“Aya, please come with me,” I pleaded with the Siren holding the vial she’d taken from Addison, “I need you to help me explain the serum, the gas, Addison ... to the Heads of Clans.”

“No, no, no, we kill the gas. We done after that. I go back to normal. Quiet. No more trouble. No more Emerald Siren loose,” she said bluntly. Aya had a knack for letting others fill in the words she chose not to waste. She was stubborn with the body of a young woman but the unshakeable resolve of one who’s lived as long as she had.

Aya had existed in the dwelling under the docks for longer than any of us could remember. She only wanted to exist to barter between Scalers and Anthros. Nothing more. Nothing less. It had been decades since anyone had seen her dragon set free. This was too much, and now I was asking her to do even more than she already had. But I couldn’t go back to Bart with merely a story and memories of a woman who he wouldn’t even dare to eat. The very same woman who disrupted his lair so long ago. Aya had to help me.

“Please. We can use the rest of my men to find wherever they’re hiding and get us inside to destroy everything. Bart needs to know what we’re up against. We have to have a way to combat the gas. How did you withstand it at The Rock?”

“It’s my scales. My scales not harm me. Manipulation of scales no matter. Fine let’s go see Bartholomew Victor.”

Relief and familiarity washed over me as I entered Bart’s courtyard. I’d been bruised, battered, and experimented on. While I wanted nothing more than to collapse in my chambers, there was still work to be done. I escorted Aya into the room where Finch and Preston sat not too long ago exercising their indifference and hesitation. They’d be even bigger fools not to believe me now.

Bart was sitting at the table with Seth over his shoulder. I liked Seth, he was a great soldier but not a very good leader. He could follow instructions better than anyone else I knew, and I wouldn’t trust anyone with my life like I did him. But seeing him standing over Bart’s shoulder, appearing as my replacement, sent a chill down my body. I didn’t like it.

“Well that didn’t take long, I see,” I growled showing Aya where to sit.

Bart looked up to see who was disrupting him. The expression on his face was lackluster at best. He sent Seth out of the room before speaking, “How nice of you to finally join us? You know if you wanted some time off to chase some tail, you could have told me. I’m a good listener, especially if you would have told me that you needed a break. You didn’t have to come-”

“What the hell are you talking about?” my nostrils flared as the briny flavor of flames tickled the back of my throat.

He pulled out a remote control to the security cameras posted around the city. The projector turned on, playing the clips against the wall. It was of Addison and me in the lab, the moment I pulled her in to kiss her through the bars.

“Are you crazy?! Do you have any idea what they were doing to me in that place? Where did you get this?”

“One of the pets saw it and thought I should see it. Preston gave it to me,” he snarled. That irritated him even more. Neither of us needed Preston to have a reason to question our decisions. “We were supposed to be in and out. No one was supposed to know, and now you’re the leading man of this romantic tale. Oh wait, here, it gets better.”

He played the clip of Shaw and me fighting outside, right before Addison fell off the cliff. It showed me leaving Shaw and running after her, diving over the edge.

“I see you made it,” Bart shook his head, “What about her?”

“That’s what I’m here to talk to you about. The guy working there and that guy whose face is buried in the mud are responsible for that extra movement down by the docks. They have this crazy shit that stops us from scaling. That’s how they got me. When we swarmed the building something pricked me in the back of the neck, and I’ve been trying to get back here ever since.”

“Bartholomew,” Aya called to him.

He craned his neck around to see her sitting across from him, “My apologies, Aya. I didn’t realize he’d brought you in here.”

“I wouldn’t dare bring Addison back in this place,” I mumbled, and as soon as the words slipped out I instantly regretted it.

Bart stood up, cocking his head to the side, it clicked. Racing toward me, I was too tired to react, even if I wanted to. He gripped his hand around my throat and slammed me against the wall. With flames spitting out after every angry word, “I knew I recognized that cunt. That’s the same trash Trevor brought in here, trying to make us like Preston. Not you too? Not my number one. You let her turn you against me, against us?”

“No,” I choked out.

“We need to go, so show him,” Aya commanded. I pulled the vial out of my pocket showing it to him.

“This is why I came here. They have another lab somewhere in the city. I couldn’t track them. I’m exhausted. We need to get in there and destroy it. This stuff? It’s dangerous. It’ll kill us all,” I told him hoping he’d listen.

Bart’s eyes moved from me to the vial in my hand, to Aya’s nodding head. He let me go.

“SETH GET IN HERE! Bring Troy in with you,” he shouted.

The other guard came in, with one of the smaller guys in our unit. We used him to crawl into tight spaces, to flesh out Anthros that could be in hiding waiting to ambush us. I gave it to Aya to show him how it worked. She placed a drop of the serum into a gas mask and set fire to it. It turned to a gas faster than I thought as she slipped the mask over Troy’s face.

We all stood back and watched as he choked, gagged, and threatened to scale right there in the conference room. Scales flashed up and down his body, but they stopped before he could release his dragon. He snatched the mask off of his face.

“What the hell is this shit?!” he asked in a panicked tone. He flexed every muscle in his body. Fear rippled down his face as tears began to fall, “I can’t scale! I CAN’T SCALE! What the hell did you do to me?! Help me! HELP ME!”

Aya took a handful of some dust out of a pouch and blew it in his face forcing the young soldier to pass out.

Bart and Seth stared in astonishment for a few seconds before calling others in to carry the guy out of there. I felt bad for him. I panicked the first time I realized I was under the serum, but I’m sure if Aya hadn’t put him under, he was about to do it himself.

“So there’s more of this stuff? How much more?” Bart asked.

“They grabbed Addison down by the docks, I assume it’s to make more, but I lost track of them. Pull up the security footage and see where they went. No sneaking around this time. We need to go in, torch the place and all the work they’re doing inside of it.”

Bart finally listened to me as he began reviewing different camera angles from down by the docks. I’d never seen my dragon on screen before, but there I was shooting a direct beam at the armored vehicle. My wings flapped in slow motion allowing me to hover in one spot. I didn’t realize how big I actually was either. And to think Aya was twice the size of all of us. No wonder the Anthros wanted us to stop scaling. There’s no way they’d win a battle against us. With that notion resting on my mind, I knew I was done fighting. After this, I couldn’t stay in Black Harbor to fight a battle I no longer believed in. I wanted everyone to just go on living peacefully. More importantly, I wanted to live my life like Aya, quiet, no more trouble.