“Welcome to The Warren,” Stephen said.
It was a fucking warren, corridor after corridor and not a person in sight until we hit a sliding door and stepped into a massive room filled with humans seated at desks and tapping away at computers. The room was abuzz with voices, everyone on a task, but one man stood apart from it all, hands clasped behind his back, cool gray eyes fixed on a huge monitor feeding an image of a three-story building.
“Eamon!” Stephen called out excitedly.
The man turned to look our way, his brow crinkling in a frown. His attention fell on me, the frown melted, and his mouth parted in shock. Yeah, I had that effect on people.
He blinked several times and shook his head as if to clear it.
“Eamon, we have outsiders,” Stephen blurted. “You were right. She sent them. She’s come for us.”
Several humans looked up from their tasks, their eyes raking us over, and then the chatter intensified.
Eamon was already walking toward us, his gaze still fixed on me, but as he got closer, his mouth turned down and his shoulders slumped slightly.
The hum was a loud buzz now.
“Enough!” Eamon raised his hand and the room fell into silence. “We have a mission. Focus. I’ll speak with the outsiders.”
“But how? How did they get in?” someone asked.
“I will make sure to ascertain that,” Eamon said. “Stephen. Thank you for bringing them to me. Now if you’ll excuse us…” He inclined his head toward an exit to our left. “Please come with me.”
Stephen looked crestfallen, but he recovered quickly when a woman waved him over. Flora, maybe?
Eamon led us into what looked like an office space and then shut the door. He took several deep breaths, then turned to us.
“The dragon queen is dead, isn’t she?”
He said it as if he hoped I’d contradict him. He said it as if he personally needed to know.
“You knew her?”
His smile was wry and his gray eyes dull. “You could say that.”
He couldn’t be more than thirty-five or forty years of age. “The dragon queen was killed fifty years ago, how can you have known her?”
He exhaled sharply. “I look young for my age.” He stood taller. “Killed….That explains a lot. But if Anara is gone, then we’re doomed. The Jotunn will rise in eight months, maybe sooner.” He paused. “You do know about the Jotunn? The truth of the Dreki?”
I nodded. “Yeah, we know.”
“Then you’ll know it isn’t an exact science; eight months could be six or even three.” His gaze flicked from side to side. “I was hoping Anara was merely unable to get back into the Arc, that maybe the key was lost or taken by the Draco. I should have known she’d have found a way to return if she could. I guess…I guess I wanted her to be alive.”
His throat bobbed and there was real pain in his eyes. He’d known her personally. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he may have had feelings for her.
A human pining for a Dreki queen…poor guy. “How did you know her?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. It’s not important anyway. I need to know what happened to her.”
“No one knows for sure.” I shrugged. “But we do know that Gustov claims to have killed her.”
Eamon blew out a breath, his hands curling into fists. “What’s happened to the world outside? The Dreki…are their numbers still strong? They didn’t come for us. I was afraid the Draco might have prevailed.”
“No. The Dreki are alive and strong. In fact, we’re working with them.”
He smiled. “Skins and Dreki together. Anara always said the Skins would be the Dreki’s true salvation, not the Bloods. Please tell me everything.”
I filled him in on the war, the stalemate, the Jotunn, and the fact that the Draco were about to use humans in experiments to create super soldiers to fight the Dreki.
His smile was wry. “We know about the experiments. There’s a lab in the Arc treating humans right now. Gene therapy, they say, to make us stronger and protect us from a virus that doesn’t even exist. Recon shows it contains important equipment, machines and chemicals that the Draco need to modify us.” His smile was smug. “We’re about to blow it up. Covertly, of course. They’ll believe it was a gas explosion, but it’ll buy us some time.”
It would buy us some time too… “We came to get you out of here.”
He made a small sound of amusement. “And take us where? Feed us how? There are ten thousand humans in the Arc and eighty percent of them have no idea that this is an elaborate prison. They’re happy. They’re thriving. They have lives. They’re safe.”
“No, they’re not,” Helgi snapped. “The Draco plan to use them.”
“And my resistance will stop them. It’s what we do. It’s all we do. We covertly thwart the Draco’s plans and keep the humans safe. It’s what Anara would have wanted. This place was created for humans to continue to live in safety, oblivious to the crazy world outside. It’s built to withstand the Jotunn, when they come, and now that Anara is gone, they will attack. When they do, the walls will light up with wards built into the stone to keep them out. So, you see, this is the only safe place for the humans.”
Shit. Well, that fucked up our plans.
“The Draco have conditioned the human population to believe that the dragon queen turned on humanity. They go willingly with the Draco when selected and no one questions when they don’t return. They believe the world outside is a wasteland filled with mutant beasts and radiation from a war that never happened. They’ll never go with you willingly.”
“And what if you can’t stop the Bloods
