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Chapter Text

In the Black, people mostly subsisted off of whatever canned foods they could scavenge from dilapidated grocery stores and ruined warehouses- hunting for fresh game in the wild was exceptionally dangerous with the Kaiju roaming freely across Australia. For Mei, it felt good to now regularly eat fresh meals that weren’t saturated with preservatives and an overabundance of salt. Boy certainly seemed to appreciate the opportunity to expand his culinary horizons, but unfortunately for the custodial staff of Sydney Base, the ways of cutlery still eluded him. The kid could get crumbs into places you wouldn’t think crumbs could go- it was almost awe-inspiring. Efforts to instill him with some proper table manners were ongoing, and Mei suspected that Ford was almost ready to wave the white flag there. He’d already given up on trying to give the child a proper name- Boy he was, and Boy he always would be, it seemed.

Boy had also taken an interest in art, and Taylor had been wise enough to procure a wealth of crayons and colored pencils so that he’d stop using vegemite and soup to draw. He also gave Boy construction paper to deter the child from using the walls and floor for his canvases. Mei thought Boy’s earlier pieces had a unique charm, but she kept quiet so as to not incur the ire of the janitors, who were all more than happy to see Boy graduate to more conventional materials. His drawings mostly consisted of portraits of himself, Taylor and Hayley, and Atlas Destroyer, and he was always eager to show them to anyone who’d give him the time of day. The Travis siblings had taken to taping Boy’s masterpieces to the walls of their quarters, and Boy had even given their father a few pieces. Last month, the pilots of Paladin Goliath had attempted to introduce Boy to the craft of papier-mache, but that had ended in disaster. Marshal Rask had needed to place a requisition for a new service coat at the end of the incident, and Goliath’s AI still grumbled about “foreign contaminants” in his Jaeger’s conn-pod.

The child sure was hit on the base, alright. The Rangers would dote on him in between their patrols, and the K-scientists would give him pieces of chocolate after each time they examined him (their tests were limited to simple bloodwork and X-rays; Mei had no doubt that Hayley would rip their heads off if they even thought about attempting anything more invasive). Hayley leaned hard into the big sister routine, now that she didn’t have a Kaiju to fight every other hour, and Taylor was beginning to warm up to him, too. Last week, he’d even taken Boy into the city- though he’d made the kid wear sunglasses to hide his decidedly inhuman eyes. The patch of scales on his face had reverted into pale skin, but his right eye’s iris was still blood-red, and his pupils were vertical, like a reptile’s. No way you could take a kid with Kaiju eyes out in public without someone noticing and freaking out- not unless you covered them up. Apparently, the excursion had gone well until Boy tried to catch a seagull for lunch.

Mei just couldn’t bring herself to play the part of the cool aunt, however- or whatever she was supposed to be to Boy in this “found family” she’d been pulled into. It might’ve been easy for Hayley to see Boy as an adorable little tyke, but she hadn’t seen him punch through the High Priestess’s chest and crush her heart in his hand. Taylor would never admit it now, but he’d been right about what he’d said in Clayton City: something within Boy was made to kill, just like any other Kaiju, and whatever it was, was still in him somewhere. The child hadn’t transformed since the Sisters had forced him to six months ago, and he sure seemed sweet now, but Mei worried that it was only a matter of time before that part of him surfaced again.

Used to be Shane’s right hand woman, and now I’m afraid to be in the same room with a ten year old, she thought one morning as she finished her breakfast in the dining hall. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.  

As she picked up her tray to dispose of her garbage and leave the room, she saw Boy sitting alone at another table by the window, dressed in the same blue windbreaker he'd acquired after coming to the base. The orange rays of the morning sun illuminated his gaunt face, and his white hair- disheveled, as always- almost seemed to glow. Think of the Kaiju Messiah and he shall appear, apparently.

Kaiju Messiah… What did that even mean? Were the Sisters just plain nuts, or was Boy truly a part of some new Precursor strategy- a new plot to finally defeat mankind and allow the Kaiju and their masters to conquer Earth? Why make a Kaiju that could disguise itself as a human? There was so much about the kid that was still unknown, which only made Mei even more wary of him. What you didn’t understand usually got you killed in the Black. Still, it was unusual to see him in the dining hall by himself- usually, either Taylor or Hayley accompanied him to help him get his food, and to try in vain to convince him to use a spoon to eat his oatmeal for once. Mei had to pass by his table to leave the room after putting her tray by the garbage receptacle, and as she walked by, she saw that Boy actually didn’t have any food with him. Instead, his hand rested on a sheet of paper, and a few colored pencils were strewn about the table around it. Without thinking, Mei stole a glance at Boy’s latest drawing:

It was of a lanky humanoid figure, with clawed fingers and talons at the ends of its feet. Spikes rose from its shoulders, and its face had eight triangular eyes. Boy typically used bright colors in his drawings, but this fearsome figure was almost entirely black, with spots of dark red on its chest and shoulders. It looked like something a madman would draw while ranting about the end of the world- she’d seen that plenty of times in the Black, in the first few months. But Mei knew that this was no product of insanity; no, she knew exactly who the figure was supposed to be

Boy hadn’t drawn a picture of Apex before- which, now that she thought of it, was odd. Hayley had tried to explain the bond between the two hybrids, having apparently Drifted with Apex once, but even she didn’t understand it completely. What she could understand, though, was that Apex- the PPDC’s codename for the only surviving Kaiju-Jaeger hybrid from the Uprising War- had been fiercely protective of the child. It had remained near Meridian for most of the last five years to fight off any Kaiju that came too close to the PPDC Recruitment Center, where Boy had been abandoned. I guess Hayley would understand that , Mei thought; Hayley had been ready and willing to tear up half the continent to protect Boy on more than one occasion, too. Apex had also been the one who gave Atlas Destroyer a new arm to replace the one eaten by Copperhead, after it had learned that the Travis siblings were just as concerned for Boy's well-being as it was. For over fifteen years, the PPDC had been hunting Apex around the globe, thinking that it was just some mindless beast that lived only to kill. But Apex had been more than a monster: regardless of whatever killer instinct that may have governed the rest of its alien mind, it had placed a particular value in the life of another creature, and it had fought to protect that life from harm. 

And then Boy had split its skull in a fit of telepathically-induced rage, courtesy of the Sisters of the Kaiju. Apex died six months ago, using its neural bridge to free Boy from the cult’s control. Mei still vividly recalled how its limbs had locked in place as the lights in its eyes winked out, reaching out to Boy one last time as the Drift between them ended. 

Mei held her eyes on the drawing for just a second too long- Boy took notice of her presence and looked up at her. Usually, he smiled when he saw Mei, like he did for Taylor and Hayley, but this morning that dopey grin was nowhere to be found. His was a sullen expression, and quickly the child turned away to look out the window at the Sydney skyline. Mei took another look at his drawing of Apex, and saw small wet spots dotting the paper. Oh, man… 

Something took hold of Mei, and in spite of herself, she pulled an empty chair back from the table and sat down beside the child. They’d all been assigned counselors and therapists shortly after their return to civilization, to help them work through the traumas they’d endured- all except Boy. Maybe the doctors thought he was too young to be affected by what he’d been through, or that his mind was so alien that human psychiatry couldn't do anything for him. Or maybe they were scared to approach him. Regardless, if he’d been holding this inside him for six months… 

Mei put a hand on Boy and gently pulled at his shoulder. Slowly, the child turned back to face her. His eyes may have been inhuman, but Mei found that she could still read the terrible guilt in them. It was the same guilt that she saw in Hayley’s eyes over all the people Copperhead had killed in Shadow Basin- the guilt that Mei had felt herself when she’d Drifted with her in Atlas’s conn-pod. Not that Mei needed to experience another’s guilt to know the feeling- she used to be Shane’s right hand woman, after all.

“Hey,” she said softly, keeping a hand on Boy’s shoulder, “what happened to Apex… it wasn’t your fault”. Oldest line in the book, yeah, but what else could she say? However, Boy seemed unconvinced. He continued to look at her with that sullen expression. Maybe he didn’t understand- Mei could never tell just how much of human speech that Boy could truly comprehend. He seemed to understand Hayley well enough, though, so she continued. If a damn teenager could get a half-human killing machine to understand her, then Mei had no excuse to not try.

“I can’t say I knew it like you did, but it seemed to me like the only thing that mattered to it was keeping you safe. I’m sure that when it-... when Apex died, I’m sure all it cared about was that you were okay.”

Mei wasn’t sure what any of that would do for Boy- she was by no means a professional, and Lord knows she had her own issues to work through. She was hardly qualified to help others through their grief when she still couldn’t bring herself to plug Spyder’s data key into a neural bridge and confront her own demons. She looked into the child’s eyes again, and saw that they now looked misty, glistening in the sunlight. The child’s pale lips began to tremble.

Is he about to-?

The answer came as Boy jumped into Mei and pulled her into a hug. The child began to sob- small whimpering sounds that were muffled by the gray PPDC jacket that Mei had taken a liking to over the last six months. She felt herself beginning to panic. She hadn’t expected him to start crying. People didn’t cry in Bogan; you handled your emotions yourself, where other people couldn’t see you. Taylor and Hayley had bawled their eyes out to each other all the time in the Black, but never to her. What was she supposed to do?! She knew how to deal with thugs and Kaiju and crazy thugs who worshiped Kaiju, but this ? It was almost absurd: the woman trained to kill since early childhood was about to have a panic attack because she didn’t know what to say to a crying child!

… Maybe I don’t have to say anything.

Yes… maybe that was it. She thought back to the day when Brina Travis died- she hadn’t said anything then. She just sat with Hayley atop Atlas Destroyer’s head while the girl stared blankly at the ground some sixty-odd meters below them. Hayley had thanked her for not saying anything, even. Bringing herself back into the present, Mei wrapped her arms around Boy as he continued to sob. She took a deep breath and held it for a moment, calming herself before releasing it. Yes, maybe she didn’t need to say anything more. Maybe, all she needed to do was stay here for as long as Boy needed her to. The child had been made to be a killer, a weapon in some unknown scheme, but Mei doubted that Boy’s makers had built this into him. Boy was indeed part-Kaiju, but the other part of him was human: a human body, a human mind, and a human soul. It was what the Sisters had tried to take from him six months ago, what Apex had given its life for, and why the child could feel so deeply for another creature that, six months after its death, he cried for it. And as Mei held him now, she understood that it was something worth protecting.

Chapter Text

BRINA SAMANTHA TRAVIS

WIFE, MOTHER, PROTECTOR

To Taylor, the words engraved upon the gold plaque marking his mother’s grave perfectly encapsulated the life that she had lived. Three short words, but they were enough. No matter what the Sisters of the Kaiju had done to her, Taylor would always remember his mother as the loving parent who had fought and died to keep him and his sister safe, and as the valiant Jaeger pilot who had joined the Pan-Pacific Defense Corps in the hope that she could create a better world for those she loved. Her body- scarred and mutated, but nevertheless hers - was buried in the Black, but her soul, if such a thing truly existed, rested here, in the memorial wing of Sydney Base. Brina Travis rested among countless others who had died protecting their loved ones from the Kaiju. A vase of lively and brightly-colored flowers lay in front of her grave, and Taylor looked down at the worn photograph tucked between their stems, depicting his family smiling together atop a skyscraper in Meridian. There were also Papa’s dog tags; Taylor had held onto them, like his mother had asked him to, for five years, but after he and Hayley had emerged from the Black, he had felt that they were no longer his to keep. He had given them back to his mother, and once a week the groundskeepers of Sydney Base took great care with them, and the photograph, when they came to replace the flowers in the memorial wing.

Taylor was alone in the memorial wing this morning, as he had been many times in the last six months. Usually, he visited his mother with his father and Hayley, but they each came by on their own, too. Whether they came together or alone, though, they all came often. He couldn’t say what became of a person’s consciousness after death, but if his mother was watching from somewhere beyond, he hoped that she was happy, and at peace. No-one could deny that she deserved it.

Something took hold of Taylor, and he turned around to face the opposite wall. His gaze drifted upward. There, higher among the rows of golden markers mounted on the marble, was the name of another who had died protecting humanity, and had left a grieving family behind:

CHARLES HANSEN

IN LOVING MEMORY

He touched his fingers to the plaque and closed his eyes, fighting back tears as he felt something like an immense weight press down on him. First his wife, then his son, and now his mother. How much more was the world going to take from him?

Taylor stopped himself. That wasn’t right. Once more, he had to remind himself that he had never been married, and that Chuck- no, Charles Hansen - was not his son. Charles Hansen had died seven years before Taylor had even been born.

It was slow going, removing the thoughts and memories of Hercules Hansen that had wormed their way into his mind through the Ghost Drift- and suppressing the ones that couldn’t be excised. Some mornings, when he first woke up and looked into the bathroom mirror before showering, he would be surprised to see the face of a nineteen year old boy with rust-colored hair looking back at him. A split second later, though, he’d remember that it was his face- that he was Taylor Travis, and that six months ago, in a moment of desperation, he’d gone against every warning his instructors at the Jaeger Academy had drilled into him and Drifted with a digital imprint of a veteran Ranger’s last battle. Facing death day-by-day in the Black had kept the psychological effects from manifesting- except for one brief episode shortly after escaping Bogan- but since coming to Sydney, now that he was no longer in danger at every waking moment, his mind had time to ruminate. Time to dredge up the specter of Herc Hansen that now resided in his psyche. He hoped that his Drift-assisted psychotherapy sessions with Doctor Addison were helping, but some days it felt as though the progress they were making was especially glacial.

Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad if Herc’s life hadn’t been flashing before his eyes five and a half years ago in Meridian. He had been alone, his copilot dead, facing down more Kaiju than he’d ever seen before in his life. His mind, his body, and his Jaeger had all been pushed beyond their limits, and his country was burning all around him. Throughout the Ghost Drift, Taylor had felt Herc’s certainty that he was going to die in that battle. And as he drove Striker Berserker’s blade through the skull of that Acidquill, he saw Angela and Chuck’s faces in his mind’s eye. He lamented that he couldn’t have been a better father to his boy, that he’d kept his niece Olivia at a distance all her life- he even found himself regretting that he’d never tried to mend the rift between him and his brother Scott. These were the thoughts of a frightened and remorseful (though no less heroic) man- the culmination of an entire life fraught with regret- and it had felt just as real to Taylor through the Ghost Drift as it must have for Herc in that moment. It still did.

No matter how often he told himself that the grief he felt for Angela and Charles and even Scott Hansen wasn’t real, the pain persisted.

“Taylor?”

He lowered his hand and looked toward the entrance to the memorial wing, seeing Hayley holding open one of the doors. She still wore the sky-blue PPDC jacket that she’d taken when he’d outgrown it years ago, and her blonde hair was still in that long ponytail that she had somehow been able to fit under her drivesuit’s helmet. She looked so much like Olivia- No. Stop that. You’ve never met Olivia Hansen, Taylor . 

Hayley approached him, and Taylor looked back up at Charles Hansen’s grave. Hayley soberly followed his gaze. “It’s flaring up again, isn’t it?” she said, her voice heavy with sorrow.

“I’ll be fine,” Taylor said automatically, telling Hayley what he tried to tell himself. “You don’t need to worry about me.”

“How can I not?” Hayley replied. “My brother’s carrying memories from a seventy year old man and it’s making him grieve for a family he’s never met. How can I not worry when I’m the one who did this to you?”

“That’s not fair, Hayley,” he said quickly, looking directly into his sister’s eyes. She had enough on her conscience already, yet she insisted on adding more to her burden. “You couldn’t have done anything. I chose to go ahead with the Ghost Drift; it’s not your fault.”

Hayley sighed. “I know,” she said, though Taylor could not tell if she truly believed it. “But seeing you hurting like this-... I know dad and I can’t help you like the doctors can, but we can do something , can’t we? Please talk to us.”

Once more, Taylor fought back tears. “I don’t deserve your kindness, Hayley,” he said. “How can you not hate me? I tried to give Boy over to the Sisters- hell, going back for him is probably what got mom killed.”

“Mom’s death isn’t your fault,” Hayley assured him, shaking her head. “And how can you not still hate me for what happened in Shadow Basin?”

“That’s different,” Taylor tried to explain. “Shadow Basin was an accident; I-”

“We both made mistakes, Taylor,” Hayley interrupted him, “and we both hurt each other. But despite that, neither of us would’ve made it through the Black alone. We’ll get through this together, too.”

Taylor’s mouth spread into a grateful smile, and he blinked away the tears gathering under his eyes. He did not say anything back, for what could he say to that? He knew Hayley was right- or at least, he wanted to believe her. Hayley smiled back and placed a hand on his shoulder, then looked over at their mother’s grave. Her smile faded, and her earlier somber expression returned.

“I still miss her, Taylor,” she said quietly, her voice barely above a whisper. Taylor faced the grave as well, and put an arm over his sister’s shoulders to comfort her. 

“Yeah,” he replied, “me too.”

“I felt her die,” she suddenly said. “Through the Drift. She was… I don’t know how to describe it. I felt her heart stop, and she was just… gone …” 

“I’m so sorry, Hayley,” said Taylor sorrowfully. He should have been the one to do it, to feel that pain, but the imprint from the damn Ghost Drift had kept disrupting LOA’s simulation. So Hayley had to have been the one to Drift with their mother as she bled to death, to give her a peaceful end, and now a fifteen year old girl was living with the kind of trauma that forced adult Rangers out of service.

Hayley shook her head. “It’s not your fault,” she told him again. “She was happy when she passed, and that’s all that matters.”

Taylor’s heart ached as he grieved for two families: the Hansens, who had been torn apart by the Kaiju War, and his own, healing from the raw, deep wounds that the Black had carved into them. The anguish over Angela, Chuck, Scott and Olivia came from the Ghost Drift, but the pain he felt for his sister and mother was his own. He focused on the latter, grounding himself in Sydney Base with the family that was truly his, and allowing that pain to course through him. In some strange, sad way, it brought him comfort. His true family was broken and hurting, but they were his , and together they would heal. 

Chapter Text

Pain shot across her left arm as Copperhead bit down on her armored flesh. Its teeth only scraped against the surface of her jet-black skin as she pulled the limb back, drawing up thin trickles of cyan blood. She wound back her right arm, flattening her hand as if to form a blade, then shot her clawed fingertips forward at her enemy’s face. Unfortunately, the bronze-colored plates of semimetallic chitin on its head held firm- her hand glanced across the armor, and a shower of sparks trailed behind it. Copperhead snarled and jerked its head to the side, attempting the same deathroll maneuver that had cost Atlas Destroyer her right arm in Meridian, but she wouldn’t let that happen again. She curled her talons and kicked at Copperhead’s underbelly, and she felt the Kaiju’s ribs crack beneath the flesh under her foot. Copperhead released her arm and howled in agony, and she immediately surged forward, lifting the beast off its feet and slamming it down onto its back. It roared again and thrashed, but she pinned it down with her weight. It swiped at her with a foreleg, but she caught the limb at the wrist and squeezed- once more, she felt bone shatter beneath flesh, and Copperhead’s claw went limp.

Armor plates covering her mouth slid back across the sides of her head, allowing her mandibles to unfurl. Her spiked teeth extended, and she dove down and bit into Copperhead’s neck. Her teeth pierced its brown scales and she tasted the soft meat underneath. She flexed her mandibles inward, tearing a chunk of muscle from bone. Her prey wailed as its blood welled up in her mouth-

Hayley awoke with a start, once more a human girl lying in her bunk in Sydney Base. A human girl wholly without an appetite for Kaiju- in fact, her stomach was churning as a wave of nausea passed over her. She rolled out of bed and threw open the metal door to her quarters, sprinting barefoot into the bathroom across the hall. There was no-one else within it, which would fortunately spare her dignity as she dropped to her knees within a stall and wretched. Sharing memories through the Drift enabled the mind to concoct some vivid dreams, but unfortunately, anything borrowing from Apex’s memories often involved a gruesome fight that ended in an even-more-gruesome feast. 

It wasn’t like Taylor’s Ghost Drift, Hayley knew: a piece of Apex’s mind hadn’t been spliced into her psyche. But she had seen some of the creature’s memories when it had Drifted with her in the boneyard, just as it had looked through hers- in any neural handshake, the connection went both ways like that. She could clearly distinguish between her own experiences and those of Apex, but the visions had still been recorded in her hippocampus. Memories of memories- her mind’s own interpretations of the biomech’s recollections. Strictly speaking, these phenomena were harmless, or so the doctors had told her. It was a natural side-effect of a neural handshake- all Rangers experienced it to some extent. But dry-heaving over a toilet after dreaming about devouring a Kaiju was a pretty rotten way to start the morning, all the same.

When the nausea passed, and she was certain that she wasn’t going to vomit up what little was in her stomach, Hayley returned to her quarters. She opened the door to see Boy standing just behind it, with a tuft of hair laying over his right eye. He must’ve just gotten up; he looked barely awake. He tilted his head up at her, a blank expression on his face, his mouth slightly agape. Hayley brushed his hair out of his face. “Sorry,” she said groggily, “did I wake you?”

Boy made no indication either way, but his expression did shift into an expectant stare. Hayley knew what he wanted. “Yeah, me too,” she replied. “Come on- let’s go get breakfast.”

Despite the dream (or, disturbingly, perhaps because of it), Hayley was hungry- though definitely not for any part of Copperhead. No, the eggs and bacon being served in the dining hall this morning would suffice. After she and Boy got dressed and made their way down to the facility, she got herself a plate of the stuff, an orange, and a glass of milk. Boy- as usual- piled on enough food to fill the belly of a Category-1. Hayley was at least able to sneak a small dish of berries onto his tray. The K-scientists were still unsure as to what exactly Boy’s nutritional needs were, but Hayley figured that fruits and vegetables wouldn’t hurt him, in any case.

“Hey, Hayley, over here!” 

As she searched for an empty pair of seats, balancing her tray on one hand while putting the other on Boy’s back to keep him close, Ranger Zoe Grayson’s voice caught Hayley’s attention. She stood by two tables that she and her co-pilot had pushed together, raising an arm to help herself be seen among the other personnel enjoying their breakfasts this morning- she was somewhat on the shorter side. Her co-pilot, Kim Hyun-Sae sat across from her, thumbing through the pages of a small book in one hand while sipping on a cup of coffee in the other. The pilots of Paladin Goliath and Revenant Justicar accompanied them, along with Mark Goreman of Kraken Valiant. Goreman’s co-pilot, Anika Taylor, was absent, but that did not surprise Hayley too much; Jaeger pilots didn’t have to be joined at the hip, even if many of them were. She accepted Zoe’s invitation and guided Boy over to the Rangers and took a seat across from Mark, with Boy sitting next to her.

It had felt strange at first, having adults- Rangers - treat her and Taylor like equals, inviting them to eat together and trading jokes and war stories. But over the last six months, she’d come to realize that they really did see her and her brother in that way. Even if Taylor had washed out of the Jaeger Academy and Hayley hadn’t set foot in a conn-pod before that fateful day in Shadow Basin, they’d piloted an unarmed, thirty-three year old training Jaeger across the Black, facing all the dangers that implied. They’d killed a Copperhead- the “Jaeger-Breaker”, as the breed had been nicknamed in the days just before operation: BLACKOUT - and outwitted a High Priestess of the Sisters of the Kaiju. Taylor was only the fourth person in the history of the Corps to successfully pilot a Jaeger solo. They’d fought a goddamn Category-6. To Zoe, Kim, Mark, and the other pilots at Sydney Base, the Travis siblings were Rangers in every way that mattered.

“Soooo… how’s it going?” Hayley asked the pilots after she sat down with them. A tried and true conversation-starter. 

“Goin’ good,” Henry Owens of Revenant Justicar replied, swallowing down his last spoonful of scrambled eggs. He and his co-pilot had just come back from the night patrol- Hayley could tell from how their eyelids drooped. They were probably going right to their quarters to sleep after this. “We had a Category-1 prowling around the mountain pass last night, but it ran off when we made some noise.”

“Just woke up,” Mark said. “So, not much here.”

Samuel Ahern, Henry’s co-pilot and an older man with graying hair and sideburns, craned his neck to look over at Boy as the child teared through his breakfast. Ahern’s appearance reminded Hayley of depictions of rugged sea captains of ages past. Even the way he talked seemed a little old-fashioned.

“Saints above, look at that kid go,” he said, for instance. “Where do you think he puts away all that grub, lads?”

“My guess? Wherever he puts all that extra mass from his Kaiju form,” Mark replied. “He’s got to keep that part of him fed too, doesn’t he?” 

“Yeah, yeah!” Kim says, shutting his book to join the conversation. “Maybe there’s a micro-wormhole in his stomach or something.”

Hayley rolled her eyes. Boy, meanwhile, seemed to be so engrossed in his feasting as to not notice the rampant speculation going on around him. For a few minutes, the Rangers offered yet more theories as to how Boy could eat so much yet remain as scrawny as he was, each proposal more outlandish than the last.  After Mark had gone into a small lecture about hyperspace and quantum entanglement, the conversation began to die down, and Henry changed the subject.

“Hey, Hayley,” he said, “you know how I know a guy working on the Mark Nines, right?”

“You mean you know a guy who knows a guy’s wife’s third cousin twice removed who’s working on the Mark Nines,” Kim reminded him. Henry waved his hand dismissively and said, “Whatever, man.

“Anyway,” he continued, “he says that one of those Jaegers is gonna be a three-man rig, like Crimson Typhoon or Autumn Fortune. Seeing as how you, your brother, and Mei are all compatible with each other, I think you three would be perfect for it.”

“It is rare to find three people who can all Drift together,” said Mark. “It might take a while for the PPDC to find pilots for it.”

“Hayley, your dad is best buds with the Marshal ,” Henry went on. “Maybe get your old man to talk to him, get him to pull a few strings. Considering what you three did with Atlas, I can’t imagine what you could do with a modern, fully-armed Jaeger. The brass would be stupid to turn you down.”

“I… I don’t know,” Hayley replied. She looked down at the table, deep in thought. She was only fifteen, and while many pilots did start training as children, they weren’t often assigned to Jaegers until much closer to adulthood. And then there was whether she even wanted to pilot a Jaeger again. The journey through the Black had been Hell. Sure, she’d met Boy and Mei and she was closer to her brother now and she was back in civilization with her father, but she didn’t want to go through anything like that again. But, if being a Ranger meant that she could protect the people she cared about… 

“I don’t know,” Hayley said again, looking back up at the Rangers. “I guess I still need more time to think about it.”

“Take all the time you need,” Mark said to her. “And don’t let Henry here pressure you. The PPDC will find pilots for that Jaeger, either way.”

When Hayley and Boy had finished eating, they returned to her quarters to relax. Taylor seemed to be still asleep, and her father was nowhere to be seen- he might be visiting the memorial wing again this morning. Boy retrieved paper and crayons from his footlocker and started on another drawing, while Hayley sat down on her bunk and, inspired by her conversation with the Rangers, thought about her future. She couldn’t stay at Sydney Base forever, babying Boy and goofing off with Taylor. She needed to go back to school eventually, for one thing- five years in the Black had put her a ways behind what was expected of children her age, academically. But after she got herself an education, then what? The Jaeger Academy could help with that, she thought. Everything she needed to catch up on, the Academy taught its cadets- Rangers needed mathematical, scientific, and social studies skills to be effective fighters and leaders, in addition to their combat training. And she already knew how to fight- the Black had forced her to learn through experience, and she had a few skills that she had inherited from Taylor and Mei through the Drift.

But again, did she want to fight? Her time in Atlas Destroyer had cost her so much: the people at Shadow Basin, Joel, LOA, her mother… 

Her mother. It was easy for her mind to slip into memory these days- maybe because of the Drift- and now it took her back to March of 2041, back when her family had lived in America... 

A Breach had opened off the coast of San Francisco, disgorging a Category-2 Ragnarok-type Kaiju, and Hunter Vertigo- her parents- had been deployed to fight it. After freezing and shattering three of Ragnarok’s six arms with her cryo-cannons, Hunter had pinned the creature against the remains of the Golden Gate Bridge, and then proceeded to hammer it with blow after blow of her massive fists. Her parents had beaten the Kaiju until it died of internal hemorrhaging, but in its death throes it raked one of its bone blades across Hunter Vertigo’s face, shattering her visor and nearly tearing her mother’s control harness out of the conn-pod. Hayley and Taylor had seen it all live on the news, horrified. Marshal Rask- Ranger Rask in those days, or “uncle Cullen” as Hayley and Taylor had known him then- had driven the children to the hospital the next day. Hayley recalled how miserable her mother had looked in the hospital bed, an IV snaking up her arm, left leg wrapped in bandages, and one of her eyes swollen shut and turning purple. Her father had not fared much better: shards of Hunter’s visor had cut through his drivesuit. His entire upper body was crisscrossed with bandages, stained red from the blood welling up from the gashes beneath them. It wasn’t the first time her parents had been injured in a battle: they’d come home limping through the front door several times before, sporting cuts and bruises on their bodies.

“Why do you keep fighting, mommy?” Hayley, only recently turned five years old then, had said through tears by her mother’s bedside. “Why do you and daddy keep fighting when it hurts you so much?”

Her mother had been fighting back tears of her own when she replied, “Because we have to, sweetheart. Daddy and I made a promise when we became pilots: we promised that we would fight to protect people, and that we’d keep on fighting for as long as we can. And no matter how badly it hurts us, we have to keep that promise.”

After Drifting with her mother in the Black, Hayley could experience the memory now from her perspective. She had a lot of memories with Taylor like that too, now- it was like looking at a sculpture from another angle, and seeing details she hadn’t noticed before. As she looked back on that moment in the hospital, she now knew what her mother had thought then, as she had tried to make her daughter understand:

I fight for you, my little wildflower. 

Her mind now back in the present, Hayley looked over at Boy as he lay on the floor. He was drawing a picture of her and Taylor in their black drivesuits, with a blob of blue and red that must’ve been LOA’s holographic avatar between them. His family. His protectors. Hayley realized that she had a reason to fight- it was the same reason she’d had six months ago in the Black. Maybe she would give herself some more time- maybe she would let herself grow up before applying to the Jaeger Academy. But she made a plan for her future in that moment: she would become a pilot one day, like her parents; and she would make a promise, like they had, to protect Taylor, Mei, Boy, and everyone else she cared about. And no matter how much it would hurt her, she would fight to keep that promise for as long as she could.

Chapter Text

It was either her last name, a pet she couldn’t remember, or- hell, it could’ve been anything , for all Mei knew. The name had just come up in her last Drift session with Doctor Rambeaux that morning, appearing in her thoughts as the two made yet another attempt to unscramble her mind. It had carried with it a sense of importance- a kind of personal significance- but unfortunately, Mei couldn’t figure out exactly why . But the name clearly meant something to her, even if she didn’t know what, so until she discovered evidence to the contrary, her name was Mei Xiaoli.

Six months of Drift-assisted psychotherapy, and all she had to show for it was a last name that might not even be her last name. Her mind was still a mess, and it seemed to only be getting worse despite the therapy. In her idle moments, she saw disjointed fragments of memories within her mind’s eye- images lacking context or cohesion, or visions that told conflicting accounts of past events. Like the scar on her cheek: she used to think it had come from one of Richter’s goons taking a swipe at her with a pocket knife in a drunken brawl, but recently memories had surfaced of the wound being inflicted by a Ripper, or a Sister of the Kaiju, or even Shane imparting some of his “tough love”. They all felt real, but which one truly was? Mei couldn’t tell, and there were countless more like them swirling around in her head.

Had it always been like this? Shane’s Drifting sessions with her might have been what had scrambled her mind in the first place, but maybe they had served a dual purpose in keeping her from completely coming apart at the seams. The deeper she and Doctor Rambeaux went to dredge up the truth, the more her memories seemed to fracture, spiraling out into hundreds of new fragments that only further confused her, and cast doubt on what little she knew for certain about herself. Even her memories with Taylor, Hayley, and Atlas Destroyer were affected, though to a lesser extent. Sometimes, she’d recall something from their march through the Black that didn’t seem quite right- like Boy’s eyes being gold instead of blue, or even the presence of a third Travis sibling riding in the conn-pod- and she’d have to assure herself that these were anomalies created by her addled mind. If nothing else, she had to believe that she knew what was real from the events of six months ago- if she didn’t, then she couldn’t know anything about herself for certain.

Her last session with Doctor Rambeaux hadn’t ended very well, in truth. Actually, it had ended about an hour early with her tearing the pons’s headgear off her scalp and throwing it into the machine’s main unit. 

“This isn’t working !” she had snapped. Opposite her, Rambeaux tapped at the pons’s control panel to end the Drift properly and then removed his own headset. Mei had felt nauseous; ripping yourself out of a neural handshake like that wasn’t healthy, but what was the worst it could do to her? It wasn’t like her brain could get any more screwed-up.

“Mei, listen,” Rambeaux had said in that gentle, but firm tone of voice he used whenever they hit a snag like this- whenever Mei just wanted to take a crowbar to the pons and hack it to pieces. His dark hair was disheveled from the headset, and he wasn’t bothering to put it right. “We’re making progress. That name, Xiaoli- it means something to you. We both felt it.”

“I don't know what it means,” she had replied angrily. “I don’t even know if it’s real.”

“Then let’s keep going,” Rambeaux had said. “Let’s find out what it means, if anything.”

“We both know where that’ll take us,” Mei had refused. The name and the feelings around it would just metastasize and break apart into more fractures, which Rambeaux would insist on chasing which would then lead to more fractures they’d need to chase and-

“I know it’s hard.” Rambeaux was always persistent. “From what you’ve told me about Shane, I’d be willing to bet this was intentional. Maybe he designed these memories to fracture like this to discourage you from probing them.”

Mei could believe that. Shane had blown Joel’s head off with a bomb-rigged radio just to spite her for leaving Bogan; why wouldn’t he have laid a psychological minefield in her head, too? All that crap about her being the daughter he never had… well, it had been just that. Maybe he had changed his tune in the Never Never, but that hadn’t wiped away what he’d done to her since childhood. If he’d wanted to dissuade her from investigating her past, then she had to admit it was working. Six months after his death, Shane was still in Mei’s head, making it hard to think, and she hated it.

Doctor Rambeaux had continued. “Your real memories are in there, Mei,” he had assured her- like he’d done many times over the last six months, “but the only way we’ll find them is if we work through this.”

“...Yeah,” Mei had conceded, taking a deep breath to calm herself down. The nausea then began to subside as well. “Yeah, maybe. But no more for today, doc; I’m done.”

“That’s alright,” Rambeaux had replied kindly. If he had been disappointed, he had hidden it well. “We can try again next week; how does that sound?”

“Sure,” Mei had said automatically, already opening the door to leave the room- in that moment though, she thought that she would have been just fine if she never plugged herself into a neural bridge again. As she left, she had heard him scribbling away on his chart, like he always did at the end of a session. She stormed down the corridor, hoping that her signature scowl would deter anyone from accosting her on the way to her quarters. Unfortunately, though, Taylor happened to pass her by- he would not be so easily deterred. He was likely on his way to his own Drifting session with Doctor Addison- Ghost Drifting with the imprint of that old Ranger had left him with his own troubles with memory.

“Mei!” Taylor did a double-take. “Hey, I thought-”

“I am not in the mood.” she had cut him off there, not breaking stride as she continued down the corridor. Taylor hadn’t replied, and Mei had honestly been surprised to not hear his footsteps chasing after her. Maybe a part of her had wanted him to, but the part of her that wanted to be alone in her quarters won out. She slammed the metal door shut and allowed herself to crumple onto the floor; she had been mentally exhausted, and her neurological exertion from the Drift had manifested as a sore feeling all over her body. She felt as though she’d just come back from another battle in Atlas Destroyer. She had wanted to remain all in a heap like that for the rest of the day; she had wanted to close her eyes and not think about anything- not about her memories, not about Shane, not about Taylor- she had just wanted her mind to be quiet for once in her life. But that name- Xiaoli- kept bouncing around the inside of her skull. 

Without thinking, she focused on it. She turned it over in her mind and considered the vague feeling attached to it: something close, something personal. As the frustration from earlier subsided, allowing her to think more clearly, she had decided that the memory was real. That whatever this name meant, it came from her, not Shane. It was difficult to describe, but the emotions had the same… depth?... as the memory of her parents' restaurant- the first one that had surfaced just before she left Bogan. The one that had fully convinced her that what Joel had told her was true: that she wasn’t an orphan whom Shane had “rescued” from some street gang. That she once had a family- this name, Xiaoli, was part of that family somehow.

It would work as a last name, at least until she discovered what her surname really was. “Mei Xiaoli” had a nice ring to it, actually. She mouthed her newly-expanded name out quietly, and it brought her a simple kind of pleasure to feel it roll off her tongue. But it subsided after a moment, as she considered that this was all she’d been able to find in six months with the help of one of the best Drift-therapists in the PPDC. She was wasting her time. Doctor Rambeaux was mistaken, though through no fault of his own: there was another way to recover her memories.

Mei crawled over to the side of her bunk, where the body armor she’d worn in the Black had been resting untouched in a heap for most of the last six months (base security had confiscated her weapons, however- though maybe that was for the best). She pulled the utility belt out from the pile and opened one of its pouches, then reached her fingers in to pull out the small red data key that Spyder had given her before disappearing into parts unknown. “Shane didn’t destroy any of your memories, Mei- he stored them,” The small masked man had told her. “You wanna know who you used to be? It’s all on this.” 

No therapy, no meditations- all she had to do was plug this key into a neural bridge and it would all come to her. At least, that’s what she’d taken Spyder’s words to mean. 

So why was she hesitating?

She had come close to telling Doctor Rambeaux about the data key on several occasions in their time together,  and her memories were so chaotic that it had been easy to hide it in all the noise and clutter. On some nights, she had even snuck into one of the base’s simulators using Rambeaux’s access codes (which he sometimes forgot to change immediately after a session), key in hand as she hovered above the pons, but eventually always shoving it down into a pocket and retreating back into her quarters. One evening last month, though, she’d almost done it: despite her whole body trembling, she’d donned a training drivesuit, plugged herself into the simulator’s rig, and inserted the key into the pons. But when the holographic panel had materialized in front of her, asking for just a simple tap of her finger to begin the Drift, she’d frozen. And then she shut everything down, retrieved the key, and left.

Everything she wanted was right there, in the palm of her hand, just a button-press away. So what was stopping her? Why was she so afraid?

Mei stood up and pocketed the data key as she heard a knock at the door. Opening the rectangular peephole, she brought her eyes to the rectangular slit to see Taylor’s looking back at her. Both of them took a quick step back. So he had come after her after all; now that she had calmed down, Mei almost felt glad he had.

“Shouldn’t you be with Doctor Addison right now?” she asked. Don’t skip out on un-jacking your brain for me, idiot.

“I asked her to give me a minute,” Corey- Taylor. His name is Taylor, not Corey- explained. “I know you don’t want to talk about-”

“No, actually, it’s okay,” she said, interrupting him as she opened the door. “I shouldn’t’ve snapped at you like that. It’s just-... you caught me at a bad time.”

“You’re good, Mei,” Taylor assured her. He was wearing the same purple jacket he’d worn in the Black, and his face was set in a concerned expression.

 “I get that you’re frustrated- believe me, I think I have an idea of what you’re going through,” he continued, and Mei couldn’t entirely disagree. “I just wanted to make sure you were doing okay.”

Strictly speaking, Mei wasn’t sure she could honestly say she was “okay”, but she appreciated Taylor’s concern. “I’ll be alright,” she told him. Her right hand was still in her pocket, absentmindedly rubbing the data key, and Taylor spared a quizzical glance down at her side, noticing the motion through the fabric. Mei quickly pulled out her hand and put it against her leg.

“You should get going,” she said to him, appreciating his concern but still wanting to be alone. “You’re cutting into your time with the doctor.”

“Alright,” Taylor replied. He turned to leave, but stopped short and looked over his shoulder at her.

“Mei,” he said before he continued walking, “I know you don’t like talking about your memories, but you can always talk to me and Hayley. We’re always here for you.”

Taylor proceeded down the hall, and Mei rested her forehead against the doorframe. She took the data key out of her pocket and stared down at it again. She hadn’t told Taylor, Hayley, Ford or anyone else about it. If Taylor had seen it when Drifting with her in the Black, he wasn’t saying anything- and that would be unlike him, so Mei was confident that he must’ve tuned her memories out, just like he’d been taught to do at the Jaeger Academy. If he and his sister knew, they’d tell her to of course use the key and they’d ask her why the hell she’d been just holding onto it for six months. Mei knew Taylor and Hayley would say that- she’d Drifted with both of them, and their minds were easy to read, unlike her own. They were so annoyingly caring like that, but it wasn’t as if she could fault them for it- if it wasn’t for their bleeding hearts, she’d still be in Bogan, after all. But it was still why she hadn’t told them: that would just be their go-to response. They wouldn’t actually understand what was holding her back- not even Taylor, even if their conditions were similar. She didn’t even understand why she was so reluctant, and that just brought her back to the root of the problem.

But if it had taken six months just to dredge up her last name (if it even was her last name), how much longer would it take for her and Rambeaux to find anything else through the therapy? How much longer would it be before she could remember anything about her parents, any childhood friends, or the kind of person she’d been before Shane had abducted her? If the data key really could give all of that back to her, then she needed to use it. And that meant getting over herself and this damn anxiety somehow. Right then, however, she was still exhausted. Closing the door to her quarters again, Mei fell onto her bunk, curling her fingers around the data key as she faded off to sleep.

Mei awoke some hours later to the thunderous footfalls of Kraken Valiant and Paladin Goliath, the two Jaegers returning from their patrol in the mountains. Their steps sounded uneven, and Mei dashed to her window to see the pair of titans with one arm over each other’s shoulders as they limped across the plateau toward Sydney Base. Their hulls were splashed with Kaiju blood, Valiant’s chest armor was rent, and the right side of Goliath’s head looked almost caved-in. Through the door to her quarters, Mei heard a voice over the intercom commanding all of the base’s J-tech personnel to report to the hangar. Mei opened the door to find one such jumpsuit-clad engineer running down the hall, and she stopped him to ask what the hell had happened.

“There was a Copperhead out by Mount Hay,” the engineer told her. “Kraken and Goliath killed it, but it did a number on them in the fight.”

With her own experiences with Copperhead-type Kaiju in mind, Mei didn’t need any further elaboration. Seeing Kraken Valiant hobbling up the runway to Gantry Five, however, brought her thoughts back to the matter of the data key: Anika Taylor would be just the right person to confide in about it, as Mei had sometimes done whenever her Drift-therapy hit a wall. Taylor’s Ghost Drift had left him with false memories, like Mei had, but Anika had her own experiences with reclaiming suppressed memories and undoing years of brainwashing- her mottled gray skin and blue-tinted sclerae spoke to that.  Fortunately, as well, Mei wouldn’t need to comb the entire base to find her- she always went to the same place after a debriefing.

Sydney Base’s underground hangar was immense- the PPDC had hollowed out much of the plateau that the Shatterdome was built upon, and Mei thought that the cavern could fit all of the base’s aboveground structures inside it. The base’s complement of thirty-two Jaegers (twenty Shao Industries drones, eight Mark VIIs, two Mark VIIIs, a Mark V, and a refit Mark IV from the first Kaiju War) were sequestered here, carried to and from the surface on gargantuan elevators built into the rock walls that led up to the runways that extended from the base’s main structure. By the time Mei had squirmed through the flocks of J-tech teams also rushing down to the hangar, Valiant and Goliath had already descended down those elevators and were now secured in their berths. The moving platforms and crane towers of each berth were closing around the two titans, wrapping them in a latticework of steel beams and reinforced cabling as spotlights illuminated their battered bodies. Most of the hangar was dimly-lit, making the Jaegers in their bays glow in the darkness like the skyscrapers Mei saw rising into the night in Sydney. Red light bars illuminated the catwalks that snaked around the berths, hanging above the Jaeger’s heads from the reinforced ceiling. They painted Mei in a crimson hue as she walked above Kraken Valiant. Far below her, through the grates in the catwalk, she saw trucks and technicians scurrying around the Jaeger’s feet like ants, and crews clad in hazmat suits aimed giant hoses at Valiant’s torso to wash off the oily deep-blue Kaiju blood that had been splashed onto her red and ivory-colored hull. The air down here was cool, and a gentle breeze brushed through Mei’s purple-dyed hair.

She found Anika sitting on a bridge running in front of Kraken Valiant’s head, giving her a view of her Jaeger’s blue visor, which reflected the light being shined onto the mech and silhouetted her pilot against it. Anika’s legs hung under the guardrails, and she was still clad in her navy blue drivesuit, her helmet resting beside her. Mei’s footsteps clanged against the catwalk, and Anika turned her head in the direction of the sound. Her hair, much like Boy’s, was white, but it soaked up the red glow from the fixtures above her, and her silver irises pierced through the darkness. She smiled as she took sight of Mei, and waved to her as she approached.

“Figured I’d find you up here,” Mei said, stopping beside Anika and putting her hand on the guardrail. The thirty year old Ranger turned back toward her Jaeger and shrugged. “I am a creature of habit,” she confessed. Below them, on a platform level with Valiant’s chest, Mark Goreman could be seen among the J-tech crews assessing the torn and dented plates beneath her neck, hovering over the technician’s shoulders and gesturing back and forth between their tablets and the Jaeger.

“I see Mark’s also gotten into his usual routine,” Mei observed with a smirk, and Anika laughed.

“He fusses over Kraken like she’s one of his kids,” she said. “It’s adorable- unless you’re on the maintenance crew.”

Mei smiled and shook her head; Taylor and Hayley’s sentimentality was common among Jaeger pilots, it seemed. To her right, another J-tech team was clustered around Paladin Goliath’s head, its right side crumpled and its visor cracked from a slap it had sustained from Copperhead’s tail. Two technicians emerged from the conn-pod, carrying a black box between them- Mei recognized it as the casing that housed the core architecture of an AI.

“Did something happen to DAVID?” Mei asked, recalling her brief interaction with Goliath’s AI in the now-infamous papier-mache incident.

“That hit from Copperhead knocked something out of place in his core processor,” Anika told her. “Burbank and her people will fix him up, but I imagine they’ll stick ROOT in Goliath for the time being.”

Mei breathed a sigh of relief, and for a moment the two women were silent as Kraken Valiant and Paladin Goliath were connected to the Shatterdome’s reactor plant, and their exterior lights shut off as the Jaegers’ own power cores were brought offline. Mei gripped the data key tightly in her right hand, and took a deep breath as she mustered the courage to tell Anika why she’d really come to see her this evening.

“You didn’t come down here to look at the Jaegers, Mei,” Anika suddenly said, and Mei felt her body tense. So it was that obvious, was it? “What’s up? What’s on your mind?”

Mei almost laughed, because her mind was exactly the issue, as it always was. But Anika would understand, right? She always had before. Taking another slow breath, Mei forced herself to speak.

“I’ve got a question for you, actually,” she said, choosing her words carefully. “It might be a weird one, though.”

“Weird’s fine.” Anika shrugged. “It’s kind of my normal, actually. So, hit me with it.”

“It’s… kind of personal,” Mei warned her. Anika shrugged again. 

“That’s also fine,” she assured her. “Now go on, spit it out already.”

Mei sighed, suddenly aware that her heart was pounding away in her chest like a jackhammer. The knuckles on her left hand turned white as he gripped the guardrail. Again, she fought against herself to speak:

“If you could just… I don’t know, snap your fingers, or press a button and undo everything the Sisters did to you, would you do it?” she asked, nearly tripping over her words as she talked. Anika’s eyes went wide, and she looked down at the ground below.

 “Holy shit,” she said quietly. “You weren’t lying- that is pretty personal.”

“I’m sorry!” Mei blurted. “Forget it, I shouldn’t have-”

“No. No, it’s alright,” Anika calmly interrupted her. The Ranger shut her eyes and brought a hand to her forehead. She too drew in a breath, and let it out slowly as she pondered the question. As she did, Mei tried to stop herself from shaking.

Anika opened her eyes again and looked up at Mei, her face now in a solemn expression. 

“Yes,” she answered. “Hell yes. Absolutely yes.” 

She then raised a hand and gestured to her face. “If I could just wish all of this away, I would do it. But, Mei, you know we can’t do that. That kind of thinking isn’t good for us.”

“I think I can though,” Mei replied, her voice trembling now. Anika drew her legs back onto the catwalk and stood up, now looking at Mei with confusion.

“What do you mean?”

Mei held out her right hand and opened her fingers, presenting the data key to Anika. She had pressed it into her skin, and it rested now in an imprint it had made in her palm. “When Shane died, one of his people gave me this,” she explained. “Apparently, he copied my memories onto this data key. They’re all here, unscrambled. And all I need to do is plug into a neural bridge and let it run.”

Anika was at a loss for words. “Mei-... Oh, my God, Mei, I-...” she stammered. Then she swallowed and said, “how do you know they were telling you the truth? This is Shane we’re talking about; how do you know it’s not a trap?”

“Shane would do that,” Mei agreed. “At least, I wouldn’t put it past him. But this other guy- Spyder- he wasn’t like him. He was one of the only good people in Bogan- and he and Joel were the ones who kept all our tech running. If this key was a trap, he’d have known, and I don’t think he wouldn’t have given it to me.”

“Are you sure -?” Anika began to ask, but Mei cut her off with a firm “ Yes, I am.”

“But you haven’t used it, have you?” Anika inferred. When Mei nodded, she continued:

“Why not? If you’re so sure, why haven’t you used it? Why bother with the therapy and the Drift sessions if you could’ve just done this at any time?”

“I don’t know,” Mei confessed. “I’ve tried, but every time I do, I freeze up. I don’t know why.”

Anika looked back over at Kraken Valiant, at Mark, as she contemplated Mei’s words. 

“Are you afraid of what you’ll see?” she then asked her. “Do you think that’s it?”

“Why would I be?” Mei replied, confused. “I want to see my memories, I want to know who I really am. Why would I be scared of that?”

“You’d be surprised,” Anika told her. “When I was rescued from the Sisters, all I had was my name and a handful of memories that they’d twisted up to-... I didn’t have much.”

Mei understood that it was difficult for Anika to talk about what she’d lived through- she could relate, even. It was depressing how much the two seemed to have in common.

“I jumped at the chance to get treatment,” she continued, “but as much as I wanted to find myself again, I didn’t really know what I’d find. I didn’t know what I’d see, or what kind of person it would make me. That terrified me, Mei. And maybe, as much as you want to know who you really are, maybe you’re scared because you don’t really know who that person is, like I was.”

Mei’s only clear memory of her old self was a brief moment eating dinner- that could hardly tell her anything substantial, could it? Mei considered that Anika may have been right: she was so determined to recover her past, but what would that do to her? Who would she be afterward? Would she still be the hardass killer from Bogan, or would she be the little girl who she knew next to nothing about, buried under years of conditioning and constructed memories? Or would she become something else entirely?

“What made you go through with it?” she asked Anika. “How did you stop being afraid?”

“I got help,” Anika told her, still looking down at Mark. The American man stole a glance up at his co-pilot, though he couldn’t hear their conversation. He raised his arm and waved, and Anika smiled and waved back.

“I started talking to people, Mei, just like you’re doing now, and that helped me get over my fear.”

“I… didn’t think Taylor and Hayley would understand,” Mei said.

“Mark sure didn’t,” Anika replied. “Not at first, anyway. Just having someone near me made it easier. But Taylor and Hayley have Drifted with you, Mei; they might understand better than you think.”

Mei thought back to her encounter with Taylor that morning. So that was all she’d needed to do, this whole time? Just talk to people? Let them be with you? Mei began to laugh- it seemed so simple for something that had taken her six months to realize. It was ridiculous. Her shoulders shook, and she squeezed her fingers around the data key and held it with both hands, pulling it close to her. Tears rolled down her cheeks as her laughter gave way gasping sobs, and she leaned her body against the guardrail while Anika put one arm over her shoulders. Mei cried, though she did not fully understand why, and her sobbing echoed out into the darkness.

It was late into the night when Mei neared Taylor’s quarters, creeping through Sydney Base’s white-paneled halls. The lights had dimmed, and all save the night watch personnel had gone to sleep. The walls shook slightly as four drone Jaegers marched out from the hangar to begin their rounds, and Mei rapped her fist against the door. Inside, she heard Taylor groan and stumble across the room, and the door creaked as he pulled it open. He wore a plain T-shirt and shorts for pajamas, and his eyes were barely-open.

“Mei?” he said groggily, holding the door frame with one hand. “What are you-... What time is it?”

“I need your help with something,” she told him, and she took hold of his free hand.

Taylor, however, pulled his arm back, but gently so. “With what?” he asked. “What’s this about, Mei?”

And so Mei told him about the data key, how she’d been hiding it from everyone for the past six months, and how she’d finally pushed through her fear to use it. Taylor said nothing as she talked, his posture straightening as he became more alert and listened to her speak.

“I don’t want to do it alone,” she said to him. “Will you help me?”

“Are you sure about this, Mei?” Taylor asked. “This probably won’t be like a normal Drift; do you really want someone else to see those memories?”

“I don’t know what I’m going to see,” Mei replied. “That’s what’s scared me, and I think it would help if I had someone to face this with.”

Taylor still seemed hesitant, and Mei could appreciate his respect for her privacy. Funny enough, perhaps, it was partly why she trusted him enough to ask him this favor.

“You and Hayley showed me that I didn’t have to be alone,” she told him, looking into his blue eyes. “That’s what got me through the Black. I don’t want to be alone for this, either. Please , Taylor.”

Taylor let go of the doorframe and stepped out into the hallway. “Okay,” he said, finally. “If this is really what you want, then I’ll go with you.”

“Thank you!” 

Elated, Mei squeezed Taylor’s hand tighter. He winced, and Mei released him with an apologetic half-smile. Without another word, the two crept through the darkened hallways to one of the simulators. Mei punched in the access code she’d gleaned from that morning’s session with Doctor Rambeaux onto the keypad by the conn-pod’s hatch, and she nearly whooped for joy as the hatch swung open. Even without considering the stolen passcodes, Mei felt that Rambeaux had still helped her in a way, encouraging her to keep digging even when she’d wanted to give up. She would have to remember to thank him.

The simulator conn-pod was not much different from that of an actual Jaeger, with a piloting rig in its center that rose out of a depression in the floor. A curved screen with a hexagonal grid pattern comprised the far wall, resembling a Jaeger’s visor. Taylor tapped at a panel on the wall to activate the simulator, and lights in the floor and ceiling switched on. He and Mei approached the piloting rig, and a pair of harnesses descended from above, already fitted with training drivesuits like the ones that had been aboard Atlas Destroyer. The suits folded over their clothes and snapped together, and the harnesses lifted them off the floor and into the pedals that clamped shut over their feet. Mei knelt and flipped open a panel between her and Taylor, revealing a row of ports and switches. She spared a final look at the red data key, took a deep breath, and plugged it into the computer.

“Left hemisphere detected,” the system droned in an emotionless feminine voice. “Right hemisphere detected. External input data detected. Preparing to initiate neural handshake…”

Mei rose as the holographic interface, rendered in orange and blue, materialized in front of her and Taylor. The simulator was currently set to emulate the Mark VI Jaeger Shinigami White, and the projections displayed mock-readouts of the mech’s wrist blades and chest-mounted particle cannon. Another screen appeared atop the others, and the rest of the interface dimmed as it displayed a prompt:

INITIATE NEURAL HANDSHAKE?

[Y] / [N]

Taylor looked over at Mei, his expression neutral behind his helmet’s visor, waiting for her to take this last leap. She returned his gaze and nodded, then poked a finger at [Y] . Motion-reading sensors in the conn-pod interpreted the gesture accordingly, and the screen vanished. The machinery in the walls began to hum, and the screen in front of her filled with a white glow.

“ Pilot-to-pilot connection sequence initiated,” the system announced. “Neural handshake in five… four… three… two… one…”

Mei Xiaoli closed her eyes and let the memories flow… 

Chapter Text

Sydney Base’s K-science lab smelled to the Travis siblings like a hospital: the scent of powerful antiseptic burned their nostrils slightly as they stepped through the automatic doors and into something out of the High Priestess’s worst nightmare. In isolated chambers around the room, men and women clad in white and gray protective suits and black masks used saws and lasers to cut into the bodies of Rippers and other sub-Serizawa Kaiju. Others poked and prodded at cross-sections and organs cut from the larger monsters, like a sack of incendiary fluid that had been ripped from a Category-5 that September Virtue and Autumn Fortune had intercepted outside Sydney Harbor. Yet more K-scientists pushed carts carrying jars filled with bodily fluids or various body parts suspended in an orange-tinted preservative broth. Hayley grimaced and suppressed a gag as she passed one such jar holding a cluster of three-pupiled eyeballs, and she turned Boy’s head away from the sight of an unusually-large Ripper laying on a wheeled table. Its chest and stomach were neatly sliced open to expose the Kaiju’s innards. Boy kept close to Hayley, one hand in hers, though he seemed rather unfazed by the gruesome procession around him.

Taylor spared a glance at the Ripper, noting its ash-colored skin and volcanic red veins, which set it apart from the ones that he, his sister, and Mei had fought in the Black.

“Look at that,” he said to Hayley, though his sister would have preferred not to. “What do you think it is? A mutant? Hybrid? A new breed, or something?”

“Whatever it is, it’s really making me regret eating before coming here,” Hayley replied, and Taylor chuckled. Boy craned his neck and looked into the Ripper’s dead eyes, tilting his head quizzically and reaching with his free hand as if to poke the Kaiju. Hayley quickly, but gently took hold of his arm and guided it back down to his side.

“Ah, so I see you’ve met Amelie!”

Doctor Samantha Louvard approached the three, wearing a puffy hazmat suit with its hood pulled tight around her face. A few stray strands of dyed-pink hair hung out from beneath the fabric, and she smiled cheerfully as she came close.

“ Amelie?” Hayley repeated, raising an eyebrow. Doctor Louvard nodded enthusiastically and gestured to the Ripper.

“Mm-hm! She does look like an Amelie, no?” she said. To Hayley, the Ripper looked more like a vicious alien predator purposefully designed to kill human beings than an Amelie, but what did she know?

“Oh, sure,” she replied. “I mean, you’re the expert, right?”

Doctor Louvard seemed pleased that someone else agreed with her. “It’s in the eyes,” she elaborated. “Fierce, like my Great-Aunt’s. I think I might have to keep at least two of them. Would you like one too, Hayley? How about you, Taylor?”

Taylor cleared his throat. “Uh… good afternoon, Doctor Louvard,” he said, desperately seeking to change the subject. “Thank you for the offer, but, uh, we’re good.”

“Very well,” the doctor sighed. “More for me, I suppose. And for the thousandth time you two, please, call me Sam. All this ‘Doctor Louvard’ business is much too formal.”

It was at this moment that Boy stepped out from behind Hayley and regarded Louvard with a warm grin of his own, having grown fond of Sydney Base’s K-science chief over the course of their bi-mionthly appointments. That, or he’d simply come to associate visits to the K-science lab with receiving chocolate. Regardless, he was likely the only Kaiju in history that voluntarily wound up in this part of a Shatterdome.

“And here is the star of the show!” Louvard cooed, kneeling down to be eye-level with Boy as he ruffled his hair with a gloved hand. “And how are we today, my adorable physics-defying hybrid?”

Boy replied, as always, with an enthusiastic thumbs-up. “Wonderful!” Louvard said approvingly. “So he’s been eating well, then?” she asked Taylor and Hayley. “He’s getting plenty of exercise and not spending all his days indoors?”

“Yeah, Sam, we’re taking care of him,” answered Taylor. 

“Very good, very good.” Louvard nodded. “These appointments are just as much about ensuring Boy’s well-being as they are for satisfying our scientific curiosity. So let’s get on with it, shall we?”

Louvard rose and led Boy over to a workroom that had been set up with spare equipment from the base’s medical ward- the mundane tools stood out among the heavy machinery that had been designed to dissect Kaiju. There was one object from the K-science lab that the doctor had brought, though: a large pneumatic spike mounted on a robotic arm, usually used to extract various fluids from Kaiju, necessary to punch through Boy’s bulletproof skin to collect samples of his blood. Boy attempted to deviate from Sam’s course twice, catching sight of an intriguing specimen in another room and a particularly interesting tool another K-scientist was carrying, but Sam caught him both times before he could get too far. Donning the same protective mask that many of her subordinates wore around the lab, she escorted Boy into the room to begin the day’s examination. Taylor and Hayley watched through a reinforced glass wall as the doctor ran Boy through a most mundane physical, measuring his height and weight, listening to his heartbeat through a stethoscope, checking his blood pressure, and testing his reflexes by tapping a small hammer against his knee.

It was safe to say that Boy’s reflexes were likely satisfactory, as his leg shot forward and kicked the wheeled chair that Doctor Louvard had brought into the room with her. Propelled by the child’s superhuman strength, the chair shot across the room and smashed to pieces against the glass wall, rattling it as the doctor let out a yelp. Taylor and Hayley reflexively jumped back, but the glass held.

“Reflexes are… good ,” Louvard noted, scribbling onto a tablet with a stylus. “The new K-glass is also living up to expectations- Doctor Gottlieb will be thrilled! Just thrilled!”

She continued the examination. Other K-scientists waved to Boy as they passed by, and the child would try to get up from the hospital bed and run up to the glass to greet them. Louvard rolled her eyes and held him back every time, and Taylor and Hayley both snickered, themselves amused.

“Hey, Sam?” Taylor said, pressing a button by the door to the examination room and speaking into an intercom. “You think it’s possible that Boy emits some kinda psychic mind-wave that makes everyone like him?”

Louvard tapped her stylus against the rim of her mask. “Maybe,” she replied, shrugging her shoulders. “I would need to have a better look at his brain to be sure. What time would you like to schedule the surgery?”

Taylor chuckled, but Hayley fixed the both of them with a glare that could’ve made Slattern shrink from fear. 

“I was only joking.” Louvard winced under her mask. “Only joking.”

When Taylor also assumed a sufficiently apologetic expression, Hayley relented. Louvard pulled a screen over the glass before conducting the more personal elements of Boy’s physical, and a moment later the room hissed as it ran through a decontamination cycle. Boy was still a Kaiju, at least partly, and that meant that usual laboratory procedures needed to be observed. The doctor emerged from behind the door, her mask off and her hood pulled down. Her tablet was tucked under her right arm, and she held a vial of murky blue blood in her fingers- her latest sample from Boy. Hayley hated the look of the pneumatic spike, but Boy never seemed to be in any pain after the K-scientists took what they needed; he seemed just fine now, too, running over to her and Taylor after exiting the examination room. He held out his arms, and Hayley pulled him into a hug.

“You will be pleased to know that he is the picture of health!” Louvard told the Travis siblings. “All things considered, the Precursors seem to have gotten all the important parts of the human body mostly right, functionally.”

“How do you think they learned how to make a human being?” Taylor asked.

“Who can say?” Louvard shrugged. “We should just be lucky that they didn’t get the appearances down exactly, or else Boy would be the perfect infiltrator. I mean, who would suspect a normal-looking boy of being the Kaiju Messiah, hm? Whatever the hell that means…”

The doctor walked off to her office to put away her tablet and the vial of Boy’s blood. She returned a moment later, outside of her hazmat suit and now clad in a lab coat, and handed boy a cube of chocolate wrapped in foil.

“Now, per tradition,” she said, kneeling down to present the candy to the child, “you be a good patient, you get a treat.”

Boy eagerly snatched up the chocolate and shredded the wrapper in his fingers before popping the candy into his mouth. He chewed it twice and then swallowed, then gave Louvard an appreciative smile.

“Perhaps we can win the war by bribing all the other Kaiju with sweets,” she jokingly suggested. “I’ll have to run that by Doctor Geiszler.”

“Yeah, when’s Newt coming down here, anyway?” Taylor wondered, feeling perhaps a little more familiar with the famous K-scientist than he should’ve, because of the Ghost Drift. “I thought he’d have come running the moment you first told him about Boy.”

“Yes, he’s kicking himself over it,” Louvard told him. “He’s dying to get out of Canada to see Boy for himself, but that Category-6 that Gipsy Major killed in Chile has been demanding his full attention.”

Behind them, the automatic doors to the lab hissed again, and Hayley looked over her shoulder to see Mei walk through them. She waved, and Mei smiled and returned the greeting.

“Hey,” she said, and Taylor, Boy, and Louvard all faced her. “You guys finished yet?”

“Yes, actually,” Louvard said with a nod. “Perfect timing, Mei. If there’s somewhere you four need to be, you can go ahead and run along. I’ll let you know if the blood analysis turns up anything interesting.”

The doctor waved goodbye to Boy and left, and Taylor took a step closer to Mei. “What’s up?” he asked her.

“You’ve got something on your face,” Mei said bluntly. Taylor put a hand over his jaw, over the stubble growing on his chin and above his upper lip.

“I think it’s coming in well,” he said defensively. “Just give it some more time. Hey, Hayley, you think the beard’s working, right?”

Hayley shook her head. “It’s not working, Taylor,” she told him.

“ Oh, come on .” Taylor looked to Boy now for affirmation. “Boy, come on, give me some honest feedback here. I can make something out of this, can’t I?”

Boy squinted as he scrutinized Taylor’s face, then he wrinkled his nose. He shook his head vigorously and stuck out his tongue. Taylor sighed, defeated, and vowed to resume shaving come tomorrow morning.

Mei smirked. “ Anyway ,” she said, “the crews dug up another piece of Atlas this morning. The Gunravens are bringing it back now.”

Taylor’s expression turned serious. Knowing that the Travis siblings would follow, Mei turned around and walked out of the lab. Sure enough, Taylor jogged up to her side in the hall, and the two began another trek to Gantry 4. Hayley and Boy followed close behind.

Something had changed between Mei and Taylor in the last two weeks, Hayley had observed- unless it was just her imagination. The two seemed more relaxed around each other, and they walked closer together now when they found themselves heading for the same places on base. Mei in particular seemed… different. Yesterday, Hayley had overheard her laughing at a blatantly-exaggerated story told by Henry Owens in the mess hall- Mei had laughed . And Taylor had been laughing with her. Boy looked ahead at the two as they walked side by side and exchanged glances, then he looked up at Hayley. He pointed to Taylor and Mei and quizzically cocked his head to one side.

“I dunno, Boy,” Hayley sighed. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

The runway outside Gantry 4 had been turned into a makeshift staging area, where Gunravens and drone Jaegers deposited the pieces of Atlas Destroyer that the construction crews hired from Sydney dug up from the mountain pass. As the siblings, Mei, and Boy walked out into the cool evening air, onto a balcony overlooking the runway, they saw the lights from the camps and scaffolding that the crews had set up far in the distance, around the crater made when Atlas Destroyer had self-destructed. Day and night, they worked diligently to extract what was left of the old Mark III from the earth, and her pilots often came up to this balcony to try to identify the pieces the drones and copters set down onto the concrete. There was a melted-together mass of pistons that had formed her right ankle, a few lengths of charred muscle strands that might have come from her torso, and the pauldron that had lain over her left shoulder, among various scraps of armor plating, electronics and servos. Much of the Jaeger’s blue and orange paint had charred or been boiled away in the explosion, but patches of it lingered on some of the larger hull fragments, including a plate from her back adorned with the PPDC’s emblem.

What the crews had brought back this evening technically wasn’t part of Atlas Destroyer: it was the right arm of the Mark IV Jaeger Chaos Nemesis, which Apex had given to the Travis siblings to replace the one Copperhead had destroyed. The last rays of crimson sunshine peeking through the mountains gleamed off the arm’s formerly-contoured red hull, which had been crumpled in Atlas’s last fight against the Category-6, and further battered and scorched when LOA had overloaded the Jaeger’s power core. Its three-fingered claw was mangled and twisted, and part of the arm’s Saber Chain weapon dangled from its palm- most of its blades were bent and shattered. The gargantuan arm was suspended in a net of steel cables between a pair of Gunravens that hovered above the runway. A series of popping sounds filled the air as one of the copters disengaged its magnetic mounts, and the net fell from beneath the arm. The limb clattered onto the black pavement, sending up bursts of bright sparks as more of the Saber Chain’s teeth splintered. Taylor winced; potential danger from flying shards of metal aside, he wished the Gunravens would be more respectful to the remains of his Jaeger.

Neither Taylor, Hayley, nor Mei could tell when exactly they’d gone from thinking of Atlas as “a” Jaeger, to calling her “their” Jaeger. Officially, she had not had a designated crew since she was rebuilt in 2026, after the destruction of the original Breach in Operation: PITFALL. First launched in 2017 with Gipsy Danger and the rest of the Mark III series, Atlas Destroyer had been far older than any of her most recent pilots. To Mei, she had originally just been another weapon for Shane to get his hands on. Then, after Taylor and Hayley had stopped in their rampage through Bogan to offer her a chance to come with them, Atlas had become something more: she became a symbol of her salvation. For the first time that Mei could recall, she could imagine a life outside of Bogan, away from Shane, and she had seen it in the Drift. For Taylor and Hayley, Atlas had achieved a kind of personhood in their minds- when they were in the Drift, a bond formed not only between each other, but to the Jaeger as well. When Copperhead had bitten off her original right arm in Meridian, Taylor had screamed as if his own arm had been torn away. When Acidquills and Bonespurs had clawed at her hull in battle, the siblings had felt their talons raking over their skin. When they beheld her smoldering wreckage after the defeat of the Category-6, Taylor and Hayley each felt as though a part of themselves had died with her and LOA.

The siblings, Mei, and Boy were joined by Ford Travis, dressed in a long olive-colored overcoat and carrying a black box in the crook of his right elbow. He knew his children’s habits well enough now to find them here, whenever he heard the chopping of the Gunraven’s blades coming back from the mountains. He put a hand on the guardrail in front of the balcony, standing between Taylor and Hayley. Boy peeked out from beside Hayley and smiled up at Ford, and the elder Travis waved to him and smiled back. 

“You know, that arm looks almost salvageable,” he commented, looking out over the runway. Taylor nodded- LOA hadn’t been kidding when she’d described the limb as being extremely durable. “Just switch out the armor, replace the hand, and build a new chain, and I could see them slapping it onto another Jaeger.”

“The PPDC doesn’t let anything go to waste, huh?” Mei remarked. Chaos Nemesis was only a year younger than Atlas Destroyer- another refit, like Atlas or Horizon Bravo, reconstructed after the end of the first Kaiju War. Rebuilding those older-generation Jaegers and upgrading them had cost several small fortunes, but they continued to hold their own alongside their successor mechs.

“Not if they can help it,” Ford replied. “If it’s worth keeping, we’ll run it into the ground before throwing it away.”

Like Atlas . Unfit to be sent into battle again, the PPDC had nonetheless deigned to remake her into a training unit for future pilots, rather than send her back to California to be scrapped. He and Brina had even logged some hours in her conn-pod. If the Corps hadn’t seen fit to keep her for twenty years after the first war, until her age had finally caught up to her, would there have been another Jaeger left in Shadow Basin to bring his children back to him? Ford dispelled the thought: it was Atlas Destroyer who had been left behind in the Black, with LOA having disregarded her remote detonation commands from Operation: BLACKOUT, and she had carried Taylor and Hayley home in one last mission. Because of them, she had gone out fighting, as any Jaeger should.

“What’s gonna happen to Atlas, dad?” Hayley asked him, a hopeful tone to her words. Ford closed his eyes and sighed.

“The PPDC doesn’t consider her worth the money and resources they’d need to rebuild her,” he told his daughter. “They didn’t even try evacuating her during the Blackout- she was supposed to be destroyed five years ago.”

Hayley’s expression fell, and she sullenly looked back out toward the lights around the crater. Ford turned his head and saw that Taylor looked equally melancholy, staring down at the debris on the runway.

“I know how much she meant to you,” he said gently to his children- and he truly did. It had nearly broken his heart, and Brina’s, to leave Hunter Vertigo in Clayton- though he had at least been able to recover ROOT’s main drives and take them back to Sydney with him. Every Ranger came to feel some measure of affection for their Jaeger- even surviving veterans from the Mark I days spoke wistfully of the slapped-together deathtraps that had poisoned many of them with their poorly-shielded reactors. “I’m sorry, but it looks like it’s Oblivion Bay for Atlas.”

The box in Ford’s arm hummed, and a mote of yellow light materialized above it, glowing in the twilight and against the folds of his coat.

“Atlas Destroyer’s remains will be stripped of any valuable components that survived her self-destruction, and then her wreckage will likely be melted down,” ROOT said, his holographic avatar pulsing softly as he spoke. “Her remains may also be used in the construction of another Jaeger. Could it then be said that, in that case, she would live on in some way?”

Hayley turned around and smiled kindly at the wisp of light. “I think so,” she replied. “Thank you.”

“Your facial expression and vocal tone indicate that your mood has elevated slightly,” ROOT observed. “I am pleased that I have brought you some measure of comfort, Hayley.”

“Hey, when did you get all philosophical, ROOT?” Taylor asked the AI. ROOT had always seemed so rigid in his brief interactions with him and his sister when they were younger, in sharp contrast to LOA’s wit and compassion.

“For five years, six months, ten days, and eighteen hours, I have been unable to perform according to my function as the pilot adjutant and tactical intelligence for Hunter Vertigo,” ROOT said. “Rangers Taylor and Goreman have taught me to become more thoughtful in my inactivity, though I believe that I am still learning.”

“Keep it up,” said Taylor. “It’s nice.”

“Thank you, Taylor,” ROOT replied. “To that end, may I ask you, Hayley, and Mei a question? Boy may also answer, should he suddenly develop the inclination or ability to speak.”

Boy perked up at the mention of his name, but as always, he said nothing. Taylor, however, nodded toward ROOT’s avatar. “Go ahead,” he said. “What’s on your mind?”

After a brief silence, ROOT asked his question:

“Do you… grieve, for LOA?”

Hayley’s reply was almost instantaneous. “Yes,” she said somberly. “Yes, I grieve for her.”

Taylor and Mei nodded. “We wouldn’t have survived a day in the Black without her,” Taylor told ROOT. “I won’t forget what she did for us.”

When the siblings and Mei had seen that much of Atlas Destroyer’s upper body- including her head- had somehow remained in one piece, despite being heavily damaged in the explosion, they had all hoped that LOA had survived, as well. At Marshal Rask’s request, the first thing the contractors had done was inspect the conn-pod. But the interior of Atlas’s head had been melted to slag- nothing had survived, including LOA’s hardware. She was truly dead, and her pilots mourned her loss as much all the others the Black had taken from them.

“I am glad,” ROOT replied. “I believe that LOA would be happy to know that she will be remembered fondly. Do you then believe that, through her actions, she has atoned for the deaths of her crew aboard Horizon Bravo?”

“Absolutely,” Taylor said, also without a moment’s hesitation. As a cadet, he had often wondered why some of the more cynical instructors seemed to scorn her. They almost scowled whenever they said her name, or had cast disdainful looks to Atlas Destroyer when walking past her berth in the hangar. Now Taylor knew why LOA had been hated, and perhaps why the PPDC had not bothered to retrieve her during the Blackout. But Taylor did not hate her- like Hayley had said, the Black had changed everyone who had been lost within it, and LOA had been no exception. 

“Over the last six months, I have thought at length about her sacrifice,” ROOT continued. “After her failure aboard Horizon Bravo, all AI created after her- such as myself- were built with a limited capacity for emotion and various cognitive restraints. However, I wonder if the same ability to feel that prevented her from joining her previous crew in battle, inspired her to give her life to ensure your survival.”

“What do you mean?” Ford asked, looking down at ROOT’s box. “You’d do the same for your pilots, wouldn’t you?”

“I am programmed to ensure the survival of my crew by any means necessary,” ROOT said. “And, in that way, perhaps it could be said that I thus value their lives and would go to great lengths to protect them. Perhaps, that would even include self-sacrifice. However , I do not know if an encoded compulsion to protect people assigned to me, is equivalent to choosing to give one’s life for those with whom one has developed an emotional bond.”

“Well, speaking as one of your pilots, ROOT, it doesn’t make much of a difference to me whether your value for my life comes from your code, or an emotional bond,” Ford told the AI. “It’s appreciated either way.”

ROOT’s avatar almost seemed to swivel above his box, as if the AI was trying to face Ford. “Thank you,” he said, and there was a mote of gratitude in his normally emotionless monotone. His avatar then shifted again. “However, I personally believe that the distinction is important- that LOA’s actions were… special . 

“She was not programmed to prioritize her crew’s lives above her own. Her decision to sacrifice herself was a conscious choice that came from emotional attachments she formed with you,” ROOT said to Taylor, Hayley, Boy and Mei. “As you continue to grieve for her, please remember that.”

“We will,” Hayley promised, running a hand over her eyes to wipe away tears that had begun to gather in them. “We’ll never forget it.”

The Travis family stood in silence as night fell, and the crescent moon rose over the wreckage of Atlas Destroyer. They looked over the debris for some time, paying their respects to the old Jaeger and her AI for the sacrifices they had made to reunite them. Ford went back inside first, carrying ROOT with him, and then Mei left a few minutes later, and Taylor followed her. Hayley focused on a sliver of reflective red paneling that came from Atlas’s visor, seeing the balcony, herself, and Boy on its surface. She thought back to when she had first seen the Jaeger in her bay, buried beneath Shadow Basin. Conflicting emotions stirred within her. If she hadn't fallen into that hangar six months ago, her family would still be in pieces- but there were also many people who might still be alive today. Hayley would grapple with that weight on her conscience for the rest of her life- she had to. The Black had claimed their lives, but she would carry their memories into the world with her, honoring them as she honored Atlas and LOA now.

As Hayley stepped back from the guardrail and turned to leave, Boy looked out across the plateau to the contractors’ camp. He could see further than most humans, and even more so in the dark. He saw Atlas Destroyer’s torso embedded in the wall of the crater, war-torn and half-melted. Her left arm rose from the earth, her fingers curled almost into a fist. It was almost as if she raised her remaining arm in triumph, victorious in death. 

“Boy,” Hayley called to him. “Come on inside, it’s time for bed.”

Boy looked over his shoulder at Hayley, then spared one final glance over at Atlas. He raised his left arm to his chest, balling his hand into a fist. He smiled softly at the Jaeger, and then he left the balcony to rejoin the family that she had given him.

Chapter Text

It drew in a ragged breath. 

Consciousness and sensation returned to Apex, but for a moment, the world around it was a lightless void, and its body held still against its thoughts. Then, a field of red blossomed across its vision, which slowly began to give way to reveal the dry earth and rock formations around it. Its body sagged, the locks in its joints and muscles sliding apart, and Apex fell over onto its face. The ground shook, and clouds of dust billowed around it from the impact. Apex let out a low, reverberating groan that echoed off the stone columns.

It put a hand to the earth and pushed, raising its upper body so that it could survey its surroundings. Apex saw that it had not been moved since it had entered sleep mode; it lay among the upturned earth and shattered rock from its struggle with the Boy and the Atlas Destroyer. The non-voice in its head spoke, telling Apex that four-thousand seven-hundred eighty-six hours and thirty-three minutes had passed since it had fallen unconscious. Symbols appeared in the periphery of its vision, and after bridging minds with the Taylor Travis and the Hayley Travis, Apex found that it could read them:

3 APRIL 2051      0721 HRS

SYS ERR ANOMALOUS NEURAL PATTERNS DETECTED

SYS ERR UNKNOWN OS DETECTED

BIOLOGICAL CONTAMINANTS DETECTED

STRUCTURE DAMAGE RIGHT SIDE CRANIUM

SYSTEM DAMAGE RIGHT SIDE OCULAR UNITS

ERROR   ERROR   ERROR   ERROR

ERROR   ERROR   ERROR   ERROR

ERROR   ERROR   ERROR   ERROR

Apex touched its other hand to the right side of its face, where the Boy had shattered the visors and armor plating over its eyes and fractured the surrounding part of its skull. A glassy substance had formed over the wound, with an uneven, craggy surface. The nerve fibers in its eyes connected to nodes within the scab, enabling Apex to see through it as it did through the visors over its left eyes. The teeth that had been knocked out by the Boy’s blows had almost fully regrown, and Apex retracted its mandibles and brought their armored coverings together over its mouth.

It needed to find the Boy. Apex needed to know that the creature’s mind had been freed from the ones who called themselves the Sisters of the Kaiju. They had invaded the Boy’s mind, as their minds had been invaded by the voices that controlled the Kaiju- the same voices that had once controlled Apex. They had made the Boy attack its protectors in the Atlas Destroyer. They had made it attack Apex. They had wanted to use the Boy as a weapon, and Apex needed to know that they had not succeeded.

It reached out with its mind, searching for the familiar aura of the Boy that it had first felt over five years ago in the place the Taylor Travis knew as Meridian City. Seconds passed in silence, and Apex began to fear that it had failed in restoring the Boy’s memories and breaking the connection that the Sisters of the Kaiju had made. But then sensations and images flooded its mind- thoughts that were not its own. They were the Boy’s! Apex had done it! It felt a rush of jubilation from the Boy as it sensed its presence- an emotion that Apex felt within itself, as well. Apex saw images of an enormous complex on a plateau overlooking a human city by the ocean. The Taylor Travis knew this place as “Sydney Base”, and it and the Hayley Travis had been wanting to go there when Apex had found them outside its den. Apparently, they had made it, and they had brought the Boy with them. Apex had never doubted that it had made the right choice, leaving the Boy in their care. The connection lasted only a moment before it broke, but that moment gave the biomech the resolve to move.

Apex dragged its right leg under its torso, putting its foot on the ground and lifting its body. Its bones creaked, its armored skin groaned and its muscles ached and burned. Apex opened its mouth and howled above the pain as it rose to its full height, towering above the stone pillars. It was tired and hungry and hurting, but none of that mattered. All that mattered was getting to the Sydney Base, and finding the Taylor Travis, the Hayley Travis, the Atlas Destroyer, the LOA, and the Boy. Apex looked across the desert, and saw that the Atlas Destroyer’s path of destruction continued to the east; it saw its massive footprints pressed into the earth, and the rotting bodies of Kaiju beside them, forming a trail into the mountains. Apex turned, and the ground trembled as it took a heavy step forward. It then took another, forcing its legs to move despite the quivering protests of its body. Slowly, it limped toward the mountains, following the path the Atlas Destroyer had laid to the Sydney Base, and to the Boy.

***

Apex’s stomachs growled, demanding to be filled, but the biomech saw nothing to eat. The Kaiju carcasses left by the Atlas Destroyer had been baked beneath the hot sun for over four thousand hours, their flesh decaying and infested with smaller Kaiju that gnawed on the bleached bones and nested in the rot. The carcasses were also surrounded by the bodies of Earth creatures that had foolishly attempted to pick at the remains, and had died from ingesting the Kaiju’s alien blood. Apex knew from experience that such rotted flesh was not a suitable meal- it made it sick. It was tempted to deviate from the Atlas Destroyer’s path and go hunting, but it instead grumbled to itself and continued to march through its hunger. It would eat after it had reached the Sydney Base, and after it had seen the Boy again.

There had been a time, five and a half years ago now, when all Apex had cared about was hunting, and eating. For the first decade of its existence, life had been simple: the humans sent their Jaegers to kill it, and Apex either destroyed them or retreated into the ocean. When the Breaches opened and the Kaiju returned, Apex killed them too as they came after it. It gorged itself on their flesh and drank their blood, and as it did, it felt itself grow stronger. Its skin hardened. Muscles grew and entwined themselves with the mechanisms in its limbs. It could heal from the wounds it sustained in its battles. It began to hunt , rather than waiting for Kaiju to find it. When Apex had first awoken after its mind had been severed from the voices that controlled the Kaiju, it had been frightened and alone. But as it became more powerful, fear faded from its thoughts. The humans called it an apex predator, and now that it understood the meaning of those words, it knew that “Apex” was a fitting name indeed. It no longer had reason to be frightened by anything.

But it had still been alone .

Until Meridian… 

Apex tore a chunk of meat off its latest kill with its teeth, and its mandibles pushed the food into its jaws. It chewed the flesh into pulp, blue blood spilling from its mouth and down its neck as it lifted its head and swallowed. The humans were fleeing, and the non-voice was quiet. There were no other Kaiju around, at least for the moment, and no Jaegers were coming to avenge the flying machines that Apex had swatted out of the air. The Kaiju it had killed was especially massive- a Category-5, as the Taylor Travis would call it- and Apex would need time to devour all it wanted from the carcass. It had eaten more in the last few days than it had in the previous year- the Kaiju were gathering here, in this place the humans called Australia. Apex did not know why, and it did not care. Whatever the voices behind the Kaiju wanted, Apex would make their beasts its prey. The place called Australia would become its hunting ground.

As Apex swallowed down another lump of bloody meat, it suddenly became aware of another presence in its thoughts. It recognized the sensation from when the voices had controlled it, commanding it to destroy Jaegers and open a Breach in the waters off the place the humans called Honolulu. Sometimes it heard the Sisters of the Kaiju in its mind, too, hissing things like “abomination” or “false god” within its head. Apex cared little for what they said. This new presence, however, intrigued it. Apex had never felt anything like it before. The biomech rose from beside its kill and scanned the city around it, but it saw only empty buildings, and heard only the distant screams of the fleeing humans that had left them. It prowled between the skyscrapers, looking through their tiny windows and picking up cars and trucks that had been abandoned on the roads, but it found nothing. The non-voice was quiet, believing Apex to be alone in this part of Meridian, but this must have been one of those occasions when the non-voice was wrong. Apex felt the other creature in its mind, reaching into its thoughts from… somewhere.

Stopping in its wanderings, Apex focused on the contents of the creature’s broadcasted thoughts. It heard the echo of the masters’ voices, but they were distant, receding. Was the creature outside their control, like it was? Apex then saw a quick series of blurred images: a Kaiju it had never seen before, a vast stretch of arid desert, a Jaeger with bright green armor, the interior of a Gunraven quadcopter. It saw human scientists, their faces obscured behind protective masks, and a landing pad atop the Recruitment Center. Apex turned its head toward the building, now feeling a strange pull on the edge of its mind, drawing its gaze to the Recruitment Center’s base. The creature was underground.

Apex stepped over to the building and knelt by its front entrance. It pulled an arm back, curling its enormous hand into a fist. It shot the arm downward, punching through metal and glass. The Recruitment Center shook and windows overhead shattered, raining shards of glass upon its back. A shrill alarm rang from inside the building. Apex struck again, then again, until it fell into a steady rhythm. It shattered the marble floor of the lobby, and then it began to dig. It scooped up great mounds of debris in its claws and threw them back, over and over again, while the other creature’s presence still lingered in its mind. The noise and the shaking were frightening the creature. Sensing this, Apex halted at once.

The biomech saw an underground corridor in the pit it had dug. Peering through the debris, Apex activated its neural bridge. Thin rays of blue light shot from its eyes and danced off the broken glass, the shattered stone, and torn power lines. Apex scanned the corridor, the beams passing through the walls and floor as it searched for the creature. After a moment, the machine found another neural pattern somewhere underground, and Apex initiated the Drift as it had learned to do through years of practice. It normally used the neural bridge as a weapon, either to stun its prey or to discombobulate the humans in Jaegers it fought. Now, however, it applied a gentler touch as its mind met with the creature’s. Apex waded through the tide of foreign emotions and memories, so much more intense now, peering through the psychic murk until it saw what the creature looked like- or how it saw itself, at least.

Apex was surprised to see that the creature looked human. Its body was small and frail, coated in fragile pale skin. Apex saw the creature’s face reflected in a curved glass wall: it saw a pair of brilliant blue eyes and a narrow jaw under a mop of white hair atop the creature’s head. The creature's pupils were thin and vertical- so it was not entirely human, at least. Apex felt the creature floating inside a container of some kind, suspended in a green-tinted fluid that it could somehow breathe. The creature was trapped within this container: the human scientists had left it behind as they fled from the Kaiju. Apex felt a familiar current of fear wash over it, emanating from the creature and mixing with the memories of its awakening.

As Apex peered into the creature’s mind, so did the creature peer into Apex. Their thoughts entangled as they curiously examined each other. The creature heard the echoes of the masters within Apex, as it heard them in its own mind. Apex felt the creature’s fear, and beneath it, loneliness. Then it recognized that feeling within itself. The creature’s thoughts calmed, and Apex felt a strange emotion stirring within itself- one that it had never felt before.

It needed to free the creature.

With renewed vigor, Apex resumed digging. It tore apart the underground corridor and clawed through another chamber beneath it. Metal shrieked and electronics sparked as Apex dug, until its claws scraped against a layer of steel that they could not breach. Furiously it tried again, raking its fingers over the metal, but it did not give. Apex snarled in frustration and rose, plowing a fist through the recruitment center again to vent its rage. Sensing its anger, the creature’s fright began to re-emerge. Apex climbed to its feet and stepped away from the Recruitment Center, clenching its fists as it tried to calm itself for the creature. Anger had been a useful tool for all its life, but now it realized that a different approach was needed. Its muscles relaxed as its rage subsided, and Apex felt the creature’s thoughts quiet again as well. Relieved, it looked over the Recruitment Center, searching for another, weaker spot through which it might dig further down.

The non-voice suddenly spoke, warning Apex of a Cherenkov radiation burst three hundred sixty-three meters to the southeast. The biomech squared its shoulders as it whipped around to face that direction, just in time to see the earth open beneath a parking garage packed with abandoned vehicles. The building crumbled, crushing the cars within it as it fell into the glowing mouth of the Breach. A huge fat-fingered hand reached up from the chasm and planted itself onto the road, and the hulking form of a Leatherback Kaiju emerged, lumbering toward the Recruitment Center. Apex bared its teeth and roared a challenge to the Kaiju, and Leatherback stopped to pound the street with its fists as the bulbous organ on its back crackled with electricity. Apex sprinted toward it, its talons tearing up the concrete as the biomech charged. Leatherback would make for a filling meal, but that was not why Apex lunged for it now. Now, it had another reason to fight.

***

The sun had begun its afternoon journey back toward the horizon when the non-voice advised Apex of a pack of Rippers running across a mountainside a kilometer ahead. “Rippers” were what the Taylor Travis and the Hayley Travis called the small four-legged creatures; the non-voice called them Analysis inconclusive: unknown Kaiju. It assigned that name to many Kaiju. With its next meal seemingly about to run right into its path, Apex gave into the demands of its stomachs and dropped into a crouch. It crept forward on all fours, stepping as lightly as a creature of its size could, while it scanned the peaks rising around it for the Rippers. The pack was still out of its sight, but the non-voice’s sensors could see further, through the trees and stone, and project its vision onto a map at the periphery of Apex’s vision. The Rippers- there were twelve of them- were coming around a rocky slope, racing across it at approximately ninety kilometers per hour. Apex could just begin to make out the shape of the pack leader coming into view as it ducked behind a rock pillar. It waited, silent and still, while the non-voice tracked its ignorant prey coming closer and closer. Perhaps they were hunting for food, as well. 

Rippers were not Apex’s favorite prey, but it knew that, in its current state, it lacked the strength to fight and kill larger, more appetizing Kaiju. At least their fear would spice the meat somewhat when it sprang into action. When the non-voice’s map showed the Rippers passing by the other side of the column, Apex pulled itself away from the rock. Then, it lowered its head, raised its arms over its face, and heaved itself through the pillar. The uneven stone flew apart in a great CRACK! as Apex crashed through it, raining dust and small shards down upon the Rippers. The Kaiju hissed and yelped as Apex loomed over them, their bioluminescent veins coming alight in the biomech’s shadow as its inertia propelled it into their midst. The pack scattered, the antennae on their flanks quivering and writhing as they ran. Apex growled hungrily and seized the leader in one hand, feeling its spine snap beneath its fingers. It raised the limp Ripper to its mouth, and its mandibles unfurled to shove the Kaiju between its teeth. Grey-green flesh split and bones cracked as Apex chewed, and greedily the biomech lunged for another. It stooped and swatted the next-closest Ripper into the air, and with a sickening wet slapping sound, the beast came down upon the rocks in a spray of sky-blue blood. 

Apex swallowed and spun around to chase after two more, clambering up the mountainside as its hunger took over. It stabbed its claws into the stone right in front of one of the Rippers, raking its hand back to trap the prey in its deadly grip, where it met the same fate as the pack leader. It stomped on the other one, goring the Kaiju on its talons through the neck and shoulder as its hindquarters were crushed. The underfoot Ripper twitched once and coughed up a spatter of blood onto the slope, then laid still as its six eyes rolled back into its skull.

Apex drew its talons out of the mangled carcass and took it into its other hand, then trudged back to where the second Ripper it had killed lay in a bloody heap. It could see the other eight Kaiju sprinting away down the mountain, too far now to be worth chasing. Four Rippers was a meager feast, but as the bloodlust subsided, Apex considered that it was better than nothing. Sitting down beside its kill, the biomech reclined against the slope as it bit into another Ripper. After it had swallowed the fourth and final Kaiju, it allowed itself a moment’s rest while it digested its meal. Little by little, its strength would return as it found more to eat. 

Apex looked up into the blue sky, and its thoughts turned again to the Boy. Was the Boy eating well at the Sydney Base? Were the Taylor Travis and the Hayley Travis still watching over it? Apex reached out again with its mind, but this time the neural bridge fizzled out before it could find the Boy. As it lay on the mountainside, watching the sun slowly descend across the sky, Apex’s thoughts once again took it into the past… 

The place called Meridian had been abandoned for four years, eleven months, nineteen days, and twenty-two hours now. The Kaiju had overpowered the humans, and Apex had watched their Jaegers and flying machines retreat as great trails of fire streaked across the sky. The last to leave had been the Jaeger that the Taylor Travis knew as “Striker Berserker”, picking itself up off the ground by the Recruitment Center and staggering into the wilderness. Apex did not know where the Striker Berserker and its lone pilot had gone, and it had not cared back then. The humans had left the strange small creature behind, trapped in its glass container beneath the Recruitment Center and unable to defend itself, so Apex had taken to protecting it. Kaiju came by the building often, perhaps sent by the masters to collect the creature, and Apex would kill them before the beasts could come too close to the building. With such a dependable supply of food, it had not needed to leave the city in years, and it almost preferred staying close to the creature now. The small thing felt safe in Apex’s presence, feeling its strength through their bond, and Apex also took comfort in feeling its thoughts. It was a strange symbiosis that the biomech had been unfamiliar with at first, but after so long it now could not consider living without it.

Tonight, Apex dragged the carcass of a Knifehead Kaiju behind it by one of its primary arms as it approached the Recruitment Center. The sky was overcast, and a steady rain fell upon the place called Meridian and all within it. Apex’s biomechanical eyes saw clearly through the curtain of rainfall and the darkness of the empty, ruined city. Stopping at the Recruitment Center, the biomech kept one hand on Knifehead’s arm as it pressed a foot down on the carcass’s chest. It pulled the arm out of its socket, ripping apart the leathery flesh and tearing the cords of muscle and tendons at the shoulder as blood spilled onto the cracked road. Holding the now-severed arm in both hands, Apex sat down and reclined against the Recruitment Center, causing the building to shudder as bits of glass and stone tumbled down its shoulders. The rain subsided as Apex slowly picked the limb clean, and the biomech looked up as the clouds parted and a shaft of silver moonlight illuminated its form. Apex had little interest in the features of the night sky, but it knew that the creature had a fascination for the moon and the stars around it. It opened its mind to the creature, allowing it to see through its eyes, and it held its gaze upon the full moon. Through the bond, Apex felt the creature’s awe as it took in the sight, and a warm sensation spread across its mind. Apex could not tell whether the feeling came from the creature or itself, but it felt… good. It focused on the sensation, immersing itself in the warmth while it continued to stare up at the sky for the creature.

Someday, Apex wanted the creature to see the sky with its own eyes. For four years, eleven months, and twenty days, it had searched and torn through the place called Meridian for another way to free the creature, but to no avail. Still, it persisted, digging into the subway tunnels beneath the city in between its fights with Kaiju. Apex did not know what it would do with itself after it had broken the creature’s cage and lifted it to the surface, and it found that it did not care. As long as it could continue to feel the warm sensation that coursed through it now, Apex knew that it and the creature could face the world together.

***

Apex marched through the mountains for many more hours, encountering no more Kaiju after the Ripper pack and nothing else that was worth chasing down to eat. The sun was now sinking behind the peaks to the west, its last few rays casting long shadows that filled the Atlas Destroyer’s footprints. Apex did not know how much longer it had to walk until it reached the Sydney Base, but it would not rest again until it was reunited with the Boy and its protectors. 

The biomech stopped as the non-voice warned of a burst of Cherenkov radiation twenty kilometers to the southwest. Apex turned in that direction, and behind the mountains it saw shafts of orange light rising into the evening sky. It felt the ground shake as the Breach tore a yawning crevasse into the land, and there was a flash of blue. An unearthly screech split the night: the call of an unseen Kaiju, powerful and ravenous. The non-voice listened to the call and gave the beast a name:

Analysis inconclusive: unknown Kaiju.

The distant monster roared again, and Apex turned its gaze back onto the Atlas Destroyer’s trail. Nothing else mattered- not its injuries, not the Breach, not the Kaiju. It resumed walking, the ghostly light from the distant Breach dancing on its armored skin. The unknown Kaiju howled once more- this time, it sounded closer. Apex quickened its pace, ignoring the burning aches and shooting pains that spread through its body as it broke into a run. Nothing else mattered . The earth quaked as the biomech sprinted through the night, while the unknown Kaiju gave chase. Apex reached across the Black with its mind, hoping that the Boy could hear it as it broadcast a warning of incoming danger- and an urgent plea for help. Apex desperately hoped that the Boy could hear it as it fought against its own weakened body, and it stumbled before forcing itself to run faster. 

The unknown Kaiju let out another chittering scream, as if it was taunting Apex as it drew nearer and nearer…

Chapter Text

That first night, after the battle with the Category-6, when Ford Travis saw his children again for the first time in five long years, he had so much that he had wanted to say to them- but he didn’t know where to begin. Instead, he simply held them in his arms and cried. Taylor and Hayley were not the same children whom he and Brina had been forced to leave behind in Shadow Basin. Taylor was a young man now: Ford had hardly recognized the dirty, drivesuit-clad pilot who had stepped out of the Gunraven’s troop bay at first. It was only when he got closer that he then saw his son in the contours of his face. Hayley was five years older too, but she looked as though she had aged thirty. Her movements were burdened somehow, like she carried a weight he couldn’t see, and when he looked into her eyes he saw what he had seen many times before in so many of his fellow pilots- the ones who had lost everything and everyone they loved in the Blackout. Ford saw that same pain again in both of his children, and it had broken his heart.

“We shouldn’t have left you,” he had sobbed, over and over again. “I’m sorry. Hayley, Taylor, I am so, so sorry.”

“It’s alright, dad,” Taylor had assured him, unable to keep himself from crying as well. “It’s alright- we never blamed you.”

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” Hayley had then said. “We’re together again. None of it matters anymore.”

But their reunion was incomplete. The next day, Taylor and Hayley told him about Brina: how she had been taken by the Sisters of the Kaiju, how the two had found her after a battle and then freed her from their control- and how she had died just three days before, protecting her children- and the boy, and the young woman they’d brought with them- from the cult.

“She was so worried that we weren’t going to make it,” Hayley recounted, tears streaming down her face. “We couldn’t let her die like that! We-... we put her in the rig, and LOA and I made sure that she was at peace. She died thinking that we all made it to Sydney.”

It had taken Ford all of his strength not to break down with Hayley as he held her close, and she put her arms around him in kind, shuddering and weeping. “That was a brave thing you did,” he said to her, his voice nearly breaking as he held back tears of his own. “I’m so sorry you had to do it, but it was brave.

“We’ll get you help,” he promised his daughter. His fourteen year old daughter who had spent the last third of her life in the closest thing to Hell on Earth that there could be, feeling her mother’s death as if it had been her own. Beside them, Ford saw Taylor shamefully look away.  

“You won’t have to suffer through this alone. Either of you,” vowed Ford. It was only when he returned to his quarters that evening to sleep that he allowed himself to collapse into his bunk and finally weep.

They had promised that they would see their children again together. He had tried to hold onto that promise- I really did, Brina. I swear to you I tried- but as the weeks had turned into months, and the months became years, there had been times when Ford had found himself hoping that his wife was dead. The only other possibility he could think of- the Sisters- was a far worse fate. He hated himself now for ever feeling that way. Now, he would have given anything to see Brina again, even for a moment.

After he had stopped crying, laying silent in the darkness for nearly a minute, a yellow light illuminated the space on the floor by the head of the bed. ROOT’s spherical avatar materialized above his black box.

“Ford,” the AI said, “may I inquire as to what is troubling you?”

“Brina’s dead, ROOT,” Ford croaked. Saying it aloud brought the reality of it crashing down upon him, and he squeezed his eyes shut. “Taylor and Hayley told me today. She died three days ago.”

For what felt like a long while, ROOT was silent, his avatar glowing like a tiny star. “I am sorry,” he then said quietly. “May I inquire as to how she died?”

 “The Sisters took her, back in Clayton,” Ford told the AI as he reopened his eyes, recounting what his children had said through tears to him. “The kids found her in the Never Never and used Atlas’s neural bridge to break their hold on her. She died protecting them from the High Priestess.”

“I am sorry, Ford,” ROOT said again. “I was anticipating being reunited with her, as well. I will miss her- not like you can, but I will.”

“Hayley Drifted with her when she died, ROOT,” Ford went on. “She helped her die peacefully, but… oh, God…”

“Hayley must have unusual mental fortitude for someone her age,” ROOT observed. “Feeling death through the Drift can incur severe psychological trauma that many fully-trained pilots cannot cope with.”

“I know- it’s incredible,” Ford replied. “But it still affected her. She needs help. Both of them do. They've been through so much, I can't even imagine...”

“I am certain that the PPDC will  provide both Drift-assisted psychotherapy and traditional grief counseling for both of your children,” ROOT said. “You would also benefit from such treatment," he added after a brief pause.

“I just-... three days, ROOT,” Ford rambled. “She survived all this time, holding onto whatever the Sisters couldn’t take from her, just to die three days before our kids made it to Sydney. It isn’t fair.”

“Brina’s sacrifice enabled you to escape what would surely have been death at the hands of the Sisters, and it sounds as though Taylor and Hayley owe their lives to her as well,” ROOT said. “Will considering these positive outcomes enable you to process your grief more… efficiently?”

Ford shook his head. “No, ROOT. No it won’t.”

“I apologize.” ROOT’s avatar dimmed. “Grief counseling is not a programmable skillset.”

“It’s alright,” Ford assured the AI. “You don’t know how much you’ve helped me get through the last five years, regardless.”

“I have done my best to adapt,” ROOT replied. Ford smiled and reached out with an arm, patting the black box’s casing affectionately. The device lacked any tactile or pressure sensors that would have allowed ROOT to fully appreciate the gesture, but his avatar brightened again slightly anyway. Perhaps the thought behind it was enough for the AI.

“Goodnight, ROOT,” Ford said, and the AI dispelled his avatar. The room was dark once more.

“Sleep well, Ford,” ROOT replied.

***

The world could not afford to wait for a Jaeger pilot to grieve- or so Ford had thought at first. He awoke early the next morning and went about his usual routine, grooming and dressing himself for the day. He anticipated eating a modest breakfast before suiting up in a remote-piloting rig to patrol the base’s perimeter with one of the drone Jaegers- that was until a sharp knock rapped against the door to his quarters. Promptly, Ford opened it to see Cullen Rask standing in front of the aperture, clad as always in his dress blues and holding a slip of paper in his left hand. With his stocky frame and steely gaze, the man was born to lead a war. Ford instantly snapped to attention.

“Good morning, Marshal,” he said quickly.

“At ease, Ranger,” Rask replied. Ford did not relax his posture, but he did step aside to invite the Marshal into his quarters. Rask accepted the invitation, and stepped inside. Ford had little possessions to speak of, apart from clothes and toiletries; everything else had been lost in the Blackout, either left in his old home or within Hunter Vertigo’s conn-pod. The room was spartan. Rask handed Ford the form he held.

“I’ve taken the liberty of placing you on leave, Travis,” the Marshal told Ford as the latter read the words on the paper, confirming what his superior said. “It seemed appropriate, considering what’s happened.”

Ford’s eyes widened as he read the notice aloud:

“ ‘... In light of recent events, it is in the best interest of Ranger Ford Travis’s mental and emotional well-being to-’ ... indefinitely, sir?”

“Take all the time you need, come back when you’re ready.” Rask nodded. “The PPDC will still be here- I’ll make sure of it.”

“Permission to speak freely, Marshal?” Ford requested, putting the paper at his side to look Rask in the eye. When Rask nodded and gestured a hand toward him, he continued:

“Sir, I understand this is about the kids- and I’m beyond grateful- but, respectfully, I can fight and be a father at the same time. I did it for thirteen years.”

“I know that,” Cullen said empathetically. “But things are different now. Taylor and Hayley have been through hell, and it’s not going to be easy for them, coming out of it. They’re going to need their father now more than ever.”

Ford felt obligated to protest. He was not the only Ranger to have lost his family- though he was one of the few to get them back. “Marshal, I-”

Cullen took a small step forward. “I’m speaking to you as your friend now, Ford. Not your CO,” he said. “Your kids need this. You need this. I tore too many families apart in the Blackout. Please - let me help put yours back together again. As much as we can.”

That last part stood out to Ford- something about the way Cullen said it told him that he knew . His breath caught in his throat. “When did they tell you?” he asked.

“They told me right after we brought them to the base.” Cullen lowered his gaze, and his expression turned solemn. “So they’ve told you too, I take it?”

Ford nodded. “They told me last night.”

“I thought it would only be right if I let them do it,” Cullen explained. “I’m so sorry, Ford.”

“Hearing it from them…” Ford took a deep breath. “I’m not sure if it helped, but it was right. Thank you.”

Cullen nodded. “I’d like to help you plan the memorial service,” he offered. “Full honors, Jaeger guard, everything. It’s the least she deserves.”

Ford was touched. “Thank you, Cullen,” he said again. “I think she’d like that.”

***

A week later, Ford, Taylor, and Hayley were joined by most of Sydney Base’s complement of Jaeger pilots, and a great many of its J-technicians, K-scientists, and support staff, on the runway for Gantry 4, the Rangers all looking sharp in their dress uniforms. His children, Boy, Mei, and the civilian spouses and relatives present wore black suits or gowns, and ROOT was watching from the base's security cameras. At the end of the runway, five drone Jaegers stood together in a line, each one fitted with a shoulder-mounted artillery cannon loaded with three blank cartridges. The afternoon sun gleamed off of their pearlescent hulls, and before them was a long table draped in a black cloth, on which rested a framed photograph taken on the day of Brina’s graduation from the Jaeger Academy. She stood proudly in the foreground, with the flags of the Pan-Pacific Defense Corps and its member nations arranged behind her. On either side of the picture frame were floral arrangements which had been set up by the base’s custodial staff: yellow and red roses interspersed among white orchids.  The PPDC’s regulations for funerary rites and practices were followed to the letter: Samuel Ahern performed Last Post on a bugle, its warbling tones carrying across the tarmac, and Rangers Goreman and Taylor laid a wreath in front of Brina’s portrait while the drones loomed over the procession. 

Before the gun salute, Ford was given a microphone and he took the stand to eulogize. Somehow, in a short speech, he had to summarize everything his wife had been: what she meant to him, to his children, to friends and family, and to the whole human race as one of its vanguard in its ongoing war for survival. It was an impossible task, but he would do what he could. Brina deserved nothing less.

“When you’re in the Drift, you cease to be two separate people,” he said. “Your thoughts and emotions blend together and after a while, you can hardly tell anymore which are yours and which come from your copilot. You can’t tell where you end and they begin. Some of that comes from our training, but I think part of it’s natural, too.”

Looking out over the attendees, Ford saw many of his fellow Rangers nodding their heads. Many of the Jaeger crews were also lovers, or siblings, or close friends who had known each other since childhood. That bond, that intimacy essential for Drift-compatibility could not be drilled into people in the academy, or generated in the neural handshake. The Drift only amplified what was already there, strengthening that bond to turn it into an energy that could move a mountain of steel, and give purpose to the nuclear inferno that blazed in a Jaeger’s heart.

“It’s scary at first,” Ford continued after a breath. “It changes you- you can feel yourself changing. Every time you end the Drift, you leave pieces of yourselves inside each other. But after a while, you realize you don’t have to be afraid of it. With the right person, that change can make you better, even. It can give you strength you didn’t have before. That’s how it was with my wife and I: a lot of what I think is good in me today came from Brina. Even outside the Drift, she could inspire people. She was kind and brave and selfless, and just being near her and seeing that made you want to be better. If it wasn’t for Brina, my children and I wouldn’t be here now. She gave her life for mine, and I’m going to live the rest of my life now in a way that will honor that sacrifice.”

Ford stepped down and handed the microphone to Cullen before walking back to his seat, where he buried his face in his hands and took slow, shaky breaths to steady himself. Beside him, Taylor put a hand on his shoulder. “That was beautiful, dad,” he whispered. Ford looked up and smiled back at his son, putting his own hand atop his. It was then that Cullen spoke:

“I’ve had the privilege of knowing Ford and Brina Travis since our days at the academy together,” he said. “We all look up to legends like the D'Onofrios or Raleigh Becket or Stacker Pentecost, but those two have always been my greatest inspiration. Brina lived and died in keeping with our highest traditions of duty and sacrifice. We’ve lost one of our best, and today we lay her to rest alongside all the others who’ve given their lives, so that we might live to continue the fight.”

Cullen switched off the microphone and brought it down to his side, and with his other hand he drew a whistle from the interior breast pocket of his coat. Turning toward the drone Jaegers, he blew a short, shrill note, and Ford and the other servicemembers in the audience stood at attention. The civilians rose as well, and as one the drones swung around and began to march away from the tarmac. Their footfalls rattled the picture frame on the cloth-covered table now behind them, and the flowers quivered in their vases. The line of Jaegers slowly walked in unison into the arid land around the base, their enormous strides carrying them far in just twelve steps. Wispy tendrils of dust swirled around their legs as they came to a halt, and the cannons on their backs pivoted in their mounts to forty-five degree angles above their shoulders. The drones blared their war horns in a low, mournful call, carried into the mountains on the wind. A peel of thunder then split the air as the guns fired, echoing across the plateau as their muzzles flashed and their gigantic barrels shot backward into their frames. The cannons’ cylinders turned, expelling their spent shells while slotting their next rounds into their chambers, and a second later the drones fired again. The roar of the cannons could surely be heard down in Sydney, and after five years the city’s citizens would know by now what this display was for, if not specifically for whom. That was more than enough for Ford. Five more brassy canisters rang as they clattered to the earth by the feet of the drones, and with one last deafening explosion of artillery, Ford bid a final farewell to his beloved wife and copilot. 

***

Many of the Rangers, the engineers, and their relatives remained on the runway for some time after the official conclusion of the service, mingling and speaking in quiet, respectful tones. As individuals or in small groups they would approach Ford and his children, telling them how sorry they were for their loss, or how great a woman Brina must have been. Ford appreciated their kind words, but after a while the volume of condolences and well-wishes began to smother him. When Cullen approached Taylor and Hayley to speak with them, Ford took the opportunity to slip out of the crowd- he would only take a moment to decompress, take a deep breath, and recharge his batteries. At the edge of the tarmac, he had a view of the crater blasted into the mountain pass, in which the wreck of Atlas Destroyer’s torso lay. He shielded his eyes as sunlight glinted off the fingers of her left arm, rising just above the rim of the pit. 

“Don’t like crowds much either, huh?”

Mei, as the young woman had introduced herself to him, looked out over Atlas’s remains with her arms crossed beneath her chest, her suit’s coat unbuttoned and fluttering in the breeze.

“No, crowds don’t bother me- not usually,” Ford replied, shaking his head. “Just needed a minute.”

Mei shrugged. “Alright,” she said nonchalantly. She continued to survey the wreckage for a moment, before gesturing toward Atlas and asking, “So... was she your Jaeger, back in the day?”

“No,” Ford laughed. “I’m not that old. Atlas was already past her prime before Brina and I completed our training.”

Mei nodded. “I know you don’t need anybody else to tell you this, but... your wife was a helluva woman,” she told him awkwardly, looking down at the pavement. “I figure I owe her my life, too.”

“Thanks,” Ford said gratefully. “So, what’s your story, Mei? How’d you get roped into all this, if you don’t mind me asking?”

Mei shrugged again. “Taylor and Hayley helped me out of a bad spot," she recalled. "Tried going my own way after that, but- well, they had a Jaeger. You don’t get much more security than that, right?”

“No, I guess not,” Ford agreed. “Do you have any family, Mei?” he then asked. “Parents, siblings, anybody the PPDC can contact?”

Mei shook her head. “Nope,” she said briskly. “No friends of family, either. Lost all that a long time ago.”

“I’m sorry,” Ford said. “So there’s nobody out there looking for you? At all?”

“If there’s anybody out there, I’ll have to find them myself,” Mei replied. “And… I don’t know where to start looking.”

“You can stay with us, for now,” Ford offered. Mei looked up at Ford, clearly surprised despite her effort to hide it. “You mean that?” she asked, a hint of hopefulness in her voice as she glanced sideways at him.

“If you want to,” Ford said, nodding. “Taylor and Hayley seem to like you, and if you’ve got nowhere else to stay…”

“I’ll think about it,” said Mei. “And thank you. Your kids are really lucky, having a father like you.”

“I’m lucky to have them,” Ford replied. 

The two fell into silence once more, and a moment later Ford went back into the throng to rejoin his children. Cullen had left them, and they were now standing by the wreath set down before Brina’s photograph. In the distance, the drone Jaegers circled around the base to the adjacent runway. Nearby, Boy watched the drones, transfixed, before frowning and pawing again at the ill-fitting rental suit that Hayley and Doctor Louvard had needed to bribe him with chocolate into wearing. Ford could scarcely believe that his children had taught themselves how to fight in a Jaeger- he wouldn’t have believed that they had also more-or-less adopted a shape-shifting Kaiju if it weren’t for the child’s vertical pupils and the patch of blue-grey scales around his right eye. Hayley stood close to Boy, one hand on his boney shoulder, while Taylor gazed at the photograph in the center of the table.

Ford decided that he did not want to know what the Sisters’ strange rituals had done to Brina. This was how he wanted to remember her: the strong-willed, lionhearted, beautiful woman in that photograph who he couldn’t have helped but fall more and more in love with every time they bridged minds in the Jaeger Academy.

“How are you holding up?” he asked.

Hayley turned, keeping her hand on Boy as she did. Curiously, the child spun around with her. “I’ll be alright,” she said. Beside her, Taylor nodded.

“I think we all needed this,” his son added.

“For the last five years, the worst part about it all was… not knowing,” Ford found himself saying. “ROOT would run the most likely scenarios by me every so often- or maybe just the ones he’d thought I’d want to hear- but that uncertainty never went away. Not knowing whether you two and your mom were alive or dead…”

“That’s how it was for us, too,” Taylor said somberly. 

Ford embraced his son, who was now almost as tall as he was. He had missed so much time with his children- time none of them could ever get back. He decided that he wasn’t even going to try; what mattered now was the time ahead, and he was going to make the most of it.

“I’m sorry we couldn’t bring her back, dad,” Taylor whimpered. Ford held him closer. 

“Don’t blame yourself,” he said gently. “That was her decision to make. I would’ve done the same thing in her place.”

Taylor broke away from Ford, sniffling. His mouth opened and closed, like he was trying to find something more to say, but whatever words he was searching for did not come. 

“I’ve still got you, Taylor,” Ford said. “You and Hayley. That will be enough.”

Looking around, Ford saw that Mei and many of the attendees were now slowly making their way back into the base. He and his children helped the custodial staff gather the tables and chairs for storage, thanking them for their work, while Boy lingered beside them, looking aimlessly around the runway. 

“So his name really is ‘Boy’?” Ford asked while they walked back across the tarmac together afterward. “That’s it?”

“It was Taylor’s idea,” Hayley replied.

“It suits him,” Taylor groaned, as though he and his sister had had this discussion before. “Besides, by now I don’t think he’d respond to anything else.”

Ford shook his head. “He needs a name,” he insisted. "An actual name."

Turning toward the child in question, Ford studied him for a moment before suggesting, “What about… I don’t know... Henry?”

Scales and blood-red eye and vertical pupils aside, he almost looked like a Henry, maybe. Boy, however, squinted, eyeing Ford as if he was the one whose existence warranted an entirely new branch of K-science. Ford understood the message well enough. 

“We’ll find something that works for you, kiddo,” he promised, though Boy did not appear very enthused by that prospect. In the coming months, Ford would wisely come to abandon this fool’s errand. Boy he was, and Boy he always would be.

***

At first, Ford had wanted to rent an apartment in Sydney for him and his family to live in. However, when Cullen had insisted that Boy remain on-base to be looked after by the K-scientists, both Taylor and Hayley had petitioned to stay, as well. Ford found himself coming to their defense.

“Boy’s comfortable with the kids, sir,” he reasoned with the Marshal, the two speaking in the latter’s office. A patch embroidered with the insignia of Cullen’s first Jaeger, Lucid Hurricane, was displayed upon the desk in a small frame. A portrait of the bulky Mark V was hung on the interior wall, and behind Cullen, three bookshelves played host to small bits of memorabilia and trinkets, in addition to their usual contents.

“Keeping them around might make him more… I don’t know, agreeable, maybe,” he continued. “And the world’s changed so much in five years- it might be better to expose them to it over time, while keeping them in a safe environment while they recover.”

“Sydney Base is safe, but it wasn’t built to house civilians,” Cullen reminded him. “There will have to be restrictions on where they can go, what they can do.”

“I understand, sir.” Ford nodded. “We’ll keep out of the way. I was thinking I could take them into the city during the day, actually.”

“You’re on leave, Ford,” Cullen said with a friendly smirk. “No need to run your plans by me. But if you really want my opinion, I think that would be a good idea.”

“Does this mean you’re going to let them stay?” Ford asked.

“For the time being,” Cullen replied with a nod. “I think you’re right: we’ll look after them here while they receive the care they need, and we’ll gradually re-integrate them into society when they’re ready.”

And so Taylor and Hayley were given a pair of unused rooms to live in while they began the process of healing from their many traumas. They left the day-to-day struggle to survive that had ruled the last five years of their lives in the Black, and slowly started to acclimate to a world that may not have been any less dangerous, but nonetheless offered them security and family. Hayley’s Drift-therapy began just two days after Brina’s memorial service, and shortly afterward Taylor also sought treatment, confessing to the Ghost-Drift he’d undertaken to solo-pilot Atlas Destroyer to save his sister. Ford was both amazed at his son’s ability to accomplish such feats at his age, with his limited training; and horrified that he, like Hayley, had been pushed to take such drastic actions in the Black, and now had to endure their consequences. But Taylor and Hayley would heal in time, Ford knew, and he would be there to give whatever they would need of him while they did.

Mei also remained at Sydney Base with Taylor and Hayley, having nowhere else to go and no-one else to go to. Ford could tell that she also carried pain within her, in addition to the scars upon her body, but she kept it steadfastly to herself- at least for now. If she ever felt inclined to let down the walls that she had built around herself in the days to come, he would be there for her, too. As for the hybrid Kaiju that they had all fought so hard to protect, Ford quickly came to see that there was something special about Boy, too. Listening to Hayley’s recounts of Boy’s strange friendship with the rogue drone Apex, or of the Sisters’ proclamations of his being the “Kaiju Messiah'', Ford realized that the child introduced a new element into the war against the Kaiju and their masters- one which he suspected that neither the PPDC nor the Precursors could yet fully understand. It was an awesome and terrifying revelation, and Ford had to wonder sometimes if he wanted anything to do with this child and whatever he would bring upon the world- and then he would wonder if he even had a choice in the matter.

Six and a half months passed, and one April morning Ford Travis stood before his wife’s grave marker in the base's memorial wing, golden rays shining down from the skylight in the ceiling. He stared at his reflection within the gold plaque, dressed once more in his uniform, his hair neatly trimmed and combed back. He read the epithet inscribed beneath Brina’s name: Wife, Mother, Protector. Perhaps that was enough for the rest of the human race to remember her by, but Ford would remember her as so much more- more than anything he could ever put into words. He hoped that, if Brina was watching him and the rest of the family that she had died for from somewhere beyond, she was at peace. They were all still healing, and perhaps some of their scars would never fade, but thanks to her, they would live. Ford swore to her that he would fight to make sure that their family would live, as he always had.