The man is barely conscious. He lifts his head when the light comes in, and I see his face, gaunt, hollow, the face of someone who’s been in chains long enough that the chains have become part of his body. His eyes are open but unfocused. There’s a number tattooed on his forearm. No name on the cell. Just the number, repeated on a tag bolted to the wall.
“Jesus,” Conner breathes.
“We take him,” Brenna says. “Jericho… the chains.”
“These aren’t standard. The runes… I’d need tools I don’t have to—”
“Then break the wall mounts. Pull the bolts. We carry him with the chains on and deal with them later.” Brenna isn’t budging.
Jericho attacks the wall mounts. The bolts resist, then give — one, two, three, four — and the chains go slack. The man slumps forward. Rook catches him, and his expression darkens.
“He’s a wreck.” His lips tighten into a thin line.
“Goddamn motherfuckers,” Brenna snarls, moving up beside Rook and peering into the man’s face. “Whatever he was before they chained him, they’ve stripped him.”
Willow is at the door, staring with a hand over her mouth.
“Earpiece,” I say. “Mara.”
“I’m here.” Her voice is tight. “You need to move. The Cravens are about to light up the vehicle depot, and the window after that is approximately six minutes before response teams mobilize from the main building.”
“We have four with us. One can walk. Three need carrying.”
“Copy. Merric is holding the loading bay. Get there.”
We move. Garrett on my shoulder and Conner’s. Rook is carrying the woman from the first cell. She’s stopped flinching, gone somewhere inside herself that’s beyond flinching. The older man is walking on his own, steady, silent. Jericho carries the chained man over one shoulder, the chains clinking with each step.
We move fast up the stairwell. Through the corridor. The second keycard door. The first.
Then the sky opens.
The sound comes through the walls: a roar that shakes dust from the ceiling and makes almost everyone in the group stumble. Not a human sound. Dragon. The Cravens are hitting the vehicle depot, fire erupting somewhere above us, and the building responds with alarms. Sirens. Red lights in the corridor, strobing.
“Move!” Merric is at the loading bay door. He sees Garrett. Sees the civilians. Sees the chained man over Jericho’s shoulder. His eyes meet Brenna’s, and she gives him a tight smile.
We pour into the loading bay. The drainage culvert is on the far wall. Sienna is at the grate, holding it open, her face lit red by the alarm lights.
“Culvert won’t work,” Jericho says. “Not with the chained one. He won’t fit through with the hardware.”
“Loading dock.” Merric points. “The bay doors. We go out the front.”
“That puts us in the open.”
Another roar from above. Something explodes, the vehicle depot, probably, fuel and metal and dragon fire turning the Syndicate’s transport capability into a column of black smoke. Through the loading dock windows, I can see the sky lit orange.
“The dragons are giving us cover,” Merric says. “We go now, or we don’t go.”
We go.
Merric hits the bay door controls. The industrial door rolls up, loud and grinding, the mechanical complaint of a system that wasn’t designed for emergency evacuation. The night air rushes in, carrying smoke and heat and the sound of the Cravens doing what they do best.
The yard is chaos. Guards running toward the burning depot. A dragon — Caleb, I think — is banking overhead, fire trailing from his jaws. A second shape — Dorian — dives toward the main building’s roof, drawing fire upward, away from us.
We run. Across the yard. Through the gap in the perimeter fence that Sienna has cut while we were inside. Into the scrub beyond the fence. The staging vehicles are three hundred yards south, their headlights off. Mara’s face is visible through the windshield in the glow of her screens.
Garrett’s weight on my shoulder is enormous. His feet are moving but barely — dragging, stumbling, the effort of a body that’s been sitting in a chair for two days slowly being strippedapart. I haul him forward. Conner takes more of the weight. Between us, we carry him.
“You’re heavy,” I tell him. Through my teeth. Running.