The world folded and snapped back together, and the first thing I registered was the smell.
Charred stone, ozone, and something worse underneath it, something that reminded me of a butcher shop left open too long in the summer heat.
The second thing I registered was the shadow.
It draped over me like a tarp, blotting out what little daylight the quarry offered, and when I looked up I found myself staring at the underside of a wing the size of a delivery barge.
Scales the color of wet slate.
A talon the length of my forearm, planted in the dirt maybe eight inches from my knee.
My wristband buzzed against my skin, business as usual, as if I hadn’t just been dropped under a dragon.
Location transfer confirmed.
Incoming: Veyr.
Outgoing: Tress.
Destination: Kharvoss, Sector 3.
Role reassignment: stretcher detail.
Note: physical attribute inheritance denied per swap protocol.
Strength, endurance, and combat conditioning remain with original operator.
So I didn’t get Tress’s arms.
Wonderful.
I was going to need them, because the man lying next to me under the shattered ribs of an overturned cart was easily twice my weight, and he wasn’t moving on his own.
I didn’t get an introduction either.
Nobody had the time to give me one, and I understood why the second I got my first clear look at the field.
There were three hunters spread in a loose triangle around the cart, all of them holding position with weapons that looked far too small for what they were pointed at.
A fourth man was down, one leg bent at an angle legs aren’t supposed to bend, blood soaking through a torn strip of cloth someone had already tied above the wound.
And directly ahead, close enough that I could count the individual chips and scars along its jaw, was the dragon.
Twenty feet, easy.
Maybe more if you counted the tail, which was currently coiled behind it like it was deciding whether to use it as a weapon or a counterweight.
Its eyes were the pale yellow-green of old brass, and they weren’t scanning the field the way an animal’s eyes scan.
They were tracking.
Calculating.
It had already looked at every one of us once, filed us into some kind of order, and was now working through that order with a patience I did not appreciate.
One of the hunters, a broad-shouldered man with a shield strapped across his forearm and a face that had clearly met a rock at some point in his life, caught my eye for exactly half a second.
Long enough to register that I was new.
Not long enough to say anything about it.
“Sivrel,” he said instead, jerking his chin at himself, then at the injured man beside me.
“That’s Darrow. He’s yours now.”
That was the entire handover.
I appreciated the efficiency even as I resented the lack of detail.
The dragon’s head dipped, and its jaw opened with a sound like a drawbridge chain paying out, and Sivrel didn’t run.
He planted his feet, raised his shield arm at an angle that made no sense against a mouth that size, and twisted his whole body in a hard pivot, like a man ducking a punch that hadn’t been thrown yet. Visit g.com for the full chapter.
The dragon’s wing snapped sideways in the exact same motion.
I watched the bite that had been aimed at the cluster of us go wide, redirected by eight feet of leathery membrane that the beast itself hadn’t chosen to move.
Sivrel staggered from the effort, sweat springing out along his hairline as if he’d just run a mile, and I understood, with the particular clarity you get when your life depends on understanding something fast, that his power made the dragon copy him.
Whatever violent, defensive gesture he forced his own body through, the thing’s matching limb was compelled to mirror it, whether the dragon wanted to or not.
Which was a fantastic trick.
It was also clearly costing him something, because his arm was shaking, and there was no way he could do that more than a handful of times before his shoulder gave out the way mine already had back in Vhaldrèche.
I didn’t have time to admire the mechanics of it.
I had a stretcher assignment and no strength to carry it out, and a dragon that had just been denied its first bite and was, from the look of the low growl building in its chest, extremely unhappy about that fact.
“Behind the wall,” I said to Darrow, or maybe just to myself, because he wasn’t in any shape to answer.
There was a low stone barrier about fifteen feet back, the remains of some market stall foundation, and it was the only cover on the field that wasn’t currently on fire or about to be.
I grabbed him under the arms and pulled.
He was heavy in the specific, uncooperative way that unconscious weight always is, and my shoulder, the one my passenger had been nursing along through two prior missions, informed me in no uncertain terms that this was a bad idea.
I kept pulling anyway.
The cart groaned above us, and somewhere in the back of my skull, in that flat announcer’s register I’d learned to dread, Vassago decided this was the moment for commentary.
Structural integrity of overturned cart: currently at 41%, dropping.
Current odds of cart surviving the next direct impact: 62%.
I didn’t have the breath to tell her where to put her odds.
I got Darrow another two feet, my boots scrabbling against loose gravel, the barrier close enough now that I could see the pockmarks where something had already chewed through half its height.
Odds updated: 18%.
“Move,” I said out loud this time, mostly to myself, hauling harder.
Odds updated: 0%.
The dragon’s tail came around like a felled tree, and the cart didn’t so much break as cease to exist, boards and iron fittings scattering across the field in a spray that peppered the backs of my legs even as I dragged Darrow the last few feet into the shadow of the barrier.
I felt at least one splinter the size of a finger punch through the fabric of my pants and into muscle, and I filed the pain away in the same drawer where I kept the ache in my palm and the grinding complaint of my knee, because right now none of it was useful information.
Sivrel and the other two hunters fell back with us, one of them dragging a coil of rope that had, until a second ago, presumably been attached to something important.
The dragon reared, wings spreading to their full, absurd span, and I had one clean second to think that maybe, just maybe, it was posturing before it opened its jaw a second time and breathed a column of fire straight down the main thoroughfare behind us.
The heat hit before the light did.
Stone cracked somewhere off to my left with a sound like a gunshot, and the entire street we’d come in through, our only route back toward anything resembling extraction, went up in a wall of orange.
“That’s the way out,” said one of the hunters, a woman I hadn’t caught the name of, in the flat voice of someone stating the obvious mostly because saying it out loud made the situation feel slightly more survivable.
“Was,” I said.
“Not anymore.”
I looked at Darrow.
I looked at the burning street.
I looked at the drainage grate half-buried in rubble at the base of the barrier, the kind of narrow stone culvert that ran under half these quarry towns to carry off runoff during the rains, and I did the math that mattered.
The culvert was maybe three feet across.
A twenty-foot dragon could not get through it at all, not even a claw, not even the tip of that tail.
“There,” I said, pointing.
Sivrel followed my finger and swore under his breath, which I took as agreement rather than protest.
One of the other hunters was already reaching for a harpoon rig strapped across his back, one of the long tethered spears they’d clearly brought out here to pin the thing down, and I put my hand flat against his chest before he could sling it over his shoulder.
“Leave it.”
“That’s a 500-credit rig.”
“And it’s not fitting through a hole that size, and neither will you if you’re wearing it.” I nodded at Darrow, whose breathing had gone shallow and wet in a way I didn’t like.
“He’s not walking. He’s barely breathing. I need every hand I’ve got free to carry him, not steady a harpoon we’re leaving behind anyway.”
The hunter looked at the rig like I’d asked him to leave behind a child.
Sivrel made the decision for him, unbuckling the strap himself and letting the whole assembly drop into the dirt.
“He’s right,” Sivrel said, already turning toward the grate.
“Ordnance doesn’t matter if there’s no one left to swing it.”
That settled it faster than any argument I could have made.
We went down into the culvert one at a time, Darrow first, or as close to first as we could manage given that he needed two of us to maneuver him through the opening without bending anything that had already been broken.
I went in right behind him, my shoulders scraping stone on both sides, my palm screaming where the wound my passenger had never gotten the chance to properly clean pressed against wet rock.
Behind us, the growl of the dragon shifted into something higher, more frustrated, the sound of a predator that has just watched its prey vanish into a hole it cannot enter.
I heard it pace along the surface above, felt the ground shudder with each footfall, and somewhere in that rhythm I picked up on something that made my stomach drop harder than the heat already had.
It wasn’t leaving.
It was tracking the line of the culvert from above, matching our progress step for step, and a few seconds later the stone around us began to warm.
Not scalding.
Not yet.
But warm enough that I could feel it through my palms, through my knees, a slow bake starting somewhere in the rock over our heads that told me the thing was pressing its snout to the ground and breathing fire into the seams, trying to cook us out like rats from a drainpipe.
“Move, move, move,” Sivrel barked from somewhere behind me, and nobody needed the encouragement twice.
We crawled.
Darrow moaned every time his leg dragged across a joint in the stonework, and I kept a hand locked around his good ankle, pulling him along in short, ugly increments while the heat behind us climbed from warm to uncomfortable to something that made the air in the tunnel taste like a struck match.
My wristband, in a small mercy, didn’t have anything to say about odds this time.
Maybe even Vassago knew there was no version of commentary that would help.
The far grate came up faster than I expected, a gray disc of daylight at the end of the tunnel, and we hit it at something close to a run, or the closest thing a crawl can manage to a run.
Hands from the outside had already found the bars and were wrenching the cover free before we got there, and I shoved Darrow up and out first, into the arms of whoever was waiting on the other side, before hauling myself up after him with my palm leaving a smear of blood on the stone lip.
Behind us, the culvert exhaled a wave of heat that rolled out across the exit like the door of an oven, and somewhere far off, muffled by rock and distance, the dragon let out a long, low sound that wasn’t quite a roar.
It was almost thoughtful.
Almost patient.
The sound of something filing away a scent for later.
We came out with Darrow alive, no harpoons, no rig, and a beast on the other side of that hill that now knew exactly what all of us smelled like.