Rebelwing, p.15
Rebelwing, page 15
Cat’s palm clamped down over Alex’s wrist, the fist blunt and sturdy, starkly so against the lean elegance of his tapered musician fingers. Hers were the no-nonsense, labor camp–bred hands of an engineer, boasting calluses visible even on shaky video footage.
Pru, watching, waited for Alex to pull free from the girl’s grip. He didn’t.
Cat released a shuddering breath. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s build a goddamn dragon. Together.”
The video shorted out.
“Enjoying the show?”
That voice hadn’t come from the video footage, but Pru recognized the person speaking over her earpiece, his vowels cool and clipped. Swallowing hard, she thumbed at the remote, then unbent her knees so she could pop the roof of the dragon’s cockpit.
Leaning over the translucent edges of the mech, still wearing an earpiece, all grown up and looking thoroughly displeased, was Alexandre Lamarque.
9
A CERTAIN AUDACITY
“How the hell did you get in here?” Pru blurted out. “We don’t have a scheduled training session! And stealth mode is on!”
Alex’s furiously furrowed eyebrows rose. “Stealth mode turns Rebelwing invisible. It does not, amazingly, turn her into a literal ghost.” As he spoke, he gave Rebelwing’s outer shell a couple solid knocks with his fist. Slowly, the layer of translucency receded from the mech’s silvery hide. “As for why I’m here, I have a war piloting license, military ID that authorizes regular access to mech training facilities, and keys. Unlike you.”
“Well, la-di-dah.” Pru yanked Jay Park’s keys out of her pocket. “Shows what you know, bourgeois boy.”
The eyebrows dove back into a V. “Pickpocketing Jay Park’s keys does not help your case.”
“I didn’t steal them,” snapped Pru, weirdly hurt by the assumption. “Anabel gave them to me.”
“Still doesn’t mean you should be here.”
“Why not? I’m trying to bond with Rebelwing!” protested Pru. “I’ve only got, like, four and a half weeks before the combat assessment.” Like Alex Lamarque himself could forget. The excuse sounded so flimsy, even to her own ears, she wanted to curl up into a ball. How could she possibly make this worse? “I can’t afford a bad mark on my transcript for this internship. Lamarque U is my top choice.”
Ah. That was how.
Alex’s eyebrows climbed so high, they practically disappeared into his hairline. “Breaking and entering charge on Coalition government property would definitely make your application stand out.”
“Look.” Pru folded her arms. “Current appearances notwithstanding, I’m not stupid. I know Rebelwing was primed to imprint on you, which means she had to have something of yours programmed into her own personality matrix. So I went digging through her memory banks, to figure out how to make her work with me.”A beat of silence stretched between them, and then he asked, very quietly, “Do you really care?”
“Do I—Jesus, Alex, I live here too!” snapped Pru. “There won’t be any universities left to reject my applications if Incorporated arms dealers storm the Barricade cities with an army of evil robot lizards. So before you give up and—and, I don’t know, break Rebelwing down for scraps and start over again, I thought I’d try to figure out how to be the sort of pilot she needs.” She ignored the odd, hindbrain-generated panic at the thought of the dragon torn asunder and mined for parts, the white-blue eyes going permanently dim. “You guys are the ones who keep telling me I need to treat this stuff seriously.”
“So you rifled through my parents’ recordings, and Cat’s—”
“Because Rebelwing gave them to me!” Pru burst out, and clammed her mouth shut again. Why couldn’t she ever keep decent control of her words around him? Alex’s eyes were very dark, and very focused on her. She tried again, averting her own gaze. “I was on the verge of giving up, you know. I was breaking school rules and government rules all on this harebrained hunch that maybe, just maybe, I could learn something useful. I went through the memory bank for an hour, maybe more. Nada. And then right when I was going to call it a day, declare myself a failure after all, Rebelwing threw a fit. When I finally got her to calm down, she’d . . . queued up that video footage. Like a peace offering or something. I don’t know,” she barreled on, one hand going up to tug out her earpiece, “it was clearly a mistake. I’m sorry if I saw things I shouldn’t have. It won’t happen ag—”
Long fingers closed around her wrist, keeping her earpiece in place. Alex leaned toward her, still wearing that crazy focused expression. “You don’t know that it was a mistake.”
Pru’s jaw hinged open and shut. “Of course it was. I just trampled all over your personal shit, not to mention Cat’s, and I don’t even have anything useful to show for it.”
The corners of Alex’s eyes, bizarrely, crinkled. He looked more like his uncle this way, on the verge of wry laughter. “One. It’s my personal shit. When I feel like it’s been sufficiently trampled, I promise I’ll let you know. Two. I’ll reiterate in other words: how will you know that what you saw wasn’t helpful until you give the piloting another try?”
“Oh, ha ha.”
In reply, Alex ducked back out of the cockpit.
“Hey, I’m trying to apologize to you here! Come back so I can be properly contrite!”
His voice answered her over the earpiece, crackling slightly. “Oh, I’m coming back. But not alone. I’ve been working on a harebrained hunch of my own for your past couple work-study sessions. So long as we’re both here at the training compound, we might as well test it out.”
“What? I thought you were just playing hooky because you were mad at me!”
“Well, I was, a little,” he admitted. Something clanged around, alarmingly loud, in the background of his mic. “So I decided to do something productive about it.”
“This doesn’t feel productive!”
“Strap yourself in and close the cockpit hatch. Also, don’t forget the earpiece. You’re going to want it, trust me.”
“I don’t trust you at all right now! What in hell is happening?”
She didn’t have long to wait. She’d barely settled back into the cockpit seat, when a second mech landed with a rattling thump opposite the dragon. “What the actual hell!” yelped Pru.
“Meet Quixote,” Alex said over the earpiece. “I’ve been piloting this little guy since I was thirteen. He was my very first mech, so he’s a little old, but rides smoothly enough.”
“Quixote”—which Pru definitely wouldn’t have described as a little anything—looked like the sort of combat mech they used to make movies about, in the days when mobile suits were first bursting onto the scene of mainstream tech culture. It was a tall, humanoid contraption equipped with floppy but durable-looking metal limbs that would ensure a long-legged stride and long-armed reach. Painted in absurdly cheerful shades of primary red and blue, the mech couldn’t have looked less dangerous next to Rebelwing.
So why were all of Pru’s instincts screaming at her to run?
“You’ve given me an idea for a training exercise,” said Alex, continuing in the same pleasantly informative tone. “Rebelwing was designed primarily as a mobile suit equipped for combat and stealth, not an ordinary transport mech. It’s possible we’ve been going about bonding you to the imprint all wrong.”
“Okay,” said Pru warily, one eye still fixed through the dragon’s eyes at this innocuously red-and-blue-limbed robot. “But what does that have to do with your pet Man of La Mancha robot?”
“Don Quixote the knight errant was created by Miguel de Cervantes a solid three centuries before Dale Wasserman penned the musical, thank you very much,” said Alex, “and his namesake is here to put some pressure on you. Don’t worry, I’m piloting him in sparring mode, not real time combat strike mode, so we won’t go too hard on you. For now.”
“What do you mean, sparring mode?” Pru’s belly went cold. “I still have five weeks.”
“Closer to four,” corrected Alex in innocuous tones. “And as my mother used to say, practice makes perfect.”
“That is such bullsh—”
Quixote jumped.
Jumped was a terrible word for it, actually. One second, Pru was side-eyeing those improbably gangly robot limbs, and the next, the robot had launched itself skyward, disappearing into the blue.
Flew, more than jumped, thought Pru. Or better yet, ninja’d. That was a verb, right?
She squinted through the dragon’s eye lenses, looking for some sign of Quixote, when something torpedoed into the back of the dragon. “Holy shit!” The piece of Pru’s brain that buzzed with the dragon’s consciousness flared with surprise, then rage. The machine that encased her woke up all at once, wings flaring outward, as the dragon gave a great mechanical bellow, trying to fling the other mech off its back.
“So, what was your hot take on those videos?” Alex asked conversationally. His mech wrapped spindly arms around the dragon’s throat.
“Screw you!” yelled Pru through rattling jaws as she fought her own panicking mech from its cockpit. Calm down, calm down, calm down, she thought furiously at the imprint, probably not very calmly at all.
“Interesting takeaway!” If Pru didn’t know any better, she could swear Alex thought he was being funny. It figured that a guy as humorlessly no-chill as Alex would think trapping Pru in an impromptu robot brawl was funny.
“Well, now I know why Cat is so in love with you!” Pru shot back, which was probably a low blow, but she figured it was allowed when she could literally hear the cables inside the dragon’s neck straining beneath Quixote’s grip. If this was sparring mode, she really hoped she never saw real combat any time soon.
A derisive snort. “She’s not!”
“Oh, really?” Pru didn’t know who Alex thought he was kidding. Mi gato, he’d called her, my Cat, like anyone could help falling in love with him, hearing a boy like Alex beg you with outstretched hands to run away and build a better world. Pru slammed her own palms against the cockpit walls. Fly, she demanded.
Rebelwing kept thrashing, but to the dragon’s credit, Pru did feel her take that infuriating squirming to the air. Huh, thought Pru. Progress. “The video footage in Robo Reptile’s memory banks says otherwise!”
“That’s hardly a romance. We were literal children!”
“Yeah?” Pru tried to concentrate on directing the dragon through the air, great chrome wings flapping, Quixote still clinging to its back like a deranged mech-riding hitchhiker. “Is that you talking, or Cat?”
“Cat, for sure,” said Alex altogether too cheerfully. “The summer I turned sixteen, she declared that it would be . . . what was it she said again? Right.” He adopted Cat’s crisp and slightly clinical cadence: “‘educational for a boy my age to know some girls preferred kissing other girls over kissing boys, thank you all the same.’”
The dragon flipped upside down midair. Pru gave a thoroughly undignified shriek.
“What? It’s a perfectly reasonable preference, Pru.” The earpiece crackled a few times, but Alex still sounded remarkably poised for someone hurtling skyward on the back of a pissed-off mechanical lizard. “Cat, as you’d imagine, was pretty matter-of-fact in the explanation.”
“I wasn’t screaming about that,” howled Pru, hanging upside down in the cockpit, as the dragon spun through the sky. “I was screaming because we’re going to die!”
“Well, aren’t you going to do something about that?”
“You could quit strangling my mech!”
“Make me.”
Pru emitted a despairing, furious snarl that probably made her sound more like a dragon herself than its terrified pilot. “Who taught you this adrenaline junkie bullshit, anyway? Your uncle?”
“My dad,” corrected Alex, amusement hinting around the edges of his voice. “And it’s called defensive mech piloting.”
“Defensive!”
“Well,” Alex allowed, thoughtful. “Defensive mech piloting with combat forms.” He and his mech were still clinging to hers like some freaky-limbed howler monkey.
Pru ground her teeth together. She needed him off. The dragon’s consciousness hummed agreement in the back of her head. “Yeah, well, guess it paid off when you . . . you know.”
Shall we raise him for art or war? Julia had asked, a million years ago.
Pru closed her eyes. In the end, Julia’s son had made his own choice. Which meant Pru could too.
“It’s about wanting it enough,” she reminded herself, repeating Alex’s words. It was about wanting something for herself. No one’s choice but her own.
Her eyes popped open.
Feint, Pru thought at the dragon, clenching a fist inside the expanse of its left wing. Miraculously, the mech actually responded to her wishes this time, jerking sideways. Over her earpiece, she heard Alex grunt, startled. Quixote’s grip loosened slightly.
“You have questions,” he observed, scrambling for purchase.
Pru wasn’t having it. Again, she asked the dragon, which complied with a tiny swoop that left Quixote dangling off the dragon’s tail. “Questions? I have fifth-period bio lab, which I’m going to be late for if I don’t buck you off!”
“Interesting source of motivation,” gasped Alex over the earpiece, clearly trying to climb over the dragon’s spine. Outside, metal limbs screeched over the dragon’s chrome-plated hull. Alex and Quixote were actually managing an impressive job of defying gravity, all things considered.
“I told you already, unlike you, I don’t have a guaranteed slot at my top choice university,” snapped Pru. She flexed her fingers, try ing to get the dragon to flick its now Quixote-weighted tail. “I can’t fail that class.”
Quixote’s long-taloned, red-and-blue fingers scrabbled along the ridges of the tail, which had begun to swoosh wildly back and forth. “I can’t believe you’re thinking about your bio grades right now,” called Alex, shouting to be heard over the crash of gears inside his cockpit.
“Well, what do you want me to do, envision you as the Executive General of the UCC?” demanded Pru. She blew stray wisps of hair off her nose, momentarily forgetting her terror, but annoyed with him all over again. “Or Harry Jellybelly—”
“Harold Jellicoe.” Was he laughing? Incredible. “And no, I don’t. I’m coaching you through this, not me. If you’re motivated by not wanting to fail fifth-period bio, then don’t fail fifth-period bio.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“I’m amazed you managed to take that as an insult!”
“How was I supposed to take it?”
“As an observation that you and I are different people,” yelled Alex as something clattered loudly near his earpiece. Quixote tried to jump again, to leap onto a more secure piece of the dragon, and nearly fell off entirely. “Rebelwing, whatever’s stuck in her memory banks, still chose to imprint on you. Whatever she saw in you already exists. You don’t have to fake something you’re not!”
Pru gave the dragon another jerk, but Quixote and Alex clung stubbornly to the tail. “You yelled at me the first time I officially test-piloted the dragon.”
“Because I thought you were going to get yourself killed! I didn’t—oh, shit.”
Quixote’s weight disappeared off the end of the dragon’s tail. The bottom dropped out of Pru’s stomach. Static crackled violently in her earpiece. “Alex!”
She’d been concentrating so furiously on dislodging him, she hadn’t given real thought to what happened to a wingless mech thrown midair several hundred feet off the ground. The dragon’s eyes zoomed in on the red-and-blue figure dropping through the sky. “Alex!” Pru screamed again. He didn’t answer.
As one, Pru and the dragon dove.
Part of her mind was screaming along with her vocal cords. The other part of her mind—the one that coasted on air currents with metal wings, and saw the world through high-definition reptilian eyes—made calculations, like she was working through a problem set on an exam with a ticking time limit.
She’d need to swoop beneath Quixote to catch the other mech in time before Quixote and Alex both went splat. Pru squinted through the dragon’s eye lenses, hard enough to pinch her temples, trying to figure out the right angle. “Hey now,” she murmured at the mech thrumming around her. “I know we haven’t gotten on so well these past few days. But how fast can you—we—just . . . fall?”
In answer, Rebelwing dropped.
Later, Pru wouldn’t be sure how to describe what happened in that moment. Just that she’d been utterly, eerily certain of herself and the span of her—no, their—body, the joint capacity of girl and dragon to catch the ridiculous boy windmilling toward gravity’s deadly embrace. The world had sped and blurred around her. Color and light exploded on her field of vision through the eye lenses, the world screaming past the screen too fast for her brain to process.
And somehow, at the end of it all, she’d wound up perched on the far edge of the Coalition government’s training field, Quixote dangling around Rebelwing’s neck.
Pru’s head pounded, a steady drumbeat inside her skull. But she and Rebelwing were earthbound, at least. Also, not dead. How nice.
Someone groaned, the sound shorting in and out over her earpiece. Pru sat up, a hair too quickly, which set her head pounding even harder. She ignored the pain. “Alex?” Her throat was raw, probably from all the screaming and terror. “Bourgeois boy, is that you?”
“Technically,” rasped the voice on the other end of the wireless, “you and your mum would qualify as bourgeois too. You voluntarily attend a prep school, and your mum makes professional art for a living. How is that anything but bourgeois?”
