Pru stared, cylinder digging into her joints. “Mama. Did you read it first? What did Alex say?”
But Mama had already dropped her hands, turning to go. “How on earth should I know? I am ancient and decrepit, well past the proper age for understanding the sweet nothings of young love—”
“Mama.”
Mama looked over her shoulder, gaze cutting toward Pru. It was one of those moments she would later struggle to catalogue, Pru thought, her brain cobbling together all the little pieces of her mother, balanced on the precipice of that moment. The white of her knuckles on the doorjamb of Pru’s childhood bedroom. The teeth sinking into the side of her red-painted lip, caught on a pause between unspoken words. But mostly, what stuck with Pru was the look in Mama’s wide brown eyes, bright with an unnamable sort of fervor. Fear, or hope, or love, or perhaps all three, warring for dominance in the heart of a woman who’d been dubbed Scheherazade in wartime. A woman who told stories in the face of all things, because stories were how she survived.
“Yes,” said Mama, before she left. “To answer your question from before. In a shithole of a world that refuses to change, one life can still matter. One life can be everything.”
14
THE BLOODLINE TRAP
HJ is alive.
For several minutes, Pru stared in dumbfounded silence at the message blinking tersely at her from the holo-drive’s 3-D display. Then she tossed it aside, grabbed her phone, and hit the first name beside the grinning dragon emoticon on her contact list.
“What the hell, Alex?” she yelled into the speaker.
“Hello to you too, Pru,” replied the innocuous voice on the other end of the line. “How lovely that your phone works after all. Your mum’s really gracious, incidentally. I wasn’t sure she’d want us talking after the attack, but she said something about how good communication is crucial to love and war. Reminds me of Anabel when—”
“Would you shut up about my mom!” shouted Pru. “What the hell do you mean, Jellicoe’s alive? How do you know that? More importantly, why hasn’t the Executive General had him drawn and quartered or buried alive?”
“Because the Executive General has no intention of doing either of those things,” said Alex. “Far from it.”
Pru, head still full of news reels, huffed a disbelieving laugh. “Are you on uppers?”
“No. And we shouldn’t keep talking about this on the phone. I’m meeting Hakeem Bishop at the Rose Room of Café Dupont at seven thirty sharp. I’ll explain everything to you there.”
“What—”
“Please,” said Alex quietly. “I need you.”
Those last words sat on her mind’s edge for slowly ticking seconds as her pulse beat a rhythm inside her head. I need you.
She wanted to scoff. What role did she play in the life of Alexandre Lamarque? When they’d first laid eyes on each other, she’d been little more than an annoyance, an annoyance that had evolved into a potential threat after his dragon had decided to imprint on her. Nowadays, she was at best an inconvenient thorn in his side who’d usurped his rightful place in his uncle’s cold war, and at worst, some mousy schoolgirl who refused to bend the knee and kiss his toes like everyone else in the Barricade Coalition. Needed her, indeed.
Then again, she’d also saved his life back on the beach. That probably counted for something, so far as needfulness went.
“All right,” Pru said at last. “Seven thirty.”
When she arrived at their designated meeting space—right at seven thirty on the dot, so ha, take that, Alex—she found Hakeem Bishop alone, facing the rear windows of the Rose Room, silhouetted by the city lights through frosted glass. The sharp-pointed shoulders of his suit rested like dragon wings poised over the hands clenched loosely behind his back. Pru hovered awkwardly at the doorway’s edge, suddenly unsure of her welcome.
“Um,” she said by way of announcement, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. “I’m on time.”
Bishop did not look over one of those sharply tailored shoulders, but they did relax slightly. “And so you are. Good. You’ll need punctuality, if that fool Lamarque boy is going to entangle you in his schemes.”
“I’m guessing you don’t mean the Head Representative.”
The Chief of Staff did turn around then. The pull of his mouth was more grimace than grin. “No. I do not.”
“Does he know we’re here?”
“What do you think?”
Footsteps approached down the café’s winding corridor. “Notifying my uncle about this meeting would kind of defeat the purpose of procuring this nice private room, don’t you think?” Alex pointed out. He strode past Pru into the Rose Room. “We’re not hiding anything,” he added, taking a seat on the edge of one of the well-polished café tables.
“Oh, no?” challenged Pru, unable to stop herself.
“No,” said Alex, refusing to rise to the bait. His dark eyes glittered when they rose toward her. “We’re just taking certain matters into our own hands.”
“Certain matters like the father of wyverns,” said Pru.
“Among other things,” said Hakeem Bishop. He produced a cylinder from one of his suit pockets, a fancier model than the ones Pru and her mother used—the kind that boasted extra features like instant video play and high-definition, three-dimensional hologram footage—and clicked the projection button. Two men in suits emerged, ghostlike in their translucency, to pace the room.
“There must be a catch,” said one of them. His face was thin and angular, almost avian with its sharp-bladed nose and narrow gray eyes, the same color as the chrome-gray suit pulled tight over his shoulders, his chrome-pale hair slicked back over his paper-white scalp. He looked like an old-fashioned black-and-white film character, retooled for the modern age. “My new wyvern flock’s a beauty, all right, but they’re not worth what you’re offering.”
Pru rounded on Bishop, jerking her head toward the hologram. “I’m guessing the one in gray is Jellicoe.” Her attention turned to second man, whose smile unfurled in increments that shot the dread of recognition through Pru’s spine, straight into her belly. “But his buddy here, that’s . . .”
“Roman Theodore Finlay III,” said the Chief of Staff. “Currently styled Executive General of the United Continental Confederacy Incorporated.”
The UCC didn’t circulate much visual footage of their leader, but the few bits Pru had seen—from old wartime propaganda posters and videos of political speeches—were hard to forget. The Executive General looked the same in every one of them: a cold gem of a man with spun-gold hair as bright as Etienne Lamarque’s, and eyes the color of blue-tinted crystal. He might have been handsome, if not for the odd drag to his facial expressions. His smiles, stretched too thin to be quite natural, constantly mismatched the deadened look in those eerily pale eyes, like a glitch in a holo-image.