“Hello, Dad,” said Alexandre Santiago Lamarque, nestled into the enemy mech he’d commandeered. He was all stage voice now. You could probably hear him from the opposite end of the Jellicoe compound. “I think it’s time we laid some family ghosts to rest.”
The UCC mech spun sideways with the sort of grace you expected from a human ballerina, not a glorified giant robot, but that was Alex all over. Like the dragon coasting through the sky, like Quixote, the red-and-blue combat mech back in the Coalition training yard. Mobile suits came to elegant and deadly life when wrapped around the Lamarque boy’s skin.
The wyvern alpha narrowed predatory blue eyes at its new prey, and dove again. Pru gave a shout, but no plasma fire emerged from its jaws. With one hand closed around the grooves of Mama’s holo-drive, she jogged the perimeter of the platform, trying to get her bearings. Blue sky above, silver stilts below, an expanse of concrete, and a monster in hot pursuit. Fantastic. Pru grabbed her phone. Her thumb swiped the number at the top of the screen.
“We have eyes on you.” Anabel Park’s voice crackled businesslike from the phone. “What the hell is going on down there, battle of the beasts?”
“Where are you?” howled Pru. She dodged a stream of plasma fire meant for Alex. His stolen suit skidded down the length of concrete. The wyvern followed, dipping just a hair too close.
“Look at your six o’clock,” said Anabel.
“Little busy right now!” Come on, come on, come on. “Wait, did you destroy the blueprints?”
“Every last one of them. Wasn’t exactly a walk in the park. Had to stun-shoot the whole security squad guarding that shit. Those assholes don’t go down easy. I’ll show you all the sexy battle scars, once you destroy the original. Preferably, like, now.”
Pru cast her eyes sideways, and made out the golden transport mech, clinging spiderlike to one of the neighboring platforms. “Tough ask, without a dragon.” Her stomach lurched at the thought of their backup plan. The one Alex wouldn’t survive.
The muffled sound of metal parts clicking together emerged over the line. Pru, imagining the plasma rifle being assembled between Anabel’s manicured hands, panicked. “Don’t take the shot yet! The imprint’s still live. Rebelwing might—”
“I know.” Her best friend’s voice was soft. “I won’t shoot unless I have to. I promise.”
Alex’s mech pivoted and swung a giant metal fist toward the wyvern’s head, catching the edge of its jaw before it could spit more plasma fire. The wyvern went crashing sideways. Pru swore and jumped, trying to give it as big a berth as she could without toppling right off the platform’s edge. “Anabel, this was so incredibly not the plan.”
“Tell me more!”
“Where in hell has Alex been until now anyway?”
“He says you were both thrown from the dragon by a force field trap. It was a close call—he clung to Rebelwing long enough to roll into a soft landing down below, then pinged me from the comms system on that hunk of junk metal he commandeered, if you can believe it. The ride he’s hitched might hold off a wyvern for a little while, but a standard-issue UCC combat mech fighting a wyvern is like taking a knife to a gun fight. We need to fix this.”
“Yeah, no shit.” Pru squinted toward the sky, bracing for the next plasma fire blast. “Any bright ideas?”
“Rebelwing. Where is she?”
“Hell if I know!”
“Pru.” Anabel’s voice steadied out. “You need to figure it out. You’re the only one who can.”
“I’ve!” Concrete blasted apart not two feet from her. “Been!” Pru jumped over the hole. “Trying!” The tendrils of smoke and debris spiraling from the mech battle made it near impossible to place her mother, or the Head Representative, or even Jellicoe himself.
“Shame. What would our teachers say?”
Pru, windmilling backward from another hole in the concrete, gnashed her teeth. She knew exactly what the faculty of New Columbia Prep would expect of one of its students. Trying didn’t matter, if you couldn’t deliver results. It had always been so much easier for Pru to assume she’d fail.
Unbidden, Alex’s furious, judgmental face flickered across her mind’s eye. Why do you always put yourself down? he’d asked over that ill-fated dinner on the beach.
Because it was better to embrace mediocrity than to try, and try, and try, only to emerge with nothing at all to show for it. Pru had scraped by three years of prep school alongside overachievers of every stripe on that rule. She was a good book smuggler. That had been achievement aplenty, for Pru. It should have been enough. More than enough. And it was.
Until a cybernetic dragon had plucked her brain up for its own unfathomable, arbitrary use. What could you do about that?
Bullshit, whispered a voice in her mind that sounded suspiciously like her mother’s. As if you’re some snoozing passenger in the train compartment of your own life. Who ran headlong into that abandoned lift like an idiot? Who rooted through all that footage of Alex’s childhood in some mad attempt to win his dragon’s favor? Who called Rebelwing down to the fighting on the beaches during the attack on No Man’s Land?
That night, she’d wanted to put Alex behind armored scales. She’d wanted him skyward among the stars. So the dragon had complied.
And what do you want now, Pru-Wu?
The wyvern emerged through the debris, great blue eyes like points of ice narrowed on Pru. She heard Alex’s shout over his stolen mech’s speakers, saw him racing toward her.
Pru looked unblinking into the eyes of the thing that had been Etienne Lamarque more than a decade ago. “Come on!” she screamed. Cold blue filled her sight line. “Come on, you great, big, stupid, ugly—”
The wyvern’s jaws opened wide.
Silver scales unfurled around Pru. Like a reversal of that first awful fall onto the platform. Scale by scale, chrome encased her once more, until her human skin was engulfed in the sleek, winged armor of Rebelwing’s cockpit. A creature of metal and fire, larger than life, and at its core, Pru. At its core, a living, breathing girl, nothing more, but nothing less. There was a strange sort of comfort in that realization.
People always went on about how your entire life flashed before your eyes before death. Pru thought it was stupid. Life was full of inconsequential crap. Right now, frozen on a precipice of something unknowable, all Pru could see were the moments that mattered: the first stories her mother had told. The pleased, assessing look on Anabel’s face after their first smuggling drop together. The scent of Alex and the warmth of his skin, hours before No Man’s Land changed everything. The way the world looked from behind dragon eyes, writ large and sharp edged and lovely, colors cast painfully bright. The moment Pru had realized that those eyes were hers to see through.