“Thought,” reiterated Anabel. Her eyes snapped up, narrowing. “Past tense. I convinced him to spare the courtroom dramas.”
Something like surprise crossed Bishop’s features. “And why would you do a thing like that?”
Anabel shrugged. Even that motion looked tired. “Yours was the only way to put an end to Jellicoe and his wyverns, wasn’t it?”
Pru’s tongue found her voice. “How do you figure that?” Her words scraped against the back of her throat, sandpaper-rough with disuse. It occurred to her that she hadn’t spoken aloud to anyone since the funerals. “Gabriel Lamarque is dead. My mother—” Her voice failed. Listlessly, her fists clenched and unclenched.
“Someone was always going to die,” observed Cat.
Pulse jumping with bitter anger, Pru rounded on the engineer. She paused at the downward cast of the other girl’s mismatched eyes. “It is what Jellicoe does,” continued Cat. “Even when he loses, he’s still bleeding you out. It is what he has always done. It’s the only way anyone survives UCC Inc.”
Cat would know, Pru supposed. The girl who’d been born Incorporated, just like Mama. The girl who’d escaped. The girl who’d dreamed of dragons with Alexandre Lamarque.
The engineer’s head canted toward Anabel. “Jellicoe was the one I should have been angry with, before.” Her mechanical fist loosened between them. Hesitantly, Anabel’s human fingers slipped up alongside the cool metal digits. “You were always going to save more lives than you took.”
Anabel blinked rapidly, wordless, but her fingers tightened on Cat’s metal hand.
“Sweet pillow talk there,” said Pru.
Cat’s gaze slid back toward hers. “I am sorry about your mother.”
And what did you say to that? Pru swallowed a distasteful knot in her throat. “Yeah.” She looked down at the carpet, kicking one shoe along the Head Representative’s seal. “That makes two of us.” Then, because that felt indecent, she added, “I’m sorry about Rebelwing.” The thought of those torn and useless wings still twisted up a hurt inside her, twining with Mama’s absence from the apartment. All part and parcel with too much silence in her head.
Cat made a derisive sound. “Just because I built it doesn’t make it mine, not like you’re thinking. I thought you knew that. I’m not a pilot. And a sentient mech chooses its own.”
“Oh,” said Pru.
“I can always build another,” continued Cat, with the studied indifference she always affected, but Pru caught the twitch of her shoulder, the way Cat’s grip tightened on Anabel’s hand. Another dragon wouldn’t be the same. Pru just wasn’t a big enough asshole to say it aloud. Pilot and engineer, they both knew about truths better tucked into silence.
Anabel spoke to Bishop, saving Pru the indignity of saying anything further. “You must have told Head Representative Lamarque what you did with his nephew after it was too late to stop us. After we’d already been deployed into Incorporated territory. Otherwise we’d never have gotten past the Barricade sentinels.”
Bishop regarded her with swollen eyes almost as weary as her own. “Gabriel was never going to let his nephew risk himself in the presence of the alpha cell. I knew he’d go after Alexandre.”
Pru’s glance wavered toward the figure bent over the guitar. “So, bourgeois boy here was bait. What about my mother?”
“That Gabriel brought Sophie Wu along on his mission was—not explicitly my intention, but it wasn’t surprising either. Old war habits die hard. And he needed . . . someone.”
Pru wanted to laugh, or hit someone. Brought her along. Needed her. As if Mama was some biddable piece of luggage who would have gone anywhere but exactly the destination she intended. Her death, as it turned out.
Anabel slumped back in her seat. “You wanted to force the Head Representative’s hand. Force him to confront Jellicoe himself.”
“What,” Pru cut in, “so he could die in Alex’s stead, and you could conveniently seize the Head Representative’s job for yourself?”
Bishop’s entire body went rigid, like someone struck, and surprised by the hit. Slowly, that red-rimmed gaze refocused on Pru. “Is that what you truly think this has been about? My own ambition? Me?”
Uncertainty prickled beneath Pru’s skin, alongside guilt, but the flash of hot violence running through her veins overwhelmed both emotions. “What else?” she bit out. “Why else would you put us through this whole hush-hush song and dance, only to wind up with the Coalition’s leader blown to smithereens?”
She’d braced herself for him to shout at her, or slam the desk where Alex was seated. She hadn’t braced herself for the strange, broken quality to Bishop’s voice, when he said, haggard but sure, “To preserve the Barricade Coalition, you little fool. To ensure that no matter what else we lost, its future would remain safe. I never wanted Ga—the Head Representative to die. But no one gets to have everything they want, and only idiots refuse to plan for a worst-case scenario.”
Like a crowded platform with no clean shot. Like Rebelwing arriving too late, too slow, too far from the action. Like the exact moment they’d all seen Etienne Lamarque prepare to kill his son, and Gabriel Lamarque make a choice.
“You wanted Alex alive,” said Anabel. Soft, barely audible over the lilting guitar strings. “You knew you’d have to risk a Lamarque, to face down Etienne. But you decided, at some point, that if the chips were down, and you had to lose one of them, better Gabriel than his nephew.”
Bishop pocketed the handkerchief. “Interesting theory.”
“Interesting because it’s true,” said Anabel, steelier now. “Alex wasn’t the one who MacGyvered a spare plasma fire cartridge from Rebelwing’s inventory into a detonator that would spell certain death for the user, not to mention anyone stuck within twenty feet of the explosion. Hell of an insurance policy.”
No, that had been Mama’s work. She’d been a soldier, once. She’d known the price of the weapon she carried, and paid it anyway, without a beat of hesitation. Pru bit the inside of her cheek until she tasted blood.
Hakeem Bishop’s gaze fixed on Anabel. “Every conflict necessitates risk, Miss Park. Cornelius—your grandfather—would have taught you that. But did you really think that I wouldn’t do everything in my power to protect the children who will grow up to shape the future of this Coalition? Almost two decades ago, Gabriel fought and won a war. Cornelius and I, we spent Gabriel’s entire goddamn youth on that war. Two decades. That’s older than most of you are now. I wasn’t going to spend a boy’s life to snuff out the father’s, and neither was Gabriel.”