Raleigh still has splinters of his brother in him.
Mako can feel them secondhand - thirdhand, if she counts Gipsy Danger's neural netting in between. Thirdhand memories still burn and unbalance her. The first time she enters the Drift it's more visual than she expected, like seeing a movie of someone else's life. Except it's just certain moments of Raleigh's life, clips and glimpses of the person opposite her in an identical suit.
She thinks she should be reeling, moving away from the mental rush, but instead she can't feel the metal array behind her at all, or the weight of her armored legs: She's all memory now, fog and dreams, and -
(Some pilots called the armor the dreamsuit, because of the Drift recorder. The technology only hadn't become recreational yet because California and Hong Kong were attacked so regularly that the big movie business was still finding its feet. Or maybe it was used for entertainment, somewhere a girl who has lived in Jaeger bases and academies for most of her life has never been.)
At the same time as her mind is wandering, latching onto stray thoughts to try to reassert itself as herself, she is drowning in and coughing up Raleigh's memories.
And as soon as she looks hard at them, they know she's there and take her.
Water crashed and metal screamed but at the same time metal was flesh and Raleigh's right arm was tearing off -
Make hadn't expected Raleigh's memories of his brother - Yancy, the name she saw only in classified documents - to be so near the surface. He should have had more control than to drag him down with her. But he doesn't - maybe it's always like this, she doesn't know, but his mind in the Drift is brash and wounded, displaying its scars.
The memory that she falls into is not of his first time in a Jaeger but of his last. She can feel the remnant pride leaking off of him like radiation - But then he left a kaiju for dead, and it came back.
His shoulder was engulfed in a burn that bashed to the back of his head. The impressions of pain flowed from Danger to Yancy to Raleigh as soon as the Jaeger's arm was torn off, digital synapses doing their job to keep the pilots in pain but aware. The kaiju kept smashing at them and the plasma canon wouldn't fire, burning blue but uselessly, endlessly cycling. Raleigh had thought he could walk through a hurricane but now the wind and rain were coming in at him, black coins of water appearing on the floor and on his suit, the wind inaudible over the sound of the Jaeger's churning engine underneath him.
And then the ceiling broke and Yancy, quiet, laconic Yancy in his white suit, whipped up into the sky with his limbs flailing and was sucked away into the snarling gray and white ocean in the kaiju's wake.
Raleigh felt some solid weight in his brain, like a cancer suddenly dropped in from the Drift, jerk his head back.
The mental whiplash was second to a flood of terror and grief, and he doubled his efforts to work the plasma cannon. He engaged the gun finally, finally, and triggered a blue burst. He pushed out and the kaiju bit down on Danger's forearm, its scaly crest peaking like a wave, and the canon fired.
The kaiju reeled backwards with its chest cavity opened, and Raleigh thought I should have checked it was dead, I'll be sure I've killed it next time.
Going back to the thought of why he learned that lesson triggered the snap again.
There was a hole in his mind where Yancy should have been. The Drift was a connection as fragile as tissue paper, as airy as digital signals, but now it felt empty and gaping and his stomach churned with vertigo as he fell in. He felt the frayed, bleeding ends of the connection and the missing piece and worse of all Yancy's memories were still trickling in, being soullessly processed by the machine and easing into the dreamsuit and the Drift, and now Raleigh remembered claws closing around Yancy just as he saw their Jaeger's head ripping open in his own memories. He'll learn later that the impression of a tumor, a weight in his head, was a kind of compensation for the sudden loss of the link: an immediate, homuncular Yancy-ghost that faded as soon as it appeared.
He thought maybe he could feel her too, Danger, stumbling under the mental onslaught, but she didn't reach out to save him. Locked into his suit Raleigh felt like he was falling off a cliff and flailing for Yancy's hand to grab him. No rescue appeared out of the fog, out of the broken remnant wisps of the Drift, as the Jaeger stood back with her mechanical muscles locked up and shivering.
He caught himself.
Mako ejects from the memory when Raleigh does, after the long, long walk back to the Alaska shore. Walking alone in the right side of the Conn-Pod, his legs as heavy as if he were the one wading through one hundred and fifty feet of the Pacific Ocean, Raleigh and Gipsy Danger swayed equally drunkenly. He got back by making things simple, by pinning the twinned memories down under the fact that he must get to the Shatterdome. He needed to make repairs, he needed to walk his coffin realized sleepily that there were people on the shore, and that made it at least one, two steps harder as he crossed the ice to avoid them, made sure the frozen sand wasn't so deep or so light that he would engulf them in it when he fell, and brought Danger to her knees before just tossing his head and shaking his shoulders to break what was left of the half-Drift and disengage from the motion rig.
Mako is left with other glimpses, facts she doesn't need to pick through because they're her memories now:
Raleigh and Yancy had a sister.
One one of their first drops Yancy said kaiju reminded him of spiders and it was supposed to be a joke but for Raleigh it made the whole thing worse.
Mako wakes up.
She'll see what she's done in a moment. She'll see Danger's arm stretched out in front of her, plate-mail and pistons and pipes, and the crowd of lab-coated techs down below, looking up at her with the fear of God in them. She'll see the Jaeger whole through her own eyes and torn up and reborn through Raleigh's. She'll see that Raleigh has sifted through her like she sifted through him, and that he knows, because of course he knows, about Stacker.
Until then, she has a second to inhabit her own brain anew.
She feels the cliff coming and catches herself.
She's like him now. Stacker says he erases all of his thoughts when he drifts, so that he leaves no splinters, no partners behind. Raleigh isn't like that. He leaves, he sheds, he drips glacial Alaska ice behind him. I'm coated now, Mako thinks as she slides to the floor. I'm the third person to ever pilot a Jaeger alone.