Drake

by D M Gilmore

  The streets were mostly silent. There were a few homeless drakes, as well as the sounds of stray animals, but other than that there was nobody who would know he was there. The dark, starless, August sky, allowed him to blend in almost perfectly with his surroundings, the lensing effect of Shimmerscale virtually unnoticeable in the darkness. Asher made sure to tread lightly, being careful not to drag his feet lest he leave prints in the dust as he went.

  The idea of sneaking into the mana station to steal an orb made his heart race with excitement. Usually he was an operator behind a desk, writing code for other people to use in these kinds of endeavours, but today it was his turn. He didn’t want to admit it, but he was enjoying the rush, and the sensation was almost enough to push his concerns and fears to the back of his mind. Almost, however, was not entirely, and despite his best efforts he just couldn’t shake the nagging feeling of something bad looming over the horizon.

  As Asher snuck up to the mana station’s side entrance, he activated the mana vision spell, and watched as his world lit up with brilliant lights that were normally invisible to the naked eye. He could see a few people on the other side of the door, one incredibly large and the other maybe only a head taller than himself. The larger of the two was easily recognizable as Ruth, his mana signature a familiar sight to Asher, the swirling colours and shapes offering a slight bit of comfort, while the other was unknown, possibly another janitor, at worst a security guard. A few infused animals and insects were also visible to his enhanced sight, but they were mere distractions at best. A scaly bird with batlike wings, a drakhawk, swooped down in front of his vision and snatched one of the glowing creatures out of the air. He patiently held his breath, waiting for something to change. Ruth knew the schedule, knew that Asher would be in position. Were things already going wrong?

  When the unknown figure’s signature disappeared, he breathed a sigh of relief. This was part of the plan for getting Asher into the building, the front entrance would be too well watched by the desk operator to risk it as the point of entry. If the plan had gone wrong here and now, he’d have to improvise the rest of his plan as he struggled to find a way in. While he was glad the plan was still on track, he had yet to actually scratch the surface of the heist. Asher charged up a small force blast, and sent it at the door. The wave of magically charged air slammed against the door with a clang, the signal to Ruth that Asher was in position

  Ruth’s signature moved across the room and opened the door, his brother stepping out into the night air, a cigarette in hand. Casually, he leaned against the door, holding it open as he lit the cigarette and stuck it in his mouth. He took a few deep drags off the stick, before flicking some ashes out onto the ground. That was Asher’s signal. He held out his hand with his thumb pressed against his palm, the gesture to activate Looper, and a ripple in the air shot out. It struck the camera that was staring directly at Ruth. Square shaped sparks of mana fell off the camera, and Asher held his breath. If Looper wasn’t working right, the camera was about to see a whole lot more than Ruth’s smoke break.

  With the camera allegedly subdued, Asher made his way forward. “Make it fast,” Ruth muttered, as the shimmering shape in the air slinked past him, into the building beyond. Ruth eyed the camera and counted the seconds. It had taken Asher less than 8 seconds to slink inside. Once he was sure that the full minute of looped footage was done, he stamped his cigarette out on the ground and closed the door behind him.

  Asher progressed slowly through the building, avoiding areas where he knew he’d be cornered by cameras. The wards had already been set to ignore him, the change done preemptively, and though there were only a few people in the building at this hour, he wanted to avoid them as much as possible. He made his way first out of the custodial department where Ruth had let him in, doing his best to avoid knocking over cleaning products and brooms with his tail, then once he was out into the main hallway that circled the whole facility, he blasted every camera he could see with Looper, and padded as silently as he could down the hallway.

  He had thankfully remembered to trim his talons earlier in the day, so as to avoid the telltale clacking sound of claw against floor. He breathed slowly, trying to maintain his silence as much as possible. He had the route he was taking mapped out in his head, the fastest way in or out of the generator room would be by going around the security office, but doing so would put him directly into the line of sight of whoever was on duty, something he absolutely did not want to deal with. Instead, his route took him upstairs to the second floor, where fewer people would be working, before taking him back down to the other side of the facility, right in front of the generator room.

  Asher enchanted the stairwell camera through a window in the door, before slowly pushing it open and slipping inside. The door had a mechanism that prevented it from closing too fast on its own, which Asher carefully helped along, wanting to maintain his silence as long as possible. He quickly checked the watch on his right wrist: he had about 85 percent of its battery left. He could have sworn he fixed the mana leak in Looper, but after only three uses it was already down 15 percent. He didn’t intend to use that watch for more than looping cameras, so an inefficient spell wouldn’t be a problem if he was careful. At the top of the stairs, he quickly hit the next camera and checked his mana again. As expected, it dropped nearly five percent. Damn, that was expensive. Shaking his head, he quietly opened the door at the top of the stairwell and stepped outside.

  The lights were off in the upper level, but he still hit every camera he saw as he slunk around corners and ducked into open cubicles. He didn’t want to take any unnecessary chances. He cursed as he went to enchant the camera inside the stairwell on the opposite end of the floor, and had to stop himself and press his body against the wall.

  The beam of a flashlight cut through the darkness of the upper floor as the stairwell door creaked open and a rotund drake waddled into the room. Shit, Asher thought, Dale was actually on patrol?

  Dale shined his flashlight beam down to one end of the hallway, before casting it down the other, narrowly missing Asher’s body in the process. Lensing could make him almost invisible to the naked eye, but he still cast a shadow, and any light that directly hit him would become distorted, making his position visible. He was racking his brain, desperately trying to come up with a solution, when abruptly he remembered that the cameras he had enchanted were only on a one minute loop.

  Dale’s own watch crackled as a voice came over it. “Hey boss I just saw you appear on the camera,” it said, another sleepy male voice crackling through a tiny speaker.

  “Yeah, I’m upstairs, what about it?” Dale replied, holding the watch up to his stubby snout and speaking into the piece.

  “No, I mean, you just popped into view on the camera, you weren’t there before and now you are.”

  Dale’s eyes narrowed as he cast his flashlight from side to side again, looking for any sign of a disturbance. Asher held his breath as Dale took one step towards him, his claws clacking against the linoleum floor. Clack. Dale took another step closer, looking down the hallway rather than directly at Asher. Clack. Asher’s lungs burned for oxygen, he would need to gasp for breath soon, and the moment he did, Dale would find him. Clack. With the last bit of oxygen he could muster, Asher called up his force blast spell, and cast it in the opposite direction. Clack. The air rippled as the spell flew down the hall, before striking the wall with a subtle whump.

  Dale suddenly stopped his advance and whipped around, turning to face the source of the noise. “Greg, keep an eye on the cameras, I think there’s an intruder in the building,” he said into the watch, breaking into a brisk jog as he ran down the other end of the hall to find the source of the noise.

  Once Dale turned the corner and was out of sight, Asher breathed a quick sigh of relief, taking as much oxygen into his lungs as he possibly could in a few quick, short breaths. As quietly as he could, he enchanted the cameras around him again, this time also hitting the one inside the
stairwell, and quietly pushed the door open, guiding it shut as softly as he could. He cursed his bad luck and did his best to pick up his pace, choosing to leap over the railing in the stairwell rather take them one at a time.

  He dropped down onto the floor below and immediately hugged the wall. Fifty percent battery left in his rightmost watch. If he was going to make it out of the facility without getting caught, he would have to move fast.

  Chapter 11

  Asher slipped out of the stairwell and out into the main hallway of the ground level. He could see the giant, steel-reinforced door to the generator room just a few paces down the hall, and blasted the cameras with a quick enchantment. There wasn’t a lot of time before somebody came around here to check and make sure the orbs were unbothered. Security was onto him; they knew that there was somebody in the building that shouldn’t be there. There was a drake standing just in front of the door, a lanky male with shiny blue scales. He seemed bored, he had his back to Asher and was swiping through his hologram display, reading text messages. Without wasting a breath, Asher switched to Magic Missile and aimed his outstretched palm at the guard, the gesture for firing the spell. A bolt of silver mana shot from his hand and struck the guard in the back of the head. He was unconscious before he even hit the ground.

  Asher was in it for the long haul now. By attacking a guard, he had made this more real. He didn’t know how much time he had before they found him out, but he knew it wouldn’t be long. He had to work fast.

  Asher jogged over to the door, no longer concerned with being silent, and dragged the slumped-over body of the guard out of the way. He was still cloaked by the effect of Shimmerscale, and that would have to do. Being slow and silent gave the security guards more time to analyze his pattern, more time to figure out what he was doing, more time to find him.

  With a flick of his left wrist, Asher called up his lockpicking spell and cast it on the massive door. The door hissed as the massive locking mechanism whirred and spun, and finally, it popped open just a crack.

  There was going to be six security cameras inside. He quickly called up a display and adjusted a slider bar, before dismissing the screen again. Asher would need to enchant every camera for a fifteen minute loop. His right-hand watch was already beginning to run low, and that much enchanting would take… Asher paused for a moment and sucked in a quick breath. “Shit,” he thought to himself, “thirty percent of my mana...”

  He winced a little as he slunk into the room, leaving the door ajar behind him and blasting the first security camera he saw. Then another. And another. Three cameras down in less than ten seconds.

  The generator room was made entirely out of concrete, with massive pipes running along the walls and ceiling leading into the main event in the centre. Four pillars rotated rapidly in the centre of the room, the orb pylons that collected and distributed the mana that powered the whole city. The pylons gave off a brilliant white light that made Asher look away and cover his eyes, and the whole room smelled of ozone.

  Asher ran to the opposite side of the room, blasting the last three cameras with the looping spell as he went. Directly on the back wall, right where Ruth had said it would be, was the control panel for the pylons, spreading from one corner of the wall to the other. Flashing lights and knobs and switches filled his vision, and for a brief moment he swallowed nervously. If he did this wrong, the mana could become unstable, leading to an explosion.

  Or worse.

  He shook off his nerves and reached out with his hand, grasping the first knob, labelled Core Rotation. It was set to 18, and slowly Asher turned it down, and watched with a grin as the four pylons began to steadily slow, before they ceased rotating around the centre of the room. Despite the accomplishment, each individual pillar still rotated on their own individual axis, and he swore as he turned back to the panel.

  Each pylon was numbered on the panel. He would only need to steal an orb from one pylon, but he didn’t know which pylon was the right one. The panel was properly labelled, the pylons were not. Hopefully it wouldn’t matter.

  He twisted a knob labelled Pylon 3 Rotation all the way from 10 to 0, and watched as the pylon behind him on his right slowed its spin before stopping. That was a good sign. The orbs still glowed with a brilliant, nearly blinding light, but he was on the right track. He then flipped a switch that claimed it would disconnect the orbs from the pylon, and nearly recoiled in surprise as all at once the orbs ceased glowing, turning a vast array of different colours that reflected the light from the other three pylons.

  Asher ran up to the pylon, recoiling as waves of heat washed over him from the cooling orbs. He noted quickly that didn’t seem orb-like in shape, but rather more ovoid, like the dinosaur eggs he had once seen in the museum as a child. He shrugged it off, and reached out for the first orb he could grasp, a bright blue thing that reflected the light off its crystalline surface. He recoiled a bit from the heat it exuded, but within a few more seconds it had cooled enough for him to grab it.

  As soon as his fingers touched it, he could feel the power within surge into his fingertips. His entire arm felt as though there was a powerful electrical current running into it, and Asher winced in pain and pulled away again, shaking his arm to disperse the sharp sensation that ran from his fingertips to his elbows.

  The whole reason he had chosen to be a drake was because drake physiology made them immune to the adverse effects that mana could have on humans. Mana could power technology and spells, but outside the broodtowns it was always in a diluted form, with such minimal saturation that it eventually just dispersed into the air rather than pollute it. The broodtowns were considered dangerous for humans because mana so heavily saturated the air, and could turn them into mutants, or worse, into monstrosities of flesh and bone. Babies are born as fuldrakes, humans transform into inhuman beasts, all because these little orbs released a power that humanity insisted on harvesting.

  Asher couldn’t deny that he was scared of what the orb could do, but there were precautions in place to make sure mana couldn’t hurt people. Duncan Smog, on the other, had no such restraints. If Asher didn’t take the orb, he would be in trouble, and Ruth would pay the price. Pain was temporary. Losing Ruth? That would be permanent.

  With renewed resolve, Asher grabbed the ovoid orb in the palm of his hand and yanked it free, pain be damned. The air rippled a bit as Shimmerscale incorporated the the orb into its effect, and Asher shoved it into his bag before once again tugging it over his shoulder.

  “Hey!” came a voice, which Asher recognized as belonging to Dale. “Red alert! Somebody’s in the generator room!”

  Asher didn’t bother with subtlety anymore. With Shimmerscale still running, they wouldn’t be able to see him anyways. He just had to hope that nobody would be able to recognize his silhouette, either. Asher stepped around the stationary pylons and watched as Dale struggled to pull the door open. As soon as it was open enough for the chubby drake’s form to fill the threshold, Asher blasted him with a quick Magic Missile, the shot arcing majestically through the air before hitting him square in the face and knocking him back into the opposite concrete wall. Dale crumpled to the floor, unconscious and bleeding a little from the blast mark on his snout. Asher wanted to apologize profusely, but suddenly his ears were filled with the splitting sound of a klaxon, the wards all around him turning red and wailing into his ears.

  He quickly pulled his hologram display and activated the application that would swap versions of the ward system, and was surprised for a moment that the alarm stopped ringing, only to start up again a few seconds later.

  Asher broke into a run down the hallway, his trimmed claws doing nothing to hide the sound of his footsteps. He booked it down the hall, past the security office, blasting another guard with a Magic Missile as he ran. Again, his bolt struck in the head, knocking the guard off his feet and into the far wall. Unlike Dale, this one was dazed, and not down for the count. He slowly pulled himself to his feet, pulling a black baton off the
belt on his hip.

  Asher didn’t stick around to see what the baton could do. Instead, he continued to run down the hallway and out into the main lobby, where the blue drake that had been so nice to him before was cowering behind her desk. He didn’t waste any time enchanting the cameras, it was far too late for that. He threw open the front doors and ran out into the night.

  Asher didn’t stop running until he was safely back in his car, his lungs burning from the exertion and his legs pounding beneath him as he slumped into the seat and pulled off his hood. He quickly called up his holodisplay and deactivated Shimmerscale, and watched with panting breaths as his body slowly shimmered back into full view.

  His grey scales were a shade darker, flush from the adrenaline that was making his heart pound against his chest. “Should have gone with the mind trick tactic,” he grumbled to himself in regret, thinking about how he had explained the two different versions of invisibility spells to Duncan Smog. If he had used the mind trick version, he could have looped the cameras and cast the illusion on anyone he saw, rather than sustaining the spell the entire time. Hell, he could have included a clause in the spell about making him inaudible, too. He pounded his fists against the steering wheel in frustration. It was a good lesson to learn, but he wished he had learned it earlier, and not in the middle of a heist.

  As his mind finally came back to the heist, he pulled the bag off his shoulder and opened it to peer inside. There was the orb, as shiny and flawless as he expected. The shape still seemed a little odd to him. Why would they call it an orb if it was shaped like an egg? He contemplated calling Smog that very minute to arrange the exchange, and had already called up his holodisplay to place the call, when suddenly he felt the orb shift in his lap.

  Then, to his surprise, the orb cracked, and his head was filled with a piercing wail.