by Rachel Aaron
Even plummeting through the dark at nauseating speeds, it still took a solid minute of falling before the stripped-down elevator finally jerked to a stop. When the steel cage rolled open, the stone of the hallway outside wasn’t even the same color as the mountain above, which Julius took as a sign that they were even deeper than the basement tunnel where Chelsie and the Fs hid their secret rooms. Deeper than he’d ever gone before, down below the roots of the mountain itself.
“This is crazy,” Julius whispered as Justin herded them out. “I knew the emergency bunker was deep, but not this deep.”
“That’s because it’s not,” Fredrick said, moving out of the way as Justin stomped past to punch a key code into the pad beside the metal door at the end of the short tunnel. “The emergency bunker is a quarter mile above us. This is the deep bunker.”
Julius gaped at him. “How many bunkers do we have?!”
“When everyone wants to kill you? Never enough,” Justin said as the light above the door turned green. “In.”
The heavy bolt had barely cleared the lock before Justin yanked it open, tossing the foot-thick metal security door aside as though it were made of cardboard to reveal an enormous room that looked like a cross between a natural cavern and NASA Mission Control.
Unlike every other room in Heartstriker Mountain, which had been hollowed out of the stone to suit the needs of the mountain’s draconic masters, this one seemed to be a natural formation. It had gently curving walls, water running down one corner, and stalactites hanging from the ceiling high overhead. There’d been stalagmites on the ground as well at one point, but they’d all been shaved off to create a floor for the massive array of computer consoles and spellwork control circles. Human ones, oddly enough.
“Why are we using human magic for our wards?” Julius asked as Justin herded them inside.
“Because Bethesda doesn’t trust any of us to do it,” Fredrick explained, looking around at the empty chairs. “Though where the mages who’re supposed to be operating them are right now is anyone’s guess.”
That didn’t sound good. “Should we call someone?”
“No time,” Justin said, marching over to one of the larger consoles. “We’ll just have to get by without—”
He cut off as the steel door behind them swung open again, and Bethesda herself swept into the room. The alarm must have woken her, because she was wearing a floor length, blood-red, see-through lace negligee. Her hair was brushed out perfectly, though, so it might have just been a dress. With his mother, it was hard to tell.
“I should have known I wouldn’t be lucky enough to get here first,” she grumbled when she saw Julius. “I was hoping to lock you out.” She turned her glare to Justin. “Why are you always so fast?”
“Because I do my job,” Justin said, poking at the machine in front of him. “How does this thing work again?”
“Oh, let me,” Bethesda snapped, hiking up her lacy skirt as she hurried across the cave to take Justin’s place in front of the central command console. “Fredrick,” she said as she placed her hands on the controls. “I have no idea why you’re still skulking about, but if you don’t want to die, I suggest you take the drones.”
Given that he was already in front of the console with the name of a major drone manufacturer printed across the front, it looked as though Fredrick was already doing just that. He stopped the moment Bethesda gave him an order, though. A move that did not go unnoticed.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she growled.
“Whatever I please,” Fredrick growled back, staring at her with pure, unfiltered hate. “I serve Julius now. Not you.”
“You can’t be serious.”
Fredrick’s reply was to just keep glaring, and Bethesda pressed a hand to her forehead. “You are,” she groaned, closing her eyes. “What have we become?”
“Better without you,” Fredrick said, giving their mother one last poisonous look before turning to Julius. “What are your orders, sir?”
Julius bit his lip. “Um, what can you do?” Because he had no idea how any of this worked. He hadn’t even known they had a room like this until a few minutes ago.
The F turned back to the large console in front of him. It lit up the second his hands got close, throwing a complicated web of augmented reality interface options into the air above it. Fredrick plunged his fingers into the commands, and screens covering the walls flickered to life with multiple camera feeds from all over the surrounding desert.
“That works,” Julius said, grinning. “Good job, Fredrick. Thank you.”
“All of my clutch were taught to use the mountain’s security systems,” he said with a shrug. “But you’re welcome, sir.”
Bethesda made a disgusted sound, but she kept any actual comments to herself as she focused on the AR controls above her own console. “I’ll take the perimeter. Fredrick, you focus on quadrant one. I want to know what tripped that alarm.”
Only when Julius nodded did Fredrick obey, pulling up a large map of the desert surrounding Heartstriker Mountain and waving his hand over the southwestern portion. A second later, the map filled with tiny green dots that began moving in unison as all the screens on the walls flipped to show camera feeds from that part of the desert. “Drones are up.”
“Good, because everything else is down,” Bethesda growled, scowling into the floating interface in front of her. “I don’t understand. I just had the sensors checked last…”
Her voice faded as she looked up at the picture that had just appeared on the biggest screen in front of them. From the high angle and the way it was weaving back and forth, the shot was clearly from a drone, but what the camera was actually showing was far harder to make out. All Julius could tell was that something was flying through the western edge of the Heartstriker’s airspace. Several somethings, moving very fast, but the way they moved didn’t make sense at all. They weren’t soaring like planes or flapping like birds or even floating on the wind. They were snaking, weaving through the clear desert morning like eels in a tight, undulating formation.
“What is that?” Julius asked, squinting at the screen. “Some kind of water spirit?”
“Don’t be stupid,” Bethesda said, her face pale. “Those are dragons.”
That couldn’t be right. “But they have no wings,” he said, pointing at the snaking shapes. “What kind of dragon doesn’t have wings?”
“Chinese ones,” Fredrick replied in a tight voice.
Julius’s eyes went wide. Since his clan was banned from China, he’d never paid attention to the Chinese clans beyond what showed up on the mainstream news. Even now that he knew what he was looking at, the undulating shapes on the screen still didn’t look like any dragons he’d seen. They were too long and compact, their sleek bodies sliding effortlessly through the morning air like silk through the sea. The longer he watched, though, the more similarities he found. They might not move how he was used to, but they had dragon heads and dragon teeth, dragon claws on their curled dragon feet. Most telling of all, though, was that they were beautiful. Breathtakingly so, in the dangerous, deadly way that only truly old and powerful dragons could be.
Even at this distance, watching through a drone camera, he could see power shimmering over the already brilliant red, green, and cobalt of their fishlike scales. Some of them even had manes, huge tufts of brightly colored fur that made them look like lions. Others had long horns that rose from their heads in smooth, arcing forks. The lack of wings let them fly in tight formation, the whole pack moving as one like a school of fish, making it impossible to tell their true numbers as they shot through the early-morning sky toward the mountain.
“They’re coming right at us,” Justin announced.
“Where else would they be going?” Bethesda said irritably. “We’re the only things out here.” She slammed her fists on the console. “I told you we were going to be invaded!”
“Let’s not jump to conclusions,” Julius said. “We don’t know it�
�s an invasion yet.”
“Oh, come on, Julius!” she cried, whirling around. “Even you can’t be this naïve. The day after I explain to you we’re sitting ducks, a flock of foreign dragons charges our airspace. What do you think they’re here to do? Say hello?” She cast a nervous glance up at the screen. “I’m just glad Chelsie’s gone.”
“Why?” he asked, suddenly suspicious. “What does she have to do with this?”
“I’d love to tell you,” his mother replied. “Alas, you made me swear on my fire to keep that secret, so I’m afraid you’ll just have to wallow in your own irony. In the meanwhile, we need to prove that a wounded clan is a far cry from a dead one. Justin?”
The knight’s head popped up at his name, and Bethesda shot him a deadly smile. “Show these snakes the price of trespassing on Heartstriker land.”
The words were barely out of her mouth before Justin’s grin grew to match her own. “On it,” he said, striding over to tap the surface of a very black, very deadly-looking console in the far corner of the room. Unlike the others, though, this was one he clearly knew how to use, tapping his fingers through the AR until the whole interface turned an ugly, angry red. “Missiles armed.”
“Wait, missiles?” Julius said. “We have missiles?”
“Of course we have missiles,” Bethesda said as the red interface appeared on her command console as well. “Whose mountain do you think this is?”
Before he could reply, she swept her hand through the tangle of menus floating in the air above her console, painting the undulating shapes of the dragons on the screen above with candy-red target icons. She was halfway through by the time Julius made it to her side.
“Mother, stop!” he cried frantically, grabbing her arm. “We can’t just shoot down any dragon who flies over our territory!”
“Of course we can,” she said, yanking out of his grip. “It’s our territory. They’d do the same thing if we flew into Beijing.”
That was probably true. Still. “We don’t even know for certain why they’re here yet! Shouldn’t we at least fire a warning shot or—”
“And waste a surprise attack?” She rolled her eyes. “You are clearly not a wartime consigliere.”
“But—”
“You can ask them about their intentions all you like once they’re on the ground,” she said in a patronizing voice. “For now…”
She brought her fist down on the command grid with a bloodthirsty grin, and a new set of sirens began to scream as missile launch warnings flashed on every monitor in the room. The ground above them began to rumble a second later, but as Julius braced for the inevitable roar of rockets, everything went suddenly quiet.
The triumphant smile slipped off Bethesda’s face.
“What happened?” she demanded, hunching over her console. “Why aren’t they launching?”
“It’s aborted,” Justin said, nodding at the cascade of flashing warning messages covering the missile system’s AR. “Looks like a system failure.”
Growling low in her throat, Bethesda shoved away from the central command console and marched over to his. Pushing Justin out of the way, she stabbed her manicured nails through the floating mesh of missile commands, grabbing the floating error messages and yanking them closer so she could read what had gone wrong. The longer she stared at them, though, the more confused she appeared.
“That’s impossible,” she said at last.
“What’s impossible?” Julius asked, hopes rising.
“This!” she cried, flinging her hands up at the interface. “It’s not a system failure. Every single missile just threw an error, and not even the same one. If they’d all failed the same way, I could see it being a hacker or a bug, but one hundred and forty-four missiles having unique fatal malfunctions at the exact same time? That doesn’t happen! The odds would be—”
She stopped cold, green eyes going wide. “Oh no,” she whispered, looking back up at the dragons on the screen. “No, no, no.”
She started cursing after that, spewing a crescendo of profanity in an impressive number of languages. The outburst was even more shocking for Julius than the panic alarm had been, because though his mother often lost her temper, she rarely cursed. It was low class, she’d claimed, a mark of vulgarity. But she seemed to be making it up for it now, and the worst part was, Julius didn’t know what had set her off. Other than getting closer, the knot of dragons looked the same now as it had before she’d tried to attack. He was staring at the beautiful shapes on the screen, trying to figure it out, when the rising sun broke over the peak of Heartstriker Mountain, lighting up something shiny and golden hidden at the center of the pack.
“What’s that?” he said, squinting at the lovely spark of gold that was blinding even through the cameras.
“The end of the road,” his mother said bitterly, finally switching back to English. “That, my dear idiot son, is the Qilin. The Golden Emperor, which is only appropriate, because we are imperially screwed.”
He stared at the screen in wonder. “But I thought the Golden Emperor never left China?”
“He doesn’t,” Bethesda snarled. “Which is why I’m upset. Though at least this explains what happened to my missiles.”
“What does his being here have to do with our missiles failing?”
His mother looked at him like he was insane. “Did you sleep through all your dragon politics classes?”
“I went to class!” Julius cried. Sometimes. When he wasn’t hiding to escape being the rest of J-clutch’s punching bag or spell practice dummy, or both. “But we didn’t exactly spend much time on China since our entire family is banned from setting foot in the country.”
Bethesda closed her eyes. “For the love of—Fine.” She marched to the front of the bunker, stiletto heels clicking furiously on the stone as she stopped under the wall of monitors and reached up to tap her nail on the one showing a close-up of the knot of dragons.
“You see all these colored dragons?” she said in her most patronizing voice. “These are members of the Twenty Sacred Clans, the original dragon clans of China who were conquered thousands of years ago by the first Golden Emperor. I thought initially they were all we were dealing with. You know, a normal invasion force composed of soldiers and shock troops. Alas, it seems we’re not that lucky, because they brought their boss.”
She rose up on her tiptoes to point at the gleam of gold hidden inside the dragon’s tight formation. “Now do you understand? This isn’t some errant thuggery to take advantage of our weakness. That’s the Golden Emperor, the Qilin, Greatest Dragon of China, the Luck Dragon, Living Embodiment of All Good Fortune, the—”
“I’ve heard his titles,” Julius interrupted. “And I see how him being here is bad, but—”
“Clearly, you don’t see,” Bethesda snapped. “Because if you did, you’d know those aren’t just titles. I’m called ‘The Heartstriker’ because of what I’ve done, but the Qilin is called ‘the Living Embodiment of All Good Fortune’ because that’s what he is. He’s a luck dragon. Literally. That’s how he conquered all the dragons in China without losing any of his own. That’s how he conquered the modern human nation of China in less than three days after the return of magic and how he’s held it for the last sixty years without a single rebellion. It’s not because he’s an amazing general or a brilliant tactician. It’s because that’s how his magic works. Anything he desires—power, empire, the wealth of nations, other dragons—his good fortune gives him, and now we’re in his sights.”
She said all of this as though it were indisputable fact, but Julius still couldn’t wrap his head around it. “How is that possible? Is he some kind of seer?”
Bethesda scoffed. “Of course not. Seers see the future and use that knowledge to make sure events happen in their favor, but their magic can’t actually change events. They can only see, not shove. The Qilin is the opposite. He can’t see the future any more than we can, but his magic moves it around like clay, manipulating events blindly
to ensure that he always gets what he wants. That’s how you end up with every missile in our arsenal independently throwing a different error the moment I decide to shoot him out of the sky. It’s all just bad luck.”
“I thought you said the Qilin brought good luck.”
“Bad luck for your enemies is good luck for you,” she said. “And Heartstriker is most definitely the Qilin’s enemy. Who do you think banished us from China?”
If he’d thought he’d get anywhere this time, Julius would have taken that opening to ask, why? What had happened to make the Qilin hate their clan so much? But he’d hit the brick wall of China too many times at this point to even waste his breath. Whatever had happened in the past would have to stay there for now. He was more concerned with surviving the next few minutes.
“We need to find out why they’re here.”
“What’s to find out?” Bethesda asked. “They’re the second-biggest clan in the world. We’re the first, and we’re vulnerable.” She shrugged. “Seems pretty obvious to me.”
“But how did they know we were vulnerable?” he asked. “It’s not like we’ve put out a press release.”
“Because this is the Qilin!” she cried. “He doesn’t need normal things like inside knowledge to win. Whatever day he picked was bound to be the right day because that’s how he works. He doesn’t have to try. Everything he wants simply happens.”
“Then we should make something happen first,” Justin said, grabbing his Fang. “I say we go out there and—”
“No,” Julius said. “We can’t do that.”
His brother’s face fell into a dangerous scowl, and Julius sighed. “I’m not doubting your capabilities, Justin, but look around. There’s only four of us. Three if you take out Bethesda, who’s sealed. That’s about a hundred short of what we’d need to fight a force that size.”