Page 82 of Raven’s Fight

It requires me not to be tracking him.

It requires nobody to have given the sisters a signal of their own, and me not to be standing here watching him walk toward them.

I blink.

Fast.

Chapter 28

Raven

The red flare goes up.

I'm already moving.

The flare is Azalea's — the one signal I gave her for the single circumstance in which I drop everything, regardless of where I am or what I'm holding or how badly I need what I'm holding. I am forty feet from the pinch where the first two fire drakes are waiting. I have spent an hour building toward this exact minute. The first is set. The second is set. If I walk that corridor in the next sixty seconds I have them precisely where I've been working all morning to have them.

The flare burns out against the sky.

I'm already moving south.

Not fast. Fast is predictable. Fast by the shortest road is what the third one is counting on — he made this happen, which means he worked out what it would produce, and what it produces is me arriving committed and reacting along a route anyone could name. If he's put anything in the main corridors, fast and direct walks me straight into it.

So I go up.

The west face of the south dormitory has a drainage pipe I used twice in Year Two for training and tested my weight against both times. It's bolted to the stone every eight feet with anchors far heavier than drainage requires, a decision by the facilities office that I thought was excessive at the time and have been grateful for ever since. The pipe puts me on the second-floor ledge in twenty-two seconds. The stone is cold enough through my palms to feel like it's taking something.

The window latch is the standard kind Balor covered in the Year Two session on getting into buildings — the session everybody thought was absurdly specific and that I have now used three times. It opens from outside if you press the lower left corner of the frame at the right angle while lifting the handle. Four seconds.

Twenty-six seconds total from the base of the pipe.

No announcement. No warning. The third fire drake is somewhere in this building and he has had the time between Azalea's flare and my arrival to set himself. If he set up at the stairwell door, which is the obvious place, he is facing the door.

He isn't facing the window.

I go through the window.

✦ ✦ ✦

The stairwell drops away below me.

I land on the second-floor landing and I read the whole of it in the time it takes to find my feet. This is the thing Balor drills until it stops being a decision: look before you commit, because what a place is when you land in it is never quite what it looked like from outside. It takes one second. One second is enough.

Bella at the foot of the stairs. One arm out, bleeding through a tourniquet she's made from her own jacket sleeve. She's standing the way someone stands who has been in a fight a long time and is managing it rather than winning it — feet wide, weight low, the shape that spends as little as possible while still covering the way in. She has been doing this twenty minutes and she is doing it correctly. The cut isn't slowing her. She's working around it.

A fourth-year green dragon between her and the corridor door. His back is to me. He was watching Bella, not the window. Blade out. He moved it to his left hand when she dropped into that stance, which is either a choice or a sign he's been fighting left-handed the whole time. Either way I keep it.

The third fire drake on the upper landing, above me, mid-shift. The air around him wrong — shimmering, dry, too warm, and the smell of him filling the stairwell like something scorched.

Bella's eyes find me the instant I land. Her face changes, though not in any way visible from where the green dragon is standing. I know her face. What crosses it is recognition and the discipline of not letting it show, the composure of a woman who has just been handed the most useful thing in her fight and has no intention of giving it away.

I move.

The fire drake first. Not a preference — an order of danger. He's mid-shift, which makes him unpredictable and immediately lethal in a way the green dragon, still human and committed to a blade, is not. The half-shifted one is the thing I can't predict. He goes first.

He's six feet above me and the heat is already coming off him in a way I can feel as pressure, as dryness at the back of my throat. Fire drakes run hot in human form. Mid-change they run like an open forge.

I don't give him time to finish.