When I call him back, he’s sluggish to respond. I can see the tension that coils and uncoils in his muscles when he draws up alongside the trainer deck. He’s already feeling cranky and overworked. If I push him, he might push back in a way I can’t control, but I can’t afford to lose any time.

“Sorry, little shit,” I tell him, and strap on the Otachi again.

I try to go easier on him in the second round, letting him take a few minutes to shake out his limbs before calling him back in to have another go at the tug. With each hollow thud of his plated snout against the ship’s metal side, I can feel the frustration building inside him. He can’t make sense of why he’s being asked to repeat the action, and he’s gotten too big for any sort of reward to be effective every time he strikes true. I can’t exactly furnish a host of carved-up neocete carcasses like we do back home, and red meat is the only sure way to get a Reckoner’s favor. As his frustration mounts, I start to worry that he’ll remember Code, that eventually he’ll just stick his head onto the trainer deck and snap me up.

But I’m frustrated and overworked too. It doesn’t mean he gets off the hook. I blaze the lasers again, and again, and again, conducting a hundred-and-fifty-ton orchestra with wrists trembling from exhaustion. There’s something I want to try, something I’ve never been able to attempt within the confines of regulated Reckoner training.

I want to see how far he’ll go to get me off his case.

So I keep on throwing up the same signal. The lights I project are so bright and sharp that they leave streaks across my vision in their wake, and I know they must be burned into Bao’s retinas by now. The lasers mounted on the Otachi are powerful enough to scorch things that get too close, and though the smudges in my vision make it difficult to tell, I think they’ve already started to wear a dark spot on the tug’s hull.

I wait for the moment I feel certain.

It doesn’t come until nearly evening. When I throw the Otachi’s beams against the tug’s side, Bao lets out a groan so loud that the ocean around him vibrates, and when he wheels, it’s with a burst of energy far stronger than anything he’s done in the past hour. He cuts through the waves like a freight train, his thick limbs kicking up a froth in his wake. I wait until he’s half a body-length from the tug’s side.

Then I twist one of the knobs, switching the signal from charge to destroy.