“LAND IMMEDIATELY, AND PUT YOUR hands up!” a mechanical voice blared over a loudspeaker. A bright spotlight suddenly enveloped him from high in the clouds. Abel knew a surveillance long-wing was somewhere up there, agents on its back recording him, running his image through a database to match his identity and classify his dragon.

They’d fail, at least with the dragon.

Abel was pretty sure they’d know exactly who he was any second, even with his helmet on. There were files on his whole family, thanks to Lina’s criminal activity, and his patchwork leather jacket from the Wind Breaker kin. He suddenly realized why kinners wore the same colors and got similar tattoos—it made it harder to tell who was who. They didn’t just identify what kin they were a part of; they made it so you couldn’t easily tell them apart. The same with the green coat and silver pants of the Dragon’s Eye. The uniform erased the individual and made him one piece of a much larger whole.

Abel, with his signature look and one-of-a-kind jacket, had made himself stand out.

“LAND NOW OR YOU WILL BE FORCED DOWN!”

Three wyverns fanned out behind him. The lane-marking drones in front of him flashed red and blue. They began to move, forming a blockade.

“What’s going on?” Roa’s voice came into his ear. He’d forgotten they were there. He really should’ve been paying better attention.

“Just a little trouble with the law,” Abel said.

“If you get arrested, you know what they’ll do to Brazza!” Roa warned him.

“I’ll take care of it,” said Abel. “They’ll never catch us.”

He leaned back hard in the saddle and let the reins go slack for speed, but Brazza slowed down.

“Oh no … not now,” he pleaded. “Please. We gotta fly! Fast.”

He looked in the saddle-mounted mirrors. Behind him, all three of the wyverns had gleaming orbs of poison gas forming in their mouths. It’d probably be enough to knock his dragon out—and definitely enough to knock out Abel. If he was lucky, he’d wake up in a cell. If he was unlucky, he wouldn’t wake up at all.

As for Brazza, there was no good outcome. She couldn’t get caught.

“I’ll keep reading you the story we started once we get back!” Abel promised her, hoping she’d understand. “I know you want to hear the next chapter! There’s romance and kissing!” He didn’t know if dragons liked romance and kissing in their stories, but he had to get her interested somehow.

The dragon turned her head, eyes narrowed. She had a keen intelligence in her gaze, like when you look at a wire that’s fallen in the street and you just know, without any proof, that it’s live and sizzling with electricity. He thought he saw a grin creep up at the corners of Brazza’s mouth, but that might’ve just been how her jaw was shaped.

She suddenly changed the angle of her wings and snapped them down, launching herself forward. At the same instant, she rolled to the left in a corkscrew dive.

“AHHH!” Abel clutched her neck for dear life. He locked his legs as tightly as he could in the saddle.

Brazza slipped out of the beam of the spotlight, moving faster than the Dragon’s Eye could keep up. Behind him, the wyverns spat their poison, but Brazza, without any instruction from Abel, dodged the first blast, then the second, then the third, without slowing in the slightest.

Four more wyverns dropped down from the wide-open air in front of them, and two more were racing up from ground level. The shopping center blocked them in on either side. They were being pinched in from three directions. The lane markers had been reprogrammed to form a hovering net behind the police wyverns. More drones closed in, blocking every alleyway and turnoff.

Brazza, however, had the motivation she needed now. She was not going to let a bunch of attack wyverns and flying traffic lights stop her from hearing the rest of Abel’s read-aloud.

She dove to the landing platform of the nearest parking lot and hit the pavement running. She smashed through the guardrail, slashing the hook on the end of her tail into the little guard booth. The unfortunate attendant dove for cover.

The bored dragons who were parked in their stalls while their owners shopped poked their heads up to watch Brazza run past. She was faster on her four feet than the two-footed wyverns following her.

She would’ve gotten away, except more armored Dragon’s Eye wyverns arrived at every possible exit to the parking lot, sirens blaring, poison breath building.

Brazza, however, wasn’t going through any of the exits. She pointed her head right for the double doors to Locke & K’s Department Store and burst through the glass-front lobby into the outerwear department. Customers fled, screaming, before her clattering claws. She tossed well-dressed mannequins in every direction with a thrash of her head. A woman in a dragon-scale winter coat froze in fright just in front of her, holding her credit card up like a shield.

Brazza showed her fangs. She still didn’t make a sound, which made it easy to hear the woman squeak when she turned and ran, high heels clicking across the tile like tiny, scuttling claws.

Abel watched it all through his fingers over his face. He’d covered his head with his arms to avoid the broken glass, even though he had a helmet on, and he decided to keep his hands there for the duration. The leather jacket had protected his back and reminded him that it wasn’t just a fashion statement.

Brazza crashed through the perfume section, huge claws smashing the cases. She broke open a fortune in fancy scents, filling the air with so many different smells, it might’ve worked as a poison breath attack. Only one of the wyverns followed them through.

“Okay, partner, how do we get out of here?” Abel asked. The wyvern behind them was fast on its feet. It gained on them with every bounding step.

Brazza’s answer was to speed up her run, aiming straight for a solid concrete wall. “Um … I know you’re strong and have dragon scales to protect you,” Abel said. “But I’m just made of, like, meat and bones. I’d rather not have them all broken against a solid wall?”

At the last instant before impact, Brazza turned sharp left, tucking her shoulder and her front legs so she fell and rolled in the air. Abel’s helmet sparked against the tiles but did its job protecting his head.

The wyvern couldn’t turn as fast and ran at full speed into the wall. The twelve-ton attack dragon in police assault armor smashed its helmet directly into the plaster. It burst through the cinder blocks, tearing a hole in the wall that Brazza simply turned around and leapt through. She dove away as the stunned wyvern rider struggled to regain control of his stunned wyvern.

Brazza used the distraction to plummet between two more shopping center buildings, picking up speed as she weaved into a commercial district. She was going faster and faster, so fast that Abel couldn’t even keep his hands on her body anymore. The safety harness on his saddle was the only thing keeping him tethered to her. His vision blurred with every breath-breaking, blood-swirling, bone-shaking turn she made.

On the Dragon Rider Academy entrance exam—the one Abel had failed at age eleven—there were questions about what happened to the human body at top dragon flying speeds, questions about “blood pressure fluctuation” and “cascading organ failure” and “maximum survivable g-force.” He didn’t understand the questions, let alone know their answers, but he had a feeling he was discovering what they meant right now.

His eyesight narrowed to a tunnel, heading toward darkness. His ears hummed. The world was turning gray.

“Abel! Abel!” Roa’s voice called in his ear. “You okay? I’ve got a visual on you! You look limp in the saddle. Say something! Abel!”

Abel tensed and pushed against his narrowing vision, forcing his eyes open. He saw their ruined skyscraper in the distance, the Wyvern Wafer ad winking in and out of color as it grew larger. He feared he was either losing his mind or losing consciousness.

And then Brazza slowed.

The breath came back into Abel’s lungs. The world returned to full-color focus. He gasped.

There were no other dragons around, no sirens, no chase. Brazza had left their pursuers completely in the wind. No one could possibly have kept up. They’d escaped, and Abel hadn’t had to do anything more than offer her what she wanted: the promise of a good story.

She flapped leisurely in toward the eighty-seventh floor.

“Abel! Talk to me!” Roa pleaded over his earbuds. “You hit nearly three hundred miles an hour!”

“I did?” he croaked out. His mouth was dry, and his throat felt like he’d chewed on broken glass.

“You’re on the news!” Topher exclaimed. “Your police chase was live on every network.”

Abel didn’t think that was nearly as cool as Topher did. But he couldn’t answer because he was busying throwing up over the side of his dragon’s back, seven hundred feet in the air.