by Alex Irvine
Mako cried out and plunged into the water, swimming toward the second pod. It was scorched and dented. Its hatch had not opened. Under the beat of the approaching Sikorskys she reached the pod and hauled herself up over its floats to the hatch, which had not opened automatically. There were manual latches on the outside and she snapped them open one by one, flinging the hatch open and leaning over to look inside.
Raleigh was there, silent and still.
She leaned in and down, shaking him, slapping his face. Still Raleigh didn’t move. Mako pulled him upright and hugged him, remembering how he had cradled her in the terrible aftermath of their first Drift together.
“No,” she murmured. “No, don’t go.”
It didn’t seem possible, didn’t seem right, that they should have destroyed the Breach and gotten all the way back to the surface. How could they have gotten all this way and Raleigh be dead?
Not when we did the hard part, Mako thought. No.
She held him tighter.
Then Raleigh coughed and opened his eyes.
“You’re squeezing me too hard,” he said softly.
Mako laughed, a short bark of joy and relief. She was crying as she kissed him, as she had wanted to since she first saw him scarred and alone in his room the night he’d arrived at the Shatterdome. He returned the kiss and they held each other tightly, each feeling the other release all the desperation and fear and loss they had felt during the day just past. Had it only been a day?
Raleigh climbed out on top of the pod. One of the helicopters was circling around them, lowering an emergency ladder with a medic dangling on the bottom rung. Around them, a formation of Super Sikorskys hovered, none of their pilots wanting to miss out on the moment when the pilots of Gipsy Danger, disgraced and then redeemed, returned to the sunlit world after destroying the Breach and keeping the kaiju and the Precursors trapped in the dying world they had made.
It was a sunny day. The world was not going to end.
***
In the LOCCENT, Tendo Choi turned to Herc.
“Sir?”
Herc leaned toward the desktop comm and said, “This is Marshal Hercules Hansen. Stop the clock.”
In the Shatterdome, empty of Jaegers, the great flip clock rattled over to zero. And stopped.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Guillermo del Toro and Travis Beacham for giving me so much to work with; to Tomoyuki Tanaka, Ishiro Honda, and the gang at Toho Pictures for all the kaiju that filled my head when I was a kid; to WXON, Channel 20 in Detroit, for the Thriller Double Feature where I saw so many of those Toho movies, as well as Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot (or was that Channel 50?); and to Lindsay, Ian, Emma, and Avi for being my own family of monsters.
ALEX IRVINE is the author of many tie-ins to popular franchises including the Transformers novels Transformers: Exodus and Transformers: Exiles, and the Iron Man novels Iron Man 2 and Iron Man: Virus. His first novel won the Crawford Award for Best New Writer. He has also won awards from Locus Magazine and The International Horror Guild and was a finalist for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer.
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