8:00 P.M. To Head Representative Lamarque: that terrorist attack on No Man’s Land is exactly what happens when you’re soft on the Incorporated. Grow a pair.
8:03 P.M. To the user posting above me: sure, blame UCC-sponsored terrorism on the guy who’s pretty much the only reason your ungrateful ass hasn’t been forcibly Incorporated yet, good job.
9:17 P.M. To my maybe-girlfriend: hey, why aren’t you answering my texts? I thought we were done playing games.
11:40 P.M. To the boy I kissed at No Man’s Land: I didn’t know your name, or even whether you were Barricader or Incorporated, but I cried when they carried your body off the beach. Your mouth tasted like champagne the last time I saw you alive.
1:45 A.M. To my uncle: I love you. I’m lying to you. I’m sorry.
* * *
“YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO be here.”
Anabel Park blinked a pair of unimpressed eyes at Alexandre Lamarque. The boredom in her expression, by some sorcery, only served to highlight the perfectly winged tips of her eyeliner. “Really? I had no idea.”
Alex glared past Anabel’s shoulder toward Pru. “You spilled the beans, didn’t you?”
“Only to Anabel!” Pru raised her hands in surrender. “Your message in a bottle—or cylinder, whatever—said Bishop’s information was for your ears, and mine. You didn’t say I couldn’t bring a backup pair of ears to the wyvern heist party. Besides, you can’t talk, Cat is right there!”
“I am Rebelwing’s primary engineer,” said Cat, without looking up from her phone. When she’d arrived at Café Dupont in tow with Alex, she’d commandeered a corner of the Rose Room with hardly a word, and hadn’t stopped scrolling through mech design notes since. “Of course I was clued in on Alexandre’s ridiculous scheme.”
“It wasn’t my scheme,” protested Alex.
“Yet here you are, running headlong into an absurd amount of danger with nary a word of protest.” Cat wrinkled her nose at an unlikely mech add-on, tapping the corner of her screen to delete the offending part. “Again.”
“If you keep pacing the room like that, Café Dupont is going to bill you for wearing a hole in their nice overpriced carpet,” Pru observed.
They all looked up when the white gilded doors reopened to admit a fifth guest. “Then they can add it to my tab,” said Hakeem Bishop. The Chief of Staff shrugged off his suit jacket. His eyebrows wedged themselves into a peculiar shape when he took note of the Rose Room’s occupants. “It seems the number of ears I have invited to these little meetings has managed to double in my absence.”
“I needed Rebelwing’s engineer for consulting purposes,” said Alex.
“And I needed her girlfriend for emotional support purposes,” said Pru. “Ow! Anabel, that hurt!”
“Spare me, it was a love tap.” Anabel shook the fingers out of the fist she’d rapped against the back of Pru’s skull. To Bishop, she said, “Pru and Alex needed backup. Someone discreet who can handle a weapon, understands basic escape and evasion tactics, and”—here, her tone went dry—“is used to working with both of them, and their squabbling.”
“I see.” Bishop took his usual spot by the frosted-glass windows, backlit by the city. “Was there anything else, Miss Park?”
“Yes, in fact,” said Cat. The engineer had finally set aside her phone. That bright, asymmetrical gaze of hers panned across the Rose Room with its cold, camera-eyed awareness. Her mouth, painted azure today, was a thin line of color across her bone-pale face. “They needed someone with the stomach to put Alexandre down like a dog.”
Neither noise-cancellers nor schoolmarm glares could have dictated a deeper silence than the one that followed. Anabel’s gaze locked on her girlfriend’s. Or maybe former girlfriend’s, the way Cat was looking at her now. Anabel, for her part, gave nothing away. “It shouldn’t come to that,” she said.
Alex made to cross the room toward Anabel, then hesitated, angling himself toward Pru instead. “I thought that was your job.” His voice rasped beneath the forced lightness he’d infused in his tone.
“I delegated,” said Pru. Her hands twisted together, bones straining. “But like Anabel says. It shouldn’t come to that. And don’t you dare do anything stupid enough to mess with those odds.”
“There shouldn’t be odds at all,” hissed Cat. “This shouldn’t be happening.” She rounded on Bishop. “This is on you. You should have told us what really happened to Etienne as soon as you had the intel. If we’d known earlier, we could have—”
“Could have what? What would you have done, little cat?” Bishop’s hands turned toward her, palms out, body language open. “Do you imagine all your engineering skill, all Alexandre’s piloting prowess, would have changed what has already been done to a dead man?”
Cat’s head jerked toward Alex, her cybernetic eye a small, searing beacon of fury. “We deserved the truth. Alexandre deserved the truth.”
Alex laughed, sudden and soft. “Why? Hakeem is right. Knowing the alpha cell was going to target me eventually wouldn’t have kept me from the fight. We were always going to fight. Wasn’t that the entire point of Rebelwing?”
“The point,” Cat began, outraged.
“Was to defend the Barricade cities.” Alex’s jaw set into that stupid, noble expression he got whenever he talked about something he believed in. “From Jellicoe’s wyvern flock, to be specific. This is what I look like fulfilling that promise.”
“No, this is what you look like joining the wyvern flock,” shouted Cat. Pru dropped her hands. She’d never heard Cat raise her voice like that, not in person, not even in that awful camera recording from Jellicoe’s camp. “Do you think I haven’t studied how genetic mapping codes work on implant cells? If the alpha doesn’t manage to destroy you first, its cyber-implant will. The alpha cell will track you, latch on to you unseen, and burrow into your blood like the parasite it is. It’ll do worse than kill you, Alexandre, it’ll turn you into a monster.”
“Not if we destroy its host with dragon-grade plasma fire,” said Alex, very softly. “It’s a risk worth taking, Cat. You knew my father before he became . . . what they made him. You know he’d do the same.” He flashed a humorless smile at her. “Besides, so long as the alpha cell survives, I’m a goner either way. The walls of the Barricade Coalition were designed to protect us from war mechs, not the terrors of genetic engineering and nanotech. I could hide behind New Columbia’s gates. Or spend my days on the lam, trying to outrun a pre-programmed fate.” The smile grew warm, as he leaned toward her, confessional. “But between you and me, mi gato, I’d rather go down fighting.”