sitting cross-legged on her bed, wrapped in a robe, hunched over her laptop, her precious cat in her lap, keeping her warm while she burns candles that smell faintly of sandalwood and listens to Supercollision play and play and play.

The knock on her door is so quiet she’s not even sure if it’s really a knock when it comes. But she gets up, trades her robe for a track jacket, and peers through the opening in the dense metal. 

It’s Serge.

“One second,” she calls through the door.

She tears off her jacket, throws open a drawer, dives into a sports bra, realizes she put it on over her tank top, then hides the whole disaster by layering the jacket back on top. She steps unsteadily into socks because her feet aren’t her best feature when they’re not in stiletto shoes; it’s too late for makeup, but then again he probably remembers that time she unexpectedly had her period and ruined a pair of pajamas she’d later burned so “no makeup” isn’t the worst of her vulnerabilities; she just likes to be ready, that’s all. Ready for everyone.

Serge isn’t special.

Serge is now extremely special but not in that way.

Well, maybe a little bit in that way.

But only a little bit. 

She has better things to think about than all of this so she swings open the door and says, “Hi.”

It comes out breathless and she wishes she could spin-kick herself in the head.

“Hi.” There’s a strange expression on Serge’s face.

Self-consciously, Lightcap reaches up to make sure of the artful sweep of her hair.

“It doesn’t show,” Serge says, “not even a little.”

“I know.” Lightcap straightens her spine, delicately repositions her glasses.

“It’s late,” Serge says. “I shouldn’t be here.”

“No,” Lightcap replies, “probably not.” But she swings her door wide and he steps over the threshold. 

She’s struck painfully and all at once by how her room must look to him. Sparse and hard and impersonal with no pictures and no decorations and yet somehow still inherently girlish—forbidden candles burn next to a glass of red wine, Schrödinger is curled in a little ball of precious baby kitty fluff on her pillow, and the novel on her nightstand has a horse on its cover.

Lightcap sits in her chair. Serge perches on the edge of her bed. 

“Wine?” Lightcap pulls the glass that used to be Jasper’s from the bottom drawer in her desk. Her head throbs dully with the change in position. 

“Didn’t they tell you not to drink?” Serge looks dubiously at the quarter glass of red wine sitting on her nightstand. “Doesn’t seem like you should be drinking a week after brain surgery.” 

She pours him a glass. “I’m not drinking it; I’m smelling it while it slowly migrates inside me. And it wasn’t ‘brain surgery.’ They just drilled an extra hole in my skull to drain off accumulating blood. There’s a difference.”

“Sure.” Serge rolls his eyes and takes the glass from her. “After this, let’s play tackle football.”

Lightcap frowns. “I am taking it easy, D’Onofrio. What do you want from me? Usually I’d be drinking hellshit beer and—” she trails off.

“Keep going,” Serge says.

“But you already know.”

“Yeah, but I’m not supposed to.” The admission has direction. Like a finger pointed at the tip of an iceberg.

Lightcap sighs.

“I can go, if you want me to,” Serge offers.

“So long as you’re not planning to seduce me, you can stay,” Lightcap says dryly. “I’m not in the mood to let anyone down gently and I’d rather not crush your hopes like an empty can of diet coke.”

“You crush a mean can.” The tips of Serge’s ears turn pink.

“Thanks.” Lightcap drapes herself over the back of her chair. 

Serge directs an anxious smile her way, then swings it at the wall. The floor.  “I made a list of things to say to you.”

To Lightcap’s astonishment, he reaches into his jacket and pulls out a literal list. On literal paper. Crisp and neatly folded down the center, he opens it like a book, then looks up at her.

“What?” he demands.

Lightcap feels glee on her face. “Nothing.” She tries to wring her gremlin joy out of her expression. “It’s too adorable for words, you little nerd; I want to rip it out of your hands and eat it.”

Unfazed, Serge says, “Cool. So number one, I’m not who I thought I was. Or, maybe, you saw me as someone I didn’t want to be.”

“Not sure I know what you mean,” Lightcap says. 

“That shit is real. People calling you pretty all the time, the constant shit about your shoes, fucking cramps, getting called a bitch behind your back, to your face, that dick who grabbed your ass on the first night of your departmental retreat when you were in college, the things that even Schoenfeld said to you, and don’t get me started on tights—”

Lightcap presses a hand to her mouth like she can iron her grin away, “Okay buddy, I get ya; you can stop.”

“I was just the most recent part of some giant, mediocre pattern.”

“No.” Lightcap’s own sharpness surprises her. 

“Yes,” Serge insists. “The way you saw me, the things I said—it wasn’t how I saw myself. Not how I wanted to be seen. Not how I wanted to be. I actually don’t want to be the guy who talks about how hot you look kneeling in stilettos. That guy is a self-absorbed dick.”

“Less a self-absorbed dick than an insulated dick?” Lightcap offers kindly.

“Ugh,” Serge says. “Just tell me you forgive me and you’ll give me a clean slate.”

“Sure.” Lightcap, on top of the world and loving it, gives him her most rakish half-grin. 

“You know I’ve never thought about the concept of gender a day in my life?” Serge says. “But then, yesterday, shopping? I almost bought some tampons because I didn’t have any?”

Lightcap laughs, musical and bright. “You did not.”

“I swear to god I did,” Serge replies. “I pulled a box off the shelf. Weirdest moment of my life. I forgot I’d never need them. Do you have any weird gender stuff left over?”

“I’m pissed every time I have to sit down to pee,” Lightcap says.

“Ha. Pissed. Nice.”

Lightcap smirks.

“I spent a day without my bearings,” Serge continues, “totally lost, knocked outta my track. And then—that feeling of confusion, of not knowing what kind of clothes to put on, that kind of thing—it faded. It pops up here and there when I least expect it. In grocery stores. When I pass Dr. Gottlieb’s giant board of math I almost used to understand.”

“I don’t understand his wall of math,” Lightcap admits.

“Impossible.”

“I know what you mean though.” Lightcap allows the steady flame of a forbidden candle to photobleach a little spot in her retina. “I never thought I’d live in a world where someone might, quite literally, know my mind. You saw things that no one was supposed to see. We both did, and I’d say that we need to forgive each other for that, except—”

“Except what?” Serge asks.

“Except I think we already did?” Lightcap is still staring at that candle. “I think we had to, to align like we did. To stabilize that wave pattern. To bear the neural load. I already forgave you for everything I might have ever needed to forgive you for. So it’s nice that you asked me, kiddo, but you didn’t have to, and I think you know that.”

Serge nods. 

“What’s number two?”

“Ah, number two.” Serge doesn’t open his little paper. “That’s a tough one.”

“Say it,” Lightcap urges, “because as soon as I get formal permission and medical clearance I’d like us to jack in again, and there will be no secrets there.”

“Again, huh?” Serge asks, quiet and warm, like he’s stepped over a threshold but isn’t quite ready to spill his secrets, or hers, into the waiting air. Lightcap doesn’t blame him. She’s less a confidant and more a fault-line waiting to slip, and Serge knows as much.

“Yes,” Lightcap says.

Serge smiles, quick and bright, while some smartass sings about insomnia from the little speakers on her desk.

“It took me a while to figure it out,” Serge says. “The memories were such a blur, so fast, so confused, so scrambled, all feeling like things I already knew. It was a while before I realized what I was trying to put my finger on.”

Lightcap waits him out, already sure what he’s driving toward. 

“You have OCD,” he says.

“It’s not a secret,” she replies. “Hell, it’s on my Wikipedia page, D’Onofrio.”

“But I didn’t know,” he says. “Probably that’s not the way you’d have wanted to tell me, if you ever did tell me about it.”

“No,” Lightcap says, “I usually wait for people to say, ‘God, Lightcap, do you have OCD or something’?” She grins. “And then I say, ‘Yes, you insensitive asshat, good pickup’.”

Serge snorts. He rolls his wine glass back and forth between his hands.

“What was it like?” Lightcap asks. “Looking at it from the inside out?”

“At first, I thought it was just…you. The counting hit like a soundtrack to your thoughts, which were denser than mine, like you knew more and you lived more and underneath you were counting. Everything hit with rhythm. But as the ‘Drift’, I guess you’re calling it, went on, I saw that it had to be that way for you. That the counting was like—some magical thing. It could ward off bad luck, erase thoughts you shouldn’t have, make it so no one hated you, make you a good person.”

Lightcap looks away, stiff and reflexive. “Counting can’t do that. It’s just lucky.”

“It’s not lucky,” Serge says.

Lightcap’s back tightens.“Fine. It’s not ‘lucky’. It’s an irrational impulse that I can’t shed. Are you happy? You think I should quit my job and meditate for the rest of my miserable, walls-closing-in life? I tried; it doesn’t help.”

“No,” Serge replies. “No, that’s not what I’m saying.”

“Then what are you saying?” Lightcap demands. “You think I don’t know it better than anyone? You think you can look at it for three minutes, in pieces, and offer some insight into myself I haven’t already dug out of my own mind?”

“No. Will you listen to me?”

Lightcap lifts a hand and drops it, out of homegrown fucks to give. 

“I’m trying to say that I get it,” Serge says. “I’m trying to tell you, in words, what I saw. I’m trying to tell you, in words, that it matters to me how you feel about what I saw.”

Lightcap’s head aches and her sinuses feel heavy. Her eyes are hot and she stares at the floor, in serious danger of crying for a library of reasons. Crying in relief, in release, for her mother who hadn’t wanted to leave her in Alaska and who’d wept silently all the way to the airport, clutching Lightcap’s hand in the back seat of a PPDC-issued car, while Stacker drove down empty roads and made awkward small talk with her father. 

“The details fade,” Serge says, “the farther from the Drift, the less I remember the need to count, how much you cried when you slid back into handwashing after Jasper’s wife called you and scared you so much—the times you fell back into rituals you thought you’d shed, the ways you tried so long to make things not your fault, to ward them off, to control what no one could control.”

She does cry then, sitting in her desk chair, her face still turned away from Serge.

“But I saw the other parts of it,” he continues, “how hard you’ve worked, how well you’re doing now, how well you’ve always done, how much faith it took to let Jasper drill into the back of your head. I can guess how much that line of stitches bothers you.”

Lightcap suppresses the urge to trace the little row of almost perfect suture knots.

“The point of this isn’t to drag you through battles you’ve already fought but to let you know I’d never want anyone else building these things. Doing what you do. Jacking into my brain. Because there couldn’t be anyone better than you, Cait, there isn’t. There won’t ever be.”

“Says the guy who’s only ever seen one other human brain,” Lightcap says with wan smile and a tight throat. “But, thanks.”

“Sure,” Serge says.

Lightcap removes her glasses, mindful of her hair. She wipes her face with the sleeve of her track jacket, then slides the frames back into place. She watches as Schrödinger uncoils himself from her pillow, leaps lightly to the floor, crosses the room, and leaps gracefully into her lap.

“You okay?” Serge watches her scratch beneath Schrödinger’s chin.

“Yeah.”

“You can tell me if you’re not,” Serge says. “I’d get it. Believe me, I would.”

Lightcap struggles for the right words, battling hyperbole and rhetoric that come like air, like oxygen. “When I did it—I don’t know what I was expecting. Not what I got. I thought I’d feel the prototype. Like you were feeling her, just half as much. But that’s not what happened. You were there. I was with you. Somehow we created a space when I jacked in. A shared electrochemistry, maybe?” She looks up at Serge to see a strange, preoccupied expression on his face. “What?”

“That first moment,” Serge says, “before memories started going off like landmines—what was it like? Do you remember it?”

“It felt like falling,” Lightcap replies. “Like the slow slide over the edge of a cliff.”

“Huh,” Serge says. 

“What about you?” Lightcap asks. “I had the feeling you were already ‘there’ in the space I was falling into.” 

“I wasn’t, not exactly,” Serge says. “I was kneeling in that room, pretty sure I was going to die. But as you came, the ‘there’ started to appear. Not all at once. You brought it with you.”

“What was that like?” Lightcap asks. “How did your mind—” she searches for the words she wants before she finishes with, “explain what was happening?”

“An empty parking lot.” The tips of Serge’s ears flush again. Charming, charming, charming charming. “You created it as you crossed it. I saw you coming.”

Lightcap snorts. “I created an empty parking lot?”

“Eh,” Serge says, blushing further. “I don’t think you created it. I think that was my brain, trying to tell me what was happening. It was a specific parking lot, actually. The one behind the church down the road from my house. Do you remember it? From the Drift?”

Lightcap comes up with a memory of dark ice, of yanking a wheel to try and spin out her parents’ shitty station wagon into a 360-degree spin.

“The church where you and Matt used to try and kill yourselves doing donuts in winter?”

“Ha,” Serge says. “No. Different church.” 

“Hmm. Your teenage stupidity seems to be one of the things for which I have the stickiest memory.”

“Great,” Serge says. “Just what I wanted to hear. But no, this was a different church—higher roof, smaller parking lot. But the church wasn’t there, it was just the parking lot. The cracked asphalt, the trees around the perimeter. And you were driving a car.”

“What kind of car?” Lightcap asks as Schrödinger’s purrs like a motor atop her thighs. 

“A little blue coupe,” Serge says. “The top was down. Your hair was blowing in the wind and you were driving fast, straight towards me. At the last second, you swung the wheel and skidded to a stop. The passenger’s side door was right in front of me. Ziggy Stardust was on the radio. You leaned across, opened the door, and that was it. Then we were just…there together.”

“I can’t believe I drove a metacognitive car into your brain like a total badass,” Lightcap says. “You’re making that up because you think I’ll love it.”

“No,” Serge insists. “No way. It’s burned into my brain forever.”

They are quiet. Serge studies the half-finished wine in his hands, Lightcap sits sideways on a chair, one arm hooked over its back. Schrödinger purrs. From her laptop some bastard sings about strange attractors.

“Can I have a copy?” Serge looks at her computer. “Of their discography?”

Lightcap feels the radiance of her own smile, lumens and lumens of bright. “Sure.”

“I’ll give you all my Tom Petty,” Serge says.

“No thanks,” Lightcap replies. “I remember liking Tom Petty, as you; but I do not like Tom Petty. As me. I’m clear on that.”

“Pretty sure Free Fallin’ was written for you,” Serge says. 

“Mmm,” Lightcap says, pleased, “but who am I? The ‘good girl’ or the ‘bad boy’?”

“Both,” Serge replies. “Obviously.”

“Whatever, nerd. If there’s ever been a song written for me, it’s—”

“Evangeline,” Serge says.

Lightcap elevates a single shoulder. “What’s your song?” 

“Bicycle Race?” Serge suggests.

Lightcap laughs, clear and high, the back of one hand pressed against her mouth.

Schrödinger jumps off her lap and shoots her an offended look over one shoulder. 

Serge grins at the floor. “I’m not a complex guy.”

Lightcap is still laughing, wound up too tight or not wound tight enough, she’s not sure which. It takes her some time to stop, to give up her emotional momentum to the sober friction of the world, but it finally happens, and she says, “Sorry. Sorry.” 

“Shut up, Cait,” Serge blusters, good-naturedly embarrassed.

Lightcap laughs one more time against the fingers she’s pressed to her mouth, then says, “This is a very serious talk you’re trying to have and I’m ruining it. What’s next on your list?”

Serge unfolds and refolds his paper. “There’s only one more serious thing on here. The rest is little stuff. Like how I miss your gremlin cat. What kind of chapstick do you buy because I want it. That kind of thing.”

Lightcap exhales, short and sharp and amused, opens a desk drawer, and tosses him an unopened tube of chapstick. “The cat’s right there. Just waiting to be petted.”

As if on cue, Schrödinger gives Serge an innocent look and flops onto his back, belly displayed, claws demurely concealed.

“I prefer my hand unmauled, thanks.” Serge pockets the chapstick.

“So,” Lightcap says. “What’s your last big ticket item?”

Serge tucks the paper back inside his jacket, swirls his wine in his glass, and says, “I read your report on the Drift.”

“You read my internal memo, I think,” Lightcap says. “The ‘report’ is classified.”

“I’m bad with bureaucratic lingo,” Serge admits. “Sure. I read your ‘internal memo’, then. The one where you advocated for the identification and training of pilot pairs. As I read it—I was wondering how you thought you might fit into all of this. Whether you’d stay on the theoretical side or whether you might want to be part of a pilot team?”

She doesn’t answer. The thrashing desire for that exact outcome is something she hasn’t been able to crush.

“With me,” Serge continues,  bringing it home. “I wondered whether you and I might be a team. The first team, even.”

“I—” She clears her throat against a sudden dryness. “I’ve always wanted to execute the final common pathway of everything I’m building. I want the interface. The connection between my mind and the work of my hands. But when it comes to killing kaiju—” Lightcap trails off.

Serge waits without speaking.

“I’m not sure how good I’ll be,” she confesses. “I’ve never done anything like that. I’ve never been in a physical fight. I can remember it from your life; how much it hurts at first, how frightening it is to take real physical damage. The way you habituate to it. The way you lose your habituation after too long away. And—”

Into her mind come the snapping catenaries of the Golden Gate Bridge.

“—they’re scary,” she finishes, sounding like a child, feeling like a child.

Serge nods, rotates his wine glass in his hands and doesn’t say anything.

“It’s not a smart choice,” she continues. “It’s not a good use of resources to enmesh myself so much in a single aspect of the process, when I’m in charge of making sure the whole thing goes to completion? Part of the answer depends on how unique we are. You and I. Whether anyone can do what we did. Could you Drift with Tendo? Could I? Can any two people do this? Or is personality and alignment and intent—are they all important? Were we unusually successful or were we only barely any good?”

“We’re good,” Serge says, a dredge grinding over rock.

“Yes. I know.”

“I think you’d take to combat training like only a few I’ve ever seen.” Serge catches and holds her gaze. “You have the kind of drive that won’t leave until you run out of air or blood. That’s what lets you win fights. Getting hit, getting hurt—those things wouldn’t stop you. Scare you, yes. Maybe. Stop you? No. You can work with, anger, with fear, with insufficient skill—you can overcome all of those things with enough time and practice. But your drive is irreplaceable.”

Hesitating, Lightcap asks, “are you sure I wouldn’t hold you back? Make you physically less in some way?”

Serge shakes his head. “Not possible.”

“If I do it, it has to be because I’d be good. To justify it, I’ll have to be amazing. One of the best. One of the best ever. Otherwise I should sit behind my desk and yell at people to work faster. You get me?”  

“I do. But I think you would be that good. I think we’d be that good. You’d have to learn how to fight. You should learn my style. From me.”

“I’ve seen you on the floor,” Lightcap says, a note of amused skepticism in her tone.

Serge snorts. “You’ll wanna kill me with your bare hands most days. I’ve seen that brain of yours. You’ll hate me every single day I set you back on your ass because I’m better than you. Every damn day. Until the day I’m not better.”

Lightcap lifts an eyebrow.

“Tomorrow,” Serge says, “we’ll start. Light stuff. The lightest of the light. Talking through it. Ask your neurosurgeon when you can start high impact training. Probably it’ll be another five weeks. Maybe longer.” 

Lightcap nods.

Serge runs a hand over his buzzcut and continues, like he’s cranking a release-valve open, “I can’t believe you made Jasper jack into your brainstem without securing the frame. I can’t believe he had the balls to drill into your head freehand. God. Never do anything like that again, it’s not worth it.”

“It was absolutely worth it, baby,” Lightcap says, flat and certain. “I saved you. I saved the whole project. It was worth dying for either one of those things.”

Serge knocks back his remaining wine. 

I thought you might be paralyzed, Lightcap thinks, when we stood and your spine was half-unbolted from that frame. But we did it for her, for the prototype, to redock her, because, in that moment, she felt just as important as we did. Who did that feeling come from? Me? You? Some strange echo of life our minds breathed into her?

“It’s gonna be that kind of a decade,” Lightcap tells him.

“I know it is,” Serge replies.