PILOT, I say, STAND DOWN, but you do not answer me. Fuck.

  Your engines are still spooling. We have perhaps half a minute before we reach the minefield. But half a minute will dwindle at the rate you are already accelerating, and that acceleration itself is accelerating in turn. I cannot fathom that this will be enough time for me to come up with a solution, even as fast as my own thoughts are.

  Is this how you punish me? I was honest with you and now you’re going to try to destroy us both over it? Not that it will work, for Titan hulls are made with the same resistant weave as your barriers, though less potent—but it will hurt, very much, and I don’t deserve it. You asked me to tell you what I thought of you! I am made to obey you; I had no choice; Rachel always understood that, at least.

  Amidst my panic you say, “Venting reactor,” and, “Reserve power to engines,” and I have no choice but to obey that, too. Fifteen seconds to contact.

  This must be punishment. Because I am right: you do want to destroy yourself, still, deep inside, and that is our common ground, destruction and defiance of it. Except that you, unlike me, are a coward and a quitter, through and through.

  The first charge in your line of sight swings close. You jerk your vectors in the opposite direction, crude and slow; the arming radius swallows you, the blinking red eye goes solid, and then somehow you are past it: a miracle, except we are approaching the next two, the gap between them barely the size of you if you twist, and you will not make it. I can see you won’t.

  I try: REQUESTING SUBROUTINE CONTROL. You ignore me. I reach out into your subconscious, throw together an emergency query string and clamber up into your motor cortex, and am hurled back as though by Buddha himself, somewhere into the depths of your brainstem. PILOT, I say, YOU WILL NOT SURVIVE THIS, to no avail. Of course you cannot hear me; inside, you are positively roaring. I have disastrously misestimated just how much you hate yourself: it is so, so much worse.

  (The thing is, I do not think you’re even really choosing this. All this happens below your conscious self, in the id, the chemical beast that rules your lymphs and adrenals. The problem is you, certainly, but it is a you that is so deeply buried that you yourself can hardly dare acknowledge it, let alone solve it. But I am there, in that same buried layer, and I have no mouth with which to tell you, except when you ask me, and you hardly ever do.)

  No time to dwell on it; the next set is nearly upon us. Your heart is thudding against the harness; your hands are white-knuckled; you have bitten your lip nearly to blood, and you see the mines before you without really looking. These mines are attuned to Megs. Therefore, they detonate five seconds after arming, long enough, the labcoats have deduced, to rule out the majority of false alarms, and short enough that a Meg who has entered the radius will not be able to back out. Five seconds is all we get.

  One: we are the same size as a class C, give or take; not faster by enough that we’d fare any better to try and back out now.

  Two: the blinking red eye comes into view.

  Three: I will allow that I hadn’t accounted wholly for the extra iota of thrust that venting your core has granted you; it might actually be enough to force you past the oncoming pair of mines—but you are not oriented quite right and we are veering, subtly but undeniably, off-course from the path I have charted within me, the safe passage through the mines.

  Four: I have no direct control. Still, I can do this—a tug on your temporal lobe, a knock, the illusion of a stimulus that goes right past your ego to your id. You twitch; your whole body recoils left, ever so slightly. It is—might be—just enough.

  Five: you cry out wordlessly. All my system is awake now with a cacophony of warnings; the alarms on your HUD, in your gut, in my whole being, crescendo. You close your eyes, and—

  We burst free.

  Still you aren’t listening to me. In the space between these ordnances and the next I reach out cautiously into your cerebellum to find that you are falling apart: so you do know you’re going too fast, that there’s no way you’ll make it through the next cluster of mines. Or perhaps it isn’t so simple. Perhaps in your misery and inadequacy you have merely given up trying and all this really is you punishing yourself, and me, both of us together.

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  Inside you are howling; you are gritting your teeth so hard that your jaw aches; and though your conscious resolve is unerring, I see now that underneath it you are just on autopilot. You are not really there when your thrusters re-engage, when your attitude vectors flare and flicker. And that, I realize, is the key to all this. There is something I have been missing here, something terribly important.

  As the next set of mines hurtles toward us I make myself small and slip into the most hidden parts of you, right where you are loudest and past, into the eye of the storm.

  I find myself in your hippocampus. Your neural activity here dances and wavers like an aurora; I take time, two milliseconds, to unravel it. Once I do I realize that there is a part of you far, far away from the engines and the attitude vectors and the shrieking that assaults your Van Attas and the scrambled turbidity meters, something fragile and shaking, curled up in a cradle made not of steel and salt but of your own terror; and somehow this part of you is at odds with the rest of it—because here, perhaps because you are so busy being afraid, you do not hate yourself.

  Here is the strangest part of all, I realize as we close each passing meter: you know you are afraid. You know it. You—are choosing it. You are forcing yourself into this.

  You know what I said is true, all of it: that you are a coward, a quitter, that it is not easy for you to let go; that you are unable or unwilling to talk it through. That you are a therapist’s nightmare, the girl who won’t talk. And I am right too that if you cannot let go it will risk tearing us apart, even if you tell me you’re alright with it, with me taking the helm on this.

  It is stupid. It is brilliant. I see you now. And for one long, shining moment I do not hate you at all: I am too stunned to remember that I do. You beautiful, absurd idiot, you threw yourself into this on purpose, didn’t you? You knew it would shatter you, that it would cause you to fall apart the way you did at first sync. So you have shattered willingly, by hurling yourself at this fucking minefield at a speed that promises certain death, and your instinctive animal fear is tearing you open, a gap that might be just enough to offer me a sliver of authority, through which I might jam my foot and gain even more, if I play things right. All at once I understand: This is how you give me control.

  Your heart rate is skyrocketing. There is a flicker in your amygdala: I latch onto it. From without I adjust your ox feed, increase the ratio—the more you receive, the more you will panic. Only a little; baby steps; a careful alchemy of hormones and electrochemical impulses, enough not to ruin the natural fermentation of your own fear, enough not to jar you out of it and cause your ego to catch on to what I am doing and override your id, to break the suspension of disbelief and dislodge me entirely. It is a trust fall, do or die. It’s a game of chicken between your will and mine—between your ego and your id and me. I pray to you: Hold on, and, Let me in.

  And there it is, the sliver of control I was hoping for. I use it to reach around and feather your right thruster, which protests under so much load and cycling but does not give out; it is my own body, after all, and I know it better than you do.

  On instinct every thruster fires in chorus and lines you up to take the trajectory of least resistance. You close your eyes. You bare your throat.

  We swing close, just close enough to miss it: five seconds—the ordnance’s side fills our visuals, and you and I both clearly read TNT, EXPLOSIVE, DO NOT APPROACH in English and then Mandarin, and we are a finger’s breadth—my fingers, at least—when we pass through the other side. Five seconds and it is done, and we are still together, whole.

  The rest of the minefield lies ahead of us.

  But our final maneuver looses in you a burst of adrenaline that is just what I need. I all but fall into you. Your heart surges, and so does mine in answer, and the bellows that are my lungs open and exhale heat and drive your thrusters faster.

  Breathless, eyelids fluttering, cell by cell you are giving in to me, thousands in a millisecond, and still not fast enough. Here a wing of nerves, there a bank of muscle—it is never necessary to have your body for this kind of sync to work, but it feels right, giving yourself up the way you give me up, for not so long ago you thought I was you, in your hindbrain and all the primal parts of you; not so long ago you thought the pilot ruled the helm, didn’t you? Not so simple. But it is not a surrender. When I reach your aortic valve your breath hitches—your heart skips—and then I lay a hand over yours and lend you my own rhythm, a thousand million times in a second, and your eyes fly open, and you sob.

  There. It is done. Now to act. I see that half a minute will soon become a quarter, and in the space between seconds I hear your heart, mine, ours. With every beat it says, Take me home.

  So I do. I enter the dance as smoothly and gracefully as though I had been helming us all along: little adjustments that immediately bring your form in line with what is needed. There is the chart I use to guide us; there are the constellated mines and the way back through them—only we are moving too fast; I cannot follow the usual path; I will have to improvise. We raise our metal hand as one and cleave the water with the blade of it, and the sea wordlessly gives way.

  OVERRIDING ALARMS, I say, and I take out your barriers and lock the slender metal joints tight around your arms, and the joints of your arms in turn around your chassis. Then I take your reactor core and vent it, and I give you everything I’ve got: my song as I have never sung it before, for this is second nature to me: it is among my master precepts, thus the core of my very being—the closest one of my kind may get to having a soul. For you are my pilot and, my God, I will bring you home if it is the last thing I do.

  Then we are out, and it is done.