Chapter Text
Ortus dies choking on his own tongue, and Harrow walks back to Ninth Base with his corpse dangling glassy eyed and swollen beside her like a puppet with its strings finally cut. She slides from the cockpit in a rush of salt water, a bedraggled black afterbirth in her armour.
Nobody says anything to her.
They have exhausted their platitudes for death.
————
“Five partners, Harrow.” Aiglamene rubs her temples and looks over the hunk of scrap metal that serves as her desk. Harrow can still, faintly, pick out the beginnings of CAVALIER NINE on the side.
“Five partners over the last six years. Two in the last twelve months.”
The older woman looks bone tired. Aiglamene has been tired since the first kaiju crashed out of the ocean.
“We’ll try again.” Harrow’s voice is empty of emotion. Ortus had been dead weight even when alive. It had come as something of a relief when he’d gnawed his own tongue off. “I told you he was unsuitable.”
“And I told you he was the only trained candidate left.” Aiglamene leans back, bracing herself against her desk. “You have to submit to the testing, Harrow. We can’t keep throwing partners at you and watching them burn their brains out. I’m done finding you victims.”
“Then I’ll pick my own candidate.” Harrow is still wearing her armour, and she’s glad of it. It hides that she’s shaking from exhaustion. “As I should have from the beginning.”
Aiglamene shoots her a hard look.
“You know what the techs are starting to call your Jaeger?”
She shakes her head, a quick, tight tilt of the chin.
“The Locked Tomb.” Aiglamene dismisses her by turning her chair away to the window to gaze out at the production floor. “You get one chance, Harrow. For your parents’ sake. And then you get tested.”
Harrow leaves, because she doesn’t want her commander to see the beginnings of a smirk on her face.
———
Gideon Nav, junior (and not very promising) engineer in the Ninth Base Shatterdome, is pulled from sleep by the feeling of her blanket being violently yanked away and a spray of stinking seawater that is still, faintly, tinted with blood.
“Oh, hello Harrow.” She mutters, scrubbing at her eyes. “Still a heinous bitch, I see.”
Harrow’s eyes are fever-bright and hungry, which is always a terrible sign. She’d looked the same the day they were twelve and she’d stapled Gideon’s pyjamas to her bunk.
“Get to the Kwoon Combat Room.” When Harrow smiles, it’s even worse. Gideon shuffles her butt back on the bunk and puts on her best defiant expression.
“What? Fuck, no.” She squints. “Why?”
This close, Harrow is a terrible thing: a narrow faced goblin with only misery in mind, clad in an exoskeleton of black. For the first time, Gideon notices that she has threads of white in the black tangle of her hair and burst red veins in her eyes.
For the first time, she wonders when Harrow last slept.
“You’re my next partner.”