“You don’t like talking about Gabriel Lamarque either.”
For a moment, Pru thought her mother might snap at her. Then Mama exhaled, and said, “The two might as well be synonymous, for me. If you don’t understand anything else about those years, Pru, understand this much: for me, the war was Gabriel, and Gabriel was the war. I was an artist long before I was Gabriel’s soldier, but he always thought that art had to exist in service of some grand battle. It was, quite frankly, exhausting.”
“Okay, but art really was a battleground when fighting against the Incorporated, wasn’t it?” Pru found herself arguing. “I mean, they imposed literal censorship zones.”
“Ah, but why do you imagine censorship zones were created in the first place?” Mama wagged a finger in Pru’s face. “Art is not always a weapon or a political statement, my girl. Sometimes, art is simply love with no place left to call home.”
“The Head Representative disagrees?”
“Please. The Head Representative doesn’t have enough hours in the day to think about anything that isn’t a weapon or a political statement.” Mama offered Pru a sideways little smile. “You remember asking me about why I started calling him Prometheus?”
“Because he brought fire to the people.”
“Yes, and got himself chained to a rock for his troubles, and all the good it wound up doing anybody. What have we done with fire since? Equipped some giant robots with it, and threatened one another with deadly force while Gabriel Lamarque sits shackled to that ridiculous office. Nothing’s changed, and nothing ever will. You know why I don’t talk about the war? Because it never truly ended. We just hid behind our walls, and told ourselves it did.”
Pru sat up and looked at her mother. The streaks of silver through her hair glinted in the light of Pru’s bedside lamp. “Did you mean what you said to Lamarque?”
Mama made a derisive sound. “About what, the failure of books to magically save humanity from itself? I’ll stand by that one. Really, I never understood why the Incorporated kicked up such a fuss about them.”
“No. About the value of saving one person. The kids who wrote you letters,” Pru clarified. She curled her fingers into the old patchwork quilt Mama had gifted her with when she was ten. “Maybe you didn’t change the world, and maybe the Head Representative couldn’t fix all the things you both wanted to, but if what you said is true, then, like . . . look, Mama.” Pru pinched the bridge of her nose, and said in a voice that sounded horrifyingly like Alex’s, “Because you guys fought for the Barricade Coalition, a handful of kids on this continent can read stories that they’d never have touched under Incorporated rule. Kids who cared enough to write to you, who said you changed their lives, if not the world. One kid’s life. One person’s life. Does that matter?”
Mama held Pru’s gaze for a long moment. “You’re being very philosophical for someone doing”—she spared a cursory glance toward the readings on Pru’s phone—“what appears to be the dullest history homework known to man. Why?”
What to say? Curled on the tip of Pru’s tongue were half a million stupid, juvenile reasons, some almost true, but none of them what she wanted to say. In her mind’s eye, dragon wings spread across the night sky. In the back of her brain, nestled beside the imprint, were memories of Mama’s earliest stories. Impossible fairytales. Simple stories. Stories for children.
But those stories had always been about dragons.
“Rebelwing saved me,” said Pru slowly. “When I was . . . that day, when my customer sold me out to the UCC police brigades. And then, at the beach, I—the dragon and I—we saved Alex. And I know people died anyway, and that should never have happened, but some people didn’t. Some people lived. Because the dragon was there, and Alex was inside to pilot it.”
“And you,” her mother added quietly. “You were there too, don’t forget. With this imprint of yours everyone keeps telling me about.”
Pru rubbed her temples. “Pretty hard to forget something that lives inside my head twenty-four seven.”
“Were you glad for it, on the beach? The imprint.”
“I wasn’t itching to have a battle of the beasts with those wyverns, if that’s what you’re asking. I needed the dragon, so it came. That’s how it works, you know? You have to want something. Believe in something. And I just wanted to save . . .”
“Alexandre Lamarque?”
“One person,” said Pru softly. “I wanted to save just one person, if I could. It was so stupid, Mama. I know it was stupid. Pitting one experimentally built dragon against an entire flock of war wyverns. We were never going to win, not without the Coalition fleet. But I thought that maybe, if I could save one or two or three people from the wyverns first, then maybe . . . maybe the imprint wouldn’t have been wasted on me.”
Mama went silent for a long moment. “That dragon’s imprint was never wasted on you.”
“Thanks,” said Pru. “Good pep talk.”
“I mean it,” Mama said, and released a long breath, pinching the bridge of her nose. “I think that maybe, underneath it all, you have more faith than I do. Than I ever did.”
“Faith in what?’
Mama’s mouth pulled sideways. “People.” From one of her dress pockets, she slipped Pru a cylinder. “I believe this is yours.”
Pru felt her eyebrows climb. “Last time I got caught smuggling books in an Incorporated zone, you promised to ground me all summer long. Guess we’ve wound up going a little preemptive with that, but—”
“Read what’s on the drive, Pru,” interrupted her mother, carefully expressionless.
“Why?”
A smile flickered across her mother’s painted mouth, briefly lighting sad, tired hollows beneath Mama’s eyes, as she rose. She winced, turning her hips from side to side to crack her back. “The cylinder, you might be interested to know, came to me from a pair of cheekbones more trouble than they’re worth. Seems you haven’t been answering your text messages. Or possibly reading them at all, for that matter.”
Pru’s heartbeat, to her chagrin, picked up. “Not like I could answer more disastrous beach getaway invites. I’m on house arrest.”
“And so you are.” Mama bent and closed Pru’s fingers around the drive, the cylinder’s metal casing cool inside the cradle of their hands. Almost airily, she added, “By the way, I have a meeting with a publisher in a few hours. Should run quite late. But I trust you’ll be kept plenty busy right here with all these very interesting history readings, and shouldn’t have the faintest notion of doing anything untoward in my absence.”