Speaking of Venkatesh—the door opens again and she sweeps in, Tagouri behind her; Tagouri’s saying, “Support told me we still need to meet the benchmark,” and overlapping her in terse sotto voce, “But the timeline—” Are they arguing? No, surely not perfect Enika Venkatesh, whose reflected figure in the mirror is still polished and coiffed despite the flush in her cheeks.

  “Gutierrez,” she says. “Let’s go.”

  Behind you Gutierrez says “Alright,” and drops silently out of the contorted handstand she’s suspended herself in—all muscle and long bones, like a big cat. She takes one look at Tagouri and Venkatesh and seems to understand. “We going out today?”

  “No,” says Holly, at the same time that Enika says, “Meng hasn’t said.”

  They look at each other. Holly frowns. “No,” she repeats. “Not yet.”

  You’re watching, rapt. So is Carol, though her long body is lax as ever. Even Lau steps back and out of form, shrugs her shoulders back into place, and looks.

  Holly says, “Look, Central’s waiting. We got readouts back—”

  “Aldehydes—?”

  Enika nods tightly.

  “Shit,” says Gutierrez. “You want the new kid with us?”

  “No,” says Holly. “Chang, run her through sets in the cradle. Dry.”

  “Wet would be better,” says Enika.

  “She doesn’t have a suit,” says Holly, “and I don’t see anyone stepping up with a spare. We need all the elbow room we can get at this point.”

  A cord in Enika’s throat flutters, but she says, “Right—Chang, go ahead,” and Carol says, “On it,” and you follow her out of the little exercise room and into the sim hall, Lau behind you, the sounds of your seniors still talking behind you fading quickly. (But what timeline? What benchmark? Why do they sound so upset?)

  Then you’re in the sim hall and your brain shuts up, because the place is massive. If you thought the gym was big—This is the biggest you’ve seen here, or anywhere for that matter, aside from the Titan hangar itself. And it feels bigger because it’s nearly entirely empty but for the forty-eight simulation pods themselves, twice as many as at Alcatraz. In the glow of the running lights that spark to life by your still-bare feet, the pods gleam like marbles scattered across the steps of the hemi-octagonal amphitheater—each on its own dais atop gleaming sets of struts; each open to reveal the innards. In the nearest you make out a harness—same as the one on board—and four cuffs hanging off it—one for each limb. A helmet on a feed line crowns the whole apparatus. Dry, for now.

  Why is the room so big if it’s nigh empty? Then you see it, high up in the shadowed rafters: a sovereign pod hung from festooned cables and a central boom. A production model, you guess correctly—mounted on rails so it can lunge and bob and dodge with six degrees of freedom, just like a real Titan, instead of only turning in place. Now the height, the sheer size, makes sense. (Behind the suspended production model glimmers the darkened outline of a glass-walled observation mezzanine; you picture techs there, watching, and you look away with a sudden thrill of discomfort.)

  “What the hell was that about?” says Lau.

  (Which surprises you, admitting to being out of her own team’s loop on gossip this juicy—in front of you, the outcast, no less. What happened to saving face?)

  “We’ll find out,” says Carol, glancing shortly at Lau. “Or not. Kanagawa, you want to pick a pod?”

  She nods toward the rows of empty black cradles. You remember well piloting from within these simulacra at Alcatraz, the calibrating hum of the magnetic drive coupler arrays inside, all of these carefully balanced to direct the cuffs you wear to simulate the buoyancy of saltwater.

  “Does it matter which one I choose?” you say.

  Dumb question, but Carol just shrugs. “Not really,” she says. “Nine’s my favorite.”

  So you beeline for number eight, because it would be bad form to pick the one your senior prefers, wouldn’t it?—or maybe because it reminds you of Ray, and better things—but don’t think about that now. The pod’s cool inside. You fit yourself into the harness and then unlock the cuffs with some difficulty and clasp them around each ankle, then wrist. The weight is familiar. It brings a taste to your mouth like iron.

  Hand on the helmet, you look back over your shoulder. Carol’s still waiting out there: will she just watch by the control column, or is she going to share the sim with you? Will Lau? Does it matter? You pull the helmet down, let the hermetic cowling settle snug around your neck. Through the darkened glass of the faceplate you catch one last glimpse of Carol; then the implant behind your ear contacts the receiver on the back of the helmet and you suddenly aren’t alone.

  HELLO, I say to you in scrolling green text, in the hiccup at the bottom of your brainstem, in the tingle that runs up your spine.

  “Hey,” you say. “Go ahead and launch us.”

  YOU STILL DON’T HAVE TO VERBALIZE, I tell you, but I am nothing if not obedient. The door irises shut, swaddles us in total darkness but for your HUD. Then the cuffs come to life; the cradle lifts you up effortlessly, and it’s nearly all the false weightlessness of a real cradle minus the biting cold.

  And here comes the rest of the sync—

  It is not as bad as the first time, or the second. In a sim, at first sync, you don’t get quite all the data you have on board your Titan; the breadth is there but not the depth—all the usual synapses are on, but not strictly transmitting. Less data means less disorientation. Besides, now you have had two times to get used to it. Still, there is a heartbeat full of nothing and then everything all at once: the readouts, the chemical senses, the phantom variables of an ocean that does not surround you; the great steel body you do not have, but that I trick you into thinking you do anyway, in the name of practice. Acidity, turbidity, the concentration of carbon monoxide.

  For an instant you flounder. Then everything turns right side up, and your radio crackles, and you hear: “Kanagawa, Lau, you read me?”

  So Carol’s sharing the dive with you after all. And so is Lau. Oh well.

  “I read you,” says Lau. “What are we running?”

  In answer the wireframe on your HUD comes alive and oh, you know this one instantly: “Shenzhen,” says Carol, “when we met Arrowhead.” (Now the rest of your sensory data comes flooding in. But now you are ready for it.)

  “Who’s on point?” says Lau.

  Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  “You.” Makes sense. Lau’s the senior here. “Kanagawa’s your defense. Play nice.”

  “Roger,” says Lau.

  You breathe in, slow and deep. What’s Lau’s unit name again, from all those grainy press releases? “Following your lead, Mazu’s Tears,” you say. You have no idea what to expect.

  “Just Lau.” At least she isn’t needling you this time.

  You check your bird’s-eye view. There is the shape of the shallow estuary of the Pearl River, some fifty miles away; beyond it are the ports, and past them the mighty sea walls that keep back the risen ocean are sunk deeply into the feet of the city’s continental shelf. You are beside that shelf on the other side of the wall, beyond the dredged expanse made to keep out Megs.

  “Central’s reading distress signals centered five hundred meters southwest of current position,” says Lau, which matches the blinking waypoint on your wireframe. “We’re gonna sweep out radially toward the target at ten degrees plus and minus, seabed march, speed at fifty percent. Kanagawa, hold twenty meters from me and stay left.” After all, Mazu’s Tears is a right-handed fighter.

  BARRIERS ONLINE, I inform you. DEPLOY AT WILL.

  This is Tokyo Calling’s great strength, after all, as a shield unit. But you just say, “Thanks for the heads up,” and you don’t even bother to ask me what kind of barriers are on board, their maximum surface area or tensile or compressive strengths (the insult, the condescension! The na?veté!). You just follow Lau obediently into the simulated breach, lamb to the slaughter that you are.

  And how well simulated this breach is. But for the weight of the cuffs it is the twin in every way of truly being in the cradle; the turbidity and chemical readings are so credible, so detailed, you can nearly taste them. When you lift your leg—slowly, all twenty-five meters from pelvic mount to end—you feel the whine of your metal body’s response: hydraulics shifting and steel flexing and turning, the beautiful symphony of a machine that obeys your every instinct as though it’s your own flesh. You set your foot down, and the virtual seabed shudders.

  Six years ago you’d had your first time in a training model back at Alcatraz—then you had reveled in the analogue majesty, the anatomy writ large, savored the weight of it and the difference in having a thousand times more power than you do in waking life. Now it has been so long, and in Tokyo Calling your movements felt pelted in rust. But in the simulation you can try again. There’s no penalty here, no cost to trying. So you try.

  Here the attitude thrusters come alive; you test them a little, give them gas—too much!—and though it’s a dream you can feel the way the girders of your shoulders groan under the sudden impulse; the response is immediate, and powerful, and thrilling. You have forgotten in your giddiness that the buoyancy of your steel swim bladder keeps gravity and the sea floor alike from halting your momentum (even here, in unreality). Amidst your folly, you nearly crash into Lau.

  “Jesus!” She’s not happy, even if it wasn’t for real. “Take it easy.”

  Message received. No fucking around, Emma, I don’t care if it’s just a sim, come on.

  For a minute you wend together in silence, back and forth and back again, carving a wedge out of the wireframe floor of the South China Sea. A lucky break for you; you get the chance to settle into a rhythm—just what Carol was telling you: pacing every breath to your steps, an inhale when your leg rises, an exhale as it comes back down. Still shaky, but better. The slow dance.

  At three hundred meters from target, Lau stops.

  “Listen,” she says.

  You do. You steady your breathing and cast yourself into another kind of hearing altogether, the transmission from your onboard Van Atta array: it settles somewhere in your bones, deeper than sound. In the lower frequencies you take in the sonics of the water around you. There the shush and whisper of tidal currents past the man-made trench; distantly, the rumble of bigger arteries. And there, tucked in among the susurruses of the seabed, nearly hidden by your own turbulent envelope, you find what Lau has already noticed—a flurry of shrill pings, due southeast.

  “Chang,” says Lau, switching onto the shared frequency, “be on standby.”

  Lau slows—your HUD flickers briefly with proximity alerts, then settles back into darkness. You drop your engines to match her; at this speed the drag of the water against your bull is tenable, and your reactor heart all but whispers.

  “Kanagawa. Turbidity reading.” Lau’s curt; the sound of her radio cuts through the calm like a knife.

  How do you do that, again? Oh wait, you don’t need to remember: I deliver the data straight to your HUD, nice and pretty, and the corresponding twitch to your cerebral cortex lets you taste it, earthy and thick. “Average 30 FNU,” you say, “time-steady within error margins, distributed across plus or minus ten percent within thirty degrees either side of current heading.”

  The little mark indicating Lau on the inside of your helmet seems to shrug—or it’s your imagination. “Wake patterns?”

  I reach back into minutes of turbidity readings for you and show you: like pulling back a curtain, like flexing a muscle for you you’d forgotten you had. (Alcatraz had shown you how to retrieve these data too, in fairness.) You close your eyes, then open them. You say, “Present. Large target moved through current position north to southwest.” You pause. “Doesn’t the wireframe already show—”

  “I know what the wireframe shows,” says Lau, clipped. “We’re doing this because it’s cadet procedure, and you said you wanted to be treated like a cadet.”

  Like hell you did, but what’s the point in arguing? “Let’s move in,” you say.

  “We don’t know where the target is.” Lau’s voice rises. “We don’t know its size, and we don’t have a profile of its anatomy. You want to go in blind?”

  “We know where it is.” Because it’s highlighted on your screen, the color-coded wake of it overlaid on your wiremap, a blinking point placed right where those pings originated, the amalgamation of my hundred million calculations of light fluctuations, chemical readings, sonics. “We can figure out the rest when we see it.”

  “We won’t see it. Not at 30 FNU average.”

  “Then what?” Your body temperature is rising; so is your temper, against your better judgment. No saltwater to cool you here. “What am I supposed to do? Are we going to wait for it to come to us?”

  “You’re supposed to listen to me,” says Lau.

  Behind you the sea erupts.

  “Shit!” As soon as she says it you’re moving, slowly, slowly—you raise both forearms up in the block you practiced just before, motors whining at their limits, and out of long steel seams your shields unfurl: gleaming cobwebs that fill your visuals from edge to edge, vertexed sails hung taut from titanium masts. Not fast enough. Out of the gloom grows a great corrugated claw like a basalt pillar, and you watch, helpless, as it descends upon you, dashes your still-deploying shields aside, sends the struts of them spinning.

  The wireframe flickers; it is interrupted suddenly by a hulking negative space, the Meg rising out of the murk, from the clouds of silt you hadn’t bothered to scope out because you were so busy squabbling.

  Impact sends you reeling. You tumble head over heels. In your panic you key your mic. “Lau—” She isn’t answering. “Lau, do you read me?”

  On your HUD appears a single glowing message: COMMS LOST. FALL BACK.

  So her Van Attas are down already, maybe cleaved apart by that first swing. A white flicker clouds your visual feed. Your shield—partly crumpled—and something is struggling against it: not the Meg, to your horror, but Lau, her Titan, scissoring in and out of view. You’ve stumbled into her.

  Resolutely you will your barrier free of your body (synaptic subcommands to the support struts, condensed charges that detonate against their bases) —three thousand milliseconds, an eternity, really—but still too slow. Your sonar flares (no reason to keep quiet now that you’ve woken the beast) and you can see again, suddenly, though only grainily. There is the silhouette of the Meg—two skyscrapers tall, maybe, long and lean—and Mazu’s Tears lances toward it at full engine power, a bright streak across your wireframe, a shining sword on sonar. And then the upswing of the Meg’s claw catches her in the articulated mass of her machined pelvis and throws her wide. She vanishes into the gloom.

  “Shit!” What do you do? What can you do? On the wireframe, Buddha’s pillar turns now to you. You grit your teeth and lift your right shield, and you brace yourself for the hit.

  But your placement isn’t right; you haven’t planned well. It comes streaking out of the gloom toward you, a craggy gray-blue mass, and you shudder as it glances off your shield—all that energy wracking you like a sob—and then right past, into the innards of your shoulder.

  You feel the cords of your neck groan, then tear. Those are vital cockpit connectors. All your senses gutter out; your limbs go heavy and blank. The last thing you see is the silhouette of Barracuda, unforgettable even here in virtual recreation, descending upon the pyramid skull of the Meg like an avenging angel of the deep, its single great red eye pinning you down, down, down.

  (Hey—at least you haven’t fucked up for real yet.)