by Julie Kagawa
“Hang on.”
More gunshots rang out, and the blue dragon snarled something in Draconic, the guttural, native language of dragons. Ember spun, making me tighten my grip, took three bounding leaps forward and launched herself into the air. Her wing muscles strained beneath me like steel cables pulsing beneath her skin, and we rose into the sky. The spotlight followed, keeping us brightly illuminated even as we left the base behind. Gunshots roared; I heard a howl of rage from the blue dragon, and gritted my teeth, hunched low over Ember’s back. She jolted suddenly, then her wings flapped furiously as we picked up speed, racing to get away from the spotlight and out of range of the compound. Very gradually, the spotlight disappeared, and the gunshots faded away, as we fled St. George and escaped into the desert.
* * *
We were out. We’d actually escaped St. George.
The wind whipped at my hair and clothes as I shifted on Ember’s back and cautiously sat up, gazing around in amazement. The desert stretched out before me, vast and endless, looking like an ocean of sand in the predawn light. Where it met the sky, a faint smear of pink was peeking over the horizon, though the land was still dark and shadowed. From this height, I could just make out the distant highway and the tiny glimmers of cars that followed it.
I drew in a quiet breath, wondering if all dragons felt this exhilaration. I’d gone surfing with Ember before, had felt that addictive rush of excitement and adrenaline while coursing down a huge wave.
It was nothing compared to this.
On impulse, I glanced behind me, at the compound I was leaving behind, and my blood chilled. Headlights speared the darkness from several vehicles, following us across the open desert. I counted three SUVs and at least one Jeep with a spotlight fixed to the roof, all straining to close the distance. There was no place to hide out here. If those vehicles got much closer they would start shooting, and we wouldn’t stand a chance.
“There’s the van!”
I looked at the blue dragon, then at the ground, where a large white van was speeding across the flat plain, trailing a billow of dust. Instantly, the blue dragon folded his wings and dropped from the sky, plunging toward the ground. I felt the subtle shift of muscles beneath me as Ember did the same, though a ragged shudder went through her as she glided after the blue. She was panting hard, sides heaving, and I hoped carrying me away from the base hadn’t put too much of a strain on her.
The blue dragon plunged low to skim the ground, then wheeled hard so that he passed in front of the van, in full view of the driver. Instantly, the van slammed on its brakes, coming to a skidding halt in a writhing cloud of dust. As the blue dragon landed, the front door opened and a human jumped out, wild haired and skinny, shouting something at the dragon as he hurried forward.
I realized with a start that Ember had dropped low to the ground and was gliding toward the van at top speed. Alarmed, I tensed, wondering when she would slow, but another shudder went through her, and she abruptly dropped from the air like a stone.
At the last second, she flapped her wings and pulled up enough to slow her momentum, before we crashed headfirst into the ground. I was thrown clear, striking the earth and rolling several yards, the world spinning around me, before I finally came to a halt several yards from where Ember had fallen.
Wincing, I staggered upright. My head throbbed, my arms were bloody and the world was still spinning, but nothing seemed broken. I ignored the stab of pain from a bruised or cracked rib and stumbled toward the dragon.
“Ember…”
My stomach twisted. She lay on her side a few yards away, heaving in great, shuddering gasps. One wing was crumpled beneath her, the other lay limp on the ground. Her legs moved feebly, clawing at the loose sand and rock, and her tail twitched a weak rhythm in the dirt. But in the time it took me to reach her, she slumped and went motionless. Her wing gave one final spasm and was still.
“Ember!”
A dark-haired, naked human raced up to her, dropping to his knees beside the scaly neck. “Ember,” Riley said again, putting a hand on her side. “Can you hear me? What happened? Are you—?”
He stopped, his face going pale. I limped up beside him just as he pulled his hand back, the palm and fingers covered in red, and my heart stood still.
“Oh, no.” His voice was a whisper, and he surged to his feet, glaring back at the van. “Wes!” he yelled. “Ember’s been shot. Help me get her in the van before St. George catches up.”
“Bloody hell.” The shaggy-haired human raced around the van, pausing to throw open the back doors. “I knew this was a bad idea, Riley. I knew the stubborn brat was going to get us all killed.”
“Shut up and help before I rip off your legs and leave you for St. George.”
“I’ll help,” I broke in, and he turned to glare daggers at me. Without waiting for an answer, I stepped around the unconscious dragon and knelt beside her, sliding my arm beneath a scaly foreleg. Ember stirred weakly, her claws raking the sand once, but she didn’t wake up. Riley hesitated, then crouched on the opposite side, taking her leg.
“Wes!” he spat as we braced ourselves to lift the dragon off the ground. “Get over here. You’re going to have to help, too.”
“On three,” I said as the other human dropped beside me, muttering curses the whole time. Over Ember’s back and wings, Riley gave me a last baleful glare, but then his attention shifted to the dragon between us. “One…two…three!”
We lifted. Ember sagged, wings and tail dragging along the ground, her neck dangling awkwardly. She wasn’t as heavy as I’d expected, considering this was a very large, armored reptile who was complete dead weight at the moment. Somehow, the three of us manhandled the dragon over the ground and into the back of the vehicle, grunting as we pushed and pulled her inside. She barely fit; her wings were crumpled against the sides, her neck bent at an awkward angle, and we had to loop her tail over her back. I ended up pressed against the front seat with her neck draped over my lap, curved talons pricking my leg through my jeans. Riley glared at me over Ember’s motionless body, obviously hating how close I was, but there was no room to move. Nor was there room for the both of us to be back here, with an unconscious red dragon sprawled across the floor.
“Riley!” Wes snapped as the other hesitated, reluctant to leave me alone with Ember, I guessed. “St. George is coming! Bloody hell, put some pants on, would you? Let’s go!”
Riley cursed and backed away, reaching out to close the back doors. His eyes glowed yellow in the shadows of the van as he stared at me. “If she dies,” he said softly, “I’m going to kill you.” It was not an idle threat.
The roar of a distant engine, not our own, echoed over the hill behind us, getting steadily closer, and my stomach lurched. St. George was not about to let us go. Wes shrieked at Riley again, and the doors slammed, cutting off my view of the outside world. Ember groaned and stirred, wings fluttering, but she didn’t awaken. I swallowed hard and scooted aside so that the narrow, horned skull was pillowed against my legs. Her breath was shallow and hot against my skin, and I put one tentative hand on her scaly neck, trying to ignore the rows of fangs hovering over my leg, the claws that scraped close to my body.
The blood seeping across the floor, making my insides cold.
The van lurched forward, bounced once and gained speed as it rumbled over the sand. We fled into the desert, the roar of St. George behind us, the head of a dying dragon resting in my lap.
PART II
All That Glitters
Cobalt
Twelve years ago
“Agent Cobalt? They’re ready for you now.”
I stood and rolled my shoulders forward and back, trying to shake out the stiffness, then followed the assistant down the hall toward the room at the very end. I hated meetings like this: sitting in a cold office building, being polite and defe
rent, while the flat, appraising glare of a senior dragon bored into me from across the table. Normally, Talon didn’t bother with face-to-face conferences, speaking to me directly only when they felt the assignment especially important. I’d rather the organization contact me the usual way: via an envelope or a folder left at a dead drop, where I could read through my assignment in peace. Where I didn’t feel like I was being judged.
Especially now. Especially since I was still furious with the way the last assignment had gone down, the lives lost because of me. Because Talon had lied, and I’d believed them.
I strode into the meeting room, where a trio was seated around a long wooden table in the center of the floor. I recognized Adam Roth, a youngish-looking man in a perfectly tailored gray suit. One of Talon’s junior VPs, though he was still older than me by at least a couple centuries. I held his gaze a split second longer than was probably safe, saw a flicker of something lethal go through that calm expression before I averted my eyes, glancing at the pair seated across from each other a few chairs down.
My stomach dropped. My trainer, the crusty old bastard himself, sat quietly with the tips of his fingers steepled against his lips, ignoring everything around him. Or appearing that he did. I knew better. Nothing in this room would have escaped his notice, not even the pigeons nesting on the sill behind his head. He was older than Roth, one of the oldest trainers in the organization; a tall, thin man with a sharp chin and even sharper black eyes that were never still. His dark hair was streaked with silver, and the jagged scar beneath his left eye only added to his mystique.
Not long ago, the sight of him would have filled me with both anticipation and dread, like a nervous schoolboy handing his report card to his parents. Now the only thing I felt was resentment. Why was he here? As if I needed someone else judging my every move, silently criticizing.
The last person in the room was barely noticeable, his presence overshadowed by the two adult dragons. A human, I realized when I finally studied him. Thin and gangly, with a mess of brown hair and a rumpled collared shirt half tucked into his pants. By human standards, I guessed he was fairly young; maybe eighteen or nineteen. I was surprised. If he was in this room with Roth and one of the oldest trainers in the organization, then he had to know what we were. Who was this human, and what did he do, to warrant such privileges? He didn’t look like anything special to me.
“Ah, Agent Cobalt,” Roth said, rising smoothly from his chair. “Thank you for coming. Please, have a seat.” He gestured to the table, and I sat one chair down from my trainer, leaving the human on the other side by himself.
“Hello, Cobalt,” the Chief Basilisk murmured without looking at me. One corner of his lip curled in that faint, amused smile I hated. It had been more than a year since I saw him last, but he could always make me feel like a bumbling hatchling again with just a look. “I hear you’ve been doing well.”
“I’m sure you have,” I muttered as Roth sat down, smoothing his tie, then folding his hands before him on the table. “I’m sure you’ve heard all kinds of things about me lately.”
This was not smart, antagonizing my trainer in front of the VP. A few years ago, I could have expected a swat upside the head at best and a six-hour training session at worst. But the years of being cowed by him were over. I was a full-fledged Basilisk, and not only that, I was one of their best. This might be a dangerous game I was playing, but it was no more hazardous than the missions they expected me to pull off without a hitch. Let him know I wasn’t happy; I couldn’t do anything about Talon or my assignments, but I didn’t have to be thrilled about them.
My instructor’s thin mouth twitched—impossible to tell if he was angry or amused by my lack of respect—before he turned to the head of the table. The VP was watching us now, dark eyes intense.
“I have reviewed your previous assignments, Agent Cobalt,” Roth began, dispensing with the pleasantries, which was a relief. I didn’t have the patience for useless small talk about my trip and what I thought of my accommodations. “Your trainer speaks highly of you and, from what I can discern, with good reason. We have not had such a young Basilisk do so well in a long time. When we asked your trainer who was best suited for this assignment, you were his top pick. Congratulations.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said flatly, dredging up a polite nod and a stiff smile. “I do what I can for the good of the organization.”
I almost gagged on the words. But it was what I was expected to say. I was not so crazy as to insult the organization itself; if I did, I probably wouldn’t walk out of this room alive.
Mr. Roth smiled, though his expression was cold. Turning to the giant screen on the far wall, he pressed a remote, and an image flickered to life: a satellite feed of a snowy wilderness in the middle of nowhere. A scattering of plain gray buildings sat within a fence at the edge of the mountains.
“I am certain you know what you are looking at,” Mr. Roth said, watching me across the table.
I gave a short nod. “It’s a St. George facility,” I replied, observing the image on the screen, committing the layout of the place to memory. “If I had to guess, one of their northern chapterhouses.”
“Yes,” Mr. Roth agreed. “A brand-new Order chapterhouse, in fact. We discovered this base last week and have been monitoring it heavily ever since. As their security system isn’t online yet, we have decided this is a perfect opportunity to strike. Do you see this building, Agent Cobalt?” A red circle appeared on the screen, around one of the identical gray buildings in the center of the compound. “That is their data center. And your target.” Roth’s voice remained matter-of-fact, as if he’d just announced the time of the next conference call. “We need you to infiltrate their base, find the main computer and download a sensitive file from their network. After that, destroy the building so that no traces of us, or the information theft, can be found.”
I kept my expression cool, but inside, my stomach dropped. I’d received dangerous assignments before, but this? Sneak into a St. George base? Break into a chapterhouse swarming with enemy soldiers? “What will I be looking for?” I asked. “I have some computer skills, but I’m no hacker. Even in a new base, their files are sure to be well protected, or at the very least encrypted.”
Mr. Roth smiled. His cold gaze shifted to the person sitting across from me, and the human looked up from his laptop.
His eyes were sullen. As if sitting in a room with three dragons not only failed to impress him, he resented being here in the first place.
“Right. Hang on a moment.” Somehow, his English accent didn’t surprise me. I watched as the kid reached around his laptop, yanked something free, then slid it to me over the table.
I picked it up: a simple black USB drive rested between my fingers. Puzzled, I looked back at the human and raised an eyebrow.
“What is this?”
“A program that will let me hack into their system undetected, find the data we’re looking for and download the correct file to Talon’s network,” the kid answered, not meeting my gaze. “Take back the drive, and the theft will be untraceable. They won’t be able to follow it back to us. So don’t worry about the technical stuff. I’ve got it covered. All you have to do is plug it in. You can do that, can’t you, mate?”
Ignoring the challenge in the human’s voice, I nodded, slipping the drive into a pocket. I wanted to ask what the data was for, what was so important that I was crossing enemy lines. But I understood that everything was on a need-to-know basis, and if Roth thought the information was important, he would tell me. If not, then he wouldn’t answer the question regardless. I had my mission; I didn’t need to know the whys.
I was, however, even more curious about the human across from me. He obviously knew what we were; Roth was making no attempt to hide it. Talon employed some of the brightest and most talented humans from around the globe, luring them with promises of wealth,
power, security, whatever they desired. But most of Talon’s human workforce had no idea who—or what—their employers actually were. They did their jobs, went home to their families and returned the next morning, completely unaware that the company they worked for was anything but normal. Only a few mortals were privileged with the truth, those whose silence had been bought with money, threats or blackmail. There were a few humans in Talon who were slavishly loyal to the organization, who truly believed dragons were the superior race and were proud to work for them. But every dragon knew that humans, as a whole, were gullible, weak and easily swayed. To bring one into the know, to reveal our true nature, was a massive risk and something the organization avoided unless there was a solid, undeniable reason the human would not betray us to the outside world.
So, what was this human’s reason? I wondered. Why did he seem nearly as angry and resentful as me?
“When you are finished transferring the file,” Roth continued as the kid dropped his gaze and went back to staring at his computer, “find the data storage center and destroy it. This will cripple their network and blind this particular base. They will be unable to recover quickly, making retaliation against us nearly impossible. But there is another reason we are sending you, agent.”
He paused, and his gaze flicked to my trainer, who grunted and sat up in his chair before turning to me.
“The other reason,” the old Basilisk said with one of his faint, evil smiles, “is to test what we hope will be a fun new toy for our side. So you’re going to be a bit of a guinea pig for this assignment. We have something that we’ve been working on, and we believe it’s nearly ready for use in the field. Congratulations, agent, you get to take it for its trial run.”
I suppressed a wince. A hatchling or rookie agent might’ve been excited for this news, willing and eager to test out something new. I was not. I knew what kind of “toy” I’d be working with, and frankly, it scared the crap out of me. Talon had always been on the cutting edge of science and technology, knowing that keeping ahead of the times was not only profitable, it was essential for our survival. As a race, we had survived because we had evolved, and knowledge was power. Talon hoarded knowledge like they did wealth, turning everything into profit for the organization. Not only did they fund countless research centers, they had their own laboratories, where the most brilliant minds the organization could find worked tirelessly, uncovering secrets, pushing boundaries, experimenting with things best left alone.
