Pru’s eyes squeezed shut. Her knees went out from under her. Absurdly, she found herself leaning into Alex’s shoulder. His arm went around her. The day had been so brutally long. She’d spent far too much of it plummeting through the sky, or staring down plasma fire. She didn’t think anyone could fault her for the tears leaking down her cheeks. So Pru cried, ugly and hard and unrelenting. She must have seemed ridiculous, cradled in a broken dragon’s cold and darkened cockpit, sobbing snot all over the last living Lamarque, listening to her best friend’s voice. She didn’t give a damn. When you almost died as many times as she had, Pru was pretty sure you got a pass on what was and wasn’t worth giving a damn about.
One life could still matter. One life could be everything.
Even if that life was no more and no less than your own.
Pru opened her eyes against Alex’s soft, tear-soaked shirt. Breathed in the scent of sweat and grease and blood. Breathed in the scent of life. “All right,” she told Anabel. “Let’s go home.”
* * *
Dear Kiddo,
You brave, foolish, reckless child. Could I ever find the words to tell you how proud you make me? I never did find words for things that really mattered.
What I’ve left for you on this cylinder isn’t much, but it’s what I have to give. Forgive your silly mother. Foolishness is all she has ever offered the world, but it is foolishness made precious by you.
I love you, bao bei.
Always,
Your Mama
* * *
HAKEEM BISHOP SUMMONED PRU to his offices a scant three days after the funerals. Pru couldn’t really find it in herself to be surprised, or even all that offended. She hated funerals. To be honest, she wasn’t sure there was any actual reason to like funerals, and state funerals centered around the loss of a leader as beloved as Gabriel Lamarque had to take the cake. Pru had clenched her teeth together and fiddled at the hem of her repressive black dress through the droning ceremony. For hours after, she’d tried without success to kill the scent of funeral flowers lingering on her skin.
At least she didn’t have as many condolence offerers crowding her space as Alex did. Small blessing, when the death of your mother, minor entertainer, ranked an afterthought in the face of greater losses. When Pru checked the usual bevy of netizens’ forums, some enterprising conspiracy theorists had already started at least three threads speculating on the truth behind the chemical plant accident that had claimed the lives of an Incorporated arms dealer, the Head Representative of the Barricade Coalition, and a teller of fairytales.
Keep on keeping on, kiddos, thought Pru with studied dispassion, and turned her phone off for twenty-four hours. When she’d turned it back on, the first message to appear was from a dead government leader’s Chief of Staff. Pru wondered what it said about her life, that her only response was to groan, toss the phone aside, and bury her head in her pillow for another three hours.
Sleep fixed a lot of things. But sleep couldn’t fix the ringing cold of the new emptiness at the back of Pru’s head, or the citizens in mourning black projected across every public flat-screen and 3-D display in the city, or the strange, cottony blankness that filled Pru every time she sat alone in Mama’s flat above the bodega, and no one darkened the door of her childhood bedroom.
Three days ago, Pru had been a girl with armored wings, a dragon’s eyes, a mother who loved her. Now the shattered dragon wings had been donated to some engineer’s scrap heap, Rebelwing’s watchful eyes dimmed. Pru’s mother had been reduced to barren corners of a dust-gathering apartment, unfinished paperwork piled high on an empty desk in an unused kitchen. Three days, to make three ghosts: Rebelwing, Mama, and the girl that Pru had been before the silence of their absence.
You had to wake up to the end of your world, eventually. You couldn’t sleep away the scent of funeral flowers, which wouldn’t quit cloying at your nostrils no matter how hard you wished them into oblivion. So Pru quit screening Hakeem Bishop’s calls, shrugged out of her pajamas, and took a ride share to the Head Representative’s offices to see the Chief of Staff. If that was even his title anymore. Could you still be Chief of Staff to a dead man? Pru wasn’t sure of the protocol here. She had never paid as much attention to the gov classes in school as she probably should have.
Music—a single guitar, strumming a darksome, complex little melody—floated down the hallways of the mansion, growing louder as Pru approached Gabriel Lamarque’s onetime offices.
She was the last in an obvious list of invitees to arrive. Hakeem Bishop stood a ways from the Head Representative’s old oak desk. He had his usual spot by one of the windows, his back to the room. Sunlight dappled his gray hair a snowy shade of white. Opposite the Chief of Staff sat Anabel, shadow-eyed, hair a severe chignon at the nape of her neck that made her look years older. Beside her, rigid backed, was Cat, one mechanical hand fisted loosely between them.
Alex Lamarque, meanwhile, had taken a seat atop his dead uncle’s desk. In his lap was a guitar, the source of the melody haunting the mansion’s hallways. One brace-bound leg thumped against the oak in time to the melody. His hair, untrimmed since their return from the smoking remains of the Jellicoe compound, curled in loose tufts around his ears. It fell away from his eyes when he lifted his head at her approach, but the gaze she caught wasn’t interested in holding hers. His lids drifted shut as he played.
“So,” said Alex, over the strumming, eyes still closed, “you told my uncle about your plan.”
It took Pru two heartbeats to realize he was addressing Bishop, not her.
Hakeem turned. Pru inhaled sharply. The Chief of Staff’s expression was stony as ever, but his eyes were red, and tear tracks streaked the creases of his cheeks. “Yes.”
Alex’s fingers never faltered on the strings. “And here we all thought you were putting us to use behind his back.”
“When I first called you to the Rose Room? When you brought Miss Wu here on board? When I deployed the dragon?” Bishop produced a handkerchief. He scrubbed the tears away with sharp, economic motions. “Yes, yes, and yes. But the secret was never going to stay under wraps forever. All that was left to me to control was when and how Gabriel would discover the truth.”
“My cousin thought you should have been criminally prosecuted,” said Anabel. She spoke offhandedly, but her fingers fidgeted at the hem of her uniform skirt. She’d just come from some study group or another. Ridiculous, that study groups still existed, in a world that had lost so much else, seemingly overnight. “Undermining the Head Representative’s authority, reckless endangerment of minors, et cetera and so forth.”
Bishop snorted into the handkerchief. “Jay would. He always had a soft touch for kids. When’s he lobbying to drag me to court?”