Chapter Text
Sophia was actually in Manila at the start of the end of the world, which isn’t something a lot of people can say. Most of the people who could say it are dead.
She was home for the semester break trying to install Solidworks on her dad’s old desktop computer when Hundun heaved itself out of the ocean, trailing algae and fishing line and Kaiju Blue. She didn’t hear it from the news; she heard it from the sirens, and then the jets and the explosions. Her mom was down the street at the pharmacy, trying to find more ankle wrap for the boys. They kept injuring themselves playing sports.
Sophia remembers the way the ground shook. Thinking it was an earthquake for one blissful second, until the roar that cracked the sky. Knowing something was wrong, and smelling iron and smoke and the depths of the sea. She remembers the lights flickering and going out.
Maybe it was naive, in retrospect, to not have guessed, but – Trespasser was six months ago, and on the other side of the world. Trespasser was never supposed to happen again.
Her younger brother had been in the basement playing on the Xbox, and she’d run down there and held him in the dark for a full day, waiting for the screams outside to stop. She remembers the glowing screen of his phone lighting up his eye sockets from below, and the way he’d gripped her hand like he hadn’t since he was six years old. She remembers feeling both very old and very young. Mostly she remembers being scared.
The internet was down, and their phones weren’t connecting to any networks. Her dad had been in Cebu for business. Her mom at the pharmacy. Her older brother had been at a volleyball tournament, on the beach.
HOST: What do you have to say to people who don’t believe in the legitimacy of the civilian ranger recruitment program?
L. RAJ: [LAUGHS]
D. AVANZINI: [LAUGHS]
L. RAJ: Legitimacy? Dani, do you think this is because we were pop stars?
D. AVANZINI: Hey! Were?
L. RAJ: Look, Tim. We saved L.A. yesterday. Sydney in September. Personally, I’m hoping they ship us to Hawaii tomorrow.
HOST: [SOTTO] It’s Tom, actually…
D. AVANZINI: We get this question like every two weeks. Sorry, I just don’t get it. Like, girl. We’re hunting actual monsters.
L. RAJ: Killing!
D. AVANZINI: Right – we’re killing them. Lowest collateral damage stats in the entire fleet. Uh, no civilian casualties yesterday, by the way. [AUDIENCE CHEERS]
L. RAJ: And people just want to talk about Gnarly!
D. AVANZINI: Right, that. That part.
L. RAJ: We’ll say it for the last time. The civilian scouting program was a success. Turns out, ten years of living and working together every single day makes people pretty drift compatible.
D. AVANZINI: Ok, we get it, we were pop stars.
L. RAJ: Which is awesome.
D. AVANZINI: Which is awesome! Now we kill Kaiju. Still awesome, I think, yeah? [AUDIENCE CHEERS]
L. RAJ: Right! Right! Let me hear you!
HOST: Anything else you’d like to say to the people of the world?
L. RAJ: Well, actually, yes!
D. AVANZINI: Yes!
L. RAJ: [TURNS TO CAMERA 1] Hey, guys. So, about Gilded Dream–
D. AVANZINI: We love the name.
L. RAJ: We love the name! It’s so…
D. AVANZINI: Inspiring.
L. RAJ: Right! Inspiring. Um. But it’s just not…how shall we say…
D. AVANZINI: It’s just not cunt, guys.
L. RAJ: It’s not cunt.
D. AVANZINI: We can do better.
L. RAJ: We should do better. It is like, our civic duty to do better. [FRANTIC ACTIVITY FROM STAFF BEHIND THE SCENES] Don’t mind them. They didn’t know we were doing this. [WINKS]
D. AVANZINI: Good morning, people of the world. We’re rebranding.
L. RAJ: We’re rebranding! Starting today, say hello to the pilots of the newly renamed–
Gabriela falls in the shallows of Tokyo Bay, sundered shoulder to hip and bleeding sparks the size of flares. She falls slow: joints locking up and shutting down in sectors. Right ankle. Right knee. Left knee. Colossal actuators burning out in the shattered remains of the left hip. The jerky start-stop inevitability of a mountain collapsing under its own weight.
Sophia is watching a deliberate, controlled, final re-routing of emergency power. She thinks, Someone in there knows what they’re doing.
Only a thousand kilometers from Tokyo to Busan: the broadcast in the Busan Shatterdome mess hall is crystal clear. Sophia and five hundred engineers, soldiers, and PPDC personnel let their breakfasts steam off into a cold morning as Gabriela’s pilots put her down in the water.
Most of what they’re getting is helicopter footage as the massive impact wave rolls out and swamps the Port of Tokyo. Unhelpful. Sophia scans the screens embedded in the mess walls until she finds a ground view: some Kaiju-chaser with a phone and a death wish streaming from a rooftop.
Okay. The Jaeger’s in bad shape. But no visible reactor leakage – no meltdown sirens, no self-destruct protocol. Shredded hydraulics and warped chassis panels but only a fractured conn-pod, not breached. Well, obviously. Someone had to pilot her back to shore. God, Sophia wants the telemetry from this mission on her datapad like, five minutes ago. But LOCCENT for this mission is obviously the Tokyo Shatterdome, and Sophia doesn’t know anyone currently posted there.
It’s gotta be bad though. It looks bad. Three thousand tons of machine scrapped and facedown in a spreading pool of oil, ten-billion-dollar shield discarded and resting somewhere on the seabed in the middle of Tokyo Bay. The fresh carcass of a Cat-III oozing Kaiju Blue into the waters beyond the miracle mile, fish already floating belly-up to the surface.
Gabriela is long-overdue for a reconstructive overhaul. Sophia had pulled her logs as soon as the dispatch order went public, three hours ago. Around the room, people are already making bets. Anchorage has been taking a lot of the chop-shop cases lately. But Gabriela has a strong record, and popular pilots. Sophia doubts the PPDC would pull the plug on her, especially when she coded on a technically successful mission.
“She’s coming here,” Manon says disinterestedly, from across the long table. She could be talking to anyone, tucking into her powdered eggs like that. But then she says, “Don’t cream yourself,” and smirks around her next bite. So Sophia knows she’s talking to her.
Technically speaking, Sophia doesn't need to get up as early as she does.
She has a little digital clock display on her nightstand with a hacked-together LCD screen that shows a video of a coral reef. Not regulation – an extra drain on her daily power ration that means she usually has to get dressed in the dark. But in Cebu Shatterdome the engineer quarters were built closer to the surface: Sophia had a half-window there that let the light in. When she first arrived in Busan, she would sometimes wake in pitch-darkness gasping and tangled in the sheets – back in the basement with her brother, feeling the ground shake with Hundun’s thunderous footsteps, waiting for the ceiling to crumble and collapse and bury them in dust.
So she started plugging the clock in.
The ocean picture is still dim when she rolls out of bed and pulls on her running shoes; all the fish are somewhere else, asleep. She makes her way through the deserted corridors of the barracks and up four levels in the lift, and then sets out around the asphalt perimeter of the Shatterdome in the predawn chill.
Sophia doesn’t need to get up as early as she does because there isn’t, actually, that much work to do in Busan. They’re backline. No Kaiju has reached mainland Korea since Atticon, three years ago. There are only two Jaegers on the whole base, and only one of them – Echo Saber, wrecked in Hong Kong last month – even needs repairs.
Sophia isn’t really here for Echo Saber. Sophia is here to babysit Debut Dawn.
That’s mean. She’s not, like, bitter. Her heartbeat is pounding steadily and she’s working into her sixth kilometer and there’s a pain flaring up under her kneecap and – she has nothing against the team, for the record. She loves Megan and Yoonchae. She has no doubt that they’re capable, that they’d be great rangers if another Atticon made landfall. But Marshal Briones sent her here from Cebu a year ago to retrofit Debut Dawn, which she did, which she did in six months, and she still hasn’t been called back.
Sophia rounds the corner of the barracks and there it is, though, and it’s hard not to feel a fierce burst of pride: the colossal arch of Launching Bay 1, and all twenty-five stories of Debut Dawn standing silent sentry, face to the sea.
God. Sophia is good at her job.
Debut is in perfect condition – arguably better than when she first emerged from the Daejeon Crucible almost four years ago. The first Jaeger entirely developed by Korea, she’d answered the call when Atticon clawed its way out of the Han river and the Kaiju sirens started blaring in Seoul.
The Atticon fight is still studied at the Ranger Academy as the most critical example of cog-desync in the entire War.
Debut’s pilots had slipped their neural handshake and lost their lives in the last-ditch self-destruct they pulled to end the battle. Sophia remembers watching the pulse of blinding white light bloom on the news when she was still at Cebu. She remembers the hush that fell over the room.
Busan spent the next two years resuscitating Debut’s wreck; then Sophia got her hands on her.
In the time since, Sophia’s team has implemented a near-complete overhaul: a new Mark-3 reactor core, titanium-alloy armor plates from Germany, and a weapons system ripped straight from the Mark-4s coming off the line in Shenzhen.
Debut is rebuilt, functioning at 100% efficiency, and spotless. She has new pilots and a dedicated engineering team and a low-risk station.
And Sophia doesn’t need to be here.
When she makes it back to her quarters, she keeps the overheads off and showers in the dim orange of the running lights embedded in the floor of the bathroom. The enormous generators for the whole base hum almost imperceptibly ten levels beneath her feet. It’s peaceful; she just barely remembers not to sing.
After, she makes sure the bathroom door is shut tight, and then turns the fluorescents on above the sink. She saves her electricity for her Dyson Plasmawrap 2000.
One guess – not regulation. But Sophia is not siphoning, she is not drilling a hole into the cinderblock wall and splicing the wires back there. She is doing this all by the book. The PPDC engineering uniform is a shapeless, grey, polyester jumpsuit: she is doing this to remain human.
Hair blown out, potato sack on, she makes coffee in her kitchen: the cramped corner behind the door with a single portable gas burner. It’s her PPDC-allotted instant ration, plus the extra that Yoonchae gives her every week. It’s basically wet dirt, but she’s pretty sure they’re getting some K-Lab chemtech to spike it with extra caffeine or maybe straight adrenaline, because it always seems to do the trick.
She pours her thermos and leaves the rest of the pot cooling on the table, and then she eases out into the hallway and goes to work.
“Boo,” says Megan, when the pneumatics on Debut’s conn-pod hiss open. Sophia had checked the cameras, though, and already knew she was in there. Megan is wearing PPDC-branded sweatpants and a wrinkled Yonsei University hoodie that swallows her hands, and there are dark bags under her eyes.
When Sophia first met Megan, she had choppy pink bangs and whisker dimples and enough energy in her body to single-handedly power Debut’s reactor. That had been almost exactly where they’re standing now, except Sophia had been up on a stepladder installing radar in the ceiling, and Megan had been coming through the hatch of her new Jaeger for the first time, side-by-side with her copilot.
Now, Megan still has her dimples when she smiles. But her hair is icy blonde at the tips, and Sophia has seen her cry.
“You don’t have clearance to be in here right now,” Sophia says, which she isn’t really expecting to work, but Debut is currently garrisoned and technically under engineering jurisdiction, so she has certain responsibilities.
Megan pouts. “Sophia, this is literally my car.”
“That’s a fire hazard,” Sophia points to the sleeping bag and electric heater tucked under the control panel. And then, softer: “You can’t keep sleeping in here, Meg.”
“I’m actually not doing a lot of sleeping,” Megan says with a pained grin, but then her face falls. “Sorry. I know. It’s just – we ran sims yesterday. You know how it is.” Sophia doesn’t, not really. But she knows the theory.
“Ghost drift?” Sophia holds out her thermos, and winces sympathetically when Megan splutters on her first sip.
“Argh! Jesus, that tastes like ass.”
“I know. Triple shot,” says Sophia, and then ignores the pointed look Megan gives her. “Go get breakfast. ”
“In a minute.” Megan bites the inside of her cheek. “Yoonchae usually goes early.”
“You guys did simulations last week, and I thought everything was fine?”
A muscle twitches in Megan’s jaw. She will never be a good poker player, but that’s fine; gambling is prohibited in the Ranger Corps. To whatever extent that’s ever stopped anyone. She says, “You sent Daesung to Australia last week.”
Oh. That’s right – Sophia had forgotten. She did send Yoonchae’s fiancé to Sydney last week. She’d needed new power cores for Echo Saber. And Megan had needed a break.
Megan smiles weakly. “Ghost drift is weaker in here, I dunno. There’s like, interference. Maybe someone should do research on that.”
“Oh, Megan,” Sophia sighs. “Go to breakfast, babe. You can’t keep living like this.”
“As soon as I figure out any other way, I will let you know, trust me.” Megan gathers up her things and sidles past Sophia, then stops short in the doorway. “Sophia.”
“Hm? Yeah?”
“Triple shot?” Megan nods at the thermos in her hand. “I thought you could only get Yoonchae to give up her ration.”
“I–” Sophia feels her face get hot, which is ridiculous, because obviously Megan does not know anything, and also, she is not even doing anything wrong. Megan is grinning though – a little evilly, but still, for real – and so maybe it’s fine. She needs this. “Whatever,” Sophia says lamely. “Leave me alone, you weirdo. You’re the one sleeping in a conn-pod like a – a pod person. Hey, check your schedule and take a shower. Don’t you know what’s happening today?”
Megan’s grin has extended to the neighborhood of shit-eating. But she still says, “What? What’s happening today?”
“This is what happens when you mute your datapad.”
“Sophia!”
“Gabriela,” says Sophia, and watches Megan’s eyes light up. “Gabriela is coming here.”
Gabriela is coming here.
Gabriela is coming now, and for some inexplicable reason they’ve all crammed into the same lift — the whole 50-person welcoming party — so Sophia has exactly five seconds when the loading doors crank open to worm her way through the crush and catch up to Marshal Paramo as they all spill out onto the landing pad.
The Marshal doesn’t exactly groan when she sees Sophia approaching, but it’s a near thing.
“Officer Laforteza—“
“Good morning, Marshal,” Sophia says, and salutes stiffly. “I was just wondering if you’ve had the chance to review my transfer request.”
The Marshal sighs. “Sophia, you don’t have to salute me, you’re a civilian.”
“Yes ma’am, sorry ma’am,” Sophia says, and drops her arm. “It’s just – I know Cebu was short-staffed when I left, and I’m sure they could use the extra hands after Sawtooth. I’d be happy to submit another request, or undergo a performance review, if you find anything about my conduct unsatisfactory.”
Sophia has put too many years into school and garages and workshops and hangers to not say it this way, to not know the protocols and what’s allowed and how the whole machine works. But what she really wants to say is: Just send me home.
“Your conduct is exemplary, Officer,” says the Marshal tiredly. “You know that. I’m sorry, I can’t talk about this right now.” The drone of a helicopter drops in low overhead, and the whole crowd jostles, trying to catch the first glimpse of the incoming pilots. Marshal Paramo moves to join Megan and Yoonchae at the front of the congregation, and Sophia just watches her go, a stone in the stream of the river.
“What was that?” Manon leans in to say it, low and right into her ear, and Sophia jumps.
“What are you doing here?” Sophia’s startled; it maybe comes out more aggressively than she means to. A flicker of surprise, and – hurt? – flits over Manon’s face, before she smooths it over. Regret sinks in Sophia’s stomach. She didn’t mean to––but this is just like Manon. Why does she have to take everything so personally? Why is Sophia always the bad guy? Manon does not lead any engineering teams, and she is not senior staff. There is no reason for her to be here right now.
“I know them,” Manon says cooly. For a second, Sophia cannot at all fathom who she might mean.
“What?”
Manon rolls her eyes, and the twist of regret in Sophia’s stomach tightens. “The pilots, Sophia. Gabriela’s rangers. Dani and Lara?”
Dani? Sophia has time to think – Ranger Daniela Avanzini? – before the PPDC bird clears the top of the Shatterdome behind them and roars overhead, buffeting the landing pad with downwash.
For a minute, everything is noise and wind. Despite that, the helicopter touches down relatively delicately, and everyone manages to form ragged but acceptable lines behind the Marshal and Busan’s resident rangers.
As the rotors slow to a stop and the helicopter’s engines whine down, Manon leans in again. “And the Marshal asked me to be here,” she says, casually. Sophia can only blink at her, because that obviously doesn’t make any sense, re: Manon is not a real member of this base. Manon is smiling placidly, like she doesn’t know the kind of rapid mental arithmetic Sophia’s just launched into – which is, of course, just an act, because Manon knows exactly what she’s doing at all times.
Doing her absolute best to get under Sophia’s skin.
But before Sophia has a chance to ask anything else, Gabriela’s pilots step out of the helicopter.
The first thing Sophia notices is that they are both wearing their right arms in matching slings, strapped across their chests. The second is that Lara Raj and Daniela Avanzini look like superstars.
There is no other word for it.
First of all, their red and black service uniforms are clearly custom. The PPDC doesn’t manufacture cropped bomber jackets; Sophia would have known. Both women are wearing aviators from their limited-edition Ray Ban/Shield of the Pacific brand collab: Daniela’s resting in her hair, Lara’s flashing in the sun as they strut in perfect synchronization across the landing pad like something out of a movie. Daniela is snapping gum, lips shiny enough at fifty meters to have Sophia reaching self-consciously into her back pocket, just to check she’s still carrying her emergency gloss. Lara Raj has evidently made some deal with God to set the flawless black waves of her hair bouncing and tumbling over her shoulders in slow-motion.
A murmur ripples through the gathered crowd as everyone unconsciously takes a half-step forward, drawn to the raw magnetism of two real-life heroes.
They’re popular – of course they’re popular. They were already pop-star famous before they ever started saving the world. And then they did start saving the world.
And, obviously, it turns out they are both just as gorgeous as they are in the interviews.
“Oh my god,” Sophia hears Megan whisper excitedly, shifting a little on her toes, and Yoonchae elbows her.
As they draw closer, both sets of pilots and the Marshal snap salutes at each other.
“Welcome to Busan, Rangers,” says Marshal Paramo. Despite the propwash, Sophia thinks it’s actually possible not a single hair has shifted from her bun. “We’re sorry you’re here, but glad to have you.”
Lara opens her mouth to say something, but before she gets the chance, Megan is jumping in, stumbling a little over her words.
“Hi! I’m Megan! Oh my god, I’m such a Newcrazy fan – I have both your original photocards from SIS, actually, would it be, like, totally insane if I asked for your autographs? I mean, wait, sorry, this is––”
“My name is Yoonchae Jeung,” says Yoonchae. Her eyes are narrowed. “We beat your Onibaba sim record. In Academy.”
“Yoonchae–” Megan grits out the side of her mouth, but Lara is just laughing.
“That was you guys? Fire. Sohey actually sent me an email when that happened, did I tell you, Dani? I had to send him fifty bucks.”
“Uh, yeah, I remember,” says Daniela. Half her attention is fixed on the crowd; Sophia is trying to figure out if she’s wearing contacts, or if her eyes are really just that hazel. “My fifty bucks, by the way. Don’t worry, I put it on your tab.”
“I love you, pookie,” says Lara. “You and your imaginary tab. You’re so good to me.”
“Thanks for having us, Marshal,” says Dani respectfully, and Sophia decides: definitely contacts. “We’ve heard great things about your team.”
“And we love being back in Korea!” adds Lara happily, throwing a finger heart to the crowd, “Saranghaeyo!”
Yoonchae’s nose wrinkles, but Lara manages to pull a half-embarrassed cheer from the gathered personnel, which Sophia thinks might have been the whole point.
“That was an impressive job you ladies pulled in Tokyo,” says the Marshal. “God knows we need more pilots like you two on the Rim. We’ll do our best to get you patched up and rotated on out of here as soon as possible.” The Marshal turns and gestures for Sophia to join them. “I want to introduce you to our chief of engineering: this is Officer Laforteza.”
If there’s anything she knows in life, it’s a cue. “Call me Sophia,” Sophia says with a generous smile, stepping forward to shake hands. Decorum takes over: Sophia is no stranger to hotshot pilots with wrecked rides. Okay, so these particular pilots are more attractive than most. Sophia is still the one with their futures in her hands.
“Sophia,” says Lara Raj deliberately, and raises a slitted eyebrow above the mirrored surfaces of her shades. Sophia feels suddenly like the ground she’s standing on is more unsteady that she realized. “I’m Lara.” Lara smiles, and bites her lip a little. “But you can call me whatever you want.”
“Oh, god,” Daniela groans. Sophia feels her face get hot; all at once, she is hyper-aware of Manon standing behind her.
Sophia gets flirted with. It’s not a big deal. And the last person on earth who should care at all about that fact is Manon. And since Sophia doesn’t care, and Manon doesn’t care, then nobody is caring, and it’s all a big useless stupid wash of an event.
Sophia has been shaking Lara’s hand for a while. She lets go.
“I think I’ll stick with Lara,” says Sophia apologetically, but – is that too harsh? “It’s pretty,” she adds, and winks, and that seems like a good balance.
Manon is somewhere behind her. Sophia wishes she could stop thinking about that for more than one second.
She wishes she could see what Manon’s face is doing.
That’s when PPDC Ranger First Class Daniela Avanzini catches sight of someone in the crowd and shrieks, at the top of her lungs, in front of the Marshal and the gathered crowd and the whole Shatterdome and everybody: “MANZANITA?”
Sophia turns around.
Manon grins. “Surprise, bitch,” she says, and then catches Daniela as she crashes into her. And Manon is giggling, spinning Daniela once in the air, arms tight around her waist, eyes alight. Laugh lines scrunching around her nose.
Sophia blinks.
Sophia feels––
“I thought you were in Berlin!” Daniela says breathlessly, stepping back and holding Manon at arms length, looking her up and down.
Lara says, “Okay, what the fuck, you’re even hotter outside Dani’s head.”
“She’s called us, Lara, you’ve literally seen her before.”
So Manon like, knows them. So they’re friends. It’s just a lot of information for Sophia to wrap her head around at once. By information she mostly means the way Manon is holding Daniela’s uninjured hand and swinging her arm back and forth.
There are a couple more introductions as the Marshal beckons over various senior staff, and no one even seems to care that any formality to this proceeding has been blown all to hell. The mystique of the Gabriela pilots is now thoroughly shattered, and it seems like everyone is falling over themselves to catch a glimpse or interact with celebrity.
Daniela is somehow actively meeting people as she hangs around Manon’s neck with one arm. Lara is taking photographs with some of the younger personnel, and camera flashes start lighting up the helipad. Megan has acquired a large pink binder, but she must have dropped it at some point because there’s a knot of activity where a small group of people are helping her scavenge an intimidating number of scattered photocards off the ground.
It’s exciting. It’s the most excitement the Shatterdome has seen in months.
Yoonchae comes to stand by Sophia, arms crossed, mouth drawn in a tight line. “This is too much drama,” she says petulantly. Sophia agrees. But also – God. Sometimes Yoonchae sounds so young. Sophia forgets, sometimes, that Yoonchae would just be out of college, if this were a world where she finished college. If she wasn’t accepted into the Ranger Academy halfway through university, hadn’t dropped everything for the chance to be a hero.
Yoonchae will be a hero. Probably, someday. Sophia just hopes it’s not for a while.
And then all the Rangers are swept away by the Marshal to the front of the crowd, and Sophia is left with a gaggle of hyped-up professionals and one glowing Manon, who is beaming with an expression so open it’s doing something funny to Sophia’s pulse.
Sometimes Manon makes Sophia feel, like, abnormal. Like there’s something wrong with her, in some system of her body that she can’t identify. Like she can’t remember how to operate normally.
“I didn’t know you knew them,” Sophia says quietly. After all the excitement it feels inadequate, but she’s not exactly sure what she would rather say instead. You could have told me? Why didn’t you tell me? I know things between us are – but if you wanted to – I would have listened – it’s all a jumbled mess in her head and she needs her journal, she needs to work this out on paper, since the one thing that might possibly help is also the one thing she categorically cannot do. Which is talk to Manon about this.
For obvious reasons.
Manon is just looking at her with a bemused expression. She says, “Okay. Why would you have?”
The thing is, Manon is not even part of the team.
Manon is on retainer from the Berlin Crucible. She’s here to port a new J-OS update into every wrecked Jaeger that passes through Busan Shatterdome’s six launching bays, and Sophia really does not understand why they couldn’t have accomplished the same thing by mailing over a flash drive.
She’s mentioned it to the Marshal – I’ve got software techs that could do this in their sleep – only to be stonewalled, which has been happening more and more frequently these days. It’s code word classified, Officer. Bannerman stays.
So Sophia pieces together that Manon maybe wrote the update, and there’s something in it that nobody is supposed to see. Which doesn’t make any sense, because every bolt, panel, and line of operating code for a hundred-billion-dollar war machine has to pass a dozen expert committees and a national leader’s desk before even making it onto a production line.
And also, Manon’s computer engineering degree is a sham.
That’s really what Sophia can’t stop thinking about, staring down at the message on her datapad in disbelief. Manon was a tech influencer. The PPDC fast-tracked her degree so they could hire her for recruiting videos. Manon spent the last three years of the war in Berlin doing R&D for the Mark-4s; she hasn’t seen combat, she hasn’t done field repairs, she doesn’t know the protocols for decontaminating a wreck so the entire hangar doesn’t fill with Kaiju bloodmist. She is not the chief engineer for the entire Shatterdome.
But she is leading the Gabriela restoration. Apparently. And the Marshal is dropping this on Sophia via email.
There are a number of things that Sophia doesn’t particularly like about Manon, but the most egregious one is probably her unprofessionalism. By this she means blatant disregard of safety procedures. By this she means: Manon, white tank, top-half of her PPDC jumpsuit unzipped to her navel and hanging down around her legs, face shield, leather gauntlets, bare arms exposed to the spitting sparks from the arc welder she’s using to cut into the side of one of Gabriela’s 4-meter-long severed fingers.
You’re not really supposed to disturb someone holding a live arc welder, but Sophia marches over and cranks the voltage down on the power supply so the torch dies before she taps Manon on the shoulder. Peripherally, she registers that Manon is kind of sweaty, and her tank top is sticking to her back in places and turning see-through.
Manon slides the face shield on the helmet up, and Sophia is surprised that she doesn’t even look annoyed by the interruption. “Look at this thing,” Manon says breathlessly, eyes shining with excitement. Baby hairs are sticking to her damp forehead under the edge of the helmet. “We could fit a whole rocket in here.”
“Put your clothes on,” Sophia blurts, and then swallows hard. Not what she’d meant to say.
Manon raises a perfectly straight brow. “Careful what you wish for,” she says, which Sophia ignores.
“Did you know?” Sophia isn’t angry. It isn’t Manon’s fault. It’s just – “Did you know, Manon. Did the Marshal prep you for this?”
“She dropped it on me this morning,” Manon says calmly, but something hard is creeping into the edge of her tone. “What do you want, Sophia?”
“Did you clear this with intake? They did an acid wash before you started cutting?” Sophia means, of course, the finger, laid out laterally across two work benches and rising above their shoulders.
There are just all these protocols for a reason, and fingers and hands usually come back to the workshop with higher levels of toxicity, given how Jaegers usually fight: melee and smash-y. And the preliminary acid washes help to counteract excess ammonia and coagulate residual Kaiju Blue and Sophia’s done this a dozen times by now, and if Manon needed any help or a consultation, or something, she really should have just asked.
“I’m not actually an idiot,” Manon says. Her expression has gone very stony – Sophia thinks of it as her mask, when she gets like this. She kind of gets like this a lot. She’s always hearing something in Sophia’s words that she didn’t actually say.
“I obviously don’t think you’re an idiot,” Sophia says, strained. “I just wish you would have run this by me. Like, just your work schedule. Or your repair plan; I need to know who I can keep on Echo’s day shift. And how much hangar space you need to reserve, starting Monday––”
“Okay,” Manon cuts her off coolly. “But you aren’t the lead on this. And I don’t report to you.”
Sophia starts to feel an eye twitch coming on. This is only technically true. This is only true in a technical sense because Manon is still not officially stationed here, still has paperwork assigning her to a corner office in Berlin, in a steel-and-glass Crucible compound overlooking a winding river, with quarters that get sixteen hours of sunlight, and a supervisor doing God-knows-what for six months while Manon makes Sophia’s life just a little more difficult every day.
Sophia says, “The Marshal––”
“Called me. Told me to handle this. And you don’t have to worry about my roster because you’re not on it.”
“Manon. Be serious.” Sophia feels her blood pressure rising. “This is the highest-functioning Mark-3 in the fleet, and we’re talking about a fifty-eight percent reconstruction, not including weapons recovery, and who knows what that shield’s going to look like once they get it back on land. We both know your best move is to just sign me on. You’re – I mean, no offense, but – you’re a programmer!”
Most of the time, Manon manages to take offense when Sophia is not even saying anything insulting. The problem is, sometimes Sophia does say something insulting.
“Whatever, Sophia,” Manon says, tone flat in a way that Sophia knows means the conversation is over. “Move. Stage one of my repair plan is getting through this fucking armor.”
“You should try pulse arcs,” Sophia says before she can shut herself up, and Manon looks at her sharply. And honestly that is really the trajectory of most of their interactions: Sophia not shutting up, and Manon looking at her.
[A DECADE OF WAR: REMEMBERING THE FALLEN CITIES]
A New York Times retrospective on the largest worldwide population centers lost in the dark days.
SAN FRANCISCO
OAKLAND
CABO SAN LUCAS
MELBOURNE
MANILA
The twists in the world must be working themselves out because Sophia gets another message from the Marshal sometime in the evening, after dinner, summoning her to Command at her earliest convenience: so, now.
This will be the meeting that fixes everything. She is suddenly as certain of it as she has been of anything. Gabriela is going on her schedule, and once that’s done Marshal Briones has called with her return orders, and Berlin has sent word for –
Something about that thought twinges. It, like, constricts. Sophia’s throat tightens. It’s doing that a lot, lately, and she pushes through it. Everyone is going back to where they are supposed to be, the world set to rights. She is going home.
On the way up to Command, Sophia pokes her head into the Ranger lounge, just to make sure she doesn’t have to chase any star-struck personnel back to their posts. She finds the two pairs of pilots in conversation on the couches: two red bomber jackets draped over the arm of one. Megan looks up when the door opens and waves at Sophia happily.
“It’s psychosomatic,” Lara is saying. “When you’re in your Jaeger, in the drift, you feel everything.”
“Kaiju took our arm off,” says Daniela. “I mean – Gabriela’s arm. But our brains can’t really tell the difference yet.”
“We have to give it a few days,” says Lara.
Megan’s eyes are wide; she is literally sitting on the edge of her seat. “Does it, like, hurt? A lot?”
Lara laughs. “Holy shit, yeah.”
“Like a bitch,” Daniela says. From this angle, all Sophia can see is her hair: it seems healthy. Dark and curly and thick. Probably not dyed. Probably she does not have to fit a whole beauty routine into ten rushed, half-lit minutes every morning. Probably there are lots of perks in Nagasaki, where Gabriela was stationed last, where they were on a record three-offshore-kill streak, and people were throwing parades for them in the streets.
Sophia wasn’t ever a big Newcrazy fan, really. After things didn’t pan out musically in undergrad, it was always a little painful to follow groups like that. She doesn’t know why she’s thinking about that now.
“Wow,” says Yoonchae, and she even looks faintly interested, which is more than she was giving on the helipad. On the couch in between them, Sophia can see that she’s holding Megan’s hand.
Sophia keeps walking.
There’s not much she knows about Megan and Yoonchae that everyone else on the base hasn’t already figured out. Sometimes, all you have to do is look at a Ranger pair and know what the story is going to be. Sometimes Megan watches Yoonchae across a crowded room and Sophia feels like turning away just to give them privacy.
Yoonchae and Daesung got engaged two years ago, just after Yoonchae graduated from the Ranger Academy. Pretty immediately after. Pretty – like, the day after. Sophia has thoughts about this, but it’s not fair to share them with Yoonchae, and it would be cruel to bring it up with Megan.
There’s no wedding date, yet. Sophia has thoughts about this also. But it’s wartime, and there is, technically, always a small chance every day that Yoonchae will be asked to risk her life to save the world, and ultimately it doesn’t matter that sometimes Sophia bypasses the secure Shatterdome network to browse Pinterest flower arrangements before bed. It’s the apocalypse: everyone has to stay sane somehow.
That’s what she’s thinking as she keys open the door to Command, and Marshal Paramo turns from the window to meet her. Sanity restored.
“Sophia,” says the Marshal, and all at once, Sophia sees the gravity in her expression, the flyaways escaping from her bun. “Close the door behind you.”
Sophia’s heart sinks straight to the floor.
The Jaeger program is dying.
Cebu Shatterdome is being decommissioned. So is Anchorage. Lima. Vladivostok. Sophia’s ears are ringing like a bell. Cebu decommissioned.
Briones got you out, said Marshal Paramo, and everything starts making sick sense – Got you out. Saved your job. Everything is being consolidated. Busan is staying operational, taking most of what resources can be spared from the Northern Hemisphere.
Sophia was transferred a year ago. So most of what she’s thinking is, How long did any of you know this was coming?
It will be Hundun all over again: she can see it so clearly. Kaiju coming through the coastal wall all over the world. Tearing through it like tissue paper. Hundun, Trespasser, the charred and smoking exclusion zone where San Francisco used to be, and it’s everywhere. Jaegers in scrapyards. Jaegers rusting at the bottom of the ocean, and nobody left in the world to recover the wrecks.
Cebu decommissioned: Sophia is running the numbers. They’re keeping Hong Kong – so, two hours away, maybe. Calculating average Kaiju speeds out of the Breach, advance warning, mobilization times… Fucking Hong Kong as the nearest defense to home. Sophia feels sick. Her head is pounding. She feels – they’re at war! Of course it’s expensive, of course it’s inconvenient, of course there are risks, of course there are losses.
Record losses, the Marshal had said bitterly, quoting someone, this year.
The money is running out. The program is dying. Manon had done some really innovative work with the Mark-4s; she had done more with less. I know you were surprised by the designation. Read her records, Sophia. We need her, now more than ever.
Manon can’t go back to the Berlin Crucible, because there is no more Berlin Crucible. There are no more Crucibles, anywhere. Shenzhen will be the last offline. Striker Eureka will be the final Jaeger ever commissioned.
How long did you know?
Sophia angrily punches in the door code to her quarters, gets inside, slams the door shut and leans her forehead against it, breathing hard. Shuts her eyes.
Because her lights are already on.
So now, to top it all off, she has to snap–
“You shouldn’t be here.”
“Oh, sorry,” Manon says dryly. “Didn’t realize this had an expiration date. Should I take back all my stuff too?”
“Your stuff–” This is it, this is the very last she can take from this terrible day. It is all bubbling over, frustration, a volcano, unstoppable. She whirls around. “First of all, everything you’re wearing is mine, and you know it.”
Oh.
So, it turns out Manon isn’t wearing anything at all, actually. She’s stretched out naked on Sophia’s bed, reading something on her datapad. Sophia flushes despite herself.
“Manon.”
“What? Put some clothes on?”
“What if someone had come in! What if I had—been with someone?”
Manon’s eyes flick up at that, and the corner of her mouth tightens slightly. But then she’s back to the datapad, expressionless. “Would you have?” Her tone is completely flat. “Been with someone?”
Sophia is not going to respond to something Manon already knows the answer to. She doesn’t have time. None of them have time, anymore.
Manon must read it in Sophia’s expression, or maybe in the way she almost kicks her single plastic chair over in an effort to take her shoes off, because she sits up a little in the bed and says, “You heard.”
Sophia rounds on her. “You knew?”
“Just today,” Manon says. She holds her hands up, which has the unfortunate effect of reminding Sophia that she is very naked. “I learned a lot of things just today, okay? Don’t kill me.”
Sophia tries to muster some sense of betrayal, but all she’s managing is a kind of dumb stupefaction. So she is the last one on this base to know anything. So being chief of engineering means nothing. So actually every choice she’s ever made in her life has led her here, to this one inescapable singularity, where maybe a dozen faceless people in the whole world decided that none of those choices ever mattered, and it was always going to end this way.
Sophia says, “I should kick you out.”
“Don’t do that either.” Manon is watching her face carefully, like Sophia is a scared animal that can’t decide whether to flee or strike. Or maybe that’s just how Sophia feels, underground in this bunker: they are all just rabbits in a warren waiting to be flushed to the surface.
The ground is shaking – she breathes deliberately, in and out – it’s just the generators, deep under their feet. She glances from Manon to the clock on the nightstand: a few sparse fish eddying in a beam of moonlight, a big coral brain.
“Why not?” Sophia manages. She steps over to the wall and flicks the overheads off, resists the urge to ask Manon how long they were on for. She can check her utilities later.
Edge-lit by the cool blue of the datapad, Manon says, “Because you seem pretty tense right now.”
“They’re going to kill us.” For the first time in ten years, Sophia realizes dully that she doesn’t even mean the Kaiju. “Cebu is being decommissioned, and Berlin is already offline, and the PPDC is – holy fuck, Manon, we’re all going to die.”
“Uh, yeah. World’s ending, thanks for noticing.” Manon sets the datapad aside, yawns, stretches. Arches her back, arms above her head, breasts pulling high on her chest. Even in the half-light, it’s kind of – obscene. Ridiculous. Unfair.
Sophia huffs; all the anger in her body transmuting into something else, trickling, pooling. Melting ice.
“Sophia,” Manon says. Her deep brown eyes, the spray of freckles over her nose, her lips, pink and pursed and saying– “We are all fucking screwed. Just get into bed.”
Sophia gets into bed.
So.
Okay, so.
This has always been the easy part for them. Maybe the only thing that’s ever been easy, for them. Sophia climbs over her and feels sort of undignified, but that stops mattering immediately because Manon pulls her down into a long kiss, threading her fingers into Sophia’s hair and cupping the back of her head. Heat radiates from every place Manon is touching her – her lips, her fingers scratching gently against Sophia’s scalp, the long lines of their bodies aligning and pressing together. The tension melts from her forehead-neck-shoulders. Warm static fills Sophia’s head.
This is how it is.
Manon’s coffee ration in her coffee pot. Manon using half her water and more than half her electricity. Manon interfering with her operations and undermining the chain of command and keeping secrets Sophia is not entitled to, but still manages to feel betrayed by.
This is the ultimate problem: at the end of the day, at the end of the world, all Sophia wants to do is kiss her.
“You feel so good,” Sophia whispers, and then presses into Manon harder because she didn’t, actually, mean to say that. And it’s so unfair, because Manon never says anything she doesn’t mean.
After, Sophia lies on Manon’s chest and tucks her face in the crook of Manon’s neck and feels their hearts beat in tandem and Manon holds her, drawing lazy patterns on Sophia’s shoulder blade. She feels wrung-out and sated and a pleasant buzz is humming in all her limbs, and usually Manon will let her stay like this until they fall asleep, or until Sophia says something about endorphins or post-coitus.
Sophia has a list of things she’s not allowed to mention after sex. This includes work, which probably, she assumes, extends to the imminent possibility of them not having work, or a planet, in the near future.
She finds it’s easier to think about it like this. Wrapped up in Manon, it’s easier to think the singularity might not be inescapable after all. The world’s been ending for ten years. They’re still here.
Instead, Sophia shifts a little, tracing Manon’s collarbone with one finger. She says, “Why didn’t you tell me? About Daniela.”
“What do you mean?” Manon doesn’t pull away, but her hand pauses on Sophia’s back. “She’s my friend. I thought…we don’t really talk about stuff like that.”
“Oh,” says Sophia quietly. “I mean, yeah.”
She lets it go. Manon’s heart thumps steadily under her own. The clock display sits dim and silent, and Sophia breathes in. The world is ending, but it hasn't ended yet. There are still good things, warm things, and she can still fall asleep and expect to wake up in the morning. Her eyelids drift closed.
Sophia has never let anything go in her life.
In the darkness she mumbles, “You know, you could ask me about my friends, though. I’d tell you.”
“Okay, Sophia,” Manon says sleepily. “I’ll ask you.”