“They did.”
Pru, pausing for air, practically swallowed it. “What?”
“We broadcast the songs,” said Alex. “Anabel figured out how stream the whole performance on a couple propaganda channels in Incorporated territory.” He didn’t sound especially self-satisfied, or even all that excited about breaching diplomatic protocol on a school night. He sounded like a student answering a teacher’s questions during lecture. “There’s not much point to music that can’t be heard.”
“Have you lost your mind?” hissed Pru. Secondhand anxiety pounded a rapid-fire drumbeat through her already caffeine-abused nerves. “You openly, knowingly broadcast censored media onto UCC servers? A normal Barricader citizen could get sent to an international tribunal for that shit. You, you’re a Lamarque! The Executive General’s going to ask your uncle for your idiot head!”
“Which is exactly why I did it,” said Alex, in tones of disturbing good cheer. “Famous names might not be good for much, but we’re great for making a scene.”
“What the hell do you need to make a scene for!”
The cheery expression shuttered as suddenly as it had bloomed. He gave her a smile, and with a pang, she remembered that face: it was the same awful look he’d leveled on the very back of the auditorium before the concert, a ghastly little grin that didn’t touch his eyes.
The back of the auditorium. Of course. That was where Anabel would have set up a broadcast recording device. Pru swallowed. Alex’s cold, spare smile hadn’t been intended for anyone at New Columbia Prep, student or teacher. It had been intended for his real audience. For someone Incorporated.
“My uncle needed to create a distraction,” said the Lamarque boy, his tone gone flat and businesslike. “So I obliged.”
A third roar, far louder than the first two, drowned out anything else he might have said. As one, Pru and Alex swiveled toward the roof’s edge. Pru’s heart rattled beneath her bones. “Vehicular lane malfunction?” she suggested faintly.
Alex, jaw set and thin-eyed, shook his head. “That’s no auto-vehicle.” His gaze darted toward her. “Pru, listen—”
But she couldn’t hear anything except the shriek of chrome sparking on bricks. A great, lumbering pair of wings rose over the edge of the roof. Pru blinked, taking the sight in piece by piece. Her brain felt like it was screaming. Scales. Wings. Chrome, or something like chrome, but flexible and delicate looking, winking continually in and out of sight, as if operating on a broken stealth modulator.
Eyes, silver and reptilian and blinding, burned through Pru’s.
Then the scales were everywhere. Wings engulfed her. The auditorium roof fell away from Pru’s feet.
3
JOY RIDE
For a dizzying moment that might have been five seconds or five minutes, all Pru saw was silver, and all she felt was an unsettling sense of buoyancy. If she still had a body—flesh and bones and blood constrained by gravity—she couldn’t tell.
Then, piece by painstaking piece, her brain fell back under her control. Gradual awareness dawned on her, of a miniature city sprawled out below, brimming with lights and automated vehicle lanes and neoclassical buildings, walled off in the distance by—
“Oh,” said Pru. She was flying above the rooftops of New Columbia.
No, not simply flying. Transformed. She was a creature of silver and chrome, cutting a silent and shielded swathe through the night sky’s air. Her wings, wickedly and metallically scaled, fanned out around her, self-protective. Her body, once so anxiously breakable— found itself encased now in something stronger, brighter, namelessly powerful.
Pru threw her head back and laughed.
She could see everything, hear everything. Her eyes were no longer human eyes, but the lens of a movie camera, her ears picking up the sound of the streets like speakers on a 3-D streaming pad. Within one moment, Pru took in the city as a bird’s-eye postcard shot. Within the next, squinting, her eyes zoomed in on a young woman in athletic wear, jogging across Farragut Square. The gleam of passing headlights from the vehicular lane painted streaks of color across the runner’s dark skin.
If Pru listened hard enough, she could hear the pulsing beats of the song blasting from the woman’s detachable earbuds. It was some pop diva’s club song, which Pru always forgot the lyrics to. All summer long, the single had swept trendy party joints, belting about booze and boys and uppers. The UCC had banned the song in Incorporated territory within the first week of its release. That week alone, Pru had dealt at least twenty cylinders of the offending diva’s discography to nervous-eyed, shamefaced Incorporated customers.
She blinked, and found a pair of boys she vaguely recognized from school, one severely blond, the other with jet-black hair, whispering together on a park bench, heads bent together. “It’s a school night,” gasped the blond, “and your old man—”
“Doesn’t need to know what exactly we’re studying,” said his darker-haired friend, laughing, as he planted a smacking kiss on the blond’s jaw. “For all he knows, it’s a biology exam—”
Face aflame, Pru hastily zoomed out of her schoolmates’ rendezvous, and returned to winging her way listlessly above the city buildings. She blinked again. Something buried inside her mind sputtered, like a rusty exhaust pipe. She’d been here before, but she couldn’t remember when, or how. Just that she’d borne these wings, suited up in these scales, and flown high over this city.
Blink. A plummeting elevator—
Blink. Silver eyes, blinding her through the dark—
Blink. Her brain racing and sputtering around fragments of memory, sensation, underlaid by a dragon’s satisfied, mechanical roar—
Blink. Sinking deep inside a nest of scales, awareness sharpening, everything sharpening as gravity died, earth dropping away from her incongruously schoolgirl-looking lace-up shoes—
Blink. Sailing, half-awake, on wind currents, past oblivious Barricade sentries, invisible wings flapping over the wall, back into the city—
Blink. Human-footed again, no armor of scales, no silver wings, just herself, stumbling in a trance through the school library. Until her eyes, blurry, pause on a familiar number, engraved on a study door—
Abruptly, the world crashed into place around her.
“Ouch!” cried Pru. She rattled around inside her strange, scaly armor, turning over and over. The wings folded neatly around her as she rolled across grass, earthbound once more. When she scrambled to her feet—heavy, so damn heavy—the scales fell away like water, retracting from her human skin. Her vision returned to her, as her ears rang. A headache was slowly but surely pounding its way up through her skull.