When they pull you out of the saltwater chamber at last, it is as if you come to from a deep, long sleep. When they take off your helmet and you gasp your first lungful of real, not pumped, not filtered air, it almost hurts.

  You croak, “What the fuck was that?”

  The other pilots are laughing.

  Well, that’s embarrassing. You’re aware that you are in nothing but your underwear, and it’s fucking cold—not as cold as it was in there, but still, there’s water on your skin and you’re shivering like a motherfucker. Like a wet rat. (The techs are all over you, holding you up, toweling you off, making notes on their little datapads—you’re definitely a rat in a little ratty lab, and they’re charting your biosigns and shoving probes up your ass and all. Behind them are the pilots, lined up at parade rest.)

  The pilots are all a little older than you, looks like, not the juniors, because of course the Titan program would only bring up their best and brightest to welcome you, all the better to drive home how new and little and completely unqualified for the position you are. Under the formal jackets they’re in suits, not like yours: real pilot suits, which in the bright light become slashes of red and black and blue and white, form-fitted, sharp. They’re orcas streaked with blood. You don’t meet their eyes, just like you don’t meet the officers’. You feel their eyes boring through you just the same.

  One of them says, just loud enough that you can hear, “She’s only here because she kind of looks like Rachel if you squint.”

  Which sounds like an insult. You grit your teeth and don’t look.

  “Go easy on her, Ketch,” comes the reply. “Kid’ll probably blow herself up too if you hurt her feelings.”

  Which is plainly an insult—aimed below the belt, and oh, does it hit.

  So you wriggle free of the techs and spin on your heel and hit back.

  Or try to. It’s been five years since the academy on Alcatraz and you’re out of shape. Out of practice. Your fist swings wide; you graze the pilot’s cheek; her head snaps askance, then forward again, and her laughing mouth becomes an O of shock and then a snarl. You see blood on your hand—your nails must have clipped her. Then she’s grabbing you by your undershirt and lifting you wholesale off the floor, your feet dangling, gasping for air.

  Someone grabs you and pulls you apart. You don’t fight this; you let yourself be dragged, limp, apart from the pilot, and you think to yourself, I’m so getting sent home for this.

  Twenty minutes later you’re in an office, dry and free of sea spray and smartly appointed with a dark wooden desk, a huddle of black chairs, a datapad, a New Kowloon flag as tall as you are standing in one corner, the crest of the Atlas Defense Force on a banner in the other (Atlas himself, holding up the world, circuit threading chevrons over his chest). There’s a line of bruises forming around your neck, over your shoulders; you feel it smarting under the collar of your shirt (through which the saltwater of your underclothes has soaked; the towel they’ve given you does little to help).

  Colonel Meng observes all of this from across the desk, from behind narrow squared-off glasses, with the flat scrutiny of some sort of bird of prey—hawk or eagle or kite, you haven’t decided.

  She says, “That was out of line. How old are you?”

  You don’t answer.

  “Too old for that,” she says. Which is true. “I know you’re Rachel’s sister, but we don’t do special treatment. You’re a Titan pilot now, cadet. Act like it.”

  “Like your pilot did?” you say, stubborn.

  Without any change to her face or tone: “She’ll be penalized.”

  You can’t help it: “Sure. I bet you do a lot of that. That why your pilots like to make quips about the fresh meat’s dead sister?”

  She gets up, puts her hands flat on the desk, leans forward. “Did you fucking hear me?” she says. “You’re a pilot. Act like it.”

  You flinch. She’s got you pinned down like the half-drowned quivering hare you are. All you can do is squirm. After a long, breathless moment, she lowers herself back into her chair and regards you once more, and you are a little surprised you haven’t wet yourself. (You pathetic mess.)

  “Act like a pilot and they won’t pick on you.” This you know in your heart to be true; you remember from your days of getting hazed on Alcatraz. Still stings. Colonel Meng doesn’t miss the look on your face. “We can issue demerits for the ones who do it anyway; we both know how that ends. It’s a matter of culture, not ruling.” She waves a hand at the long window to starboard—“You think demerits matter out there? You think anything matters other than what you do?”

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  “No, sir,” you mumble.

  She looks back at you. After a long moment, she leans forward again, clasps her fingers on the desk. Under your collar the bruises pulse a steady drumbeat.

  “Any questions about the sync?” she says.

  You blink. You’d been sure she was going to tell you the conditions of your punishment, at the very least.

  “Well?” Apparently not. “Don’t be shy.”

  You look out the window. There’s a whole row of Titans there—this is the alpha hangar: not the big old one where you took the plunge (where you met me), but bigger still. Though you’d glimpsed me and taken in what you could see of me, slack-jawed, when you look out at these you can only see the silhouettes of pieces—of scaffolding catwalks arrayed around the hint of some gargantuan shoulder like cobwebs on a castle—and that brings home to you how incomprehensibly giant we all are.

  Writ large on the side of each hulking body is a name: C. Chang, T. Gutierrez, H. Tagouri, E. Venkatesh. In the half-light of the hangar they are like looming tombstones, dark and somber. (Did you expect to find your sister’s name among them? Surely not.)

  “Does it always hurt?” you say.

  Colonel Meng considers this. “You know the first time encountering the onboard AI is difficult. They told you that on Alcatraz.” This is all true, too. “Think of it like a muscle,” she says, flexing her own arm for emphasis. “The more syncs you make, the easier it gets.” She clasps her hands again, regards you. “You will be making a lot of syncs. Get used to it.”

  You say, “Can it always hear me?”

  Yes I can, for your information.

  “Your helmmaster is embedded in you,” says the colonel, raising an eyebrow. “It’s been integrated into your brainstem already. Point of your first sync. They taught you this too, no?”

  “Yes, sir,” you say sheepishly. “I just—”

  “Having regrets?” Her thin line of a mouth widens a hair; the closest you’ll get to seeing her smile, you figure. “Should have mentioned you were shy about it before you got to base. Syncing is a one-way operation.”

  Self-conscious, you put a hand to the back of your neck, where the subcutaneous transceiver chip makes a knobble just below your skull.

  Colonel Meng sighs. Shakes her head. “Alcatraz didn’t tell us you had a temper,” she says, “or doubts. They did share that you’d spent your years after graduating working a fish and chips shop by the buoys at Pier 39. Why? You were nearly valedictorian, Kanagawa.”

  “Sorry, sir,” is all you can say. Sorry for what, exactly? You don’t know. You just want to be out of here, really.

  “Don’t make us regret taking you,” she says. Unspoken: You’re not Rachel. You never will be. Six years of doing nothing with all that potential you’d shown at the academy does little to assuage the bitter reality of your inferiority.

  The back of your neck prickles, right where they’d made the incision for the chip. Your cheeks are hot. There’s a tightness in your throat—but no tears come. Under the desk you clench your fists tight; you know without looking that your knuckles are white, that there are little red crescents in the soft skin of your palm.

  “That’s all. Dismissed,” says the colonel. When you don’t move, she looks up at you; her lips have gotten somehow even thinner. “Go. Get out.”

  You nod numbly and rise. The chair gutters back; the line of bruises on your shoulders is a full-blown blaze now. You’d wanted to say that you wondered if the helmmaster embedded in the base of your skull had heard your sister, too, and if it remembered her (if that was even how it worked, if mere machines could remember). You don’t say that. You just leave.

  As you go out into the hallway the colonel says behind you, “Report to the running track on 52 tomorrow at oh-four-hundred. You’re due for an hour of laps every day, courtesy of today’s performance. Chang’s going to oversee you.”

  Well, she did say no special treatment.

  Why are you so upset about this? You’re like a child, storming down the faceless gray corridor, fists still clenched, all over a few words—none all that harsh anyway; you heard worse at Alcatraz, surely. But you’re upset just the same, that’s undeniable, and knowing you’re upset makes you angry with yourself, so you’re even more upset, a negative feedback loop that goes on until the lump in your throat has reached critical mass. You’re so busy feeling sorry for yourself that you don’t notice the girl in the unremarkable hoodie and cap and joggers who’s leaning on the wall outside Meng’s office, arms crossed, face hidden, maybe watching your little tantrum, maybe not.

  At least you know where the dorms are; you’ve always been good at counting steps, memorizing routes. Up two flights of stairs, down a hallway that smells of bleach and sweat, across the silent square with the fake olive trees planted at intervals—more stairs—here you are. You stab viciously at the keypad; the door gives way with a clunk, slides back inconspicuously into the wall. You all but force it shut and the sound of it slamming into the jamb is like thunder.

  Here you flop onto the unadorned bed among the huddle of cardboard boxes they’ve sent up since you left your bag here—you’ll unpack those later and find the furniture your room’s missing inside of them—and you shove your face into the plastic-sheathed mattress and will yourself not to cry. What does it matter? New joins always get hazed. Pilot culture. Combat culture, maybe. Did six years selling fish and chips by the flooded ruins of the old wharves make you forget so fast?

  They’re cowards, you tell yourself furiously, they’re just barracudas smelling blood in the water, the same old brand of schoolyard bully looking to get a hit in to satisfy the fact that they can’t fuck well enough to keep a girl around, to stave off the loneliness at night. But aren’t you too? Aren’t you lonely? All alone in a country that isn’t yours, seven thousand miles from home. Haunted by the ghost of a sister you haven’t seen in a decade.

  In the end you all but cry yourself to sleep. So much for planning on dinner.