Nice Dragons Finish Last (Heartstrikers)

by Rachel Aaron

  Julius could think of several reasons, but he was tired of arguing. “You don’t have to come with us if you don’t want to.”

  “No way,” she said, shaking her head. “I said I’d stick with you and I will. I just want to get all this out now so I can say ‘I told you so’ later when we get eaten by a Balrog.”

  Despite everything that had happened, Julius couldn’t help smiling at that. “I can’t believe you know what a Balrog is.”

  She gave him an arch look. “Who doesn’t? I mean, really.”

  “A ball-what?”

  Julius and Marci both turned to see Justin standing behind them, his hand resting casually on the hilt of his sword. “If you nerds are done yakking, can we get a move on? I’ve got other things to do tonight.”

  Marci’s face pulled into a snarl, but before she could rip into Justin as she so clearly wanted to, the dragon jumped into the storm drain and vanished. A few seconds later, a loud splash echoed up the pipe as he hit the water below.

  “Drop’s only about twelve feet,” he called. “Hop on down.”

  By this point, the look on Marci’s face had gone from deadly to deathly. “I can’t hop that.”

  “Neither can I,” Julius said, pointing at the metal ladder that was bolted to the side of the drain pipe. “There.”

  The sight of the slimy rungs only made Marci’s eyes go wider, and for a second, Julius was sure she was going to bolt. Instead, she took a deep breath of the stale, Underground air and sat down on the drain’s edge, slowly feeling out the ladder with her feet. Too slowly for Justin, apparently.

  “Get a move on, woman!” he bellowed up the pipe.

  “I’ll move when I’m ready!” she bellowed back, clutching the ladder for dear life.

  “I’m very sorry about him,” Julius said quickly. “He doesn’t mean anything by it. My brother’s just a jerk sometimes.”

  “Only sometimes?” Marci grumbled, glaring down the pipe at Justin’s head like she wanted to drop something heavy on it.

  In the end, though, they made it down, landing safely in a cement spillway that was much larger than Julius had expected. The ceiling was high enough that even Justin could stand up straight, and since it was the end of summer, the water flow was barely more than a trickle, leaving plenty of dry space on the sides to walk. But despite the roomy proportions and the Lady of the Lakes’ strict water regulations, it was still a storm drain. The runoff water might have been relatively cleaner than in other cities, but it still stank, and every surface was covered in bugs and black slime mold glistening wetly in the light of the LED flashlight Marci had pulled out of her bag.

  “Lovely,” she said, using the light to send the bugs skittering before training the beam on Justin’s back, already twenty feet ahead of them down the tunnel. “Does that man even know the meaning of the word patience?”

  “If he does, I’ve never seen it,” Julius said, catching Marci when her foot slipped on the spillway’s slick floor. She flashed him a quick smile that made him feel slightly less guilty about getting her involved in all this and started carefully making her way after Justin.

  “You know,” she said, stepping high over a puddle where the trickle of water had caught and pooled on a knot of trash, “there’s no guarantee we’ll be able to get into whatever this place is from down here. If I was living in the storm water system, I’d consider the below-ground entrances much more dangerous than the street level and ward them accordingly, if I didn’t just brick them over.”

  Julius nudged a rat skeleton out of their way. “Are the things down here really that bad?”

  “Not all of them,” Marci replied. “But think of it like this. The DFZ is full of magic, and magic attracts magical creatures. That wouldn’t be so bad if the DFZ Underground wasn’t also one of the world’s densest human populations, but it is, which means all those magical animals are competing with people for space. Usually, this is where the government would step in and balance things out, but this is the Detroit Free Zone. Animal control is an outsourced, free market system, just like everything else.”

  “You mean the bounties?”

  She nodded. “People pay the Animal Control office, and they pay freelancers per head—small amounts for minor annoyances, and big pay outs for the really dangerous stuff. It’s not actually a bad system most of the time, but the whole thing breaks down when you get into areas where the cost and trouble of killing the animal is more than the price you get for its head.”

  “I see,” Julius said. “So the hunters don’t come down here because it’s too much risk for the reward, and as a result, the pipes have become a safe haven for magical nuisance animals.”

  “Bingo. It’s like roaches running under your fridge because they don’t want get stepped on. Only these roaches are enormous, man-eating, and sometimes fire-breathing.”

  He grimaced. “What a lovely picture.”

  “Welcome to the DFZ!” Marci said with a laugh, hopping over a particularly smelly pile of washed up plastic bags.

  Julius was digging out his phone to look for pictures of the sort of stuff they could expect down here when the slime-coated pipe they’d been following suddenly merged into a much larger spillway that was actually filled with water. Fortunately, some long-dead contractor had thought to build a metal walkway into the wall above the waterline. Justin was already on it, perched on the edge of the rusting metal like a giant, overly aggressive bird. He pulled Marci up one-handed when she came into arm’s reach, and then did the same for Julius, plucking him off the ground as easily as he’d pull a weed.

  “We have a problem,” he announced once they were both safely above the water. “The mages we’re after should be straight ahead.”

  “And?” Julius prompted.

  His brother’s answer was to point further down the way they’d been walking, which, thanks to the T-intersection of the pipes, meant he was now pointing straight at a cement wall.

  “Oh,” Julius said. “That is a problem.”

  “I’d cut through it,” Justin said. “But it looks load-bearing, and you two are kind of squishy. We need to find another way around.”

  Julius sighed and glanced down at his phone, but the AR display came up blank. Apparently, even the DFZ’s municipal wireless couldn’t reach all the way down here, and GPS completely useless when there was twelve feet of pavement and dirt between you and the satellite signal. In any case, the map would have only shown roads, not the water system below them. Julius was about to use this as an excuse to tell his brother they should call the whole thing off and go knock on the front door like he’d originally suggested when Marci spoke up.

  “I have an idea.”

  Justin and Julius both turned to see her digging through her bag.

  “We’re looking for a commune of mages, right?” she asked, handing her flashlight to Julius.

  “Right,” he said slowly, taking the light.

  “Well, lots of mages means lots of concentrated magic, and if it’s magic we’re looking for, I think we could try this.” She pulled her hand out of her bag with a flourish, holding up the golden, grapefruit-sized orb Julius had seen her examining in the car after his dust-up with Chelsie. Back then, it had glittered like a golden ornament. Now, it sparkled like the noon sun on a waterfall in the brilliant glare of the LED flashlight, throwing little golden dots all over the waterway’s dark stained walls.

  “What is that?” Justin asked. “A golden disco ball?”

  “It’s a Kosmolabe,” Marci said, her voice giddy with excitement. “An ancient tool used by mages, the first mages from back before magic faded, to detect and identify other dimensions.”

  “Why would we need that?” Justin said with a snort. “We’re already in the right dimension.”

  Marci must have been amazingly excited, because she didn’t even look annoyed. “Ah,” she said. “But Kosmolabes find those other dimensions by detecting their ambient magic. It’s been theorized for decades now that a properly
trained mage, given enough power, could open a portal to another dimension. No one’s actually tried it yet, though, because there’s no way to know what would be waiting on the other side. The wall between our world and the other planes is simply too thick for us to see through. We could be opening a hole into the vacuum of space, or into a star, or into a completely new environment we can’t even imagine. That’s where the Kosmolabe comes in.”

  She stuck the ball directly under the flashlight, making it shine painfully bright. “You see the pattern on the gold leaf under the glass? It acts as an amplifier, reacting to the natural vibrations of magic on a molecular level that’s supposedly a thousand times more sensitive than anything a human can feel. Sort of like a compass, only the needle points at magic instead of North. I’ve been dying to try it out!”

  “Uh-huh,” Justin said, crossing his arms over his chest. “Still waiting to hear why I should care.”

  “You should care because we’re looking for a heavily warded community of shamans,” she said hotly, leaving the implied you moron thankfully unvoiced. “And if the theories are correct and the Kosmolabe is like a compass, then that sort of magical density should act like a magnet.”

  “I see,” Julius said. “They’ll pull the needle right to them. That way, even if we have to go off course, we’ll always know which direction the mages are in.”

  “Yes, thank you,” Marci said, giving him a beaming smile. “At least someone here gets it.”

  Justin rolled his eyes, but Julius moved in for a better look at the golden ball. This close, he could actually see the points in the tiny golden patterns twitching, exactly like little needles. “That’s amazing. I’ve never heard of a Kosmolabe.”

  “They’re incredibly rare,” Marci said. “Even back when mages were thought to be common, not many places had the sophistication needed to make one, and once the magic dried up, the knowledge was lost all together.” Her face fell. “Most magical learning was, actually. The only reason we know dimensional connection is even possible is because Kosmolabes exist. We’re only beginning to rediscover just how much we lost during the magical drought, and we still don’t why the magic went away in the first place. Thankfully, we have our ancestor’s tools to help us figure everything out again.” She smiled down at the golden ball in her arms. “This one’s a Persian Kosmolabe. They’re supposed to be the most accurate, and the most delicate. It’s a miracle this one survived so perfectly intact. It might just be the last fully functional Kosmolabe remaining in the whole world.”

  “Uh huh,” Justin said. “So why do you have it?”

  Marci jerked at the question, then she relaxed, shrugging with the sort of careless flippancy that was the hallmark of someone about to tell a whopping lie. “My dad gave it to me. Anyway, like Julius said, this Kosmolabe should be able to guide us right to our target. Once I figure out how to use it, of course.”

  “You mean you haven’t tried it yet?”

  Marci lifted her head high. “Well, obviously I haven’t had the chance to test its ability to find missing mage colonies, but there’s no reason it shouldn’t work.” She looked down, peering into the golden patterns like she was trying to read her future in a crystal ball. “Actually, I think I’ve got something already. Follow me.”

  She got to her feet and set off down the walkway, her boots clacking on the metal grate. When Julius stood up to follow, though, Justin grabbed his shoulder.

  “You sure about this?”

  “No,” Julius said. “But coming down here was your brilliant idea, remember?”

  “I’m not talking about the sewers. I’m talking about the part where your human just lied to us.”

  Julius blinked. He hadn’t actually thought Justin would pick up on that. His brother didn’t usually do subtleties, but then, Marci was a pretty awful liar.

  “She probably only lied because you asked her such a nosy question,” he said. “Anyway, it’s not my business where she got her Kosmolabe. All I care about is how Marci does her job for me, and so far, she’s been excellent. When it comes to magic, I trust her completely.”

  His brother snorted. “You’re gonna get yourself killed thinking like that. Blind faith makes a terrible leader.”

  “It’s not blind faith,” Julius said. “I trust Marci. She’s my…”

  Justin went after his hesitation like a bull after a red flag. “Your what?”

  “I trust her,” Julius said again.

  Justin crossed his arms over his chest. “Why?”

  Because she was his friend, and because she trusted him back. But Justin was too much of a dragon to understand that, so Julius said nothing, which of course, his brother took entirely the wrong way.

  “Oh, no,” he groaned. “You’re not having a thing with her, are you?”

  “Of course not,” Julius snapped. Not that having a thing with Marci would be bad, but… “I just trust her, okay? Leave it alone.”

  He stomped away, leaving his brother to follow. For a moment, the metal walkway was silent, and then, with a long sigh, Justin jogged after him. His brother quickly matched and then beat his pace, leaving Julius to run alone behind him through the dark.

  ***

  Thirty minutes later, the Kosmolabe had led them up, down, and over more disgusting, slime-covered, bug-riddled pipes and tunnels than Julius ever wanted to see again in his life. Even Justin was starting to look a little green. Marci, however, was practically skipping in delight, all her earlier fear completely replaced by the dazzling sparkle of the Kosmolabe.

  “It works!” she cried yet again, nuzzling the golden ball with her nose. “I knew you would work, you beautiful darling!”

  “Works nothing,” Justin snarled, shaking something unmentionable off the toe of his boot. “We’ve been walking for half an hour, and we still haven’t seen so much as a Keep Out sign.”

  “It works perfectly well,” Marci said. “It’s not the Kosmolabe’s fault your mages decided to hide in the one drain that apparently doesn’t connect to any of the others.”

  “But why do we keep going down?” Julius asked, stepping over a stagnant puddle. “It would be one thing if we were going in circles around a fixed point, but we’re not. We just keep heading lower.”

  Marci shrugged. “That’s where the signal goes.” She tapped her heel on the dank cement floor. “There’s an enormous magical concentration right below us. It has to be our mages. Nothing natural could generate pressure like that. I mean, just look at it.”

  She held the Kosmolabe out for them to see, but while the gold leaf flecks were indeed all waving like tiny flags in a storm, they didn’t seem to be waving in any particular direction. Julius imagined it would look different if he focused on seeing the magic instead of the physical reality, but since physical reality was the one that was going to soak him with disgusting water if he slipped, he kept his attention on the real world.

  “Okay,” he said with a sigh. “So we’re closing in. What’s the plan when we get there?”

  He directed the question at Justin, partially because he needed to know, and partially to prevent his brother from snipping at Marci again. He’d taken to playing peace-keeper for the last quarter hour just so he wouldn’t have to hear them bicker, and he’d quickly discovered that the key to keeping harmony between his mage and his brother was to keep each of them focused on their respective jobs. Fortunately, both Justin and Marci were highly distractable when it came to their areas of expertise.

  “Recon comes first,” Justin said, drumming his fingers on his sword hilt. “We need to know what we’re up against. Once we’ve got that, we make a battle plan from the information and proceed from there.” He glanced back at Julius. “I’ll do the actual fighting, of course. The way you’re panting like an old woman, you’d probably just give yourself a heart attack.”

  “I am not panting like an old woman!” Julius protested, albeit breathlessly. This hike through the pipes had been a lot more exercise than he was used to. “I’m jus
t a bit out of shape.”

  “I can’t tell you ever had a shape to start with,” his brother said, giving him a caustic look. “Seriously, what happened to you? You used to be the fastest of all of us, but I think even Jessica could run circles around you now. Did you completely stop training when you exiled yourself to your room?”

  More or less, Julius thought with a sigh. He’d hadn’t liked combat training even back when he’d been relatively good at it, and once he’d turned seventeen and his clutch had been declared ready to enter the world, he’d seen no reason to continue. This was especially true living at home since the nature of combat training meant it had to be done in the same gym used by the exact hyper-competitive, aggressive older siblings he’d hidden in his room to avoid. Before he could think of a more flattering way to explain his lapse to Justin, Marci’s voice rang out down the tunnel.

  “Found it!”

  Justin was moving at once, racing down the pipe and around the corner Marci had turned. Julius followed hot on his heels… and nearly crashed into him when he rounded the corner to find both Justin and Marci standing right on the other side. They were perfectly still, staring at what appeared to be a black wall. A second later, though, Julius saw it wasn’t actually a wall at all. It was a precipice.

  Beyond the cement lip, the sewer fell away into a space so huge, Marci’s flashlight couldn’t penetrate the darkness to find the edges. Julius couldn’t even guess how big the room beyond must be, but what really bothered him was the smell. The air here was still, far too still for such a large space, but the draft that did reach him had a cold, oily thickness to it that he didn’t like at all.

  “What’s down there?” he asked, covering his nose.

  “No idea,” Marci said, glancing at the golden ball in her hands. “But the Kosmolabe says our target is dead ahead.”

  She pointed straight down into the inky dark, and suddenly, Julius was more certain than ever that this was not something they should be doing. “I—”