Leaning over the translucent edges of the mech, still wearing an earpiece, all grown up and looking thoroughly displeased, was Alexandre Lamarque.
9
A CERTAIN AUDACITY
“How the hell did you get in here?” Pru blurted out. “We don’t have a scheduled training session! And stealth mode is on!”
Alex’s furiously furrowed eyebrows rose. “Stealth mode turns Rebelwing invisible. It does not, amazingly, turn her into a literal ghost.” As he spoke, he gave Rebelwing’s outer shell a couple solid knocks with his fist. Slowly, the layer of translucency receded from the mech’s silvery hide. “As for why I’m here, I have a war piloting license, military ID that authorizes regular access to mech training facilities, and keys. Unlike you.”
“Well, la-di-dah.” Pru yanked Jay Park’s keys out of her pocket. “Shows what you know, bourgeois boy.”
The eyebrows dove back into a V. “Pickpocketing Jay Park’s keys does not help your case.”
“I didn’t steal them,” snapped Pru, weirdly hurt by the assumption. “Anabel gave them to me.”
“Still doesn’t mean you should be here.”
“Why not? I’m trying to bond with Rebelwing!” protested Pru. “I’ve only got, like, four and a half weeks before the combat assessment.” Like Alex Lamarque himself could forget. The excuse sounded so flimsy, even to her own ears, she wanted to curl up into a ball. How could she possibly make this worse? “I can’t afford a bad mark on my transcript for this internship. Lamarque U is my top choice.”
Ah. That was how.
Alex’s eyebrows climbed so high, they practically disappeared into his hairline. “Breaking and entering charge on Coalition government property would definitely make your application stand out.”
“Look.” Pru folded her arms. “Current appearances notwithstanding, I’m not stupid. I know Rebelwing was primed to imprint on you, which means she had to have something of yours programmed into her own personality matrix. So I went digging through her memory banks, to figure out how to make her work with me.”A beat of silence stretched between them, and then he asked, very quietly, “Do you really care?”
“Do I—Jesus, Alex, I live here too!” snapped Pru. “There won’t be any universities left to reject my applications if Incorporated arms dealers storm the Barricade cities with an army of evil robot lizards. So before you give up and—and, I don’t know, break Rebelwing down for scraps and start over again, I thought I’d try to figure out how to be the sort of pilot she needs.” She ignored the odd, hindbrain-generated panic at the thought of the dragon torn asunder and mined for parts, the white-blue eyes going permanently dim. “You guys are the ones who keep telling me I need to treat this stuff seriously.”
“So you rifled through my parents’ recordings, and Cat’s—”
“Because Rebelwing gave them to me!” Pru burst out, and clammed her mouth shut again. Why couldn’t she ever keep decent control of her words around him? Alex’s eyes were very dark, and very focused on her. She tried again, averting her own gaze. “I was on the verge of giving up, you know. I was breaking school rules and government rules all on this harebrained hunch that maybe, just maybe, I could learn something useful. I went through the memory bank for an hour, maybe more. Nada. And then right when I was going to call it a day, declare myself a failure after all, Rebelwing threw a fit. When I finally got her to calm down, she’d . . . queued up that video footage. Like a peace offering or something. I don’t know,” she barreled on, one hand going up to tug out her earpiece, “it was clearly a mistake. I’m sorry if I saw things I shouldn’t have. It won’t happen ag—”
Long fingers closed around her wrist, keeping her earpiece in place. Alex leaned toward her, still wearing that crazy focused expression. “You don’t know that it was a mistake.”
Pru’s jaw hinged open and shut. “Of course it was. I just trampled all over your personal shit, not to mention Cat’s, and I don’t even have anything useful to show for it.”
The corners of Alex’s eyes, bizarrely, crinkled. He looked more like his uncle this way, on the verge of wry laughter. “One. It’s my personal shit. When I feel like it’s been sufficiently trampled, I promise I’ll let you know. Two. I’ll reiterate in other words: how will you know that what you saw wasn’t helpful until you give the piloting another try?”
“Oh, ha ha.”
In reply, Alex ducked back out of the cockpit.
“Hey, I’m trying to apologize to you here! Come back so I can be properly contrite!”
His voice answered her over the earpiece, crackling slightly. “Oh, I’m coming back. But not alone. I’ve been working on a harebrained hunch of my own for your past couple work-study sessions. So long as we’re both here at the training compound, we might as well test it out.”
“What? I thought you were just playing hooky because you were mad at me!”
“Well, I was, a little,” he admitted. Something clanged around, alarmingly loud, in the background of his mic. “So I decided to do something productive about it.”
“This doesn’t feel productive!”
“Strap yourself in and close the cockpit hatch. Also, don’t forget the earpiece. You’re going to want it, trust me.”
“I don’t trust you at all right now! What in hell is happening?”
She didn’t have long to wait. She’d barely settled back into the cockpit seat, when a second mech landed with a rattling thump opposite the dragon. “What the actual hell!” yelped Pru.
“Meet Quixote,” Alex said over the earpiece. “I’ve been piloting this little guy since I was thirteen. He was my very first mech, so he’s a little old, but rides smoothly enough.”
“Quixote”—which Pru definitely wouldn’t have described as a little anything—looked like the sort of combat mech they used to make movies about, in the days when mobile suits were first bursting onto the scene of mainstream tech culture. It was a tall, humanoid contraption equipped with floppy but durable-looking metal limbs that would ensure a long-legged stride and long-armed reach. Painted in absurdly cheerful shades of primary red and blue, the mech couldn’t have looked less dangerous next to Rebelwing.
So why were all of Pru’s instincts screaming at her to run?
“You’ve given me an idea for a training exercise,” said Alex, continuing in the same pleasantly informative tone. “Rebelwing was designed primarily as a mobile suit equipped for combat and stealth, not an ordinary transport mech. It’s possible we’ve been going about bonding you to the imprint all wrong.”