Night comes and goes, and then you get up and do it all over again.

  In the mornings you have found that going out to the balcony outside the little square with the fake trees wakes you up. The cold spray off the sea and the sharp breeze that carries it have you shivering, and when you step barefoot onto the concrete deck it sends shocks all the way up through your body. You’re not the sort to drink coffee, so there you stand, wrapped in goosebumps, gazing out at the marine layer as though it does not hide monsters taller than you can fathom.

  There were shipping lanes there once, you have been told, out past the edge of the harbor, where the sunken remains of Hong Kong Island now glitter like a giant’s forgotten toy castle. There were ships as wide and long as Megs, their bottoms painted fire truck red, their prows tipped with bulbous noses and their tops laden with containers made of steel, full of things: foodstuffs and clothes and cars and airplane parts, oil and guns and furniture, medicines and dolls and cosmetics and lumber, sundries and bric-a-brac. There still are such ships, occasionally, when nothing else will do the job. (You’d watched one of the French teams escort one such unit across the Atlantic on TV, once, when you’d been very small: the team was new and their Titans were cutting-edge, gleaming beside the high gray masses of the Gibraltar gates like knives in the Mediterranean sunset, and they had made it very nearly two hundred nautical miles before the first attack.)

  The breeze today is stiff. It whips the hair back from your face and up around your head, causes rogue strands to fly into your mouth, tasting of salt and earth. You narrow your eyes against it. Out there, somewhere, do you spy the place in the water where you and Carol fought? There is no hint of what goes on beneath the surface, not here, not now.

  You have brought your pager with you. You squint down at it now.

  YOU SHOULDN’T JUST WAIT FOR HER MESSAGE, YOU KNOW, I write across the screen. IT WON’T COME RIGHT AWAY.

  You don’t answer this. To answer would be to admit you are desperate and, frankly, uncool. Besides, it opens you up to more hair in your mouth.

  Today you’re going to try the same carcinate target mission scenario over again. I know this; I know you will be applying what you’ve learned, or think you have learned, from fighting Gutierrez yesterday. Too close and you’re done for. Titan shield units are not made for offense; they are the stalwart, the protector; and Tokyo Calling was never the vast and unyielding expanse that Amphitrite is, nor the monolith that was Tianhou, older-gen designs that wedded shield with sheer size. You are, overall, more dependent upon your barrier, like Fishhawk or Morgana. But if I tell you this, you won’t really get it. You know this already, the way you told Holly you knew what sync was. You won’t understand it till you find out for yourself.

  I try a different approach: IN THE MEANTIME, PERHAPS YOU SHOULD CONSIDER REREADING TOOJI.

  “I’ve read enough fucking Tooji,” you say, which is true.

  ALRIGHT, I say. LEONG, THEN, FUNDAMENTAL ELEMENTS, FIRST PUBLISHED IN EIGHTY-THREE. A RELEVANT CONTEMPORARY. EQUALLY FOUNDATIONAL.

  “Yeah,” you say, “I know.”

  WOULD YOU PREFER TO HAVE YOUR SWORD COMPLEMENT READ IT TO YOU ALOUD? I ask you.

  “Piss off, Helm,” you say, but there is no venom in the way you say this, either. Which is good, since it means you are open to being snarked at in turn—which is not that surprising, since you are, after all, Rachel’s sister. Still. Any opening is a good opening.

  PERHAPS YOU FEEL YOU HAVE READ ENOUGH IN GENERAL, I say. PERHAPS YOU WISH TO SIMPLY DO. And, YOU COULD ENTER SIM, NOW, IF YOU WISH.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  You say nothing. You look out at the ocean, which is nearly as far below you—a good hundred plus feet—as it was that day on the seawall at home, and chew your lip further, the taste of your own flesh mixing with the taste of salt spume until they are one and the same.

  In sim you recall this vividly when the illusion of saltwater rises up around you and envelopes you once more in the virtual darkness of the Shanghai estuary. Carcinate target, twenty-four thousand tons, three hundred twenty feet along the major axis. It rears up before you like some pillar of God, and you consider it, and do not move.

  So you have nothing here but your shield, your engine, and your wits. No sword to cover you, no offense but your fists—no teeth this time, only your rage, the same boiling-hot reservoir that fueled you against Gutierrez earlier. Fucker still owes you an explanation for the fucking toothpaste, you think, what’ll it be next time, shaving cream in your coffee creamer—and then the target roars, infrasound shiver through the water, dimly violet flood on your sonar, and you are brought rudely back into the scenario you have chosen.

  So no rushing. No lunging in and into the radius of the seeking claws. You’ll have to be smarter about this. Tooji spoke of knowing thy enemy, of using their weaknesses against them and of diminishing your own. You circle cautiously; there is a technique by which you can use your own sonar to destructively interfere with their own and thereby even out what sonar they produce, which does reveal to them that you are there, but makes it harder for your target to know exactly where you are.

  You do this now, though clumsily. If you had my help I could take over that subroutine for you and make sure the smoothing and directional adjustments are optimal, but since that time in the minefield it seems some part of you still balks. (Experimentally I have reached out, tapped around the edges of your psyche just to see; no dice.)

  The carcinate is on high alert. Were it a mammal its hackles would be raised. It circles you just as you circle it. You can tell by the way the shape of wakes around you change and evolve, slowly, like a wedding train flowing over hilly earth, always the same coherent overall form but ever-shifting from one contortion to the next. You can tell, too, that it is big, longer than you are tall, and the reality of that is never so visceral as when you sense the sheer vastness of the shadow it leaves—the wedding train that is not much bigger than the body itself, the whispers of its presence.

  The joints, you know, the underbelly—this is where you are aiming. On the wireframe you have mainly only the center of mass marked. Sonar will have to take care of the rest.

  First you must make your move. The destructive interference can’t go on forever.

  From internal calculations arises a suggested approach vector. There; you see it highlighted like a riptide, piercing the dark cloud of your sonar cloak. As good as anything: Leong would have suggested taking it. You spool up your reactor, align with the vector on your HUD; 45 FNU, current flowing against you, thrusters flaring to compensate.

  Barriers up. Your engines flare purple, and you leap forward, bear down.

  Instantly you know you’ve fucked up. The target rears up before you like a skyscraper—the claws are wide open; the belly is exposed. Why is the bastard not bothering to cover itself? you have a moment to think stupidly before, a second later, the ocean explodes around you, a storm of sound turned into sheer force, and too late you glimpse the massive dactyl strikers still boiling the water around them, held close to the body—a moment to curse, then the full brunt of it strikes your barriers and they flare and go out.

  BARRIER CAPACITY LOW, flashes your HUD. RECALL ADVISED.

  You rip the corset harness off you as soon as your helmet’s gone dark. Then you throw off the helmet itself—let it clang against the side of the pod, pendulum wildly from the support cable—and leap to the ground, the cuffs forgotten behind you, the magnets gone quiet, their fall echoing around the hollow inside over and over.

  Later you will ask me, looking out over the sea again, how many times that was; and I will say sixty-six, but that is not quite true, because I am not counting the twenty-three other times you did not even make it to the target without making your presence known early and letting it slip from your grasp. Even sixty-six is an embarrassingly high number. Right now, however, you merely dash the sweat furiously from your face—make a pass over it with the hem of your shirt—then turn on your heel and get back in, and, after a moment with the cuffs dangling from your wrists, snap them shut and pull the helmet on again.

  Cycle sixty-seven it is. By the way: Leong’s Fundamentals is at least ten years out of date.