“Oh boy, this is about to get awkward, isn’t it?” Masterson scratched the back of his neck, actually looking sheepish. “For what it’s worth, you were a good business partner, kiddo. Sorry it had to end this way.”
Over Masterson’s head, red and blue lights—the signature of UCC enforcement patrols—flashed across Pru’s sight line. Her blood froze. Violently, she swore, backpedaling into concrete. The hairs on her arms practically stood on end. “You snitched on me?”
Masterson made a great show of yawning. “Guilty as charged. Nothing personal. The Incorporated is as the Incorporated does, and cracking down on black market sales of censored media is all the rage this month. Never bid against the police brigades, sweetheart.”
With a low snarl, Pru shoved Masterson aside, and glanced wildly down the alleys of Hummel Avenue for an escape route, an alibi, anything. The dead-eyed windows of half-grown construction projects stared back at her, useless and accusatory, abandoned by Incorporated architects who’d cast them aside to develop bigger, better, shinier buildings. Just like a book smuggler whose wares had outworn her worth. That ominous red-and-blue glow drew closer, but Pru’s limbs, like a rusted-out cyborg’s, had locked at all the joints. Fear-frozen.
Do something! she thought furiously at her brain.
Shit, shit, shit! replied her brain helpfully.
Then she saw it: the sliding door of an abandoned pachinko parlor, hanging slightly ajar, right across the street from that stupid game display. Pru launched herself off the concrete and through the entrance, just as a siren’s scream pierced the air. Scooting down the pachinko parlor’s darkened corridor, she careened past the creepily cartoonish slot machines, garish colors still low-lit with the final gasp of their battery reserves. Booted footsteps beat a clockwork rhythm outside. Someone shouted an order, muffled by the parlor walls. Pru’s heart pounded against her sternum. Where the hell was the back door to this dump?
A plexiglass elevator winked at her between two dusty, darkened gaming ads, one of them in Spanish. Great, the parlor must be a prewar relic, if it still boasted banned-language posters. Incorporated management was like that: shuttering what they considered obsolete to chase innovation, like children abandoning last year’s toys. Still, book smugglers on the lam couldn’t be choosers. Head tucked, Pru pelted toward the door, jammed her finger blindly against one of the buttons, and nearly wept with relief when the plexiglass whooshed aside to admit her. It was a stupid idea, climbing into an untested elevator in an abandoned building, maybe even suicidal, but falling down a mystery elevator shaft was still better than falling into the hands of Incorporated police brigades. The UCC’s Executive General had no qualms about disappearing his own citizens for breaking one too many censorship regulations; Pru didn’t really want to think about what would happen to a book smuggler. Diplomatic immunity probably didn’t apply when half your gate pass docs were forgeries.
The door slid shut. For a moment, nothing happened. Pru breathed out once, carefully, the way prep school therapists taught all their twitchy, anxiety-prone students. Her heartbeat pumped away in her ears, slowing just a little.
Then the floor dropped. Pru’s stomach nearly catapulted through her throat. An expletive died on the roof of her mouth. It was one thing knowing, intellectually, how chancy the lifts in old buildings could get. It was another learning firsthand how roller-coaster quick they hurtled toward ground zero.
The lift kept dropping.
Spine curled into the corner, Pru watched the building floors rattle upward, the darkened elevator shaft sparking against the enforced plexiglass. Faster, and faster, and faster, she fell through the endless black, her fingers clutching the rusty rail. Well, some part of her thought, grim toned. At least no one would chase her down this particular direction. Small comfort. Anabel always said Pru needed to see the brighter side of things, and considering how many ways Pru could blame her current predicament on Anabel, honoring Anabel’s wishes now seemed apropos.
Somewhere above Pru’s head, a roar echoed through the dark.
No, thought Pru, growing dizzy with the certain onset of hysterics, not a roar. That couldn’t be right. It must be the cables clattering against the elevator shaft. But still, the roar went on, distinctly animalistic, vibrating over the scream of the falling elevator.
Which was slowing. Pru blinked, wondering if she’d well and truly lost her mind at last. But no, she was right. The lift was still falling, but its descent had slowed to a steady pace, less a roller-coaster screaming toward gravity’s deadly embrace, more a vertical subway train trundling gradually into its station.
At last, the lift ground to a halt entirely.
Pru rose from her crouch, blinking, eyes trying in vain to adjust to the dark. She had all of five seconds to wonder just how far underground she’d fallen.
Then something wide, flexible, and metallic—like steel-forged goddamn bat wings, Pru thought nonsensically—pried the plexiglass doors open with a clang. Yelling, Pru curled herself back into the corner, elbows covering her head. “What the fuck!”
The thing attached to the wings clambered through the newfound entrance. Pru took the sight of it in by pieces: the clinking, arrow-headed tail, the wingspan, the reptilian neckline and sheer, chrome-scaled body. It had eyes, too, in a shade of blue so pale it might as well be silver, bright enough to make you flinch.
A wyvern. But Pru had studied the grainy holograms of Incorporated wyverns from old war footage: their jerky robotic movements, dead eyes gleaming above death-dealing metal jaws. They didn’t move like this, all curious, animalistic grace. And they never looked at anything the way these eyes fixed now on Pru, full of fire and furious intelligence.
When Pru was a girl, she’d loved every story her mother ever penned—the visual novels, the wireless dramas, even the nostalgically schmaltzy, made-for-home-cinema film specials. But her favorites had been Mama’s plain-text fairytales. Mama said stories too big and strange for grown-ups belonged, always, to kids. Stories needed human hearts to rest inside, and kids’ hearts, according to Mama, made the surest, strongest homes.
The earliest stories she’d ever entrusted to Pru had dragons in them.
The wild, chrome-winged thing forcing its way into the lift now was a machine. Logically speaking, it had to be—a very large cyborg, perhaps, or very small piece of hovercraft—but something manmade, nonetheless, a machine gone mad and strange. In all the ways that should have been most obvious, it looked very like a wyvern. Yet Pru, shielding her eyes from the thing’s searing, silver gaze, could only think: That’s no Incorporated war machine. That’s a motherfucking dragon.
The thing approached, until it had Pru backed into a corner of the lift. Above her head, she heard the cables creak dangerously under their combined weight. She squeezed her eyes shut. A metal-cool snout, for lack of a better word, bumped her forehead.
It was about the last thing she noticed, before she heard the snap of the final cable. The elevator floor plummeted. A horrible crash rang through her ears. And then, Pru’s world winked into oblivion.