Then she looked up, and was nearly blinded by a pair of silver eyes. Tilting a long, metallic snout at her was—
A dragon, her brain supplied, taunting. Violently, Pru shook her head. This did not improve the headache situation.
“You’re one weird-ass robot,” she told the winged, scaled thing that could not possibly be a goddamn fantasy dragon. At seventeen years old, she was at least a decade too old to believe in that nonsense. This thing—this robot, or AI experiment, or whatever it was—had encased Pru in the softest and strongest brand of cybernetic armor she’d ever touched, spread its wings, and flown her across the city like a demented hovercraft.
There was more, though.
Pru recognized the thing’s eyes. That blinding, silver burn. How could she have forgotten? Pru’s gaze traveled over the painstakingly rendered body, swallowing the sight, bit by unbelievable bit. Whoever designed the totally-not-a-dragon had created a marvel of modern engineering. The scales both armored and streamlined the design, supple without compromising its strength. The wingspan boasted an almost translucent cast that definitely suggested a cloaking mechanism of some kind. Maybe a stealth modulator, like Pru had first guessed, or a network of reflective lenses, or some combination of both. The eyes, embedded bright inside the reptilian skull, tracked Pru’s movements with such unsettling care, she half-believed the thing really might be sentient after all. As opposed to some overgrown robot gone rogue. Probably, the robot’s engineer read even more fantasy novels than Pru had as a kid.
The wings lifted, stretching toward the sky. The motion revealed a telltale outline of detachable hatches concealed along the underbelly.
Pru had been inside the robot. No, not just inside—integrated within it, controlling the movements of the wings, the lenses of those scary silver eyes—at least on some level, piloting it.
Maybe that made it a mech, not just a robot. Pru had an Intro to Robotics teacher who’d stressed the difference before every single quiz, though given that Robotics I had wreaked havoc on Pru’s GPA in her first semester, she didn’t really trust herself to remember all the principles correctly. She was pretty sure she had this bit right, though—proper robots wandered about doing as they pleased; mechs were mobile suits designed for human pilots. The more advanced prototypes could sometimes move around on their own, but they functioned best with a driver in the seat.
Yes, Pru decided—still staring stupidly up at her great, chrome-winged monstrosity of a joy ride—she’d accidentally commandeered a mech. Not just any old mech, either, but some malfunctioning, dragon-shaped mobile suit that messed with your memories and let you observe the world in high definition, like a portable, 4-D virtual reality chamber. That could be a thing, sure.
Though that still didn’t explain what kind of mech randomly rescued Barricader schoolgirls from plummeting to their deaths in Incorporated elevator shafts, or spirited them away from auditorium rooftops, or why, indeed, a mobile suit would be stretching its wings and staring at Pru with such bright, curious eyes, canting its head from side to side.
“What are you?” Pru whispered.
The mech, unsurprisingly, just kept staring at her.
Slowly, pulse vibrating inside her veins, Pru stretched a trembling hand toward the mech’s snout. What would those cool, otherworldly scales feel like beneath her fingers? A machine’s armor or a living animal’s hide?
Pru didn’t get to find out. With a mechanical growl, the mech flinched backward from her touch. Silver eyes glaring, it tossed its head, wings twitching.
“Wait!” cried Pru.
Too late. With a snap of those great silver wings, the mech took to the air, and in a dizzying blur of chrome, catapulted itself skyward. A moment later, it vanished from sight entirely.
Pru sat backward into the grass, hard. No trace of the mech remained. There one moment, then gone the next, like dreams you had on the waking edge of consciousness, nonsensical yet replete with that crazy, nameless brand of wonder, leaving only an ache inside your head or heart. The mech might never have existed at all.
Except, of course, for how Pru was getting grass stains on the ass of her uniform skirt, out here on this pseudo-suburban patch of god-only-knew-where. Wobbly-legged, she rose. A coffeehouse sat amidst some nondescript shopfronts a few meters away. Maybe someone inside had noticed a giant robot dragon trespassing on their lawn. Maybe they’d even brew Pru a decent cup of coffee, something hot and bitter, bracing and real. After the night she’d had, caffeine was nonnegotiable.
That was something else she’d have to contend with, Pru supposed, stumbling toward the coffeehouse. The sky was practically light again, which meant she’d never checked into dorm curfew, which meant she was definitely detention-bound whenever she found her way back to school. If she ever found her way back to school.
The coffeehouse door slid aside with a smooth, auto-tuned jingle. Immediately, Pru’s nostrils inhaled the scent of—
“Cha siu bao?” she exclaimed in badly accented Chinese. She’d follow that warm, roast pork scent anywhere.
The hip young barista at the counter aimed a vaguely judgmental expression toward Pru. “Yes,” said the barista, almost reluctantly, with a disdainful nod of a svelte, auburn-pompadoured head. Pru caught a flash of one shiny, cybernetic hand, the fingers’ elegant gleam matching a pale, machine-made eye. Alongside its kohl-lined, hazel companion, it observed Pru from beneath long lashes. Cybernetic body parts weren’t so unusual in this day and age, but Pru rarely encountered anyone who wore them with such intimidating grace.
Pru still had grass stains on the back of her skirt.
“Are you going to order or not?” asked the barista, stylishly mismatched eyes narrowing beneath the makeup. Pru’s brain—taking in the hair, the slick-tailored suit, the metallic golden lipstick— fumbled briefly for a pronoun, then promptly abandoned this enterprise when her stomach growled. “Uh, how much for one of those cha siu buns?”
With a wordless purse of that gold-painted mouth, the barista shoved a menu—the old-fashioned, paper-print kind—in Pru’s face.
Pru scowled, both at the barista’s inexplicable rudeness and the inevitable “we’re a trendy coffeehouse nyah nyah nyah” price inflation. Then she inhaled that roast pork scent again, and hastily fumbled for the coin transfer app on her phone. “I’ll take a bun and a coffee, please.”
Service, at least, was prompt, however unpleasant the coffeehouse’s host. The rustic wooden tables were still empty this early in the morning, allowing Pru to stress-eat in relative peace. Biting into one of the cha siu buns, she groaned her delight. The treat tasted just like Mama’s baking, the pork hot and savory inside the sesame-topped, perfectly soft golden bun. Really, Pru had to admit, you couldn’t count any night a complete loss—cyber-dragon kidnappings aside—if it ended with fresh-baked pork buns and hot coffee in the wee hours of dawn.