You wrench the neurohelmet off your head and get up, pulling yourself from the wreckage, heavy and clumsy and ugly and ungainly in your exosuit. You may have cracked something from that landing, parts of your Frame on fire before you, sickly pink and teal and gold from exotic matter and plasma and you pull yourself up and look behind you

and oh it's bad. it's worse than you expected. the helm is heavy in your right hand.

your heart stops as you see the enormous white and gold monorail shikansen smoking and sparking and lodged in the i/o tower, neatly intersecting where one of the beams used to project, 12 around it like spokes of a wheel or hours on a clock but this one in the air and up in one of the two projecting into space, the Jacob's Ladder sparking and sputtering. the tower sways. Behind you, you see a chunk of what used to be the doorframe of a space elevator in ruins, a freestanding wooden doorway on a beach full of crabstrocities.

You look into your right hand and the key to that door was snapped clean in half, you are not getting back that way.

Doggerel from your wingmate flows through your head:

dadachick dadachee so much for the fuckin' key, dadachum that's real keen all things serve the fuckin' -

"Hey."

You look up at your wingmate. As they were. Rail-thin and tan, studs in their ears and nose, dark mischevious eyes and short-cropped hair; walking with a limp even in her exosuit with the PILOT 00 insignia where you're 01. Jules is safe and you could kiss them and you feel ashamed for how much you ache to and then they take your hand.

"Hey, Crybaby, focus," she - they. they! - say, bringing you into a hug you need you ache for it it's been so long since you touched someone not through a hologram, and then they wipe the blood off your forehead and they start to pull all 325 fucking pounds of you along away from the beach and you can't help following after them, trying to look at the back of their head instead of their ass.

You can barely stutter it out. "Where - where are we -"

Your voice is alien and deep and scratchy and speaking with it hurts. How long were you out?

"Away, so you can heal, so you can make it here," they say. "Before the thing on the train finds you, it's free."

You hear a horrible ululating wailing howl and look up and

run faster as the thing swims through the air, wings buzzing, it's moan echoing and turning to static and snow the sound of a dead TV channel, the radar dish on it's head spinning faster and faster and you know it's not hearing anything because that beam is gone, one down thirteen to go -

You shake your head. "Safe is good, you're safe. I'm just glad you're okay, Jules, just -"

They shush you and smile and take you deeper into the jungle and oh.

Oh there's a town here, a shrine here, Jules is leading you there; a pool under a gazebo (it's pastel colored and friendly, it won't bite), spring fed. Pure.

"You're beat up, and hurt, and you've been fighting. You need to clean off to stay here," Jules says, and they start helping you out of your suit, and you don't want them to see what they're doing for you but you're too tired and hurt to object. You're naked before them and sweaty and sooty and bloody and fat and ugly and -

- and they're stripping down too and you don't know what you were worried about, as you walk to the pool. Your mother did this, she talked about it, you know how to do it. You need to immerse yourself completely, go under for it to be kosher, to be purified and reborn. Under and holding your breath to remind you that this too will pass, that all moments are fleeting, that life is short but good works endure.

You sink into the cool cleansing waters of the mikvah with your eyes closed for one long instant and you feel the sweat and grime and tears and blood and pain and ugliness float away and drift off, and it somehow tastes sweet as strawberries as you rise up.

Your head breaches the water, long red hair flowing, your ears popping up and listening for the soft scuttling of mice as it filters out the wail of the Glatisant, water rolling off your face and down your breasts and belly and hips and your three tails and you feel beautiful and at peace and