Mostly, though, she remembered how badly she’d wished for a copilot. It was kind of nice, even under these circumstances, to be validated.
Pru didn’t ask Alex if he was ready. She already knew in the moment she dug her fingers into the walls of the cockpit, imprint humming inside and around them. They both did.
“Fly,” they whispered as one. The earth fell away from them.
* * *
Barricading Beat: Your Number One Source for Citizen Journalism!
Posted by DeepState461
Spotted at 3 A.M. this Friday evening—or is it Saturday morning?—lights still on in the Head Representative’s Mansion, where someone’s favorite war hero is apparently still burning the midnight oil. Rumors have emerged of a disagreement between Head Representative Lamarque and longtime aide and Chief of Staff Hakeem Bishop, who was seen entering the offices earlier in the night, and hasn’t yet left. Sources close to the Coalition government claim that Bishop had an urgent briefing for the Head Representative. Could this have to do with the mystery terror attack launched at the No Man’s Land beach party? Let’s stay tuned to find out!!
* * *
“THIS IS TOO EASY,” said Pru.
Alex stirred against her. “I appreciate the confidence.”
The whole endeavor was a bit like one of those half-waking dreams you had after too many hours of running on caffeine, your heart still palpitating as you lay in bed, trying to drag your exhausted brain into unconsciousness. On one hand, this: Pru’s limbs entangled with Alex’s, stuck against the cockpit walls, one foot falling asleep while a cramp built along her thigh. On the other hand, this too: the world through the dragon’s eyes, through Alex’s eyes, filtered into the imprint like light through glass. It was too vast to feel quite real, yet too real to be denied. Her entire brain practically lit up with the sprawl of Incorporated land below and the whisper of clouds around their translucent wings.
“No, really,” said Pru, more urgently now. “It’s too easy. Something’s wrong.”
They’d been airborne for just seven minutes, cradled by unmarked enemy sky, still unseen, thanks to the cloaking mechanisms. Beneath them, just coming into view through the zoom of the dragon’s eyes, were the walls of the Jellicoe company compound. Their visuals gave no warning of wyverns or hovercraft coming to intercept them.
“It shouldn’t be this easy,” she pressed. “Should it?”
Alex’s hesitation twined with her own. He’d been here before. He knew how to handle Jellicoe’s security, could probably break things as well or better than Pru could. But back then, he’d been escaping. Finding an exit, rather than an entrance. It was a different sort of breaking.
Pru knew about this kind of breaking, the sort where you wedged yourself into a place you didn’t belong. She knew how to lie to Barricader sentries and smile boringly at UCC enforcers. She knew how to run, she knew how to hide, and she knew how it felt to throw yourself down a route no one else wanted to take, crashing through the dark like a falling lift.
Through the imprint, she narrowed her gaze at the unmarked blue of the horizon over the Jellicoe compound. The thing about putting yourself someplace you didn’t belong was that, inevitably, you met resistance. You could deal with resistance any number of ways, when you were a book smuggler, depending on what form that resistance took. You could trick a security guard, or hide from the police, or run from an unsavory customer.
Just as long as you did the unexpected. Become predictable, and the job was kaput.
They were directly over the compound now.
Some reflex in Pru’s lizard hindbrain twitched. Her fingers closed around Alex’s wrist. “Drop,” she croaked at him. “Fall from the sky.”
“What—”
“Do it. If there’s anyone who can nosedive a mobile suit without killing us both, it’s you. Do it now.”
He must have sensed the same thing in the back of her mind. The blue disappeared abruptly from Pru’s field of vision. Her stomach dropped, and the sky fell. Just in time. Above them, the rapidly departing sky exploded in a spray of silver-edged plasma fire, impossibly bright through the dragon’s eyes.
“Worst fireworks display ever!” Pru yelled at no one in particular.
Of course, that wasn’t the whole of the problem.
Beside her, Alex was a plane of muscle, tension pulling him stark beneath his skin as he fought the dragon’s descent toward the compound. “We’re coming in too hot.”
Caught between a rock and a hard place, Pru thought grimly—or rather, caught between an explosion and gravity’s pull. Fat lot of good it did them to evade Jellicoe’s plasma fire booby trap, if it just meant crash-landing to their deaths on unforgiving concrete. The fear of it caught Pru by the throat. She croaked out, “Can you—”
“I’m slowing the drop as best I can.” And he was. The surety of Alex’s mind blazed against the dragon’s imprint, all precisely implemented willpower. For a few harrowing seconds, Pru thought it might work. After all, they’d fallen together before, and lived. The ground was terribly close now.
Then the dragon screamed.
The force of its cry cleaved through Pru’s eardrums, vibrating through every bone beneath her skin. Something slipped away from her. No, not something. Everything. The rippling layers of silver scales that had previously kept her secured inside the cockpit retracted. Pru’s body jerked forward, momentum rattling her bones as she tried to brace herself against Rebelwing’s rippling walls. The chrome kept retracting, splitting apart until the cockpit itself opened beneath Pru’s legs. Blue sky, sunlit, flooded through the cracks between rapidly disappearing chrome. Air shrieked past her, as her body tumbled downward, limbs flailing for purchase, damnably human without the dragon’s scales to shield her.
Beside her, Alex gave a shout. He’d managed to anchor himself against the remaining dragon scales, one arm straining with the effort. The other reached for Pru. For one harrowing second, her fingers scrabbled against his. With all her strength, she clung to him, as if the sheer desperation of sweat-greased human palms might hold her place inside the dragon.
All her strength wasn’t enough. Pru fell.
Wind, impossibly cold, shrieked past her ears, biting into her skin. Sky and earth fell away from her in a disjointed jumble, the sun blinding her too-human eyes, as Pru tumbled unprotected through the air’s freezing embrace.
No scales, no suit, no dragon. She was falling alone, like that moment in the lift all those months ago.
She screamed. It might have been for the dragon. Or Alex. Or her mother. Anyone.