A long, long time ago, somebody told you: When you go under, don't breathe in.

  You were eight then, or younger, maybe, and Rachel was thirteen or fourteen, and you were taking swimming lessons for the first time in the big blue Olympic pool at your local YMCA. Mom dropped you off there every day after school—you weren't yet old enough for the academy, of course, so it was a regular elementary school with all the other little kids in your cluster of classic cupcake row houses—and you went unwillingly, decked in hand-me-down froggy goggles and yellow floaties and a singularly unflattering red polka dot one-piece that you felt made you look like Minnie Mouse, whom you hated. The only thing that appeased you was Rachel putting on your floaties herself, and helping on your swimsuit, and holding your hand on the way into the pool, and even then you grumbled.

  The water scared you. The first time you went in you gasped when the water hit your nose: it burned going down, so you panicked and inhaled more. Ray dragged you out crying, snot-faced, coughing up chlorine. You almost drowned that day, Rachel would tell you later, laughing, which is why she ended up getting you the floaties for next time; and you'd punch her every time she told the story and laughed about it, which only made her laugh harder. Maybe if I laugh hard enough, she'd tell you, you'll be shamed into not sucking in air next time, you big dummy.

  In hindsight it wasn't shame but spite that instilled the instinct in you. Next time you went to the pool you marched right up and ripped off the floaties, jumped in the deep end and refused to apologize even when they pulled you out, dripping and shivering, having dropped like a stone and inhaled water on the second breath. So it went the third lesson and the fourth, and even when you were threatened with reduced TV time—none at all, eventually—you didn't stop.

  Ray didn't say sorry, either. By the tenth time doing it you still hadn't broken the habit. And indeed you missed seeing every episode of the Machine Princess reruns that summer, which hurt you to the bone. At Alcatraz, it took you weeks to look at an acclim pool and not recoil at the memory of looking down into clear glass-green water. But by God, you never gave in.

  Now you remember. You hold your breath; you wait to float right side up again.

  Issue: no time to wait. Your sudden unburdening combined with no change in engine trim means you have gone hurtling over the sea floor like a stone loosed from a sling. You have seconds in which to stop yourself.

  You become aware of this at the same time that the sound of alarms reaches you, cuts through your daze. OVERSPEED, says one. CHECK HULL INTEGRITY, says another. Your skin, the steel sheets of it, is rattling; it judders in your teeth; you inhale sharply and taste ozone and copper, some sickly-wrong and grossly sweet aftertaste from the smelling salts with which I have laced your ox feed.

  Protocol dictates you throw open your joint-plates, dig your thrusters into the water, full reverse, and bring yourself to a long, skidding stop; you draw in a breath and count: one, two, three—ten seconds in all. Your sight un-narrows, the alarms in your ears resolve into chimes, and you are looking at the wireframe again, taking it in, and you have come to a stop.

  Then you are at the foot of Lantau, ungraceful, roughened and missing tons. Your whole body thrums in time with your pulse—you'll feel it later, more, the ache that is now dulled by adrenaline—and you breathe in, once, twice, shaky and in pieces, and then focus on your HUD, where sonar ripples in slow waves of turquoise and aquamarine, revealing the ruin of your passage by turns.

  Your radio clicks: "Tokyo, Mazu—come in. Are you seaworthy?"

  Debs. Right. In front of you is a hulking pile that you slowly realize is what remains of the cleo: the shell, the severed limbs. The sea still roils around it. And Mazu is in front of it, fifty meters away, looking down at you, her blades covered in cryobloom wash.

  For a long and naked moment you look at each other. Her eye limns her, in your visible range, in mercury blue; there is no real expression on Titan faces, but there doesn't have to be.

  Then she turns away and you glimpse the wound gashed across her back: hot metal gutters and steams into the water around her. Oh, you think dizzily. Oh.

  "Tokyo," says your radio, "hey, girl, whoa. Zone in."

  You lick your cracked lips—and with a sudden desperate fury you right yourself within the salt bath, key the mic: "Seaworthy," you say. "Barriers intact."

  "She ran into the mines," says Mazu. Well, no denying that.

  "Tokyo," Fishhawk says, "what're your barriers at? Specifically." Then, before you can answer, the hum hits you: sonar, gentle, low-amplitude, questing over your hull and chassis, what's left of your tattered shields—the piecemeal membranes fluttering over your arms, the pockmarked metal underneath.

  In the cockpit you flinch, shrink back. This does nothing, of course, and I filter it out of your inputs so your Titan does not respond, the better to conserve your still-limping coolant. You are naked, bare, exposed for the world to see; no amount of shame will change that.

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  In your ear Fishhawk whistles, low and slow, pitched expertly for her mic to pick up. It occurs to you that she does not have to use the radio to talk to her own sword—vice versa—that all this is for your benefit only.

  "Barriers at forty percent, maybe," says Mazu, "not enough for a pissed-off class A."

  "I'm fine." You're not. "I have barriers at fifty"—forty-seven—"membrane available, deployment avenues all nominal—"

  "Right, because Mazu stepped in and got you," says Fishhawk. "You look like death, Tokyo."

  She's right, of course; the cavalcade of alarms in your ears is testament.

  Fuck—in all the excitement you'd forgotten to keep tabs on her. And you are not helm-linked, not to her or anyone else, least of all to Carol—

  "Tokyo," says Fishhawk, not unkindly, "advise you retreat and wait for Central. Can you maneuver back alone?"

  Hell no. You can't even cross the mines alone. "Negative," you say, "awaiting my sword." And then, because you can't help yourself, "I still have at least fifty percent barrier."

  "That's a rough fifty," says Debs, though still not meanly. "Is Sea Witch even coming? Do you have comms on her?"

  "No time," says Mazu suddenly. "Target inbound. We have maybe sixty seconds. Hold in Silver Cloud, six and two."

  This you remember vaguely is a stealth formation, the sword behind, the shield in front: both running destructive interference patterns on sonics to cloak their own wakes, barriers unsheathed and strategically crimped to maximize noise absorption—

  "Tokyo," says Mazu, "leave."

  "Shit," says Fishhawk. "Tokyo, can you—?"

  You should. Ray, in your position, would not have, so what you say next hardly surprises me: "Mazu's taken damage."

  "Yeah," says Mazu. "So?"

  "So I should stay," you say, "and offer you extra cover."

  "No," says Mazu, "you should get the fuck out. You're a liability."

  "Tokyo," says Fishhawk, "that's nice of you, but I have it covered. Fall back, wait for Sea Witch."

  "I have barriers," you say stubbornly.

  "You're going to alert the fucking target," says Mazu. "Forty seconds. Get off the channel, both of you." And, pointedly, she does.

  "Roger," says Fishhawk. "Tokyo—please. For your own sake."

  Then she, too, is gone, and it is just you—and me—and the water.

  Something hard and bitter has risen in your throat. With a helmet on you can't brush back tears, so you swallow instead and open your thruster ports, rally what you can of your engine—probably thirty seconds to interception now—and through the alarms that still cluster your HUD, you look at the wireframe and see there, blinking, a single red dot, skimming northwest, headed south.

  Here's the thing: move now and you'll just be able to stay outside alert range, probably, especially since Mazu and Fishhawk are going to drop cloak and move in as soon as the target's close enough to hear your engines. Sea's still turbulent, after all, with the echoes of your unlucky passage and Mazu's kill. And you don't even have your sword right now, let alone a substitute. What can you possibly do?

  "Helm," you say, "show me your prediction for target path."

  Why? But it is not in my precepts to question you on a direct command like this. The target will go here, say my algorithms, having taken a careful three milliseconds to calculate, southeast, toward open water.

  Now, Emma, there's no need to quibble. Falling back is the right thing to do, the wise thing; Fishhawk is right; so is Mazu. It's in protocols; you know the rules, Emma, and so do I. So why aren't you doing it? Why are you just sitting here, watching the little red dot go faster and faster?

  "Helm," you say. And: "Give me all the power you've got."

  Oh no—but your jaw is set. Your willpower has rallied, what you were missing in the minefield. I cannot deny you this time.

  "Thank you," you say, which is how I know something is terribly wrong. Then you throw yourself at the target.

  The thing about doing this as a Titan is that it's loud. Your engines—your attitude thrusters—the passage of your wake—if you do not do what Mazu and Fishhawk have done, take in the noise you produce and cancel it with equal and opposite noises from your sonar array, then every Meg and bogey for half a mile around will hear you clear as day. And you do know how to do this, they taught you at Alcatraz, you've never done it in practice but could—but you don't. So when you throw yourself forward, you scream.

  Not with your real mouth, your meat-mouth, though that opens too. Your sonar, your hull-mounted actuators, every vent and thruster, the rattlers along your back: these are fairly aflame with noise that radiates out into the water in shades of bright ripping crimson, vectoring you straight for the target, loud and fast as you can manage, and oh, God, you don't even have half your barriers.

  On the wireframe, the target flickers, pivots, then turns right back around toward you.

  Oh, fuck, why isn't it stopping? You're a Titan! You hunt these beasts, you kill them!—except that first one knew you were weakened by the mines, thought rightly that you were easy pickings and wrongly that you were alone—this time it is the same thing: the smell of ozone from your pummeled hull makes you bait even at 100 FNU, for enough Megs have taken down your kind to know a damaged Titan by scent alone. This one smells blood in the water already. Well done, you, you've figured out how to end yourself.

  Your heartbeat is a drum. Each breath comes quick and hot in your ears. The cleonicerotid is close enough to show up on sonar now, which is rendered more vividly than ever thanks to your outcry. Amidst the waves of your own noise you see it: the shell like a wall, like a meteor, and then, in the last few seconds, the writhing mass of legs under. I hope this was worth it, you have time to think before you hear the sonic cloaks come down, and Mazu's engines roar, and you close your eyes and let it all go to hell.