Chapter 30: Far
The rhythmic clang-clang-clang of a faulty coolant valve provided the bassline. Kai, half-inside the Grunt’s thoracic cavity, was providing the melody. He whistled a jaunty, off-key tune that echoed metallically in the hollow chassis.
“You know,” his voice came out muffled, “they say old man Matthew still has nightmares about the vomit. Says it tasted like synthetic protein and regret.”
Ren, tightening a bolt sequence on the knee actuator, couldn’t help a snort. “I thought it was legendary.”
“Oh, it is. The legend of the smell. It’s what they use to haze new techs. ‘You think this grease is bad? You should’ve been here for the Matthew Incident.’” Kai wriggled out, his face smeared with a new stripe of black fluid. He held up a corroded pipe. “Behold! The artery of a champion. Clogged with the dreams of better pilots.”
Ren tossed him a clean rag. “Your optimism is inspiring.”
“It’s a gift.” Kai caught the rag and made a theatrical show of wiping his hands. He leaned against the Grunt’s leg, surveying their work. The machine was a patient slowly coming back to life. “Okay, theory time. Why did our metal friend here punch a wall?”
“Neural feedback lag,” Ren recited, repeating Kai’s earlier lesson. “The pilot’s aggression spiked, the empathy core translated it as a threat-response, but the hydraulic regulators in the right arm were 0.3 seconds behind. The force overcorrected.”
“And what do we call that?”
“A costly mistake.”
“We call it getting your feels ahead of your steels,” Kai said, grinning. “Rule one: the machine feels what you feel, but slower. You gotta feel in advance. Be predictive. It’s like… whistling a song before you remember the notes.” He demonstrated, whistling the same tuneless riff.
Ren picked up a sonic driver, examining it. “So I should whistle while I work?”
“Now you’re getting it!” Kai pushed off the Grunt and grabbed a second driver from the cart. He held it like a microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen of the maintenance bay! For your listening displeasure, the Rusty Duet!”
He began whistling his erratic tune louder, punctuating it with the high-pitched zzzt-zzzt of the sonic driver triggering on empty air. He added a ridiculous, shuffling dance, his boots squeaking on the concrete.
A laugh burst out of Ren—short, surprised. It felt foreign in his chest. He shook his head, but a smile tugged at his lips. He raised his own driver, adding a lower, wobbling whistle to Kai’s melody, syncing the zzzt to what he imagined was the drumbeat.
For a minute, Bay 7 was a concert hall. The grinding of a distant saw in another bay was the applause. The flickering light was their spotlight. Kai spun, pretending to almost drop his driver, feigning horror. Ren played a dramatic, descending whistle note, imitating a falling bomb.
“And the crowd goes mild!” Kai announced, bowing deeply to an audience of dormant exosuits.
The sharp, deafening shriek of the public address klaxon tore the performance to shreds.
Both boys flinched, the drivers falling silent in their hands. The orange lights cut out, replaced by a stark, rotating red beacon mounted high on the wall. It painted the bay in frantic, bloody strokes.
A voice, clipped and utterly devoid of humor, replaced the siren. “Cadet Ren Ikawi. Report immediately to Briefing Room Delta. Cadet Ren Ikawi to Briefing Room Delta. This is a Priority One summons.”
The message repeated. Priority One. It wasn’t a request. It was a gravitational pull.
Kai’s joking demeanor evaporated. His face went blank, all the levity draining away into the grime on his skin. “Delta,” he muttered. “That’s… that’s Captain Yui’s direct briefing room. In the operational wing.”
Ren’s mouth was dry. The grease on his hands felt suddenly toxic, insulating him from the clean, clinical world of pilots and priorities. He looked at his father’s jacket, hanging on a hook, brilliantly white against the rust-streaked wall. A symbol. A target.
“Go,” Kai said, his voice low. “Don’t keep her waiting.”
Ren moved on autopilot. He scrubbed his hands hastily with a solvent rag, the chemical smell burning his nostrils. He shrugged into the jacket, the weight of it different now. It wasn’t armor; it was a uniform for a judgment he wasn’t ready for. He left the bay without a backward glance, the echo of their foolish whistling song still haunting the air behind him.
The corridors of the operational wing were a different species from the academy halls. The floors were a darker polymer, swallowing sound. The lights were a constant, unblinking white. People moved with purpose, data-slates clutched to chests, expressions grim. No one looked at him. He was a smudge of the maintenance bays moving where he didn’t belong.
Briefing Room Delta was an unmarked, brushed steel door. He took a breath, the air cold and tasteless, and entered.
The room was small, stark, and freezing. A holotable dominated the center, currently dark. Five people stood in a loose semi-circle around it, their conversation dying as the door hissed shut behind him.
All eyes turned. He recognized Captain Yui immediately—taller than he’d imagined, her black braids coiled tightly against her scalp, her posture rigid. Her face was all severe angles, and her gaze, when it landed on him, was a physical weight. It scanned him from his poorly cleaned boots to his white jacket, lingering on the red stripe with an unreadable flicker.
To her right stood a silver-haired man in a pilot’s duty suit, the patches worn but clean. Kenny Matthew. His arms were crossed, his jaw set. He didn’t look annoyed; he looked actively hostile, as if Ren’s very presence was a contaminant.
The other three were senior operations staff, their insignia marking them as logistics and comms. The air in the room was thick with a tension so potent it felt like ozone before a lightning strike.
And then, in the corner, partly shadowed, was his uncle.
Kaito Ikawi leaned on a polished carbon cane, his bad leg slightly bent. His kind, scarred face was etched with a deep, weary gravity Ren had only seen a handful of times in his life. It was the look from the old news reels, from the declassified after-action reports. It was the face of the Flying Star, not the man who made tea in their cramped apartment.
Captain Yui spoke first. Her voice was like a sheet of ice cracking. “Cadet Ikawi. You are late.”
“The summons was immediate, Captain. I came directly from the maintenance sector,” Ren said, forcing his voice steady. He could feel Kenny Matthew’s stare boring into the side of his head.
“Your personal schedule is irrelevant,” Yui stated. She didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t need to. She tapped the holotable, and it ignited with a topographical map of the Tokyo-1 perimeter. A sector, maybe thirty kilometers out, pulsed a sickly, intermittent violet. “Three hours ago, a Class-2 Anomaly solidified along the Tama River residual zone. Scanners indicate rapid expansion. Eradication protocol is activated.”
Ren’s heart hammered against his ribs. An active anomaly. Not a simulation. Not a story.
“Standard cleaner teams are mobilizing,” one of the ops officers said, her voice tight. “But the distortion field is generating intense interferometric shadows. Our scans are blind beyond the initial perimeter. The nature of the hostiles is unknown.”
Kaito’s cane tapped once on the floor. All eyes shifted to him. “A blind insertion,” he said, his voice the stern rasp Ren knew so well. “It’s a setup for an ambush. Ground teams will be walking into a meat grinder.”
“We are aware of the risk, Retired Captain,” Yui said, the title a formal barb. “Which is why we are deploying a Mark III for field dominance and reconnaissance. Pilot Matthew will lead the cleaner sweep in Adam.”
Kenny Matthew gave a single, sharp nod. His eyes, however, slid from Yui to Ren, and then to Kaito. A challenge.
Kaito ignored him, his gaze fixed on the pulsing violet blotch on the map. “One Mark III changes the equation. But it doesn’t solve the blindness. You need a dual-frequency scan from within the anomaly to clear the fog for Adam and the teams. A pinpoint, high-speed insertion to gather data and get out.”
A cold dread began to pool in Ren’s stomach. He saw where this was going. He felt the pieces click into place with terrible, grinding certainty.
Captain Yui turned her glacial eyes back to Ren. “The only other empathy-core equipped asset currently in Tokyo-1 that is not on active patrol or in deep maintenance,” she said, each word measured and precise, “is the legacy Mark I unit.”
The silence that followed was absolute. Ren could hear the hum of the holotable, the faint rush of air from the vents.
Kenny Matthew broke it. “You cannot be serious.” His voice was a low growl. “That relic is a museum piece. And the boy is a cadet who can’t handle a basic Grunt sim without attempting demolition.”
“The Ikaze is combat-ready,” Kaito interjected, his voice cutting through Matthew’s scorn. “Its systems are dated, but its core is stable. And it has one advantage your Mark III does not, Pilot Matthew. Extreme low-altitude agility. It can get in under the interference where Adam cannot.”
“This is not a training exercise,” Matthew snapped, finally addressing Kaito directly. “This is a real incursion, with real shadows. Sending a child in that… that junk-heap is a death sentence. For him and for any team relying on the data he’s supposed to get.”
“The decision is not yours,” Captain Yui said, her tone final. She looked at Ren. “Cadet Ikawi. Your familial designation grants you provisional operational clearance for the Ikaze. Your performance to date does not inspire confidence. However, Retired Captain Ikawi has advocated for this tactical solution, and the need is critical.”
She leaned forward slightly, the red beacon from the hallway outside flashing across her face through the door’s viewport, casting her in alternating light and shadow. “You will suit up. You will perform a high-speed reconnaissance run into the edge of the anomaly. You will activate the Ikaze’s deep-scan suite and transmit the data to Adam and command. You will not, under any circumstances, engage the enemy. Your mission is eyes only. Do you understand the orders?”
Ren’s whole world had narrowed to the pulsing violet light on the table. He saw his father’s jacket sleeve in his peripheral vision. He felt the ghost of Kai’s whistling tune in his ears. He heard the silent, furious judgment radiating from Kenny Matthew.
He saw his uncle’s face, stern, expectant, filled with a fearful hope.
“I understand the orders, Captain,” Ren heard himself say. His own voice sounded distant.
“Then move,” Yui said. “Wheels up in forty minutes. Dismissed.”
The meeting broke apart. The ops staff began talking in low, urgent tones. Kenny Matthew shot a last, venomous look at Kaito before striding from the room. Kaito moved toward Ren, his cane clicking on the floor.
But Captain Yui held up a hand, stopping him. “A moment, Cadet.”
She waited until only the three of them remained. The rotating red light bled into the room, a relentless strobe.
“This is not about legacy,” she said, her eyes locking with Ren’s. “This is about necessity. You fail this mission, and people die. Cleaners. Pilot Matthew. The Ikaze is a tool. You are now an extension of that tool. Nothing more. Your name, your father’s jacket… they are irrelevant in the Dead Zone. All that matters is the data. Bring it back.”
She turned and left, the steel door closing with a soft, definitive thud.
Ren stood frozen, the weight of the mission crushing down on him. The joking, the grease, the shame of the simulator—it was all gone, washed away by the cold, violet tide of the map.
Kaito put a heavy hand on his shoulder. The grip was firm. “Come on, kid,” he said, his voice rough. “I’ll walk you to the hangar. It’s time you met her.”