Pru’s jaw clenched. “What?”
“Hit him—it—between the eyes.”
“I don’t—”
“Et—the alpha,” clarified Bishop. His dark gaze was a fixed point in a haggard face. “That’s where the alpha cell implants in a wyvern. Between the eyes. Don’t miss. Do you understand?”
Pru opened her mouth. Nearly choked. “Yes,” she said at last, in a small voice that made her feel smaller still. She couldn’t bear to look Alex’s way. “Yeah. Got it.”
“Good.” He cleared his throat, and looked away, rubbing a palm over his forehead. “We’ll be in touch regarding details of the mission, as this is highly irregular—”
Pru was already halfway out of the Rose Room, head tucked. With one hand, she swiped the tears from her cheeks. She waved the other over her shoulder, affecting what carelessness she could. “Yeah, yeah, handle further highly illicit activity with care. I hope you know that Gabriel Lamarque will fire your ass once he finds out, and possibly lock you in prison for the next million years, but hey, you’ll go down for a good cause. One for the history books. Don’t worry, Bishop. I promise not to flake on our super-secret mission to prevent cross-continental civil war.”
“Pru.”
Pru’s feet stopped at the Rose Room’s exit. Alex’s voice, as ever, arrested her. She could hear the break in her name, the echo of all the things probably breaking inside him in the space of this evening. She almost turned around.
Her fingers gripped the doorjamb. “I’m sorry about your dad, Alex. I . . . call me, or text, if you need to. I’ll pick up this time.”
She fled before either Bishop or Alex could say anything more. Hand over mouth, she pelted down the quickest exit she could find from Café Dupont, back onto a train platform. The metro ride toward Mama’s apartment blurred into faceless, nameless strangers milling through the underground, jostling Pru on the train, laughing without a care in the world. And why shouldn’t they? People who didn’t imprint on dragon mechs didn’t get whammed with bloody family secrets that held the security of the Barricade cities in balance. Good for them, really.
Pru slammed into Mama’s apartment with a crash of the sliding door that sent Mama herself swearing out into the hall. “Good god, Prudence, what—” She stopped when she got a look at Pru’s face. “Oh, bao bei. Kiddo.”
The sob Pru had been holding back all night bent her double, a great heaving gasp. Without quite noticing what her feet were doing, Pru pitched herself across the length of the hall, into Mama’s waiting arms. “Mommy,” she wailed against her mother’s cotton shoulder. “Mama, I don’t, I can’t—”
Her mother’s arms closed around her. She smelled like the pork buns she used to make when Pru was little, which, ridiculously, made Pru cry even harder. “I know, bao bei. I know.”
Pru wasn’t sure how long they stood there in the hall, clinging to one another and rocking back and forth. Her temples throbbed when she finally lifted her face from her mother’s now thoroughly snot-stained nightshirt. “I’m sorry.”
Her mother snorted. “Kiddo, I’ve been a single mother since I was in my twenties. I’ve had worse than your snot on my clothes, thanks. Now, what’s that Lamarque boy done, and who do I need to punch?”
Pru laughed wetly. “Nothing, actually. It’s what I’ve agreed to do.”
A pause bloomed between them. Mama cleared her throat with exaggerated awkwardness, and said, “Now, Pru, I know he’s a handsome boy, but we’ve had the talk about certain intimacies—”
“Not that!” shouted Pru, face aflame. How weird, that under threat of war and wyverns and Alex’s secret undead dad, Mama could still embarrass her in the most juvenile way imaginable. “It’s nothing like that. But I don’t know if I can talk about it. Just . . . Mama.”
“Kiddo.”
Pru bit the inside of her cheek. “If I told you that I’d promised to do something scary and dangerous to save some arbitrary handful of people—not because I wanted to be a hero, or impress a boy, or get into a good university—but because I’m literally the only person equipped to do it. Would you be mad?”
Her mother’s arms tightened over her shoulders for half a minute that felt like half an hour. Then, a little hoarsely, “I’d say you’re the girl I wanted to be, at your age. You watch yourself, bao bei.”
Pru hugged back, eyes screwed shut. “I’ll try, Mama.”
Later, after Mama had gone to sleep, Pru lay awake in her childhood bed. For agonizing minutes, she stared up at that crack in the ceiling. Surrounded by the warmth and smallness of the room, the ache of her failure to fit throbbed harder than ever beneath her bones. Would she ever be able to face this room again, after this mission with Alex? If they saved the Barricade cities? If she shot him dead?
Finally, frustrated by her own insomnia, she tugged her phone out from beneath her pillow. The messages she’d screened from her friends and schoolmates glowed back at her. In a display of either great kindness or great passive-aggression, one of her bio lab partners had sent her bullet points from the two lectures she’d missed since No Man’s Land. Another had invited her to a pre-curfew dorm party. One of the kids in her History class was still puzzling over the actual causes of the first French Revolution, and wanted to know if Pru had an opinion, or at least some notes he could borrow that would be less boring than the assigned texts.
At the top of the chatter, however, read a single name from her contacts list: ANABEL PARK.
The all-caps font blinked accusingly at Pru. “Oh, all right,” she told the screen. “Just quit guilt-tripping me. I’ve had enough of a night, thank you.”
What she was about to do would probably make Hakeem Bishop’s blood pressure skyrocket. Well, turnabout’s fair play, she thought, a bit pettily. Besides, the last time Pru had ventured into Incorporated territory alone, she’d gotten kidnapped by a dragon for her troubles. Alexandre Lamarque was all very well, but imprint sharing or no, Alex wasn’t the one who’d been wingmanning her gambits in UCC zones for the past two years. Better not to chance things, given the foundations of liberty at stake.
Pru scrolled to a blank messaging screen on the phone, and flipped the security switch in the sidebar to its highest setting. Carefully, she began typing out a reply to one of Anabel’s texts.
* * *
HONESTY-NET
Your Virtual One-Stop Shop for Missed Connections & Anonymous Confessions
7:24 P.M. To my jerk of a chem teacher: I can’t believe you confiscated the footage I had of the No Man’s Land attack! Those winged mechs were SICK, man.