Bishop’s head bowed over the desk, his fingers steepling on its surface. For a moment, he looked nothing more and nothing less than what he was: a survivor, weighed down by life’s weariness. “There’s precious little point in preserving a legacy when no one’s left to inherit it.”
“So now we’re, what, exactly?” Pru strode forward, until she stood opposite the desk. Blood salted the back of her teeth. Before her on the left sat Alex and his guitar, seemingly lost in his music still; on the right, this ancient-eyed man who moved people about like chess pieces in some unending battle. Her feet splayed over the center of the Head Representative’s seal. “Kids playing dress-up in our dead parents’ clothes?”
“Kids who have to grow up, just like your parents did, not so long ago,” said Bishop. He snapped his fingers under her nose. “Wake up, Miss Wu. Men like me built this world, but you’re the ones who are gonna have to live in it, once we’re all bones rotting beneath the dirt. Best figure out what kind of world it’s gonna be.”
“So that’s why you wanted to talk to us three days after the funerals,” said Anabel. “To plan for what happens now.”
“The world doesn’t stop spinning just because people die, Miss Park. Jellicoe may be dead, but he wasn’t the only arms dealer servicing Incorporated interests, and the Executive General’s not exactly pleased to have had the most powerful weapons in the UCC arsenal mysteriously destroyed on the very day they were to be delivered.”
“Can’t we expose him?” Pru demanded. She thought of the slow, eerie drag of the Executive General’s smile, his tonelessly delivered ultimatums. “He’s the one behind this whole shitshow, isn’t he? He ordered the attack on No Man’s Land. He bought the wyverns. He was going to arrange for Jellicoe’s goddamn retirement in paradise!”
Even before she finished speaking, Hakeem Bishop was already shaking his head. “If we expose the Executive General, we also expose our own espionage networks, and our own violations of the peace treaty. We’ll return to war. Gabriel Lamarque’s legacy will have been for nothing.”
“Fuck legacy!” yelled Pru. “If the Incorporated want a war so bad, let’s give them a war. They’ve earned it.”
“Right now?” Anabel spoke quietly. “We can’t afford it. We’re still recovering from the first Partition Wars, and Project Rebelwing’s in traction. Even without wyverns in the Incorporated arsenal, we couldn’t face down the entire UCC army. We’d lose. Badly.”
Bishop nodded. “To say nothing of emergency elections, and reshuffling the Coalition’s leadership, and—Alexandre, would you quit plucking at that damn instrument!”
Alex’s fingers stilled, aborting the music so suddenly that the melody’s absence felt violent. His lips twitched upward. Pru tempered a flinch. She’d witnessed an entire catalog of Alex Lamarque’s smiles, from the bright-toothed stage grins of the hurricane boy, to the small, private curves of his mouth. She’d never seen his lips carve his face into something calculated to mock. To cut, not for the sake of some greater cause, but for the sake of cutting. He hopped off his uncle’s desk, guitar in hand. It was shaking, very slightly.
“Very well,” he said placidly. “If you’re going to continue this wonderfully amusing exercise in political theater, my damn instrument and my plucking fingers and I will all take our leave.” He cut a jerky parody of a bow to a gape-mouthed Chief of Staff, and limped through the office doors without so much as a backward glance.
“Where are you going?” Bishop thundered. “Alex—Miss Wu!”
But Pru was already following hot on Alex’s heels. She caught sight of him rounding the corner from the foyer, past the couch where Pru had once lounged, crimson-faced, listening to Mama fight with the Head Representative. Both ghosts now.
Alex was heading outside. Wordlessly, Pru slipped through the wobbly French doors, and dogged him down the long, winding staircase toward the mansion gardens. The limp should have slowed his movements, but instead he seemed determined to spite the injury, pace lengthening. His doctors were going to kill him. Jogging around one last turn of the stairs, Pru lost sight of him.
She swore. “Alex!” She jogged through rows of neatly clipped rose bushes. “Alex, wait—”
A strain of guitar music cut her off. Pru followed it, and found Alex sprawled on a bench beneath a cherry blossom tree, guitar balanced between belly and knee as he strummed, eyes half lidded. He looked like a boy on a book cover. If the injury beneath the leg brace bothered him, he refused to give any indication. “What do you want?”
A million responses bubbled to the tip of Pru’s tongue. Pru bit back every last one. His music, oblivious, mocked her. That, more than anything else, was maybe what wrought real words out of her.
“I want the world to stop turning.”
Alex’s fingers paused on the guitar strings.
The hot, thick anger of the words didn’t abate. “I didn’t think Mama believed in anything for the longest time, you know that? She was tired of wars, and tired of causes, and tired of Lamarques. But she died for it all anyway, and what does the world care?” She sank down beside the bench, chuckling around the familiar pressure in her chest that meant she’d start crying if she didn’t keep laughing. “So, yeah. I want the world to stop turning. Give me a week. Give me a day. Give me five damn minutes. Wouldn’t that be enough?”
“No.” The guitar strings made an ugly sound. “It’s never going to be enough, not even goddamn close.” He jerked upright, hands curling white-knuckled over the guitar. For one blood-hammering moment, Pru thought he’d fling the instrument aside, smash it apart like dragon wings being pulled to pieces by Jellicoe’s giant. She thought of guitar strings yanked asunder, the scream of her own living mech, and her heart twisted inside her chest, like an ankle folding under a bad fall.
He seemed to sense her thoughts, pausing. The observation made Pru flinch. Wishful thinking, believing he still knew her mind. A stupid notion, without the dragon’s imprint to bond them. Still, he set the guitar aside in the grass, rose from the bench, walked around it with a jerky, limping stride. He was favoring the bad leg worse than before. Probably from all that idiot speed walking down the stairs.
“It’s not,” he snarled. “Ever. Enough.” With tranquil, thunderous force, he shoved the bench down the side of the garden slope, where it crashed hard against a tree trunk. Cherry blossoms shuddered from their branches, weeping into the wreck of wood.
“Don’t!” Pru grabbed him by the elbow before he could hurt himself worse. Fury seemed to have bled off her, into Alex. Now, guilt tempered the edges of her own anger, turning it to something else. She hadn’t known Gabriel Lamarque well. A warm presence, charismatic and effusive, but more icon than man, even after meeting him in person. He hadn’t been her uncle. He hadn’t been her parent.