Dante

  So comes snow after fire, and even dragons have their endings.

  --J.R.R. Tolkien

  “Down!” Anton shouts, ripping a canister free of his makeshift glider and tossing it into the Dragon-filled room while yanking the parasail itself in front of the door.

  The thunderous eruption of raw plasma from within cuts off all conversation. And nearly cuts us in half as the implausibly tough sailcloth distends, warps and rips apart within a single second.

  But another muffled whump comes from within, and the blazing heat of plasma fire suddenly quenches.

  Followed by a wave of bone-chilling cold which floods into the passage around us.

  I see Anton is backing away fast from the doorway, as am I. It’s move or freeze.

  From within I hear a wave of rattling thumps and then a sound like endlessly shattering glass.

  Anton winces. “Hated to do that,” he admits, his breath a plume of white mist and snow in the frigid air. “But we do have to stop them, and they were going to kill us. We can check in a minute.” He nods towards the billowing, icy mist flowing from the entryway like a river of death.

  “What?” I ask.

  “Liquid helium and some other cryogenics.” Anton waves it away. “Chris figured out how to compress them. That’s why the material deflects charged plasma so well. Meissner effect gives it an extra boost.”

  I glance from him to the mist, and feel a greater chill as it courses over our feet.

  “How often do you need cover from charged plasma?” I ask carefully.

  He grins. “Welcome to the Archons, man.” His whole body shakes in almost silent laughter. Or maybe he’s shivering. Hard to tell. He’s amused, though.

  We give the freezing mist less than a minute to clear. Then we move as one for the room.

  The chains and gears are still turning above us, though coated with a rime of frost in the sub-zero air. I can see the film of distortion halfway up beyond which everything seems to fade. And past that, the shattered pane of reinforced glass leading into the restricted section of Celestine Library.

  I exchange a glance with Anton.

  “Heat rises,” he says with a shrug, raising the launcher for his rappelling line. “And so do we.”

  I nod, and we fire together, each hitting opposite sides of the broken pane. I notice the slight quiver as they pass the layer where everything starts losing color and focus.

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  “Gravity flips right about there,” I note, pointing.

  Anton nods. “And flips back again,” he notes. “Open wormhole aperture, I’m guessing. Grav does weird things in those.” He begins reeling in his line, or rather tightening it, as he puts a foot on the wall and begins walking up it like it’s something he does every day.

  “How weird?” I ask, stepping up to the wall and rappelling upward. Yes, it’s strange, but the climbing amounts to a fancy ropes course or something where no one is trying to kill me. So pretty normal, compared to everything else.

  “You weren’t ripped apart by gravitational tidal forces,” Anton points out, “so not nearly as weird as they could be.”

  “Fair enough,” I admit.

  We reach the top, and peer around the gaping window frame. Jagged shards of glass project from every edge, like the fangs of an enraged beast. On the other hand, there are no visible, actual monsters inside. Not even tiny dragons like the ones we’re hunting.

  Though the floor is strewn with unconscious bodies in high-tech power armor. From the looks of them, they were all beaten senseless at incredible speeds. There are a few holes in the walls and in one bookcase, but not much for a bunch of people caught in a firefight. Or a firefight lasting more than a fraction of a second.

  “Who did this?” I ask, kicking out a couple of fragments and slipping back into the room.

  “Not us,” Anton says with finality. “Hammersmith dropped through the Maze one we knew where you’d gone, and all of our heavy hitters followed her in.” He shrugs. “Plus me.” He taps a couple sharp pieces of glass back inside and then eases in as well.

  “My uncle said his backup was almost here before I heard these guys dropping,” I recall, looking around.

  “Keiron?” Anton asks, giving me a significant look. “I mean, anything’s possible with him, but if we’re lucky, he sent one of your cousins.” He starts heading towards the elevators and stairwell, stepping over bodies as he does so. No one on the floor so much as twitches, though everyone I look at is still breathing.

  “His daughters?” I ask, following. That seems… strange, yet somehow logical.

  “Yep.” All three elevators are open and, as we glance inside, their control panels appear to be out of order and smoking slightly. “Problem is, how big was the attack, if she didn’t follow you in? If she’s not done already?”

  “What do you mean?” I say, though his words make sense somehow. I just can’t say why.

  Anton sneaks a look into the stairway, then leans back to look at me. “You do still remember them, right?”

  “Kerry and Lyra? Of course.” I shake my head, as though trying to knock cobwebs from my brain. “I know they’re capable, but…”

  Anton snorts, and peers over the stair rail. Everything below is deathly silent. He begins heading down, fast. “Capable is the world’s biggest understatement.”

  “Enhanced, sure,” I acknowledge, “but…”

  “But they’re two of the most-powerful Anomalies on Earth,” Anton cuts in. “Seriously, man, they’re even more scary than—” He cuts himself off and swallows whatever he was about to say.

  “So they could do this?” I ask.

  “Absolutely. Either one. Not sure how far they go up the Savant and Paragon scales, but far enough we don’t need to worry where they stop.”

  I nod, and we descend the rest of the way in silence, stepping over more Circle troops sprawled along the way. If these were all taken down by the same person, they must have gotten dozens just in this building. If she did it in the seconds between Keiron’s heads up and my fall down the clocktower’s shaft…

  That would have meant moving several times faster than any Enhanced I’d ever heard of, while incapacitating all these armored shock troops as she went. And being the Circle, I have to wonder how Enhanced each individual soldier was at that.

  We hit the now-deserted ground floor. I’ve yet to see anyone dead, and we don’t have time to treat unconscious attackers. Not if the mini-Dragons we’re after still have a chance of reaching the controls and opening up the world to the kind of attack we saw down in Aurelia’s Nexus.

  “No signs of any ambushers,” Foresight notes. “Human or reptilian. But I’m getting some traces of plasma heading out the door.”

  “Shades?” I ask, slipping mine on. Anton follows my example.

  “Done,” Foresight answers, and now there’s a superimposed tracery of blue-green light over the scene, showing where the trails passed earlier. Some on the ground, some in the air. All matching what he’s seen from the diminutive Dragons we’ve encountered so far.

  “Let’s see where their trails lead us,” I advise Anton, texting rapidly in my iPhone as I head for the double doors of the main entrance. “And share the data with anyone we can. Either we follow them to the wormhole controls, or round them up before they can make progress.”

  He’s texting, also. “Got it. Victory conditions, either way.”

  We walk through the open Library doors together, and see what’s become of the street.

  A spiral of blue-green fire and tiny, rising Dragons dances in midair above the Library’s fountain.

  A strange hum fills the air, somehow below the threshold of hearing, yet vibrating us to our very bones and beyond.

  “I think,” Anton remarks, “they may have found something already.”

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