—Jake in cadet training, jogging alongside Nate Lambert. They’re both teenagers, filled with grand ideas and ambitions. At night after training they talk about saving the world, being the first line of defense if the Kaiju ever return. The run is punishing, mile after mile in the hills outside the Shatterdome, but if it meant getting into a Jaeger Jake would run to the moon and back. He is Stacker Pentecost’s son. Nothing is going to stop him from being worthy of his father’s example—
—In the combat training room, Mako comes at Jake with a staff. He tries to parry, but she slips his defense and her staff taps him along the ribs. She backs away and shows him what she did, teaching him what to look for, little shifts in the opponent’s weight or the direction of her gaze. They do it again. He comes closer, but she still gets through. They reset. She’s telling him he can do this, but he’s going to have to focus, block everything else out except this moment, only this moment—
“Warning. Neural connection unstable.”
Jake snapped out of the Drift fugue and saw the Drift connection meter on the training rig’s monitor. The strength of their connection was dropping, close to the red zone where it would break apart and they would have to start all over again.
“Stay focused,” he said, channeling what Mako had said to him so long ago.
He felt her renewed concentration, the revitalized clarity of her thoughts and her presence in the Drift. “That’s it,” he encouraged. “The stronger the connection, the better you fight.”
She grinned, and Jake felt the flush of her happiness as she felt herself getting the hang of the Drift. “This isn’t so hard,” she said. “You lived in a mansion!?” Then a memory struck her and Jake felt her shock—
—She’s on the Santa Monica Pier. The sun is shining but a long shadow falls over part of the boardwalk. She holds a Polaroid picture in one hand. All around her people are running and screaming. There’s a noise, like nothing she’s ever heard, and a smell cuts through the seaside odors of salt and caramel corn and grill smoke—
Don’t let a memory pull you in! Let them pass through you! Amara!
Jake’s voice. She turned to see him, but instead—
—Her father, smiling, holding a Polaroid camera. Amara! Get in there! he says, pointing to where her mother and brother are already at the pier railing. They press close together and her father raises the camera. Click. The Polaroid photo slides out of the camera. Amara rushes to her father and takes it from the camera, then dashes back to the railing. She shakes the photo, enchanted as always by the way the picture slowly comes into being from the uniform gray of the exposed film. She starts to see the shapes of their bodies, then their faces, against the endless expanse of the Pacific Ocean.
Amara! You need to let it go—
—There is a sound like an earthquake, and a Kaiju, Insurrector, rears up from the water. Waves surge outward from it, battering the pier’s piling. The pier shakes and the Kaiju crushes an entire section, which tumbles into the water. The air fills with screams and Amara freezes, Polaroid in her hand. Her mother and father and brother are on the other side of the shattered gap in the boards—
“Warning. Pilot exceeding neural limits.”
—Amara!—
—It’s Jake’s voice but also her father’s voice. He stretches a hand out across the gap. The Kaiju looms, its roars loud enough to shake the pier under her feet. You have to jump! Amara hesitates, terrified of the churning water below. Please, baby, jump to me! I’ll catch you, I promise! Amara!
She runs and leaps with all the strength she can muster, but just as her feet leave the boards, the Kaiju’s foot comes down, obliterating the pier in front of her and everyone on it. Her father is gone in that instant, and her mother and brother and hundreds of other people. Her hands grasp empty space and she plummets into the water. Eyes wide with shock, she registers the shadow of the Kaiju passing overhead, and feels the pull of its gargantuan step. The water churns around her and her chest begins to burn. She can swim a little, but only on the surface and only with a wacky noodle. She kicks and flails her arms but the surface of the water still seems far away. Light ripples around her again but she’s sinking down among the shattered timbers and the dark floating shapes she will not think about. Someone grabs her by the shoulder—
“Amara! Come on! Hey!”
It’s Jake. She’s not in Santa Monica, she’s not four years old. She’s in the Drift training room of the Moyulan Shatterdome and she’s fifteen, but it was all just right there, it was real…
“I was back home,” she said. “I felt it…”
She was shaking, trying not to panic, and also feeling the first waves of embarrassment and shame at Jake seeing her so vulnerable. She looked up at him and saw the sympathy in his face. “I felt it too,” he said. Was the Drift always like that? Did you have to let your partner all the way into your head, to see everything you’d ever been afraid of or sad about, every weakness behind the brave front you put up so the world wouldn’t look too closely?
Jake’s comm crackled. “Jake, it’s Nate. You there?”
Still looking at Amara, Jake found his
