In sim, you’re quiet. Suits me just fine, except I can still hear you thinking, and holy fuck are you loud inside your head.

  It’s about last night, of course, still, and the morning after, and everything else. Lau. The Megs. The oncoming shitstorm. Your deafening, deafening self-loathing. How the fuck are you going to do this? No amount of feel-good I pump into your ox feed—not within standard parameters, at least—could have any hope of drowning you out.

  “So,” says Carol, cutting through the noise, “what’s the plan?”

  She’s perched next to you on a ridge above and behind the mouth of the ice channel, engines off, headlamp dark, sonar silent, only the quietest of feedback into your Van Attas even reminding you she’s there. On your wireframe is an overlay with a blinking red dot at the far vertex—the projected position of your target.

  “Head south,” you say, rote, “and follow the channel in. Maintain trailing distance of one mile minimum between objective and self. Confirm target downwind on sonar; prepare closing pattern. Don’t be cavalier.”

  “Good,” says Carol. “Let’s move.”

  You’ve taken a good twenty steps before you realize Carol’s not with you: she’s hanging back, up on the ridge. (She doesn’t want you after all. She hates you. Gutierrez told her that you— Okay, shut up.)

  At the twitch in your jaw, I key the mic for you. “We’re going to lose acoustics in here,” you say.

  The radio crackles. “It’s fine,” says Carol. “You know where I am. Go ahead.”

  You didn’t know where she was, clearly—and you don’t want to admit that that’s your fault; protocol dictates that a pilot in motion should keep reference distances in mind to every teammate, and you didn’t, since you were too busy feeling sorry for yourself. But you ordered me not to psychoanalyze you, so I remind you of approximately none of this and enjoy the show instead.

  Wake confluence points to target fifteen miles or so away, west-southwest. Or southeast. You’re not sure. Fuck, how are you this bad? You were best in class at it back in school. Does Carol notice? Of course she must. She could at least bother to correct you, you think savagely, ignoring that you haven’t bothered to tell her.

  “Kanagawa—status.” You hadn’t realized you’d fallen silent. “All good?”

  “Yeah,” you say. And you can’t help but add: “Thought we were both doing this.”

  In the silence you picture her shrugging, though her Titan doesn’t move. “Aren’t we?”

  “Well,” you say, “no, I’m doing it. You’re just watching.”

  Carol snorts: softly, but still loud enough to hear over the helmet feed.

  “Okay,” she says, “so you want me to go in with you.”

  It’s not a question. “Yeah,” you answer anyway. “Isn’t that how it’s meant to be? Sword and shield together? Tip of the spear?”

  Carol says nothing, but you sense a subtle rise in the ambient temperature, and a moment later her engines flare to life, soft orange and peach on your sonar. She moves off the ridge, down toward the shimmering wall of ice.

  You never get tired of this, the simple act of her moving. Somehow when she does it it’s utterly graceful, nearly as much as when Lau does: probably fifty thousand tons or more of steel and tungsten and titanium and tantalum, water taken in and forced out in an endless cycle like the respiration of some vast Olympian bellows—and yet you behold the ponderous silhouette of her Titan through your sensor feeds and are put in mind of nothing so much as an animal on the prowl, a big cat or a stag, one of those extinct ones you’ve only seen as curated skeletal mounts in museums with racks as wide as two men laid end to end, which you imagined must have once stepped through the forest as lightly and easily as the biggest of the living deer you’ve seen, even those mostly just in videos, since they’re precious rare now.

  Carol’s headlamp cuts suddenly through the gloom.

  “Coming?” she says over the radio.

  “Shouldn’t we keep the lights off?” you ask her.

  Stolen story; please report.

  “Doesn’t matter,” she says. “We won’t get close enough either way.”

  It stings, but she’s right. You bite your lip, hold back your irritation, and follow her down.

  She’s gone silent again. Normally you wouldn’t mind; you never were a big fan of chitchat back at the academy, and it suits you when your teammates aren’t, either. Now, though, it irks you in a way you can’t describe. You expected her at least to be pissed about needling her for not coming with.

  It’s the same as back when she showed up at your room unannounced with your suit in her arms. You were pissed—you wanted her to be pissed. You hated that she didn’t seem to care. As if all that back-and-forthing in the dressing room meant nothing to her, as if she went around teasing every girl about staring at her tits—! (Christ, it’s like you think that ought to be a badge of honor or something.) But never mind that; the point is, it takes the wind out of your sails when you don’t get the chance to fight with someone you’re pissed at—nothing feels shittier than wanting to punch someone who isn’t punching back—and all the worse that she isn’t talking to you at all. (You still aren’t quite sure if she even likes you.)

  Calm down, Emma, it’s not a roller derby: deep breaths; count to ten. If only my precepts let me provide you with a HUD graphic to remind you to chill the fuck out.

  Carol says, “What do you want to do?”

  “I’m thinking.” It comes out harsher than you meant it. Briefly you regret that—then you remember that, no, you’re pissed, and you’re convinced that she deserves it. Typical of you. “We should keep our sigs low toward the choke, then, uh, launch a signal northward to bait the target. Use the curvature of the natural opening there to bounce it. Make it look like we’re downwind.”

  “Okay,” says Carol, helpfully.

  You snap. “Don’t you get bored?” Of course she must: It’s boring no matter what you do. You’re bored. But you’re also pissed, and this is the best you can manage without lashing out at her outright. “Just, you know, watching me fuck up?”

  Silence. Then: “Are you trying to?”

  Your body temp flares, and with it your adrenaline. “Fuck no,” you say. “Obviously. But obviously I am fucking up. You know it and Lau knows it and Meng knows it. I know it. So is it fun? Sitting back and seeing me fuck up over and over and over?”

  “If you’re not trying to fuck up,” says Carol, “then no, I don’t care.”

  “Yeah,” you say, “that’s the thing. You don’t care. You just sit there and let me go in and fuck up, every time, without fail, and you barely answer when I ask you—isn’t that what I’m supposed to be doing, asking you? Aren’t you supposed to be mentoring me?”

  She actually turns to look at you; her headlamp knifes through the darkness, cutting a swathe across the ice walls, which flash like a hundred thousand million diamonds and are gone just as quickly, through the visible light range of your readings. It doesn’t make a difference for your own data whether she looks at you or not, so, clearly, she’s doing it on purpose to echo what would happen if you were talking face to face, as tiny weak unshelled humans, and you aren’t sure whether to feel insulted or touched by the gesture.

  “It’s just,” you say, “you keep telling me I need to work on my form. But that’s not it, is it? That’s not why I keep fucking up. So I keep fucking up and embarrassing myself and I don’t learn anything, so what’s the point?”

  For a long moment Carol is silent, which both satisfies and terrifies you.

  Then she says, “Emma—” but no, you won’t let her: “Call me Kanagawa.”

  “Kanagawa,” she says, “on your six.”

  As she says it you feel it on your sonar, too, a susurrus to your southwest, so quiet you hadn’t realized how deadly close it has gotten. I did, but you don’t listen to me.

  Carol moves before you do. Her engines flare to life, stark caustic lime and yellow, and you catch a glimpse of a great bright spike bursting from her left palm, boiling the water in shades of tangerine and violet. Then she’s in front of you.

  That’s not how it’s meant to be at all. You’re the shield. But it’s too late to protest. The target is already upon you; you see it on sonar now, a violet lance of sheared fluid and turbulent wake, the central mass of it dark, and then it’s in visual range, and all your alarms go off, HUD and embedded alike.

  Carol doesn’t speak. She doesn’t pause. Her strike is one long unbroken movement that began the moment she got in front of you. It looks like the sea sunders itself for an instant, like lightning strikes and splits your wireframe map in two, and then her blade is enveloped in a white shock of cryobloom, like blood, like smoke, and the two halves of the neoradiodont drift past your headlamp and fall silently, majestically, to the sea floor.

  Through your HUD I let you know: SCENARIO COMPLETE.

  It was small, after all, only as long as you are tall. Upon the crumpled little body—the split halves—you glimpse rows and rows of legs, already curling with loss of internal pressure: nothing so much as a really big bug, you think. Then you look at Carol, whose lance is already cooling, and remember how helpless you felt earlier under Lau’s rain of blows—how helpless you’ve felt this whole time, really—and your throat fills up with shame and heat alike.

  Carol looks at you, expectant despite the facelessness of her Titan, her hand still bleeding cryobloom. Her engines are on idle now.

  “Right,” you say, “cool. I’m getting out.”

  You don’t wait for her answer.