Chapter 1
The Drop
The whole mess
was a long time coming, but the drama really began when the long, sleek
snout of a plasma gun interrupted Pru’s breakfast.
“Good
morning,” said Alex, black-eyed gaze intent over the shiny chrome barrel
he’d aimed at Pru’s head. “We need to talk, please.”
“Ah hawt finif muh foo!” protested Pru.
Her interrogator blinked. “Pardon?”
Pru
swallowed her mouthful of cha siu bao, and said, “I haven’t finished my
food. My mama taught me not to talk with my mouth full.”
Alex
sighed. “Fair point.” He adjusted the setting on the plasma gun with a
flick of his thumb, as the weapon lowered. Like everything else he did,
it was an annoyingly graceful motion. Figured that someone like Alex
could make even borderline death threats look pretty. “All right, finish
your pork bun and coffee. But after that, I have, like, an entire
midterm essay’s worth of questions for you.”
“Abo wuh?” demanded Pru.
“Please finish chewing first too,” said Alex.
With
relish, Pru obeyed, catching errant sesame toppings with her tongue as
soft bao dough gave way. The bun’s cha siu filling had been marinated to
perfection. “About what?” she repeated, when she was done.
Alex
cast her an incredulous look that would have been hilarious if Pru
hadn’t still been sort of scared of the plasma gun. “What else? The
dragon.”
“You sure it wasn’t a war wyvern?”
“Pru.”
“I’m just saying, it looked an awful lot like—”
“It was a dragon, you shameless smuggler.”
Pru licked crumbs from her fingers in mildly offended silence.
Wordlessly, Alex passed her a handful of napkins.
“Thanks,” said Pru grudgingly.
He
ignored her. The hand that hadn’t passed her the napkins was twirling
the plasma gun in a casual, alarming display of dexterity. “I mean it,
Pru. What happened to the dragon?”
With a sigh, Pru took the
napkins, and began dabbing at the cha siu bao crumbs scattered across
the pleats of her uniform skirt. That was, she thought, an excellent
question.
If Pru really stretched her imagination—because her
imagination was pretty damn flexible—she could probably argue that the
real root of her current trouble was procrastination. The first wyvern
sightings, a shadow of metallic wings kissing the city walls amidst the
lazy summer haze, had been easy enough for the Barricade Coalition
government to write off as the hysterical ramblings of inexperienced
sentinels. Since the end of the Partition Wars, the Coalition’s
Incorporated neighbors had made a passive-aggressive little hobby of
testing all sorts of military wares in plain view of Barricader
sentinels. If every ugly metal thing bearing Incorporated logos seen
within five kilometers of Barricade walls was a real bona fide war
wyvern, the peace treaty would have gone up in plasma fire years ago.
“We
should make Masterson’s drop now,” Anabel had said during the first
week of school. “Getting into Incorporated territory will be a lot
harder if schools issue a lockdown.”
“Please, they won’t go into
lockdown this early in the semester over one misidentified hunk of
Incorporated metal,” scoffed Pru. “Can’t we put our side hustle on
hiatus for a couple days? Summer break’s been over for, like, five
seconds, and I somehow already have a research paper and three exams to
cram for.”
Naturally, the second wyvern sighting hit the news
five hours later. Barely twenty minutes after the first headline blared
to life on Pru’s phone, Headmaster Goldschmidt announced a campus-wide
lockdown on New Columbia Prep, effective immediately.
“Well,”
said Anabel. “Now you have a research paper, three exams, and an
anal-retentive Headmaster to defy, if we want to get paid.”
Pru
did want to get paid. Getting paid was how she afforded little luxuries
like the textbooks she needed to pass the exams. Pru was luckier than
most of the other scholarship kids—Mama made all right money, just not
bougie private school money—but that also meant less generous bursaries,
which meant finding creative ways to stretch her pennies. So Pru had
pulled two all-nighters, half-assed the paper, and let Anabel book a
private study in the school library to cover their illicit exit from
campus, which, of course, was where the first seeds of disaster were
planted. Therefore, Pru’s thesis statement: dawdling was the source of
all evil. She’d been a prep schooler for going on four years now. She’d
hung a midterm paper or two on fouler bullshit than that.
But
dawdle she had, and the Pru of that fateful day paid the price. Already
jittering on her third thermos of coffee, her fingers twirled the
holo-drive cylinder in an anxious, chrome-bright staccato across her
thigh, Pru was unreasonably scared of being spotted through the one-way
study window. Which was, Pru realized on several levels, ridiculous.
Even if it were a double-way window—which, she reminded herself sternly
it wasn’t—plenty of students kept cylinders for legitimate purposes. You
needed them to store notes and textbooks, unless you were one of those
weird pretentious kids hunched beneath enormous knapsacks who insisted
on hardback, paper-bound everything. God bless and keep the lifespan of
their spinal cords.
Pru sometimes took paper-bound smuggling jobs
too, but those made considerably riskier drop-offs, even if the money
was better. Really, if you wanted to buy black market media in
Incorporated territory, a cylinder holo-drive was your cleanest bet for
evading police brigades. Holo-drives were small, easily concealable, and
most importantly, well-primed for remote content deletion. Still, Pru
wouldn’t begrudge a paying customer some old-school sense of bookish
romanticism.
Tap-tap-tap, went the holo-drive, insistent
and illicit beneath the smooth metal desk, concealed under the
standard-issue pleats of Pru’s posh uniform skirt. Minutes slowed to a
crawl. The thrum of Pru’s heart inside her ears crescendoed. She felt
ridiculous.
Cylinder smuggling is easy. You’ve done this, like, fifteen million times, and never once been caught, not even during lockdowns,
Pru informed her brain. Grim experience had taught her that applying
logic to the caffeine-hyped fog inside her head was a lost cause, but
what else could you do? Quit being such a big baby.
Shan’t,
retorted her brain, which in fairness, Pru had run pretty ragged with
the latest crop of half-assed problem sets and hastily scrawled bullshit
essays. She cast a bleak, accusatory look at her depleted thermos,
trying in vain to un-jitter-fy her fingers. Coffee: the cursed elixir of
sleep-deprived, overachieving prep schoolers everywhere. The
productivity potion that giveth and taketh away.
Where the hell
was Anabel? Three years of running a book smuggling ring right under the
shadow of New Columbia’s walls—lockdowns, public safety mech patrols,
and all—taught you a lot, but what it drilled in hardest was strategy.
Anabel and Pru had theirs down to an art form:
One. When making a
drop-off during a campus lockdown, book your alibi in advance. New
Columbia Prep’s faculty loved its stereotypes, and so far as Headmaster
Goldschmidt was concerned, the anxious little grade grubbers who
reserved three hours of library time five days early couldn’t possibly
be using that time to smuggle black market media into Incorporated
territory like common delinquents.
Two. Put in face time during
your first hour in the library, and no one would bother checking to see
if you ever returned from your “bathroom break” during the second.
Three. Don’t be fucking late to that first hour.
Like an answer to her prayers, or an eavesdropper on her inner monologue, came the telltale whoosh of sliding chrome.
Pru practically exploded toward the door. “Park! About damn time you showed up for the job, I was just about to—”
She
paused. The boy at the door wasn’t Anabel Park. He was probably another
student, judging from his uniform—either a student, or some terrible,
sleep-deprivation-induced fever dream—but not a student Pru had seen
around campus before. At the very least, she’d have remembered the
knife-edge silhouette of those cheekbones.
So why did he seem so familiar?
“My name’s not Park,” said Cheekbones McFever Dream.
“Clearly
not,” said Pru faintly. She turned her chin up for a better look at
him. Nonplussed, Cheekbones McFever Dream returned her scrutiny with
dark eyes, deep-set beneath a wavy mop of equally dark hair. His white
button-down, bright over olive skin, and schoolboy tie loosened at the
collar made him look like a long-lost leading man from an old-fashioned
film poster. Maybe he’d been summoned forth from the depths of history,
newly arrived in their brave new world. Or maybe he’d escaped the pages
of some teen romance comic Pru’s mother was penning. That would explain
both his alarming familiarity and distressing amounts of sex appeal.
Maybe Pru could call Mama later, and ask. Say, Mama, she imagined drawling, funny
thing, but you don’t happen to be missing one brooding romantic lead
disguised as a prep school kid, about my age, perhaps yea high? Why? Oh,
no reason, just an anxiety-induced case of creepy deja-vu! Love you.
“May I . . . help you?” asked the fever dream delicately.
“Sorry,” mumbled Pru. “I’m waiting for Anabel Park. I thought you were her.”
“I’m
flattered.” The full mouth twitched with amusement. “Though sorry to
disappoint. Afraid I’m nowhere near as charming as the youngest and
cleverest of the Park clan.” He stuck his hands—what Mama liked to call
artist’s hands, long-fingered and elegantly-formed—into his trouser
pockets. “I’m merely me.”
“Who?” asked Pru. “I’m, like, eighty percent sure we haven’t met.”
“Alex,”
said the fever dream, then with an odd shift to his accent, “Alexandre
Santiago, if you need to pull the school library records. Anabel Park
and I are checking into this study, actually.”
“No, you’re not,”
said Pru. Indignation temporarily overruled self-consciousness. “Anabel
and I are checking into this study. I’m supposed to”—hurriedly, she slid
the holo-drive into her stocking—“meet her for a . . . a project here.
The study should be booked in her name.”
Alex’s expression
cleared. “That’s the mix-up, then. She’s also my project partner, for
Modern Politics II. She booked our study too. If she’s working with you
for another class, she must have double-booked yours by mistake.”
Irritation jabbed at Pru. “And you’re so sure she double-booked me, and not you?”
Alex frowned. “That’s not what I meant. You probably just have the wrong time slot.”
“Look,
my dude,” said Pru, fishing out her phone, “Anabel told me two p.m., in
study number five thirty-two, I’ve got it right here in the automated
calendar. How do you know you’re not the one who got the wrong time
slot?”
“Fine,” snapped Alex, producing his own phone, “we can check the official school records.”
“Fine,”
agreed Pru, jamming a finger against her screen with more force than
strictly necessary. The brightly colored library records burst into
reproachful, three-dimensional life over her outstretched palm. “See
here?” Triumphantly, she swiped a finger through the hologram to pull up
the study bookings. “It should say right here, ‘Anabel Park’ and
‘Prudence Wu.’”
“Maybe it should,” said Alex amiably enough. The
hologram colors gleamed in the dark mirror of his eyes. “But you might
want to look again.”
Pru, against her better judgment, looked. And groaned.
Anabel Park and Alexandre Santiago, read the entry for Study No. 532, West Library, 2:00 p.m.
“Clerical error, maybe,” offered Alex with a shrug.
Murder, thought Pru with hysterical, malevolent cheer. I’m going to murder Anabel. What’s a little homicide between friends?
“You’d
have to ask Anabel,” said Alex. “But do me a solid, would you, and give
her a chance to finish her share of the Modern Politics presentation
first.”
“Did I say the homicide thing aloud?” Pru probably didn’t
need another coffee, but she definitely wanted one now. Maybe with
something stronger mixed in.
“Look,” said Alex, who was evidently
inclined to take pity on would-be murderers, “wait until Anabel
arrives. Once she’s here, you two can sort out your scheduling mix-up—”
“No,
no,” Pru flapped a hand, “don’t take time out of your study date on my
behalf. The mix-up is my fault, anyway.” Which was a blatant lie. Pru
wasn’t the one who’d double-booked their alibi like some overworked
secretary. Then again, if Pru hadn’t procrastinated on the damn drop-off
in the first place, she wouldn’t be stuck here playing chicken with
this obnoxious, tight-assed pretty boy.
She grabbed her knapsack
with a grimace. The metal cylinder dug cold against her thigh beneath
the stocking. There was no help for that. It wasn’t like she could text
Anabel to reschedule, when they’d already delayed the job this long.
Besides, Pru had been smuggling longer than she’d been friends with
Anabel. Even on lockdown hours, what was one solo drop-off in
Incorporated territory? Cake.
Alex’s sharp black gaze tracked the staccato efficiency of Pru’s movements. “Wyverns got you nervous?”
“What,
those flying mechanical boogeymen?” scoffed Pru. “Rumors, that’s all.
Some caffeine-deprived guard manning the Barricade gates probably just
saw a flock of really big-ass birds or something, and freaked the fuck
out.”
“Birds,” repeated Alex, utterly deadpan.
“Fine,
maybe not birds,” Pru allowed, with a roll of her eyes, “but don’t tell
me you really believe in this bullshit about a revival of the war
wyverns. You’d think the Incorporated would have thought of better scare
tactics since the Partition Wars, with the amount of money the
Executive General throws at their Propagandist. I mean, airborne stealth
mechs that shoot top-grade plasma fire and kill on sight? In peacetime?
They’re not real.”
Even growing up on classroom
holo-footage of the Partition Wars, it was hard to believe wyverns, all
razor-edged wings and jaws crackling with plasma fire, had ever been
real. Anyone could build weapons for a war, but the Incorporated had
built monsters. Nothing about wyverns would ever look real to Pru.
Like a switch flipping, those big black eyes went flat and cold. “Partition War veterans might beg to differ with that take.”
As
if some fine-faced rich boy would know. “The war ended, like, a decade
ago. Our government’s just paranoid out of habit. Any leftover
mechanical monstrosities the Incorporated engineers have cooked up
aren’t going to leave their territory.”
“Right,” said Alex. His
sarcasm sounded lighthearted, or should have, but something dangerous
lingered in the tilt of that expressive mouth. “Because you’ve spent
plenty of time on Incorporated land, I’m sure.”
“Yeah,” said Pru,
emboldened despite the anxiety thrumming through her gut. “I’m a real
secret revolutionary. By day, I’m a schoolgirl of modest origins here in
the hallowed halls of New Columbia Prep, surviving on scholarship
sufferance. By night, dorm curfew be damned, I breach our fine city
walls to spread Barricader values of freedom and liberty through their
sad little corporate empire.”
An abrupt smile dimpled his cheek. “I don’t doubt you do. Enjoy your insurgency.”
“Enjoy
my study,” Pru shot back, unable to contain that last bit of pettiness
as she pushed past him. At least Anabel’s name was on the study booking,
which meant Anabel would find a way to cover for them both if
Headmaster Goldschmidt decided to check records of Pru’s whereabouts.
Fixing trouble was what Anabel did, even when she was the cause of it.
“I’ll
give our favorite double booker your regards,” Alex called after Pru as
she rounded the corner. She snorted. Fine-faced rich boy he might be,
but at least he’d stoop to match her petty for petty.
Pettiness
wouldn’t sub in for a decent wingwoman on the other side of the wall,
though. That, thought Pru grimly, was what sheer dumb luck was for. Fair
enough. Not like she’d have gotten this far in the book smuggling
business without it.
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