Page 56 of Inferno

Riley, I thought.I hope you’re okay. Wherever you are, keep it up for just a little while longer.

“Wes,” Garret said into the com. “Find us a way down. Once we’re through this room, we can’t stop for directions. Just get us there as quickly as you can.” He paused another few heartbeats, then nodded. “Understood. Heading there now.”

He looked at me, and I took a deep breath. Together, we pulled the door open and slipped into the flashing, blaring chaos of the lab.

We hurried through the halls of the laboratory as swiftly and quietly as we could, passing rooms of shelves, counters and strange equipment, going deeper into the lab. The lights and alarms continued to sound, and after a few minutes, I started to feel a headache throb behind my eyes. We saw very few people on our way through the corridors, and the ones we did see were either running away or huddled in a room, looking confused and scared. We didn’t slow down. Garret led us through twisting hallways and narrow corridors without hesitation, following instructions from Wes. Once, we turned a corner and ran into a trio of guards, who shouted and raised their weapons, but were swiftly gunned down by the soldiers before they could respond further. Another time, a pair of humans in white coats barged out of a room, nearly running into us, and rushed off down the hall without looking in our direction. Peter Matthews raised his gun to shoot them in the back, but was stopped by Garret’s sharp order to stand down.

After several tense minutes, we turned another corner and came to the end of the hallway. A pair of elevator doors stood in front of us, open and blinking red inside.

Mist balked when she saw what lay at the end of the hall. “I really don’t like the idea of using the elevator,” she remarked, gazing at the metal box with suspicion. “It might not even work, now that the alarms have sounded. Can we find a staircase?”

“Not according to Wes,” Garret told her. “The nearest staircase is on the other side of the laboratory. But this will take us to the lowest floor and will be the closest point to the target room.” Shouts echoed down the hall, making us all jerk up, and Garret’s jaw tightened. “There’s no time for anything else. Let’s move.”

We crowded into the elevator, and Garret slammed his thumb into the button for the last floor. The doors hissed shut, cutting off the alarms and flashing lights, and the elevator started to descend.

I forced myself to breathe, tried to calm my pounding heartbeat. Almost there. Almost to our destination, the room that held Talon’s vessel army, hundreds, maybe thousands, of Adult dragon clones. I felt the weight of my pack on my shoulders, the bag that held a scary amount of explosives, enough to collapse a room by itself. Garret, Tristan, Peter Matthews, they all carried the same in their own packs, but would it be enough? Could we really destroy that massive army, make it so they could never rise to threaten the world? And, if we did, how many more lives would be taken when the lab went down? I thought of the scientists we’d passed on our way here, the humans who would be trapped in this laboratory when everything detonated. They would all be killed, along with any dragon who happened to be here when the explosives went off.

This is war, Ember.The elevator came to a smooth halt at the bottom of the shaft.If we don’t stop Talon now, the fighting will never be over. You know this has to be done.

I set my jaw and took a deep breath, gathering my resolve, as the elevator doors hissed and slid back.

Revealing Dante’s smiling face on the other side. And a dozen armed human vessels behind him, all pointing guns into the elevator.

RILEY

So far, so good.

I spun around for another pass at the base, dodging a purple hatchling as she soared by, and angled myself into a dive that would take me close to the ground. The sky was filled with dragons, swooping from above and breathing jets of flame onto enemy guards. The ground in front of the laboratory smoldered, scattered fires burning across the scorched earth, sending columns of smoke billowing into the air. When the soldiers of St. George had first swarmed the yard, the guards had been so focused on the attacking humans they hadn’t seen the small army of dragons descending from the sky until it was too late and flames had exploded around them. Since then, it had been utter chaos, with bullets and dragons flying through the air, screaming humans and the roar of flames and gunfire, all mixing into a hellish cacophony that pounded my eardrums and vibrated through my teeth.

But it seemed that we were actually winning. I didn’t want to get cocky, but it looked like there were more enemy guards lying on the ground, and hardly any dragons or soldiers of St. George. The remaining guards had taken cover behind whatever obstacles they could find, but we were slowly driving them back toward the lab and the enormous steel doors of the entrance.

“They’re on the retreat!” Lieutenant Ward’s voice crackled through the bud that had been jammed into my ear canal. “All squads, press forward. One last push should finish them—”

With an earsplitting groan, the enormous steel doors of the laboratory creaked open. I paused in midair, beating my wings to keep aloft, as the huge barriers swung slowly back.

Uh-oh. That’s a bad sign…

With a sound like the buzzing of a million locust wings, a swarm of metallic gray dragons flew out of the opening and took to the air. Hissing and snarling, they coiled upward in a glittering cloud, before turning and descending on us like a storm.

“Shit!” I surged into motion again, flapping my wings hard, as the army of clones set upon hatchlings and the soldiers of St. George alike. Now our soldiers were forced back, diving behind cover to avoid gouts of flame, as vessels swooped overhead. They swarmed into the air, slamming into hatchlings and dragonells, and several bodies plummeted to the ground.

Roaring, I dove into the fray, ripping a vessel away from a hatchling and sending it careening into one of its fellows. The vessels tumbled from the air, but another slammed into me from the side and sank its talons into my back. We dropped from the sky in a tangle of wings and tails, snarling and raking at each other. At the last second, I managed to bring my back feet up and kick the thing in the stomach, shoving it off me. Quickly, I opened my wings, enough to turn my freefall into a dive and skim the dusty ground as I regained my aerial balance. The vessel couldn’t react fast enough, however, and crashed full force into the rocks with a thud and a sickening crack of bones.

Climbing into the air, I gazed around in dismay. There seemed to be a lot more metallic gray bodies than my own dragons, and the mood of the battle had become even more frantic. Vessels chased their bright counterparts with predatory skill and latched on to them to bring them to the ground, seeming not to care about their own safety. Lieutenant Ward’s voice barked in my ear, shouting commands to the men on the ground. The soldiers of St. George had regrouped and were doing what they did best, which was kill dragons, but they had their hands full with the sheer amount of vessels swooping out of nowhere.

A booming retort, more like cannon fire than a gunshot, rang out from somewhere far behind me, and one of the vessels simply exploded in midair. One second there was a dragon swooping toward me, the next it had vanished into a cloud of blood, bone and scales.

“Nice shot, Nicholas!” came Martin’s voice through the earpiece, and I realized they had finally brought out the prototype we’d stolen from the train. The Dragonkiller, as it was aptly dubbed. “Keep it up,” Martin encouraged as the echo of the retort finally died away, “but don’t fire willynilly! We don’t have a lot of ammo for that thing.”

Also, please don’t hit any ofus, I thought, wondering, for a split second, what this would mean for the future of the Order. A gun like that would certainly change things, for both St. George and Talon, provided any of us survived this. It was certainly powerful, but there were swarms of small, fast-moving vessels that were difficult to hit with any single firearm, and a lot more clones than there were bullets. We couldn’t count on the Dragonkiller to turn the battle. It was up to us grunts, on the ground and in the air.

A dragonell shrieked as she plummeted past me, two vessels clinging doggedly to her back. With a snarl, I dove after them. Sinking my claws into one clone, I wrenched him off the other dragon as the dragonell twisted and managed to shove the other away. But the vessels recovered, beating their wings to stop their downward plunge, and came back for us. We flew higher with the clones in hot pursuit, and I whirled to face them, roaring a challenge as the two abominations came at me with teeth bared.

Ember, St. George, I hope you’re almost done in there. Because I don’t know how much longer we can keep going.

EMBER

“Hello, Ember.”

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