1. Arianna

Arianna had a bomb, three bullets, two refined daggers, a mental map of her heist, and a magic winch-box. All she waited for now was darkness.

The refinery she stared down upon had been coughing up only wisps of smog from its spiraling smokestacks since sunset. Ari had been watching it dwindle for weeks until it finally all but wrote “Tonight is the night, oh White Wraith” in the sky. She’d been eager for this job; the pay was astounding. But that hadn’t been what drew her to it. No, she loved the challenge of it, the way it dredged up patience and planning and calculation from her like rare minerals from a mine.

Weeks of preparation—listening in on grunts describing their rotations, lifting papers from refinery manager’s homes, studying the logic behind the blackened, mammoth skeleton of steel and iron that was known as the refinery—had come down to this night. She looped her line through the stonework next to her and clipped it to itself. Dortam’s infamous White Wraith was so very ready for what was coming next.

Moonlight streamed bright enough to cut her shape into the ground far below, making her presence known to any who bothered to take note. But Ari stood with relaxed shoulders and a slack posture. The grunts would be called into the refinery’s core to provide extra protection when the reagents were switched. They wouldn’t know they were a glint in her eye until it was far too late.

The refinery belched up a sudden stream of smoke. Thick, inky, oppressive. It sizzled across Ari’s nose with the uncomfortable tang of magic turned sour. The reagents had been exhausted.

The moon’s annoyingly attentive stare finally faltered in the clouding sky, and Ari stepped forward into welcoming blackness. The winch box on her hip sang as it funneled golden cabling from spools attached to her belt and through the harness strapped across her waist and chest. Seconds ticked by in her mind, sharp and precise. Ari knew how fast she would fall, and the exact height of the building where she’d perched just a moment ago. After that it was basic arithmetic to determine how long it’d take to reach the top of the iron-spiked wall that bordered the refinery.

Magic pulsed from her fingertips as she tapped the winch box. The gears within clicked smoothly, slowing her descent at her behest. Ari reached down and felt the top of one of the spikes just beneath her, exactly where she had expected. Vaulting off the wall, she pulled the linchpin of her line and tumbled onto the barren ground below.

Ari rested a hand on one of the two crossed daggers at the small of her back and summoned the line back into the spool on her hip. The metal cord shuddered and sprang to life at her silent magical command, slithering back to its home like a snake to its den. She turned on her heel and strode through the murky darkness without need of a light. The refined goggles that served to enhance her already-above-average eyesight made easy work of navigating the night.

A giant, ineffective padlock attempted to bar her entry. She’d taken apart her first Rivet lock when she was a toddler; the satisfying weight of the tumblers engaging with the soft click that followed filled her with a familiar delight.

Numbers remained consistent. Numbers and facts attempted to bring order from a chaotic world, to make sense of the impossible. They were the foundation for colossal structures and the tiniest of clockwork machines alike. Ari loved numbers, and not just because they saved her life by keeping her alert in her surroundings.

She knew that each of her long strides were about a peca. She knew the dimly lit workers’ passage she went through was about twenty pecas long. And just for fun, she knew—based on the foreman’s old schematics that she lifted from his home office a week earlier—that they placed tiny bioluminescent scones about every two pecas.

She moved with the ease and purposefulness that came from being unafraid and unhindered by the concerns that clouded the emotional mind. It all vanished the moment she became the White Wraith. Like this, she was an extension of the will of her benefactors, an enemy to all Dragons, and more than just a Fenthri. She cast aside the mortal coil to become something…more. When Ari felt the tattered flaps at the bottom of her white coat hit her booted calves, she felt like a bloody god.

The slow beats of mechanical hearts grinding to a halt echoed up to her from deep within the refinery. Mechanisms that spun molten steel for final refining grew still. The room would cool, then Revo grunts would guard the Alchemists as they replenished the reagent chambers anew. Which meant that right now, two floors above her, they were preparing the next batch of reagents for refining. They had been taken from a chilled stasis locker and were waiting, ripe for the taking. Ari’s fingers twitched.

With impeccable timing, Ari reached the grated door of one of the refinery’s four supply elevators. The New Dortam refinery could process four separate chambers of reagents, but the smokestacks on the north end had been cool for over a month. As expected, the elevator was still and silent, just waiting for her.

The motor glinted high above, at the top of the shaft. Its large wheels nearly glowed through the filter of her goggles. Ari focused on it carefully, willing it to life. The cogs obeyed, slowly churning in the darkness. She stepped onto the roof of the elevator as it eased by, and rode it two landings up.

When heists were this easy, it almost felt like she hadn’t done anything to earn her infamy. The “impenetrable fortress” of New Dortam had presented a challenge no greater than the one posed by a standard bank vault.

The elevator put her just where she expected: a dark wing of Alchemist laboratories. Magic hung heavy in the air, nearly suffocating. It made her skin crawl with the sensation of rot. Experiments they had been working for far too long were locked away in some of these chambers.

She stopped at the twelfth door, spinning the map of the refinery in her head. Each room was five pecas wide. On the diagonal heading she’d made after entry, she should be just above the reagent preparation room.

The door lock was plain iron—not a trace of gold about it. Ari clicked her tongue against her teeth. Unrefined and nonmagical. She’d have to open it manually. It was trickier than the Rivet padlock, but just slightly, and equally ineffective at barring her entry.

The room was thick with the nearly visible haze of magic and chemicals. Worktables stood littered with records and research. Beakers sat out, some full, some empty. Ari reached into her inner breast pocket and pulled out the metal disk that had been digging into her chest all night beneath the straps of her harness. She tossed it into the center of the room haphazardly before strolling back out.

Some Alchemist was about to have a really bad morning.

With a thought, the gold at the center of the disk turned molten and the heat activated the powder packed around it. The bomb exploded with a BANG of satisfyingly epic proportions. With it, Ari’s relatively quiet heist was thrown full steam ahead.

She started to run.

She clipped her line to the handle of the door that had just failed to keep her out, jumping through the now gaping hole in the floor. She landed on rubble and the remnants of half the reagent preparation room. The blood of an Alchemist oozed from underneath the pile, and Ari was careful not to step in it. Blood left tracks that were too easy to follow by Fenthri, Chimera, and Dragon alike. The other Alchemists were still reeling, coughing, wheezing—trying to figure out what was happening.

“Th-the reagents…” one wheezed.

“Have been so beautifully prepared,” Ari praised brightly. “Still cold and encapsulated, their magic preserved just so… Perfection!”

She grabbed the three golden tubes from the floor where they’d landed after the explosion. Her prizes had been destined for refining, but now she would whisk them away from the hands of Dragon dogs.

“White Wraith, die!” one of the Alchemists shouted.

Ari scrutinized the woman. Her hands were long and bright red, a thin scar around her wrists where they met pale grey flesh. Ari’s eyes fell on the woman’s face. Two triangles—one pointing up and the other down, connected by a line that intersected their off-set points—were tattooed in black ink on the woman’s cheek. A bold circle encased them. “You’re young for a circle. Don’t throw your life away.”

The woman charged with a cry.

“I warned you,” Ari sighed dramatically. In one swift movement, she stepped to the side, drew her dagger, and plunged it to the hilt in the woman’s gut. Ari hated murdering talent; the world had such precious little of it. But the woman had been warned. Ari pulled her magic back, only lacing her dagger with enough to make the wound difficult to heal but not impossible. The Alchemist was a Chimera and, if her Dragon blood was strong enough, she’d manage to survive such a wound.

The doors to the room burst open, the grunts behind it freezing at the sight before them. Ari grinned wildly. Their cheeks bore the tattooed symbol of a revolver chamber, with one of the six holes filled. Revo grunts.

“Too late!” Ari gleefully withdrew her dagger from where it still nestled in the woman’s gut. The winch box on her hip sprang to life with a thought and she sprang upward, back through the hole and up onto the floor above.

Gunfire pelted the opening she’d just traversed, leaving singed and pitted marks.

“Incendiary rounds, for little old me? You shouldn’t have.” Ari pulled her head away just in time for another volley of shots to light up the ceiling above her. Barely marked Revos. It took nothing to goad them into wasting a precious canister on her taunting.

“Get her!” someone cried, rather unhelpfully.

Ari would’ve been nervous or scared by the proclamation if anyone actually competent was on her tail. She bounded down the hall, each long stride of her muscled legs carrying her toward freedom, success, and a tidy sum of dunca. She threw her shoulder into a door as she opened it, letting the momentum swing her around a corner to another access hall.

Footsteps were incoming from the left, but Ari was too fast. She ran with her life on the line and, instead of fear, she felt elation at the fact. Blood pumped through every inch of her, racing as fast as her feet. Her skin tingled with the magic that mended the tiny tears from exertion in her muscles as soon as they formed.

Ari bounded through a door at the end of the hall and was met with the early light of a gray dawn. With near mechanical precision, she clipped onto, and leapt from, the railing surrounding the suspended walkway. Ari fell harmlessly, slowing just before the ground rose to greet her.

“It won’t work,” she called up to the grunts trying to cut through her clip. “For working at a refinery, you’re certainly imbecilic about gold.”

With a touch that was befitting of the White Wraith’s reputation, Ari snapped her fingers at the clip high above her. It unclipped itself and reared back before slapping across the grunts’ faces like a barbed whip, leaving a sharp crimson line across their tattoos in its wake. She swung her arm and watched with curt satisfaction as the clip soared to a balcony on the other side of the refinery wall. The winch on her hip couldn’t have moved faster; Ari didn’t have time to properly brace herself and her head shot back with the force of the pull. It wiped the smug grin off her face.

Magic was electric in the air, sending tiny daggers prickling against her exposed skin.

The seconds she took to move her line were almost too long. The ground rattled right where Ari had been standing, imploding inward in what should have been a lethal attack. Bloody, steaming, Chimera, circled Revo.

This was not like the Chimera Alchemist Ari had encountered in the reagent preparation chamber. This Chimera was a hulking creature whose skin was a scarred patchwork of a dark Fenthri gray and Dragon rainbow. Ari turned, straining her neck in spite of the pain to get a good look at him. If he had been chasing her from the onset, she would’ve been in trouble. He hadn’t been in any of her notes.

She braced herself, slammed into the balcony railing she’d chosen, and flipped over it. The Chimera roared, foaming at the mouth. Imperfect, poor soul. The powers that were at the refinery had taken a circled Revo—a master of his craft—and stuffed as many Dragon parts as they could into him. He was a Chimera in the worst of ways, and he wasn’t long for the world now. No matter how many organs or how much blood the Alchemists pumped into that “experiment” of a creature, his core was still Fenthri. And that much magic was breaking down his body, starting with his brain.

Ari thought he might not see more than another dawn, but that was enough time to make trouble for her.

The Chimera raised a hulking weapon. A crackle of magic filled the air and Ari was off with barely enough time to fill her lungs again. She wasn’t there to slay any forsaken Chimera—that was way above the pay-grade for this job, even at the insane amount she’d been contracted for. Ari was proud, but she wasn’t stupid. She didn’t fight battles she had a slim chance of winning if there wasn’t a reward on the line.

The creature gave chase the second Ari was on the move. She bounded from rooftop to rooftop as more grunts poured out from the refinery. The stone and concrete skeleton of a building under construction had her skidding to a halt over roof shingles. She pulled a small canister from her belt, three notches marring the otherwise flawless exterior. Ari drew her revolver from its holster on her left leg and popped the canister into one of its open chambers.

Malice.

It surged through her, the will to destroy—the desire to burn and crash. The want to explode things into a million tiny pieces that could never have any hope of being put back together. Alchemical runes on the outside of her gun shone white as she pulled the trigger, and let go of it all.

Florence hadn’t been lying. The girl had outdone herself with the canister, which demanded an exhausting amount of magic, but in turn shot a beam of pure power to the structure Ari had chosen. The explosion was as bright as sunlight and nearly blinded her with the magnification of her goggles.

The building shuddered and groaned, coming to life. Ari pushed herself as hard as she could, the Revos from the refinery still hot on her tail. But she was several steps ahead, literally and figuratively. She knew how the building would sway and fall. She knew the way to run to narrowly miss the first colossal beam collapsing. Once more, it all came down to numbers: the number of load-bearing pillars, the weight distribution of the structure, the probability of how the collapse would occur.

The second she crossed onto the other side of the smoke and chaos, Ari dropped down into an alleyway. She’d had her grand finale. Now it was time for her to do as her namesake and disappear like a wraith with the dawn.

Ari didn’t have any safe houses in New Dortam. She could never feel safe in an area that worked so closely with the Dragons, their Royuk language was used as commonly as Fennish. Even if her eyes could make sense of the rectangles, lines, and dots, she avoided reading the Dragon notices and advertisements plastered on buildings.

Well, almost.

“That looks nothing like me.” Ari squinted at the drawing of a lithe and long-haired woman on a wanted poster that had White Wraith written in bold Royuk below, along with an impressive sum of dunca. The reward for her head had gone up, Ari noted with pride. She tore the notice off the wall. Florence would find amusement in it as well.

An unnatural scream tore through the sky, followed by a fast zip. Wind rushed through the alleyways and fluttered the mostly folded paper in her hands. Ari scowled at the rainbow trail glittering through the pale morning clouds.

Bloody Dragon Rider. What in the Five Guilds was going on to get a Rider involved? Ari felt in her bag for the three tubes she’d swiped from the refinery. It was a capital offense to engage in the illegal transport or harvesting of reagents, but that shouldn’t merit the King’s Riders.

A second time, the heavens themselves sounded like they were being torn apart as a Dragon descended from the sky world of Nova. The Dragon’s mechanical gliders swept arcs of magic across the impenetrable clouds that separated Loom and Nova as they darted over the city. Ari pressed the wanted poster into her breast pocket. She’d stick to the original plan. Now was not the time for panic or over-calculation.

The sewer systems of New Dortam funneled together into the older, original system in Old Dortam. Ari headed in a straight line, sticking to alleyways and hastening across the slowly crowding streets she couldn’t avoid. Eventually, she knew she’d hit a main line access, or she’d run into Old Dortam. She’d lost the Revo grunts from the refineries. So long as she moved quickly and confidently, people wouldn’t notice the unorthodox clockwork gearbox and chest harness she wore. People only ever saw what they expected, rarely what was actually there.

Ari rounded the corner of a back alley near her expected sewer entry, and came to a dead stop.

Shingles littered the ground, scattered underneath a prone Dragon. Ari’s breathing quickened, her goggles flaring brightly with the Dragon’s magical presence. Slowly, she reached for the sharper of her daggers.

The Dragon’s steel blue flesh was covered in the shining glow of a corona. It looked like the scales of a sea serpent, sparkling with its own unnatural brightness, and would render even her sharpest golden dagger useless no matter how much magic she put behind it. Ari inched around the opposite wall, her eyes tracking the Dragon the entire time.

He didn’t move. She couldn’t even tell if he was breathing despite being only a short peca away. Ari dared to creep forward, and luck rewarded her.

Exhausted, the Dragon’s corona flashed and disappeared as the golden bracers that sustained the protective magic cracked and fell from around his wrists. Still, the Dragon did not stir. His head and heart were intact, so no matter what state he appeared to be in, he was certainly going to wake soon. His Dragon blood was quickly pulsing through his body, healing him. When his mind caught up from the blackness his fall had created, he would be as well as if nothing had ever happened.

Ari passed the dagger hand to hand.

She didn’t have time to harvest the body properly of all its useful parts. She had to be prepared for the Dragon to wake the second she began trying—if she tried at all. Ari slid her feet over until she was standing next to him. She’d have to cut out his heart in one motion.

It was reckless to the point of idiocy. Ari’s mouth curled into a sinister smile. Florence would scold her for it later. But perhaps the tidy sum a Dragon heart could fetch would be enough to sway the girl.

Kneeling down beside the rainbow-colored eyesore, Ari raised her golden dagger. It was refined steel, and tempered to her magic and her will. It’d slow him if he woke. Ari could only imagine what a fresh Dragon heart was going to fetch in the seedy underground market of Old Dortam.

She plunged her weapon down.

In the same instant, the Dragon’s hand shot up and caught her wrist, stopping her just short of his chest. He stared at her in surprise.

Ari snarled and bore her teeth in rage. She’d been set up. It was certainly too good to be true. A prone Dragon without his corona? Never.

Ari pulled one hand from the dagger and reached for her other. She sliced at the Dragon’s wrist, cutting deep, but the blade was the duller of the two and it stuck in his hardened bones, turning into a spigot for golden blood to pour onto her knees.

The Dragon didn’t move. He held her in place and stared through her attacks and her snarls. The black slit of his yellow eyes roved over her face.

Was this a ploy by the Riders to find out what she looked like?

Ari pushed off the ground with her feet, rotating in place. The Dragon was strong and could hold the sharp point of her dagger off its mark even with all her weight above it. But it took two hands for him to do so, which meant when Ari twisted, she was able to bring her feet down, hard, onto his unprotected face.

He finally let her go and she flipped backward, landing on the balls of her feet, a dagger in each hand. The Dragon stood, contemplating the wound on his arm. It was as though he’d never been cut by anything other than unrefined steel. His broken nose was already resetting itself and would be healed well in advance of the gash in his wrist.

She had a choice. On one shoulder, there was a very sensible little version of herself reminding her that this was not her prey or her job. She’d done what she came into the land of Dragon dogs to do. She should leave and collect her handsome pay. In short, she should stick to the plan.

On the other shoulder was a different tiny version of herself. This version was screaming bloody murder. Cut out his heart! It demanded over and over. It cried for her to do what she was made to do: slay Dragons.

It wasn’t hard to pick which one to listen to. Ari darted forward. First stepping with her right foot, she drew his attention in one direction before jumping onto her left and bringing her right heel across his face.

The Dragon half-dodged, reaching out his foot to hook behind the heel of Ari’s supporting leg. She bent backwards, releasing the duller of her two daggers to tumble with one unarmed hand.

“I don’t want to fight you.” The Dragon held up his palms as though any gesture of his could be nonthreatening. Despite his words, his claws were out—wicked sharp and extending past the end of his fingers in points.

“So don’t, and let me cut out your heart.” Ari set in for another string of attacks. The Dragon dodged about half of them.

“Fenthri—” He side-stepped, narrowly missing a dagger point in his throat. “Listen to me!”

“Not a chance!” she almost sang, pushing him against the wall. His head hit hard and he was dazed a moment. “I have a very strong ‘no negotiating with the enemy’ policy.”

Ari rotated her grip on the knife to an icepick hold and pulled back. His eyes regained clarity as she once more attempted to plunge the dagger into his chest. He grabbed her wrist again, but still didn’t attack. His claws had retracted.

The magical zing of a Dragon Rider flying overhead piqued both their attentions. Fenthri and Dragon alike looked up as the Rider slowed not far from where they’d been brawling.

“I can give you something better than my heart.” The Dragon’s voice had taken on a thrumming intensity that burned with a fire Ari hadn’t heard there previously. But if her feverish attacks hadn’t inspired the change…what had?

“Something better than the satisfaction of killing a Dragon and the reward of a fresh heart?” She hummed. “I doubt it.”

“I’ll give you a boon.”

Ari paused, considering this. She’d heard of boons before, but oh, they were rare. A Dragon rarely lowered himself to the point of giving a boon, and especially not to a Fenthri. Dragons saw the Fenthri as the servant, not the other way around. A boon would make him hers.

“Any one wish of me.” The Dragon’s eyes kept darting skyward. “You can demand anything of me as the terms of the boon.”

“For letting you keep your heart?”

“For taking me to the Alchemists’ Guild.”

It really didn’t matter to Ari what she had to do for the boon. A wish. There were so many things she could wish for. So many old wrongs she could right with the unquestioned help of a Dragon and his magic. It could be a chance for redemption—for vengeance.

Or, at the very least, she could always wish for him to cut out his own heart and give it to her. Then she’d get the satisfaction of watching him do it.

“Fine, Dragon.” The agreement was an ugly smear of magic across her tongue as the boon was formed. It tasted of disgust peppered with loathing. “You have your deal.”