Gill did as he was told, hacking into the system as quickly as he could. The lights flickered on after a couple of seconds. Without thinking, Alex pulled off her blindfold. The light flooded her eyes, but she pushed past the pain.
The room was blurry but quickly coming into focus. Once her eyesight returned to her, she wished she could have looked away.
The stables were almost completely destroyed. There was rubble everywhere and no dragons to be seen. Alex thought back to the tremors and explosions she had felt when the invasion had first started. She hadn’t seen any damage to the rest of the Nest. The attack must have been focused on the dragon stables.
Alex grabbed Manny and shouted, “I need to find Chine!”
Manny avoided Alex’s eyes. He floated away, trying to get a grasp of just how much damage was done. “They can’t be dead,” Manny whispered. “Their cadets would have felt it. Everyone would have felt it.”
Brath walked away from the other cadets and said, “Maybe the Nest helped them like it’s been helping us. They could be hiding.”
Alex needed that little bit of hope. Hope was all she had. She pushed her way through the rest of the stunned cadets and ran farther into the main area, looking around to see if she could find where the dragons might have gone.
It felt like Alex’s whole plan was falling apart. She had put everyone in danger in the hope of getting to their dragons. Now they might be gone.
Everyone could end up dead because of me, she thought.
Her chest closed up, and her heart was racing. She kept thinking of the orcs—their footsteps echoing in the hall, their screams as they readied their swords and rifles. It was almost too much.
Tears poured out of the rider’s eyes. She felt like her heart was curling up. She wanted to scream, to cry, to be anywhere but where she was right then, yet she was there. The orcs weren’t going anywhere, and neither was she.
Alex faced the rest of the cadets. She didn’t bother wiping the tears from her face. Instead, she stared at the cadets as she hiccupped through her tears. “Manny says the dragons are here,” she said, her voice more confident than she felt. “Everyone, find your dragon. This is where we fight.”
Alex stepped away from the cadets, unsure if she had just ordered everyone to their deaths. It didn’t matter, though. Death had come for them. It was time to find out if they could postpone it for a little longer.
The cadets split up. No one said a word. They were all driven by the urge to find their dragons. Alex thought it might have to do with the binding. Maybe it was more than just the words Myrddin had said. The binding was obviously something far beyond Alex’s understanding.
Alex forced herself to stop thinking. She shoved away every thought that crept into her mind. There was only one thing to focus on—finding Chine. She reached out again, shouting in her mind, Chine! Where are you? Chine!
Chine’s voice came screaming through Alex’s head. She nearly fell over from the force of his thoughts. Child of Dust! Chine shouted. I have been trying to find you for hours. Are you okay? Please tell me you’re well?
Alex stopped running and stood still. Chine had been worried about her. He had known something was going wrong. And he was alive. Most importantly, he was alive. I’m okay, Alex thought to him. The Nest is under attack. Where are you?
We’re hidden. Some kind of magic of the Nest. You can turn it off. Find the central switch. Release us. There was fire in Chine’s thoughts. The dragon wanted to fight.
Alex scanned the stables, trying to see where the central control system was. Everything was rubble. It was impossible to see anything. It’s not impossible, Alex thought. I can do this. I can do this.
An explosion rocked the stables. Alex and the other cadets who were searching for their dragons turned to the doors of the stables.
Holmorth stood on the threshold, his staff raised, the orcs at his back. “Kill them!” Holmorth shouted.
The orcs poured into the room as the cadets shrieked and sprinted off. If she left the cadets, they were all going to die.
Manny went flying toward the orcs, his eyes white and filled with fury. The walls of the Nest bent to his will and shards of crystal flew, impaling six orcs and nailing them to the wall.
Behind Manny, Gill and Brath pulled out their rifles and fired at every orc they could see.
An orc slipped past the plasma fire and grabbed Brath by his red cap. The gnome screamed and fired a bolt of hot plasma point-blank that ripped through the orc’s face.
Manny was floating in the air, all of his tentacles flailing wildly. A concussive force shot out of him, pushing all of the orcs and Holmorth back toward the doors.
Alex started to work her way through the rubble. She had no idea what the control system looked like. She had never seen it through Manny’s eyes and had never touched it. This was worse than looking for a needle in a haystack. At least most people know what a needle and a haystack looked like.
Alex ran through the throng of cadets who were dispersing through the room as Manny continued to push the orcs and Holmorth back. Brath and Gill, now at his side, were shooting any orcs who managed to get past Manny’s psychic powers.
As Alex was running, her foot hit a large stone. She toppled over and fell into a pile of crystals and computer parts. When she sat up, she saw a computer screen. Could this be it? Alex thought. She scrambled to the computer screen and tried to find the keyboard. It was shattered, along with the CPU.
There wasn’t
