Caydee scales the mech like a spider, her tools clinking whenever they make contact with its armor. The machine is three times her height, a lusterless giant at once completely technological and as faceless and ancient as a clay golem.

She ratchets two mesh housings off the top of the armor, drawing a greasy forearm across her face to move the sweat around. It’s cool in the mech bay, but she’s coated with the usual film of perspiration and synthetic lubricant. She wrenches the grating off with a grunt, then changes the LEDs underneath with acute, obsessive tenderness. She swaps the actual lights first, then more bulbs that cover other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. It is very dark outside—always, always dark—and the pilots need every kind of light they can get. That done, she climbs down and stretches until her vertebrae pop.

“Good girl,” she says to the mech.

“I’m good,” a low voice says from over her shoulder, “this is a machine.”

Caydee jumps. Probably not more than an inch, but it feels like a foot. She’s not new to mech work, and knows she’s wrenched all the kinks out, but she is new to this pilot. Pairing up survivors is normal, and she’s done it more than once, but this pilot’s reputation casts a long shadow.

“Hi,” Caydee says, and starts babbling. The pilot is slim, scarred, and quiet. There’s a bit of grey in her close-cut hair. Caydee gets herself under control enough to say things that make sense. “So, you want me to use your name or callsign?”

“Pilot is fine.”

“Huh. Okay. You probably read my file, but just call me Caydee. As in K.D. It stands for—”

“I don’t want to know. How charged are my cells?”

“Eighty percent.” Caydee rattles off information while the Pilot gives the mech a walk-around. It stands on its own, a giant patchwork of armor and hydraulic struts. The machine is festooned with flashspun fiber saddlebags for salvage, and there’s a gun mounted over one shoulder. The weapon is a skeletal set of rails twisted into something like a unicorn’s horn.

“I rebarreled the coil gun for three millimeter. It won’t drain your batteries as much as the old cannon did, and the muzzle snap won’t ruin your night eyes.”

As the Pilot finishes her inspection, Caydee whispers a command into her earpiece and the armor plates blossom open. Caydee steps up onto one armored knee and offers the pilot a hand. The Pilot climbs past her without a word and slumps awkwardly back into the machine’s saddle, snaking her arms into the suit.

“Right, just lie back and let me tuck you in.”

The Pilot ignores her. Caydee unhooks thick cables from the suit and lugs them away. The armor closes around the Pilot until just her face is visible. Caydee climbs back up and lowers the last, huge armor plate, enveloping the Pilot completely in high-carbon alloy and hermetic silence.

Caydee uses an impact wrench on the bolts and seals the Pilot in. The coil gun pivots left and right as fire control systems come online and the Pilot looks side to side. The suit doesn’t have a head, just little bubble camera sponsons all over its superstructure. None of them look at Caydee as the Pilot marches the suit toward the door outside. All the lights in the bay go out for an instant, and the exterior doors open.

Frigid air gusts in from outside as other mechs walk up the ramp to join the Pilot. Ash swirls in through the gap and muffles the machines’ steps. They file out into the dark and the doors close like giant steel curtains. Caydee settles in to wait.

The Pilot was having a hard time getting used to her new mechanic. Caydee wouldn’t stop talking; everything about her was blunt, unfiltered, and perpetually in motion. It disrupted any sense of calm the Pilot felt getting ready to go scavenging, which was all she was willing to apply any deep focus to. The rest of her days passed listlessly, eating tasteless food, sleeping formless sleep, and dreaming about the dark outside. Things her waking mind wouldn’t admit, even to itself.

Every time she got ready to head out, she felt like a surly parent talking to a very energetic child. Walking around the mech, making sure the maintenance and repairs were on point, which they were to an almost sublime degree, the Pilot couldn’t think of a good word to describe her.

“Do you have to be this cheerful?” the Pilot said, slumping into the suit.

“Yeah,” the mechanic replied, looking up at her as the petals closed. The Pilot didn’t actually ask the next question out loud, but Caydee answered it anyway. “So that I can imagine this moment as something other than nailing you into a coffin.”

Before the Pilot could say anything, the mechanic pulled the armor plates closed and the world went quiet. Her external view popped up, projected on the interior surfaces all around her. The camera bubbles gave her a very wide field of view, and the mechanic was a motion blur at the bottom of her field of vision. Muscle corded and thrummed in her arms as she bolted the Pilot in. Only a very faint metallic rattle made it through the armor from Caydee’s impact wrench.

Unsure why, the Pilot felt like she ought to say something to the mechanic. She engaged her coms.

“Anything I need to look at, Pilot?” Caydee’s voice came through clear. They were only ten feet apart. The link would be lost not long after she walked out into the swirling ash. Static electricity in the infinite plume made lightning sometimes, and thunder that came from everywhere at once.

“Pilot?”

She started. “No.”

“Okay,” Caydee said cheerfully, “good talk.”

More silence.

“Caydee?”

“Pilot?”

“It’s not a coffin. I’m a better machine than anything out there.”

The Pilot’s time outside was no time at all. She made a point of not remembering any of it. It caught her, often, in her sleep. Clouds of ash and a sky, in the rare moments with enough light to see it, like the underside of a lake during a storm. The metallic tap of debris in the wind against her armor, the quiet terror when her sensor suite told her something in the sky was sweeping the earth with radar, looking for her.

The world outside the bay couldn’t reach her, though, because she didn’t let herself see it. Didn’t let it touch her. Didn’t let anything touch her. The sky had dropped a black cloth over her soul, and made her invulnerable. She piloted her machine around the dark world, and took whatever was left that was of any use. She dumped it all in the saddle bags, and tried not to get caught. There was always the gun, if anything went wrong. It’s flat, harsh snap wasn’t all that different from the lightning. She came and went, unseen and unknowing, until the bags were full and she passed back through the bay doors in a snowy swirl of ash. Until she had the mech parked back in Caydee’s little pool of light.

“How was it up there?” the mechanic chirped.

“Dark.”

“That’s it? One word? No blue sky or fruit trees?”

“I’m not talking about it,” the Pilot said. She was just old enough to remember what blue sky looked like, and used to hate going scavenging because of it. She worked hard to lock that down, and Caydee was chipping away at the armor with her endless collection of tools and flippant comments.

“That’s okay. There are different ways of dealing with having no time left.” The bolts rattled out and the armor opened. The Pilot closed her eyes and sat still. Just breathed. Surprisingly, the mechanic left her alone. The Pilot heard her checking the coil gun’s magazine. She had fired most of the ammunition, and the twisting rail still glowed a very faint orange.

“Jesus. How did you get blood on my beautiful paint job?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” the Pilot said.

The mechanic looked down at her. Like she could feel everything the Pilot had, or hadn’t, through the armor plate. Like she could see something the Pilot kept hidden in the dark.

“Sure,” Caydee said, “let me get you out of there.”

Days pass in a strange way underground. Caydee sleeps whenever she can, and wakes when the Pilot and her mech need her. The machine needs her a lot. The Pilot, she’s less sure about. Sometimes individual minutes seem to take hours, like she can focus on a single problem for a week and find she’s ticked one thing off a list of a thousand and it’s only been five minutes and she has to move on. The Pilot distracts her through all of this, skewing the cascade of Caydee’s thoughts, even when she’s not around. She’s talked to her so much, and the Pilot never says anything. Caydee is sort of getting used to it; she talks to the mech the same way, and it never answers, so what’s the difference?

“Anything you want me to look at? I can fix anything,” Caydee says. The Pilot is giving the machine her usual intense scrutiny. She turns from the mech suddenly, and meets Caydee’s eyes. A little awkward, because Caydee is used to the staring thing being unrequited.

“Things that shouldn’t scare me do, and things that should don’t,” the Pilot says.

Caydee is, for the first time in a long while, speechless. The Pilot looks at her expectantly, as if there was any kind of answer to that. Her eyes are the kind of blue the sky maybe was, once, but Caydee has never seen. She searches for something to say and comes up empty. The Pilot starts climbing the mech, and Caydee offers her a hand up. The Pilot almost takes it. Balks. Caydee powers the suit and buttons her up in silence.

“Am I ready?” the suit’s speakers say.

“Almost done,” Caydee replies.

She bolts the chest plate in, and pulls the red spray can she usually uses to circle fault points off her utility webbing. She paints a little smiley face on the armor plate. The front camera bulbs watch her.

“All better. Get out there.”

She can’t tell if the Pilot laughs, but the mech lingers for a second before turning for the door.

Caydee looks up. “Anything wrong?” she yells. The mech is facing the bay door, but one camera bulb gimbals to keep looking down at her. The machine reaches out one huge hand. Caydee reaches up to hold one of the fingers. The moment is quiet, briefly.

“This probably looks really awesome. Can I walk you to the door?”

The mech’s hand drops and it stomps off.

Caydee smiles anyway.“Good luck!” she yells, as the Pilot marches her machine toward the bay doors.

Scavenging missions take a long time, unless the pilots come charging back in a swirl of ash and darkness in a few minutes because everything went wrong. Some of the mechanics fret, some sleep or leave to get something to eat, if there is anything to eat.

Caydee stays in her little pool of light and stows her tools. Arranges everything in rows as neatly and lovingly as a gardener in hydroponics planting seeds. Time passes aimlessly for a change, maybe a lot of it, until her earpiece crackles and the alarm klaxons go off.

In the far darkness of the bay, the doors crack open, screaming on their rails. Four mechs went out. One returns.

Caydee’s finger trembles when it touches her earpiece. In other pools of light, other technicians draw breath to speak at the same moment she does. Four questions for which there can only be one answer.

“Pilot, respond,” Caydee says. Static. Her heart falls into her stomach. The mech stomps mechanically past the first few stations and stops in front of her. The coil gun rail is red hot, and the armor pitted with high velocity impacts. The central plate has a single conical hole bored into it, the shining metal looking liquid under the lights. The smiley face is gone. A rush of adrenaline makes Caydee feel like she’s vibrating. She grabs her impact wrench and climbs.

“CKEM strike, somebody call the medics!”

The bolts rattle as she guns them out. The entire plate is slightly concave. It won’t hinge loose when Caydee tries to pull it free. She drops the impact wrench and pulls out a vapor torch.

The mech’s interior is full of hemostatic foam and blood. The suit has used every emergency system it has. Caydee torches the Pilot’s harness and manages not to set her on fire. She reaches in and pulls and the muscles in her shoulders scream. She ignores them. The kinetic energy penetrator has bored a hole in the armor and sent a semi-molten arrow through it, the Pilot, and out the back of the suit. The wound is somewhere beneath her jawline, and the foam has only partially stopped her bleeding. She looks like a ghost.

More hands help Caydee pull the Pilot down, and in a few seconds she’s alone again. The foam is pink and tacky on her hands. The mech stands empty before her, as suddenly fragile as a punctured and empty eggshell. Caydee starts shaking.

The Pilot knew this about her mechanic; she would find Caydee sleeplessly working on the mech, because it was the only thing she could fix. She couldn’t close wounds, or staunch blood, or light the sky or mend hearts, so she’d be working in a fever to get the mech back into working order. The Pilot wasn’t sure when she learned all this, but she knew. She wanted to see it, and the reasons for that were harder to explain.

She made a good prophetess, even on unsteady feet. The Pilot walked gingerly, trying not to turn her head, toward the pool of light and sparks in the bay. Watched the muscles on Caydee’s back tense as she worked, and felt a twist of heat cut through the chilly air.. She banished the sensation immediately, but found it insistent, like a signal return on a radar track. Distant, but unsafe to ignore.

The Pilot spoke. Her throat still hurt, and all she managed to do was croak.

“Pilot!” The mechanic struggled to put down her tools without doing anything dangerous. Caydee hurled herself toward her, stopping awkwardly at the last possible moment.

“Wait, fuck. Are you okay? Can I give you a squeeze?” She fidgeted desperately.

The Pilot tilted her head up to show Caydee an uneven lozenge of metallic fabric stretching from under her chin to just below her right ear.

“The weave is still bonding, but I’ll be operational in a day or two. The penetrator missed my spine, so it was just a bleed injury. Survive the first twelve hours and you’re in the clear.”

Caydee took off one of her gloves and reached out very tentatively to touch the mesh.

“Can you feel anything through it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to touch it.”

“I do,” Caydee said, and did. The Pilot felt it. Like someone touching her through a veil. Caydee’s fingers reached the edge of the mesh and met skin. The Pilot closed her eyes and tried to remember, idly, the last time she had really touched anyone.

“I really need to give you a hug, okay?”

The Pilot nodded, and more of the mechanic came into contact with her. She was very warm, and smelled like the mech, but a lot more alive. Caydee exhaled deeply, and the hot rush of it tickled the Pilot’s neck. She pulled back a little. Their cheeks brushed.

“Better,” Caydee said. There was room for something between them. A perfect amount of space. The Pilot dropped her chin, closed it off, and their foreheads touched gently. The mechanic failed to let her go, and the Pilot let herself be held for a moment before looking up. Their eyes met. Travelers in the dark.

“What is this?” the Pilot said.

“Wrenching,” Caydee replied, letting the Pilot go and wiping at her face. She left grease marks and little glittering flecks of metal on her cheeks. Time didn’t bother to pass. The Pilot found her hands being held.

“Come on,” Caydee said after a while, letting her go. “I’ll show you how I’m going to keep you alive.”

Soon, scandalously soon, the Pilot is ready to go back out. The mech, of course, is pristine.

“Clear,” the Pilot says, “button me up.”

Caydee climbs easily up the mech.

“Well, it can’t go any worse than last time.” She takes off a glove and finds some pretense to reach in and accidentally let her fingers brush the Pilot’s ear. “Are you ever going to talk to me about what it’s like out there?”

“Dark and cold,” the Pilot says.

“Two words. I’m making progress.”

She’s trapped until the mechanic finishes powering up the machine. Caydee leans in to kiss the Pilot for good luck as if it was something they’d done a hundred times before. The Pilot balks. Turns her head and closes her eyes.

“This doesn’t mean anything and cannot go anywhere.”

Caydee laughs. Not childishly. From somewhere deep and old.

“You are not very good at this.”

“I’m also not wrong.”

“I know.”

The pilot opens her eyes. The mechanic is smiling at her sweetly, like she knows something very simple and wants her to understand it without making her feel bad.

“What?”

“You don’t stop feeling when there’s no hope, you feel because there is no hope. You have everything backward. There is nothing wrong with this. Check it out.”

Caydee leans forward, one hand gripping the armor frame, and joins the corner of her lips to the Pilot’s. Nuzzles and turns her head so that the Pilot has to turn with her. The Pilot tastes a little sweat on her lips. The feeling of the kiss is that of being plugged into a battery, of feeling a charge that makes everything that comes after possible. When it breaks it leaves electricity.

“The world is broken. You’re broken. I get it. I’m not. Okay?”

The Pilot meets Caydee’s eyes, soft and brown, and tilts her head up. Their lips touch again, for a little longer, until Caydee’s twist into a smile.

“See? Not wrong. Now, can I call you something other than ‘Pilot?’”

“Pilot is fine,” the Pilot replies, but there’s something other than emptiness in her eyes.

“Fine. Go out there, Pilot, and come home. That’s it. Go out there and then come back to me.”

The Pilot nods, and Caydee lowers the plates and bolts shut her armor against the world.