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: Witching hour.

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 torqueing herself around setups rather than levering her setups around herself. She needs to stop doing that. Soon. Soon she’ll 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.

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 echoes, not looking up, tracing the silver trail of electrodes with her eyes. The alignment in the right leg looks good. Looks right. Ha. If this works, she’ll make it easier to set up. She’ll make a suit, where misalignment is impossible. If this doesn’t work, well, maybe she’ll also make a suit. Because this is a pain in the ass. Literally. She’ll start it this afternoon. No, this afternoon won’t work—that’s J-tech time. Tonight. Tonight, after the data analysis from today’s run is done. Right after she makes sure the newest PPDC recruit’s fancy genetic sequencer is going to get her before he does. And after she goes over her first formal progress report with Stacker. Maybe tomorrow then. After the half-day site visit. In the afternoon. 

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

“Got it, got it,” D’onofrio says, good-natured and patient. Then, “you’re just really good with those things,” D’onofrio says.

“Microelectrodes?” Lightcap says dryly. “I should hope so.”

“Prrrrettttttty sure he means the shoes, Cait,” Tendo says with an effortful neutrality that rubs Lightcap the wrong way. The wwwwrrrrooonnnnggg fucking way. 

“Oh,” Lightcap says, looking down at her stilettos—black, closed toe, high, narrow, with a bright red sole—and then looking up at D’onofrio with narrowed eyes.

She has a twin urge to snap a humorless, “watch it,” and to stand, lift her right foot, and plant it directly on his thigh, while saying “these shoes?” But the guy doesn’t deserve either response. He walks a mostly respectable line, right 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 biolevel three pathogen, he’s built like a stack of bricks, but—honestly? If she didn’t spent so much of her day obsessing on the complex topic of keeping him the fuck alive, she’d probably find him forgettable. Well, that isn’t quite fair. There is one thing about him that she deeply, wholly admires: his good natured panache in the face of a substantial risk of death. 

“It’s just impressive,” D’onofrio continues, not moving his head. “Physically. As a physical feat. That’s all. I mean, don’t you think it’s impressive, Tendo?”

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

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

“Spinal alignment confirmed,” Tendo says, straightening up, pulling the calipers out of his mouth and dropping them into a pocket. “And, for the record, I have absolutely zero opinion regarding Cait’s footwear. I don’t even see it. Heels? What heels? I see only science. Speaking of which, I think we are good to go. I’m going to head to the booth and check over the software one last time.”

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

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

“Creepy,” D’onofrio murmurs.

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

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

The door shuts hollowly behind Tendo.

“I think everyone agrees that was a clearly creepy moment,” D’onofrio says, louder this time.

Lightcap stands, her eyes sweeping the room—the shining walls, the shining floorspace, the dark window that separates the lab from the waiting 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 after it had happened, his eyes shut, some can of hellshit beer pressed against his forehead even though it had been cold in the room, cold in the bar, cold in the city, cold in the state, cold for huge arc minutes 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. Some kind of standing wave of—I don’t know. Charge? And then—

Lightcap had been crying, her tears coming hot and trailing cold over her face in little clusters of four, falling into her gin and onto the insides of her glasses. It was the rig, she’d said. It was. I know it was. And the thing—the thing I—I built it and I still don’t know—what’s wrong with it. We only have one data point. I can’t fix it from that—I can’t know. I can’t know what happened. We need more neuro people. Better neuro people. Or, just one. Someone like you.

And look where I got us, Tendo had whispered, his eyes shut.

No, Lightcap had said, her voice cracking and sending another river of salt water out of her face. This has to be on me. Not you. That’s how it works.

“Hey,” D’onofrio says, “Dr. L.”

She snaps her eyes away from the first rig, its 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 had cleaned it off as if nothing had happened. The one to dip the electrodes into a decon solution, the one to drape them in a loop over the dark metal frame.

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

Lightcap turns and walks into his line of sight, crouching in front of him, eye to eye, shallow sea to clearest sky. 

“Don’t push,” she says. “Do not push. Just—withstand. Okay? Don’t try to actually do anything. This is your first time. We just—want to get some 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 that 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 quietly. “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 whispers, like he’s letting her in on a secret.

“Oh yes?” Lightcap asks, smiling. 

“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 whispers. 

She stays, hands on knees, half-bent over, her 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 says, his voice coming from everywhere, from the ambient air. “Get up here, Cait.”

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

“Ready?” Lightcap asks him. 

Jasper pats the drill on his hip with one hand, evidently prepared to begin the unbolting process at the first sign of neurological or mechanical trouble. “I have to admit that I do like his style,” he says, his eyes tracking to the control console where Soul Love plays over the open channel.

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

“I heard that,” D’onofrio says, his voice distorted only slightly in its transmission to electronic signal and back.

“Well don’t let it go to you your head,” Lightcap replies, short and sharp, scanning the screens in front of her for any indication of potential trouble. There’s the EEG on her left, D’onofrio’s brainwaves fluxing and shifting 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 of resistance, current, voltage throughout the rig, throughout the Jaeger. There’s the waiting interface protocol, 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’ve been dying to meet this lady you’ve told me so much about.”

“Dying?” Jasper says 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, Lightcap will never be able to listen to David Bowie again. And that will be a crime. So it’s not allowed to happen. 

“My count, kids,” Lightcap says, her throat tight. “It’ll be: one, two, three, go.”

“Keep your ‘lectric eye on me babe. Put your raygun 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 says, not breaking her internal rhythm, jacking him in right as the guitar solo starts. Because, when she has the choice? She prefers to do things with style.

Tendo flicks switches on his side of the board as Lightcap starts her manual, analogue slow fade of 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 replies, his voice full of strain.

“Please stop making death puns,” Jasper says, leaning over Lightcap’s shoulder.

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

“Serge,” Jasper says, conversationally, his eyes glued to the EEG over Lightcap’s left shoulder. “Seriously. What the hell is wrong with you?”

“So many things,” Serge replies.

“Stop,” Lightcap says quietly to Tendo, “we’ll hold it 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 it right here.”

“Why? What’s wrong?” he asks, a hint of impatience making him sound like a guy who’s just been told he can’t tailgate before the Sunday afternoon football game.

“Nothing’s wrong,” Lightcap says, trying to sound calm and controlled and truthful, because she is all of those things. “Nothing’s wrong. We’re just easing into it, is all. A slow ramp. Relax. Listen to David Bowie’s album about killer aliens, ya weird kid.”

Jasper gives her a pointed look, and then turns back to the EEG. “What?” Lightcap demands, the word entirely silent. 

“Nothing,” he mouths back.

Lightcap gives him a stormy glare that he might or might not deserve and that is wholly wasted on the eyeless side of his leadlined, impenetrable skull. She tightens down savagely on her own 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, surprised. 

“I think so,” he confirms.

“Describe it,” Jasper says, leaning 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 er—it’s hard to put into words. When I’m talking to you I feel a strange sort of resistance to moving my mouth. As if—as if there’s something in between wanting to move and the movement itself. Does that make any sense? There’s some kind of barrier where no barrier was. I think that might be her. I guess it could also be my brain struggling, but I think it’s her.”

“It’s possible,” Lightcap says, hearing a note of awe in her own voice. “Your brain may be feeling the electrical resistance between your circuits and hers and trying to turn it into something you can understand. We don’t really know how the mind is going to interpret a lot of this input.”

“How do you feel otherwise?” Tendo asks. 

“Fine. A little bit of a headache. A little bit of an ache in my hands and feet.”

“Not bad,” Jasper whispers. 

“Another minute, I think” Tendo murmurs, glancing over at Lightcap. 

She nods. 

“We’re going to hang out here for another minute, Serge” Tendo says, full volume. “Keep recording. You tell us if anything changes.”

“Sure,” D’onofrio replies.

Lightcap scans every screen, left to right across the entire dark and bright expanse of the console. She hooks one heel around the rung of her chair, fighting to keep her mind busy, to keep out the intrusive negative thoughts she can feel 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. “Am I right?”

No one replies.

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

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

“We’re not hopeless,” Tendo replies, toggling between screens. “We’re focused.”

“Focused. Sure. That’s one word for it,” D’onofrio says. “So, 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.

“Can we not?” D’onofrio shoots back. “I’m trying not to freak out about hooking up my brain to a giant metal machine. Do you think she’s 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 that 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 single supportive shake. 

I can’t be involved with the kind of operation you seem to be running, Anderson had said over the phone, poised and clipped. Little to no ethical oversight, outrageously risky human trials. Even under the most extenuating circumstances, even in times such as these, there must be some adherence to a pre-defined benchmark. I don’t feel comfortable with the lax standards for which you’ve advocated. 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. You have the luxury of carefully mapping your way. Look, I understand your objections. I truly do. I sympathize with them. But this approach is necessary. As head of kaiju-related projects you wouldn’t even be involved in any—

It’s never necessary, Anderson had cut in. You’ve demonstrated your operating philosophy. In spectacular style. I don’t think I’d be a good fit for your organization.

“Since two weeks ago. We’re getting her co-director instead. The guy,” Lightcap says.

“There’s a JET Force guy?” Serge asks. “Since when?” 

“Yeah,” Lightcap replies. “Apparently. He’s less into spending time with the press, more into spending time collecting specimens. 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 K-science division to write a post-modern novel.”

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

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

“Is he any good at his job,” Jasper says darkly.

“He’s still alive, so that’s got to be some kind of surrogate endpoint for skill,” Lightcap says. “It’s hard to know from a publication record, a cover letter, and a snappy personal style. But Dr. Gottlieb apparently loves him so—well, I actually have no idea what that means.”

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

“I did not say ‘likes’,” Lightcap replies. “I said ‘loves’. 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 and then turn around and tell me that I shouldn’t hire him because he’d be wasted on practical troubleshooting and should stay in realms of higher thought. We’ve also got to be way past the one minute mark, Tendo, what are you doing?”

“I thought you wanted a slow ramp,” Tendo says.

“Not this slow. I said a minute and I actually meant a minute. Can we focus please?” Lightcap asks. “Rather than salivate over the admittedly amazing interpersonal drama that may or may not be coming our way?”

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

“I’m trying not to focus,” D’onofrio says. “That was actually 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 persistent attempts to lighten the mood. She pulls a deep breath in, resettles her shoulders, relaxes the tension in her thighs, and looks critically at the entirety of the data set they’ve recorded. She can see no problems in the ebb and flow of electrical signals. She takes a deep breath to settle herself.

“Okay,” she says, after a propitious little four count. “We’re going to go a bit further, again on my count—I’ll give you a one two three and then a ‘go’ on four.”

“Yup,” Tendo confirms.

“Aces,” D’onofrio says.

“I’m watching,” Jasper adds.

She gives them their count. Tendo’s channels are already live, so he just 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. Kind of weirdly—both together at the same time.”

“Proprioception,” Lightcap says, her eyes fixed on D’onofrio, her throat tight, her voice higher than usual. “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 snaps soundlessly, one hand over the mic. “Look.”

Lightcap snaps her gaze left. At first she notices nothing out of the ordinary. But then, small and quiet within the background noise, she sees it. A sinusoidal wave. Small. Coming and going. Oscillating in amplitude within the static. The same thing that had risen up to kill Casey midway through their first trial.

She swallows. 

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

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

“What do you want to do?” Tendo whispers, leaning toward her, his hand over the mic.

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

“Don’t jump to conclusions, Cait. Let’s just abort the trial,” Jasper says. “We’ll take some 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 am 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 bluntly.

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 my fingers. We know it can be done. Pentecost did it and lived through it, no problem.” 

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 someone to be the breaks to my engine and I know you can do it. You’re the only one I know can do it. So if you can live with the fact that they chose me rather than you—even if you can’t—I need you to come with me.’ He had 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 him, 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, like a rock in a stream. “We’re still in familiar territory. We’re not pushing, we’re replicating previous findings.”

She can feel her insides 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 eyes on the snaking current readout, Lightcap’s jockeying the camera feed from the shatterdome floor into a closeup view of the prototype’s right finger. She waits for it like a coiled spring. Next to her, Tendo inches forward on his chair. She can feel Jasper’s breath on the back of her neck. 

Onscreen, the Jaeger’s finger twitches.

“You did it!” Lightcap shouts in total elation, her eyes switching immediately to the readout Tendo is watching, where oscillating voltage weaves through neural noise.

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

“Sorry,” Lightcap whispers, instantly contrite, instantly quiet. “Sorry. No change in your oscillating pattern. At least at a first approximation. Can we mathematically confirm that, Tendo?”

“Give me a second,” Tendo replies. “Yup, confirmed. No change.” 

“Let me try it again,” D’onofrio says. “I get the feeling that this is the kind of thing that improves with practice.”

“Hold up,” Jasper snaps, “you bleeding, Serge?”

Lightcap watches in protracted horror, her vocal chords frozen, her mouth opening silentely, as D’onofrio, unthinking, reflexive, 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. 

“Shit,” Tendo breathes, high pitched, as the EEG explodes into a oscillating wave of strain. “Shit shit shit—”

“Freeze,” Lightcap snarls into the mic, every tyrannical impulse she has poured straight into a single word.

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

No one speaks. 

The Jaeger waits for D’onofrio to move again.

The snake on the readout settles back into its static, unperturbed.

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

“No,” Lightcap whispers, her eyes still on his EEG. “You’re doing it. You’re okay. We still 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 your arm down. Nice and slow.”

Lightcap watches as man and Jaeger lower their right 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 happened to Lightcap in months. “Let’s jack out,” she says, her mind buzzing with elation. “Captain, we’re jacking you out; you did an amazing job.” 

“Wait,” D’onofrio says. “If you guys are okay with it, I want to try something.”

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

“I want to try standing up.” 

Tendo and Lightcap exchange a sharp, speculative look. 

“No.” It’s Jasper who speaks, flat and final, doing what Lightcap pays him to do. “No way. Not yet. Let’s look at this data. Wait a few days. Build up your tolerance to the load.”

“But I can feel her,” D’onofrio says. “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 here with me. We need more than an 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 snaps.

“I have a hole in my head,” D’onofrio says. “Live a little, Dr. L. I can do this. I’m telling you I can.”

Lightcap glances again at Tendo, who shrugs and makes a useless 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 expression of urgent appeal and, after a moment, 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 you’re ready.”

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

Lightcap feels the hot rush of tears in her eyes she pans the camera back to look at the standing Jaeger, the tiny waving figures of J-tech at its feet. She presses her fingers against her mouth and hunches in her seat, trying to contain all that she is feeling. 

“Maybe it’s him,” Tendo says, watching Jasper stand there, trembling, blood trickling from his nose. “Maybe he’s just—a natural. Maybe Pentecost was as well. Maybe some people are just—strong enough. Maybe some people just have the right neurochemistry. Maybe Casey didn’t have it. Maybe he pushed too fast?”

“I don’t know,” Jasper replies, slow and cautious, his eyes flicking back and forth between Serge’s face and the oscillating current readout. “Run another round of analysis on that pattern will you? Just to be safe?”

Take a step, Lightcap wants whisper to Serge, her eyes still on the video feed from the Shatterdome floor. Take a step forward. But she says nothing, staring at the unarmored, naked 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 says. 

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

Lightcap’s hand flies to her mouth, and the prototype Jaeger rocks their control room as it brings a foot in a high, uncontrolled arc and slams it against the floor. Jasper falls into Lightcap’s shoulder as she and Tendo grab their console for support. A distant alarm begins to sound. Yes, she thinks, triumphant, elated, it will work. It is working. 

“We have a problem,” Jasper says, right in her ear.

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

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

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

“Serge,” Tendo is saying 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. To late. Too late.

“Cait,” D’onofrio says, once, maybe, choking through clenched teeth. 

“Cut the connection,” Lightcap says, high pitched, shrill, trying 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 got him too tight. I can’t separate the feeds. We’ve got to manually get him out of there.” 

On the screen, Jasper darts into the room, sprinting across the floorspace, and skids to a stop behind D’onofrio. “Hang on,” she hears him say over the monitors. “Serge. Serge, hang in there.” The drill begins to revolve, a high pitched crescendo that phases as Jasper starts at the base of D’onofrio’s spine. 

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

“We’re going to get you out, Serge,” she says, her voice so high it doesn’t sound like hers.

Tendo shakes his head and Lightcap thinks her own lie 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 great. It’s killing him and you can’t get it off him before he dies. Maybe you can help him hold it up. But how.

“He’s strong,” Lightcap says, speaking rapidly, her hands clenched on the edge of the console. “Stronger than the others. He can hold through the unbolting it if we help him. We have to help him hold it. How can we help him hold it?”

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

Lightcap stares at the oscillating wave on the monitors, watches its amplitude open up, watches its frequency narrow down. Jasper’s halfway up D’onofrio’s spine when the Jaeger crashes to one knee, bringing D’onofrio with it. There is the terrible sound of a drill, of a misaligned drill, screeching to a halt and 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 total elation. 

Tendo looks over at her. 

“Tell Jasper to stop,” she whispers, stumbling to her feet, tripping over a heel she’d hooked to her chair, but not falling. Not seeing anything but her only remaining option. Her fingers are numb; her heart is pounding so hard that it feels like something a person could die of.

“To—stop?” Tendo asks. “Where are you going?”

 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 snap 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 costal city. It’s not far, and when she gets there, she plants a hand on the open doorframe, swings herself through it, and staggers into the lab. 

“Stop that drill,” she shouts.

Jasper stops the drill. 

D’onofrio is dying. Right there. Right in front of her. Back arched, kneeling on the floor, still half 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; it’s contacts a detailed web that can’t just be yanked out of the human nervous system. She knows that she can’t pull 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, nearly 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, even quieter this time.

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

He starts toward her, his 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. “No one touch anything. Anything.”

“Okay,” Tendo says, stressed and sharp and right in her ear. “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.

“It okay,” Jasper whispers, right next to her. “I’m with you. There’s no time for a local anaesthetic. It’s going to hurt and you have to hold still when it does. Perfectly still.”

“I know,” Lightcap tries to say. 

“One two three four,” Jasper counts with her over the whine of the drill. She feels the pressure on the back of the helmet. “Two two three four, three two three four—”

The opening chords of Ziggy Stardust sound 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 deep burn of metal breaking skin, the prick and pressure of electrode extension, the danger of a waiting precipice before sliding right over a nonexistent edge in an avalanche of something 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 fourcount ignites.

Ziggy played guitar

Jamming good with weird and Gilly

And The Spiders from Mars.

They are together. 

They are not together. Instead they are the same, 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, behind her mother’s shoes. The ice where they are 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? But there is no her to call to anymore; there is only them. The water is too hot. Their hands are dry and cracked, wet with 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, hitting springy turf, landing on the ball, curling around it. Praise God from whom all blessings flow; praise God all creatures here below! Alleluia! Alleluia! Praise 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 full of crystal dropped on a tile floor. 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 will walk. 

Ziggy really sang, 

Screwed up eyes and screwed down hairdo

Two people as one. A little girl. A little boy. Holding onto one another to balance in the slurring, drifting, cracking space they’ve made out of themselves somewhere 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 is 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 are alone and they are weeping in their car, the kind of crying that will 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 real to them, too real, realer than the rest and we can’t stay here; don’t follow it, don’t follow it down. The wheel feels real beneath their hands and Evangeline. Evangeline. I’m losing everything to this is Lightcap and we’re a we and we can’t stay here is Serge but they’re splitting apart with a tearing feeling in her heart in her 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 is stretching in a way that cars don’t stretch. Serge’s fingers clamped around her wrist, Serge’s fingers clawing at her shoulder. Serge’s nails pressing through her blouse and Lightcap screaming, screaming, screaming in past and present agony. Just the bier-light to guide us. The second she reaches back toward him they snap back together: tight, aligned, and drifting through the landscape of memory that they do not 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 into 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 yet know how to use, studying a field of static grays and static reds. 

“Cait,” Jasper whispers, right there, his voice afraid. “Cait—can you hear me?”

They can 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. “We can hear you, Jasper.” 

They look around the room with Lightcap’s eyes. Her pain is duller, hotter, deeper than the cold and knifelike agony that runs up Serge’s spine. 

Making love with his ego

Ziggy sucked up into his mind.

“What’s happening?” Jasper whispers.

“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.” But he’s grabbed the port behind her helmet and has dragged the rig to follow. 

“Thank you,” Lightcap says, and then slowly (slowly) kneels.

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

Yes, that’s exactly what they’re going to do.

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. All three as one.

When the kids had killed the man

I had to break up the band.

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

There is a rending feeling as their self is torn apart. She passes briefly through a shrieking darkness of perception before Lightcap is alone, alone in her own head, back in her own body, the back of 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 is shouting, one hand gripping the back of her helmet, one hand pressing down on her shoulder, “come down here and help me get them out.” People are already pouring through the door, the med team and her techs. To her left 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 singing Suffragette City.

“Cait,” Jasper says, very quiet and very close to her. “Listen to me. You’re okay. I’m going to unbolt you right now.” She feels him grasp the electrode he’s screwed into her helmet and into her skull. She can feel his grip somewhere where no human should ever feel anything. “Take a deep breath,” he says. She tries, but he says, “Not good enough, Caity,” he whispers. “Try again. All the way in, all the way down.”

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

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

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

“Oh my god,” Jasper says. 

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 red 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 barely see him behind the wall of people that separates 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.

Also? That was blood. On the helmet. The one she had been wearing. She thought Casey’s blood was gone. She thought she’d cleaned it all.

“Look at her back,” Jasper is hissing to 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.”

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

But he doesn’t answer her, 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. Pentecost comes 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 says, her fingers running over the side of her head where they’ve shaved away her hair in a narrow strip, the 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. Your hair is so long that no one will even be able to tell.”

Lightcap lifts an eyebrow.

“That was weird,” Serge says. “Yes? Yes. Sorry. That I know too much about your hair. Also that you almost died. Also very sorry about that one, Dr. L.”

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

They don’t talk in earnest for ten days, not until an unusually cold night when she is sitting cross-legged on her bed, wrapped in a robe, hunched over her laptop, the 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 on repeat. The knock on her door is so quiet that 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 yanks 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 undergarment disaster by putting the jacket back overtop. She steps unsteadily into socks because she’s always felt like her feet really aren’t her best feature when they’re not in stiletto shoes; it’s to late for make-up, but then again he might or might not remember that time she unexpectedly had her period and ruined a pair of pajamas that she’d later burned so ‘no make up’ isn’t really a thing, she just likes to be ready, that’s all. Ready for everyone; Serge is not 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. At times like this she wishes she could spinkick herself in the head.

“Hi,” Serge says, with a strange expression on his 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 replies, straightening her spine slightly, delicately repositioning 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, if only because she’s burning forbidden candles, if only because she’s poured herself a glass of red wine, if only because Schrödinger is curled in a little ball of cat on her pillow and because of the novel on her night stand with a horse on its cover.

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

“Wine?” Lightcap asks, reaching down to pull the glass that used to be Jasper’s out of the bottom drawer in her desk. Her head throbs dully with the change in position. 

“Didn’t they tell you not to drink?” Serge asks looking dubiously at the quarter glass of red wine sitting on her nightstand. “Maybe it’s just me, but doesn’t seem like you should be drinking a week after brain surgery.” 

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

“Yeah,” Serge says rolling his eyes, taking the glass from her. “After this we can go play some tackle football.”

“I am taking it easy, D’onofrio. What do you want from me? Usually I’d be drinking hellshit beer and sitting on the end of the deployment dock— ” she trails off. Because he knows. He knows all of it already.

“No,” he says. “No, keep going.”

“But you already know,” Lightcap murmurs. 

“In a way I’m not supposed to know,” Serge says, like a finger pointed at the tip of an iceberg.

Lightcap shrugs and doesn’t bother to finish her half-articulated thought.

“I can go, if you want me to,” Serge says. “I shouldn’t have come.”

“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 soul like an empty can of diet coke.”

“You crush a mean can,” Serge says, the tips of his ears turning faintly read.

“Thank you for noticing, D’onofrio,” Lightcap says, draping herself over the back of her chair. 

“So um,” Serge says, looking up at her with a rueful smile, swinging his smile in the direction of the wall, and then looking back at the floor. “I made a list of things to say to you.” At this point, to Lightcap’s astonishment, he reaches inside his jacket and pulls out a literal list. On literal paper. Crisp and neatly folded right down the center, tucked into a pocket somewhere inside the depths of his uniform. He unfolds it carefully, then looks up at her.

“What?” he demands.

It strikes Lightcap that her expression is probably most kindly described as gleeful. “Nothing,” she says, trying to drag the grin off her face, trying to resume a neutral expression. “It’s just too adorable for words, you little nerd; I want to rip it out of your hands and frame the thing, god damn it. But no, go ahead. Read me your list.”

“So number one,” Serge says, letting the paper fold itself closed. “I’m not quite who I thought I was. Or, maybe, you saw me as someone I didn’t want to be.”

“I’m not sure I know what you mean,” Lightcap says. 

“That shit is real,” Serge says, inexplicably. “People calling you ‘pretty’ all the time, giving you shit for 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, can you believe that guy? The things that even Schoenfeld said to you that he wouldn’t have said if you were a man, fucking tights—”

“Oh my god,” Lightcap says, breaking in, literally pressing a hand to her mouth for an instant to try to press the grin straight out of it, “okay buddy, I get ya; you can stop.”

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

“No,” Lightcap says sharply. 

“Yes,” Serge insists. “The way you saw me, the things I said—that image 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 stilettoes. 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 says, giving 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, and wraps her arms around the back of her chair. “You did not.”

“I swear to god I did,” Serge replies. “I literally 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 literally every time I have to sit down to pee,” Lightcap says.

“Ha. Pissed,” Serge says dryly. “Nice.”

“That was for you, baby doll,” Lightcap replies. 

“I spent about a day without my bearings,” Serge continues, “totally lost, knocked out of 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 just pops up here and there when I least expect it. In grocery stores. When I pass Dr. Gottlieb’s giant board of math that I almost used to understand.”

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

“Impossible,” Serge shoots back.

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

“Except what?” Serge asks.

“Except I think we already did,” Lightcap murmurs, 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,” Lightcap whispers.

“Ah, number two,” Serge says without opening 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 are 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 must know it. How could he not, after all he has seen and done?

“Yes,” Lightcap says, and 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 confusing, so scrambled, all feeling like things I already knew. I had to go back, try to figure them out, try to separate yours from mine, before I realized what it was that 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 at him. “And then I say ‘yes, you insensitive asshat, good pickup’.”

Serge snorts at that and rolls his wineglass back and forth between his hands.

“What was it like?” Lightcap asks. “Looking at it from the inside out, in pieces, without knowing what it was?”

“You know, at first, I thought it was just you. In some of the memories—the counting was just a soundtrack to your thoughts, which already felt denser than mine, like you knew more things and you lived more fully and underneath it you were just there, counting it out so everything hit with a rhythm, everything arrived on time. But as it went on, as the ‘Drift’, I guess you’re calling it, went on, I could see that it had to be that way for you. That the counting was like—some magical thing. Some thing that could ward off problems, that could erase thoughts you shouldn’t have, that could make it so that no one hated you, that could make you a good person.”

“It’s not like that,” Lightcap says, stiff and reflexive. “Counting can’t do that. Counting is just counting. It’s lucky.”

“It’s not lucky,” Serge says.

Lightcap looks away. “What are you saying?” she snaps. “Fine. It’s not ‘lucky’. It’s an irrational impulse that I can’t shed. Are you happy? Do you think I should quit my job and meditate on it for the rest of my miserable, circumscribed life? I tried that; it doesn’t help.”

“No,” Serge replies. “No, that’s not at all 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 me some insight into myself that I haven’t already seen? That I haven’t already dug out of my own mind?”

“No,” Serge says again. “Will you just listen to me?”

Lightcap lifts a hand and drops it, not bothering to look at him or not able to look at him. 

“I’m trying to—to demonstrate that I get it,” Serge snaps. “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.”

Her 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, crying in release, crying for her mother who had not wanted to leave her in Alaska and who had wept silently all the way to the airport, holding Lightcap’s hand in the back seat of a PPDC issued car, while Stacker drove down mostly 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 immediacy of the need to count things off in sets of fours, how much you cried when you slid back into handwashing after Jasper’s wife called you and scared you so much—the times you returned to rituals you thought you’d shed, the ways that you tried so long to make things not your fault, to ward them off, to control things that no one could control.”

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

“I saw the other parts of it—how hard you’ve worked for what you have, 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 imagine how much that line of stitches probably bothers you. The point of this isn’t to drag you through battles you’ve already fought but to let you know how fucking much I saw, and to tell you that 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 just couldn’t. There couldn’t ever.”

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

“Yeah,” Serge says.

Lightcap takes off her glasses in a careful pull, mindful of her hair. She wipes her face with the black sleeve of her track jacket and 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 scales her leg to end up in her lap.

“You okay?” Serge asks her, watching her pet her cat.

“Yeah,” Lightcap says.

“With all the things I saw?” Serge asks. “You can tell me if you’re not. I’d get it. Believe me, I would.”

“Well,” Lightcap says, struggling for the right words, battling through too much hyperbole and rhetoric. “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 felt her. I thought we’d share the load. I’d feel her half as much. But that’s not what happened. You were there. I was there with you. We were in the same space. Somehow we created it to accommodate what we became when I jacked in.” She looks up at Serge to see a strange, preoccupied expression on his face. “What?” she asks.

“That first moment,” Serge says. “Before the 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 almost had the feeling that—you were already ‘there,’ whatever ‘there’ means in this context.” 

“I wasn’t, not exactly,” Serge says. “I was kneeling in that room, pretty sure I was going to die—and then, 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 stops to search for the words she wants before she finishes with, “explain what was happening?”

“An empty parking lot,” Serge says, the tips of his ears flushing again. “That you created as you crossed it. I knew you were coming. I could see you coming.”

“I created—an empty parking lot?” Lightcap asks, grinning at him. 

“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 just down the road from my house. Do you remember that one? From the Drift?”

Lightcap tries to think back, and she has a vague, nebulous sense 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 to kill yourselves doing donuts in the winter?” she asks.

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

“What can I say? Your teenage stupidity seems to be one of the things for which I have the stickiest memory.”

“Great,” Serge says dryly. “Just what I wanted. 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 border. And you were driving a car.”

“What kind of car?” Lightcap asks, feeling the vibration of Schrödinger’s motor-like purr against her thighs. 

“A little blue coupe,” Serge says. “The top was down. Your hair was all over the place with the wind and you were driving fast, straight towards me. At the last second you swung the wheel and stopped so that I was standing right in front of the passenger’s side door. Ziggy Stardust was on the radio. You leaned across and 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 like it. Are you making that up?”

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

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

“Can you dump this on my drive?” Serge asks, his gaze directed toward her computer. “Their entire discography?”

Lightcap smirks. “Sure.”

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

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

“I’m pretty sure Free Fallin’ was written for you, actually,” Serge says. 

“Ah, but who am I? The ‘good girl’ or the ‘bad boy’?”

“Both,” Serge replies. “Obviously.”

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

“Evangeline,” Serge says.

Lightcap elevates a single shoulder. “So what’s your song, then, D’onofrio?” 

“Bicycle Race?” Serge suggests.

Lightcap laughs, the back of one hand pressed against her mouth, and Schrödinger jumps off her lap, shooting her an offended look over one shoulder. 

“I’m not a complex guy,” Serge says, grinning at the floor.

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 lose her emotional momentum to the sober friction of the world, but it finally happens, and she says, “sorry. Sorry.” 

“Shut up, Caitlin,” Serge replies, good-naturedly embarrassed.

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

Serge unfolds and refolds his paper in the blink of an eye. “There’s really only one more serious thing on here. The rest is little stuff. Like how I miss your demon cat. What kind of chapstick do you buy because I want some. 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 is right there. Just waiting to be petted.” 

“I prefer my hand unmauled, thanks,” Serge says, pocketing Lightcap’s chapstick. 

“So,” Lightcap says. “Since we’re already doing this; we might as well do it right. 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. Where you advocated for the identification and training of drifting pilot pairs. And when I was reading it I was—wondering how you thought you might fit into all of this. Whether you’d stay on the theoretical side, whether our Drift would be your only Drift—or whether you might want to try it again? Whether you might want to be part of a pilot team? Whether you and I might be a team. Might be the first team.”

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

“I—” she has to stop to clear her throat against a sudden dryness. “I have always wanted to execute the final common pathway of everything I’m building. I’ve always wanted that. But I’m not sure I want the right part of it. I want the interface. The connection between my mind and the work of my hands. When it comes to killing kaiju—frankly, I’m not sure how good I’ll be. 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 terrifying it is to feel real physical damage. The way you habituate to it. The way you also lose your habituation after too long away. And they’re—inherently—well, they’re terrifying. The kaiju.”

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

“And then there’s the question as to whether it’s a smart choice. A good use of resources. Should I be so enmeshed in a single part of the process, when I’m in charge of making sure the entire thing goes to completion? Part of the answer to that question depends on how—unique we are. You and I. Whether just 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 were good,” Serge says, like a dredge grinding over rock. “You know we were.”

“Yes,” Lightcap whispers. “I know it.”

“There’s a lot that can’t be answered right now,” Serge says. “But, if you’re interested in my opinion, I think you’d take to combat training like only a few I’ve ever seen. You have the kind of drive that won’t leave you 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—all of those things are surmountable in different ways. But that terrible, overriding drive—irreplaceable.”

“Terrible,” Lightcap repeats. “Overriding. So—you think, with training, I’d be good. You don’t think I’d drag you down? Hold you back? Make you—physically less in some way?”

“No.” Serge shakes his head. 

“Because if I do it, it has to be because I’d be good. To do it, to justify it, I’d 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. Do you know what I mean?”  

“I do. And I think there’s a chance that you would be that good. That we’d be that good. You’d have to learn how to fight. You’d probably have to learn my style. From me.”

“I’ve seen you on the floor,” Lightcap says. “I’d have no problem with that.”

Serge snorts. “You’re going to want to kill me with your bare hands most days. I’ve seen that brain of yours. You’re going to hate me, every day single day I set you back on your ass because I’m better than you. Every goddamned day. Until the day that 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 five more weeks. Maybe longer.” 

Lightcap nods.

Serge runs a hand over his buzzcut and then continues, like he’s cranking a release-valve open, “I can’t believe you jacked right into your brainstem without securing the frame. I can’t believe Dr. Schoenfeld 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 half his remaining wine. 

I thought you might be paralyzed, Lightcap thinks, when we stood and your spine was half-unbolted from that frame. But you were with me then, and, together, we decided to stand anyway. 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 that our minds breathed into her?

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

“I know it is,” Serge replies.