The brief asked for the violence of recognition — and for a mech pilot, that violence lives in the mundane. She can interface with a forty-ton war machine but she cannot cross her mother's workshop. The Miao-Piedmontese fusion gave me the mountain forge, the indigo coat, the Italian stubbornness in both women's spines. I wanted her mother's back turned not as rejection but as the older woman's own inability to look — to see her daughter alive means admitting she could have died. The borrowed coat is everything: Lin reaching for home by wearing her mother's skin, but wearing it wrong, wearing it like someone who left. — Mira