“Well, what do you want me to do, envision you as the Executive General of the UCC?” demanded Pru. She blew stray wisps of hair off her nose, momentarily forgetting her terror, but annoyed with him all over again. “Or Harry Jellybelly—”
“Harold Jellicoe.” Was he laughing? Incredible. “And no, I don’t. I’m coaching you through this, not me. If you’re motivated by not wanting to fail fifth-period bio, then don’t fail fifth-period bio.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“I’m amazed you managed to take that as an insult!”
“How was I supposed to take it?”
“As an observation that you and I are different people,” yelled Alex as something clattered loudly near his earpiece. Quixote tried to jump again, to leap onto a more secure piece of the dragon, and nearly fell off entirely. “Rebelwing, whatever’s stuck in her memory banks, still chose to imprint on you. Whatever she saw in you already exists. You don’t have to fake something you’re not!”
Pru gave the dragon another jerk, but Quixote and Alex clung stubbornly to the tail. “You yelled at me the first time I officially test-piloted the dragon.”
“Because I thought you were going to get yourself killed! I didn’t—oh, shit.”
Quixote’s weight disappeared off the end of the dragon’s tail. The bottom dropped out of Pru’s stomach. Static crackled violently in her earpiece. “Alex!”
She’d been concentrating so furiously on dislodging him, she hadn’t given real thought to what happened to a wingless mech thrown midair several hundred feet off the ground. The dragon’s eyes zoomed in on the red-and-blue figure dropping through the sky. “Alex!” Pru screamed again. He didn’t answer.
As one, Pru and the dragon dove.
Part of her mind was screaming along with her vocal cords. The other part of her mind—the one that coasted on air currents with metal wings, and saw the world through high-definition reptilian eyes—made calculations, like she was working through a problem set on an exam with a ticking time limit.
She’d need to swoop beneath Quixote to catch the other mech in time before Quixote and Alex both went splat. Pru squinted through the dragon’s eye lenses, hard enough to pinch her temples, trying to figure out the right angle. “Hey now,” she murmured at the mech thrumming around her. “I know we haven’t gotten on so well these past few days. But how fast can you—we—just . . . fall?”
In answer, Rebelwing dropped.
Later, Pru wouldn’t be sure how to describe what happened in that moment. Just that she’d been utterly, eerily certain of herself and the span of her—no, their—body, the joint capacity of girl and dragon to catch the ridiculous boy windmilling toward gravity’s deadly embrace. The world had sped and blurred around her. Color and light exploded on her field of vision through the eye lenses, the world screaming past the screen too fast for her brain to process.
And somehow, at the end of it all, she’d wound up perched on the far edge of the Coalition government’s training field, Quixote dangling around Rebelwing’s neck.
Pru’s head pounded, a steady drumbeat inside her skull. But she and Rebelwing were earthbound, at least. Also, not dead. How nice.
Someone groaned, the sound shorting in and out over her earpiece. Pru sat up, a hair too quickly, which set her head pounding even harder. She ignored the pain. “Alex?” Her throat was raw, probably from all the screaming and terror. “Bourgeois boy, is that you?”
“Technically,” rasped the voice on the other end of the wireless, “you and your mum would qualify as bourgeois too. You voluntarily attend a prep school, and your mum makes professional art for a living. How is that anything but bourgeois?”
Pru shut her eyes, and dropped her head back against the cockpit seat. “Really?” she said, without lifting her eyelids. “You choose to have this argument now?”
“I kept meaning to bring it up, but you always distract me with, like, more immediate and infuriating arguments.” He sounded bizarrely pleased about this, which Pru could only chalk up to sheer adrenaline from the joy of not being smashed to a zillion pieces on his uncle’s training field. “Now seemed as opportune a moment as any.”
“Glad to hear that our near-death experience—which was completely your fault, by the way—hasn’t rattled your charming personality.” Pru unstrapped herself, flexing stiff joints and rubbing at the red imprints of the safety restraints on her skin. “Your friend Quixote really did a number on us.”
“Us?”
“Me and Rebelwing.”
“Ah, of course. The imprint.” A smile snuck into his voice. “How’s the bond?”
“Strengthened by terror and rage, so thanks for that. Are you insane? If I . . . if we hadn’t caught you—”
“We’d have had ourselves a nice little safety parachute drill.”
A beat passed between them. “Excuse me?”
“We were never in real danger,” said Alex. “Think about it. Remember how mad your mum got at my uncle before she even agreed to sign the permissions forms for the work-study?” His voice softened, almost imperceptibly. “No one would actually let you—or me, or Cat and Anabel, or any of us—get hurt, not on Coalition time. I wouldn’t remember to put Quixote in sparring mode, only to forget all the other fail-safes, like parachutes.” Then, a bit more wryly, “Besides, I think I learned my lesson from the first time we officially let you ride the dragon around this field. Poor Jay nearly lost his head.”
“Oh my god, you’re never going to let that die, are you?” They’d never been in real danger. Pru didn’t know whether she wanted to laugh, all giddy relief—or pry up the hatch on the dragon’s cockpit, drag Alex out of Quixote, and shove him off their tangled mountain of mech limbs. See who’d bother catching him then.
“So, what did it for you?” Alex sounded genuinely curious. “You were just as much of a mess as usual at the beginning of the sparring—”
“Thanks!”
“—but you guys smoothed out almost completely by the time we wound up in free fall. How did you manage that? What changed?”
Pru paused on her automated retort, half-formed and sardonic on the tip of her tongue. With an effort, she swallowed. Unbidden, the footage from the dragon’s memory bank replayed itself across her mind’s eye. Alex learning music scales at his mother’s knee. Alex listening to his father rail against his uncle’s cowardice. That final, aborted plea from Alex’s mother.
Alex at fourteen, breaking into Incorporated labor camps and dreaming of dragons.