Sasha felt the water rush in, bringing with it the unspeakably vulgar scent of the acid that was crippling Cherno Alpha. She'd never thought about what she'd do in the last moments of her life. Never let herself. No idea what to say. She felt a fierce need to continue the attack, an animal want to leap out of their holed Jaeger and hit the Category 4 with her fists, her teeth, her nails. But instead…
"Aleksis…"
She'd never believed someone's life really flashed before their eyes. You only lived once; no reruns. And yet, her body pushed her mind away from what was happening, like her stomach would eject bile out her mouth or a tear would carry dust from her eye. The rush of cold water became the staid yet warm air of the Vladikostok Shatterdome, with its five million ruble air conditioning system that had never yet, and would not at its closing, stop the cold frosts that invaded the building like angry bees, biting you in your sleep the night when you needed your rest.
Those were still good days to think of, and Sasha let them sprawl before her like a dessert after a meal of hard bread and stale vegetables.
Her great-grandmother had been one of the infamous 'Night Witches' of WW2, her grandfather a tank gunner in Afghanistan, her mother Minister of Economic Development in the hard years after Putin. The Russian government was in her blood. She could not be happy living out a destiny, she had to shape it for herself and her country. That was her vocation. Her passion led her to the Armed Forces. No matter how much her mother wished for her to be in politics, starting out in some nepotistic cushioned secretary's chair and crawling her way up like a silkworm, she knew that could come later. When she'd had her blood and glory.
In the Army, women were a joke. Practically camp followers. Sasha almost hated the women who joined up to find husbands as much as the men who took advantage. She endured. She advanced. And when the Kaiju attacks began, the Army realized how much it needed her. Women were suddenly expected, allowed to serve. They held down the rioting, the looting, the sheer chaos that the Kaiju bred as it shattered Nakhodka.
She went up the ranks fast; battlefield promotions. When her commander ate the first round in his clip, Sasha led her comrades to put out the fires that would've finished what the Kaiju started. After that, there were medals, interviews. Jokes about her being a Russian princess because of her mother, now retired, and her political ties. The gladhanding irritated her more than insults would've—fighting insults wouldn't be seen as ungracious. But she understood the need for heroes. And it offered her an opportunity at Vladikostok.
Of course she signed on as a test pilot. She watched the bones of Cherno Alpha as it was assembled, massive in their own right, and participated in the strange rituals that would winnow the applicants down. Testing on nothing, testing on everything, looking for any excuse to wash someone out. The slightest hesitation. The briefest error.
Finally, only six remained. From there, it would be two. Sasha knew she would be one. All that remained was her second. And that was how she met Aleksis.
He insulted her. Not out loud; the man was gregarious to a fault. But his presence was offensive. Sasha had trained for years, prepared herself mentally and physically, familiarized herself with every nut and bolt of the Jaeger. She had expected an elite group to be her compatriots. Most of them were like her—hardcore military. Aleksis was former military, at least, but since Putin's fall had been working as an ice road trucker in the North. He'd re-enlisted at the same time Sasha had been promoted, after the catastrophic losses the Army had taken subduing the Category 2, "Polarhide."
The four besides her and Aleksis were no match for her in the staff trials, only one even landing a blow, but at least they were soldiers. That smooth edge had been irrevocably blunted in Aleksis; she saw no trace of steel in him. He was a big bear of a man with unruly dark hair down to his shoulders, and his shorn chin made him look babyish where the other clean-shaven men were crisp and professional.
They hadn't spoken until that moment, the final trial. Some theory about how the drift test might be more accurate if it was the first insight into a partnership's communication. Sasha didn't mind. Less time she had to spend staring at his oafish expression. He offered a meaty hand, two fingers covered with thick rings.
"Aleksis Kaidonovsky! I look forward to our match! I hear you are very good!" He spoke in a deep, booming voice, but his poor English and unbridled enthusiasm robbed it of any intimidation.
English had become the official language of the Pan-Pacific Defense Corps, with the candidates having to learn it double-time to keep up with the technicians installing drift technology in Cherno Alpha. Sasha herself used English only sparingly to maintain a level of perfectionism. She knew lack of conversation gave her a stand-offish air, but didn't care. Aleksis, on the other hand, seemed to relish in his bad English, like something out of an old Hollywood movie. The man delighted in being a stereotype. She'd even seen him wear a ushanka.
Sasha gave his hand the most cursory of shakes, like she was tugging a dog's leash. "I am."
"Good luck! It would be nice co-piloting with such a professional."
"Yes, it would."
Aleksis stepped back, gathering his hair into a quick ponytail and taking off his rings to leave with his coat. His muscles bulged from his bare arms well, but Sasha dismissed them as show muscles. No good in a real fight. He took his quarterstaff to the center of the mat and waited.
Sasha couldn't help herself from taking one last look at the onlookers—the technicians, the Marshalls, the other candidates—watching her, judging her. She put them out of her mind and gave her quarterstaff a spin, liking the weight and power it cleaved the air with. She faced Aleksis. He bowed stiffly; an affectation from the PPDC's eastern members. Sasha inclined her head slightly in response, then attacked. She instantly scored a point; one of four she needed to be rid of this oaf. He backed off, circled, rubbing his arm where she'd hit.
"Oof! You hit hard! Like grandpa's homemade whiskey!"
"Yes," Sasha said tersely, and attacked again.
He got his quarterstaff up this time, but she batted it aside with one parry and thrust into his gut. He backed off again, winded.
Now she backed away, holding her quarterstaff loosely, glaring at him challengingly. She wanted no doubt in the onlookers' minds.
"Oh! I get a turn! Nice of you!"
Aleksis took a deep breath and came on, making a clumsy turning stroke with his staff. She ducked under it and delivered a stinging touch to his head. Just to be clear.
He rubbed his head, popping a lock of hair out of place.
"Three to zero," she said, rubbing it in.
"Alright if I have another go?"
She shrugged her shoulders. "Be my guest."
He nodded. "Good." And attacked.
This time he was much quicker. Almost unbelievably quicker, a man his size moving so fast, like a panther lunging. Sasha got her quarterstaff up, but his blow had too much power behind it. He drove her quarterstaff down to the mat and flicked his back up, taking her in the knee, knocking her to one leg. Then another touch immediately, quick to the stomach, and before she'd even realized it she felt the cool wood pressed against her cheek. Three to three. Her own quarterstaff had barely even moved.
Sasha's mind whirled in furious concentration. How could it have happened? It was impossible! He'd slipped right into her defenses and scored three touches in as many seconds! It was like—like—
Like he'd read her. Like he'd let her get three touches, just so he could familiarize himself with her moves and plan accordingly.
"You had a strategy?" she demanded, slipping into Russian.
"Da. It seemed appropriate for the best candidate. Your turn."
Sasha caught her breath and wiped the sweat from her brow, just then realizing she'd been breathing hard and broken a sweat. She reset the quarterstaff in her hands and attacked. He blocked, thrust, she parried, he riposted, their quarterstaffs clacking together over and over again, the noise echoing on top of echoes, muscles burning, sweat flowing down her body and going suddenly cold as the quarterstaff slipped from his hands just an inch, giving her the opening to swing for him. She nearly took his head off, but checked herself at the last second so the quarterstaff was only moving at a feather's speed.
He took a deep breath, now that the match was over, and dropped the quarterstaff from his white fingers. Four to three.
The judges said they would get back to them with their decision in the morning.
Ten minutes. That's how long the tiebreaker had taken. Longer than all her previous matches combined. Sasha showered and scrubbed like she'd been shamed, throwing her old clothes aside before she could burn them and changing into new ones that were even darker and more—what was the English? Butch. She looked at the effect in the mirror and felt somewhat assuaged.
Then she went to Aleksis's room. It was late by then—her aching muscles had only just settled. She had to ask directions and interpret the squeaking response she got, but finally came to his door. It was open, a light burning out into the hallway, and a mechanical drone pulsing its way through the cracked door. Sasha pulled the door all the way open and discovered it was Ukrainian hard house music pouring out. Aleksis was lying on top of the sheets in bed, smoking a cigar that bounced in time to the aggressive bass. When he saw her, he turned the music down to a dull throb.
"Having trouble relaxing?" He didn't wait for an answer. "Me too. What can I say, this relaxes me!"
"I want another match," she said, in English so quick that her accent nearly solidified.
"Why? You won."
She just stared at him.
"Alright…" He shut the music off and grabbed his slippers, not intending to put on his boots just to take them off again at the mat. Sasha's eye twitched.
In the deserted training room, the lights seemed to burn extra bright to make up for the darkened hallways outside. Sasha took two quarterstaffs, tossed one to Aleksis, and was annoyed by the perfunctory way he caught it out of the air.
"First to four?" he asked.
She nodded tightly.
"Okey-dokey!"
She attacked. He defended himself well, as she had hoped, but it wasn't enough to keep her from scoring a touch. They broke apart, circled, and he came on like a bull, as she knew he would. She slunk back like a switchblade being retracted, brushing his offense aside with her staff, until he almost casually feinted one way and hit another. She nursed the touch for a bare second, the bruise already purple in her imagination, then assaulted him, quarterstaff whirling, a war cry wrenched from her gritted teeth. He was stolid, unyieldingly absorbing each hit with his own staff, until she finally broke through and got a touch on his shoulder.
In the next exchange, his pantherish speed earned him a quick touch, but she retaliated with two in a row, winning the match. He took a deep breath and headed wordlessly for the water cooler in the corner of the room.
"Again," she said.
He didn't question it. Just brandished his quarterstaff and, when she came for him, managed to grab her by the arm and wrench her to the matt. She rolled away from a touch that would've pierced her heart, and swept his legs out from under him to put Aleksis on his back right beside her. But he kept his head about him. When her quarterstaff came down on him like a scorpion's tail, he had his up across his body to block it, then just bunted it over to prod her in the ribs. She rolled away, incensed, and attacked him from her feet. He defended from his knees, the unusual position putting her off-balance, until she overextended and he rapped her on her toes like a schoolteacher with a ruler.
"How many is that?" she asked, her English hard and thick.
"I wasn't keeping track."
"We go again."
"Water first."
When he came back from the water cooler, he brought her a cup as well. She drank it and tossed it aside. Then they started again.
The next thing Sasha knew was the steady buzz of the lights outside coming on, their hum growing to the usual consistent inaudibility. It was morning. Aleksis was soaked with sweat, hair frazzled, and Sasha could only imagine she looked just as bad. The quarterstaff was visibly marred from the work it had done, the varnish chipped and worn in places.
"You're very good," Aleksis said in Russian. In his native tongue, his voice was smooth and powerful.
"Yes," Sasha said. She was just then realizing how starved her lungs were of oxygen, like she'd swum to the bottom of a lake and only just resurfaced. She sat down and bent nearly in double, working her lungs. "You as well."
Belatedly, she heard the door swinging on its hinges. Her eyes cut away to the newcomer, one of the American technicians with a clipboard in hand and the usual ridiculous Western hair. "Oh, there you two are. Good news. Command decided you're drift-compatible!" His brow furrowed. "Did I come at a bad time?"
Ignoring him, Aleksis got up and offered his hand to Sasha. She took it and felt the strength she was well-acquainted with as he pulled her to her feet. He looked at her, seeming on the verge of saying something, but instead turned on his heels and fairly stormed off. Didn't even stop for his slippers.
He's as good as me, Sasha realized. Then: What have I done?
She went to the cafeteria for breakfast, feeling a moroseness that sat in the pit of her stomach like she's swallowed a stone. She'd misjudged Aleksis. It was an unforgivable lapse, an unbelievable act of stupidity. He was her equal and she'd treated him like…
Now she felt foolish. Childishly, girlishly foolish. He was the best candidate for the position, because the PPDC was not the military. It was something else. She had thought that drifting would be like working in a military unit, following orders in unison, but that wasn't it at all. That was assuming a role, becoming a mask. This would be stripping off masks. Aleksis, with his zest for life, his richness of character, his storied history—he could give and give and give of himself. But she—what was there to say about her, besides the medals on her chest? Who was she, outside the rank and the serial number?
She thought maybe she was the part of herself that persisted in being fitted with the drifting headgear, though her wounded pride wanted her to back out of the entire program. As explained to her, the drift could be a shockingly intimate affair. The test chamber—a storeroom still filled with the technological detritus of getting the system up to snuff—was abandoned to give them their privacy. Only the Western technician remained to watch over his precious system.
"This will take some time," he said, checking the connections on the electrodes one last time. "You won't go full mind meld right out the gate, just pick up surface thoughts. Think of it like having a catchy tune stuck in your head. That'll be intrusive thought. Try not to fight it. Just be open and honest and let the dialogue flow."
"Okey-dokey," Aleksis said, while Sasha nodded as best she could with the skullcap stuck to her.
"This should be something!" Aleksis continued, toward her, as the Westerner went to play with his laptop. The test must've been going better than expected; Sasha could already tell he was patronizing her. "The first Russians to go into another's head. We'll be like Yuri Gagarin! Perhaps they'll name schools after us. I think I'd like to be a party college!"
"This won't work." Sasha didn't care anymore how heavily accented her English was. "It's alright. I'll take the blame. I wouldn't want to embarrass you by not going through with the attempt."
"That isn't necessary," Aleksis told her. God, even the thought of drifting with her must've repulsed him.
"You must be compatible with anyone. Anyone but me." He was that kind of man, she knew. Friends with all. He could even drift with her, as unpleasant an experience as that could be. She felt his thoughts and fought them. They crept back to her like niggling doubts and white lies.
His thoughts became easier to sense; notes of music in another room. She tried harder to shut them out. She didn't want to go where she had no right to be.
"That's not it at all," he told her. He must've read her mind not reading his. It bewildered her, how quickly they could connect. "Please, just listen. I don't have the words. So listen."
And for a moment, she did. She was behind his eyes and seeing herself as he saw her.
In the quarterstaff fights, Sasha had thought of herself as a machine, rigidly applying whatever technical solution was necessary to win each match. But what Aleksis saw was the grace that came with power wielded efficiently. Poetry could be haiku as well as long-form. Her scalpel movements, her brutal directness, he saw in them a crispness and clarity that could belong to a diamond.
Unthinkingly, Sasha reached up to touch the boyishly short hair Aleksis found so—adorable.
"I like your power," Aleksis said. For the first time, his booming voice was tentative and unsure. "It will give us strength. And maybe, with me being so… compatible… that gives us strength too?"
Sasha suppressed a smile, but knew she needn't have bothered. He could feel it warming her. That struck her as… ideal. "I haven't liked before when men found me beautiful."
"They didn't find you beautiful. They found you… exploiting." It wasn't quite the right word, but the harsh tone he put on it fit.
"You don't have to be ashamed," she told him, remembering/imagining how he had seen her last night. The sweat glistening on her body. The sight of her making him hum with admiration. "I don't mind the way you look at me. I like being the most beautiful woman someone has ever seen."
He smiled for both of them, his grin big enough for three. He felt her thoughts of him pour like a bottle tipped over. "And me… I suppose I should grow a beard!"
The rest was going dark, but Sasha could still remember its warmth. The drifts—and there were more and more as Cherno Alpha neared completion—connected them like they were lifelong friends, just now remembering their closeness. The drift washed away the awkwardness of small talk and first impressions; outside it, they were just able to spend time together, like two animals in the same herd.
He became quite handsome, resembling the idealized Aleksis that stuck in Sasha's daydreams, while she grew to favor the clothes that he favored. Things soon became physical, flirting by way of erotic memories growing into creating some of their own. They went slow, compared to their intimacy in the drift. With each neural handshake, they knew what the other wanted and was ready for, sometimes better than their partner did. Sasha quickly lost track of which she anticipated more, the drift in which she could feel the fireplace warmth of Aleksis's emotion, or afterwards, when she could feel him retrace it in touch. The only hiccup came when he asked for a week off his duties, precluding the drift. But he only wanted her engagement ring to be a surprise.
Sasha felt it now, its metal warm compared to the freezing water that buried her. It, and the rings Aleksis had bought for her on their anniversaries, their marriage a glove Sasha touched everything else through. When she felt Aleksis's hand in hers, it was like touching the sun.
"Escape pod!" he said simply, pulling her toward what had to be it. The capsule doors were already opening, waiting as he shoved her inside. The space was small. Cramped. Not enough for both of them. Aleksis's was on the other end of the Conn-Pod.
She tried to tell him to get in instead, but already the water was spilling into the pod, gagging her. Aleksis closed it before she could drown. She saw him in the water as the pod carried her away. The pumps drained the water out of her capsule. She still felt cold.
Hours passed. She couldn't think of the good times anymore. She counted each ring on her fingers, but the memories slipped away. She couldn't think at all. Not of the Wei Tang triplets or Striker Eureka or even all the people of Hong Kong, their lives in jeopardy. She could only wait, her mind a riot, for however long it took for the situation to calm and a retrieval team to find her.
They did, like the universe would end or the stars grow cold or the sun go dark. If you waited long enough, anything happened. She felt a spark inside her. Heard the clink of her rings against each other as she moved her hands. "Aleksis?"
The interior of the helicopter that had picked her up was cramped with medics and retrieval specialists, like a surprise party that had not been sprung. One had the guts to say "No sign."
Her face did not so much as flicker. "Keep looking."
"We'll try, ma'am…" He obviously couldn't bring himself to continue into placating her.
Her vehemence rose like bile. "Keep looking. He wouldn't leave me."
They did, the helicopter's searchlight searching for the telltale green fluid, phosphorescent in the night sea. It refused to come. Sasha didn't care. It could've malfunctioned. The pod could've still come to the surface, Aleksis inside, hurt, unconscious, sleeping even. Or maybe it was trapped underwater, the life support system still keeping him alive while he waited for them. But then, why wouldn't the tracking beacon give his location. It was designed to. It was designed to survive and endure. Like them.
"Please," she said, in English and Russia, to God and the Devil and the Universe and even the Kaiju, if they really were the angels they were worshipped as. She didn't care. As long as one of them gave him back to her.
"We're running low on fuel," the pilot said. "In the morning, the sun will—"
"Keep looking!" Sasha interrupted. The words were the only ones that felt right in her mouth, like cool water in the desert. She squeezed her hand into a fist, her rings grating against her palm.
The pilot held the stick steady, the searchlight kept moving, but she heard him toggle the comm for the Shatterdome. "Marshall Pentecost, we have an issue…"
Let him call it in. Pentecost had lost family, both found and blood. He would understand. You don't leave family. Though the world may fall away under you, you hold your ground and you wait.
She closed her eyes. Now the memories came to her, obedient, loyal. The engagement. The wedding. The good times. The bad. He'd taught her so much. Not things she'd needed to know, but things she'd wanted to learn. How to love a rainy day. How to enjoy a bad movie more than a good one. How to drink just enough so that a hangover felt like an accomplishment.
He'd never taught her how to say goodbye. She wasn't ready to learn.
"Say again?" the pilot yelped, his voice gone up an octave. He whirled to face Sasha over his shoulder. "The divers have something. They're bringing it up now."
Sasha fell on all fours before the open door, staring down at the whitecaps of the sea formed by the helicopter's wake. Deep below, she could see the divers' lights, and the oblique shape coming up. It was a pod, it had to be!
She leapt down from the helicopter as the pod came to the surface. The cold cut into her, but she could barely feel it. She swam through the gaggle of divers swarming the pod and climbed atop. She could see his face through the glass. She hit the emergency release on the door. It raised half an inch, but jammed. She fixed her fingers in the space and pulled as hard as she could. The door came loose and he was there beneath her, her Aleksis, hers to wrap up in her arms and hold and not let go of again.
He sputtered on her shoulder, gasping in air. She could only imagine how low his oxygen supply had gotten. "Sasha? You are okay?"
"I'm not lost," she said, vaguely hearing the outside world coming to rescue the both of them. "I'm not lost."