“Don’t condescend to me,” snarled Alex, shrugging out of Pru’s grasp. He covered the length of the room in a few short strides and fisted his hands around Bishop’s suit lapels. “I know what I heard.”
“You’re thinking with your heart, Alexandre. A useful quality, at times. But right now, I need you to think with your head.” Bishop’s fingers rested over the tops of Alex’s hands, but made no move to shove the boy away. “Let go of me.”
Alex’s grip tightened.
Pru’s legs finally jerked into motion. “Let go of him, Alex. Alex!” Her hands closed over his shoulder again, far less gently than before.
“Don’t.” Alex tried to shrug her off again.
With Anabel Park–taught military precision, Pru bent her knees, found her leverage, and twisted. Alex, caught by surprise, stumbled and slammed sideways into a stray chair. He barely had time to reorient himself before Pru had him shoved up against the frosted-glass window. “Get a hold of yourself!”
He struggled against her. He’d probably have won on superior height and strength alone, if he’d really been trying, but she had her entire body weight pinning him in place, and the determination to keep him there. “I’m sorry,” she said. The words felt stupid and useless and small. Just like Pru. “I’m so sorry.”
At some point, he’d stopped fighting her, and slumped forward, his forehead caught against her shoulder. For a moment, they stayed like that, stuck in this exhausted, grief-bent parody of an embrace, her cheek buried against his hair. “I’m sorry,” she repeated, like a robot. Like all the sorry in the world could make anything better when your own father had been made into the thing you hated most in all the world.
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” Alex asked at last. The question, half-whispered into Pru’s neck, was directed at Hakeem Bishop. Pru could see the blurred shape of his reflection in the window, a lonely shadow of a figure standing to the side, hands tucked in his pockets. She thought he might have been concealing fists.
“I’m not your blood, nor your legal guardian. That’s your uncle. The truth was never mine to disclose.”
“But it was mine to know.” Alex’s weight vanished from Pru’s arms, sudden and sharp as everything Alex did. He’d rounded on Bishop again, but he no longer looked poised for a fight. He looked lost. Gone was the young man lashing out at the world with blind violence, and here in his stead was a boy left hunting for answers, soft-eyed as the night Pru first saw him on an auditorium stage, singing love songs in his mother’s language. “So why would Uncle go out of his way to hide it? I get pain. I get secrets. But I was a child who thought my father was dead, and now you’re telling me that you’ve known for . . . what, months now, that we’ve had it wrong all along? Uncle Gabriel could have—”
“What,” Hakeem wanted to know. The flickering blue light of the hologram cast the faint wrinkles of his skin into sharp relief. “Could he have comforted you with this alternative? Don’t pretend that would have been better. You thought your father was dead, and for all intents and purposes, he was, from the moment the UCC took him. Don’t make me repeat to you what happens to political prisoners in Incorporated jails. Death is the kindest of fates for the lesser offenders, and your father was not a lesser offender. This . . . thing he is now, that’s not Etienne. Harold Jellicoe has been working on a new generation of wyverns since the end of the Partition Wars. Anabel Park told me all about the transformation of that UCC man on the beach, from human to wyvern, how he had nothing left of himself by the end. How long did Jellicoe have to exact horrors on that prisoner’s brain and body: a few weeks? A month, perhaps? He had Etienne for nearly a decade. The man you called Papa is no longer your father.”
Alex leaned across the space between them. “Then why, I’ll ask again, did Uncle keep that from me?”
Bishop ran a hand over the close-cropped gray of his hair. He turned away from Alex. “Because the alpha’s identity wasn’t the only secret we had to keep from you. It’s also how Jellicoe programmed the alpha cell.” His mouth twisted. “Before their deaths, the Aberdeens were an abundant well of information for our intelligence operatives, at the right price.”
Pru frowned. “That night on the beach,” she said slowly, “you told us it wouldn’t be enough to destroy the alpha. You said we’d also have to destroy the cell itself, for good.”
“That’s right,” said Bishop. He dug the heels of his hands against his eyes. Sagging against the table, he mused, “Let me tell you both about the inherent problem with grooming a beloved hero’s offspring as living insurance against the rise of your enemies. It all seems very good at first, of course. He’s got the right name to rally behind, and what’s more, he’s passionate about precisely the right things. Genuinely so. If you’re lucky, he’s an ace pilot, an inventive dreamer who works closely with brilliant engineers to build bigger and better mechs to defend those passions he guards so righteously. He is, in any case, primed to take down whatever new mechanical monstrosities the other side throws at you. There is no one better for the task, the last, best hope of a flagging coalition of rebel cities. Brilliant. Goddamn great.”
Bishop shut off the holo-drive, the mocking image of Etienne Lamarque, the wyvern lurking beneath his bones. “I’m not blaming you, Alex. You . . . truly are the best of your family.” He closed his eyes with a hard swallow. “Where we went wrong was hubris. We were fools not to realize that the Incorporated had banked on our investment in you from the start. Which brings us back to the cell. Fascinating, the different ways you can program a cyborg cell. How it can be built to map on to particular types of hosts, down to the most arbitrary specifications. Chromosomes. Blood type.” Bishop’s eyes opened, points of darkness over the silver. “Genetic makeup.”
It took Pru several seconds to absorb the full implications of what the Chief of Staff had just disclosed. When her brain clicked, she sank into a chair, an expletive formed low in her throat. “That means—”
“Yes.” Bishop’s gaze was on Alex, standing a few feet apart from her. Pru couldn’t see his expression, but she saw the moment the realization struck him too, the sudden clench of his fists. “We wondered for the longest time, why go to such trouble to keep Etienne Lamarque prisoner, specifically to serve as the alpha? He could make a fine enough figurehead, sure, the Lamarque turned Incorporated beast—but what would be the point, when no one would recognize the man’s face behind a wyvern’s scales?” His fingers spun the cylinder faster and faster. “Funniest little things, cyber-implants. I must hand it to Jellicoe. His engineers may not be as clever as our Cat, but he’s cornered the market on ruthlessness. A cell—the alpha cell—won’t suffer a dead host for long. It’ll move on to the next best living thing it’s coded to implant in, or go dormant until its engineer reprograms the code. But so long as another Lamarque lives, this alpha cell will always have a host.”