“Hold up,” I gasped when we were safely past the last camera. “Let me…catch my…breath.”
My father scowled. “It was only ten flights.”
“I don’t…exactly get time…to do cardio…these days…” I panted. “Cut me…some slack.”
He did, though not without reminding me that he’d been basically dead not a week ago, and he’d managed the stairs just fine. I didn’t have the breath to waste pointing out that he was a supernatural creature while I was merely human, so I saved myself the trouble and looked around instead.
Just as the DFZ had said, we were standing inside a mine. Unlike the floor we’d come in on, there were no cement hallways or rooms full of random storage down here. Just dark, rough-cut tunnels through the stone big enough to drive a tractor down. The lights were few and far between and so old they hummed like pitch-pipes. The rock floor was even dustier than the one upstairs, and while I could see a few footprints going down the cave ahead of us, it didn’t look as if anyone had been down here in a long, long time.
“Are you sure this is the right place?”
“Positive,” my father said. “I saw her with my own eyes just this morning, and you couldn’t ask for a better place to lock up a dragon.” He nodded approvingly at the rough-cut stone. “Nothing to burn, too tight to use our wings, and too much rock for us to break through. It’s perfect.”
“I’m sure the Gameskeeper has imprisoned all manner of creatures down here,” I said bitterly, remembering yet again that this was the monster who’d wanted to fight our baby cockatrices. That thought got me riled up again, and I pushed off the rock wall. “Okay, I think I’m done dying. Which way to White Snake?”
My father pointed down the tunnel and off we went, keeping to the shadows even though there seemed to be no cameras at all down here. I knew there had to be at least one because that was how the Gameskeeper had showed White Snake to me, but the tunnels themselves appeared completely unwatched and unguarded. Also unmarked. We passed so many forks and turns that I was soon hopelessly lost.
Thankfully, my dad seemed to know exactly where he was going. He led us unerringly down tunnels and around corners until, at last, we dead-ended at a huge steel security door set deep into the stone—an old Algonquin Corp one according to the logo stamped into the upper corner—and I broke into a grin.
“I got this.”
“You do?” my father asked, looking surprised. “I thought we’d have to break it down.”
“We still might, but let me try first,” I said, digging into my bag for my pliers. “These old doors are everywhere in the city. I don’t think you can be a Cleaner for more than two weeks without coming up against one. Fortunately, they’re all made exactly the same way, so I’ve gotten pretty good at cracking them.” My father’s eyebrows shot up at that last part, and I grinned wider. “My job required a lot of breaking and entering.”
“I see why your mother despised it,” he said dryly, but he didn’t get in my way as I switched my usual metal-lined safety gloves for my full-rubber, anti-electrical set and started digging my pliers into the door’s punch-code box.
I knew the moment I popped the panel that this was going to be a standard model. I didn’t consider that an oversight on the Gameskeeper’s part, though. This door was the best security you could get for the price, which was why everyone used them. But when everyone uses something, the knowledge of how to break it also becomes widespread, especially among Cleaners. I’d looked up how to crack these things so many times I had the process memorized, and barely a minute later, I had us in.
“There,” I said as the last latch popped. “I know there’s at least one more camera inside, but I’m going to let you get it this time. I don’t want to have to hold it with magic the whole time we’re in there, and I’m going to need my attention for the ward.”
“Right,” my father said, tearing his eyes away from the metal door I’d just processed like a pro-burglar. “One moment.”
He pulled the ball bearing out of his pocket again and grabbed the door’s handle, leaning his body inside. He must have already spotted the camera during his scouting, because he didn’t even have his head around the corner before his arm lashed out, sending the steel ball flying with sharpshooter precision. There was a sharp crack followed by the clatter of glass as the camera’s metal casing shattered, and then my father pushed the door the rest of the way open.
“After you.”
I dropped a fake curtsy and hurried inside, taking a breath to ready myself for what I knew was waiting. But even though I’d seen it myself already, cameras were terrible at capturing scale, and the memory of the little picture on the Gameskeeper’s monitor did nothing to prepare me for the monster waiting inside.
I stopped cold, clamping my teeth tight to stop the alarmed yelp. The room we’d stepped into wasn’t a room at all, but a huge cavern. And at its center, surrounded by a warded metal cage the size of a three-story building, was White Snake.
As I’d seen on the camera, she was in her dragon form, but even curled into a ball to fit inside her prison, the sheer size of her was shocking. You’d think growing up with my dad would have gotten me used to dragons, but while I didn’t even notice Yong’s predatory menace when he was in his human form anymore, it was impossible not to be intimidated by an actual, in-the-scales dragon. She may have been only half my father’s size, but White Snake was still hundreds of
