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This morning, the war clock resets to zero, and Kaz Brekker knows that he is cursed. Death and loss dog his steps, mangy and persistent, always have, too constant for coincidence. It had started with Jordie; Kaz has never been stupid enough to believe it would end with him.

Everybody knows the story, of course. Kaz and Jordie Brekker, underdog up-and-comers, two skinny Cat II orphans who’d scrapped on street corners until they looked old enough to walk into a recruiting station and then kept on scrapping until they’d graduated the ranger program with honors. They’d never even humored the idea of drifting with anybody else and hardly anybody was fool enough to ever ask them to. They’d been on their way to breaking records, the papers said. Three drops, three kills, on their way to four, and they were clean, too, kaiju never died that easy. That’s what everybody said, anyway. Up until the end.

Up until the heat, and the screaming, and the pain, and the dying, the feeling of Jordie fucking dying still attached to him by the fucking brain and the dragging, boiling, empty pressure of the jaeger on his own. Of being on his own for the first time in his life.

Until the screaming he still hears in his head when it’s too quiet, the cane he uses to get around these days, which isn’t even a problem, really, because he knows plenty of disabled pilots who rehabbed and kept right on dropping, but- well.

Until he tried drifting again two years later, for the first time since his world bisected, with this quick-talking rookie kid Jesper Fahey and got stuck chasing rabbits so long it’d nearly killed them both. Three days, to be exact.

Spend seventy-two hours in anybody’s head and try to imagine the rest of your life outside their back pocket.

Which is to say, Jesper had imprinted hard, attached himself to Kaz’s side like a limpet despite the discouraging reality of Kaz’s attitude, which was hostile, and his prospects, which were nonexistent.

Whether this had been fortunate or not for either of them is still up for debate, but the facts are that the grasping, tendrily things left behind in him by Jordie’s amputation had fused just as firmly to Jesper in return without any question as to Kaz’s thoughts on the matter. Where he goes, I go.

Jesper likes to joke that Kaz is his personal trainer, or his bodyguard, or his escort, depending on his mood. The truth of them is something more complicated, or maybe something simpler. They are, willing or not, two dysfunctional halves of a dependent whole. In a more grounded sense, Kaz is Jesper’s “mentor,” as though he has the right to claim such a thing after three drops, three kills, and a cautionary tale.

Whatever they called it, it was why Kaz was present that day, just off the mats while Jesper warmed up. He was fully recovered from his cruise through Kaz’s subconscious, and medically cleared to test out a different partner, one less likely to drag him through the drift by the throat, please and thanks. Jesper’s always been a good pilot and even better in the drift, flexing around the shape of the mind and memories presented to him to match. It means he has potential to pair with more suitors than most - it was why he’d been presented to a volatile, unmatchable Kaz, at first. He could align with any of the fresh grads lined up against the far wall well enough to be dancing with them in seconds. But Kaz was there, as his mentor, for all the good that’d do either of them, and for Jesper - who he hardly knew, who’d worn his brain like a straightjacket for three straight days, and to whom he owed quite a lot for the pleasure - he wouldn’t permit anything but the best.

The best, it had appeared, was not forthcoming. Several long minutes of awkward sparring and mind numbing repartee had Kaz near to throwing in the towel on this graduating class when a slight, straight-backed shadow had slipped out of the ranks and onto the mat.

She was something different. He’d known as soon as she took her first step.

And Kaz had found himself nearly lost in the two of them, the lithe conversation, the twisting bodies - the synchronicity. He remembered feeling part of something like that. He remembered the adrenaline and the satisfaction in knowing, like it was his own, where Jordie’s bo staff would land next.

He’d recognized the tight, fierce little smile tucked furtively into the shadow’s cheek as Jesper dropped her to the mat, tying them 3-3, like looking in a mirror three years ago.

“I don’t need to see anything else,” Kaz had said, finally speaking up. “She’s the one.”

Jesper had nodded, grinning already as he clambered upright, carefully avoiding stepping on his new partner now their bout was over. Meanwhile, Inej Ghafa’s head had snapped up, gaze locking on Kaz as if noticing him for the first time. She’d risen to those light feet, ignoring Jesper’s outstretched hand, in a heartbeat; crossed the room to stand face to face with Kaz in less.

“What is this?” she’d asked, voice kept nearly level. She’d cast her frantic gaze around the room, as if looking for someone to blame. “What is he doing here?”

When no one answered, she stepped even closer.

“What are you doing here?” she’d asked again, directly to Kaz this time. She’d grown wild, no more forced calm. “Finally looking for a new partner, are you?”

Kaz’s face had twisted mean, his thoughts meaner, hackles raising before he forced them flat.

“No,” he’d said. He’s dead. I’m dead, too. “I can’t.”

“Can’t,” Inej had repeated, her voice flinty.

What to say to that? He’d nodded.

“Why.”

“That,” Kaz had said tightly, “is not your concern, ranger.”

“It is, though,” she’d said, loud, shaky. “It is, because we are fighting a war, and you- Kaz Brekker, I know who you are, of course I do, you were one of the best. And when your brother- when- I prayed for you to- I- you gave up! What, because you’ve lost someone, because you’ve lost someone the way all of the rest of us in the world have, you think you can just- just run away and hide and quit? Fight me, you goddamned coward.”

The way she had glared at him, eyes ablaze, chest heaving, baby hairs loosing themselves from her tight braid and framing her face in a halo of refracted light - it had punched something out from the middle of him.

Oh, Kaz had thought, in this instantaneous, visceral way, fuck.

“I’m retired,” he’d rasped, instead of verbalizing that particular thought, and limped out of the room in what he hoped looked like righteous outrage but probably more closely resembled panic.

Just as the door had swung shut behind him, he’d heard Jesper’s wry voice confirming, “She’s definitely the one,” and he’d thought, even more viciously than the first time, fuck.

Sometime after Jordie - and wasn’t it all, won’t it always be, anymore, and that fact had felt endless, then - but before Jesper, swimming unmoored in the deep hole his brother had left behind and haunting cobwebbed corners of the shatterdome at all hours, Kaz met a decrepit K-scientist who called himself Specht. Specht claimed, among other things, to be one of the world’s preeminent experts on kaiju, in fact. It was a title that meant next to nothing in those days, when the extent of human curiosity vis a vis The Kaiju Problem began and ended with “How can we most efficiently make them die?”

He was a meaningless thing among meaningless things, to Kaz, for whom nothing was particularly meaningful anymore, but this had meant that he was no more meaningless than any of the rest. To this day he can’t entirely explain what had piqued his interest. Was it the gruff manner in which the old man had clapped Kaz on the shoulder that first meeting? A latently burning, know thy enemy -style desire for vengeance? Simple academic curiosity, perhaps. Or, perhaps the way Specht had eschewed platitudes in favor of informing him bluntly, “Whether or not you believe it, boy, there are better ways to spend your time than waiting to die. You’re not spent yet.”

Inspiration notwithstanding, Kaz had begun trailing after Specht soon thereafter. He’d been a silent specter at the old man’s heels as he collected specimens and data, developed and conducted hypotheses and experiments, wrote and published paper after paper after paper. It forced him to keep regular hours, because Specht did, and built his cardio back up, because Specht was remarkably spry for his age. And, after a time, Specht had forced Kaz to help, rather than loiter. To arrange microscope slides, calibrate centrifuges, slice up kaiju specimens, format data tables. Eventually - after his catastrophic drift with Jesper, when Kaz felt his life and what he’d intended for it splitting apart at the seams once again, when he’d returned to Specht and his lab with a fervency that had shocked them both - to co-author papers.

It had been unexpected, nearly unintentional, but somewhere along the way, he’d joined Specht and his very few colleagues as an authority on kaiju biology and tactics. Know thy enemy, indeed. And Specht had been right, of course - it was better than waiting to die.

Useful, too, because once Jesper was partnered, Kaz had had his work cut out for him.

Inej’s resentment had not lasted terribly long, in the grand scheme of things. It only took until the first time she and Jesper had drifted, until she’d caught a sidelong glimpse of the contents of that lingering seventy-two hour-long KazandJesper sinkhole tucked in his brain’s back pocket, for the walls to start coming down. It hadn’t, by any means, been all at once. But it had been enough to work with.

They had a year of mandatory workups prior to taking post as active pilots. Wraith, a revamped legacy rig with a fresh digital processor, needed final tune-ups before they’d be able to take her for a spin, and in the meantime her rangers would undergo tune-ups of their own. Kaz’s position was, of course, strictly advisory. The dome kept athletic trainers on staff and employed rangers who’d been temporarily grounded, often due to injury or a partner’s retirement, to run the mats and the simulators.

That hadn’t stopped him from involving himself wherever possible, though. His old arrogance, it seemed, had not quite been beaten out of him. So he’d gone to the marshal to demand an official position as Wraith’s pilots’ handler. And then, with a healthy portion of his usual obstinance and even more of his usual pride, he’d shouldered his way into the gyms, the simulators, the briefings with them, cane thumping across floors that he hadn’t been welcome to tread in nearly three years. He’d advised and wheedled and pushed, and watched as they’d grown stronger, and their bond had grown stronger with them.

And as the days wore on, as they grew closer, Kaz had felt himself fading further away from them. And that was fine, he’d told himself, it was how things were supposed to be. The permanent hole punched in Jesper’s head to match his own did not entitle him to anything. More than that, Kaz was liable for the two of them now, for how they trained, how they strategized, how they drifted, for god’s sake . It was at best foolish and at worst grossly irresponsible for him to crave the intimacy they accessed so easily. Better for him to simply establish professional boundaries before they were established for him. Better not to make them say it.

But when they’d noticed him trying to distance himself, Inej and Jesper had grabbed hold with both hands and wrangled him into something alarmingly resembling an Emotional Conversation, and then they’d all resumed living out of each other’s back pockets as though Kaz’s “transient idiocy” (Jesper’s words) had never happened.

If pressed, before the world ended, Kaz would have grumbled that, yes, fine, Jordie was obviously the person he loved most in the world. The only person he loved, possibly, with their parents dead and no extended family to speak of and cruel, callous times which grew cruel, callous people. Living in each other’s heads had only made it worse, because if knowing wasn’t love, then what was, and goddamn if drifting wasn’t the purest form of it. Put bluntly, love had been the drift, until it was ripped right out of him in a spray of jagged steel and live wires. To lose that ability had been akin to losing his own humanity. But over the course of a year, he came to know these two - better than anyone else in the world. And with the knowing came- well.

It would have been understandable, with the groove Kaz’s proteges had worn into their drift, for them to fall into something that looked like InejandJesper, and also Kaz. It still feels like it even now, in a painfully itchy, amputative sort of way. But he knows that the rest of the dome looks at them and sees a bizarre, six-legged organism - of one mind, three bodies, and an altogether innumerable quantity of stolen sweaters.

They’d wriggled under his skin, is what he’s saying, felted into the fabric of his life, and regardless of whether or not they felt the same, of whether or not they preferred each other’s company to his - because who wouldn’t, really - it had lit a fire under his ass. As they’d come up on the end of their final training block, ever closer to Wraith’s cockpit and all that that entailed, he was a man possessed, fueled by this burning need to keep them safe. Kaz had been intimately entangled with loss his whole life. He was unwilling to allow this, new and tender and green, to further that torrid affair. He taught them everything he knew and then some, scoured tactical pubs and scientific journals for assigned reading, ran them ragged on the mats, drove them to distraction in the sims. They’d been ready to kill him and each other, by the last week before they were rotated from reserve to active, but he’d felt something like satisfied, at last.

Let them seethe. Let them hate him. Let them live.

Specht had often said, back when they’d worked together - before he’d been forced farther inland last year by the sort of rare medical conditions that come of working with dubiously hazardous alien flesh for the lion’s share of one’s adult life - that the only experience wasted is one you haven’t learned anything from. It was one of those truisms that the old man was prone to sermonizing on while Kaz was formatting tables or rotely transcribing handwritten data, but it had also been, well, true.

So, though Kaz had known he’d done good work with Inej and Jesper, though he’d known they were ready, more than ready, that they were good, he’d still known better. Kaz Brekker is cursed, and Kaz Brekker is doomed, and Kaz Brekker is not cocky, not anymore. So he’d called in backup.

Matthias Helvar and Nina Zenik had been drafted into the program following an arrest conducted when they were both just shy of turning 18. Neither of them much likes to talk about the incident or the offense, but it’s generally known that they were informed in no uncertain terms there was roughly zero chance of their being charged as minors. With the promise that their sentences would be commuted and could be served concurrently with their time in the rig - a generous offer they’d received because of their conspicuous if begrudging drift compatibility in a season when recruiting numbers were down - they’d managed to avoid the alternative, which would undoubtedly have been time and hard labor in one of the penal colonies constantly springing up in the shadow of the coastal wall project.

They’d come up with a chip on their shoulder and firmly within their own blast radius, but had somehow survived a good couple years of both each other and active drops off the oft-targeted coast of Japan before their eventual transfer to the same southern California base as Kaz and his rangers. Kaz had met them only once, before. They’d been a fractious, cannibalistic yet fiercely defensive unit that he, pressed shoulder to shoulder with Jordie, had registered at the time with a bizarre combination of amusement and horror. He hadn’t been sure what to expect from them this time around, hadn’t cared to guess beyond pulling their dossier to ensure they were as lethal as the rumors claimed. Still, it had surprised him to find that somewhere along the way mutually assured destruction had tilted on its axis.

They’d been no less bitchy when they arrived in California than they’d been in Japan, bickering with each other and anyone else unfortunate enough to find themself in their general atmosphere. But now there was - Matthias’s hand in Nina’s back pocket, most days. Twin gold chains around their wrists.

They were no less capable, either. They proved that much within the week, when the breach opened up and spat out a welcome gift.

The new arrivals had been transferred, on paper, to relieve a pair of old-timers on their way to retirement, but in actuality were obviously there to shore up the new rookie team while they found their footing active duty. Inej and Jesper had resented the lack of confidence, but Kaz had specifically requested Corpsewitch for the task, cashing all his personal favors and wheedling the brass until they caved. There are not many rangers left standing from Kaz’s day; Matthias and Nina are.

Today’s drop is their fifth alongside Wraith. After seeing them in action for the first time several months ago, Inej and Jesper’s ire melted into something closer to idol worship; they’d made fast friends with Nina and shortly thereafter the three of them had joined forces to draw the more reticent Matthias out of his shell. The blooming camaraderie has seemed to make today’s predicted double event slightly less daunting to their rookie team. Corpsewitch doesn’t need comfort, of course. For them, this is old hat - the legacy analog-hybrid rig is more than halfway to triple digits these days, with a near one-to-one drop-to-kill ratio. It’s a mythic career. A record any ranger would kill and bleed for.

Kaz thinks sometimes about how Rietveld looked, crumpled and smoking on the beach he’d managed to drag her to, half dead as he was and wishing he were the rest of the way there. There’d been a surreal quality to her, to seeing something so unassailable suddenly terrible and vulnerable. Like seeing your father cry for the first time and realizing the world can touch him after all.

After, she’d been deemed unrecoverable and stripped for parts - the war effort waits for no factory line - and then retired, the remaining unusable framework of her melted down for scrap. She’d been one of the last analog builds still kicking, one of the only Dutch models that had made it past early development. Kaz sometimes feels, bizarrely, as though he let her down.

And then, this morning.

“Come back,” he’d said, like every time before, forehead pressed to their plex helmets, inches from them, miles, Come back to me. “No mourners.”

And they’d said, “No funerals,” like every time, like it was ever that simple.

He sits on his hands now, alone, high in the scaffolding of some other nameless, digital pre-commission rig, and he waits for hours.

These days he thinks he understands the shape of Inej’s anger back then, the flavor of it. The way a girl like her, who had lost it all in the space of minutes, could catch the news on a half-splintered television in the bombed out wreckage of her life, could watch someone like Kaz and someone like Jordie build something out of a hell she was just now coming to know the full shape of. How the thought that this loss, this emptiness, didn’t have to define her or kill her, could instead cremate a lonely, scared child and turn her into something different entirely, a phoenix rising from the ashes - how that could give her hope . Or something like that, to hear Jesper tell it. She’d heard about Jordie when she graduated basic, and she’d mourned a boy she’d never known. And she’d waited. Waited for Kaz to rise again from those same ashes that had created her. And he never had.

At first, she’d prayed for his survival. After a time, she’d prayed that he’d died.

Kaz knows, intimately, the exact dimensions of disappointment.

But it is, as with most things (he has come to understand), not that simple. It’s not that he doesn’t want to avenge his brother. It’s not that he doesn’t dream about tearing every goddamned fucking alien piece of shit to pieces with his bare hands before they can ever touch another person he loves. He doesn’t even indulge in fantasies where he and Jordie never joined up, because that was never, in a million years, going to be the call they made, it just wasn’t. He doesn’t - can’t - regret that choice. It’s just that - he can feel the pull of the drift in his brainstem even now. Like a riptide, deep and dangerous like it never was before Jordie. It’s not as simple as wanting - something in him was broken back then, something that even clotted and scarred over does not seem likely to heal in a way that makes him worth his rations or his rack space. He hasn’t tried to drift again, since Jesper. He thinks he probably never will. He doesn’t need more blood on his hands.

Coward.

Still, if he could be out there instead of one of them, instead of both of them - the grasping, greedy parts of him still fused to Jesper and Inej pull taut. Their absence throws him off-kilter in a way that has nothing to do with his bum leg.

He doesn’t know how long he sits before Wylan appears beside him, having climbed at least five stories without making a sound, and Kaz doesn’t jump at his arrival but it’s a near thing. Before he can think about what’s coming out of his mouth, Kaz asks, “Isn’t that Jesper’s?”

The stupid orange camo jacket Wylan’s wearing, that is. And, Kaz is pretty sure it is, although sometimes it’s hard to tell anymore, what with how little stock any one of them puts in privacy or personal space. Like, Jesper and Inej practically live in each other’s heads and, to a lesser degree these days, in Kaz’s too, so what’s a hoodie, really? But-

“Isn’t that?” Wylan asks, with a pointed look at Kaz’s own shirt, which, case in point, is quite possibly Jesper’s, but may just as likely have been Inej’s to start, or - more humiliatingly - Kaz’s own, but stolen enough times that it’s no longer recognizable as such.

“Fair.”

Wylan “Hendriks” - because Kaz will eat his own arm if that’s his real last name - is a towheaded digital rig mechanic with a perpetual rime of motor oil smudged across his fine-boned face. He’d been Jesper’s find, haunting Wraith’s maintenance scaffolding at all hours and sitting alone in the mess for every meal. He’s always had a soft spot for isolationists, Jesper.

His easy welcome had drawn Wylan into their fold in fits and starts. He’d been fighting uphill against Inej’s austere calm and Kaz’s carefully curated standoffishness, after all, not to mention Wylan’s own reticence.

It had been hard to miss, though, even at the beginning, how antsy he got when top brass visited the dome, how he’d withdraw up Wraith’s scaffolding and pull the figurative ladder up behind him. It’s still new, though, his presence, his secrets, and Kaz won’t push. Not yet, at least.

“What news?” Kaz asks after a moment.

This, too, is new - the shared burden of hand wringing. Of being left behind. Kaz had thought sharing Jesper with this bright, undamaged boy would be difficult - that it would only widen a gap he feels too acutely on days like today.

“None, yet,” Wylan says, sounding just as aggrieved as Kaz is even though they should both know that it’s still too early for word from the breach.

It has, surprisingly - and Kaz is often surprised, these days, by the company he keeps - not been difficult at all. Instead, it’s something like a kindness. A lighter load. Something like perhaps their group is finally complete, or some similarly sentimental nonsense.

Kaz doesn’t know how to reconcile the guilt he feels for the past with the halting, nascent joy of his present reality. He’d left Jordie behind, on that rocky, Seattle beach. And yet, he’s still at Kaz’s shoulder, most days. He fills silences, occupying the hollows of Kaz’s brain and all his ragged edges, dogging his steps like a vengeful ghost. There is not a god that Kaz could pray to, to exorcise this particular specter, nor would he, given the chance, but he’s afraid. Only sometimes, only at night. But he’s afraid that Jordie must be angry that he’s moved on. Found a new family, however strange and precarious. Been so incapable of avenging him in a way that matters.

But he hopes, too, that Jordie - who, despite the black hole of it all, Kaz remembers as hugging him, reading to him, laughing - would be happy. To see that his moody younger brother had managed to find, build, something for himself from the rubble Jordie himself had left behind. For all Kaz has never really believed in an afterlife, he hopes as much as he fears that Jordie is watching. Watching out for him, and the life he has now.