Cold Open (0:00 to 1:30)
The cooler (0:00 to 1:30)
Tide Wards // the shop // 12 yrs ago
Twelve years ago.
The cooler at the back of the shop is the size of a closet and colder than anything has a right to be in August. Seven people are standing in it. Nobody is talking.
There are two onigiri in a pair of small hands. Pickled plum, the good ones from the top shelf. They were warm when her mother pushed them into her fists. Now they're going hard.
MIKO (V.O.): I was eleven. Mom said hold these, so I held them. That was my whole job that night.
The door doesn't shut all the way. It never has. Dad was going to fix it in the spring. A crack of orange streetlight runs down the dark, and in it, the street.
The light goes out. Comes back. Goes out.
Something is walking past. Not driving. Walking. The floor tiles tick under their feet with every step: one, then a long wait, then another. Through the crack, a leg goes by. Gray. Wet. Wider than the shop.
Out front, a jar falls off a shelf and doesn't break.
In the dark behind her, her grandmother starts to hum. Five slow notes, going down and coming back up, like a boat on a swell. Over and over. Very quiet.
MIKO (V.O.): She said it was for the Sleeper. So he'd stay asleep. I thought it was the dumbest thing I'd ever heard.
The ticking gets farther away. The hum doesn't stop.
MIKO (V.O.): I didn't let go of those onigiri until the sun came up.
CUT TO BLACK.
TITLE: TIDEWALL: IRON TIDE
Act One: Four Days Later (1:30 to 5:00)
Green across the board (1:30 to 3:00)
Breakwater // link bay
Four days after Tidemaw, the link bay still smells like burnt dust. Four chairs in a row under white lights, four collars plugged into four cables, and a Kurenai tech in gray walking behind them with a tablet, reading numbers out loud like a teacher handing back tests.
TECH: Baek Ah-young. Thirty-one percent.
Aya nods like she expected worse. She has a paperback open on her knee. She hasn't turned a page.
TECH: Jung Nari. Link's fine. Blue Signal has no drones until Thursday, so you're not flying anything until Thursday.
NARI: I could fly it without drones.
TECH: You could fly it into the bay without drones.
Nari considers this and doesn't argue.
The tech stops behind Rin's chair and looks at the tablet for a long time. Miko watches him look. People don't look at Rin's numbers that long.
TECH: Yoon Rin. The link is... catching. It drops a beat and picks it back up. Dr. Jang wants you on the ground for seventy-two hours.
RIN: Fine.
That's all. Fine. Arms crossed, back straight, eyes on the wall. But Miko is in the next chair, and Miko can see the thumb. Rin's thumb is pressed hard into the crook of her own elbow, like she's holding something down.
Then the tech gets to Miko and actually laughs.
TECH: Kazama Miko. Green. Everything's green.
MIKO: Sorry, can you say that louder? For the room?
TECH: Everything is green.
MIKO: (standing, both arms up) Healthiest pilot on the coast! Somebody write it down!
NARI: You're green because you sat on your mech.
MIKO: I sat on my mech heroically.
NARI: Your mech died in the first ten minutes. You spent the rest of the fight on its shoulder yelling at me.
MIKO: And look at me now. Green.
Aya laughs into her book. Even the tech smiles.
Rin doesn't. Miko drops back into her chair and bumps her knee against Rin's, the way she has a thousand times.
MIKO: Three days. That's nothing. You'll sleep. You never sleep.
RIN: I'll sleep.
Her thumb doesn't move.
Wardrobe (3:00 to 3:50)
Kurenai Ent. // dressing room
Sora has a garment bag over one arm and a pair of clear glasses in her other hand, and she's looking at Rin the way she looks at a hem that won't lie flat.
SORA: Medical asked wardrobe for clothes in his size. Two sets of gray. Socks. They wrote "tall" on the form like that's a size.
She hangs the bag on the back of the door. Through the plastic, Rin can see the folded gray cotton. Clothes for someone who isn't going anywhere.
SORA: Sit.
Rin sits. Sora goes to work. A plain black cap pulled low over the bangs. The bob tucked up under it at the back. Concealer, a dab, then another, pressed over the small mark under Rin's right eye until it's gone. The glasses last. Sora steps back.
SORA: You look like an intern who's about to quit.
RIN: Good.
SORA: I deliver the bag at eleven. You carry it. You don't talk. If anyone talks to you, you're new and you're scared of me, which is true of everyone, so it won't be a stretch.
She hangs a Kurenai Entertainment lanyard around Rin's neck. The photo on the badge is a girl who left the label in the spring.
SORA: Phones off. Earpiece off. The Port logs everything that pings.
Rin takes the squad bud out of her ear and holds it. It's the channel the four of them have been on since debut. Every launch. Every stage. She switches it off and puts it in her pocket.
SORA: You have thirty minutes before I'm missed. I have a date at one.
RIN: Who?
SORA: Tugboat captain. Very tall. Very boring. Don't make me late.
She picks up the bag, then puts it in Rin's arms.
SORA: And you have about thirty seconds before you're stupid. Use them well.
The hum (3:50 to 5:00)
Tide Wards school // gym
The gym is quieter than it was four days ago. Half the cots are folded against the wall now. People have gone home to houses with no first floors. The ones who are left have turned their cots into rooms: a blanket hung on a string, a rice cooker on a chair, a kid doing homework on a crate.
Nari carries one end of a water crate. Miko carries the other end and does all the talking.
MIKO: ...so I said, healthiest pilot on the coast, and he said it again, louder, everything's green...
NARI: I was there.
MIKO: I'm telling Grandma.
Grandma is on the cot by the bleachers, folding a towel into a square, then folding the square smaller. Miko's mother is out at the shop with a mop and a bucket and no front window. Miko's father isn't here at all.
GRANDMOTHER: The Port called him back. They need every crane.
MIKO: He's been up for four days.
GRANDMOTHER: He'd rather lift something.
Miko sits on the cot and steals a rice cracker out of her grandmother's bag. Her grandmother slaps her hand without looking and lets her keep it.
Nari stays standing. She's tired in a way that doesn't feel like it lives in her body. Around her the gym is all small sounds: a cough, a zipper, a radio somewhere playing the news at a whisper. She has always heard rooms like this, in layers. The radio is the high end. The rain on the roof is a pad. The old woman's hands on the towel are a shaker.
Then the old woman starts to hum.
Five notes. Slow. Down, and back up. Then again.
Nari's hand is in her pocket before she has decided anything. Phone out. Voice memo. She holds it low by her hip, the way she'd hold it in a club bathroom to steal a drum fill, and the red dot starts counting.
It isn't a good melody. It's barely a melody. It sounds like something you'd hum to keep your hands busy. But it sits in a strange key that doesn't land where her ear wants it to, and the fifth note comes back up a little flat every single time, the same amount flat, like that's how it's supposed to go.
MIKO: (groaning) Not the Sleeper song.
GRANDMOTHER: You loved it.
MIKO: I was eleven! I loved juice boxes!
Nari keeps recording. Forty seconds. Fifty.
Then every phone in the gym goes off at once.
The alert tone. Then the sirens outside, climbing over each other across the Tide Wards. On Nari's screen, over her recording, the banner: PORT TERMINAL. CLASS 4. SHELTER IN PLACE.
Miko is already on her feet. Her grandmother catches her wrist.
GRANDMOTHER: The Port.
MIKO: I know, Grandma.
GRANDMOTHER: Your father is at the Port.
Miko looks at Nari over the old woman's head. For once she doesn't say anything at all.
Nari saves the file without looking at it. It names itself. untitled 48.
Act Two: The Docks (5:00 to 11:30)
Launch (5:00 to 5:40)
Breakwater // hangar
Jun meets her at the bottom of the ladder with a wrench in one hand, his cap on backward and his whole face doing the thing it does when he's scared and trying to look bored.
JUN: Legs are new. Calves are new. I rebuilt everything those crabs touched. You break it, I don't fix it.
MIKO: You always say that.
JUN: I always mean it.
She's already climbing. The hatch, the seat, the collar locking into the headrest with a click she feels behind her teeth. Crimson Howl wakes up around her like a big dog that's been waiting by the door. The screens bloom. The visor strips come up red. Everything green.
On the ops channel, Ryo. On the targeting channel, Nari, back in the ops room with her headphones on and her knee going.
MIKO (comms): You good, cap...
She stops. It came out on its own. Every launch, every stage, every sound check. There's nobody on the other end to answer it.
MIKO (comms): Where's captain?
Half a second.
RYO (comms): Grounded. You know that.
MIKO (comms): I know she's grounded. I'm asking where she is.
RYO (comms): Not on this channel. Focus on the Port.
On her side screen, the ops room camera. Four seats at the main table. Nari in hers. Ryo standing. Two empty. Aya's, because Aya is lying down on doctor's orders. And Rin's.
Rin always sits in her seat when she's grounded. She watches every second. She tells Miko she's dropping her guard before Miko drops it.
The seat is empty.
JUN (comms): Miko. Launch rails are yours.
She puts it away somewhere in the back, in a box. She'll open it later.
MIKO (comms): Crimson Howl. Going.
Rivetjaw (5:40 to 7:00)
The Port // container terminal
It comes up out of the water at the end of Pier 4 like a dropped truck, and the whole terminal hears it.
Container cranes stand in a row along the quay, yellow and black, every one of them taller than Crimson Howl. Stacks of containers in every color. Trucks abandoned with their doors hanging open. And walking out of the bay between two cranes, water pouring off its back in sheets, comes a Class 4 with its head down.
The head is mostly jaw. That's the first thing she sees. A jaw hinged so deep it starts behind where the ears would be, plated over the top like the hull of a ship, with rows of teeth set in it like rivets. It doesn't roar. It doesn't look at anything. It just walks.
NARI (comms): Class 4. Bay Watch is calling it Rivetjaw. It's a biter. Don't let it close.
MIKO (comms): Copy. Don't let the biter close.
Both forearms split open in three petals and the barrels slide out, six to a side, glowing orange at the tips. The hip drums spin up. She puts both cannons on it and holds the triggers down.
Brass rains off Crimson Howl's arms and bounces down the quay. The rounds walk up the water, up its legs, up its chest, and break on its skull in sparks. It doesn't slow down. It drops its head lower, so the plated top takes all of it, and keeps coming. One step. Another.
MIKO (comms): Nari, it doesn't care!
NARI (comms): It's built not to care. You have to get inside the mouth.
MIKO (comms): I don't want to get inside the mouth!
Then Nari's voice changes.
NARI (comms): Miko. Heat signature. Crane nine. Somebody's still in the cab.
Miko looks up.
Crane nine. Yellow and black, its boom swung out over the water, the operator's cab hanging high off the side like a lunchbox. She knows that crane. She has eaten a hundred lunches at the foot of it, sitting on her father's toolbox with her legs swinging.
MIKO (comms): That's my dad's crane.
Nobody says anything.
MIKO (comms): That's my dad's crane, Nari.
NARI (comms): The cab elevator's dead. He can't get down.
Rivetjaw is forty meters from the foot of crane nine and walking straight at it, because crane nine is in the way of wherever it's going.
Miko stops shooting. She walks Crimson Howl backward, three heavy steps, until its heels are against the crane's base and she can feel the steel through the link, cold and solid against the backs of her own legs. She plants both feet.
JUN (comms): What are you doing?
MIKO (comms): Standing here.
Thirty seconds (7:00 to 8:30)
Kurenai Industries // Port campus // containment
The containment wing is two floors under the Port campus, and every time something outside hits something else, the whole corridor shakes. Dust sifts down from the ceiling tiles. The lights flicker and come back.
The corridor is white. White walls, white floor, a white desk at the far end with nobody behind it. The guard who signed them in looked at Sora's face, looked at her badge, and didn't look at Rin at all. Ten minutes later every guard on the floor was running for the stairs to the perimeter.
SORA: (low) Well. That's luck.
She takes the garment bag back out of Rin's arms.
SORA: I'm going to go put these in a locker. Very, very slowly.
She walks off down the hall and doesn't look back.
Rin stands alone in a white corridor with another girl's name on her chest and her own pulse in her ears. Under it, the other one. Slow. Heavy. Closer than it has ever been. So close she could put her hand out and touch it.
Footsteps behind her.
She turns. Gray lab coat. Short gray hair. Reading glasses pushed up on her head and forgotten there. Dr. Jang has a coffee in one hand and a tablet in the other, and she stops three meters away and looks at Rin's face for a long moment. At the cap. The glasses. The spot under her right eye where the concealer is.
She knows. Rin watches her know.
DR. JANG: I'm going to walk to the end of this hall.
She says it the way she used to read numbers off the console. Calm. Plain.
DR. JANG: It takes about thirty seconds. Then I'm going to walk back, and I won't know you.
She walks past. She doesn't hurry. Her shoes squeak on the floor.
The third door on the left has a window.
Rin goes to it.
The cell is small and white and too bright. A bed bolted to the floor. A chair. A drain. And on the floor, his back against the far wall, facing the side of the room where the sea is, in gray clothes that don't fit him: Kaito.
He's already looking at the door. As if he heard her coming two floors away. As if he's been waiting since they brought him here.
The glow at his collarbone is bright. Every time the building shakes, it flares, a pulse of teal running out along the lines under his skin, then fading.
She puts her palm flat on the glass.
He gets up. Slowly, like it hurts. He comes to the window and stops on the other side of it, and up close his eyes are his own. Dark. Tired. Twenty-six.
Another impact, far away. The glass hums under her hand. The glow flares.
KAITO: It's not coming for me.
His voice through the speaker grille is thin and hoarse, like it has come a long way.
RIN: What isn't?
KAITO: The one at the docks. Everyone up there thinks it's coming for me.
He tilts his head, the way he used to in the sim bay before a run, listening to something nobody else could hear.
KAITO: It isn't hunting, Rin. It's running.
RIN: From what?
He looks at her. Then past her, at the white wall, toward the sea.
He doesn't answer.
Down the hall, Dr. Jang's shoes start squeaking back.
Rin takes her hand off the glass. On the other side, he lifts his and lays it flat where hers was, and holds it there.
She walks away before she can't.
The bite (8:30 to 9:40)
The Port // container terminal
Rivetjaw hits her like a building falling over.
She doesn't dodge. She couldn't if she wanted to. The forearms fold their barrels in and rebuild, plates sliding over plates, until her hands are two armored fists the size of cars, and she meets its head with the right one.
The punch lands on the plated skull with a sound like a church bell. It goes back half a step. She hits it again. Left hook, right hook, every impact running up through her arms into her shoulders, into her teeth.
MIKO (comms): Come on! You want the crane? Come and get it!
It comes. Head low, jaw opening, and she sees too late how wide it opens. All the way back. Rows and rows of rivets.
It takes her left arm at the elbow.
The jaw closes. Through the link, through the collar, through every nerve she has, she feels it close. Not on metal. On her. Her own left arm, in the cockpit, crushed in a fist of fire.
She screams. She can't help it.
It braces. It twists, the way a crocodile twists, and Crimson Howl's left forearm plating comes off in its teeth like the lid off a can. Hex plates. Orange trim. The inner panel with the kids' signatures on it. Gone, folded in half, into its mouth.
JUN (comms): MIKO! Back off! Get out of its reach!
MIKO (comms): I can't!
JUN (comms): You can! Boost back, it's slow, you can...
MIKO (comms): He's behind me, Jun!
Her left hand lies dead in her lap. She can't feel the grip. She looks down and it's shaking on its own, like it belongs to someone else.
MIKO (comms): Captain?
Nothing. Static.
MIKO (comms): Captain. You watching this?
Static.
NARI (comms): (quiet) Focus, Miko.
Flashback: the block (9:40 to 10:10)
Tide Wards // shelter window // 9 yrs ago
Nine years ago. A different night. A shelter in a school basement, one high window at street level, and a girl standing on a chair to see out.
The Iron Years. The mechs back then were construction rigs with armor bolted on, all rust and welds and floodlights. Out in the street, one of them is standing in front of her block. It's missing a hand. Something has torn the plates off its chest. It is not winning.
It doesn't move.
Things come at it out of the dark all night, and it doesn't move. It doesn't go forward. It doesn't go back. It stands there, between the street and the building where her whole life is, and takes it.
When the sky turns gray, the street is quiet. The old frame stands in the dawn with smoke coming off it. Then it lifts its one good fist and raps it against the wall of her building. Twice. Knock, knock.
It turns and limps away down the street.
She never found out who was inside.
Inside the mouth (10:10 to 11:00)
The Port // container terminal
The cockpit is red on red on red. Rivetjaw has let go and backed off a step, chewing on her plating, gathering itself to come again. High above her, in the cab of crane nine, a tiny figure is pressed against the glass.
She knows how to stand still. Somebody taught her. She just never found out who.
MIKO (comms): Nari. Rivetjaw locks when it bites. It doesn't let go.
NARI (comms): ...Yes.
MIKO (comms): So it's going to hold its mouth open. Around something.
JUN (comms): No.
MIKO (comms): Around my arm.
JUN (comms): Miko, no, there's nothing left on that arm, it'll take the whole...
MIKO (comms): Then it can have it.
It comes. She doesn't hit it this time. She holds out the stripped left arm, bare frame and cable, like she's handing it something.
It bites.
The pain is so big it goes white. She hears herself make a sound she's never made. The jaw locks, braces, and doesn't let go. The mouth is open around her elbow, wide, all the way back.
She brings the right arm in.
The fists come apart and the forearms rebuild again, faster than Jun says they're rated for, plates and barrels sliding and locking, both arms joining into one long cannon braced against her shoulder. The Heavy Plasma Lance. And because her left arm is already in its mouth, the barrel goes in with it. Into the jaw. Down the throat.
Orange light starts climbing inside the barrel. The HUD screams.
MIKO (comms): No brakes.
She fires.
Light comes out of Rivetjaw's eyes. Out of the seams in its skull. Out of its back. The terminal goes orange-white for one full second, and the boom rolls across the bay and comes back off the hills.
Then it's falling. It lets go of her arm, finally, because there's nothing left to hold on with, and it goes down across the quay at the foot of crane nine and lies there with smoke rising out of its mouth.
Crimson Howl stays standing. Both feet planted. Back against the crane.
The gouges (11:00 to 11:30)
The Port // container terminal
Miko's lip is bleeding. She bit it somewhere in there. She tastes copper and doesn't care.
On her screen, the crane cab door opens. A man in a hard hat climbs out onto the ladder, slow, a big man going hand over hand, the way he taught her to climb when she was six. Halfway down he stops, hooks an elbow through the rungs, turns around and waves up at Crimson Howl. A big, wide, both-arms wave. Thank you. To a pink mech whose pilot nobody knows.
Inside the cockpit, where nobody will ever see, Miko waves back at the screen.
She's grinning. Her face is wet. Both are happening at the same time.
JUN (comms): Miko. I'm on it.
On the side screen, there's Jun. Already out on the quay, already up on the carcass with the wrench in his back pocket, walking along Rivetjaw's back like it's a hull in dry dock. He stops. Crouches.
JUN (comms): You should see this.
She tilts the camera down. Across Rivetjaw's back, from the shoulder almost to the tail, three trenches are torn through its plates. Each one wide enough to drive a truck down. Old. Black at the edges. Already starting to heal.
JUN (comms): You didn't do this. Nobody did this. Nothing we have does this.
NARI (comms): It was hurt before it got here.
Miko looks at the three trenches for a long time.
Then up the quay, past the terminal fence, at the low white buildings of the Kurenai Industries campus, a few hundred meters from where it came ashore.
Act Three: Combat Review (11:30 to 14:30)
"...Too?" (11:30 to 13:40)
Breakwater // combat review
Combat review is tiered gray desks and a screen the size of a wall, and today the screen is Miko getting her arm bitten off, again, from four angles, in slow motion.
She sits in the front row with an ice pack strapped to her left forearm and her fingers still tingling, and she's having the best time of her life.
MIKO: Okay, pause it. Pause it there. Look at that punch. Look at the form.
Moo-jin, standing at the side of the room with his arms folded over his chest, doesn't pause it.
TIDEWALL is in the front row, where it always is. Miko. Rin beside her, arms crossed, back straight. Aya. Nari with her headphones around her neck.
The back row has changed. It used to be two trainees with no machines. Now Yuna has her boots up on the desk in a VANTA flight suit with a real chevron on the shoulder, chewing pink gum, and Reina sits next to her with her pen and her notebook and her braid over one shoulder. Shin sits at the far end of the top row, alone, in black, very still.
On the screen, the jaw comes down on Crimson Howl's arm.
Behind Miko's head, a pink bubble grows, and grows, and pops an inch from her ear.
MIKO: I swear on my grandmother.
YUNA: (chewing) Your grandmother loves me.
MIKO: My grandmother has never met you!
YUNA: She'd love me.
The replay runs back and plays again. Bite. Twist. The plating tears away.
Reina hasn't looked at the screen once. She's looking at the back of Miko's head with her pen resting against her lip. She leans forward and says it softly, the way she says everything.
REINA: You drop your left shoulder.
The whole room goes quiet.
Miko turns around in her chair very, very slowly.
MIKO: ...Too?
Somebody in the third row snorts. Then the whole room breaks. Gun-woo pounds the desk with both fists. Aya has her face in her paperback, shoulders shaking. Beside Miko, Rin presses her lips together hard.
Reina sits back with the smallest smile and makes a note.
On the screen, frozen: Crimson Howl's left shoulder, a few degrees low, a heartbeat before the bite.
MIKO: Is everybody's left shoulder just down? Is that a thing? Is that a Breakwater thing?
REINA: Yours more.
In the aisle, the Oh twins already have the notebook out.
HA-EUN: Odds on Crimson Howl's arm back by Friday.
HA-JUN: Jun says Friday.
HA-EUN: Jun said Friday last time.
HA-JUN: Last time it was Wednesday.
Moo-jin finally steps up to the screen. He lets the last second of the fight play: Crimson Howl with its arm gone, its back against the crane, both feet planted, not moving an inch.
He taps the screen twice with two thick fingers. Knock, knock.
MOO-JIN: Good. Again.
He means run it again from the top. Everyone groans. The replay starts over.
Miko doesn't groan. Something in her stomach has gone quiet, and she doesn't know why, and the replay is already moving, so she lets it go.
Then she looks at Rin.
Rin is watching the bite come again. And when the jaw closes, Rin flinches. A small one. Her shoulders come up a quarter inch and her breath stops, the way you flinch at a crash in a movie you've never seen before.
Rin has watched every fight Miko has ever had, live, from the ops room. She has never once flinched at a replay. She has seen them all already.
Miko watches her watch it.
Up in the top row, Shin isn't looking at the screen either. He's looking at Rin.
Ask her (13:40 to 14:30)
Breakwater // corridor
Miko catches Nari outside the review room, by the vending machines. Nari is drumming on the side of one with two fingers, a beat only she can hear.
MIKO: Hey.
NARI: Hey.
MIKO: When I was out there. In ops. Where was she?
The drumming stops.
Nari's hand goes up to her necklace and closes around the pendants. Her face doesn't do anything. Her face never does anything. But Miko has lived with her since debut, and Miko knows exactly what that hand means.
MIKO: Nari.
NARI: Ask her.
She holds Miko's eyes one second longer than she wants to. Then she walks away down the corridor with her hand still on the chain.
Act Four: The Hallway (14:30 to 17:30)
Where were you (14:30 to 17:30)
Breakwater // dorm hallway
Ten at night. Rin is at her door with her key in her hand when Miko comes up the stairs.
MIKO: Where were you?
Rin turns around. She doesn't ask what Miko means. She doesn't say ops. She looks at Miko, at the ice pack, at the split lip, and Miko watches her decide not to lie.
RIN: The Port.
MIKO: The Port.
RIN: Containment. Sora got me in.
MIKO: The Port.
She can hear her own voice going up and can't stop it.
MIKO: You were at the Port. You were in the building it was walking toward.
RIN: It wasn't walking toward the building.
MIKO: It came out of the water three hundred meters from where they're keeping him! It walked straight up the quay!
RIN: Miko.
MIKO: My dad was in that crane!
It comes out so loud that a door down the hall opens a crack and closes again.
MIKO: My dad was in the cab of crane nine and the elevator was dead and that thing was walking right at him, and I called you. On the channel. Twice. And you had it off.
Rin doesn't say anything.
MIKO: You've never had it off. Since debut. Not once.
RIN: I know.
MIKO: Four days ago you flew off and didn't answer anybody, and I thought, okay. That was Tidemaw. That was a bad night. She's allowed one. And then today...
She stops. Her left hand is shaking again. She shoves it under her right arm.
MIKO: My mom's shop is under the waterline, Rin. The water went to the ceiling. Grandma's sleeping in a gym. And the night it happens, he walks out of the sea. Glowing. And four days later another one comes up right next to him. And you want me to think that's nothing.
RIN: It's not coming for him.
MIKO: How do you know?
RIN: He told me. They're running.
Miko laughs. It doesn't sound like her laugh at all.
MIKO: Running. From what?
Rin opens her mouth. Miko watches her look for it, and watches her not find it.
MIKO: From what, Rin?
Nothing.
That's the answer. That's the whole answer. She doesn't know either. She doesn't know, and she went anyway. Past the empty seat in ops and the crane and the channel and Miko's dad, two floors underground, to stand in front of a man who walked out of the sea.
MIKO: I covered for you. For three years.
Rin goes very still.
MIKO: Rig 12. The pier. You think nobody knew? I knew. I knew the first week. I lied to Moo-jin for you. I lied to the Oh twins for you, and you know how hard that is. I never said one word, because you were happy. And you're never happy.
Her voice cracks on happy and she hates it.
MIKO: And I'd do it again. That's the stupid part. If it was just you.
She looks at Rin. Rin, who never shouts, never cries, never fidgets. Rin, whose thumb is pressed so hard into the crook of her arm that the knuckle has gone white.
RIN: (very quiet) Miko.
MIKO: Don't.
She goes past her to her own door. She gets the key in on the second try, because her left hand won't work.
Then she stops, with the door half open, and doesn't turn around.
MIKO: Every launch. Every stage. Every sound check in every arena. I ask you. You know I do.
RIN: I know.
MIKO: I'm not going to ask you anymore.
She goes in. The door closes. Not a slam. Worse than a slam. Just closed.
Out in the hallway, she doesn't hear Rin's key turn. For a long time, she doesn't hear anything at all.
Act Five: Noodles (17:30 to 20:00)
The names (17:30 to 19:30)
Breakwater // hangar // 2:00 AM
Jun hears her before he sees her. Nobody else climbs a ladder that loud at two in the morning.
The hangar is dark except for one work light high on the gantry, aimed at Crimson Howl's left arm. The arm is stripped to the frame from the elbow down, cables and pistons and raw gray steel, the torn edges of the old plating cut back clean. A new inner panel is bolted on, plain primer gray.
Jun is sitting cross-legged beside it with his back against the railing and a black marker in his hand.
Miko comes up the last rungs one-handed with a plastic bag hooked over her wrist and drops down next to him.
JUN: You're supposed to be asleep.
MIKO: You're supposed to be asleep.
JUN: I'm a mechanic. We don't sleep. We just get quieter.
She holds up the bag. Two styrofoam bowls with lids, steam fogging the plastic.
MIKO: Your mom's. She set up a camp stove in the parking lot at the gym. There's a line around the block. She gave me extra and said you don't eat.
JUN: I eat.
MIKO: She said you'd say that.
He takes one bowl. She takes the other and tries to pick up her chopsticks, and her left hand won't close on them. They clatter on the grate.
She stares at her hand. Her fingers are trembling, all of them, a little, all the time, like a phone set to vibrate.
Jun stops talking.
He doesn't make a joke. He picks up her chopsticks, wipes them on the one clean spot on his coveralls and puts them in her right hand. Then he takes her bowl and holds it up for her, so she doesn't have to.
She eats like that. Her right hand, his hands holding the bowl. Neither of them says anything about it.
After a while, she looks at the panel.
It's covered in names. Small and careful, in black marker, in a dozen different styles. Some in big round kid letters. One backward. One with a heart instead of a dot over the i.
MIKO: Those were on the old plating.
JUN: Yeah.
MIKO: It ate them.
JUN: Yeah.
MIKO: You remember them?
He shrugs, holding the bowl. He's looking at the panel, not at her.
JUN: Ji-ho always writes his J backward. Seo-yeon does the heart. The kid with the cast from the gym last week is on there twice, because he got back in line. Hae-won spelled his own name wrong and his mom made him fix it, so it's crossed out and written again.
He points with his chin.
JUN: That's how it was. So that's how I wrote it.
Miko looks at the names for a long time.
MIKO: Jun.
JUN: Mm.
She looks at him like she's about to say something. He waits. Whatever it is, he can see it get stuck somewhere on the way up.
MIKO: ...Your mom's noodles are better than ours.
JUN: Don't tell your grandma.
MIKO: I'm telling her first thing.
He grins. She grins back. Somewhere in the next few minutes, she leans her head against the railing, and then against his shoulder, because it's closer, and her eyes close.
Jun sits very still so he won't wake her. He holds the bowl in his lap. He looks at the names, and at her, and at the names.
He opens his mouth.
He closes it again.
Below them, in the dark, Crimson Howl stands with one bare arm and a gray panel full of children's handwriting, and the work light hums.
Two doors (19:30 to 20:00)
Breakwater // dorm
Three in the morning. Rin lies on top of her covers in the dark with her palm flat on her chest.
Under her heartbeat, the other one. Slow. Heavy. A few kilometers away, two floors under the Port, against a white wall that faces the sea.
She listens to the wall.
Every night for three years, Miko has been on the other side of it. Talking to herself. Laughing at her phone. Snoring like a truck. And on the bad nights, her music, too loud, the bass coming through the plaster so Miko doesn't have to think.
Tonight there's nothing.
No music. No snoring. No laughing. Nothing at all.
Rin lies there and listens to it until the window starts to turn gray.
The hallway, empty, the lights humming at half strength. Rin's door, closed. Miko's door, closed.
HOLD on the two closed doors.
CUT TO BLACK.