Mcmolly

Amygdala Circuit

She wasn’t alone in the dark, less now than almost ever. A shape manifested imperceptibly across from her, glinting off of light that wasn’t there before the shadows claimed it again, and left it hardly more than a smudge against the black.

But Quinn could feel it. Could feel her there. Fingers raked gently through her brain, picking at the thoughts submerged so deeply therein that she wouldn’t be able to tell if they were truly hers or nor—only that she felt them.

“Now we feel real,” she said, excitement shaking her voice. “Now we show them why.”

Besca’s voice piped up in her ear. “You girls in?”

“We’re ready,” Dahlia answered. Quinn might have seen that little shape grin at the sound of their sister’s voice.

“Good. Listen, CSC’s all occupied, so you both are gonna have to handle one of the singularities each. Deelie you’ve got the northern one, we’re lining up…now. Get into position, you’re shock-dropping in. There’ll be a town about four miles south of you, but north past the singularity there’s nothing, you’re free-range that direction.”

“Got it.”

There was a shaking outside, a heavy thumping Quinn could feel even through the cockpit as Dragon got into position. Shortly, a siren blared—the lift hatch opening, followed by the sharp hiss of the hard-light barrier keeping everything from being sucked out into the void of space.

“And…go, go, go!” A scraping sound, another blaring as the hatch resealed moments later. Besca’s voice came again, this time over the speakers. “Brace for redirection.” Again the Aerie shifted, though inside the Savior it was nowhere near as jarring.

“Quinn,” Besca said, back in her ear again on the pilots’ comms. The ways he sounded, it seemed like she’d wanted to say hun’. “We’ve got two Modir coming out of a singularity in the west, heading towards a city about thirty miles south. It’s farmland out there, lot of flat ground, not a lot of cover. You’re gonna have to shock-drop, alright? You’ve gotta get yourself through the hatch, then disconnect—don’t reconnect until you’re through the atmosphere, got it? Try to cushion your fall if you can, but if you can’t, then ball up, disconnect and lock yourself into the seat. Ablaze can take the impact, just reconnect once you’ve actually landed.”

The siren blared again.

“We’re lining up…and…good to go. On you, Quinn.”

Amygdala Circuit

Besca watched as the pair of fresh Casobani pilots charged courageously at the singularity as it spewed forth a deluge of ink-black creatures. Most were crushed underfoot, and what surged past them was mopped up by the lines of military barricades waiting behind. Eventually a sizable beast, nearly half as tall as the Saviors, breached the void, rushing one of them on four legs, with a wickedly-horned head leading the way. A Modir clawed its way out shortly after to engaged the other one.

The news feed quickly became inundated with drone-feeds, cycling between close-ups and wide-shots, while the anchors rattled off play-by-plays like sports commentators. For a brief moment that whole country held its breath, waiting to see if the newcomers would fold in their first battle. Even Besca found herself worried, instinctually.

But there was no need. The pilots were swift, graceful, and they were obviously toying with their opponents—likely as they’d been instructed to. The pageantry of it all never failed to frustrated her; at least with someone like Dahlia, things were over quickly and without theatrics.

They’ll be in a good mood after this, she thought, but it wasn’t reassuring. This demonstration was as much for the people of Casoban as it was for the ESC. Eusero’s space station was parked right by Casoban’s, watching, assessing. This was an audition; that they would ally themselves was practically given, but the unspoken question of what Casoban brought to their allegiance had yet to be answered. They had to prove that their poor performance at the duel wasn’t a systemic weakness.

Well, good for them.

She’d been trying to ring the CSC station all morning with no luck. All week, really. There’d been no formal severing of ties, nothing in writing to say ‘You fucked up, that’s it,’ but the message was clear nevertheless. She almost felt bad for Toussaint; the man was likely still fighting for their alliance with Runa, and it would undoubtedly cost him his job. Some new Euseran shill would be at the helm soon enough, then there’d be no conversations at all.

Besca had half a mind to just leave. Why did she need to be here for this? The Board was looking for her replacement, and there was nothing she could do about it—there was nothing she could do about anything. So why not leave? Why not just go spend what time she had left up here with Quinn, and Deelie, and just enjoy herself?

With a resigned sigh, Besca started for the door. Fuck it, she’d take the girls to CB Danes, browse some online shops. They’d make an afternoon out of it.

Then she heard it—the beeping. The chatter in the room fell instantly quiet, and everyone went still. Except Besca.

“Where?” she asked, whirling back around. She pulled up the tracking map of Runa, scanning furiously for blips signaling a singularity. But there were none—at least, not here.

On the TV, news stations scrambled, their anchors speaking so quickly and anxiously that the auto-translate struggled to keep up. But she caught enough: Two more singularities were opening in Casoban.

---

“That’s scary,” one of the technicians said. “They showed up fast.”

“Happened during the duel, too, remember?” said another.

“Didn’t even have time to set up barricades.”

The crew was split, gathered into clots around TV screens across the hangar. They watched, muttering and worried, as the news showed the CSC station lowering its elevator on the outskirts of Gontiard, where already a small horde of creatures was charging towards the city.

“That’s Château,” Tillie said, pointing to the Savior that leapt from the platform. Looking down at Quinn, she realized the girl might not have been as thoroughly invested in pilots from other nations. “He’s probably their best when it comes to handling Modir. But with the new guys still on the coast, that only leaves Foudre to deal with the other singularity—she’s more of a duelist.”

Usually, whenever she went off spouting trivia, people just told her to shut up. Now, though, the eyes that turned to her did so deference, and she felt suddenly burdened with responsibility.

“S-She’s fought Modir before, though, I’m sure she’ll be fine. Plus, the others will be done soon, then they can help.”

“No they can’t,” someone said.

The news went hysteric; a fourth and fifth singularity were opening.

Static crackled overhead, then a voice thundered throughout the Aerie’s comms—it was Besca.

“Brace for redirection.”

A moment later the Aerie shuddered and lurched. The crew grabbed onto railings, the wall, or got low to the floor. Tillie was unlucky, stumbling to the ground alongside a slew of smaller, unsecured tools and devices. Before the general air of surprise could shift into anger, the intercoms sounded again.

“All hands to stations. Pilots, prepare to disembark.”

All eyes turned briefly to Quinn, but unlike some of the looks she would and had been getting from the staff in other areas of the ship, everyone here seemed to hold her in confidence. As the crew split up and hurried to their stations, she got nods and assured pats on the shoulder. Go get’em, girl, they seemed to say.

Tillie was much more forthright. “Okay! Uhm! Go get changed, I’ll finish up getting Ablaze ready for you!” She reached out awkwardly, miraculously still unsure of just how to operate her hands at a time like this, and wound up settling for a firm grasping of Quinn’s shoulders and a smile, before she darted off.

Down below, shouts of encouragement rang out as a familiar face dashed across the hanger on a full-tilt sprint for the lockers—Dahlia.

Amygdala Circuit

Tillie blinked. “Huh?”

She realized she must have sounded rather rude, but, in her defense—huh?. The perception of pilots in the public sector versus governmental was often contradictory, but Tillie had always been immune to it. She’d managed to carry that starry-eyed adoration with her from her childhood bedroom all the way up to the Aerie. In part she figured that was due to Runa’s pilots being generally well-liked; certain social histories documented that the earliest batches of a nation’s pilots were often the most well-regarded, followed by the pilots who came in to replace those who were especially ill-regarded. Had she grown up somewhere like Eusero, or Helburke, where pilots were often seen doing less-than-heroic things—case-in-point being their newest guest—she might have had an entirely different view of things.

For instance, she might not have trusted that Quinn really did just want a hug. Thankfully though, Tillie found herself utterly incapable of imagining any other possibility.

“Oh—uhm! Sure! Sure let me just…” she fumbled with the suit, prying it off her legs and feet. “Still sticky, wouldn’t want to—there we go!” Tossing it onto a wheeled table, Tillie darted over and wrapped her arms around Quinn. Another embarrassingly high-pitched sound escaped her, but she ignored it.

The girl wasn’t very tall, all told. It was a bit like hugging her niece. Tillie liked to imagine they’d have gotten on—then again, Quinn could probably get on with just about anyone.

Stepping back, she let out a long, contented sigh. “Gosh, I don’t even know what to say! Some places, people have to pay out the nose just stand near pilots! Uhm! Not that I wouldn’t!”

Amygdala Circuit

Relieved that she was neither about to die, or worse, annoying Quinn, Tillie pulled herself back up to her feet and brushed herself off. It was so easy to get ahead of herself I this job; some people spent their whole lives only ever seeing a Savior from miles away, behind a military barricade. Here she was, getting to work on them every day, and better than that, working with the pilots too! It absolutely would not do to go about taking such a life for granted.

That said, when Quinn praised her work, she felt her mind shorting out again, and her cheeks went red as her hair. “O-oh gosh, uhm! Wow, really? Well, I had really good teachers, and I watched a lot of those, y’know, instructional videos. But it’s neat stuff! I mean, have you ever seen the inside of one of these guys before?”

She scooped up the device dropped to the ground in their collision, scrolling quickly through dozens of slides of data she’d recorded. She found a page detailing the assimilation rates once everything was said and done, and turned the screen excitedly over to Quinn. It was, really, just a spreadsheet of numbers—albeit all meticulously categorized and color-coded, but numbers nonetheless.

“Look how healthy it is! Like, up here is the regenerative rate, right? And here’s the assimilative rate, here—look at the difference! We dropped tungsten into its stomach, and it converted that into tissue matter way faster than it would have just healed on its own! I mean yeah the rate tanks with larger injuries but still! It’s like alchemy!”

She pulled the device, scrolling again just to double-check herself, only to remember that she was, in fact, party to her favorite pilot.

“Ohmigosh! Uhm! I’m so sorry—how are you? How’s it goin’ today? Anythin’ I can help you with? Anything you need?”

Amygdala Circuit

Tillie had had many adjectives attributed to her over the years. Quiet, dorky, boring, pasty, pretty—once, by college boy who stopped talking to her after she’d won the grant they’d both applied for. More recently things had taken a positive tilt; they called her diligent, dependable, antsy, which she chose to interpret as a good thing. But for everything she’d been called, never, not once in her life, had she ever been accused of being ‘sturdy’.

So, when Quinn barreled into her at the closest human’s could reach to mach-speed, despite the girl’s meager stature, she sent both of them sprawling to the floor. Tillie let out a yelp not unlike a small dog, but was too concerned with her immediate fate to be embarrassed.

Her first thought was: Shoot, I’ve upset her somehow and now I’m going to die. After all, everyone she’d ever spoken to about it had told her that pilots were fickle. That the weight of heroism caused them such mental strain they could be given to fits of violence at even the most minor of provocations. However, as she realized that Quinn’s grip around her was not, in fact, an attempt at snapped her spine in half, she considered the idea that she was not in trouble.

“Tillie Tillie are you--are you okay—are you okay—”

Huh?

She felt rather silly then. How could she think Quinn would try to kill her—Quinnlash Loughvein! Yet, somehow just as unlikely in her mind was the idea that the girl would be hugging her so tightly, either. When that reality made itself apparent as well, she felt like her mind might just stop working.

“Eeee—” she said—or squealed, really, as it was not words she produced. Unsure of what to do with her hands, they flittered around like hummingbirds, too afraid to actually touch her and hug back.

Blessedly, her composure did eventually return and she managed to wrestle back her grasp of language. “O-okay? Uhm! Oh gosh, I’m so much more than okay! Wow!” She pulled herself upright, momentarily mortified by the look her supervisor shot her, before they walked off. “I was just, uhm! I was just testing Ablaze’s assimilative functions. I’ve never gotten to perform it myself, it’s exhilarating! Oh—uhm! I’m sorry, were you going to do it yourself? We can totally run it again if you want!”

Amygdala Circuit

That Quinn’s celebrity status was in flux across the Aerie—and most of Illun, for that matter—was more statement than question. However, in the hangar things were stubbornly unchanged. For certain some of that starry-eyed adoration had mellowed over the months as the crew saw her more often, but unlike some of the staff in security or logistics or wherever else, here none of the faces soured at her.

They were like this with Dahlia as well. For the hangar crew, who spent most of their days laboring over the Saviors, the pilots—at least, the ones they liked—wound up as close as colleagues.

Ablaze stood in its usual spot, flanked by a pair of walls that doubled as supports. Scaffold platforms were wheeled up and anchored around its legs, though only one or two people manned them. It seemed that whatever maintenance was being run on it had already concluded, while down the way, Dragon’s was just starting.

But as she got closer, Quinn could spot a brace fixed to Ablaze’s mouth, holding its mouth open. Had Quinn ever looked into her Savior’s mouth before? Beyond those gleaming razor teeth there seemed to be nothing but blackness. Saliva, dark but not quite so much as modium, dripped in long strands to the ground, vanishing into the drainage system built into the floor.

What sort of horror must it have been, to be eaten by a monster?

It seemed she’d have an answer. A long cable attached to the brace went taut, and slowly, something crawled its way out of Ablaze’s throat. Bright orange and drenched in fluid, limbs thick, hands grasping—it was a person. They wore some sort of hazard suit, holding the cable linked to a harness on their chest with one hand, and a strange device in the other.

Even the passenger in her mind recoiled. Some maniac had gone down inside the Savior? Why? Who?

Suddenly, the alien spelunker seemed to notice Quinn approaching. They jolted, nearly dropping their machine down Ablaze’s throat, and waved with an almost hysteric excitement. They made their way out of the mouth, ducking expertly beneath the teeth and onto one of the platforms. They vanished behind the Savior’s neck, then emerged on the other side, suit undone to their waist, and waved at her again. This time, without layers of modium-resistant material blocking the way, her voice was loud and clear.

“Quinn!”

Amygdala Circuit

Dahlia hugged Quinn back. She wouldn’t cry—for starters, she didn’t have the energy. Some days it was all she could do to drag herself to the sims, she didn’t have it in her to break down so early in the morning. Besides, Quinn made that easier. However fraught she was some days, having her around made Dahlia feel…safer. More at ease.

Being a pilot was so tumultuous on the best of days. Constants were scarce, and fleeting, and at times Dahlia was scared of how close she and Quinn had become, if for no other reason than she might lose her. For now, though, she was right here.

“You don’t have to be sorry either. We’re both just…tryin’ our best, right? That’s family stuff.” She let her head rest on Quinn’s. “Real family stuff.”

Another few indulgent moments, then Dahlia let go before she could decide to forget about her responsibilities for the day.

“Alright, I’m headin’ out. Wanna do lunch? You can pick a place, just text me whenever you get hungry!” She stuck her tablet in her pocket, threw on that bright yellow jacket from the hanger, and made for the door. “Love you!”

Then she was gone, and Quinn was alone in the dorms.

Well, partly. It was rare for Quinn to ever feel truly alone these days. As Dahlia left, a longing bubbled up in her mind. A chill ghosted down her spine, brief and not uncomfortable, like the touch of a cloud. A sound like distant hoofsteps underlaid the ambient buzzing, and the quiet sound of the TV, a decreasingly strange phenomenon as the days went by.

In the corner of her eye was the flicker of a girl sitting on the counter, absently kicking her legs, vanishing in some imperceptible trick of the light, but not gone. Never gone.

The day had begun.

Amygdala Circuit

Suddenly, Dahlia wished she’d eaten faster. Then, she felt guilty. Hovvi came to her often, sometimes as a terrifying jolt in the middle of the day, others as a protracted nightmare when she slept. Every time it was the same; she saw the lake roiling, the town burning, she heard thousands of voices screaming in fear. She saw Safie die. She saw her father…

What was she supposed to do? Lie? She couldn’t. Even if she wanted to, she could never bring herself to praise someone like that. But at the same time, what did spilling every detail of Hovvi’s destruction do for anyone? What did Quinn gain listening to Dahlia try to explain it all without breaking down? What did she gain dragging herself through it again?

But she couldn’t lie to Quinn.

“I didn’t like him,” she said flatly. “He got on with everyone, and people liked to be around him. I thought he was a selfish jerk. But he helped Runa for a long time, before…Hovvi.”

Her appetite was gone. She set her fork down and dumped what was left on her plate into the trash, then took it to the kitchen. What would Quinn do in her place? How would she feel about someone like that? Would she be as merciful to Lucis as she was to Roaki? Probably—or at least, she’d handle it better than Dahlia was.

“I’m…I’m sorry. Is it okay if we don’t…talk about this? I didn't...I’m still kinda working through it with Follen. I…I don’t really even know how I feel, yet.” She shrank a bit over the sink. "I'm sorry."

Amygdala Circuit

Stupid of her not to expect this. What, had she believed Quinn could go the rest of her life without hearing his name? That would have been practically impossible for a civilian, let alone a pilot so connected to what had happened to her. And yet, somehow, she’d managed to avoid it this long. Her memories of that night were foggy, scattered. Certain, unfortunate images had stuck with her, but the details seemed to be lost.

Besca could count on two hands the number of people who actually knew what happened in Hovvi, and fewer than that who had seen the footage. Just about none of them worked on the Aerie. She had, of course, been sworn to secrecy for the sake of Runa’s alliance with Casoban—who she wasn’t even certain were aware themselves, even at the highest level. Frankly, she had expected the RISC to try and leverage it against them, but by now either they hadn’t, or the CSC didn’t care.

Either way, hearing people speak Lucis’s name with the same reverence they did Ghaust and Safie turned her stomach. But she’d held her tongue this long, and, really, what would letting go now do for anyone?

“Oh,” Besca said, sighing and shaking her head. “He was one of the pilots who died in Hovvi. Part of the exchange deal we had going on with Casoban.” Her tablet beeped, and she didn’t have to look to know it was the Board. “Speaking of…”

Setting her fork down, Besca donned her coat and came around the counter. She gave Dahlia a quick hug, sharing a knowing glance with her—perhaps the last person on the Aerie who deserved to have to keep such an awful secret. Then she went to Quinn, planted a kiss on top of her head and squeezed her close.

“You both be good, I’ll try to be back for dinner.”

And with that, she went out to face whatever shitstorm was waiting for her today.

Dahlia was finishing up as well, though she seemed to be in less of a hurry. “Think I’m headin’ for the sims. How about you?”

Amygdala Circuit

Besca let Quinn swerve the topic of her dream. There were a lot of things she still didn’t fully understand about the girl, like what went on in that head of hers when she laid down at night. Most people, especially so early on into their piloting careers, were utterly wrecked with nightmares. Some managed to string out their honeymoon phases longer than others, but usually after they’d squared off against the Modir a few times, they began to dread shutting their eyes at the end of the day.

Yet Quinn, who by every account ought to have been entirely unable to sleep for the amount of terror Besca expected her to face at night, sleep soundly and, apparently, pleasantly. She thought about the ‘Little Her’ Quinn had told them about. The thing that came curiously to her in her dreams. Whatever it was, it was undeniably tied to the Circuit—it had to be—which meant that no matter how it presented itself, it was dangerous. But for now there was nothing to be done but to keep her monitored just like they did any other pilot, and thus far she was, diagnostically-speaking, fine.

Things were picking up on the TV. A countdown was displayed at the top of the screen, presumably for when the singularity would open. Besca knew better; the only people with the instruments to most accurately predict it were the analysts in the CSC. Nevertheless, as the clock ticked down, the two newcomers made their way to their Saviors with raucous fanfare. On their way, the broadcaster pulled up a familiar face: a picture of Lucis Abroix. It seemed they were holding some sort of memorial for him.

Besca grimaced and went back to her own meal, nearly finished, and returned her attention to Quinn. “So what’s on your agenda for the day, hun?”