PROLOGUE

Earth. Looks pretty from out here, doesn’t it? All blue and shiny and happy. But get up close, and it all falls apart. My generation, we were born into war. Into a world of chaos.

Something called the Breach opened up at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. A gateway to another dimension. Sounds cool, doesn’t it? Except on the other side is an alien race called the Precursors. They thought it’d be a laugh to send giant monsters through the Breach to say hello. We called those monsters Kaiju.

To fight them, we built our own monsters: Jaegers.

Jaegers were big bad metal machines—so big they needed two pilots to run them, with their minds connected together in the Drift.

Ten years ago, we sealed the Breach. We won the war.

But you wouldn’t know it by looking around. The Kaiju made every hit count. Coastal cities got it the worst. Now the relief zones are filled with folks just trying to get by, psycho cults that worship the Kaiju like they are gods or something, and homegrown gangsters slapping together their own junk Jaegers from stolen parts.

Anyone with money moved inland. Middle of Nowhere became the new Beverly Hills. Because everybody’s afraid of another breach opening up. Afraid of another Kaiju attack.

Which is cool with me. Because one man’s fear is another man’s opportunity. In the relief zones, you have to get creative. Out here, we place a different value on things. The Pan Pacific Defense Corps usually looks the other way—as long as you don’t go poking around where you don’t belong.

. . . Say, like a scrapyard of decommissioned Jaegers. But laying hands on their Jaeger tech is worth the risk. Good score will set you up for a year. And I got a knack for delivering for my customers . . .

. . . Most of the time.