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  “So you decided to hide in the woods?”

  She looked at him to see if he was kidding. He still didn’t understand.

  “No,” she said. “I was trying to get to the sea.”

  “Why?”

  “I never saw it. It’s just over there, and Babulya won’t let me see it.”

  He sighed. “The sea is dangerous, Vikushka. Especially on days like this. Your grandmother only tries to protect you. But why now, why—” he stopped, and his green eyes shone clearly before he turned away.

  “Ah,” he said. “The Jaeger. Is that it?”

  “Yes,” she admitted. “Cherno Alpha is there. I saw it on the monitor at school. Dedulya, Cherno Alpha is fighting a Kaiju, out in the water. I want to see.”

  He shook his head. “The sea is a big place,” he said. “The Kaiju is south of here, and on the east coast. We’re on the west side of Sakhalin, so you could never see it from where you were heading. And for this you almost died.” He coughed, a heavy cough deep in his chest.

  “Your grandmother…” he began, but he didn’t finish. He just looked away.

  “This boy. Why did you hit him?”

  “He said I was a liar. He said I was an orphan.”

  “What did you tell him, that he said you were a liar?”

  “I told him that Sasha Kaidanovsky is my mother and Aleksis Kaidanovsky is my father, and they ride in the chest of Cherno Alpha, and one day, when all of the Kaiju are dead, they will come back here and get me.”

  Her grandfather again fell silent, and seemed to sink into himself. When he did speak again, it was very quietly, as if he was afraid the snow outside might hear him.

  “What has your grandmother said about this?” he said. “She told you they were your parents?”

  She dropped her head.

  “Yes. But she also said I am never to say that. Never to speak their names or tell anyone.”

  “That is so,” he said. “Your grandmother is very wise. You must obey her in this.”

  “Why? Why should I let Maksim call me an orphan?”

  “It does you no harm, what he says,” the old man told her.

  “Because I know the truth?” she asked.

  He was quiet for a moment. Then he put his hand on her shoulder.

  “Does it make you feel strong, knowing who your parents are? Does it inspire you to become great, like them?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Very well,” he sighed. “That’s good then. But you must not run off like this again,” he said. “You must promise me.”

  “I promise you, Dedulya,” she said. “But can you tell me – is the battle over? Has Cherno Alpha won once again?”

  Her grandfather laughed. “How should I know? I’ve been out here, looking for you.”

  * * *

  They finished the night in the hut, and the next morning her grandfather walked her to their little cottage in the low hills outside of town. Then he went to catch his ride to work, cutting trees in the north.

  “You’re a thief,” her grandmother scolded her. “Your grandfather needs his rest – he works so hard. And you stole that rest from him.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “And what of me? If you had frozen to death, what could I say? Your parents left you here with me, to care for you, see you grow strong – what would they say if all I could deliver to them was a little ice princess, a frozen block of meat?”

  “I only wanted to see the sea,” she said.

  “The sea is death. It is cold, and miserable, and it is a murderer and a stealer of souls. That is why we live here, away from it.”

  “You once lived near the sea, Grandfather said.”

  “Yes, once. Before, but not now. Not ever again, do you understand?”

  She didn’t answer. Grandmother sat on the little bed, next to her. She had big gray eyes and a wide nose and ears that stood away from her head. Her hair was blonde, like Viktoriya’s, although shot with duller strands. She’d told Viktoriya several times that came from her great-grandmother, who had been one of the old people of Sakhalin, an Ainu. Most of them had been deported when Russia took the island from Japan, but a few had stayed. Grandmother’s people went deep into the island – Grandfather’s parents had come from Perm, to work in the oil business.

  “Why isn’t Grandfather’s name Kaidanovsky?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “Maksim said Sasha and Aleksis weren’t my parents because Grandfather’s name isn’t Kaidanovsky.”

  “Your other grandparents are the Kaidanovskys,” she replied.

  “Where are they?”

  “Moscow, I guess.”

  “But then shouldn’t my last name be Kaidanovsky?”

  “We’ve been taking care of you for so long,” she said, “it’s easier for you to use our name. The government asks fewer questions.”

  “But my magazine said Sasha’s name was Vasilev before they got married…”

  “What magazine?” her grandmother demanded. “Let me see it.”

  She hesitated, but Babulya gave her the look, and she dug the old magazine from beneath her mattress. Grandmother took it and thumbed through the fading Cyrillic lettering until she came to their pictures. Sasha was tall and strong, but Aleksis was nearly a giant. Both had shocks of blonde hair, but Sasha had dark eyebrows, like Vik’s grandmother, and she suddenly felt bad for asking.

  For doubting.

  “You know,” her grandmother said, “back in the old days there were demons everywhere, just roaming the earth. They loved to destroy, but they loved to attack children the best. I don’t know why. It’s how demons are. So, back then they didn’t name children right away, because once you have a name, a demon can find you, and attack you. In those days, even when you had a name, you kept it hidden, and went by a nickname instead. Over the years, we let that slide, along with a lot of other things. We forgot, because we thought the demons were gone, first driven away by heroes with swords of steel and later by electric lights and algebra and all of that. But you know what, Vikushka? They came back, didn’t they? And they still hear our names when they are spoken. If the Kaiju knew your real name, they would come for you. Your parents are strong, your parents kill them. But if the Kaiju knew you were their daughter, your mother and father could not protect you – they could not guard Russia at the same time. So, I have hidden your name, child, to hide you. We have hidden it, you understand? So we go by my maiden name, Malikova.”

  “But what if they learn my first name?”

  “That’s a very good point,” her grandmother said. “Viktoriya is a long, beautiful name. It might be noticed. Perhaps from now on we should call you something else. Tori, maybe.”

  “I think I like Vik better,” she said. “It’s shorter. Less noticeable.”

  “Vik,” her grandmother said. “Very well. You will be Vik Malikova, understand?”

  “Okay,” she said. “But – is that why they never come to see me? Because they’re afraid the Kaiju will know where I am?”

  Her grandmother just smiled, and kissed her on the head. Then her face became stern.

  “Don’t think I’ve forgotten what you did. You hurt a boy, you ran away. You could have gotten yourself killed and your grandfather as well. Three days with no vidiot, do you understand?”

  Vidiot was what Babulya called anything you watched for fun. She thought all of it made you stupid.

  “But I want to see about the fight.”

  “Cherno Alpha won, of course, and that is all you need to know.”

  But that didn’t satisfy her. She knew how to find out; on the way home from school she stopped by the bar, where all the old men too injured to work hung around, drinking away their stipends. Three of them were sitting outside, and they told her about it, two of them slurring their words a bit.

  The Kaiju’s name was Vodyanoi, named for a water monster that figured in dark, ancient stories of the Russian people. Like all Kaiju, he was terrifically
huge. They all looked different, like normal things mashed together with really not normal things. Vodyanoi looked sort of like a big, fat, puffed-up toad, and he was really nasty. Two Jaegers went after him – Cherno Alpha and Eden Assassin. The monster spit some kind of acid on Eden Assassin and it ate right through its metal skin, killing both pilots.

  “Cherno Alpha didn’t like that,” an old man named Vladimir said. “She pulled an iceberg right out of the water. And she beat it to death. With an iceberg. A grobanyy iceberg. Right before it got to the capital.”

  He lifted his glass. “Screw them and their wall. The Russian machine, the Soviet Slammer, she’s our savior! To Cherno Alpha, and all the other Jaegers and their pilots!”

  They gave her a little of what they were drinking so she could toast with them. It made her mouth and nose burn, and she couldn’t swallow it. She wondered if the stuff Vodyanoi spit on Eden Assassin was anything like it.

  She went home; Grandmother wasn’t back from work yet, so before doing her chores, Viktoriya went to her room. On her wall hung a once-glossy poster of Cherno Alpha with her huge, barrel-shaped head and massive chest. She imagined her parents in there, making the gigantic Jaeger move, fight, kill.

  Next to it, on the wall, she had written a list of names.

  Reckoner, Raythe, Tengu, Denjin, Atticon. The Kaiju Cherno Alpha had battled with and not only survived, but triumphed over.

  To this list she now added Vodyanoi.

  Then she went to wash the dishes.

  That night, she had to go to bed early, part of her punishment. Her grandparents had the news on, and she wasn’t allowed to watch. So she lay in bed and thought.

  She’d seen Maksim that day, with a big bandage on his head. He hadn’t said a thing to her. But she’d heard he was telling people she’d cheated, using a rock.

  But now she thought about Cherno Alpha, beating a Kaiju to death with an iceberg. That wasn’t cheating. That was winning.

  Even her grandfather had said it was smart. Maksim was too big for a girl her size to beat. But not if that girl had a rock.

  What she hadn’t told her grandfather was what she’d been pretending when she hit Maksim. She had been pretending she was a Jaeger; armored, powerful, controlled by pilots hidden away and protected by her chest. And Maksim, he was a Kaiju – mean, big, not too smart, breaking things and hurting people just because he could. Because it was his nature. And when she had hit him, she hadn’t felt sorry, or ashamed, or shocked. Because she was a Jaeger. Armored, doing what she was supposed to do. It wasn’t her hand that picked up the rock; it was the Jaeger’s.

  She thought of Cherno Alpha, striding through the frozen sea, unbothered by the cold or the snow, of the man and woman who rode within her. Were they thinking of her, too? Of the day when the fighting was finally over, and they could climb out of their steel giant and be her parents again?

  She thought they were. She hoped they were.

  Thinking that, she went to sleep.

  6

  2018

  SEA OF OKHOTSK

  RUSSIA

  CHERNO ALPHA

  MOTHER’S HYSTERICAL LAUGHTER FROM THE next room so cold and what is that smell Russell’s little casket so tiny sting of the slap on her cheek taste of blood smaller kids scattering from his path smell of vodka on her breath brother’s playing but say she’s too young first taste of vodka in his mouth burns sees her curled in the cell what is she doing here the callouses on his fingers the stillness of his presence the strength the fire the anger burning inside her soothing touch he smells of machinery, the power, Reckoner so grobanyy big, all legs, battering, beating shock after shock, riding the bright line between fury and control…

  Present. Sasha and Aleksis were in the Drift.

  “Initiating neural handshake,” LOCCENT control informed them.

  And now they were Cherno Alpha.

  And Cherno Alpha was a monster. Two hundred and eighty feet tall, two thousand four hundred and twelve tons of high-tech metal armor and technological guts, and between them Sasha and Aleksis controlled every inch of her through their fused minds and the Pinocchio rig they were fitted into. If Sasha raised her right arm and made a fist, Cherno Alpha lifted the many tons of her massive right limb. When they walked, Cherno walked, and when they ran she ran. She was a Mark-1, a first-generation Jaeger, but while there were newer, shinier models out there, Cherno was theirs. The monster they lived inside.

  It took a monster to fight a monster, and a monster was headed their way.

  Five years before, the first of the Kaiju had burst from the depths of the Marianas Trench, where one continental plate was pushing beneath another, where nearly unimaginable vertical pressure and literally earth-wrenching tectonic forces met. The place of its emergence was later called the Breach, but it wouldn’t be recognized and named until later. All scientists had at the time was a lot of strange data that didn’t seem to add up to anything until a thing arose from the depths. They called it Trespasser, eventually, but at first it was just a three-hundred-foot-tall nightmare that came out of the Pacific and began to destroy the works of man. It surfaced near San Francisco, and over the course of six days left three cities in smoking ruin. The United States and United Kingdom threw everything they had at it, including, finally, a nuclear weapon.

  The nuke worked. But the cure was as bad as the disease.

  Which would have been one thing, if Trespasser were both the first and the last of its kind.

  It was not. Another came, and another, and humanity began to wake up. After destroying, marginalizing, or mastering every predator – every dominant form of life on the planet, for that matter – something had come along to shake Homo sapiens out of their self-congratulatory comfort zone.

  They were now ants beneath the feet of giants.

  But they were clever ants, and they were determined ants, and with the same minds and same hands which had constructed their nests of wood, steel, and plastic, they built their own giants.

  And these they called Jaegers.

  Jaegers carried as much potential energy as a nuclear weapon – the early ones, Cherno included, were nuclear-powered – but they kept it contained, kept it local, prevented the kind of collateral damage a bomb would cause.

  The war effort was international. Cherno Alpha was Russian built; others came from United States, from Japan, from China, Panama, Mexico – but all were housed in the Hong Kong Shatterdome. All along the Pacific Rim, other Shatterdomes were being built. Soon – perhaps by the end of the year – Cherno Alpha would rest on Russian soil, in Vladivostok, where she could better serve the motherland. Other facilities were being constructed in Sydney, Anchorage, Tokyo, Lima, and so forth, forming an arc of protection for the world.

  But for now, all deployments started from Hong Kong.

  But since this Kaiju was headed toward Russia, it was Cherno Alpha’s honor and duty to dispatch it.

  The helicopters had lifted it out of the Shatterdome when the Kaiju – Raythe – was nothing more than a tectonic and sonar signature moving through deep water. No one knew what made a Kaiju go this way or that, but this one stayed in deep water, skirting far west of the major Japanese islands, on a straight line toward Kamchatka, so they had flown out to meet it, suspended beneath the rotating wings of eight V-50 Jumphawks. Now they stood in the shallow, icy water about ten miles off the Kamchatka Peninsula, waiting.

  “This time will be different,” Aleksis said. He spoke out loud; their minds were merged, they felt everything and knew everything the other felt, but the best way to relay something focused and specific was still spoken language.

  Even without the Drift, Sasha wouldn’t have had to ask him what he meant. Their first fight had been almost two years ago, and it hadn’t gone so well. The Kaiju named Reckoner had broken through the Miracle Mile and reached the Hong Kong waterfront. Cherno Alpha had been able to punch it back for a time, but they had suffered crippling damage in the hours-long fight. In the end, it had been Chi
na’s Horizon Brave that finished the beast by hurling it into an electrical plant. The Blackout Knockout, the press had dubbed it.

  That had been sitting in Aleksis for two years now: two years of private recriminations, hard training, waiting for his chance to redeem Cherno – and himself. What he wanted – what Sasha felt – was to beat the Kaiju to death with his bare fists.

  With Cherno Alpha’s fists, motivated by the most powerful energy cell of any Jaeger, that was possible. But it would do no good to get cocky.

  “We fight defensively,” Sasha said. “We do not let it out of the water. Not one toxic foot on Russian soil.”

  A third voice suddenly inserted itself into their conversation: Konstantin Scriabin, in LOCCENT control.

  “I’m glad you guys are so gung ho,” he said. “But there’s been a little snag.”

  “Explain,” Sasha said.

  “Target has changed trajectory. It’s turned west, toward Hokkaido.”

  “What then?” Sasha asked. “We’re miles from there.”

  “You’re still a lot closer than anyone else, by a power of ten,” Scriabin said. “The best we can do is get you down there as quickly as possible.”

  “It faked us out,” Aleksis said. “We should have known better. Why Kamchatka? There’s nothing there. Reindeer and snow. Sapporo makes a better target. It has cities. And beer.”

  “Who knows why the Kaiju attack where they do?” Sasha said. “They’re mindless beasts.”

  “This mindless beast faked us out,” Aleksis said. “Bring the Jumphawks back. Get us down there!”

  “On their way, Cherno, but they have to refuel at Okha. They’ve already flown a long way today. Maybe you two should break Drift, take a rest.”

  There were limits to how long anyone could Drift – some pilots could only make it a few hours before the connection began to fall apart.