“The comics you bought off us,” Anabel began.
“Stupid indulgence,” hissed Masterson. His voice was changing, like sloppy auto-tuning, robotic and full of fuzz. “There’s the rub, isn’t it? Thinking . . . questioning . . . worrying about things, it’s all . . . such a . . . headache. Easier to just . . . sign it over. But that’s the . . . human thing . . . I guess. Testing the . . . cage . . . you’ve bought. Always . . . testing . . . your choices.” He giggled, once, nails scraping down metal. “Choice. Can you . . . imagine? So damn double-edged.”
Anabel leaned in. “You’ve still got one.”
Another brittle giggle. “You can’t save me.”
“No,” agreed Anabel, with a resolute sort of chill. “No one can. But that doesn’t mean you can’t screw over the people you sold yourself to. I do know you love screwing over business partners.”
“I can’t—”
“You can. By answering me this.” Anabel ticked off questions, one-handed. “One, how many wyverns are there? Two, who are they? And three . . . three, how do you take them out?”
Silence stretched between them. The scales were razoring in faster and faster, but Anabel didn’t even seem fazed, waiting Masterson out, like they were on another UCC-controlled street corner, waiting for a mid-risk drop.
“Twenty-seven,” Masterson choked out at last. “Twenty-seven, last I counted, with more in beta. They’re . . . people who broke the rules of . . . Incorporation. With book smuggling . . . or protesting . . . or wearing the wrong-colored socks, I don’t fucking know.”
“Yes, you do.” That came from Cat, who strode over to grip her own metal fingers against the still-human flesh at Masterson’s chin. “Organically grown cyborgs that work in flocks like yours, they’re just another kind of animal, like their flesh-and-blood cousins. I’ve studied this. Your flock has an alpha.” Cat’s eyes glinted under the slivering moonlight, the boom of plasma fire in the distance. “Take out the alpha, and you take out the flock. Who is it?”
“Not a . . . who,” gasped Masterson. “A . . . what. I never . . .” The remainder of his words died inside a mechanical throat, as metal scales erupted over the last pieces of human skin. Cat jumped backward. Anabel swore.
A wink of blue-white plasma fire flickered to life inside Masterson’s ruined mouth. Pru shouted, springing forward, but Anabel got there first, a revolver materializing in her hands out of nowhere. She fired once, a silent shot of plasma. Masterson—the thing that had been Masterson—went down.
It could be a film poster, or a video game ad, thought Pru, scrabbling backward from the bloody tableau Anabel and Masterson formed. Brigadier General Park’s youngest, cleverest granddaughter straightened her spine over the wreck of metal and man crumpled at her feet, revolver still trained on the crimson ruin of his head. If any of the red had splattered onto her navy silk cocktail dress, the darkness of the cloth hid the color. The cloth billowed around her knees like a robe on some stylized goddess of death.
Pru couldn’t stop staring at the blood she could see. Masterson had been a douchey but reliable black market customer. Masterson had betrayed them. Masterson had been bought and sold and used for parts by Incorporated arms dealers. Masterson had, by the will of whoever was pulling his mechanical strings, tried to kill them all in a spray of plasma fire right here in this No Man’s Land cabin. And now, Masterson was dead.
Another tremble of the ground, followed by more shouts from outside, shook them all back to life. “We’ve got to find Alex,” Pru croaked at last, dragging her eyes away from the corpse. “We’ve got to find him, and get the hell out of here.”
“Can’t,” said Anabel grimly. She stepped around the body, looking faintly gray beneath her beach tan, but spoke steady voiced. “Routes in and out of No Man’s Land are all blocked off right now, thanks to the attack. Our only chance is if Alex gets a signal out to the Coalition.”
“Well, where is he? How long will that take?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s not good enough,” said Pru. Blood hammered in her head, and pooled on the floor beside her. “We need to find him.”
Anabel’s fingers snagged on her shoulder. “If you think you’re heading out to the beach, with wyverns dive-bombing the shit out of anyone stupid enough to be caught running across open shoreline right now—”
“I’m not!” Pru shrugged her hand off. The barest traces of a plan, riding on the edge of adrenaline, were falling together inside her head. Come on, brain, don’t fail me now. “At least, not alone.”
“Cat and I—”
“Are staying right here,” said Pru. A grim sort of foolhardy determination had filled her up inside, making a heady cocktail of the amplified anxiety in her gut. “I’ve got another friend to call on.”
Anabel sucked in a sharp breath, as Pru’s meaning caught on. “You can’t mean Rebelwing.”
Pru ignored the extra terrified leap of her heart at hearing her terrible plan put into audible words, and said, coolly as she could, “Hopefully, it’ll help me hold off the worst of more wyvern attacks until the actual Coalition military gets its ass over here.”
“That . . . is so many shades of awful idea, I’m not sure I actually know where to begin.”
Pru shrugged, trying to mimic her usual habit of shrugging off nerves before a book smuggling drop. “Not sure I’ve got many other options.” Just like she was talking about firewall hacking versus physical drop-offs in an Incorporated zone. Options laid out easy, risky but familiar. Manageable.
“Do you know how far out No Man’s Land is from New Columbia?” demanded Anabel. “Can your imprint even catch a signal from out here?”
“Depends.” Pru turned to Cat. “Alex said you brought . . . toys. Anything useful?”
Cat gave a slow nod. “A neural amplifier. I had one disguised as a holo-drive. Amplifies the imprint as far as sixty kilometers. We’re within range, barely.”
Anabel bit her lip. Girls of Anabel’s stock didn’t stand down easy, but they were also canny enough to know when they’d been checked. “You really think this will work?”
“It will,” said Cat, with the sort of finality that only the dragon’s own engineer could really sell. Stepping up beside Anabel, she slipped a little chrome cylinder into Pru’s hand. “I didn’t think you deserved the dragon,” she said bluntly. “I’d like, for once, to be proven wrong.”
“Thanks.” Pru looked down at the cylinder, so like the one she’d passed to Masterson almost two months ago, the one that had sealed her present circumstances. Plasma fire outside. Wyverns in the sky. No Man’s Land stretched out untouchable around them, routes out back to the Barricade cities all blockaded.