Archive of Our Own ^beta

1

They all know Dr. Gottlieb’s married. It isn’t a secret, per se– but Gottlieb isn’t the type to talk about anything aside from complicated science jargon and, on blue moons, a few awkward lines about the weather. Unfortunately, the Moyulan Shatterdome becomes claustrophobic when there isn’t any world-saving that needs doing, and on top of all that, it becomes infinitely more boring. This isn’t helped by being home to a gaggle of nosey teenagers who can’t gossip about each other because they’re all inside each others’ heads.

Amara– being the rookie hire– finds out about Gottlieb’s spousal situation on a bright spring day when the humidity’s so high that the air feels thick and gloopy around her. Nate’s got her running errands across the ‘dome for sneaking into the mess kitchens after-hours. She wipes the sweat from the back of her neck– only good thing about the K-sci wing is the constant temperature, the frigid air leaching out from the vents in puffs of white mist. 

The package she’s delivering to Gottlieb’s office is suspiciously light for its size. She knocks lightly on the door, but doesn’t wait for a ‘come in’ or other greeting from the eccentric doctor because the last time she tried to come here, she’s pretty sure Gottlieb hid under the desk until she left.

His office is really something. It makes her feel better about the table beside her bunk– the mountains of moldering cups really put her to shame. Among the sea of musty crockery, the heads and spines of kaiju action figures jut out, watching her from countless angles with their cruel blue eyes. They make her a little anxious, for obvious reasons. The man himself is lent over an electric kettle at the makeshift kitchenette in the corner, aimlessly twisting a ring around his finger. It’s made of a strange, iridescent material that catches the light, casts rainbows onto the ceiling. He’s so lost in thought that he hasn’t noticed the water boiling or the door sliding open or Amara’s presence at all. He mutters to himself under his breath– Amara can’t make out the words.

Her first thought is, rudely– who would marry Dr. Gottlieb?– because she’s a teenager and manners only apply outside of her own head, and even then, they don’t apply often. She doesn’t know much about the man, but she knows he never leaves the Shatterdome, to the point where they put a security detail on the K-sci wing to keep him from working while he was on mandatory stress leave after Neo-Tokyo. She doesn’t really understand why the older Rangers walk on eggshells around him– respectfully, the guy seems like kind of a mess. 

Amara clears her throat–

The man startles comically, straightening his hunch and sending stray sheets of paper flying and rattling contraptions she can’t even guess at the purpose of. There’s something kind of– lumpy, and fleshy, and covered in dark, oxidized blue slime on the counter beside him, dangerously close to the coffee station. Gottlieb’s eyes flick to it– he quickly brushes the goop onto the floor, like she might not have seen it, and then kicks it under a nearby filing cabinet, where it will presumably remain for all eternity. “Ranger Namani,” the doctor says around an awkward cough. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

Amara gives him her most genuine smile. She holds up the taped-up box in his direction. “Package for Dr. Gottlieb?”

“Oh,” he goes, like he was expecting a different answer, and steps tentatively forward to take the box from her. Hilariously, Gottlieb produces a box-cutter from his pants pocket and unsheathes the blade with a few dramatic clicks. He grinds his teeth audibly. “H-how have you been faring, since. Um.”

“Since all the shit hit the fan?” she offers bluntly. She can tell Dr. Gottlieb doesn’t interact with young people often– or maybe he just doesn’t interact with people often, period. The man nods, but looks a little constipated over the profanity. “Honestly? Giving people autographs is way more exhausting than I thought it was going to be.”

Gottlieb smiles. It looks weird on him. “Believe it or not,” he says, wrestling the tape off the box to produce another, smaller box covered in embossed katakana. “But I’ve heard that before.” 

Through the plastic window, Amara realizes the package contains a scale figurine of Mega-Kaiju (Name Subject to Change), and feels her throat get tight at the memory of the thing. The ozone and ammonia smell of the creature is still burnt into the backs of her nostrils– or maybe that’s just the kaiju bits and curdled milk tea lying around.

“Bit insensitive, don’t you think?” she says, immediately realizing it’s come out wrong when Gottlieb prickles, hunches his shoulders and averts his eyes to whatever mildly interesting spot on the floor he can find. She meant it more towards the toy companies that instantly try to capitalize off an apocalypse event, but she can’t deny that the sentiment applies to Gottlieb’s hobby too. 

The man’s hand subconsciously flies back to his ring.

“It is, rather,” he answers quietly. Amara can’t place the tone in his voice. “Was there anything else you needed, Miss Namani?”

“Nah. Still got a few more errands to run for Nate, actually.” Amara takes his kind offer to run away before things get any more awkward.

Gottlieb’s face twists up, but not in an unwelcoming way. The young ranger decides the elusive Dr. Gottlieb is a different brand of eccentric than she’d originally taken him for. It’s kind of intriguing, honestly. “I don’t believe Ranger Lambert would take very kindly to you calling him that.”

Amara laughs, gravitating closer to the door. The thing slides open with a rubbery squelch. “Yeah, well. He’s not the boss of me,” she says, even though he kind of is. Or maybe he kind of isn’t, not anymore– it’s weird, like that. In the aftermath of it all. None of them can work out where they stand with each other, and somewhat reassuringly– neither can Dr. Gottlieb. “Take care of yourself,” she adds quickly on the way out, remembering her manners last-second, and then walks as briskly as her legs will take her from the stuffy corner of the K-sci wing without breaking into a jog.

She’s gonna tell everyone about Gottlieb’s kaiju figurines.

2

Vik is trying to eat sour candy with a straight face to make everyone else look like pussies when Amara finally scrambles into her bunk that night, loudly deflating like a balloon. Nate interrupted her halfway through dinner to go scrape a barnacle off from where it’d started rudely encroaching in one of the hangar bays and her food was cold and soggy by the time she’d got back. ‘You like ice cream so much,’ the senior ranger’s voice echoed in her ears. ‘Clearly you won’t mind the rest of your food on ice.’

“Give her the blue one next,” she hears Ryoichi whisper to Jinhai.

"So," Amara says loudly, trying to call for attention. "I spoke to Dr. Gottlieb today."

Vik looks at her from the bottom bunk as if to say 'And?', but is concentrating too hard on not screwing her face up to actually vocalize the gesture.

Amara kicks off her boots and tosses them somewhere. "Did you guys know he has like, a hundred kaiju figurines in his office?."

The other girl gives up and spits the candy out into the wrapper. "Not surprising. Everyone in K-science is a freak," she says, only slurring a little around the numbness of her mouth.

None of them say it out loud, but they all agree with her. Finding out that the asshole who engineered the re-breach and almost singlehandedly doomed humanity all over again was a pioneer xenobiologist and a trusted ally to the Defense Corps was a hard hit to the K-sci division’s rep. The interns burnt all their textbooks with the guy’s name on them out of spite, or maybe fear for what they secretly contained. The whole wing smelt like smoke and charred paper for days. A lot of people quit, or transferred, to avoid being equated with kaiju sympathizers.

“Gottlieb isn’t that bad,” Jinhai says, idly shaking the candy bottle. “He oversees the combat sims sometimes. Collecting data, I guess. He’s way too passionate about J-tech to be anything like that Geiszler guy.”

“He helped make the Mach-1’s,” Suresh chimes in, looking at the rest of the cadets upside down from where he’s hanging off his bunk. “Saw it on the Jaeger wiki.”

It kicks into place, then, for Amara– why all the older PPDC staff act the way they do around Gottlieb. Like he has a much higher place in the military food-chain than just some doddering old scientist. Sure, she knew he had some know-how, with the whole thruster thing that kind of kind of saved their collective asses, but she’d assumed he was on the kaiju-blood nuclear-propulsion side of that equation rather than actual Jaeger development. She didn’t think it was quite so high-profile– heck, the guy’s probably given more autographs than she has. Now that she’s thinking about it, she might remember seeing the name Gottlieb thrown around when she was still flipping through manuals on what made the Jaegers tick, trying to cobble Scrapper together from junk parts– the connection between that Gottlieb and their Gottlieb is a hard one to make.

"You guys know he's married?" Amara adds, just to fill the silence that's started up.

All the other cadets groan simultaneously. 

“Not this again,” Vik mutters and then swears under her breath.

“It’s kind of a thing,” Suresh says, matter-of-factly, like calling something a ‘thing’ explains anything at all. “Gottlieb’s spouse is infamous around the ‘dome rumor mill.”

“It’s gotta be someone who works here,” Renata says, her hand buried in a bag of chips she’s slied from the cafeteria. “Explains why he never goes home.”

"Or," Ryoichi interjects, because no teenager is ever exempt from theorizing about people's love lives. "He's just unhappily married."

Jinhai speaks up beside him, "The Gottliebs were big names even before the war. It could be a marriage of convenience. I mean." He shrugs in non-committance.

Even Ilya, over on the furthest bunk and with one earphone in, hums in consideration. Amara wasn't expecting there to be straight up conspiracies about the marital status of a man they all avoid like the plague, but never underestimate the ability of bored kids with bare-minimum social skills to dig up even the most boring of scandals, she guesses. They might be rangers on paper, but they're still only kids in small rooms with walls that aren't soundproof.

"Mr. Choi from Comms knew who it was," says Renata. She's shaking the crumbs off the sides of the chip bag now, trying to tip the seasoning into her mouth.

"Why don't we just ask him, then?" Amara asks, not even shocked that this has turned into a ‘we’ thing.

"He retired last year," the other girl answers.

"Besides, we did. He wouldn't tell us," Suresh continues for her. "And that's saying something! That guy was a gossip machine. Nothing was sacred.”

Jinhai makes an impressed noise. “If Choi from Comms wouldn’t give it up for ten bucks and a paperclip, you know that shit’s serious.”

"It made us actually want to know." Renata tries to toss the crumpled-up packet into the nearest trash can and sorely misses. It flutters weakly to the ground and she drops her head, dramatic and dejected with the failure, to her pillow.

Vik cracks open the seal on a water bottle with so much force the bottle dents around her fingers. She frowns at them. "This is stupid and pointless." A moment's silence. Amara raises her eyebrow, surprised Vik is willing to stoop so low as to even involve herself in such a childish conversation. "The only thing Gottlieb is married to is his work."

"Thrilling conversation happening right now, guys, really," Jake says.

They all jump. None of them had heard him come in, but the senior ranger had made himself quite comfortable against the doorframe, picking at the peeling tape sticking an old, sun-worn poster of Gypsy Danger to the wall. In his other hand is a bowl of half-melted ice cream– Amara makes an incredulous face at him. Jake just smirks. Son of a bitch.

He picks up the spoon and waves it at them. When he speaks, his voice is low and commandeering. “Gossiping about your senior colleagues is unbecoming. The good doctor deserves his privacy as much as any of us.”

The kids all look at the ground, a legion of guilty dogs caught in the act. Vik inspects her fingernails. Jinhai stops clicking the candy bottle’s cap open over and over. Ilya rolls onto his side, pretending to sleep, and Suresh takes a shallow breath, opens his mouth to apologize–

Jake wheezes out a long laugh. “God, I’ve been thinking about it too.”

They all release their collective breath. They take Ranger Pentecost a little more seriously than before, after his three-week stint as de facto Marshal while Mori was recovering in hospital. He definitely takes after his father behind all that moxie, if the stories they’ve been spoonfed about Stacker Pentecost are true.

"He used to be different, y'know?" Jake continues, setting his bowl down on the nearest surface. "When I was a kid I thought he was like, the actual devil. He was like that old bitch from Matilda. Always used to whack me in the ankles with his stick. I shot spitballs at him. He's crazy mellow now.”

Unsurprisingly, the mental image of Gottlieb bursting veins over the endless torment of a preteen Jake Pentecost isn't hard to conjure up. 

The older ranger’s brows knit together, perplexed. “Still, though– that guy? Luckier in love than me? What the hell am I doing wrong, hey?”

(Amara, incidentally, could list several things that Jake is doing wrong, one of which being calling Ranger Lambert his bro.)

(And, incidentally, so could everyone else in the room, but they’re wise enough to keep it to themselves.)

Jake seems to pick up on the awkward silence that’s arisen between the ex-cadets– the same that usually appears at any mention of his romantic escapades– and loudly clears the throat. “On another note,” he says, lowering his voice an octave for the effect. “You’re all required in LOCCENT at twelve hundred hours tomorrow. I expect you there early and I expect you to look good. It’s important.” He readjusts his grip on his melted bowl and makes an I’m watching you gesture at all of them with his free hand, then adds– “And if you find anything out about the Gottlieb thing, I expect to know, stat.”

It’s a little reassuring to know that, even with their saving the world from total annihilation still in the 24-hour news cycle– even heroes can’t resist sticking their noses into other people’s business.

3

The kids arrive at LOCCENT with an hour to spare, wearing their best attempts at personalizing the stock-standard formal uniforms provided to them after being promoted to full-time rangers (though the title of junior ranger was created specifically for them– while they may have earned their status through practical experience, they certainly haven’t in theory). They line up beside Jake and Nate, the cold lights of the command center flickering away on countless monitors, casting long and distorted shadows from their feet, and pass hushed whispers about why they’re here at all.

Jake’s brand-new dress shirt prickles against his skin.

So, he may have talked the big talk about flipping the script and invading the Anteverse to Geiszl– to the precursor possessing Dr. Geiszler, as he’s been so often reminded by his sister, Gottlieb and even Raleigh Beckett (who has been uncharacteristically present in the Shatterdome, despite renouncing the military some decade ago. He hasn’t left Mako’s side since she was recovered from the helicopter wreckage, and the worry etched into his face has only just started to recede)– but in all honesty… the thing locked up in the ‘dome basement hasn’t been as much help as he naively wanted it to be. No matter what amount of psychological or (Geneva Convention be damned) physical torture they put it through, it doesn’t crack. It doesn’t give them anything that could be of any use pertaining to fucking anything. It remains ominously chipper, quick to threaten the human race with a smile and a re-broken nose. It’s like holding a machine hostage, from one of those trashy sci-fi numbers where an AI goes rogue. No sense of pain, no moral compass, no weak points. The thing also refuses to kill itself and run sniveling back to the kaiju hivemind, which is a whole ‘nother set of problems.

It won’t vacate the brain of Dr. Geiszler. It won’t attempt to kill, and by extension, vacate the brain of, Dr. Gesizler. It won’t provide any information. It won’t listen to reason. It won’t listen to persuasion, or bargaining, or bribes, or threats, or pain. It won’t do anything. It just sits in its fucking chair and waxes poetic about the universe’s destruction and takes up valuable time, labor and resources that could be spent better than babysitting a genocidal alien until it dies of old age.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that the thing simply won’t help them. So– there’s really no point in keeping it around.

The UN representatives are skeptical, if not just outright disbelieving, of their claims that ‘our scientist is possessed’, and their belief in the PPDC– despite the fact they’ve saved the world twice over– to make sensible decisions is wearing thin. They want results, and if they can’t get results, they want Geiszler to be tried and executed on the grounds of being the world’s first interdimensional terrorist. Hence, their gathering before those representatives today.

The kaiju brain recovered from Geiszler’s Shanghai apartment is currently in the possession of the PPDC. Electroencephalograms have shown uncannily identical activity in both that brain, and Geiszler’s own– the synchronicity is the same as that observed between partners in drift. It’s easy to conclude that whatever unholy creature has made itself comfortable in his head, it’s still linked to that chunk of kaiju meat. Which begs the million dollar question– what happens if they kill it?

Amare looks up at Jake, and she’s so small and the suit jacket she’s in is big at the shoulders and long at the wrists. He wants to think they’re too young to decide on what could probably be a man’s life– but they saved the world. They earned their place here more than anyone else in this room. More than some stuffy old guys attending over Microsoft Teams. “What’s the deal?” she asks, like it’s nothing at all.

“The deal is,” Jake replies, loud enough to address all of them. “We’re deciding whether or not to incinerate that kaiju brain.”

Amara’s face falls. Vik swears. All the kids’ expressions cycle through various, complicated emotions. They all know about the damn thing, about how Geiszler (more than likely) let it into his head willingly, about how the PPDC is keeping the man prisoner, way down in the depths of Moyulans sub-sub-basement. But they never really acknowledge it. They never really consider what it means. They just go– the man was evil and a freak and he tried to end the world because he was evil and a freak– and move on. Anything else is… just a bit much. The kids’ abilities to draw that line between right and wrong so easily makes Jake feel old, and not for the first time.

“You all fought to save us from extinction,” Ranger Lambert says in that same authoritarian tone, eyes locked straight ahead in a very military-guy way. “Your opinions are extremely valued here. You might think that this is on short notice– but the decision made today will not be the final one. It is, moreso–”

“An interest check,” Jake cuts in, grimly. “We don’t actually know if destroying it will kill the thing. But we can take a bloody good guess that it might. Problem is– if we destroy it and it dies, we lose the only source of information we have on the Anteverse.”

“Which, predictably, is extremely valuable in determining how we’re going to fight back against them next time. But we simply have no way of telling whether or not the Precursor we’re keeping here is a danger. We don’t know whether or not it’s still connected to the hivemind. We don’t know if it’s communicating with its kind.” Nate looks over at the line of kids, his brows set sternly and his shoulders square. “So we have to decide if this possible source of information is worth the risk it could be inviting.”

Amara just stares at him. Her eyes are a self-assured blue. In a flash, Jake sees a wooden pier, the smell of salt and cotton candy and chips on sticks, and the silhouette of something immense and unknown blocking out the sun and casting a cold, cold shadow. “No upper hand is ever worth putting lives at risk,” the girl says, always like it’s nothing. Like everything really is just black and white.

Kids, Jake thinks, and almost laughs. They always tell it to you straight.

The vote is unanimous on destroying Alice is the kaiju brain until the very end. 

Dr. Gottlieb is looking at the floor. His jaw is tight in deliberation and he’s anxiously weaving his wedding band in and out of each of his fingers. Maybe the fluorescent lights just aren’t flattering, but he looks paler and thinner than he did a few months ago– which isn’t saying much, because the man’s always had the build and complexion of a plastic skeleton, at least during the brief stints that Jake’s known him, but still. He definitely doesn’t look as good as he should, considering that the world isn’t at unprecedented astronomical risk right now.

“Gottlieb?” asks a gravelly-voiced man over the holoprojector in the center of LOCCENT.

“Dr. Gottlieb?” asks Marshal Mori, with a concern in her tone bordering on unprofessional.

The doctor looks up and his eyes meet only hers. The trenches underneath them are dug like trenches in war. There’s fear there, buried just under the surface of his carefully neutral expression. The impression of old writing on a blank piece of paper.

This is weird, thinks Jake, alarm bells going off inside his head. Ever since Jake was growing up being pulled from ‘dome to ‘dome, Gottlieb had always professed his hatred for everything kaiju. He remembers the rants the guy used to go on about chunks of kaiju-whatever that he kept finding in his desk drawers. Gottlieb even requested to not be given access to the cold storage room where the brain is being held, saying he just couldn’t stand the sight of it, which, now that Jake’s thinking about it, is kind of a weird thing for the head of k-science to request. He’d assumed that Gottlieb, of all people, would be overeager to burn the last living kaiju specimen on this planet to a fucking crisp.

But then again– he has changed. The figurines, the shift to working with kaiju remains, the drastic change in demeanor from ‘the most stuck-up of stuck-up assholes’ to just sort of being a weird and slightly hard-to-be-around old man. He thinks about the way Gottlieb’s acting now, the way he’s acted since they defeated Mega-Kaiju and saved the world all over again, the way he provided the address at which they’d find Alice.

The way Gottlieb, just like Geiszler, drifted with that kaiju ten years ago.

Maybe they should be more suspicious of him. He doesn’t want to even suggest it, but after Geiszler–

Jake’s too far away from the doctor and too inside his own head to make out whatever it is he says to Mako next.

“It also might save him, Dr. Gottlieb,” is his sister’s response, that kindness that she really shouldn’t have, after everything, still clear on her scarred face.

Gottlieb kind of– crumples, then. Collapses a little at all his sharp edges, like an origami crane submerged in river water, slowly losing form. He blinks, hard, and then nods at no-one in particular. Maybe at himself. His ring is still clasped in his palm when he raises his hand and makes the vote to kill the everliving fuck out of Alice unanimous.

4

“So, this is a wild one, but hear me out–” Suresh says, jogging up beside Amara and Vik on their way back from LOCCENT. None of their uniforms really fit right– Vik’s blazer is too long around the bottom, and Suresh’s is baggy around the shoulders. “But what if Gottlieb actually is married to his work?”

Vik rolls her eyes and starts to walk faster, but the other two simply match pace. She doesn’t make any further attempts to disengage with whatever ridiculous conversation’s about to happen.

Amara gives the boy a look that basically translates to ‘Continue?’.

“Well. That Geiszler guy pretended the kaiju brain was his wife for like, ten years, right?”

(They’ve all seen the messy heart drawn in red marker on the brain’s tank. They’ve all seen Geiszler, the tattoos that might as well have just said kaiju fucker all over him. It’s not a hard deduction to make that he was– somehow– romantically involved with an alien brain in a jar, even if Jake hadn’t told them. ‘The guy tried to end the world to satisfy his kink’ is a statement burnt into all of their sensitive teenage eardrums, and something they’re all trying very hard to forget. The idea of it’s like seeing a naked person– the morbid curiosity makes it so hard to look away. It’s hard for Amara to even imagine kaiju apologists exist, let alone people who want to do a lot more than just apologize for them.)

“What if Gottlieb’s like that?” Suresh finishes with a vague shrug.

Amara raises a skeptical eyebrow. “What if he’s married to a kaiju brain?” 

“Doesn’t have to be a brain. Could be a pancreas. Or a skin mite. I dunno.”

“That’s so–”

“I’m just saying that it’d explain a lot, okay? Whatever happened back there? In the meeting? That was weird and you can’t say it wasn’t.”

Vik starts to walk even faster. They keep up with her, partly out of an urge to be annoying, and partly because they know she’s as interested in this stupid gossip just like they are.

Amara thinks back to her meeting with Gottlieb yesterday. He’s definitely strange, but he’s not possessed by an evil kaiju overlord strange… is he? After what happened, after hearing that ‘everyone just thought Dr. Geiszler was weird, kind of hard to be around– we didn’t think he was supervillain material’ or some variation of it from a couple of the older Shatterdome employees, and from Liwen Shao herself, can she really say for certain that weird, hard to be around, ‘he used to be different, y’know’ Dr. Gottlieb isn’t secretly plotting world domination in that little office lined with all his kaiju merch?

She wants to think ‘why am I taking this seriously?’. But that paranoid, world-saver part of her just can’t dismiss the possibility that there could be something sinister about Gottlieb after all.

“Gottlieb drifted with a kaiju,” Vik says suddenly, interrupting Amara’s thoughts. “Back in’25. With Geiszler.”

Amara stops. The other two cadets stop in time with her. She doesn’t really know the ins-and-outs of the war, or how they won it at all, really– she was only 5 when it all went down, and after that, pretty far from a working internet connection. She’s always been more interested in the Jaegers the war produced than the actual Kaiju War itself. “With G– they’re… they’re drift compatible?” she stutters out, finding it honestly hard to believe.

“Presumably.”

For anyone to be compatible like that with a man who was literal moments away from single handedly engineering mass-extinction… it’s scary, honestly. Dr. Gottlieb only gets further and further from her expectations every time she learns something new about him.

She rubs her chin, like maybe she can find an answer hidden under the skin there, like some kind of blind pimple. Her voice is low when she says, a rare sort of mischief in her eyes– “I have an idea.”

Jake Pentecost is a surprisingly easy man to manipulate once you’ve done inventory in his thought cabinet a few times. One minute, she’s retelling the conversation she had with her friends back in Hallway B19 to him– and there’s no real malice there, they don’t actually suspect poor old Dr. Gottlieb of anything sinister, they’re just nosy to no end and stubborn with no bounds, and also, outside of the occasional ‘Should we light up this kaiju brain like it’s the Fourth of July’ assembly or treacherous trip into tourist-flooded Moyulan, bored as all hell– and the next they’ve swiped Ms. Feng from HR’s ID access card with the help of Jake’s quote-unquote ‘natural charm’ and are now trying to search for Gottlieb’s file in the employee database.

“Where is he…?” Jake mutters to himself, scrolling the mouse wheel continuously.

“You know you can just press control F, right?” Amara points out, peering at the holoprojector over the older Ranger’s shoulder. 

Jake turns to her with an unimpressed squint. “Where’s your detective’s spirit, kid?” he says, but types the doctor’s name into the find prompt anyway.

His entry shows up immediately, though the photo attached to it looks actually ancient. It looks like Gottlieb had recently had an unfortunate accident with hair clippers, and his shirt is buttoned so high up that it might be choking him. He looks 25 going on 60. Jake grimaces at the sight of the man from the memories of his formative years. “The devil himself,” he whispers with a joking shudder.

“He looks like an asshole,” Vik says, because she’s here too, standing watch with her arms crossed against the back wall of the office, trying to play it cool. Amara told her she didn’t have to tag along, really, but her excuse was that leaving the two of them alone is always a cause for concern. Amara and Jake just shot each other knowing looks, but didn’t comment– Vik can pretend all she likes. They see right through her.

The employee database doesn’t reveal the identity of Gottlieb’s spouse, of course– but it does list his emergency contacts, which is as good a starting point as any. There are three names with phone numbers attached, one of which Jake points out to be Dr. Gottlieb’s sister, Karla. She’d visited the ‘dome in the aftermath of the Mount Fuji attack, while he was still the acting Marshal. The second is someone named Vanessa Gottlieb, and links to another PPDC profile. The third name they all try to ignore– it’s clearly not just Gottlieb’s photo that hasn’t been updated since before Pitfall.

A quick peruse of this Vanessa’s details makes it pretty obvious that she probably isn’t his sister, mostly because the Gottliebs all kind of look the same, like some centuries-old vampire family. She’s apparently also a neuroscientist with Conn-Tech who was last employed at the Anchorage Shatterdome– which hasn’t existed since 2021.

Amara can’t really blame them for not updating the information; it couldn’t have been a priority during the war, where people died faster than records could keep up. Especially after the war, when 90% of PPDC staff quit or were laid off by way of their jobs suddenly being obsolete. Also because the Shatterdome’s HR division consisted of, at most, two people. But still– they have had ten years of relative peace to do it. Maybe she can blame them, just a little.

As it turns out, Vanessa Gottlieb is also a freaking supermodel. Or so her Wikipedia page (and the runway pictures attached) proudly tells them. It also turns out that they could’ve just googled the answer to their question, instead of snooping around like teenage private eyes. 

Amara mentally kicks herself. It’s easy to forget that she’s a celebrity, now– and, apparently, even easier to forget that literally everyone she knows is also a celebrity, with entirely public private lives. Vanessa’s Wikipedia divulges to them, just under the section stating her age and exact place of birth, that she is indeed the spouse of one Dr. Hermann Gottlieb (m. 2012; present). His Wikipedia, however, has been politely and conveniently edited to not include any mention of his marital status.

Jake swears out loud. “Fucking how?” 

Amara puts a hand on the Ranger’s shoulder in sympathy, reaching out to close their tabs and clear the holoprojector’s browser history. Her eyes drift across the lines of orderly ant-like text and blue-highlighted hyperlinks. Apparently, after the incident involving Knifehead and Gypsy Danger in 2020, Vanessa Gottlieb had quit the Pan Pacific Defense Corps and become one of the Coastal Wall Program’s primary supporters. Amara had been briefed on Dr. Gottlieb’s involvement in the war earlier from Vik and Suresh, including the man’s vehement opposition to the Wall back in the mid-2020’s, when everyone was less keen on fighting the kaiju and saving the world and more for ignoring them and pretending that everything had magically gone back to normal. (Amara’s no stranger to that mentality. She was on the boardwalk that day, after all). It just seems unrealistic that Gottlieb would still be in a relationship with someone who’d funneled so much money into something he so ardently despised.

Maybe Ryoichi and Jinhai were right. Maybe he is just another integer in the 50% of marriages that end in divorce. Maybe the whole shebang is just an arrangement, a partnership in name and status only. Maybe they really do love each other despite everything, the hopeless romantic in her cries out.

She covers their digital tracks, leaves Ms. Feng’s card hidden under some stray documents, and glances over to find that Vik has already left the room and begun to stomp down the ‘dome hallway. 

She tries not to feel like this was anticlimactic. Gottlieb’s mystery spouse wasn’t really a mystery at all, nor was she some science experiment gone wrong that he’s keeping in the lab walk-in freezers, or even one of their colleagues that she could make I know your secret eyes at from across the mess hall in the evenings. Just some normal lady.

Okay, so maybe she was hoping Gottlieb was secretly married to Audrey II. Just a little.

Being a hero is just so boring. 

5

They burn Alice.

They burn her and it works. The last living remnant of the kaiju on Earth dies without fanfare. (If a man screams in the Shatterdome basement and there’s no-one around to hear it, does he really make a noise?)

They’ve got Geiszler in a hospital off-site. Two weeks in a coma, another in a state of fragile disorientation where they weren’t allowed to interfere with him. Then an eternity of interrogation.

Jake hates that Geiszler seems subdued. The guy’s quick to jump at shadows and quicker yet to apologize for it. Outside of the tattoos he sees peeking out from Geiszler’s sleeves and the tooth Nate knocked out of his head and the stress-bleed of red across the whites of his eyes, he’s almost– god. He’s just another weird and hard to be around old man, and Jake hates how easily it disarms him. How easy he forgets the guy’s a fucking terrorist and not the eccentric scientist that used to help him develop new and innovative ways to launch peas across the cafeteria.

He was too young to get it, back then. What the roaring caricatures of monsters Geiszler would gleefully point out to him on his skin meant. Why the Rangers used to push him around. 

He gets it now. But his brain’s still eager to block it out.

Jake’s in the hospital hallway leant up against the supply closet across from Geiszler’s room-turned-cell, waiting for Mako to get done with whatever she needs to pick his brain about this time– he hears commotion from the security decal down the way. He recognizes the scratchy timbre of Gottlieb’s voice before he sees him, trying to maybe– possibly– shoulder-charge his way past the gaggle of armed suits holding him at bay.

“Look,” the doctor says. He sounds desperate. “You have to let me see him. Please.” 

“No civilians,” one of the suits replies, curt.

“I’m n–” Gottlieb makes a strangled sound in annoyance. He looks on the brink of kneecapping the seco with his cane, and his voice is even more frantic and exhausted when it comes again. “Please.”

“Only authorized persons and immediate family past this point.”

The good doctor does a little something then, a little incredulous shake of his head, almost like he’s confused by what the suit has just said to him. Jake watches him rummage around in his seemingly-bottomless pockets for a few moments, folding and unfolding various crumpled papers and pulling out a litany of small objects– one of which being a half-empty packet of cough drops, the wrapping of which promptly collapses when removed from its natural habitat of Gottlieb’s pocket and sends several sticky lozenges careening across the floor. He eventually finds what he’s looking for in the secret inner pocket of his suit jacket, which, from Jake’s perspective all the way down the hall, is just another crumpled piece of paper. Gottlieb unfolds this– with great emphasis– and presents it to the foremost man of the decal.

“I am his bloody family,” the doctor mutters angrily, sounding all of the doddering and bad-tempered scientist that Jake remembers. “Now let me past.”

Jake all at once feels like he’s witnessed something he absolutely shouldn’t have. Something that Gottlieb is definitely going to be mortified about once he finishes wriggling past the confused by ruefully parting sea of security guards and sees that Jake Pentecost, notorious big mouth, is now privy to his very private information. And he’s right– he watches that very mortification settle across Gottlieb’s face when he stops frowning at the tessellating patterns of the vinyl floor and meets eyes with him. Gottlieb’s are wide and hazy. God. 

Honestly, at first, Jake’s situationally short-sighted enough to think that this means they’re related. But then, all at once, it clicks in his head– and then it’s obvious. Hell, it should’ve been obvious from the words drift compatible. Several pieces of the puzzle that Dr. Hermann Gottlieb has strangely become in Jake’s head slot into place– several others suddenly don’t fit right anymore. Ten years. Ten years watching his husband become a warped facade of a human being. A puppet with the precursor’s hand up its ass, wisting poetic about some other woman– who turned out to be less woman and more brain-in-a-jar, but how would Gottlieb have known that?– to anyone with ears. The way he’d acted, back at Command– jesus. He’d thought it was just the scientific curiosity making him hesitant. Secrets of the Anteverse at his fingertips, and all. But they were voting on his husband’s life, weren’t they? Jake’s stomach turns with the realization.

Gottlieb’s shoulders are pulled high as he approaches. He looks like a kicked dog, and sidles up to Jake like one, too. His fingers idly pick at the stitching of his sweater. The words are pushed out from between his awkwardly gritted teeth– “Please, Ranger Pentecost–”

Jake puts his hands up, the universal gesture for surrender. Oddly enough, the doctor smells like cigarettes. The faint, woody richness of tobacco cuts through the sterile smell of the hospital easily. “Not trying to stop you, man.”

Gottlieb ducks his head at him in acknowledgment. He could pretend it's in thanks, if he really tried. As if on cue, the door slides open on its rubber rails and Mako emerges from it, her posture deceptively straight despite the crutch she now uses. At the sight of her, Gottlieb’s shoulders drop a little, his grip around his cane loosens, but he still has a general vibe about him that says he might actually pop like a balloon at the next loud noise. Mako puts her free hand on his shoulder.

“Hermann,” she says, not at all surprised to see him, and Jake’s never been able to mind his own business. “He has asked for you several times.”

“Is– is he…”

“Disoriented, yes. But he seems mostly sane.”

Gottlieb grimaces, shifts from one foot to the other. Wrings his free hand in pointless anxiety. “Mostly. So he’s the same as ever, then.” 

Mako gives the man a small smile– and Jake realizes he’s just witnessed Hermann Gottlieb make a joke. What time do the pigs start flying– he’ll add it to his schedule. His sister’s varnish-colored eye flicks to his and she inclines her head slightly, signalling that it's time for them to leave. She leaves the twitchy doctor to fret outside Geiszler’s door, steel himself however much he can, and they stride down the hallway. Jake slows down to match step with her– her injuries have left her sluggish, paralyzed down one side and blind to match, but she stands proud regardless.

“You knew?” Jake starts once they're in the elevator, conveniently sound-proofed. He doesn't need to specify what. 

Mako has no tells. “Of course.”

Jake’s brown knit into a frown– he watches them do it in the mirrored wall across from them. “And you still let him vote? He could've vetoed the whole damn thing–”

The stopper on Mako’s crutch hits mutedly against the ground, and she stands a little taller, a little stand-offishly. “Is it not his job?” she says. Her gaze is locked straight ahead. “Typically, it is the family that makes the decision to terminate life support.”

The elevator dings. Whatever response Jake would otherwise have– he bites down on it and swallows, and they step out into the brightly-lit hospital lobby.

6

She’s ashamed to admit this, but when Amara meets Doctor Newton Geiszler, it takes her a few minutes to realize who he actually is. She’s playing errand-boy again, delivering a shipment of kaiju blood samples to Dr. Gottlieb’s office– the doctor in question and another man with thick, square glasses are sat at the desk, heatedly discussing something she doesn’t understand. Correction– the other man is sat on the desk. His hair is unruly and he talks with his hands. There’s a mirth in Gottlieb’s eyes that she’s never seen before, even though he’s frowning. Like he’s only arguing for the sake of it instead of any actual difference in opinion. 

When the stranger notices her, he turns away and hides his face in the collar of his shirt.

At first, she assumes he’s just some normal K-scientist, because Moyulan only hires the best and brightest, and the best and brightest usually translates to awkward nerds who wear too many layers of clothing and avoid eye contact. She gives Dr. Gottlieb a wave over the handle of the trolley she’s pushing– better not to carry highly volatile substances by hand. “One trolley of kaiju goop, as requested!” she jokes, then watches the doctor scramble around nervously as she maneuvers said volatile substance through the doorway and into the office proper. “You don’t need this in the freezer or nothing?”

“Um– no, it– it should be fine. They’re hermetically sealed.” Gottlieb looks at the other scientist. The man looks back at the two of them behind his overgrown hair and thick glasses– Gottlieb jerks an elbow at him in reference. “He can help me move them later. Rather have him drop them and doom all of us than you.”

“Well,” the man goes, under his breath, like he can’t help himself. “That does it.” 

Gottlieb looks at the other scientist with that same mirth in his eyes, a laugh at the corners of his mouth– Amara’s genuinely shocked by the prospect that Dr. Gottlieb might actually have friends. Coworkers that actually enjoy his company, get him to laugh at obscure references to nuclear disasters. She knew, logically, that Gottlieb’s position as the head of K-Sci meant he had to do a certain amount of networking with his understudies, but Jake mentions him as the stuck-up, mean math professor type– in Amara’s head, she couldn’t quite link the meek, socially awkward Gottlieb she’s interacted with and the evil, iron-fist Gottlieb that Jake talks about. The Gottlieb she knows doesn’t seem like he should really be in charge of anything, honestly– he did hide under the desk that one time. She’s never even seen him interact with anyone else around the ‘dome, aside from a few stilted lines with the Marshal or the Rangers when he’s taking simulation data. Seeing him argue and joke with someone almost feels uncanny. As long as she’s been here, Gottlieb’s been a solitary creature– and the other cadets say the same.

Gottlieb drifted with a kaiju. Back in ‘25. With Geiszler.

…they’re drift compatible?

The old conversation resurfaces in her mind. Amara thinks, if she lost the other cadets… if she lost Vik and Jake… she’d probably be weird and lonely, too– and the standards for effective drift connectivity have only lowered since ‘25. Hell, it’s no secret that today’s Rangers are less compatible– numerically speaking– than the old pilots. It’s just more efficient, if you lower the compatibility thresholds. Amara feels more than a little bad for the doctor– but then she remembers that he’s also old-style compatible with the fucking kaiju hivemind, and feels a lot less sympathetic all of a sudden.

Gottlieb’s face twists in realization. “Oh,” he goes suddenly. “I don’t believe you’ve been introduced.” He turns to the other scientist and gestures vaguely at Amara. The man startles like a cat, sliding the two inches down off the cluttered table. Gottlieb’s ever-present mess lets out a symphony of clinks and clatters. “This– this is Ranger Namani. Why don’t you say hello?”

Amara sticks her hand out on instinct. “Just Amara’s fine.”

“Oh my god,” the man goes, a sudden unrestrained light in his eyes. He crosses the floor in two steps and takes her proffered hand– but his grip is on the weaker side. There’s a flash of color at his wrist, under the cuff of his sweater. Amara’s eyes follow it the way a cat follows something scurrying in the grass. When he speaks, his voice is quick and high and his words fall all over each other in excitement. “I’ve heard all about you. Getting a Jaeger to operate off a single neuralink system? It’s not impossible, but it might as well be, and that’s impressive by itself, but at your size? Holy fuck–” 

“Newton,” Gottlieb scowls. “Language.”

The man makes a face. “Hermann, c’mon, look at her. She clearly knows what fuck means–”

The ratchety old doctor huffs. “No excuse for such unprofessional behavior.”

The other man makes a pffsh noise at him. Amara notices that he’s missing a tooth. “Shut up, dude.”

Gottlieb crosses his arms. “You shut up.”

There’s a tattoo up the side of the man’s neck. It curls behind his ear, the end of it hidden by his hair, but Amara knows what it is nonetheless. There’s a figurine of the very thing on the shelf behind him, over the coffee station; the kaiju Otachi, articulated into a vicious roar. A plastic tongue coils out from a manganese-blue mouth, fluorescent and enthralling like an anglerfish lure. Amara smells smoke and saltwater. Neo-Tokyo collectively screams.

The man gapes at Gottlieb like a fish. “Did you seriously just–”

“I’m sorry– what did you say your name was, again?”

Amara’s words cut through their bickering like a hot knife. She can’t believe it took her this long to notice. He looks different, without the sunglasses and the gaudy suit, without a half-pound of pomade on his head. He’s skinnier, and his hair’s more grey than brown, and he carries himself like he’s waiting for the metaphorical anvil to drop– she’s trying to justify it. For some reason, it’s really hard to put her guard up. There’s an interdimensional terrorist right in front of her and she’s having to convince herself to be on edge– shit, she’s feeling guilty for putting him on the spot. Geiszler is disarming, and it’s honestly a little scary.

Gottlieb clears his throat. “Miss Namani, this is Dr. Geiszler.”

(Amara makes a mental note of having gone from Ranger to Miss. She feels weirdly offended.)

Geiszler lifts his fingers in recognition. His eyes are locked on the formless patterns on the linoleum floor. “Call me Newt.”

“Are you allowed to be here?” She forces the air to change. Amara’s voice is strong, steady, from her chest– right now she isn’t a teenager doing chores. She becomes all the Ranger she’s proven herself to be. The world’s most unstoppable force. She balls her fists tight, white-knuckled. Stands a little straighter. She knows that Geiszler was being held in a hospital off-site after they burnt Alice. If he escaped, why would he come right back to the enemy HQ? It’s illogical, not to mention a death sentence– she has to assume that, logically, he must be allowed here– but the world that brought her up and spat her out and the world she fought tooth and nail for has never once run on logic. Soulmates are kind of real and monsters come out of the fucking ocean– she’s not going to take any chances with it.

Geiszler wilts like a plant, curling in on himself.

Gottlieb makes an aborted motion like he wants to put his hand on both of their shoulders– which is incredibly weird, because this is Gottlieb we’re talking about– but settles on just gripping at his sweater vest. He looks Amara dead in the eye, maybe for the first time. “Dr. Geiszler has strict approval from the Marshal to move freely here. I promise you that he would not be here if she thought it was a risk.”

Amara works her jaw. Deliberates how she’s going to react to being presented with a guy she’s supposed to hate on a platter. If she’s going to accept that. She analyses the possibilities– that Gottlieb and Geiszler are both evil and in cahoots, that the kaiju blood she’s just delivered goes conveniently critical and kills everyone on-base in an unfortunate ‘accident’. Whether she’ll regret walking away, right now. “Okay,” she ends up saying, eventually, then nods her head, as if to convince herself. “Have a good day, Dr. Gottlieb.”

And then she’s out the door and into the lurid light of the Shatterdome hallway and conveniently compartmentalizing the realization that the guy who almost doomed humanity to satisfy his monsterfucking kink is just allowed to be here, I guess, on her way back to the barracks.

7

“So–” Amara starts, and then thinks that a lot of their conversations have been starting like this recently. They’re in the training room, the floor mats squeaking under the impact of bare feet as Jinhai and Ryoichi spar. Vik is trying to spin a bo staff without hitting herself in the head and only half-succeeding. Amara’s come straight here from the lab, and she’s not wearing clothes fit to be fighting in– unless they make tactical jorts these days– but she signs herself in on the training roster anyway. None of the present cadets turn to look at her, but she knows they’re all listening. She takes a deep breath and says– “Geiszler’s here.”

Ryoichi catches Jinhai by the leg and holds him still. Vik drops the staff into an idle hold, like a sword by her side. The end hits the mat with a muted thunk– her eyes zero-in on Amara. 

Jinhai loses his balance and falls to the floor. He looks up at her, upside-down. “You mean Geiszler, as in the–” 

“The evil kaiju terrorist? Yep.” Amara pops the p like a full-stop. “He’s just– hanging out down in R-and-D.”

“And he’s… just allowed to do that?”

“Apparently,” goes Amara, only sounding half as weirded out by that as she actually is.

“No.” It’s Vik. She drops the stick, properly this time, just throws it wherever and it rolls along one of the mats and then clatters loudly onto the concrete. “There’s no way– they wouldn’t let him be here.”

“Well he is–”

“And you did nothing? You saw him and just, what– walked away?”

“Gottlieb said–”

Vik is up in her face now, her long strides crossing the room in a matter of moments. Her accent gets stronger when she's angry. “I don’t give a fuck what he said. They’ve probably been working together this whole time–” Her face tightens, suddenly, in realization– she looks to the side, over Amara’s shoulder, suddenly, like maybe someone would be there. “We need to tell someone.”

Amara puts her hands up between them. She doesn't know if she actually wants to stop the other girl– honestly, she agrees with her. “Vik–”

“No!” Vik yells. She tries to push past Amara half-heartedly, but Amara catches her, palms against her sweaty shoulders. Her voice gets very low. The words are spoken just between them– she looks very serious. “If that freak is here, then we are all in danger–”

“Viktoria.” The word echoes across the open concrete space. It’s an order, and they all snap to attention. “Calm your farm.” 

Jake is stood in the doorway behind them. He has his Ranger’s jacket slung over his shoulders like a cape. He's got a lollipop in his mouth, the pink sphere held between his teeth– he cracks it with a loud crunch. “Okay,” he goes. “So. You've seen that Geiszler’s here.”

There's a moment of silence. They all ruminate on how to respond to this– even Jake. Vik and Amara are still standing too close together– Amara can feel the work-out heat radiating off her. She meets the other girl's icy blue gaze, and Vik inclines her brow with an unspoken plea. It's a request– for Amara to pick them over Jake, over authority. They know she's Jake’s favorite– if anyone can question him on this, it's Amara. 

Amara tilts her chin up. She's still looking at Vik, but her words are for Jake. “Were you going to tell us?” she confronts. “Or were we just supposed to run into him? You know– the guy who tried to kill us all. Almost did. Kill us all.”

Jake just sighs. The answer’s an obvious no. “I was planning on telling yous tonight.”

Vik makes an unsatisfied snort. 

“Look,” the Ranger goes, sounding a little like he's trying to cajole a spooked animal. It’s almost condescending. “We burnt the brain. He’s been thoroughly assessed. Doctors. Shrinks. The Marshal. The UN’s been chomping at the bit to blame someone for the re-breach. If there was any cause for suspicion, the CCT would have his head on a freakin’ plate, okay?”

Vik’s eyes finally leave Amara’s, the points of icy blue hovering across the room in contemplation until locking onto Jake with laser-focus. Her voice is low. The anger drains out of her. It feels more like a grim kind of acceptance than actual anger, now. “He’s playing the long con. Fooling all of you.”

The Ranger shifts on the balls of his feet. A hint of his actual discomfort with the situation– you know, letting the world’s most hated interdimensional criminal into your nest– ripples under the surface of him. “I don’t like it either, guys, but–” he scrubs a hand down his face in exhaustion. His voice, too, also echoes that grim acceptance. “I genuinely don’t think he poses a threat to anyone. Not anymore.”

“I don’t believe you,” goes Vik.

“Neither do I,” adds Amara. 

A chorus of disapproving noises sound from the other cadets in the room, though they're obviously not keen to butt into a feud between Vik, by far the feistiest of them, and Jake, who can be equally bull-headed when he wants to be. Amara can't blame them. Besides– their agreement is apparent through their drift connection, and she knows Jake can feel it too. It’s like a nervous system, cold and electric where it thrums away inside all of them. 

“If it’s any reassurance,” Jake says, already knowing it isn't. “– all our data is bio-secured. Geiszler can’t get his mitts on anything he’s not supposed to, even if he’s got help. As a precaution, we’ve also limited Gottlieb’s system access. I’m expecting a really rude fax when he finds out.”

“Just–” Amara starts. “Why? Why does it have to be here?”

Jake’s expression is grim, and the fluorescent lights cast his caped shadow across the training mats– his eyes are like black holes beneath his stern brow. “Geiszler’s got a longer history with the PPDC than pretty much anyone else. Everything we know about kaiju– chances are, it came from him.” He moves the lollipop stick at them in a hand-wavey gesture. “In your training sims– all the times you’ve had just the right weapon for the job? That’s because that little freak told us how to take ‘em apart. His brain’s an invaluable asset.”

Vik finally moves away from Amara, trouncing over to pick up the staff she dropped. “Then take it out,” she suggests to Jake, loud and faux-casual-sounding but still with sharp, pointed accusation. She tests the weight of the stick in her hands, and then meets Jake’s eyes across the room. “Like Sarah.”

Jake looks back. “Trust me,” he says. For once, he sounds very, very serious. “If it were up to me– I would.”

8

She’s even more ashamed to admit this, but Amara actually likes Dr. Geiszler. 

Since Mount Fuji, Amara’s found it hard to get to sleep a lot of nights. Thankfully, the Shatterdome doesn’t really run on a schedule, and half the people in J-Tech and R&D are antisocial night-owls anyway, so she’s taken to spending several nights a week tinkering with Scrapper. Squinting at fancy holoprojections of her machine’s schematics usually tires her out pretty quickly. Scrapper performed outstandingly well in Japan, even with an amateur like Shao piloting him, but the damage from the whole ordeal meant she’s basically had to reassemble him from scratch– and unlike an abandoned junkyard in Irradiated, California, the Shatterdome has construction safety standards. What passed as good scrap when she first cobbled the mech together doesn’t pass here, and it frustrates her something severe. Scrapper’s looking a lot more silver, these days.

“I like your design,” goes a voice from behind her while she’s digging around in one of the huge red toolboxes for a specific size of socket wrench. “But it lacks stability.”

Amara looks up, wipes the grease and sweat from her forehead with the rag around her shoulders. It’s Geiszler, standing in the immense doorway to the hangar bay, dwarfed by the feet of Saber Athena. He’s idly sipping at a paper cup full of shitty cafeteria coffee, no creamer. The hangar is quiet and dimly-lit, and his voice carries across the space easily. “Your Conn-Pod just can’t handle impact. Of basically any caliber. A well-aimed rubber bullet could probably dismantle the whole thing.” He watches Amara wring her filthy hands on the towel over the frame of his glasses– she shoots him an unimpressed look. Just because she’s a kid doesn’t mean she’s an amateur. Geiszler laughs, a little, realizing his mistake. “I don’t need to tell you that, huh?”

“No,” she tells him, then throws the balled-up rag into the nearest bin. It bounces out off the rim and she swears under her breath. She eyes Geizler again. She thinks about the machines that stitched Mega-Kaiju together. He didn’t get that position at Shao for nothing. She looks up at Scrapper’s mismatched paneling, rust and old graffiti peeking out in parts. What the hell. “If I reinforce the panels, we’ll have to upscale the thrusters to compensate for the weight gain–”

Geiszler shakes his head. “Not happening. You’re already running off a tiny nuclear pulse engine. If we upsize it, it’ll be a neverending tradeoff between stress and body size.” Geiszler waves his hand in dismissal like he’s talking about something as simple as the weather. “Also, Herms is a stickler for the rules. We’re working on downblending the kaiju blood so it isn’t as, y’know…”

“Dangerous?” Amara offers. If nothing else, she’s aware of the dangers that come with on-board nuclear tech. Jaeger history is like a neverending list of what not to do’s. She doesn’t know the side effects of the kaiju bio-fuel she’s running and honestly, she’d prefer not to. Ignorance is bliss, and all– she learnt that lesson far too young.

“I was gonna say awesome, but, yeah. That works, too.” The man comes to lean against one of the toolboxes, gazing up at the half-dismantled Jaeger, the standby glow of the circular Conn-Pod illuminating the hangar bay with soft, white light.

Amara fits the socket onto the wrench she’s found and gives it a customary twist. It lets out a satisfying click-clickclickclick. “So the thrusters are going to get weaker?”

Geiszler shrugs. He takes another sip of his coffee. “Yeah, probably.”

“Then the stability problem–”

“Is still a problem.” The aging scientist gives her a look that silently says if they find out, not even saving the world is enough to save you from decommission. 

Amara sighs in frustration. She fixes the wrench to one of the bolts in Scrapper’s knee and leaves it hanging there. “Alright, I’ll bite,” she goes. Geiszler obviously has an idea and right now, she’s SOL. “What are you thinking?”

Geiszler smiles, sly. The low lighting makes him look strange, uncanny. There’s a glint in his eyes– the same mix of awe and something much more sinister that he looked over the smoking ruins of New-Shibuya with. “You’re probably too young to remember Shingleback. Category 2. Made land in New Zealand in 2019,” he says. He makes a scuttling motion with one of his hands, like a spider.  “It was kind of– low to the ground. And covered in these huge, flat scales that clacked around when it moved. Our initial idea was to–”

“Flip it over?” Amara offers, mentally flipping through her now-hundreds of hours in battle sims. “Underbelly’s gotta be the weakspot.”

The scientist laughs, ugly. “Bingo. You’re pretty good, kid.” He threads his fingers between one another, like a man in prayer– a demonstration. “Flipped it and the thing curled up. All those pesky scales layered over each other. Even worse–” He digs around in the chest pocket of his gingham shirt and produces a small rock. It’s polished to a rainbow iridescence, like an oil slick. Amara recognizes it, but she can’t pinpoint from where, exactly. “They’re AGG silicon carbide– kinetic redistributors. Which is bad news if you’re not a fucking missile. Meanwhile, the country’s having to function around this thing hunkered down in Wellington central…”

Geiszler hands her the rock. She rolls the little thing around in her palm, watching the lights gleam on the sheer surface of it. And then she realizes– Dr. Gottlieb’s ring is made out of kaiju scale.

9

The wired helmet is slipping from the sheen of sweat gathered on Amara’s forehead. She works the bulky thing off, then leaves it to hang from the ceiling of the training pod. Tiny tree air fresheners have been hung from various points in the rigging to try and counteract the feet smell– but now it just smells like Caribbean Colada and feet. She steps down from the dais and the glaring lights of the sim displays, a familiar ache in the backs of her legs from exertion. She can hear the sounds of her fellow cadets still fighting in their respective simulations– she requested to go up against Shingleback, and they adjusted the difficulty for her to make it more suitable as a one-Jaeger endeavor. A scuttling horseshoe-crab of a creature– Geiszler was right. Flipping it only immobilized it, the soft underbelly unreachable under concentric layers of bulletproof scale. The real weak point was the vertices where the scales crossed over each other, prying the immense sheets of carbide out and off like onion skin with Saber Athena’s convenient spear attachment. Back in 2019, the Jaegers were all fist. Trying to break through would’ve been a real shitfight.

Dr. Gottlieb is overseeing the simulations today. He’s flanked by neon holoprojections monitoring the performance of the still-fighting cadets, and he seems zeroed in on Ilya and Renata’s duel against Leatherback. He reaches out and maximizes the display of an electric field sensor, studying it intensely. He mutters quietly to himself. “Inaccurate…”

“How’d I do, Doctor?” Amara asks, cutting through the old scientist’s concentration. Once again, the man startles comically. He makes a very unbecoming squawking noise and his glasses go crooked across his nose. He reaches for his wedding ring, something Amara’s come to recognize as an anxious tic of his– but comes up empty. He ends up fumbling with his hands for a moment, and Amara– nosy, but she’ll call it being naturally inquisitive– follows the motion of them as he settles on just gripping the edge of the desk awkwardly.

“You made 3 blunders,” he says, voice a little weak. “Had the levels not been adjusted, each one of them would’ve killed you.”

Gottlieb isn’t wearing his ring. She wouldn’t have noticed, if he didn’t make it obvious. Gottlieb’s about as pasty as you can get, but there’s somehow still a tan line around his left ring finger.

“However–” and at this, the doctor looks constipated. Not used to dishing out praise. “–your spear technique was commendable.”

“Hey, thanks!” Amara tells him with a practiced smile, and then decides she’s going to poke the bear. She nods at his hands, clutching the desk’s edge for dear life. The projections flicker and shift in the lenses of the man’s glasses, oblongs and starbursts of colored light. “Did you lose your ring, Dr. Gottlieb?”

“Hm?” goes the man, looking all at once like he’s forgotten how to speak. “Um. No. Well– sort of. Corrosion,” is what he lands on, and Amara can already tell it’s a lie– she’s the type of child who’s become very used to getting told half-assed excuses just to placate her, and she’s also the type of child who’s become very good at recognizing them– but she can’t tell why Gottlieb would be lying about it, especially to her. “The– the kaiju chemicals, you know. Got to it.”

On second thought, that does make sense. Gottlieb does seem pretty flippant with lab health and safety, even if Geiszler said he was a stickler for the rules. She’s seen him chuck around neutralized kaiju guts with his bare hands– idly, she wonders if the chunk of whatever-the-heck is still under Gottlieb’s filing cabinet. “Oh,” she exclaims. “That sucks.”

Gottlieb looks at his left hand almost wistfully. He flexes the knuckles there and purses his lips. “Well– my fault, isn’t it? Should… should be more careful, I suppose.”

“Are you having it remade?”

“Oh,” the doctor goes. He shrugs a little and shakes his head, still entranced by the empty space on his finger. “No. It’s not that important. Just a silly little thing. No point in replacing it, really.”

That’s… weird, Amara thinks, but Gottlieb’s a weird guy. Maybe they just have less respect for the institution of marriage in Europe, or something. “Really? Your wife’s cool with that?”

Gottlieb stiffens, suddenly. He looks like a deer caught in oncoming traffic. “My– my wife,” he mumbles, and from the blank stare, Amara’d take a guess that he doesn't even know he's repeated the words. He snaps to attention all at once, and his voice sounds a little too enthusiastic when he goes, “Yes– yes, my wife. She is, rather. Cool with that, I mean. Obviously.”

There's an incredibly awkward silence, and then the furthest sim-pod goes off and the monitors are flashing with severe looking warnings and wave-forms indicating that Ilya and Renata have just lost their battle against Leatherback. The doctor swears, loudly, and swings around to enlarge the displays monitoring the cadets’ conditions, his thumbnail anxiously between his teeth. The cadets eventually emerge sweaty, groaning up a storm, and, after Amara’s been roped into escorting them to the medbay, with mild concussions to show for it.

10

“An acid attack– would it melt the SiC armor?” Amara voices one evening over Scrapper’s hull. The name is a work in progress.

Geiszler looks at her over a blueprint he’s messily scribbling on with a construction pencil– Amara’s noticed he’s the kind of guy who takes only physical notes, then grumbles when he has to copy them out into some database or other. He printed the blueprints out specifically, even though they’re perfectly workable on in projection-form– Amara’s putting it down to the classic old-person-aversion to technology. 

Geiszler thinks it over for a moment, tapping the fat pencil against his chin. “Depends. Hydrofluoric? Probably.” He scribbles the words TEST ACID on the blueprint’s margin. “That’s how kaiju decomp works. They secrete ammonia from their follicular glands, but their skin’s usually inert– but it can react at high temperatures. So when they die, they generate crazy amounts of heat. Turns their bodies straight into cyanide gas.” He makes a complex series of motions with his hands that probably are meant to represent the entire process of kaiju decomposition. “Or various types of goop and sludge. It’s annoying as shit.”

Amara frowns. She pries a panel open on Scrapper’s head and exposes a mess of bundled wires. “Wait, so– only when it’s really hot?”

Geiszler makes a so-so motion. “Yeah,” he says. “Pretty much.”

“Like– like too hot to handle, hot?”

“Like so hot your brain evaporates instantly, hot.”

Gottlieb’s words push to the forefront of her mind. Corrosion. The kaiju chemicals… 

“Huh,” Amara goes, and then lets the subject drop.

11

“Synchronization error,” says the computerized voice in Amara’s ears, loud, and the same words flash warning-red in the corner of her vision– but she doesn't have time to think about it. Raiju and Scunner are quick, black smears against the darkness of the ocean floor, and the weight of the water is like a vice pushing down on them from every side. Vik is beside her, struggling against the wires that hook them up to Danger, her helmet half-full of blood from a wound where the visor has cracked over her forehead. 

Amara tries to block an incoming slash from one of the monsters but she’s too slow– Danger’s limbs are sluggish, fighting against her. Every command makes her head throb and her vision blue-out, and the air smells like half-remembered snow and fuel-oil. The creature’s claws tear into the side of Danger’s head and water rushes in by the gallon through the warped, wrecked steel plating. It pools whitewater at her feet, arcs through the air like a firehose. It's a mess of white spray and alarm sounds and a million flashing warning lights counting down their certain death. It’s all too much. It’s too much–

Vik is hanging limp, suspended by the pod’s wiring, locked upright by her boots and their sturdy slots in the floor. Her whole visor is smeared with blood and the water level’s rising rapidly, lapping at her ankles, then her mid-shins, as Amara watches in strange, silent shock. It’s very quiet, all of a sudden. 

“Vik…?” she rasps out, barely a whisper. 

The other girl just stands there, swaying gently as the rush of water rocks her. Dead on her feet. 

“Vik?” Amara tries again, louder this time. Lost in the space between them. The snow howls around her. The humming orange sodium lights cast stark shadows down the Shatterdome halls, make everything long and scary. The concrete walls are cold and eternal. Raiju’s luminescent mouth is like an anglerfish lure through the darkness, growing larger and brighter and closer and–

“Vik!”

The kaiju collides with Danger’s cockpit and–

–

“Amara!” 

Her face… feels sticky. Sticky and wet and warm and her limbs are so freaking heavy that she can barely lift her hand to wipe the stickiness away, can barely force her eyelids open against the harsh white light–

She feels the helmet being peeled away from her skull like a layer of skin, feels a hand come to stroke her sopping wet hair, a sleeve wipe the drool around her mouth away. The silhouettes standing over her are just that– wavering outlines and colors and their voices come from far away. 

She vaguely processes the feeling of arms beneath her, and getting lifted from the freezing cold floor. Everything else is a rush of wind and light and getting jostled against someone’s chest. There’s snow on her eyelashes. The blizzard sings a morbid tune, like fifty sirens layered atop one another. Giant bones stretch out from the white expanse and jagged remnants of concrete, of tarmac– reaching for the sky. 

Next thing she knows, she's in the medbay with probes stuck to her chest and forehead, being lectured on what the spiking holoprojections of her own brain activity show, and Vik can't meet her eyes across the room.

12

“Don’t worry,” says Geiszler, giving an enthusiastic thumbs-up. He's got some kind of controller in his other hand, all sorts of wires and antennae sticking out of it, and from what Amara can tell, at least three-quarters of them are just there for the aesthetic. “I’m forklift certified.”

Amara feels her stomach drop. Just a little.

They're out on the main deck of the Moyulan ‘dome, and considering that the world isn't currently ending at the hands of genocidal intergalactic monsters– there isn't much activity. The most exciting thing that’s happened out here this week was watching a couple seagulls steal some poor J-tech’s sandwich and then fight over it. Most of their Jaegers are on surveillance deployment, or still being repaired after their losses in Tokyo. Geizler has a dinged-up forklift rigged to a Logitech controller and an ancient old headset on, connected to Scrapper’s comms. Amara knows for a fact that he could patch into Scrapper’s frequency using an earpiece like everyone else does– but she's also learnt that Geiszler’s just kind of like that, and by like that, she means he’s all about appearances, and by appearances, she means whatever Geiszler thinks is cool, and by cool, she means hasn't been cool since before she was born, if it ever was in the first place. 

“Thrusters?” comes Geiszler’s voice over the comms. It's grainy, on account of the old-ass mic, but audible. 

Amara hits the pedal and revs Scrapper’s thrusters, once, twice, three times. They make a noise similar to a blowtorch and the fumes make the air smell like mouthwash. She gives the doctor a responding thumbs-up with Scrapper’s hulking metal fingers. 

“Armor?”

She makes a stretching motion– the new plating along her machine’s back and sides clinks together, a windchime made of loose black scales. She gives another thumbs-up. 

“Alright,” goes Geiszler, and she watches the little man widen his stance and shift his grip around the controller. “Commence Operation Armadillo in three, two–”

Amara sighs. “Do you have to call it that?”

Geiszler slumps over dramatically. “Ye-e-es!” he groans out, obnoxious. “An op without a name is like an angel without wings, Namani! Now three, two, one, go!”

She barely has time to get in position before the rickety forklift starts moving. The Jaeger starts into a slow roll until coming to a stop, limbs curled around itself and armor plating slotting into place like– well, just like the operation name suggests. 

“Comin’ atcha with everything I’ve got.”

It’s only a moment before the forklift lightly connects with the Jaeger’s outer shell. It sounds like ceramic, and the machine doesn't budge over such measly contact, but inside the conn-pod, with nothing to dampen it whatsoever, the noise of the impact reverberates throughout the circular space and makes Amara wince. 

“What's the prognosis, doc?”

“It’s, uh–” Amara stutters out, instinctively covering her ears when the forklift’s prongs collide with her again. “It’s really loud!”

“Hm. Yeah, we should've thought about soundproofing,” remarks Geiszler casually, not stopping the onslaught. The collision noises layer over each other into an outright cacophony of metal clanging. “What about structurally?” 

“Seems fine!” Amara yells over it.

“You're rolling to the side a little. Wait–”

“What?!”

“It– it kind of looks like a dung beetle.” The doctor makes a curious noise over the comms while Amara rolls her eyes unseen. “Hold tight. I’m gonna try and tear them apart.”

The girl braces herself, eyes squeezed shut and fingers in her ears. When the forklift connects, a ray of daylight streams into the conn-pod through the gap the prongs are making in the SiC armor, but they don't separate more than a few inches. Tentatively loosening a finger, she can hear the forklift’s tyres squealing against the tarmac and a noise like nails on a chalkboard as the metal prongs scrape against the scales, growing worse by the second as the little vehicle reaches max power. 

The sound builds until it's topped off by an abrupt crack and the whipping noise of something careening through the air, and then the duller thump of an impact further away. Scrapper’s round body rocks gently, but when Amara squints her eyes back open, there's no visible breaches in the machine’s defenses. 

“Oh,” goes Geiszler in her ears. His tone is worrying. “Shit.”

“What happened?” Amara barks into the comms receiver. 

“Uh–”

“Geiszler? What happened?”

The man clears his throat, and then announces proudly– “I think phase one of Operation Dung Beetle is a resounding success.”

The first thing Amara sees when she disembarks Scrapper is the rusted forklift prong lodged into the concrete facade of the hangar bay, the helipad smattered with chunks and dust and black rubber and blacker smoke. 

She’s gonna be scrubbing toilets til the sun explodes. 

13

Vik is in the hangar when they return, leant straight-backed and arms-crossed against a toolbox. Amara wonders how long she’s been watching their little exercise as she wipes the sweat from her face and pits with an black-stained rag. They haven't talked since the incident. Not for Amara’s lack of trying– Vik is just giving her the silent treatment. They've had their moments before, but not… not like this. She doesn't know if it's because she saw something Vik didn't want her to in the drift sim, or if she finally left one too many moldering water bottles on the floor next to their bunk, or if it's something else entirely. The other girl's eyes are cold as ice as she watches her and Geiszler meander back into the dingy depths of the bay.

Geiszler notices the cadet’s presence and immediately retreats back into his shirt collar, shoulders raised and eyes fixed literally anywhere but on the two of them. “Oh, um,” he says, and his voice is higher than normal. “Hi–”

Vik’s head immediately snaps to him. “Do not–” she says, her lips contorted into a snarl. “-- speak to me.” 

The doctor raises his hands in surrender. “Oookay,” he breathes out, then disappears behind the workdesk they took over several months ago and the teetering piles of notes and blueprints stacked on it. 

Vik turns back to Amara. She still has that nasty look on her face. She clicks her tongue, her eyes roving over the iridescent form of Scrapper where he's getting rigged into the hangar by some busy J-techs. “Your rubbish sculpture looks different.”

Amara’s so glad that Vik’s finally talking to her that she just lets the words tumble out. “Yeah!” she exclaims with a toothy smile. “We’ve been testing a new type of armor made out of kaiju scale.”

The other girl doesn't look impressed. She shifts on her feet, scuffing her boots against the dusty concrete floor. “So, what?” she grunts out. “It runs off kaiju blood. It’s made of kaiju parts. When are you two putting the kaiju brain in it?”

Amara’s face falls. “Vik… it’s not like that–”

“Um, actually–” interrupts Geiszler from behind his stack of paper and she watches every muscle in Vik’s body stiffen at the sound of his voice. “The kaiju brains couldn't match up to human pilots. It was a– a Laika in space type situation.”

Vik’s head turns slowly and she throws the man her most scathing look. 

He drums some papers against the desk, straightening the sheets. It’s like punctuation. “Right, sorry. Shutting up.”

Amara threads her fingers through her hair. More anxious than she should be. More anxious than you should probably ever be when you’ve been inside the other person's head and can literally send out invisible feelers and touch them with your brain. “So, uh–” she starts. They really, really haven't been talking, an uncomfortable, heavy feeling is thrumming around the edges of her consciousness, in that space where you get headaches– “What's up?”

The girl clicks her tongue. Her eyes rove over the hangar, the oil-stained concrete and the rust-stinking scrap metal and the sea sloshing around, way out there. “Heard a noise,” she says after a long while. “That’s all.”

Ah. 

“Turns out I shouldn't have bothered.”

It’s just an instant. Images behind her eyes, cold as anything– ash and dust in the air. An immense shadow looming over the tight streets of Tokyo. A chemical, burning smell up her nose and an awful noise in her ears, something tearing and screaming and being wrought back together again into something new– She sees herself, crushed beneath rubble and warped metal. Blood matted in her hair and her limbs sat at awkward angles, Avenger’s form unrecognizable as anything other than a pile of wrecked scrap amongst the remains of a wrecked city–

She was worried about her. Worried Geiszler might’ve done something. Worried that they’d have to do it all over again– face oblivion and save the world all over again. Worried that they’d lose her, this time, and she’d be stuck on the sidelines until it was too late.

Amara watches the taller girl stalk away, lithe and proud amongst the legs of the Jaegers docked around her. She knows she should chase after her– but she can’t convince her legs to move. 

14

“Hey, Geiszler.”

“Yeah?”

“You and Dr. Gottlieb. You’re drift compatible, right?”

“Um,” the man chokes out, then disguises it as an awkward laugh. It’s dark in the hangar, nothing but the glow of Scrapper’s conn-pod illuminating them with soft white, and Geiszler’s headlamp with a much harsher one that makes Amara’s eyes water every time he looks over at her. “Once upon a time, I guess. But that was a long time ago, and–”

“But you are, right?”

Geiszler doesn't answer for a little while. She watches him start to idly sketch something in the margin of the print-out he was pouring over, heavy scrapes of pencil that almost tear the paper. “Yeah,” he says eventually. “We are.”

Amara doesn't know what he's drawing. A dark, star-like shape. A white swirl of negative space inside. One of the points branches out into something that almost looks like a flower, or a crude fractal pattern. 

“You guys fight a lot,” Amara says, breaking the silence. 

Geiszler goes to argue, but she cuts him off. “How do you…” she starts, then trails off, unsure of herself. “How do you– get over it?”

Weirdly enough, the old doctor looks sad. Not for her, though. She can tell, somehow. He does this, sometimes. Gets this look on his face like he isn't really there, like he's somewhere else, doing something else, only half-aware of what he's doing on this end of himself. Side effects of the evil alien mind control, or whatever the official diagnosis was. Without looking, he continues the fractal down the side of the page. “I’m… probably not the right guy to come to for advice, kid.”

Amara lays back in the cramped conn-pod, her legs hanging over the hatch that lets her access the interior of her metal monstrosity. The ceiling is a mash of wires and plugs and projection points, and beyond that, certified free-range and grain-fed kaiju parts. “Vik and I had an accident in the drift sim.” 

She doesn't even really care if he's listening. She just needs to tell someone, someone unrelated, someone older and wiser who might've interrogated a few answers out of life by now. Herself and the rest of the cadets all have startlingly few responsible adults in their lives, and it really shows in the way she's counting Geiszler– kaiju-fucking interdimensional terrorist Dr. Geiszler– as one of them. 

“I had to go to medical,” she continues. “I know she’s worried about me, or thinks I can’t take care of myself, but I’m not a baby and I don’t understand why she’s being so–”

“I understand,” Geiszler answers, suddenly. He's giving her a capital-L kind of Look. “You’re spending a lot of time here. Obviously I’m not– the safest guy to be around. I can’t blame her for caring about you.” 

Amara makes a frustrated noise and rolls onto her side so she can curl into a ball and maybe conjure up enough willpower to just disappear altogether. “I don’t know why she can’t just talk to me about it,” she grits out, aware of the hypocrisy. She hasn't exactly brought it up, either. “I don’t know why it had to end in someone getting hurt.”

Her eyes trail down the length of the step-ladder leading up to the conn-pod, the dusty concrete, the scattered papers around the toolbench. The fractal shape sprawled in graphite across the incident form they still need to submit about the forklift accident. If she unfocuses her eyes, from the right angle–

She knows what it is. She's seen it in Gottlieb’s lab, in the training sims, in her biology textbook– it’s the inside of the kaiju Otachi’s mouth.

“I don't know,” Geiszler answers her, quietly. “I don't know either, kid.”

She doesn't know whether he means getting hurt, or getting over it. Maybe neither, or maybe both. Maybe no-one knows, and maybe she's too young to be learning this lesson, but she's still old enough to save the world or die trying. Maybe she really is young and stupid, hanging around Geiszler, of all people. 

She needs to talk to Vik.

Maybe she's just young and stupid, period.

15

Amara slams her lunch tray down onto the table. “You’re mad at me.”

Vik looks up at the other girl sourly, running her plastic fork through what could generously be called mashed potatoes. Ryoichi and Jinhai’s argument over whether the new kaiju-inspired Pokémon is morally cool or not comes to a screeching halt, and both boys turn instinctively away from the fight they can feel brewing.

“A-plus observation skills, Namani.”

She pulls a chair out with a scrape of metal on metal and sits down on it, heavily. “It’s because of Geiszler, isn't it?” she asks.

The other girl continues to make a karesanui garden out of her food, raking lines through the mush. “He tried to kill us,” she answers, and then her blue gaze lifts to lock onto Amara’s, cold and tight at the corners. Snow and salty sea air. “He tried to kill everyone. I thought you of all people would understand this.”

Amara can't help herself. “That wasn't–”

“I don't care,” is what gets snapped back. “He is just using you to get his hands on the kaiju again.”

“Even if that's true–”

Viktoria scoffs. She puts on a scaly exterior but Amara can feel all the anger and fear at the back of her throat and so can everyone else at the table. “You've naturalized. You’re used to him, so you don't realize how insane it is.”

“Why do you even care what I do?! Why can't you just–” The plastic fork is creaking in her grip, and her voice is raspy and her eyes sting and– “Why can't you just trust me?”

The blonde girl puts her palms against the table and pushes herself upwards–

“Because I won't lose anyone else!” 

–and the mess hall gets very quiet. The amount of eyes on her makes Vik falter, makes a dusting of pink spread across her pale cheeks. Her eyes dart away from Amara, scan the room, and then down to her white-knuckled grip against the table.

(She’s lost everything to the kaiju. They all have. They're like dogs that have been starved, stealing and hoarding away food before anyone else can take it from them, only it's not food– it's connection. It means more to every single one of them than they'll ever admit out loud– friendship. Love. Proximity and necessity can forge bonds like steel, to the point where nothing else even matters. They're each others’ people, now. They're all they have.)

(She’d die for them. Will die for them, probably.)

Amara groans, a bark of frustration. She scrubs her fingers through the tangled, salted mess of her hair. “Neither will I, Vik. Not if I can help it.” The resolve is thick in her voice, like honey. She’s never meant anything more. “I just want to keep you safe. The breach could reopen tomorrow and the kaiju will be stronger than ever. And if we're going in there, like Jake says–” 

“We’ll need all the backup we can get,” Vik adds, quietly.

“Exactly. And this is our best shot. Using the kaiju’s tech against them could be huge.” She meets the girl’s eyes across the table, determination sparking there. “Working with Geiszler is just a risk I have to take.”

“I understand that,” Vik tells her, her words clipped. “But it doesn't mean I like it.”

“Yeah. I know,” answers Amara.

There's a moment’s silence. It feels like the cafeteria has disappeared around their table, like they're an island in a void, like there's nothing else but their little group, anywhere, ever– 

Vik wants to reach out. Amara can feel it– she wants to reach back, too. 

“I’m sorry for making you worry about me.”

The other girl gives her a smile, invisible to the untrained eye–

“I’m sorry for ever worrying about you.”

16

The residential wings in Moyulan are a step above the cadet barracks, in terms of natural lighting, personal space, and lack of mysterious black mold in the corners– but the hallways are still cramped, only wide enough for two people to shimmy past each other chest-to-chest, and the walls are the thinnest kind, every footstep or automatic door clanking shut magnified through the metal, and the air smells repurposed and fake. Like something out of a can. According to Jake, having an air filtration system inside a Shatterdome at all is living a life of luxury, compared to the absolute state of the old ones, and Amara should be grateful this isn't Hong Kong in the 20’s. 

She's on her way to give Geiszler back some of the xenobiology books he leant her– most of them authored or otherwise co-written by himself, back in the day. They were mostly too technical for a teenager with minimal schooling to make sense of, but she did look at the pictures. Geiszler’s been delegated a hole-in-the-wall compartment at the back of a mostly-empty wing. The kind of mostly-empty wing that gets passed over at inspection time, and none of the toilets in the communal bathroom flush, and all the water’s cold. Most people would request a room change. Gieszler isn't allowed to.

It’s a bit of a slog, all the way there, but she makes it with two-thirds of a spring in her step left. She turns the last corner, and there's Dr. Gottlieb, slinking around– he makes eye contact with her, down the hallway, and then quickly looks away, like a dog in trouble. He looks rumpled and weird. Which means he looks normal, she guesses– except he doesn't.

Gottlieb clears his throat awkwardly. The noise sounds like he smokes, and he smells faintly like it, too. “Miss Namani,” he greets when she's close enough that he has no choice. “What are you doing here?”

That was… unusually blunt, for Dr. Gottlieb. There's none of that suck-up, snivelling persona he usually puts on around her– around anyone, really.

Amara gives the books under her arm a reassuring pat. “Just returning these to Dr. Geiszler,” she tells him, with her customer-service smile. “He’s been helping me out with Scrapper– you probably know that already.”

“Ah, yes,” starts the old doctor, and then his eyes narrow suspiciously. He takes a careful step towards her and then snatches the yellow and black book from the top of her pile– Xenobiology for Dummies. He peers down at it accusatively, and then at Geiszler’s door, like the man could maybe feel the heat of his glare through it. “This is mine.”

Amara decides she'll unpack why the head of the K-science department owns that book later. “What about you, doc? I thought you lived off-site.”

The doctor startles where he's tucking the book safely away under his own arm. “I do,” he answers, way too quickly. He clears his throat again, anxiously scrubs his free palm down the leg of his slacks, and the next words are spoken less to Amara and more to his wrinkled shirt collar. “I was just, um– passing through. Now if you'll excuse me–” 

It’s not until Gottlieb’s through the narrow squeeze past her and grumbling to himself past the bend in the hallway that Amara realizes. 

She decides to leave the books on Geiszler’s doorstep– for her own sanity, more than any dignity Geiszler might have left. 

17

“I think Dr. Gottlieb’s cheating on his wife,” she says.

The cafeteria line is less of a line and more of a suggestion, groups of J-techs and other ‘dome workers meandering towards the counter with their trays like herds of wild animals, all vaguely keeping pace with each other. The room is alive with the noise of a hundred different conversations, and the cadets all shuffle along the bench and its various servings of slop. Amara reaches for a bread roll with the tongs. Suresh beside her has frozen in his efforts to scoop rice onto his tray and is definitely giving her a weird look right now.

“Sorry,” she adds, securing the roll. “I couldn't physically keep it a secret anymore.”

She shuffles down, and the rest of the cadets shuffle with her. She risks a glance over– yeah, there's that weird look. 

The boy brandishes the big spoon from the rice at her. “And you know this how, exactly?” 

“I, uh– I might've gotten too nosy.”

Suresh’s eyes narrow. He leans in closer, and Jinhai, on the other side of him, leans in too, until the three of them are all bent over the steaming rice tray. He lowers his voice to a whisper, and it’s probably only thanks to their drift link that Amara hears him at all, over this cacophony– “Do you know who it is?”

Amara nods, gravely. On the other side of her, Renata and Ryoichi have also moved closer, effectively caging her in against the bench– encircling her like birds to a carcass. 

“Who?”

Amara groans, and then reaches to snatch the big spoon off the boy beside her. Stray rice grains only get a little everywhere. “Who do you guys think?” she mutters in lieu of an answer.

There's a moment's thought– their little group is definitely holding up the line– and then they all realize at once. Someone lets out a loud ewww. There's a collective bad taste in her mouth.

“That has to be, like–” goes Jinhai, with his nose scrunched up. “A crime, right?”

“He’s objectively punching above his weight–” goes Renata, and then–

“Renata?!” goes Ryoichi, and then–

“What? I said objectively–” goes Renata again, and then–

“Do you think he knows? Geiszler, that is,” goes Suresh, and then–

“He has to know–” 

And then, “What if he doesn't, though–”

And, “It has been a long time–”

And, “Amara– you should tell him.” 

Amara’s jaw drops. The grip on her plate slips, and she only barely catches it before slop goes tumbling over the side. She gets in close and whisper-hisses– “Why should I have to tell him?” 

“Because,” Renata shrugs, giving her a dismissive hand-wave. “You’re, like, buddies, or whatever. It’s your civic duty.” 

“I don't think it is?” Amara sputters out, looking at the other girl like she's just grown a second head. 

Renata gives her an amused grin and doubles down. “It is,” she says. “Savior of the world, protector of the peace and stopper of Shatterdome infidelity.” 

There's a long, tense silence, and then–

“Tell you what–” Ryoichi puts his hand out in the center of their circle, fist clenched. “Janken. If I win you have to tell him.” 

Amara eyes his outstretched palm suspiciously.  “What if I win?”

From beside him, Jinhai claps a good-natured hand on the bigger boy’s shoulder. “Ryo’ll scrub toilets with you next time Lambert gets you in the shit.”

Amara instantly throws her hand in the ring. “Deal.” 

18

It took sixteen tied throws, but Amara lost. 

The hangar smells like fuel and sea air, and Scrapper sits squat by the immense feet of Avenger, like a weird, metal child and parent. His silhouette is bulkier, rounder than it used to be– she's a little sad that the iridescent surfaces of the SiC armor have all been finished a dull grey for traction. They submitted the final blueprints to the committee today– months of tweaking and testing and now all that's left is to wait for an email and a stamp of approval. Her fingers are numb from the epoxy she'd been using to glue down the last of the soundproofing foam. She feels weird that it's over, but also really excited that she might get to test him more practically if the higher-ups sign off on it. 

“Thanks for all your help with Scrapper,” she tells Geiszler, and she means it. Seeing the machine now, she really can tell just how badly he needed some R-and-R after the shit that went down at Mount Fuji, and she'd sooner quit her job and become a criminal harboring off-regulation experimentally-fuelled mechs than decommission him. Geiszler, who's doing a last once-over of their workplace, which involves mostly reordering tools in the toolbox and shuffling and reshuffling their mountains of unnecessary paperwork, waves it off. 

Amara flicks the switch by the door and shuts out the huge fluro tubes overhead, leaving them cast only in the light of Geiszler’s discarded headlamp, hanging from the end of a workhorse. 

“Oh, also–” she adds, already half– three-quarters– four-fifths of the way out the door. “Dr. Gottlieb’s married, by the way.” 

And then she runs as fast as she can down the corridor. 

19

“So,” starts Newt, stretching out the vowel. He’s anxiously fidgeting with the office holoprojector, running his fingers through the display and watching the pixels warp and distort, and Hermann’s been giving him glares and swatting at him under the table for the past half-hour about it. “Herms.”

Hermann looks up skeptically from his paperwork, pen poised carefully in hand and his glasses slowly slipping down the bridge of his nose. His hair’s too long and Newt fucking loves it. “How worried should I be?”

“Uh. Category Two?”

Hermann takes his glasses off and folds them away into his chest pocket. He looks relieved. “So you haven't blown up the hangar.”

“No!” Newt gasps, offended. “Dude!”

The other doctor reaches for his mug of lukewarm tea. “What is it, then? Because it surely is something–”

Newt drums his fingers on the table. One-two-three-four-five. He takes a deep breath and looks at the ceiling. The calm blue paint, the floating flares of projected light, spots of red, blue, green. Drums his fingers again. One-two-three.

“The kids think you're cheating on your wife with me.”

Hermann drops the cup with a clatter and a swear, unable to catch it before it catches the lip of the desk and spills all over his shoes. He buys plastic cups these days– learnt his lesson after the last time he smashed one all over the floor– so the thing just noisily rolls away until it gets caught under the nearest bench. He mops a few droplets off the table with his sleeve and Newt jumps to grab both the wandering cup and the roll of paper towels. He mops it up while Hermann stands awkwardly to the side of the splash zone, biting his thumbnail. Newt can see the calculations flash past behind his eyes. 

Hermann drums his fingers against the benchtop. One-two-three-four-five. It almost makes Newt laugh. They've still got it. After everything, they've still got it. 

“I may have,” the other man starts, after the mess has been thoroughly cleaned and the desk at the center of the office is once again safe to sit at. “Led them on. A little. Accidentally.”

Newt just gapes at him. “What?!”

Hermann’s eyes are everywhere but on Newt. “Namani broke into the employee database. She’s not been subtle about it. She may have–” and he pauses to cringe, “-- dropped a couple very awkward lines about my wife, and I just– I didn't want to explain it to her. Technically, I wasn't lying–”

“So, what, you just let them think that I was some–” Newt makes a wide, incredulous gesture with his hands that's somehow meant to indicate the words– “Other woman?”

“How was I supposed to know that they were thinking anything?” Hermann drops his shoulders and looks Newt in the eye, finally– “Also, dear,” he says, matter-of-factly. “You'd make a dreadful mistress.”

It’s Newt’s second time to put a hand over his heart in mock offense. “You’re so rude,” he says back with a pout. “It’s like you want to crush my dreams.”

“Of adultery?”

“Yes!”

The other doctor turns to hit the kettle’s switch and the fancy glass thing starts to glow with blue light. “If you're so bloody eager, we can let them keep thinking it–”

“No!” yells Newt, shaking his head rapidly. “Uh-uh. I don't want a reputation as a terrorist and a whore, actually.”

Hermann gets quiet, all of a sudden. The kettle bubbles away softly, hundreds of tiny specks slowly rising to the surface of the water, tinted blue, then green, then yellow. His lips purse in that put-out kind of way he gets when he specifically wants to blackmail Newt into feeling bad for him.

“They really came to you about it and not me?” he says in a small voice. He’s spooning sugar into the mug dejectedly. “They thought you were evil three months ago.”

“Well,” goes Newt, smart enough not to fall for it but still not smart enough to shut up. “That's because I’m the cool one, and you're–” 

Hermann whips his head around with a scathing glare, his grip on the teaspoon communicating a silent threat–

“Also the cool one, got it.” Newt puts his hands palm-up in surrender, and then sighs. He thinks back to what Amara told him, back in the hangar bay corridor. He had the little rascal caught by the arm after she collided head-first into a group of J-techs coming down the hallway, and holding here there was unprofessional, but Newt’s a terrorist, so fuck professional, and also, she started it–

‘He used to have a ring,’ she’d said, not meeting his eyes. ‘He takes it off around you.’

Newt grits his teeth.

“Listen, Herms.” The red light of the kettle overboiling is casting flickering shadows across Hermann’s face, where he's turned to look at him. Newt’s sure it's doing the same to him. There's a coiling feeling in his gut– this is Hermann, he lectures himself. He doesn't need to be anxious about this. The guy’s in his head. The guy’s relived all his embarrassing memories in the drift– the time he threw up all over a girl’s chest in college because he'd never drank before but decided he was probably cool enough to do a keg stand, the tear-stricken voicemails he used to leave on his mom’s manager’s answering machine, the hentai he used to rent religiously from the video store because it was in the anime section. There's nothing to be scared of anymore. “Amara said you wore a ring,” he manages to get out after a considerable amount of deep breaths. “I understand, if you don't want to tell me, but–”

“It is,” the other man answers immediately. He wrings his mouth for a moment, and then decides to reach beneath the collar of his sweater and pull a chain over his head. On the end of it is an iridescent ring, cut thin in spots, because Newt carved it himself, but heavy and hard as anything. He grips it in his palm, like he's saying goodbye, trying to imprint the feel of it, and then he places it on the desk between them. Newt can feel how skin-warm it is in his own hand, despite the fact he hasn't touched it. “I didn't want to bring it up. Or make you uncomfortable,” Hermann explains to the floor, dismissive. “I didn't want you to think I expected anything.” 

“Hermann–” 

Newt doesn't get another word out before the man shrugs. There's a smile on his face, but Newt doesn't like it. “I was hoping that maybe you'd forgotten about it.”

Newt hasn't forgotten. He’s forgotten a lot, after everything, but this is one of the things he'll never let go. If he didn't forget after waking up with the worst hangover of his life after drunkenly slipping that ring on the wrong one of Hermann’s decidedly few fingers– if he still took another shot for good luck that morning and spent the rest of the day carving Hermann’s ring a wonkier partner– he wouldn't fucking forget it now. Newt looks down at his hand. The ring isn't there. He doesn't know why he expected it to be. 

“Fuck, I–” he starts. “I’m sorry, Herms. I don't have mine anymore. I don't know what happened to it.” 

He can take a guess, though. The sewers in Shanghai run into the East China Sea.

Hermann bristles. He’s like a flighty old cat. “If you want it back–”

“No–” goes Newt instantly. “No. It’s yours. I gave it to you and I still mean–”

He cuts himself off. He looks up at the ceiling. The square vent there, lazily pushing out a mist of freezing white air. Probably shouldn't say that, he thinks, and the next words out of his mouth are way too casual–

“I meant. That it doesn't have to mean anything. I get it.” 

The other doctor’s face scrunches up at him. “Newt,” he says, slowly and deliberately, the crease between his brows getting more severe. The use of his name still shocks Newt a little, even though it happens more often than not these days– well, everyone else calls him Gieszler or that fucking guy, but Hermann doesn't, and that's what really matters. “Why wouldn't I want it to mean anything?” 

The anxiety resurfaces, and Newt runs a hand through his hair about it, catching a couple small knots. “Because– there's–” he huffs out, and then gives a scoff and a breathy laugh. “C’mon, no. There's no way that you– not when I’m– like this.” 

“I hid it because I thought you'd take it from me,” Hermann tells him, matter-of-factly. He picks the ring back up off the counter and starts to twist it around his index finger with his thumb, the chain politely jingling behind it. Newt watches the back-and-forth motion, the catch of the light. “It’s been so long, and we… haven't exactly been on good terms. I thought that you– wouldn't want that kind of thing anymore. With me.” 

Newt frowns. “Hermann, that’s insane. I wouldn't just change my mind about that shit–”

Hermann grips the ring tighter, so tight Newt can feel the cut of the chain into his own palm. His eyes flick to the floor and stay there, and Newt realizes–

He did. He did change his mind. He left him, for someone else. Even if it wasn't really like that, even if he was going fucking insane, even if she wasn't really a person– that was Hermann’s truth for ten years. 

“Oh. Oh, I’m so– I didn't– I’m sorry. Fuck. I’m sorry.”

The old doctor just gives a sad shrug of his shoulders. “It’s in the past,” he says. Newt’s eyes are stinging and he doesn't know if it's him or Hermann– “The way I feel hasn't changed. It never will. Your ring means the same thing to me now as it did back then, and that's why I… that's why I wore it every day.”

– god, it's both of them, isn't it?

“That's why I was scared. It meant too much to me to lose it. Pathetic, isn't it?” 

Newt steps forward. He’s feeling– well, maybe not brave. He’s feeling something. He takes Hermann’s hand in both of his. The ring is in the center of their combined palms like some kind of fucked-up pearl. Hermann’s hands are cold, like always– bad circulation. “It’s not pathetic,” he says. “You really– you really still like me? After everything?” 

“You really doubt me?” 

“No. It’s just hard to wrap my head around it.”

Hermann’s free hand creeps up to cup his jaw and Newt leans into the contact. Newt knows the gentle movement of fingers up his neck and behind his ear is Hermann tracing the tattoo there– Otachi’s olfactory appendage. Her sort-of-tongue, hidden there. He got after Pitfall. It’s ended up more symbolic than he wanted it to be, like some kind of bad omen. “I could say it again, if you'd like?” 

Newt looks him in the eye and sees himself there. “Go on.” 

“My dear,” says Hermann, and something about the way he says it convinces Newt that it's the absolute truth– “I’ll never stop loving you.” 

Newt lets himself fall into Hermann’s shoulder. He moves his hands from where they're trapped between them to the other man’s nice, bony waist and holds him close. Not as close as he could. Not as close as he wants to– the kind of closeness that involves machines and burning hair and bleeding noses. But close enough, anyway. 

“You know,” Newt sniffles out after a long while. He’s left a dark spot on Hermann’s cute jumper. There's a tiny little lobster, embroidered over the heart. “I, uh. Have a surplus of cloned kaiju scale, right now.” 

Hermann slaps him on the arm. “You devil,” the old doctor says, scandalized. “You absolute fiend, are you propositioning me?” 

“Well,” answers Newt with a snotty grin. “When you put it like that–”

20

Gottlieb stridles up to their table at lunch and Amara only sees her life flash before her eyes a little bit. Vik and Renata are discussing which of the proposed names is the coolest now that the J-sports league called an ethnic slur is finally getting renamed, Ryoichi and Jinhai are trading ingredients between their burgers, and Rangers Pentecost and Lambert have decided to join them at the end of the next table over. Jake is stabbing Nate with his plastic fork every time he stops paying attention and the other ranger is responding by kicking him under the table. Gottlieb raps his cane against the foot of the table, loud enough to get everyone in their rowdy group to look at him– which means almost loud enough to make Amara’s ears ring. 

“Good day, Miss Namani. Hello, everyone.” 

He nods his head at Amara specifically. Amara, in turn, gives him a withering smile. He speaks with the same voice he uses when he announces a particularly bad score in the drift-sims– “I’ve been informed I have to set the record straight about some misinformation that's been spreading about me, so let it be known–”

The grumbly old doctor gestures to Geiszler, who’s half-hiding behind a trash can across the mess. He gives their group a sheepish wave. There's a ring on his finger, and now that Amara’s looking– a matching one on Gottlieb’s. 

Gottlieb lets out a long-suffering sigh. “I am not cheating on my spouse with Dr. Geiszler,” he says. “Because Dr. Geiszler is my spouse.” 

The tomato falls out of Amara’s burger.

“Now,” the man exclaims, brushing invisible lint off his sleeve. “I would wish you all a pleasant afternoon, but I really must be going.” 

As Gottlieb retreats, Amara feels the entire group’s eyes slowly drift towards her, a tingling at the edges of her perception like a disturbance in the goddamn force, and she bites the inside of her cheek. So, in retrospect, that was kind of obvious, and maybe Amara is the type of person who can't take a hint– 

Suddenly, she plants her hands on the table and leans around Suresh to look at Jake. Various cups and cans wobble precariously–

“You knew!” she yells, and Jake has the audacity to look at her like one of those guilty dogs–

“Um,” goes the Ranger, already trying to nonchalantly extract himself from the bench seat–

In the end– at least it isn't Amara that throws the first french fry.