A shadow falls over the canteen table, and the gaggle of rowdy, giggly pilot trainees fall abruptly silent. Gimbal's skin prickles; her hand freezes on the nape of her neck.
"Stop tampering with your implant," a voice says, very close and menacingly even behind her.
"Sorry, Handler," she says, hurried and meek, looking down at her tray. "I wasn't — I was just scratching a little because it itches—"
Her Handler lets out a controlled sigh. Gimbal shuts the fuck up. The other trainees sit very still, point their eyes away, as if ire is contagious.
"Don't." Her Handler says. "Scratch."
"No, Handler," Gimbal whispers, and the looming presence at her back steps close enough to her for body heat to shimmer against Gimbal's shivering back.
"If you touch it again," her Handler says, soft and threatening but still loud enough for the whole table to take in, "I'll superglue all your fingers together. Sooner it heals up, sooner you can train on the brainlink, sooner you won't need them to fly anyway. So that would actually help you, wouldn't it?"
Gimbal's other hand twitches in mute horror around her plastic canteen spork.
"I need my fingers free," she croaks. "What about — eating?"
"I'm your ground support," her Handler says. It sounds like she's smiling. It sounds evil. "I'm all the support you need, whatever you need. I can put a spoon in your mouth, pilot trainee."
Gimbal shudders. "What about—" she says before she can think better of it.
"I can wipe your ass," her Handler says, sweet and terrible.
Gimbal's mind goes places. She tries very hard for it not to, because Handler will know. Handler always, always knows.
"I can do that, too," her Handler says, proving the point, rich and cruelly amused. "Just the way you like it. Down the front of your pajama pants in the middle of the night, tiny tiny light circles while you whimper Topaz Topaz Topaz."
Gimbal looks at her plate, lightheaded. Down the table, Topaz — they do gunnery drills together, never spoken outside that — is also looking at her plate, and doesn't react in any visible way, not like Gimbal, not like twitching-bag-of-tells Gimbal, every thought that goes through her head a flashing neon KICK ME sign.
"Or the way you sometimes roll over and put just a tip in the back entrance and cry a little into your pillow and whine no no not there oh fuck—" Handler says, actually quiet now, maybe not going further than Gimbal's redly burning ears; and then the two missing syllables at the end of it slam Gimbal in the diaphragm, because Handler knows, she knows—
"Maybe none of you have really internalised this yet," her Handler says, back to table volume. "You don't have privacy. You don't have secrets. Not from your Handler. You're wondering, maybe: did we miss cameras in the bunks? Can they actually read our minds? And the thing is: it doesn't fucking matter. Your Handler is all the support you need, and we know everything we need to be that. Whether you agree what we need is irrelevant, and your uninformed opinion on necessity is useless. If your opinion is ever of value, we'll ask for it. Whether you like it: also useless and irrelevant."
She sharply flicks Gimbal's ear.
"What are your orders, pilot trainee?" she says.
"Don't touch my implant site, Handler," Gimbal says meekly, and a terrible thought occurs to her and falls right out of her stupid, appalled mouth: "Shit. Shit, they brought me up to medical spec on induction, fixed up two broken teeth — do I have bugs in my mouth?"
"Awwwwww," her Handler says, something like fondly, and pats the top of Gimbal's stupid head. "Don't make yourself crazy, you paranoid little dipshit. If you make yourself crazy, you'll wash out, and at this stage that means they send you to a nice farm upstate — by which I mean they shoot you and drop you in a vat of corpse enzyme to dissolve you so they don't risk damaging your implants to recover them."
Gimbal swallows hard and looks at her plate.
"...But at this stage," her Handler says, "I get first refusal on taking you home and keeping you as a fucking rescue animal that can't be allowed outdoors," and Gimbal shudders harder than ever at her pleased and speculative tone. "You might not wanna wash out, Gimbal."
"No, Handler," Gimbal says hoarsely.
