She found herself reaching for his hand. His palm covered hers. And together, girl and boy and dragon, they dove toward the ruins below. The scythe followed, then the giant behind it, movements sluggish, as Jellicoe tried to readjust his mech toward a direction he hadn’t anticipated. The dragon, airborne, should have flown skyward, should have tempted the scythe higher and higher. Instead, it shrieked a rapid arc toward the earth, until its belly practically skimmed the concrete-covered ground. Pru waited until she sighted a pair of mechanical feet. Each was big enough that the giant probably could have left a trail of craters in a walk across soft ground. It was a clever visual effect. Jellicoe’s engineers had wanted to build something that would flood an opponent’s veins with fear. The humanoid largeness of the giant, its dumb ironclad strength, was made to frighten, just like its fairytale counterparts.
But its design had neglected the question of practicality. The great tree trunk legs carried an impressive girth, but moved slowly. Too slowly.
Pru switched on the comms system, and jacked the volume up as high as it would go, so Jellicoe could hear her loud and clear. “You should have invested in wheels,” Pru said, and rammed the dragon against one metallic ankle. The giant, already unbalanced from bending toward the diving mech, buckled. One enormous hand groaned toward the dragon, but Rebelwing was too nimble. Again and again, she and Alex wove their mech out of reach.
The giant began to fall. Slowly, at first, then faster, as gravity did its work.
Pru felt Alex counting seconds in the back of her head.
Teeth clenched, Pru shouldered the dragon upward. With a mechanical hiss, its wings folded downward. A pause.
Alex finished their count. Now, Pru!
The mech rocketed high, past the giant’s grasping fingers, past Jellicoe’s roar of fury. The afternoon-kissed sun blinked at Pru through the dragon’s eye lenses, a spatter of light across the view screen. They would make it. For a crazy, rabbit-hearted moment, Pru really thought they would make it.
Then a shadow crossed the sun. No, not one shadow. Five. Fingers. The giant, reaching still, canting up from the ground.
Alex shouted. Pru tried to brake. The dragon’s wings gave a jerk. A headache snarled through Pru’s head. Too little, too late.
She heard a horrible shriek, a mechanical scream specific to metal being torn in two. A roar from the dragon. The entire cockpit spasmed.
They plummeted as one. Pru and Alex and the dragon, wheeling helplessly through the air. A single wing beat uselessly against the sky. Someone screamed. Maybe Pru. Maybe all of them. Through the blurring dragon’s eye lenses, a final image seared itself onto Pru’s mind: the dragon’s other wing, ripped from its body, dangling dead between the giant’s fingers.
Earth and sky tilted around them.
Mama’s voice echoed giddily across some broken vault in Pru’s memory. Maybe that was what happened when you died. You heard the voices of other dead people.
In a shithole of a world that refuses to change, one life can still matter. One life can be everything.
How stupid and fitting and infuriating, thought Pru, to spend more of her life falling to her death than not, and only realize, just now, how terribly badly she wanted to live.
Alex’s fingers clenched through hers. He knew what she intended.
Pru shut her eyes and dreamed of flames.
Plasma fire bloomed from the dragon’s open mouth, white and blue light licking across the sky, filling the view screen, blotting everything out. The last of their ammunition reserves. The last a crippled dragon had to give.
Jellicoe didn’t even have a chance to scream.
The dragon, plasma fire spent, kept falling. The view screen flickered out. The warmth of other minds pressed up against Pru’s went cold. She gasped with the force of the loss. She hadn’t realized how lonely it would feel, to be by herself inside her head again, until she was.
Time slowed. And so too, it seemed, did the world.
The dragon, gone dark inside, stopped falling. Beside her, Alex hissed. The world without plasma fire was dark, and far too cold. How dumb was that? Pru hadn’t thought she’d complain about a world without death-dealing, explosive mech ammunitions. But it was dark, and cold, and unsettlingly still, and all Pru felt was alone.
Light buzzed from Pru’s phone.
Pru lifted her head. It might have been an illusion. She might have lost her mind. A stupid illusion to have, on the brink of death, the cracked screen of your cheap-ass phone lighting up some forgotten corner of your broken-down cockpit. If you were going to die, you might as well go out with a bang, not some telemarketer’s vacation scam.
“You gonna get that?” Alex’s voice sounded like a pipe rusting in a mech mechanic’s failed experiment, but Pru sagged against him all the same. Relief drained the strength from her limbs. Alive or dead, neither of them were completely alone. With bone-cracking effort, she untangled their fingers, and dropped from her seat. On her elbows, Pru crawled across the cockpit, until her hand, numb from clutching Alex’s, clamped around the phone. She swiped the screen.
“Hey,” croaked Pru. “I don’t care how good your deal to Timbuktu is, you’re not getting my life savings.” She considered those words, then added, “I’m not sure I’m even alive. So there.”
“Good thing the only place I’m taking you is back across the Barricades to New Columbia, then. You can board our new ride once we find a good landing spot.”
Pru froze. That was no telemarketer. A shaky pause filled the other end. Then, like a waking dream, Anabel Park added, voice thick, “About damn time you picked up, Pru-Wu. I could kill you myself for screening my calls on the brink of a life-and-death mech fight.”
Stumbling to her feet in the narrowed space of the cockpit, Pru flashed her phone’s glow over one of the darkened eye lenses. The faint blue of a force field cradled the mech’s broken body. And bare meters away from it, still sitting on its concrete perch, was the force field’s source: a familiar spherical transport mech.
“While Anabel was busy knocking out Jellicoe’s goons to get to the alpha blueprints, I took the liberty of hacking the codes to his forcefield traps,” announced Cat’s clipped, no-nonsense voice. She was farther from the speaker than Anabel, her voice warped and tinny, but unmistakably hers. “You’d think that in the course of a decade, that man would have learned not to keep all his security algorithms in the same place. In any case, these fields do much more nicely as a portable crash bubble, wouldn’t you say?”
“Absolutely,” said Pru faintly. “Anabel, please never break up with your engineer girlfriend ever again.”
Anabel made a strange, small sound. “When you asked me to come along on this ghastly little misadventure, it was because you knew I could take a life without flinching.” That hitch in her breath echoed across the phone’s speaker in the small, dank space. Someone shuffled in the background. Cat, probably. Cat, moving to stand beside Anabel, where she belonged. “I’m glad I got to save one instead. Much better for the university applications, you know?”