Ruin of Dragons Page 19

  "Back that way," Bran said, gesturing the opposite direction, and the two sprinted away from the guards who were now running after them shouting for them to stop. Before she could even wonder if they'd be able to make it, the terminal room opened and the trapped guard stepped out into their path.

  "Bran!" Petra shouted.

  "I know! Keep going!" Bran seemed to think the two of them could muscle past the single guard at a run, but instead of chasing toward them like the others, he instead drew his weapon and leveled it at them. Petra froze, and Bran skidded up beside. "New plan," he said. "Hang on."

  "To what?" she asked, but Bran was already wrapping his arms around her ribcage and lifting her bodily upward.

  "Me," he said as he sidestepped to the edge. Before Petra could object, Bran was leaning backward, and she could feel the world tilt sickeningly as they both toppled over the railing into the open chasm of the atrium.

  Petra's first impulse was to scream, but confusion quickly replaced it as she realized they were not falling so much as gliding, skirting around the edge of the chasm as an odd pressure pushed upwards against them. She looked over at Bran, who was pivoting as they approached the next level. He twisted suddenly, and they tumbled over, allowing him to reach out and grab onto a nearby ceiling rail, swinging them away from the open space and the strange pressure that had been supporting them. Petra felt gravity pulling at her again but didn't have time to scream or even react as they immediately landed in a heap on the floor.

  Dazed, she lay there for a moment while Bran rolled himself over and attempted to stand up. Petra's vision stabilized and she managed to sit up, noticing they were still in a circular corridor ringing the central atrium, only two or three levels down from the terminal section they were just in. Bran offered a hand to her and she took it, letting herself be pulled up to a standing position.

  "Ow," she said as the blood rushed from her head, making her dizzy again. She massaged her left temple that had struck the floor as they landed, and could feel at least a couple of other tender areas she would have to examine more closely later.

  "You okay?" Bran asked.

  She turned to him and proceeded to punch him in the arm. "Don't ever do that again!"

  "Sorry," he said, wincing. "Come on, won't take them long to catch up." They set off in the direction of the lifts.

  "What was that?" Petra asked. "Why didn't we fall?"

  "Repulsor field," Bran said, and when Petra looked more confused, he elaborated. "It counteracts the flow of gravity, prevents accidental falls." They stepped up to the lift and Bran pressed the button. When the door opened and no one else was on, she breathed a bit easier. Leading Petra in, Bran keyed for the first level.

  "So what now?" she asked. "There are people after us – well, after me, and I don't feel like we have that much of an advantage."

  "Don't worry, I have a plan."

  "That's not encouraging," Petra said. "We haven't really done anything wrong, isn't all this running just going to make things worse?"

  "Your logic is commendable," Bran said. "But a violation is still a violation, despite whether it was intentional or not, and the elves are very protective about their cultural space."

  Petra opened her mouth to protest but was interrupted as the door opened in front of them. "We'll try to talk our way out of this if we don't make it out, okay?" he said, turning and leading her along the corridor, making for the main concourse.

  They stuck to the outer edge of the rotunda, trying to stay away from the center where they would be visible from the upper floors in the atrium. They tried to move quietly and draw as little attention to themselves as possible, but were still startled at every nearby sound of footsteps or doors opening. Reaching the lobby, they stopped, Bran holding up a hand.

  "What now?" Petra whispered.

  "This isn't going to work," he said, gesturing to the side of the expansive chamber. They were standing just inside a large archway that separated the front lobby from the main rotunda, and though they weren't in direct view of the front entryway, in the towering panels of metal and glass lining either side of the chamber they could see a reflection of the entry doors.

  "There are more guards than normal," Bran said, nodding at the reflection. "There's usually a sentry outside, then two more at the security checkpoint just inside, but I'm counting four inside and what looks like more outside as well."

  "Why?" Petra asked, a note of panic rising in her voice. "I'm not dangerous, I didn't come in here waving a gun around, why all the extra security? I'm just a kid."

  Bran's face relaxed slightly. "This isn't your fault," he said, his voice soft. "If you had been anyone else the response would have been the same. This is the cultural center of their entire species, offworlders aren't even allowed in without consulate approval and escort." He shrugged. "You stumbled into this situation accidentally, but honestly."

  "Lot of good that does me," Petra said. "How do I get out of it?"

  "We pick a different door," Bran said. "Come on, they'll be expecting us to leave by one of the main exits. We need to find one they won't think you'll have access to." They turned around, headed back into the rotunda, then took a side door back into what looked like a service area.

  "Won't they just be keeping an eye on all the exits?" Petra asked.

  Bran stopped. "Well … maybe," he conceded. "Look, we need every advantage we can get."

  Petra looked around. They were in a simple corridor, similar to the one Cray had led her down, with no windows, few doors, and square utilitarian lighting along the ceiling. "So where are we going? Is there a back door?"

  "More like a side door," Bran said, trying to be nonchalant as he checked behind them as they walked. "My merchant pass doesn't get me very far past the receiving area, but it might get us into other noncritical areas, like the kitchen." When Petra looked confused, he elaborated. "Food services has their own receiving area."

  They reached the end of the corridor, which emptied out into circular vestibule with a bay of service lifts, across from which was a wide set of double doors. On the left was a card scanner and Bran pulled his pass out of a pocket, waving it at the reader. A green light flashed, followed by the click of a door unlocking, then an immediate booming thrum that vibrated through the entire structure in a cascade that made Petra shudder as every single light in the corridor abruptly shut out.

  Bran froze, looking around, the alarm on his face clear even in the pale wash of the blue emergency glowstrips that had come on along the corridor floor edges. It had become deathly quiet as well, and in the gulf of silence Petra was abruptly aware of her heart beating in her throat.

  "What did you do?" she asked, her voice reverberating louder in the silence than she was expecting.

  "That wasn't me," Bran said, trying his card in the reader again. There was no response, and the door didn't budge. "Looks like the power's out." He turned to Petra. "We need to head back to the front. Some areas lock down in an outage, and we don't want to be trapped in here with no power." They turned and headed back the way they came, noticing others now coming out into the corridors, some looking around in confusion, some immediately making for the entry chamber, all looking similarly confused.

  "I take it this isn't normal," Petra guessed.

  "No," Bran said. "This complex is on independent generators, powered by the river itself, and there are redundancies so if one goes down, the others pick up without an interruption." He gestured around them. "This means there's something wrong."

  Another wave of vibrations cascaded through the building, accompanied by a low rumble like thunder that Petra could feel in her bones. They both froze as Bran looked around, listening intently but hearing nothing.

  His wide eyed glinted in the blue of the emergency lights as he turned back to Petra. "I don't know what that was, but it wasn't thunder. Come on." They set off again, this tim
e at a full sprint.

  • • •

  Mira had the last book in her stack open. She quickly flipped pages, blinking rapidly as her ocular implants captured images of each page spread. She had gotten what she needed from the relevant entries in the digital archive and had then moved on to the older volumes in Physical Storage. She sat in a hermetically sealed room in the environmentally controlled section, wearing gloves and a face mask to avoid introducing any new moisture or foreign contaminants into the collection.

  Mira reached the end of the book, having decided for expediency to scan all pertinent volumes and sort through the data later when she was safely back on Vermithrax. She carefully closed the volume, placed it on the stack with the others, and walked them back out, returning them to their case. She then sealed the glass door and reset the vacuum and temperature controls.

  She stepped out into the decontamination barrier, shedding her mask and gloves, then exited into the central vestibule, making her way toward the outer lobby. Halfway across the chamber, however, she was plunged into darkness as every light abruptly cut out, followed by a vibrational shudder that passed through the building as every piece of electrical equipment powered down.

  Mira stopped, the sensors in her eyes automatically switching over to infrared as blue emergency glowstrips lit up the edges of the floor. She made for the door, but found it shut tight. She turned around to scan the room, thinking. She was in an environmentally controlled section, which automatically locked down all outer entries in a power loss to keep the inner climate stable for as long as possible.

  "Castle, we may have a problem," she said into her comm, but got no response. She tapped her earpiece. "Castle?" she said again, taking out her handheld. There was no signal between her and the communication hub at the center of the city.

  "Lovely," she said, putting the handheld away. She walked back to check the rear of the section. The doors between the interconnected suites were open, which meant there was a possibility she could get to the far end of the section, where she hoped to find access to a maintenance crawlway. She pulled up the building's schematics on her handheld. The section she was in had six interconnected suites. The far-right suite abutted another section of terminal rooms, while the front of each suite led into the main Physical Storage complex, which itself would be sealed on all other sides. The suite on the far left, however, shared a wall with the east lift cluster vestibule, and she was more likely to find a way out there.

  She stepped off into the next suite, her eyes scanning the rooms as she went for alternative options. Two rooms in, she froze as a seismic vibration shook through the building with a low angry rumble. Mira listened for a moment, her brow creased. The sky had been clear when she arrived, and they weren't close enough to the sea for a storm to have blown in this quickly. And the vibration had passed through in a wave, like an impact tremor from an explosion.

  She immediately turned and dashed off in the opposite direction, remembering that there was an outside window in one of the forward suites. As she ran, she could feel smaller, similar vibrations pulse through the building, and the low rumbling returned and intensified until Mira was no longer certain what she was hearing.

  She reached the window and froze in her tracks, her shock punctuated by another wave of seismic vibrations, this one loud and jarring. The shockwave was the result of a large explosion that ripped through a building mere blocks away, and as she watched, a wall of orange and purple flame rose up, engulfing the building's nearest neighbors and spreading to either side.

  Mira didn't understand what she was seeing. Much of the center sections of the city were soaring structures of metal and glass, with almost nothing that was flammable to the extent that she was witnessing, and the entire municipal district was powered by clean energy, with no chemical pipelines or other accelerants to speak of. Plumes of smoke could be seen starting to rise into the sky farther into the distance, and as she leaned into the window alcove to get a wider field of view, she saw them: two shadows, flitting across the faces of the buildings in front of the fire, almost too fast to see.

  Mira didn't wait to see any more, immediately on her feet and sprinting back through the complex. She no longer had time to be delicate. Once back in the central vestibule, she drew her sidearm and aimed at the main front entry, a wide set of glass double doors. Not even slowing down, she fired a quick succession of four shots into the center of the glass then ducked her head, raising her arm up to cover her face. The first three shots had weakened the glass, the fourth breaking through, sending a web of fractures outward from the center, so that when Mira hit, it shattered out away from her with almost no effort. She slid to a halt at the central atrium railing, took a second to brush glass bits out of her hair and off her clothes, then immediately bounded off toward the main stairwell.

  • • •

  Petra and Bran stepped out into the main rotunda as another wave of vibrations shook the building, this one closer and more forceful than the last. They were also confronted with a wave of people heading for the front entrance, and quickly found themselves being pulled along with the crowd, growing denser by the minute. There was more security present as well, but they appeared to be more concerned with keeping people moving and didn't seem to even notice them.

  "Keep your head down," Bran said to Petra. "Looks like whatever's going on is giving us an exit." They made their way to the middle of the group they were in, and generally tried to keep a several-person buffer between them and any security personnel they saw as they were ferried directly out the front door. They stepped out into the sun and Petra stopped short, blinking.

  Ahead was a long, sweeping stairway leading down and splitting around a wide circular courtyard ringed with greenery and tall twisting spires. Paths led off the center out to the side wings of the building that arced around the back half of the courtyard. A wide avenue connected the far end of the courtyard to the main thoroughfare that crossed in front of the council complex. And beyond that was chaos.

  The walkways leading from the council complex out into the city were filled with people pouring out of buildings, while ground and air traffic were practically choked to a halt as everyone seemed to be trying to flee at once. In the distance, a wall of flame cut across the center of the city, with pillars of smoke rising into the sky, obscuring the line of sight to what damage might lie beyond. And with her eyes turned toward the sky, she finally saw them.

  A rough line of maybe a dozen dark serpentine shapes moved swiftly across the tops of the buildings, sweeping from left to right. Thin tendrils of white heat stabbed down into the city skyline like blades, creating new eruptions of orange and purple flame that boiled up into the air like liquid, flowing through the space around the buildings and adding to the intense wall of fire that crept steadily toward them.

  Petra couldn't tear her gaze away from the spectacle. She could feel waves of people pushing past her as the council complex slowly emptied out, but she found herself rooted to the spot. Even though she had been huddled down in a corner indoors when it had happened, the memory of the shattering destruction across her little town that had come from a single dragon that hadn't actually been trying was indelibly seared onto her memory, to the point that standing there watching it happen in front of her on a monumentally larger scale was nothing short of paralyzing. She was dimly aware of Bran grabbing for her hand, and it took a moment for her brain to register that he was speaking to her.

  "…Petra," he was saying, trying to get through her fog. "Petra, come on, we need to move." She looked over at him, trying to formulate a response, when another building, this one a few blocks closer to them from the firewall, ruptured in a gigantic explosion, sending a shockwave out that rattled her teeth, snapping Petra out of her reverie. "Right! Sorry," she said, shaking her head and following Bran as they headed down the main steps to the courtyard, falling in with the flow of foot traffic.

  Petra
looked around at the people flowing in all directions, then ahead to the impossible force of dragons and their wall of flame that continued toward them, relentless and unyielding. "Why aren't we heading in the other direction?" she asked.

  "We can't go back through the building, we'd have to go around." He pointed to the right and Petra noticed there were no gaps in the semicircular wings of the council building, forcing them to go forward before being able to go out in either direction. "But we don't want to go that way," he said. "We're on the northern edge of the city, the only thing on the other side of the complex is forest. What we need to do is get underground."

  Petra wondered if that was a good idea. The dragon she had encountered back home had come from underground, and she didn't feel like that would be any safer. She was about to voice that concern when Bran continued. "There's a transport system under the city. If it's still operating, it'll take us far away from here, hopefully outside the range of all of this," he said, gesturing toward the oncoming horror.

  They started out, making their way across the courtyard and out into the city proper, going along with the flow of people as they filtered through the rows of buildings. Two blocks in they were sprinting, and Petra could feel the air around them get increasingly hotter and thicker as the flames drew nearer, as every few minutes a new explosion nearby would shake the ground. Shadows of the dragons passing by in their sweep pattern overhead could be seen flitting across the row of buildings directly in front of them, and her nervous fear was quickly turning into crippling terror.

  Petra screamed as a large shadow passed over them accompanied by a hissing shriek that hurt her ears. The top floors two buildings away burst into flame, the upper windows shattering outward. Petra dove under the overhang of the closest building, dragging Bran with her as a hail of glass shards rained down onto the pavement around them.