The speakers stood in the hallway, before a familiar couch. With a start, Pru recognized an evening-shaded rendition of the foyer where she’d once sat beside Alex, listening to Mama fight with Gabriel Lamarque. Now Gabriel—younger, the silver absent from his hair and his face unlined—bent toward a lean blond whip of a man, their shoulders knocking together.
“Je sais,” spat Etienne, raking long pale fingers through his hair. He was built slighter than his handsome, soldierly older brother, like he’d been made for the ballet instead of the battlefield, his sun-golden head bright as a candle compared to Gabriel’s brunet coif, but they had the same blue eyes, set over the same sharp, aristocratic bones. “Tu pense que—” With a frustrated snarl, Etienne switched abruptly to English. “I’m not an idiot.”
“Your wife begs to differ,” drawled the Head Representative. “As did Sophie, once upon a time.”
“Sophie Wu stopped taking your calls a year and a half into your first term as Head Representative, so don’t try to weaponize our old war buddies against me,” snapped Etienne. His shoulders slumped at the momentary hurt that skittered across his brother’s face. “Forgive me. That was a low blow. But this was as much Julia’s idea as mine. She and I are united in this.”
“Your unauthorized attacks on Harold Jellicoe’s private com pound, you mean? And how would that poll among the electorate, eh, my own brother and his wife committing treason?”
“Oh, I’m a traitor now, am I?” Etienne’s voice dipped flat and cold. His eyes, narrowed on his brother, were twin chips of ocean-blue ice.
“Of course not! I’m not talking about what you are, I’m talking about what you look like to everyone else!”
Etienne’s pale hair obscured his gaze, as he gave a slow shake of his head. Danger threaded every tension-pulled inch of his body language. “You’ve changed since the war. What did we fight for? I thought it was freedom from Incorporated tyranny, but you seem to think it was for the right to make pretty compromises with men like Jellicoe while children waste away in his camps, bare kilometers from the walls of your precious New Columbia.”
“Alexandre,” said Gabriel.
“Don’t you dare use my son as—”
“No,” said Gabriel Lamarque, in a different voice. “Your son is here.”
Both sets of blue eyes flickered toward the camera. Etienne’s squeezed shut, as his expression crumpled. “Mon fils. How long have you been standing there?”
“You told me I could play with the camcorder,” said a small voice. “I’m sorry, Papa. I heard your voice, and Uncle Gabriel’s, so I thought . . .” Hitched breath. “But I didn’t know—”
“I’m not angry, Alexandre,” said Etienne. His jaw set. “In fact, I’m glad you’re here. You’re getting older. It’s important that you learn what’s worth standing for.” He rounded carefully on his brother. “So long as we live, Julia and I will continue sabotaging Jellicoe’s compound. We will free as many children as we can, and destroy whatever wyvern prototypes we can find in the factories. Arrest us now, if you’d like. But don’t pretend you never had a choice, brother.”
The video ended. Pru didn’t have to wait long, this time, for the next one to start.
A flurry of motion exploded across the view screen. Pru swore, flinching from the white noise that flooded the sound system. As the camera righted itself, Julia Santiago’s face fell into focus. A bruise was blooming over one dark eye, and her cheeks were streaked with soot, but the stark, understated beauty of Alex’s mother was unmistakable. “Alexandre,” she called. “Alex, mijo, I don’t have much time, so I’m using the last of our reserve power to transmit this video. I—your father is dead.” Grief crumpled her features as she spoke, but Julia persisted, steel under her voice. “We miscalculated. Jellicoe was ready for us. He sprang a self-destruct mechanism in one of the wyvern factories. Almost all the children working there were killed, except . . . except one. Badly hurt, but a survivor. A fighter, just like a little cat. I’m copying the child’s coordinates to you and your uncle, so you know where—”
An explosion rocked the lens. Voices rose in alarm over the sound of plasma gunfire in the distance. “It’s over.” Julia’s eyes closed. She tried to smile. “But save the little cat, Alex. If we can save even one child, it will all be worth—”
Another explosion. A final smile bloomed across Julia’s features, even as tears leaked out from beneath her lids, carving long streaks through the soot on her face. “Don’t forget to practice your scales every day, mijo. Guitar and piano both. Even when the world is falling apart, the music still matters, all right? Sometimes, that’s when it matters most. And never doubt that I l—”
A final explosion shorted out the remainder of the video.
Pru pressed the heels of her hands against stinging eyes, thumbing angrily at the tears at their corners. Exhaling through the threat of a sob, she skipped to the next video in the queue. Second to last.
The picture took a moment to calibrate, shuddering in and out of focus. Someone blinked over the lens. “You’re not Etienne,” said the voice from behind the camera, young and suspicious. “Or Julia.”
“No, I’m not.” The answering voice had deepened since Pru last heard it on the recording, but there was no mistaking that mop of dark hair, or the great black eyes peering out from beneath its fringe. Barbed wire crisscrossed the fences behind him, beneath the half-light of a graying sky. “I’m Alex.”
“Who’s Alex?”
The boy—not the round-faced child he’d been, nor the svelte young man Pru knew now, but Alex at the dawn of his teens, all jutting bones and growing shoulders—swallowed, lifted his chin, and said, “Their son. What’s your name?”
A pause tightened between boy and camera. Then, as if offering something breakable on outstretched fingers, “Your parents called me Cat.”The little cat. The back of Pru’s head thudded against the cockpit seat. Of course. That machine-made eye Cat wore. There would be a camera at its center, to allow its owner a full range of vision. The engineer’s eyes recorded everything she saw. Literally. And that included Alex and his family, never truly off-camera, even in these quiet, stolen moments of a war-worn childhood. Pru studied the barbed wire in the footage, letting its implications settle into her mind.
“Cat,” repeated Alex. “I’m going to get you out of here.”
“You?” Even a few years younger, even trapped in an Incorporated labor camp, a familiar skepticism colored the way Cat spoke. It almost made Pru smile. “What are you, twelve?”
“Fourteen!”