“Jeez, ain’t you heard?” Pru called back. She channeled all the early morning grouchiness she could muster into her voice. “Transport shuttle number oh-five-two-six-one, reporting for duty. Some asshat at your command calling for another hush-hush special delivery.”
“Ah,” said the voice over the intercom, in a slightly different tone. The sentry’s awkwardness was palpable. “Right, and so you are.”
A few minutes later, several crates had been loaded into the mech’s back end compartment. “You have a good day now,” said one of the sentries. He hopped off the mech’s spindly legs as soon as the final crate was dropped, as if he thought it might bite him.
The gate opened to let them pass. Pru glanced sidelong at Anabel, who kept her eyes resolutely focused on the path ahead. Their mech scuttled on its long metal legs toward Hakeem Bishop’s prescribed route, climbing around cars and pedestrians, spiderlike. “So.”
Anabel’s eyebrows twitched. “So?”
They’d chosen a relatively sparse piece of Incorporated territory, the route trickling along toward one of the abandoned districts. Over-rapid tech development had left the skeletons of half-finished construction projects hollowed out over vehicular lanes like a depressing, haunted forest of chrome and concrete.
“Lovely view, isn’t it?” said Anabel.
“Weak dodge, Park.” Pru jerked her head toward the back of the mech. “Want to explain what’s in those crates?”
Anabel actually blushed. “When I pitched a Coalition-sanctioned book smuggling program,” she said carefully, “I had to delegate some of the work. I had little say in, um, curating some of the actual material—”
“I believe it is popularly called erotica,” interrupted a no-nonsense voice in the back.
Anabel swore, and nearly swerved one of the mech’s legs into oncoming traffic. Righting herself, she twisted her head toward the voice’s source. “What the hell are you doing here?”
Slowly, Cat’s bright head of hair emerged from the stacked up wall of crates. Her face rippled into view, as her thumb flicked aside the lever on the rotund cloaking device at her wrist, a miniature of the same sort the dragon used. In her other hand was—judging from the cover—unmistakably an erotic novel. Old-fashioned and paper-bound, Pru observed faintly. How romantic.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Cat’s voice was, beneath its default monotone, faintly petulant. “I am here to help you. If you’re depending on that half-wit Jinwoo Park to wipe Jellicoe’s blueprint backups from the wireless, you are, in a word, fucked.”
“My cousin’s not a half-wit, he’s just not you!” snapped Anabel. “Besides, I thought you were angry with me.”
“That was a week ago.”
“And now?”
It was Cat’s turn to falter. “It doesn’t matter,” the engineer settled on at last. “There are more pressing matters at hand than . . . us.” Her eyes flicked up toward Anabel’s face, softening briefly, before narrowing again. “Besides, Alexandre explained your plan to me. You will need me.”
“He could have warned us,” said Pru.
Alex’s response rippled across the imprint at the back of her mind. He was soaring somewhere overhead, white clouds flashing over Rebelwing’s sight line. But what would be the fun in that?
Pru shivered, scowling. She wasn’t sure what was weirder: hearing his voice in her head, or hearing that voice crack the same terrible jokes it usually made aloud. “Great. Any other fun surprises?”
The underground library sits on a network of tunnels for ease of access, one of which, unknown to Jellicoe, leads directly to his compound. Anabel will head that way with the shipment, as planned. Cat will go with her to cloak them, and to direct their passage toward Jellicoe’s. A second transport mech should be waiting for them.
Pru felt her mouth twitch. Silently, she asked, Is this a life-threatening heist on Jellicoe military tech, or is this a matchmaking scheme?
Cat’s spent more time on Incorporated land. She knows the tunnel network better than Anabel does.
Uh-huh, thought Pru, very dry. Aloud, she announced, “Our fearless leader declares that the plan proceeds as discussed, except that Cat will be lending cover and navigation aid to Miss Directionally Impaired here—”
“Honestly,” huffed Anabel, “I turn us down the wrong street on one drop-off, and you never let me live it down.”
“You’re a strategic communications guru with perfect hair and perfect aim,” retorted Pru. “If you had a sense of direction on top of it all, I’d have thrown myself off a building by now.” In her peripheral sight line through the window, Pru kept an instinctive lookout for the glimmering hint of the dragon’s wings, but Alex had piloted himself high out of sight. “Meanwhile, I go with Alex.”
From the other end of Pru’s sight line, some of the mirth fled Anabel’s features. “You sure?”
“It’s what we agreed on with Bishop.”
“I still don’t like the risk.”
“I know.” Pru lifted her shoulders, wishing she could shrug off the growing anxiety in her gut the same way she shrugged off Anabel’s worrywarting. She tried a grin on for size, thin and wry. “Trust that I know what I’m about, at least when it comes to petty crime.”
“Because that went so well last time.”
“Hey, I got a dragon out of it, didn’t I?” Mentally, she tapped at the imprint. “All clear up there, Alex?”
Clear.
They pulled up at a decrepit wreck of a building. “You sure this is it?” asked Pru.
“Positive,” said Anabel and Cat as one. They looked at each other, grinned, then remembered they weren’t doing that anymore, and quickly glanced toward opposite ends of the transport mech, color high on both their faces. Pru rolled her eyes so hard, they could have popped from her skull.
“Right then,” said Anabel, braking the mech. “One illicit underground library shipment, here we go.” She opened the latch on the bottom of the mech, and hopped out of the cockpit. Cat and Pru trailed after. Sure enough, a circular little hovercraft was waiting just outside, already half-stacked with book crates, ready to be transported underground.
“You know,” said Pru, grabbing a crate, “when you said you pitched book smuggling as a means of resistance from within Incorporated territory, I really thought you meant, like, some George Orwell or Ray Bradbury or something. Not . . .” She glanced at one of the covers topping the crate. Upon it, an improbably muscular man—who’d apparently misplaced his shirt—dipped another man, similarly disrobed, in a sultry lovers’ embrace. “. . . um, explicit gay porn.”