by Dima Zales
I bend over, gasping for air as tears stream down my face.
I want to wipe them off my cheeks, but my hands are bound behind my back—and even if they weren’t, the helmet would be in the way.
“What happened?” Ariel demands. “Sasha, are you okay?”
My hyperventilating eases enough for me to realize that I’m back inside my body and that what I saw was a vision. Meaning that future doesn’t have to come to pass. Maybe Lilith can still be stopped somehow. Despite how powerful she is and—
“Seriously, Sasha,” Felix chimes in, sounding worried. “What’s going on?”
I drag in a shaking breath and try to make words. “Nero is a dragon,” I finally force out. “And… he’s going to die.”
In the silence that follows, I tell them about my Headspace misadventures, doing my best to choke back my panic. When I’m halfway through my story, I calm down enough to start keeping an eye on the guard pacing the hallway, so I can count his steps and note his movement patterns.
“So that’s what Nero is,” Felix mumbles when I’m done. “That explains his super-deep voice and the eyes thing, plus the claws. Oh, and his lie detection abilities.”
“How so?” I ask on autopilot, even as my mind keeps spinning, looking for solutions to our impossible situation.
“When I was little, my grandpa told me fairy tales about dragons,” he says. “In those stories, dragons liked to play a variation of the Truth or Dare game. They would eat those who chose the truth option but then lied—and they would also eat those who couldn’t do the often-impossible dares. I thought my grandpa made those stories up as a parable about telling the truth, but—”
“Right. It also explains why Nero likes making money so much,” Ariel cuts in. “Even in human legends, dragons like treasure.”
“You’re right,” Felix says excitedly. “I bet getting rich actually makes him more powerful. That’s crazy smart and is like a loophole in the Mandate, if I’m right.”
Could that be true?
When Nero first locked me up in the basement cell, I had confronted him about the pointlessness of getting wealthier when he was already rich as sin.
“It’s not about wealth,” he’d replied. “It’s about power, and power is survival.”
I hadn’t understood what he meant, but in the context of a dragon hoarding his treasure, it makes more sense. Having a large net worth is just like sitting on a pile of gold.
Too bad Nero’s wealth-boosted dragon power isn’t enough to deal with Lilith, who’s enhanced her powers by having a whole world believe her to be a goddess of luck or blood or whatever.
Or, more accurately, it won’t be enough—future tense.
“When do you think he’ll get here?” Itzel asks. “Do you have a plan?”
Instead of answering, I continue watching the guard and counting the seconds we’re in his view.
Too many seconds for my liking.
Maybe I wait until another shift? The next guy might walk slower—or simply sit somewhere where he wouldn’t see us.
No.
If I hadn’t seen that vision, I might be more careful, but as is, I’ll have to follow Felix’s favorite Russian proverb: “She who doesn’t risk never gets to drink champagne.”
“Stand here,” I tell Felix and position him near the cell bars.
“Why?” he asks.
“Because I said so, and you have nothing better to do,” I mutter as I herd Ariel to stand next to him. Fear for Nero is like a living thing in my stomach, but I refuse to give in to it.
Now is the time to act, not freak out.
“Itzel, you stand here.” I put the gnome next to the wall across from the others and wait for the guard to come our way.
To my huge relief, the guard doesn’t question the new way everyone is standing. If I were him, I totally would have.
Mentally counting the seconds, I stick my head between Itzel and the wall and forcefully say, “Lean back.”
Itzel does as I say, jamming my helmet between her butt and the wall.
Exhaling to calm my nerves, I twist my body until I hear the helmet’s opening mechanism clank open.
“You still have your hands behind your back,” Itzel says. “How—”
“Just make sure the helmet doesn’t fall,” Felix says. “I think I see where she’s going with this.”
Itzel keeps propping the helmet with her posterior, and I carefully remove my head from it.
The prison smells pretty much how I’d imagined it—like a mix between a morgue and a sewer.
Ignoring my gag reflex, I relax all my muscles.
Thanks to the fact that I tensed when the rope was put on me, relaxing now creates the slack I was hoping for.
I was right when I compared this spacesuit to a straitjacket. Drawing on that experience, I manipulate the slack toward my left shoulder and proceed to escape the suit as if I’m performing an effect.
My heart pounds as though I were on stage in front of thousands of people, but I free myself in a record-setting three seconds.
I then take the helmet from behind Itzel’s butt and gently place it on the ground before untying the gnome.
The guard returns, and I freeze in place, using Ariel and Felix’s strategically placed bodies to block me from his view.
He paces away, and I untie Ariel and Felix. I then have them face the hallway with hands behind their backs, so the guard won’t see that they’re now free.
Next, I pull out the lock picks that are pretending to be a stud in my tongue, but I don’t go near the lock on the cell door because of the count in my head.
The guard passes by the cell just when I thought he would.
I hold my breath. If he questions Ariel and Felix’s new stance, he can still raise an alarm.
He doesn’t.
As he walks away, I push my friends aside and examine the lock.
It’s as I feared.
There’s no way I can defeat this thing before the guard returns.
There’s something else I need to try, but it’s risky.
Shrugging at my own reflection in Felix’s helmet, I put my hands to my mouth and generate a bird call.
I do my best to imitate a roc, muffling the sound to create the illusion that the noise is coming from outside.
My friends’ shoulders tense inside their suits, and I can picture their questioning expressions.
There’s no way I can reassure them, so I don’t. I need my father to do his part now, but I have no idea if he caught what I said before we disconnected in Headspace. And if he did hear me, does he know how to—
Something clanks in the distance. It sounds like someone upended a table.
My breath whooshes out in relief as I hear the guard run to check what the commotion is about.
Rasputin came through.
This is my chance.
I attack the lock with the picks as though everyone’s life depends on it—and it very well might.
The lock is rusty and of unusual design, but this wouldn’t have stopped Houdini. So, a few gray hairs later, I finally crack it open and exhale the breath I’ve been holding.
“Remember how you wanted to kick some ass?” I whisper to Ariel. “Now’s your chance. Try not to make too much noise.”
I then gesture at the door, and Ariel rubs her hands together menacingly as she walks through.
I follow her to Rasputin’s cell.
The guard is there, inside, next to an overturned table. He’s raising a fist to strike my father.
Ariel rushes in. Grabbing the guard’s fist with her right hand, she locks his throat in the crook of her left elbow.
The guy slumps in Ariel’s superhuman hold just as the bones in his fist break with a crunch.
Ariel tosses her victim to the side and lets me come through so that Rasputin can see me.
He leaps to his feet, his eyes greedily roaming over my face.
“Sasha,” he whispers, his voice cracking… and in that
moment, a roar shakes the walls of the castle along with my inner organs.
A very familiar dragon roar that seems to say, “Give her to me or die.”
Chapter Fifty-One
“We’ve got to get out of here and save Nero,” I say urgently, the fear gripping me again.
“Your mask and costume.” Rasputin points at my head, then at Ariel’s helmet. “You have to put them back on so that—”
“He’s right,” Itzel says through her external speaker. “You need your suit for our way back.” Under her breath, she adds, “Assuming we actually make it off this world, which I doubt.”
“Right.” I grab Felix’s shoulder and turn him so Rasputin can see his back. “I’ll go put on mine, and you put on yours.”
Rasputin looks at me in confusion, but then he realizes Felix has a spare suit strapped on, like a backpack.
As my father starts to gather his gear, I run back to our old cell and put my own suit back on.
“I’m Felix, and that’s Ariel and Itzel,” I hear my friend say in Russian on the suit comms once my helmet is back on. “Do you want us to call you Rasputin, Grigori, Grigori Yefimovich, or Sasha’s dad?”
“Since you’re Sasha’s friends, please call me Grisha,” my father replies. “And thank you for—”
An outside roar interrupts him.
“No time for pleasantries,” I say tersely. “That’s Nero out there, and he needs our help.”
“Nero,” Rasputin says, pronouncing the name with a strong Russian accent. “He isn’t bound by our contract to do this. Why is he here?”
“I think he came to save me,” I say. “It’s a long story.”
“Itzel, can you translate to me what everyone is saying?” Ariel says in annoyed tone. “And can someone please tell me how I ended up as the only person who doesn’t speak Russian?”
As I rush back to them, I can almost picture the parts of my vision where the archers and the spearmen attack Nero.
As though in confirmation, another angry roar shakes everything around me—vibrating my inner organs even in the suit.
“If you’re in a rush, I can’t join you,” Rasputin says when he sees me. “She has my hair. Running with me would be pointless. I would lead her straight back to you.”
“You said you knew where she keeps it,” I say. “Take us there. Fast.”
He nods and shuffles out of the room—clearly unused to the boost in movement that the suit provides.
Ariel catches up with him, and the rest of us follow.
We turn the corner.
Four frightened-looking guards are staring out the window.
Under the cover of yet another roar, Ariel leaps for the guards and knocks them out before they know what hit them.
Not much can be seen from the window, but we hear hundreds of men screaming in unison.
“Nero just spewed out a stream of fire,” I explain, my stomach clenching. “We need to hurry.”
We reach the staircase and frantically run down, the suits enabling us to leap several stairs at a time.
Ariel chuckles mirthlessly as she runs next to me. “When they first took us up here, my first thoughts were, ‘Great. I’ll be a damsel locked in a tower. All that’s missing is a dragon.’”
The sounds of Nero’s napalm-like breath drown any replies.
Ariel speeds up to run ahead of us, and a floor later, she encounters a confused guard.
The man doesn’t put up much of a fight as Ariel grabs him by his shoulders and unceremoniously tosses him down the stairs.
When we reach ground level, I hear the shrieks of wounded roc birds.
Nero must be fighting that squadron of flying soldiers—which means we’re running out of time.
“Through here.” My father sprints down a narrow corridor that’s lit only by torchlight.
Five solders armed with swords block our way, and I curse under my breath.
Ariel leaps forward, and I follow.
She kicks the first guard’s sword out of his hand, breaking his wrist, and then she smashes in another guard’s face. The three other guards ignore their colleagues’ screams as they surround Ariel—which is a mistake for the one who turns his back to me.
With a well-practiced move and all of my suit-enhanced might, I hit the soldier in the back of the head. He collapses in a heap of limbs.
Dodging two swords aimed at her, Ariel grabs the two remaining men by the backs of their heads and smashes their foreheads together.
The heads explode like overripe melons.
“Well, the hallway is clear.” Felix sounds on the verge of fainting. “That’s good news.”
Rasputin jumps over the bodies and runs ahead, stopping next to a closet-like room the soldiers must’ve been guarding. Opening the door, he leaps in.
Outside, the dragon’s next roar sounds like it has notes of pain in it.
I fight the temptation to take off my gloves so I can bite my nails. Instead, I rush after my father—just to bump into him as he comes out of the closet, holding something that looks like a hairball that a jaguar threw up.
My first thought is pubes, but then I realize it must be his beard.
“Got it,” he says, holding it up triumphantly. Running up to the nearest torch, he tosses his disgusting score into the flame. “Finally, I’m free.”
The hairball burns up in an instant, and I can imagine how it smells. Thankfully, the suit is airtight.
“Yay,” Itzel says flatly. “Now we just need to figure out a way to get off a floating island while a dragon is trying to kill everyone and everything, including a god. Should be a piece of cake.”
“This way to the exit,” Rasputin says, ignoring the gnome, and we all hurry to follow just as the next roar rings out.
Crap. This roar seems to contain the words, “Give her up.” Depending on where we are in the castle, we may be in danger.
Well, in a bigger danger.
A very specific type of danger, to be exact.
“Hey, Itzel,” I say, trying to hide the panic in my voice. “A purely hypothetical question… can someone smell me when I’m encased in this suit?”
Itzel doesn’t reply because we enter a large hall and face about a hundred soldiers—all armed to the teeth.
They look terrified by what’s happening outside, but when they lay eyes on us—an enemy that isn’t a dragon—they menacingly unsheathe their swords.
Chapter Fifty-Two
“Damn it.” I swiftly take in the room layout.
Though I don’t spot anything we can use to our advantage, something nags at me. I do my best to figure out where we are in the castle in reference to what I saw in my vision.
“There’s no way we can kill them all without at least getting the suits pierced,” Itzel says. “How—”
“On the ground,” I shout as it comes to me. “Get down and scoot back. Move it!”
Matching action to words, I faceplant on the stone floor and start crawling backward on my stomach.
To my relief, my father and the others do the same thing.
I can’t even imagine what the soldiers must think of our weird behavior. Then again, they’re about to—
A world-ending crunch of rocks meeting claws deafens me.
If this were an earthquake, it would be a ten on the Richter scale.
People scream, and solid stone crumbles into pieces.
Bits of rock fall on my back, but none are big enough to harm me or my crew.
I chance a glance at the hall we just escaped. There’s a gaping hole in its place. In that gap, I see the ginormous dragon sniff the chunk of castle he’s holding, then toss it to the ground.
“We can get up now,” I say and follow my own advice despite my shaking knees. “The next chunk of castle he rips out will be a spire, so we should be safe... assuming there’s another way to the exit?” I extend my hand to help my father get to his feet.
“There is,” he says, accepting my hand, and once he’s upright, he le
ads us down a spiraling corridor.
We rush into a new hall—and come face to face with a dozen monks armed with staffs. Compared to everyone we’ve met thus far, and given the circumstances, they’re surprisingly chill.
Heck, they even look calm when Ariel leaps forward, grabs the biggest one, and tosses him against the wall like a baseball.
“No doubt their faith keeps them so zen,” Felix grumbles as he hits the monk nearest him in the face. “Lilith did a number on these people, that’s for sure.”
A monk hits me in the solar plexus with his staff, and I double over. My father yelps a Russian curse and hits the man in the jaw, knocking him out.
I catch my breath in time to spot another monk raising his staff to hit Rasputin in the back of the neck, so I kick his shin and, thanks to the suit’s boost, snap his leg.
He cries out, but I punch him in the face, and he loses consciousness.
“Brace yourselves,” I warn everyone when I estimate the castle will shake again.
Nothing happens.
I punch out another monk. Then another.
Finally, the earthquake comes. Nero must’ve ripped off that spire—which means Lilith is about to face Nero personally.
The shaking knocks a few monks off their feet, and the five of us take advantage of their position to knock them out before they can get back up. Then we effortlessly deal with their still-standing brethren.
“Grisha, how far to the exit?” I ask my father as we begin to run.
“A few minutes,” he replies. “Also, could you call me Papa?”
“I don’t think we have a few minutes,” I grit out, my leg muscles straining as the Nero death clock in my head ticks louder.
“You’re trespassing, lizard,” Lilith’s heavenly voice booms outside. “Did you forget about the accord I have with your kind? You stay out of my world, and I stay out of yours.”
A chill streaks through my bones, and I speed up. Rasputin follows closely behind, with everyone else on his tail.
“This way,” my father pants over another roar.
The cardinal who was part of our welcoming committee and a couple dozen more monks block our path.
“Feisty,” Lilith says outside, and I recall she’s about to hit Nero with birds, hail, and lightning.