THE ORANGE DRAGON HAD NO RIDER.

Instead, Drey stood beside it with his phone.

“Abel,” he said. “Nice to see you again. Thank you for bringing such a wonderful dragon for us.”

“She’s not for you,” Abel replied. “None of them are. We’re getting out of here!”

Drey laughed. He tapped an app on his phone, and Carrot Soup Supreme formed a ball of fire in its throat. The last time Abel had seen Carrot Soup Supreme, it didn’t have a breath weapon at all.

“I don’t think you are,” said Drey. “You see, our experiments are going well, but I haven’t tested the control program in battle conditions yet! I’d love the chance.” Drey paused with his finger over his phone screen. “Unless you want to surrender quietly? It’d be a shame to injure your amazing specimen, but I suppose we can extract the DNA from her after you’re both destroyed.”

I really should have let Brazza keep that scientist hostage, Abel thought. He looked down the corridor, searching for any sign of the Red Talons. I could use some ruthless, criminal, dragon-battling backup right about now.

Drey pursed his lips, considering Abel’s long silence, then shrugged and tapped his phone. With that simple flick of his human finger, the big orange dragon roared and spat a white-hot ball of fire.

Brazza’s tail snapped around the length of her whole body. The gleaming hook on the end of it batted the fireball aside.

Drey tapped a few more commands in his app, and the orange dragon roared again, the Fog dragon shrieked, and the Emerald Widow Maker simply charged.

“Let’s see what they can do!” Drey cheered.

Abel pulled on the reins, trying to turn to escape, but Brazza wasn’t the sort of dragon to back away from a fight—or to forgive anyone shooting fire at her.

She planted her four legs and braced herself, ready to go claw to claw against all three dragons.

“I admire your guts,” Abel told her. “But there is no way we can win this fight!”

Brazza didn’t seem to care. She raced like she couldn’t lose, and now she was going to fight the same way, even if speed was her gift, not violence. Abel gave up on trying to command her. He thought about jumping off and making a run for it now that all the people who weren’t riding dragons had hidden behind the nearest heavy equipment they could find.

But instead, he held on to her back. He shut his eyes, remembering her crouched in her stall at the Burning Market, alone and abandoned, angry at everything. She’d been craving someone just to sit and read her a story. No wonder Brazza was so angry. She thought she was alone in the world. Abel wasn’t going to let her think that again.

He held her neck and whispered to her, “Whatever happens, I’m here.”

He felt a shift. Her weight moved toward her front legs, and Abel tilted ever so slightly forward. He dared to open one eye, and the other snapped open on its own at the same instant his mouth opened to scream.

All three dragons were closing in on them, mouths wide and breath weapons blasting. Abel lost track of Drey, but he was on his phone somewhere, controlling the three.

Flame, fog, and jagged jewels shot toward Abel, but Brazza’s shift had been just enough for her to fall forward into a perfect shoulder roll under the attack. Her wings curled around to protect Abel while she crashed through the legs of all the three dragons, tripping them with their own momentum.

The dragons fell into a tangled heap. Brazza popped up again; then she jumped into the air, spreading her wings while Abel was still catching his breath.

“You have got to warn me next time you do that!” Abel pleaded.

Brazza flapped forward and burst over the three dragons’ heads, racing straight for the entry platform they’d used to get inside. She was going to try bursting through the doors and escaping.

“Wait, no!” Abel cried out. “We can’t leave! We have to stick to the plan! We have to wait! We have to get the rest of the dragons out!”

Brazza ignored him, flying fast for safety. But the huge door was sealed, so she turned with nauseating speed and went back over the scrum in the corridor, speeding up in the hunt for another way out. The three dragons were just getting on their feet again when she blazed over their heads and zipped around the corner. A flurry of jagged gems slammed into the wall behind them, sinking several inches deep into the steel where Abel’s body had just been. The Widow Maker screeched.

The corridor was a blur of lights. Sky Knights fired their stun spears at Brazza as she flew over them, but they didn’t even come close to hitting her. She was too fast.

“I know it’s scary!” Abel cried out to her. “But we can’t just leave! We have to find a way to help these dragons! We have to slow down!”

Behind them, the pale blue Fog dragon unleashed a thick mist, which rolled toward them.

The mist from normal Fog dragons makes people feel drowsy and silly—almost pleasant. Until, of course, they fall asleep and get eaten. But Abel heard sizzling on the walls and realized quickly that this Fog dragon had been engineered so its mist was acidic. The steel it touched bubbled and blistered and began to run in metallic beads, melting to the floor.

If it caught up with them, it would do worse to Abel’s flesh.

“Okay, you can speed up!” Abel said, and pulled the reins again. Brazza accelerated, the mist behind them fading. Carrot Soup Supreme joined the Fog dragon in the chase.

Abel spotted another exit platform just ahead. Although it was closed, it looked like Brazza was going to try to slam through it, like she had in the department store.

“Listen, dragons like gold, right?” Abel tried desperately to reason with her. “Well, humans have this thing, the Golden Rule. It means you treat other beings like you’d want them to treat you. And, well, how would you feel if you were being held captive here? Wouldn’t you want someone to rescue you?”

Brazza sped up and lowered her head. She was going to ram the door with her horns. Abel was pretty sure it was reinforced against a dragon, even one flying as fast as she was. This was no department store wall. If she hit this door, their bodies would be shattered and it’d still be shut.

Behind them, all three attack dragons were in pursuit but had slowed down, ready to devour whatever was left after they splattered against the steel.

“So I know it’s not, like, literal, actual gold,” Abel pleaded. “But the Golden Rule gives you something more valuable. Not every treasure can be held in your claws, you know? Sometimes the invisible treasures are the most valuable!”

Abel was no philosopher. He’d actually read that last part in the fortune cookie that came with Brazza’s take-out food last week, but Brazza didn’t know that.

Just before they hit the door, all three dragons behind them fired. Brazza dove at the same moment, tucking her head under her body like a swimmer turning laps in a pool. She shot straight back below the pursuing dragons.

Their breath weapons hit the door at the same time. An instant later, it exploded open.

“Did you get that from a fortune cookie?” Topher’s voice filled Abel’s ears. He was receiving a signal again!

Over his shoulder, through the blasted door, a flock of armored dragons poured in, Red Talon riders on their backs. Behind them, Arvin piloted a midnight-blue long-wing Colossus, with Roa and Topher in passenger harnesses.

“A little late!” Abel said. “And yes, I did get that from a fortune cookie. Wisdom is like dried gum on the sidewalk. Once you start looking for it, you can find it anywhere.”

He’d gotten that from a gum wrapper.

Now the three attack dragons were outnumbered by Red Talons. Where’s Lina? Abel wondered.

“Surrender!” Jazinda Balk yelled from the back of a sleek red Heartrender Reaper. Her two Stoneskins flapped at its sides. Her goons spread out around her, riding every manner of dragon Abel could think of, and some he didn’t even recognize.

Sax and Grackle, two Red Talons who’d terrorized Abel’s neighborhood for years, rode matching wyverns, which they steered down to the floor and stopped directly in front of Drey. Poison gas clouds bubbled in the dragons’ mouths. It was nice to see the kinners threatening someone else for a change.

“You really think you can beat us?” Drey called up to Jazinda. He held his phone up to hit the buttons, but Jazinda Balk fired a single pulse from a stun gun at her hip, frying the device in his hands.

“Ouch!” He dropped it.

Jazinda grinned, but Drey’s voice came out fierce and furious as he stared at the wreckage of his phone on the floor.

“You fool! If I die today, there will be a hundred more Sky Knights to take my place and carry on the work. We aren’t like you! The Sky Knights believe in something.”

“The Red Talons believe in something too!” Jazinda Balk laughed. “We believe it’s better to be on a dragon’s back than in its jaws. Which is where you’ll be in five seconds, if you don’t put your hands up and lie on the ground.”

Drey smiled at her and nodded. “Well played,” he said, putting his hands in the air. “One thing, though …” he added.

Abel’s heart thundered in his chest. When a kin boss smiled and said they had “one thing” to add, it was never something good. Just once, couldn’t they ominously offer an extra slice of pizza? Or spring the surprise of, like, free movie tickets?

Nope. Definitely not this time.

Drey slammed his palm down onto a computer panel on the wall next to him. “If I don’t get out of here alive, neither do any of you!”

An earsplitting siren blared. A line of code projected into the air and then vanished.

“Good luck,” said Drey as every door to every dragon stall slid open along the corridor. From inside, the captive dragons smelled their first whiffs of freedom.

This was not part of Abel’s plan. Some of them roared. Others screeched. They had been released, not one at a time like Abel had planned, but all at once.

And with his phone in pieces on the ground, the mutant dragons were no longer under Drey’s control.

They were no longer under anyone’s control.

There was a moment of terrible, eerie silence, the only sounds the beating of dragons’ wings in the dark.

And then came the mayhem.