Rebelwing, p.22
Rebelwing, page 22
On the fourth day of Mama-mandated house arrest, Mama herself appeared at Pru’s bedroom door and announced in conversational tones, “Okay, tell me if I’m wrong, but I think my attempt to discipline you for foolhardy beach partying in politically dangerous locales has backfired on me. The way you mope about under that blanket, I’d think you actually want to isolate yourself from your friends. Even the foolhardy beach-partying variety. Maybe especially the foolhardy beach-partying variety,” Mama added, looking thoughtful. “Now, there’s a wrench in my responsible parenting scheme. Figuring out the most effective ways to be tough yet fair on a teenager is its own battlefield. Remarkably, no one bothers to warn you about that when you’re a seventeen-year-old dragged into a massive continental war.”
“We’re not at war,” Pru informed the ceiling.
“Not yet, obviously. And I was referring to myself, you self-centered little ingrate.” Mama’s weight dipped the mattress. “I think we ought to talk.”
“Why?” A thin crack ran from the age-stained linoleum ceiling tiles down toward the flickering white glow of her fairy-shaped bedside lamp. Pru had grown up in this apartment, but she’d never counted on feeling as if she’d grown out of it. “You’ve never wanted to talk about wars before.”
“The Partition Wars?” Mama sighed. “No, I suppose I haven’t.”
“We always talked about other stuff,” Pru continued, staring at that crack. “The stories you write. The special sales at the bodega downstairs. Your opinions about continental languages. The things Grandma and Grandpa told you about their life back in Old Shanghai, before they made the arguably terrible life choice of moving across the ocean to a mismanaged chunk of land, doomed to lose all its countries and governments within a century. Great call on their part.”
“Yes, how tremendously short-sighted of my parents not to be psychic fortunetellers,” said Mama dryly. “New Columbia was once the seat of democracy for the most powerful country in the world. It seemed a promising prospect, back in the day.”
“And now it’s the seat of democracy for a ragtag pack of rebel cities left over from three countries whose governments were handily bulldozed by a megacorporation with a chip on its shoulder.”
“No one saw the Partition Wars coming, kiddo. Not the true scope and scale of them.”
“Maybe someone should have.”
“‘Should have’ is a very easy state of being when hindsight’s twenty-twenty, wouldn’t you say? Besides, who knows if it would have helped at all, or only made things worse. Maybe we’d all have been Cassandra, waiting for the fall of Troy, knowing what would become of our home, and helpless to prevent it.”
“Is that what Gabriel Lamarque thinks?”
Her mother’s pause was a tangible thing, lingering heavy in the air. “Who’s to say?”
“Why were you arguing with him when Alex and I came home?” Pru blurted out.
“Because I take comfort in hobbies, and that one is an old favorite. You and your Lamarque boy took your sweet time finding your way from No Man’s Land back to New Columbia. Forgive your elders for finding their own means to pass the time, not to mention the utter heart-numbing fear.” Mama’s voice went high on that last word, cracking into nothing. She inhaled once, gathering herself, and said, “I have never known a moment I wasn’t afraid, from the end of the Partition Wars to the first time I saw you toddle on your own two ridiculous little feet. That, kiddo, is why I don’t like talking about wartime.”
“You don’t like talking about Gabriel Lamarque either.”
For a moment, Pru thought her mother might snap at her. Then Mama exhaled, and said, “The two might as well be synonymous, for me. If you don’t understand anything else about those years, Pru, understand this much: for me, the war was Gabriel, and Gabriel was the war. I was an artist long before I was Gabriel’s soldier, but he always thought that art had to exist in service of some grand battle. It was, quite frankly, exhausting.”
“Okay, but art really was a battleground when fighting against the Incorporated, wasn’t it?” Pru found herself arguing. “I mean, they imposed literal censorship zones.”
“Ah, but why do you imagine censorship zones were created in the first place?” Mama wagged a finger in Pru’s face. “Art is not always a weapon or a political statement, my girl. Sometimes, art is simply love with no place left to call home.”
“The Head Representative disagrees?”
“Please. The Head Representative doesn’t have enough hours in the day to think about anything that isn’t a weapon or a political statement.” Mama offered Pru a sideways little smile. “You remember asking me about why I started calling him Prometheus?”
“Because he brought fire to the people.”
“Yes, and got himself chained to a rock for his troubles, and all the good it wound up doing anybody. What have we done with fire since? Equipped some giant robots with it, and threatened one another with deadly force while Gabriel Lamarque sits shackled to that ridiculous office. Nothing’s changed, and nothing ever will. You know why I don’t talk about the war? Because it never truly ended. We just hid behind our walls, and told ourselves it did.”
Pru sat up and looked at her mother. The streaks of silver through her hair glinted in the light of Pru’s bedside lamp. “Did you mean what you said to Lamarque?”
Mama made a derisive sound. “About what, the failure of books to magically save humanity from itself? I’ll stand by that one. Really, I never understood why the Incorporated kicked up such a fuss about them.”
“No. About the value of saving one person. The kids who wrote you letters,” Pru clarified. She curled her fingers into the old patchwork quilt Mama had gifted her with when she was ten. “Maybe you didn’t change the world, and maybe the Head Representative couldn’t fix all the things you both wanted to, but if what you said is true, then, like . . . look, Mama.” Pru pinched the bridge of her nose, and said in a voice that sounded horrifyingly like Alex’s, “Because you guys fought for the Barricade Coalition, a handful of kids on this continent can read stories that they’d never have touched under Incorporated rule. Kids who cared enough to write to you, who said you changed their lives, if not the world. One kid’s life. One person’s life. Does that matter?”
Mama held Pru’s gaze for a long moment. “You’re being very philosophical for someone doing”—she spared a cursory glance toward the readings on Pru’s phone—“what appears to be the dullest history homework known to man. Why?”
What to say? Curled on the tip of Pru’s tongue were half a million stupid, juvenile reasons, some almost true, but none of them what she wanted to say. In her mind’s eye, dragon wings spread across the night sky. In the back of her brain, nestled beside the imprint, were memories of Mama’s earliest stories. Impossible fairytales. Simple stories. Stories for children.
But those stories had always been about dragons.
“Rebelwing saved me,” said Pru slowly. “When I was . . . that day, when my customer sold me out to the UCC police brigades. And then, at the beach, I—the dragon and I—we saved Alex. And I know people died anyway, and that should never have happened, but some people didn’t. Some people lived. Because the dragon was there, and Alex was inside to pilot it.”
“And you,” her mother added quietly. “You were there too, don’t forget. With this imprint of yours everyone keeps telling me about.”
Pru rubbed her temples. “Pretty hard to forget something that lives inside my head twenty-four seven.”
“Were you glad for it, on the beach? The imprint.”
“I wasn’t itching to have a battle of the beasts with those wyverns, if that’s what you’re asking. I needed the dragon, so it came. That’s how it works, you know? You have to want something. Believe in something. And I just wanted to save . . .”
“Alexandre Lamarque?”
“One person,” said Pru softly. “I wanted to save just one person, if I could. It was so stupid, Mama. I know it was stupid. Pitting one experimentally built dragon against an entire flock of war wyverns. We were never going to win, not without the Coalition fleet. But I thought that maybe, if I could save one or two or three people from the wyverns first, then maybe . . . maybe the imprint wouldn’t have been wasted on me.”
Mama went silent for a long moment. “That dragon’s imprint was never wasted on you.”
“Thanks,” said Pru. “Good pep talk.”
“I mean it,” Mama said, and released a long breath, pinching the bridge of her nose. “I think that maybe, underneath it all, you have more faith than I do. Than I ever did.”
“Faith in what?’
Mama’s mouth pulled sideways. “People.” From one of her dress pockets, she slipped Pru a cylinder. “I believe this is yours.”
Pru felt her eyebrows climb. “Last time I got caught smuggling books in an Incorporated zone, you promised to ground me all summer long. Guess we’ve wound up going a little preemptive with that, but—”
“Read what’s on the drive, Pru,” interrupted her mother, carefully expressionless.
“Why?”
A smile flickered across her mother’s painted mouth, briefly lighting sad, tired hollows beneath Mama’s eyes, as she rose. She winced, turning her hips from side to side to crack her back. “The cylinder, you might be interested to know, came to me from a pair of cheekbones more trouble than they’re worth. Seems you haven’t been answering your text messages. Or possibly reading them at all, for that matter.”
Pru’s heartbeat, to her chagrin, picked up. “Not like I could answer more disastrous beach getaway invites. I’m on house arrest.”
“And so you are.” Mama bent and closed Pru’s fingers around the drive, the cylinder’s metal casing cool inside the cradle of their hands. Almost airily, she added, “By the way, I have a meeting with a publisher in a few hours. Should run quite late. But I trust you’ll be kept plenty busy right here with all these very interesting history readings, and shouldn’t have the faintest notion of doing anything untoward in my absence.”
Pru stared, cylinder digging into her joints. “Mama. Did you read it first? What did Alex say?”
But Mama had already dropped her hands, turning to go. “How on earth should I know? I am ancient and decrepit, well past the proper age for understanding the sweet nothings of young love—”
“Mama.”
Mama looked over her shoulder, gaze cutting toward Pru. It was one of those moments she would later struggle to catalogue, Pru thought, her brain cobbling together all the little pieces of her mother, balanced on the precipice of that moment. The white of her knuckles on the doorjamb of Pru’s childhood bedroom. The teeth sinking into the side of her red-painted lip, caught on a pause between unspoken words. But mostly, what stuck with Pru was the look in Mama’s wide brown eyes, bright with an unnamable sort of fervor. Fear, or hope, or love, or perhaps all three, warring for dominance in the heart of a woman who’d been dubbed Scheherazade in wartime. A woman who told stories in the face of all things, because stories were how she survived.
“Yes,” said Mama, before she left. “To answer your question from before. In a shithole of a world that refuses to change, one life can still matter. One life can be everything.”
14
THE BLOODLINE TRAP
HJ is alive.
For several minutes, Pru stared in dumbfounded silence at the message blinking tersely at her from the holo-drive’s 3-D display. Then she tossed it aside, grabbed her phone, and hit the first name beside the grinning dragon emoticon on her contact list.
“What the hell, Alex?” she yelled into the speaker.
“Hello to you too, Pru,” replied the innocuous voice on the other end of the line. “How lovely that your phone works after all. Your mum’s really gracious, incidentally. I wasn’t sure she’d want us talking after the attack, but she said something about how good communication is crucial to love and war. Reminds me of Anabel when—”
“Would you shut up about my mom!” shouted Pru. “What the hell do you mean, Jellicoe’s alive? How do you know that? More importantly, why hasn’t the Executive General had him drawn and quartered or buried alive?”
“Because the Executive General has no intention of doing either of those things,” said Alex. “Far from it.”
Pru, head still full of news reels, huffed a disbelieving laugh. “Are you on uppers?”
“No. And we shouldn’t keep talking about this on the phone. I’m meeting Hakeem Bishop at the Rose Room of Café Dupont at seven thirty sharp. I’ll explain everything to you there.”
“What—”
“Please,” said Alex quietly. “I need you.”
Those last words sat on her mind’s edge for slowly ticking seconds as her pulse beat a rhythm inside her head. I need you.
She wanted to scoff. What role did she play in the life of Alexandre Lamarque? When they’d first laid eyes on each other, she’d been little more than an annoyance, an annoyance that had evolved into a potential threat after his dragon had decided to imprint on her. Nowadays, she was at best an inconvenient thorn in his side who’d usurped his rightful place in his uncle’s cold war, and at worst, some mousy schoolgirl who refused to bend the knee and kiss his toes like everyone else in the Barricade Coalition. Needed her, indeed.
Then again, she’d also saved his life back on the beach. That probably counted for something, so far as needfulness went.
“All right,” Pru said at last. “Seven thirty.”
When she arrived at their designated meeting space—right at seven thirty on the dot, so ha, take that, Alex—she found Hakeem Bishop alone, facing the rear windows of the Rose Room, silhouetted by the city lights through frosted glass. The sharp-pointed shoulders of his suit rested like dragon wings poised over the hands clenched loosely behind his back. Pru hovered awkwardly at the doorway’s edge, suddenly unsure of her welcome.
“Um,” she said by way of announcement, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. “I’m on time.”
Bishop did not look over one of those sharply tailored shoulders, but they did relax slightly. “And so you are. Good. You’ll need punctuality, if that fool Lamarque boy is going to entangle you in his schemes.”
“I’m guessing you don’t mean the Head Representative.”
The Chief of Staff did turn around then. The pull of his mouth was more grimace than grin. “No. I do not.”
“Does he know we’re here?”
“What do you think?”
Footsteps approached down the café’s winding corridor. “Notifying my uncle about this meeting would kind of defeat the purpose of procuring this nice private room, don’t you think?” Alex pointed out. He strode past Pru into the Rose Room. “We’re not hiding anything,” he added, taking a seat on the edge of one of the well-polished café tables.
“Oh, no?” challenged Pru, unable to stop herself.
“No,” said Alex, refusing to rise to the bait. His dark eyes glittered when they rose toward her. “We’re just taking certain matters into our own hands.”
“Certain matters like the father of wyverns,” said Pru.
“Among other things,” said Hakeem Bishop. He produced a cylinder from one of his suit pockets, a fancier model than the ones Pru and her mother used—the kind that boasted extra features like instant video play and high-definition, three-dimensional hologram footage—and clicked the projection button. Two men in suits emerged, ghostlike in their translucency, to pace the room.
“There must be a catch,” said one of them. His face was thin and angular, almost avian with its sharp-bladed nose and narrow gray eyes, the same color as the chrome-gray suit pulled tight over his shoulders, his chrome-pale hair slicked back over his paper-white scalp. He looked like an old-fashioned black-and-white film character, retooled for the modern age. “My new wyvern flock’s a beauty, all right, but they’re not worth what you’re offering.”
Pru rounded on Bishop, jerking her head toward the hologram. “I’m guessing the one in gray is Jellicoe.” Her attention turned to second man, whose smile unfurled in increments that shot the dread of recognition through Pru’s spine, straight into her belly. “But his buddy here, that’s . . .”
“Roman Theodore Finlay III,” said the Chief of Staff. “Currently styled Executive General of the United Continental Confederacy Incorporated.”
The UCC didn’t circulate much visual footage of their leader, but the few bits Pru had seen—from old wartime propaganda posters and videos of political speeches—were hard to forget. The Executive General looked the same in every one of them: a cold gem of a man with spun-gold hair as bright as Etienne Lamarque’s, and eyes the color of blue-tinted crystal. He might have been handsome, if not for the odd drag to his facial expressions. His smiles, stretched too thin to be quite natural, constantly mismatched the deadened look in those eerily pale eyes, like a glitch in a holo-image.
“That’s because I’m not just buying your wyverns, Harold,” said the Executive General. “I’m buying a very specific kind of assassination.” He spoke without inflection, laying the facts out, costs and benefits, profit and loss margin. “No Man’s Land,” he clarified. “Your flock will take out Zachary and Paulina, and a few others besides. I want this to look like true terrorism, not a targeted attack on a couple Incorporated executives, or the Barricaders won’t care.”
“The Aberdeens.” Jellicoe whistled. “I’m surprised. Always thought they were favorites of yours.”
“Why, because I bought their war mechs over yours from time to time? Because I expensed scotch and steaks and yacht trips for them?” That strange smile spasmed across the Executive General’s face again. “That’s not friendship, Harold. That’s a business relationship. You of all people should know the difference. And when business relationships go sour in my company, someone’s liable to get hurt.”
