When my brother and I were kids, our parents used to wake us up late in the night to look out at the stars. We used to talk about what it would be like up there, looking down below and free of everything but each other—and, of course, as my brother and I had to wonder, whatever other life might be out there, too.

We always thought alien life would come from the stars. But as it turned out, we were looking in the wrong direction. When alien life entered our world it was from the deep beneath the Pacific Ocean: a fissure between two tectonic plates, a portal between the dimensions. A breach.

I was eight years old when the first kaiju made land in San Francisco. By the time tanks, jets and missiles took it down, six days and thirty five miles later, three cities were destroyed. Tens of thousands of lives were lost. We mourned our dead, memorialized the attack, moved on. And then, only six months later, a second attack hit Manila. And then the third hit Cabo. Then we learned this was not going to stop. This was just the beginning.

Something out there had discovered us. They counted on the humans to hide, to give up, to fail; and at first we almost did. They never considered our ability to stand, to endure, that we would rise to the challenge.

It came from a young lieutenant in the Canadian Forces—a man by the name of Sokka Ota. Nobody wanted to listen at first. In order to fight monsters, he said, we needed monsters of our own. A new weapon. Man linked to a giant machine, able to feel everything it felt. I know—it sounded crazy. Everyone else thought so, too. So at first no one listened. But then we got desperate.

The German mechanist who took the task of designing these machines called themjaegers: it means "hunter." It didn't start off too well, though. The jaegers were so huge, so complex, that the strain it took on the human brain to stay connected was too much. The whole thing might have been forgotten if it hadn't been for one kid, just a Tibetan Buddhist monk who said that the problem was the idea that everything was individual—that the solution lay within each other. A dual-pilot system: right hemisphere, left hemisphere. Minds and memories melded as one to share the neural load of the jaeger, the self forgotten so that no one had to face the kaiju alone. That kid was in the first jaeger ever to take down a kaiju.

The Jaeger Program exploded. After the Dragon Dancer, there was the Tundra Boomerang, the Kyoshi Warrior, the Bandit Boar, the Chakra Blue. It wasn't just enough to keep them from finding us, now. In the jaegers, we could stop their attacks before they hit hard. We started winning; the jaegers stopped invasions everywhere. But the jaegers were only as good as their pilots, so jaeger pilots turned into rock stars. The danger turned into propaganda, kaijus into toys. We got really good at it—winning.

Then everything changed.

Jaegers started falling faster than we could build them. Kaiju were adapting, using better strategy, showing different attacks. We just couldn't keep up. They broke through the coastal walls—smashed city after city and finally, we decided, the only thing left to do was retreat as far as we could go and try to find a place the kaiju couldn't follow.

Not the jaegers, though. Everything that was left, it's their job to keep the kaiju out for as long as they could. So the pilots and the jaegers remain on the shoreline. There are lots of people in the world, after all, and they can't go at once. Someone's gotta protect them.

It's all just temporary, though. Sooner or later, there'll be nothing left to hold them back. And when that day comes… we have no idea what we're gonna do.

The world for hours has been nothing but fear, of dust and dirt and the screams of people as they ran. Now, though, it is silence, but for the rush of blood in her ears and the heavy rush of breath against the glass that fogs up her vision.

Breathe.

It's the one word she can remember, and she clings to it, the line to keep her head above the darkness that swims just below her vision. It's the chant she uses to time her ever step, her every swing; it's a command her lungs obey over the promise of rest in the drifting blue. She wants to live.

She just can't remember why.

Breathe.

Her body is not her own any more; it is so much more than that. She can feel the uneven surface against her feet despite her steps on cold hard metal, feel the crunch of flesh and bone in her hands though she holds nothing there. And she can feel the ground as it rises to meet her, until her head hits stone and silence turns into blackness.

"Breathe, Korra—"

"Korra."

A bare-tipped finger touches her cheek, gently pulling at her lower eyelid, and she jerks, whole body twitching and eyes flying wide. The culprit's hand drops from her face to her shoulder. "It's all right," he says. "Can you hear me? Do you know where you are?"

She licks her lips and tastes chapped skin and dried blood. "I… yes," she replies as she blinks, squints around the room to make sense of things. The room is pristine, crisp white sheets and pale blue walls, and, most tellingly, the beep, beep, beep of a monitor by her side. She's clearly in a hospital, but she cannot remember what she has done to earn herself a stay.

His gaze is level as he watches her, looking for something, it seems—just for a moment. "Do you know why?"

She lets her attention rest on him: his head perfectly shaved without even a stubble, the full beard that made up for the lack of hair on top, his pressed royal blues, the bronze pins and ribbons along his chest, the winged symbol on his chest. It's a symbol she knows but not one she can place, a symbol that should, she thinks, belong emblazoned on steel, five times her size—tattooed on arms she raised high above her head, arms that came crashing down on the head that ripped, that tore at her chest, that tried to bring her down, down, down—

"Because I fought a kaiju," she says, and pain lances through her head so intense that when it fades to a dull throbbing in her skull she cannot keep herself from shaking.

He sits down on her bed, hands curled in his lap as he turns to look her square in the eyes. "Miss Grey, you did more than fight that kaiju. You killed it."

And despite the trembling, she smiles.

"I don't know what happened out there, but I do know this: that was not your jaeger to drive. One of Naga Siren's pilots is still alive, however, and she's told me that she fell unconscious the moment her copilot was killed. That jaeger was down. That means that you entered it on your own, linked with a fallen jaeger on your own, and piloted a victory on your own."

She isn't listening. I'm a pilot, is the only thought in her head—the newsreels and cheering crowds of her childhood only the backgrounds. She even owns a pair of Chakra Blue sneakers, somewhere home in her closet.

"You are twelve years old, let alone untrained," he continues, and the knuckles on his hand turn white as he clenches them tighter together. "By all rights you should be dead, but what's done is done, and it doesn't look as though we have a choice."

Cheering—or was it screaming—people running but the kaiju running faster, and Korra was alone, her parents still, she thought, at work. And worse, she watched the jaeger fall: but when the crowd ran, she went forwards, full of the urge to see and the urge to fight and the urge to live.

"Miss Grey."

She's pulled back to earth by his voice, her breath short in her throat as she twists a shaking hand in her hospital blanket. The ranger stands again; whether he's aware of her lack of attention to him or whether he's simply agitated, she can't tell, but she looks at him straight. "This is a serious matter. I am Marshall Tenzin Gyaltsen of the Pan-Pacific Defense Corps, and unfortunately because of your inability to understand why all our pilots go through intense training before they stepfoot in a jaeger, you are required to make an immediate move to the shatterdome in Anchorage. I've already spoken with your parents, and they understand why this is necessary."

He says it like it's a punishment. "I killed a kaiju," Korra says through her grin, "and I saved lives, and you gotta deal with it."

"That is not—!" The Marshall catches himself halfway through his retort, a whirl on the soles of his polished shoes. He swipes a hand over his beard, gave it a tug; with one deep breath, he tries again. "Korra, listen to me."

She does, but she does not stop smiling.

"You plugged yourself into a jaeger alone with an untrained, immature brain. It's a mystery how you survived, but the neural load it took on your body has not gone without consequence." He quiets; Korra's smile slips, just a little. "You will be a ranger candidate, Miss Grey. But you will never be able to take the force of a jaeger on your own again, or you will die."

Death is not a concept Korra has ever seriously had to consider—not any twelve-year-old, really, since the invention of the jaeger. And yet she'd already faced it, before in the cockpit of the Naga Siren and now, as Tenzin stares at her over her hospital bed, grey eyes meeting blue. Still, death is only word; that's all it would ever be.

Tenzin tugs on his beard, once more. "You've already proven you're willing to do something so obviously harebrained," he says, his shoulders drawn together—just slightly. As though an attempt to soften the announcement of Korra's relocation to a shatterdome and inevitable death, or perhaps to drive it home, he adds, "This is for your own protection, more than anything."

And then he is gone, his shoes clicking on the linoleum far down the hallway where she can still hear. Korra takes a breath, deep, and sucks in air between her teeth; she feels her lungs fill and swell before she raises a shaking hand and covers her face. Against the palm of her hand the world is dark, and she can focus on tasting air, on the quiet, persistent beep of the monitor by her side that assures her that her heart is still beating. And yet something feels wrong—not the pain in her head or the limbs she couldn't keep from trembling, but something in her chest, like there's a hollow between her heart and her lungs but she doesn't know what belonged.

She isn't left alone, not for long. A blue-clad nurse enters her room after hearing she's awake to check her memory, that she remembers who she is and where she's from. Her parents come next to hold her close and cry—that they are so happy to see her alive, so proud of what she has done, and Korra hides her face in her father's shoulder and holds on tight because soon they will be gone.

But at the end of it all, only one thought remains in Korra's mind: she is going to pilot jaegers.