Monster-hunting turns out to be a lot more boring than it sounds.

  Mostly the two of you pick your way through the gloaming of the harbor, leaving wakes as deep as skyscrapers are tall, and you struggle to feel at home in a body newly a hundred times as tall while Gutierrez does all the work. Fish and trash alike dart past you in silver schools; some you crush underfoot; others leave rippling silhouettes on your sonar tableau.

  And Gutierrez is singing—you’re freezing to death and trying not to wonder if your sister felt so cold in the cradle the day she died and she’s singing, and she hasn’t bothered to key off her mic while she’s at it. If it’s some kind of bizarre hazing ritual, it’s working.

  Has she forgotten that you punched her yesterday? That she—that she’d said -

  “Hey,” Gutierrez says over the mic, “new kid, come here.”

  You turn—too fast. You forget that this body is made of a thousand tons of steel and pins and gears and wiring; it doesn’t respond to you in milliseconds, or, well, not all of it. So vast a structure flies apart under the force of its own impulses if it moves too quickly, and besides, there is latency implied by so many interconnected parts, such long limbs. Your chassis groans. You don’t hear but feel it, all the way up in your bones.

  “Whoa!” Gutierrez’s headlamp swings around at you, cuts through the murk like a knife. Good thing your HUD modulates incoming visuals to a level that won’t blind you. “Easy, girl.” A gleaming shoulder materializes, then her arm and gauntleted hand: she’s slow, graceful despite her size, and the serrated hulk of her machine belies its own mass as she reaches out to catch you. She says, “Alcatraz wasn’t big on teaching you kids to dance, eh?”

  Your face heats, despite the cold. Of course they did, but it’s been six years, and you’ve been trying your damnedest to forget.

  You could tell her to fuck off and die. You’d love to. Instead you go with, “Sorry. First day on the job.”

  She laughs. A welcome surprise, actually, but you won’t admit that, not to yourself and definitely not to her.

  “Better learn quickly,” she says, and turns back into the darkness. You follow. Slowly this time: you grit your teeth and remember the old mantras from school—lean into the cradle; let it buoy you; be light. One step forward, then another. Your calves tremble with effort—you aren’t flesh at all, you tell yourself, but the metal you inhabit, the yards and yards of naked steel, the nuclear heart that beats a thousand times a second. Christ it’s cold. You grit your teeth harder.

  “Boss wants us to check out activity at the old Disney site,” Gutierrez says from somewhere ahead of you. It’s too dark to see her, but sonar has her about ten meters ahead of you—kissing distance by Titan reckoning. “Something something elevated electroreceptor levels, blah blah, potential traces. You know how she is.”

  You don’t.

  “Yeah,” you say. “Alright. What do you need me to do?”

  “You do learn quick!” Her glee is palpable. You hate it. “Just shut up and don’t break anything.”

  Sure. You can probably manage that.

  Things swim out of the murk, formless and shimmering: even on a clear sea like this, visibility is limited to a few meters at best. It is a good thing you do not rely on visuals down here. The Van Atta array on your back pings back to you, makes sense out of the chaos: I update your wireframe to show you. Hulking iron skeletons—girders, lost ships, the ruins of sea walls. Fuck you’re cold.

  Gutierrez is singing again. “Herring boxes without topses—” Something groans, big and slow; you feel it drumming up through your chassis, turned into piezoelectric impulses and delivered to your nervous system (by yours truly) and pitched up into frequencies you understand. She’s moving one of the big ships. The wireframe shifts: she’s clearing a channel for the two of you to walk through, right up into the ruins of Discovery Bay.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  “Not bad, huh?” She’s panting with effort, which is funny, because it’s her machine that’s doing all the real work. But even piloting takes work. “Don’t tell Meng. She’s not a fan of us moving things without Central’s approval.”

  You say, “What’s it for?”

  Gutierrez sighs theatrically. “Didn’t I tell you to shut up?” But there’s no bite in the way she says it. “Said there’s traces out there somewhere below Ma Wan, right? Need to check them out. Could pick our way over there, but clearing this shit out is faster.” Not without a little pride: “Ghost can handle it. Your average Titan maybe not, sure, but she’s strong.”

  You follow her around an outcropping that must be half the size of a high-rise: an oil tanker wedged prow-first into the silt, you’ll realize much later. The wireframe shows your depth here at one hundred twenty meters, barely enough to submerge you. Just so she doesn’t start up that godforsaken singing again, you say, “What kind of traces?”

  “The monster kind.” For all that she told you to shut up, she’s clearly enjoying this. “They teach Meg Biology 101 over at Alcatraz, right? You know about the bloom, don’t you?”

  Sure you do. Cryobloom is the algal symbiote that lives on all the Megs like mold in old bread, and it’s the reason they never actually died in their frozen tombs all those millions of years in the Antarctic before the poles started to melt.

  “Well,” says Gutierrez, turning slowly, gracefully, a ballerina in hulking iron form, “when those things want to check out an area, sometimes they’ll leave behind colonies of bloom. You know, same way cats piss on things to mark their territory. Keep other monsters away. Or maybe it says, Scouted here already, or maybe, Good eats at this city.” She doesn’t shrug—would take too long at Titan speeds—but it’s implied. “The nerds who work at Central know better about that. We don’t need to. The traces are there, so Megs can’t be far behind.”

  You never heard about this at Alcatraz. “That’s the theory?”

  Gutierrez laughs. “That’s the reality. Seen enough to know. Been running sorties since you were working up the courage to ask some girl to Prom, pal, remember.” She pauses. “Or guy. Both? Neither?”

  Your screen flashes: BODY TEMPERATURE LOW.

  You blink blearily at it. You’re thinking, Low? How low? And I’m clambering up your brainstem, yelling, Get to shore, idiot, NOW, like I’ve been doing the past five minutes, except hypothermia makes you mammals fucking stupid and you haven’t noticed, and you still don’t, and the little message on your HUD isn’t doing much to break through the fog, either.

  Gutierrez is just humming now, thank God.

  She’s gotten ahead of you, though. Probably half a body length by now on the wireframe. You take a sluggish step. Something grates along your thigh—a ruined nest of half-corroded girders. You hardly feel it.

  “Hey,” says Gutierrez, “new girl, get over here. You’ll want to see this. Pretty neat shit. Looks like we might have a big one brewing.”

  “Hey,” you say. “What’s ‘body temperature low’ mean?”

  “What do you think?” She’s stopped humming.

  You feel like you really are your Titan: slow and heavy, a hundred meters tall. “I don’t know,” you find yourself saying. “How low is low?”

  “Why’s that—” You squint against the sudden glare of her headlamp. “Tokyo Calling, requesting biosign readout.”

  A rush in the back of your skull signifies me rising up—for once!—past your animal id to answer Gutierrez myself: your HUD lights up with the flood of charts and numbers and readout summaries.

  “Oh, shit.” She sounds like she’s coming through water, like you’re hearing her with mortal human ears and not your Van Atta array. “Hey, Central—”

  You fall asleep.

  When you wake up you’re on the catwalk in a puddled heap. You taste salt. You’re sodden and so small and so thin and your legs don’t work and the world swims with color and noise. Techs are swarming you in big colorful blobs.

  Groggy, you try, “Meng,” but all that comes out is a retching sound, and then there’s a growing pool of vomit and drool on the catwalk that you can only stare at uselessly.

  People are shouting and you don’t have it in you to cover your ears. It hurts—it hurts your little baby head full of soft liquid and fleshy matter so much. Everything is too fast and half your senses are gone, turbidity and sonar and internals. Someone’s dragging you upright. (Why are you so small?) There’s an arm under yours. Then you’ve been hefted into the air—you’re being carried—a pair of steady brown arms have you—Gutierrez is in your ear saying, “Real dumb move, Fresh Meat,” and you’re too tired to tell her to fuck off. Nice of her not to drop you. You fall asleep again.