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 Bar ricader 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 the sis 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 twirling 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 poorly solved 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: