My subroutine wakes you at oh-three-thirty, a pinch of your brainstem that launches you upright, quivering, practically panting. The room for an instant is unfamiliar, a faceless gray box punctuated by a mess of angles and lines—the packages they’d left you. The chip at the base of your neck itches; then you remember that you aren’t alone, that there is a passenger in your skull now, and the weight of me in your hindbrain is dizzying, nearly nauseating. Alcatraz never prepared you for this, did it? Swearing roundly, you allow yourself a minute to level yourself, to regain your land legs. And then you remember what Meng told you: the track, in thirty minutes. More swearing.

  You’re starving. At least you aren’t short on sleep. Jet lag ensures that all the sleep you did get was sweaty and unrestful, though. As you drag yourself to the commode and piss, gargle a bleary mouthful of wash, sort out the bird’s nest of your bangs, you find yourself staggering. How are you supposed to get through an hour of laps like this? Fucking Meng. Now you remember the pilot who brought up Rachel, too, and a flare of anger lances through your grogginess. Refreshed by that, you yank on the fatigues you’d heaped onto your duffel yesterday (navy tee, grayish camo pants, combats—hardly different from what you wear at home anyway) and storm out, kit tossed over your shoulder, into the darkened hall.

  The square with the fake trees is utterly silent; when you tramp across it, the echoes of your boots ring from the walls. The stairwell, too, is silent besides your footfall, which here takes on a metallic ring. Level 52 is some dozen floors higher; you’re determined to take the stairs the whole way. Halfway there you’re wheezing, nearly bent in half. Six years selling cod paninis was a choice you now regret.

  You’re almost late by the time you arrive, panting, at 52. The back of your tee is already soaked through; the bruises from yesterday are pulsing. Would it be so bad if you didn’t show up? Would whatever Meng comes up with to thrash you for your absence be worse than doing laps in the state you’re in now? Fuck, why did you skip dinner?

  You’re midway to a full-blown pity party when you drag yourself through the door to the gymnasium complex. There you stop in your tracks and stare, slack-jawed, at the sheer size of it. Alcatraz was big—as big as you could get without spilling off the island, and with the reclaimed concrete skirts around the edges of the academy grounds proper, it was spilling a little as it was. You’d been taught that things got even bigger with real state-of-the-art Titans involved, not the rinky-dink training models at the school; you’d glimpsed them, the real deal, during visits to the hangars off the shore of Tiburon. But this—and not even a hangar, not even built for a Titan itself!—is a complex for giants, ceilings easily a hundred feet above you, climbing walls and ropes spilling down from it, windows along one side looking out onto a tarry black sky, twilight spilling in through the glass. And the running track itself stretches all the way around the room, easily five hundred feet end to end and still not flush with the far walls. Beside it, opposite the windows, are banks of lockers; one of these has your name on it, surely. You shut your gaping mouth and beeline for those.

  You’re certainly late now, but what can you do? Here’s a moment of peace and quiet you’re not eager to pass up. So you savor it, stretch out the tardy, what’s a little more scolding later—you find a locker that looks alright, take your time opening it and shoving your kit in, take a minute to breathe.

  As you shut the door the locker next to you says, “You’re late.”

  Fuck! You nearly jump out of your skin. Five inches from you a shadow unpeels itself from the wall, jumps down from a perch on top of the row—it’s a person, and as your eyes adjust you see by silhouette that she’s lanky, taller than you, in fatigues like you are, a loose long hoodie. She’s looking at you. The bill of a cap shadows her face.

  (You remember now: the girl outside Meng’s office, the one you almost didn’t notice. And then what Meng said about a senior watching you. Oh.)

  “Sorry,” you mumble, still hot with adrenaline.

  The girl shrugs. “I don’t give a shit,” she says. Her voice is cool. A little hoarse. In the gloom you can’t make out her features. Is it better or worse to know what the person watching you humiliate yourself for the next hour looks like? “You might want to, though.”

  “What,” you say, struggling to recover your dignity, “because Meng’ll slap me on the wrist if I’m tardy?”

  She shrugs again.

  You fight the urge to ask her not to tell. You say, “Alright. Well. What do I do?”

  The girl pauses. “Meng told you, right?”

  Slowly, you nod. “Hour of laps,” you say.

  “Right.” She sounds like she wants to be here even less than you do. “Just here to make sure you really do it.”

  You stare dumbly. “Do I have to—are you going to time me or something?”

  You guess her silence is enough of an answer. Not a talker. Cool. You can work with that.

  You’re halfway back to the track when from behind you you hear, “What did you do to get on her shit list?”

  You turn back. She’s stopped about ten feet from you, leaning next to a rack of weights, one hand in her pocket. Face still in shadow—thanks wholly to the cap now that you’re away from the wall.

  “Heard you punched Gutierrez,” she supplies.

  “Yeah. Sure. Something like that,” you say and turn your back again, close the distance to the track. You’d rather just get this over with.

  Easier said than done. Not even fifty paces into your first lap the doors at the end of the gym bang open. “Shit, Carol, I’m so fucking hung over—” Your blood runs cold. You know that voice—remember it pronouncing, not twelve hours ago, that you’d kill yourself like Rachel had if they bullied you too much.

  “So do it hung over,” says Carol, unperturbed.

  An explosive sigh. “Fuck off, man. I don’t want to be here.” Your bully pauses. “Who’s on the track?” Another pause. Then, sotto voce, not so much that you still can’t make it out: “Oh, fuck, she’s here? Shit shit shit.”

  Carol, your faceless senior, observes dryly, “Meng likes her irony.”

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Well, this is great, isn’t it.

  “Hasn’t been an hour yet.” That’s directed at you. “You done already?”

  So the new company is Gutierrez, you figure, the one she said you punched. Well, Carol’s right, you ought to keep running, and that’s as good an excuse as any to get away from this Gutierrez, all the better not to let her faze you again, can’t let the pilots see you cry when you haven’t even been here a day, but -

  “Hey!” Oh no. Gutierrez is trotting up behind you. You can see her shadow rippling over the steadily lightening floor like a shark across shallows—if sharks were built like linebackers. She sounds out of breath. “Hey. New girl.” You should’ve just kept running; now you’re rooted in place like a deer in the headlights. “Kanagawa. Right?”

  “You’re scaring her,” says Carol mildly.

  “Yeah. Kanagawa. That’s me,” you say, as deep and tough as you can muster. “You’re the pilot I punched, right?”—which might have been the least bit badass if your voice didn’t crack on the last bit. Nice, Em.

  Gutierrez laughs, short and loud. For a heartbeat you think she’s about to sock you back. “Yeah, that’s me,” she says. “Hey. I deserved that.”

  Is she joking? Is this some kind of setup? You blink up at her (she’s easily two heads taller than you and half again as wide), and in the gloaming she just sticks her hand out (you see even in this dimness that there’s a nice purple blotch right around where you clipped her on the cheek) and waits for you to take it.

  O-kay. So you take it. Her grip is terrifyingly strong.

  She shakes once, firm. Doesn’t let go. “Gotta work on your right hook, though,” she says. “Not going to sugarcoat it, kiddo.”

  Is that—a threat somehow? You can’t tell. Her face, what you can see of it, is honest enough. “Well,” you mumble, “I’m left-handed.”

  Her laugh this time is longer, real. “Sure. How about I help you improve your technique—fucking Meng says we’re stuck together for the next few dozen mornings anyway. In exchange—” she lets go of your hand at last; you’re gonna need to massage some feeling back into it for sure—“don’t use my own medicine against me. Deal?”

  From somewhere behind you two Carol drawls, “You ladies getting back to it or do you want to just get a room at this point?”

  “Shut the fuck up, Chang, you’re just mad you don’t get any,” says Gutierrez and, without missing a beat, launches into a long, easy lope that takes her down the track away from you alarmingly fast, faster than she makes it look. Over her shoulder she calls, “You gonna keep up or what, new kid?” That’s a challenge if you’ve ever heard one. You’re damn well gonna try.

  This, too, is easier said than done. Fifteen minutes in you’re bent in half, wheezing, the back of your shirt and ass and crotch of your pants completely soaked in sweat. Ahead of you, Gutierrez is steaming along like there’s no such thing as lactic acid buildup. Or running out of breath. Hungover your ass. Gutierrez is fast and steady and you’re so out of shape it crosses the line past embarrassing into straight-up concerning.

  Twenty minutes in she laps you. You’re breathing so hard your whole body shudders with every step. Your mouth tastes like iron, and Gutierrez hasn’t flagged at all. Hurts your ego all the more knowing this is the pilot who shit-talked you yesterday.

  You’re not giving up, of course—you can’t, but it’s a downright bloodbath. (When’s the last time you did any serious exercise? Bike rides by the bay from time to time, sure, when you had time. But most of your time was spent at home on the couch reading stuff Dad sent you from across the sea, books about Zoroastrianism and the Eleusinian Mysteries and shamanic religion on the steppe, or playing stupid video games, or strumming your guitar shittily, anything but going outside and moving and thinking about Rachel, about the news, about the letter you’d gotten when she’d died, about her photograph on the mantle. What it felt like when she died. Why.)

  You’re so busy feeling sorry for yourself that you almost don’t notice when Gutierrez stops abruptly. She stands, statuesque, in the middle of the track, gleaming with sweat (same navy tee, same fatigues: difference is she fills hers out the way you don’t), panting lightly.

  You too stumble to a stop behind her. Why is she stopping? You feel like chewed gum. Fuck, is she looking at you? Does she smell blood in the water? You can’t tell what expression she’s wearing—she’s too far ahead. Your lungs hurt so fucking much.

  Carol (from somewhere behind you now—you’d lost track of where she was half an hour ago) says, “Hasn’t been an hour.” The clock on the wall reads a big red glowing oh-five-hundred.

  “Don’t tell Meng,” says Gutierrez. “Fuck this, though. I’m done.” She jerks a thumb in your direction: you’re too busy trying and failing to cough up a ball of phlegm—like a cat with a hairball—to protest. “She’s done too. Look at her.” An insult or an olive branch? You can’t tell. “We gonna get in early for the breakfast line or what?”

  “You don’t think Meng will find out anyway?” says Carol languidly, who you now see has materialized across the track, propped herself against one of the pulldown machines that studs the end of the middle island. Her gray half-lit silhouette swims in your vision.

  Gutierrez is looking at you. You think Carol is, too.

  Gutierrez says, “Nah. Newbie’s not going to snitch. Are you?”

  Here is a stark crossroads. You still remember what she said yesterday, of course. You could—you could get her in trouble. But you really don’t want to keep going, so snitching would get you both in trouble. You have a feeling you’d get on some kind of shit list even if that weren’t the case. And you’ve never been one to snitch, anyway.

  Revenge and her shit list, or keep your head down? Fundamentally it comes down to this: you’re some little book nerd and Gutierrez is an apex predator, a Titan pilot for fuck’s sake, and you had the gall to punch her not twenty-four hours ago. You’re acutely aware that Gutierrez is huge, way bigger than you, and you’re a sniveling flaccid mess, and if she wanted to beat you up right now (like happened to kids on Alcatraz every two days while you were there) you’d be shit out of luck. And the way she’s squinting at you right now, you can’t tell if she’s thinking about beating you up or if she’s taking pity.

  You remember what Meng said: Nothing matters when you’re out there, a mile under, except what you do.

  You shake your head.

  “See?” Gutierrez shrugs. “We’re good.”

  Silence. Carol seems to be considering this. You’re still bent too much in half to see for yourself.

  At last the reply comes: “Sure, whatever.”

  “Cool,” says Gutierrez. Then she turns to you and raises her hand, and you shut your eyes and brace yourself for the hit. She claps you on the shoulder, firm, cordial. “Good try, new girl,” she says. “You look like shit. Take a break. You’ve earned it.”

  You blink up at her. “Yeah,” you gasp, “yeah, will do. For sure.”

  “Cool!” She steps back. What you can make out in the lightening room is a big blocky handsome face and broad dark brows, and when she grins even rows of big square white teeth flash in the dark. “Just don’t be late for roll call. Fucking Meng doesn’t like it when we do that.” Blessedly you hear her boots tromping away from you; the prey response in you relaxes, you’re finally able to cough up that spit and gasp in a proper lungful of air. Your legs are about to give out. You’re on the brink of collapse. Can’t let them see you do that, though. Gingerly you lower yourself to the ground and hear, as if through water, very distantly: “What’s for breakfast anyway? God, I hope they have eggs… Holly said it’s good for hangovers. Yeah, raw. Cabbage too…”

  That sounds disgusting, you think to yourself very, very slowly, as if the thoughts are rising up toward you from the bottom of a bell jar underwater. Your heart thunders in your chest. You should be happy, shouldn’t you? You should be relieved. You’ve passed some kind of test. But your whole body’s on fire, your face is hot with shame and exhaustion alike, and worse, something’s missing, something’s important. After a long moment it hits you: you forgot to bring your canteen. Fuck.

  Only later, stumbling alone out of the gymnasium, red-eyed and parched and still tired as hell, does it occur to you: you still haven’t seen her face.