Mama blew smoke at the pale, elegantly arched ceiling. “You want to know how you turn the tide of a culture war? You give the people a paragon. Some symbol of hope and goodness, ready-made for a pedestal. And if you’re smart, you find yourself a paragon who’s a true believer, charismatic and pretty and just goddamn genuine enough to make you want to believe in his cause, the same way you believe in the man. Prometheus—Gabriel—was perfect.”
“I’m sensing a ‘but,’” said Pru.
“Oh, there isn’t one, not really.” Mama waved the cigarette like a stage prop before sticking it back in her mouth, smoke blooming in hazy shapes around the Head Representative’s desk, which would smell of burning tobacco for days to come, Pru was pretty sure. “Prometheus is the real thing. He’ll ask you to fight and die for him, and send you off to do it, and if you do lose life or limb or soul to his cause, he’ll mourn your loss too. And the worst part is that he’ll really mean it. Probably shed some real goddamn tears at your funeral and everything. Which, in my opinion, just makes this all harder on us than it really has to be.”
“Isn’t that a good thing, though?” Pru pressed. “Like, wouldn’t you rather have a leader who believes in the same things you do than one who doesn’t?”
“Aw, kid.” Mama’s smile around the cigarette was thin lipped. “Prometheus and I fought side by side about a million years ago. Back then, I sided with him willingly—hell, happily. He never coerced me to do anything I didn’t want to do. I’ll cop to all that.” She exhaled smoke. “But whoever said that now, a million years later, he and I must still march through life in lockstep, like the sweet, stupid kids we were? Who says you have to believe the same things forever?”
Pru blinked. “You’re an author. He’s the Head Representative of the Barricade Coalition. How could you not believe in the same things?”
Mama blinked back. “Goodness. I’d forgotten how simple everything was, at seventeen.”
“Don’t condescend to me.”
“I’m not,” said Mama. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Kid, I was seventeen, when I left my cushy desk job pushing propaganda for an Incorporated office. Seventeen, when I ran off to side with the Barricaders in a war I wasn’t sure they could win. I know how it feels, to make those choices. I haven’t been seventeen in a long time, but I do remember what it’s like, to really believe in something, with all your heart.” She pointed her cigarette at Pru. “My question, daughter mine, is this: Do you?”
Pru had no good answer to that. “I believe in finishing school where I started,” she said at last. “And I believe in not getting myself thrown in jail for petty crime. And I . . . I believe that I’m supposed to fly Rebelwing. Or try, at least. If nothing else, work-study will be good for university admissions. Isn’t my education worth a few hours in a cockpit?”
Silence hung between them for the space of another drag on Mama’s cigarette, the darkness in her eyes unreadable. “You tell me, kiddo. If Incorporated wyverns breach the wall. If we see a second Partition War in our lifetime, and you’re deployed to the front lines. Will your education still be worth it?”
Pru eyed the orange glow of the cigarette. She tried to imagine what Mama must have seen in those war-torn days before Pru’s birth: monsters made of metal, calibrated for the kind of fear that made your own brain betray you.
Unbidden, she remembered Alex smiling in his rumpled schoolboy tie outside Cat’s coffeehouse, how he’d talked about sharing the marketplace of ideas, the same dreamy way people in romance novels talked about true love, like the exchange of information and expression could armor you against anything. Ignorance is really just a different kind of fear.
“If my education’s not worth fighting for,” Pru said at last, “then what the hell else was the first war for?”
Mama met Pru’s gaze with another thin-lipped curve of her mouth, not quite a grin. “Touché, daughter mine.” Her eyes were bright with some unnamable emotion. “Very well, I’ll sign the permission forms on two conditions. One,” she ticked off her index finger, “you and Prometheus check in with me biweekly. I want progress reports on what you’re up to. If this is going to be a work-study with parental sign-offs, it’s also going to be a work-study with a reasonable level of parental supervision. Gabriel Lamarque so much as takes you on a field trip into a UCC zone without my say-so, and I’ll take his balls. Clear?”
Pru’s jaw twitched, half exasperation, half relief. In truth, she’d expected something like that. “Crystal. But what’s the second condition?”
Mama was already sliding off the Head Representative’s desk, smoothing out her trousers while the cigarette dangled from the corner of her mouth. “Oh,” she said breezily, sashaying back toward the door, “you’re grounded for your entire summer break for the whole book smuggling thing. You hurting for more money during the school year? Don’t worry about my feelings—you tell me, understand? You don’t want jail time for petty crime? Don’t do petty crime.”
“Don’t do petty crime?” Pru echoed, incredulous. “You punched the Head Representative in the face!”
“Sure I did.” Mama bent to retrieve her high heels, and tossed a grin over her shoulder, through the lingering haze of smoke. The smell of tobacco burned beneath Pru’s nose. “I consider myself tough, but fair. Now let’s go tell Prometheus and his pretty purple jaw that we’ve reached an agreement on this Modern Politics II bullshit.”
7
COLLISION COURSE
Modern Politics II, when you got down to it, was actually kind of a terrible class, even when you were only doing the watered-down, half-credit version designed for burnt-out overachievers who couldn’t stomach the midterm project. The teacher looked ready to fall asleep next to the flickering 3-D smartboard, reading the contents of the slides off in a monotone. Pru had picked up on all his talking points the night before, just from doing the reading. Hell, she’d picked up more.
From her seat at the back of the lecture hall, Pru could see at least five kids texting under their desks. Two more looked busy writing up what were clearly assignments for other classes. Three in Pru’s row were blatantly snoring, the light from the smartboard animations playing over their closed eyelids.
“Well, yeah,” said Anabel, when Pru observed as much. “Everyone knows showing up to lecture for Modern Politics II after midterms is pretty much a formality. This bit of the course isn’t really about discussions or essays. The entire point is the work-study. People are too busy kissing ass at their internships to treat it like a proper schoolroom class.”
“Or staging illicit rock concerts in the auditorium.”