“Is destroyed. Exploded, with the rest of . . .” His chest shuddered once, twice against her. “It’s done. We need to find Anabel and Cat, and go home.”
“Not without Mama. She and your uncle—”
“Pru.” His fingers twisted into her hair. “It’s over.”
“How can you say that?” She jerked free of his grip. Fury pounded inside her veins. “It’s not over until we turn around. Maybe they survived. Maybe they—”
Pru’s phone buzzed in her pocket, blaring to abrupt life. In the same moment, something rocked against the dragon’s outer shell. The mech gave a horrible roar, and suddenly blue spun into a dark, ugly gray. Downward, they went. Azure skies vanished from view, giving way instead to the wreck Pru had left behind. Charred, smoking remains of the platform rushed past her sight line as she fought instinctively for control of the dragon.
“The alpha,” gasped Pru over the phone’s insistent rings. “The wyvern’s not—”
“That’s no wyvern,” said Alex. His dark eyes were flinty. Gripping the sides of the cockpit for balance, Pru followed his gaze toward the attack’s source.
The head came into view first, cleaving through the smoky sky. Pru thought it was another platform at first, rising through the air. Painted black as pitch and flat-topped, the metal skull’s only humanoid features were a pair of makeshift eyes, glowing like lamplight cast through windows in a noseless, mouthless face. The mech—the biggest mech Pru had ever laid eyes on—lumbered toward them on powerful metal legs. A mountain in the shape of a mechanical man. A giant, stolen from the same fairytales that had birthed wyverns and dragons.
A voice crackled loud across the dragon’s sound system. “Schoolgirl,” breathed the giant’s pilot, spiteful and familiar. “The Executive General won’t be pleased with how you’ve damaged his bill of goods.”
Of course. They’d come ready to fight wyverns. They hadn’t thought about other mechs Jellicoe might be selling in his final package to the Executive General.
“There aren’t any grown-ups left to clean up your mess now, little girl. And the Executive General will want his compensation for what I sold him.” The giant’s great metal fists flexed. Jellicoe breathed hard against the speaker, like he was genuinely eager to fling a couple of broken-down teenagers from the sky. But then, he’d been doing exactly that since girls like Cat were children in an Incorporated camp. It was how men like Jellicoe made themselves feel bigger than they were. “Didn’t your mother teach you any manners?”
A tight, hot knot of something unnameable came undone in side Pru. Crooking her fingers through the dragon’s scales, she jammed the wireless on, jacking the volume as high as it would go. “Please.” A hysterical note bubbled into her voice, magnified over the mech’s speakers. “What kind of question is that? Mama raised me polite as anything.”
Plasma fire struck one of the giant’s eyes, then the other. The giant flinched backward, roaring.
“There’s your goddamn manners,” hissed Pru.
“Pru,” said Alex.
Pru jerked her fingers from the wireless. “I don’t need a lecture right now.” The dragon wheeled high over the stumbling giant. Narrowly, Pru ducked a flailing metal fist. Swearing, she wheeled in the opposite direction, trying to muster up the same wordless rage that had conjured the plasma fire, but the giant was too quick. With a low hum, its other fist lengthened into a long, sickle-shaped blade.
“Shit!” Pru dropped the dragon with barely enough time to avoid getting her head taken off.
Alex’s fingers clamped down on her wrist. “Pru.”
She shook him off. “I said not now!”
The blade arced through the air before she could fully recover. She dodged again, but felt the blade crunch through the tip of one wing. The dragon fought to recover itself, but its flight arc was messier than before, wheeling jagged through the sky.
Pru. Listen to me. The strange, familiar meld of Alex’s mental voice against the inside of her mind pulled her up short. Outside, the dragon tossed itself back and forth like scrap metal caught on the edge of a hurricane, but the hurricane inside Pru’s head was, at least, familiar territory.
That same hurricane shattered the tight, hot knot inside her. She slumped over in her seat, hands raking across her temples. Air shuddered out of her. Her eyes cut through the space between her fingers, toward the rattling view screen of the dragon’s eyes. How long would she have to brace for the giant’s next blow? “I can’t keep this up.”
“Not this way, no,” agreed Alex, speaking aloud now. He’d pulled himself close, half draped over the cockpit seat. He watched the sharp-edged world blooming across the dragon’s gaze, his own dark eyes intent on the screen. “You don’t win mech fights without changing up your tactics to adapt to your opponent’s assumptions.”
“I can’t—”
“Can’t you?” he countered, annoyed now. “I remember lots of ‘I can’t do this, I can’t do that’ back in the training yards, but you still fought Quixote to a draw.”
Quixote. Mechanical red-and-blue limbs flashed through Pru’s mind, a product of memory, or imprint, or the piece of Alex in her head. Spindly, flexible, but flightless. The dragon had taken the upper hand when Pru had flown skyward, Quixote’s long arms rattling around its neck as he struggled to hang on to Rebelwing.
The scythe arced toward them again, shrieked against a wall of metal scales with a spray of sparks. Pru swore through rattling teeth. “The giant’s too heavy for us to lift far off the ground,” she yelled over the noise. “Way bigger than Quixote.”
Alex snorted. “Bigger’s not always better. Any advantage in excess is also a weakness. Last time, you didn’t just win the upper hand by flight alone. You won it by forcing Quixote out of his natural element. Quixote wasn’t made to be airborne. Wrong environment.”
His words clicked on some half-formed thought in the back of her mind, and hung there. Bit by bit, like the solution to a difficult problem set, a plan flickered to life. “Maybe the giant’s not the one whose natural element needs disrupting,” said Pru. “Maybe it’s mine.” She hesitated. “Ours.”
The imprint warmed the scant space between them. Alex’s presence tickled along the edges of her mind. She could feel him pushing gently at the idea, wandering the periphery of the bond the dragon’s cockpit walls had forged across two minds. You think it might work? she asked without speaking.
Alex smiled, then, one of those devastating, hard-edged smiles, the smile of a hurricane in the shape of a boy. “Only one way to find out.”