PROLOGUE
Earth. Looks pretty from out here, doesn’t it? All blue and shiny and happy. But get up close, and it all falls apart. My generation, we were born into war. Into a world of chaos.
Something called the Breach opened up at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. A gateway to another dimension. Sounds cool, doesn’t it? Except on the other side is an alien race called the Precursors. They thought it’d be a laugh to send giant monsters through the Breach to say hello. We called those monsters Kaiju.
To fight them, we built our own monsters: Jaegers.
Jaegers were big bad metal machines—so big they needed two pilots to run them, with their minds connected together in the Drift.
Ten years ago, we sealed the Breach. We won the war.
But you wouldn’t know it by looking around. The Kaiju made every hit count. Coastal cities got it the worst. Now the relief zones are filled with folks just trying to get by, psycho cults that worship the Kaiju like they are gods or something, and homegrown gangsters slapping together their own junk Jaegers from stolen parts.
Anyone with money moved inland. Middle of Nowhere became the new Beverly Hills. Because everybody’s afraid of another breach opening up. Afraid of another Kaiju attack.
Which is cool with me. Because one man’s fear is another man’s opportunity. In the relief zones, you have to get creative. Out here, we place a different value on things. The Pan Pacific Defense Corps usually looks the other way—as long as you don’t go poking around where you don’t belong.
. . . Say, like a scrapyard of decommissioned Jaegers. But laying hands on their Jaeger tech is worth the risk. Good score will set you up for a year. And I got a knack for delivering for my customers . . .
. . . Most of the time.
Darkness engulfed the scrapyard, but Jake didn’t have to see the ground to know where he was going. It was all familiar to him at this point—the electric fence that sparked and hummed, the hole ripped into it that he could easily crawl through, and most of all, the fallen Jaeger bodies with their metal body parts littering the ground. Jake pulled out the plasma tracker from his jacket. He could feel Sonny and his men right behind him.
He quickly put his arm up to stop Sonny from walking forward. A PPDC security vehicle rumbled by. Jake shot Sonny a warning look. The area was heavily patrolled, and they needed to be careful. Suddenly, his plasma tracker pinged. Jake looked up at the remains of the Jaeger in front of them and smiled. He knew it would be here.
He yanked on the hidden release inside the panel, and grinned as the access door opened.
But the second he was inside, he knew something was wrong. Cables hung down from the ceiling. Electricity sparked at their ends. The plasma capacitor was gone!
CRACK! Sonny whipped Jake in the face with his handgun. Jake fell to the ground. The sting pulsed through his whole body.
“Kill him,” said Sonny, turning to leave.
Jake thumped his tracker and the screen flickered. It showed that the plasma capacitor was on the move. Somebody else was in there, and they had it.
He jumped up, quickly scrambling over the machine parts. He slipped through the doorway. One of Sonny’s men caught up to him, and Jake quickly laid him out. Then, he ran full tilt through the corridors.
He followed the signal on the tracker. He knew every inch of this scrapyard, but he also knew that if Sonny and his men caught him, this time they wouldn’t hesitate to kill him. He dashed into a tunnel thick with power cables. He made his way through them, left and right until he was clear of the scrapyard.
Dawn was breaking over Santa Monica, California, as Jake ran. Sunrays gleamed against the broken-down machinery, dirty streets, and slums of a city that had once been beautiful. Now, it was a wasteland inhabited by those too poor to move away from the water. If the Kaiju attacked again, the homes on the coast would be the first destroyed.
Jake’s tracker pinged. He dashed up a hill of rubble and eyed the massive Kaiju bones that jutted out of the partially destroyed pier. His tracker locked onto an old shipyard down by the water. Gotcha!
Jake climbed into a grime-filled window and entered a building inside the shipyard. He looked at the room around him. There was a dirty mattress in the corner and food wrappers littered the floor, but the space was mostly full of junky old machine parts. The walls were plastered with images of Jaegers and Kaiju. Whoever lived here also had a thing for Shao Liwen. Clippings on the wall tracked her career from young computer genius to the head of the multibillion dollar company named after her: Shao Industries.
Jake’s eyes fell on a faded Time magazine cover with Raleigh Becket’s face on it, and the years of his birth and death: 1998–2026. Jake stopped the sadness from rising in his chest. He was here for a reason.
He reached the main floor. There, in the middle of the room, was some kind of machine. It looked like a . . . like a homemade Jaeger. It was nearly four stories tall and cobbled together with mismatched parts. Jake’s tracker pinged loudly. Nestled in a hatch on the mini Jaeger’s computer, the plasma capacitor caught his eye. But Jake couldn’t think about that anymore—this little machine could be the real score! If he broke this little Jaeger down and sold off the parts, he’d have enough money to stop scrounging through scrapyards for good. He’d never have to deal with people like Sonny again.
Suddenly, a hooded figure jumped out from the shadows and swung a pipe at him. Jake wrenched the pipe away and slammed the figure into the ground. He raised
