“LAND IMMEDIATELY!” SILAS WARNED. THE spotlights blinded Abel. Brazza thrashed in their white glare.

“AH!” Roa yelled, tossed from Brazza’s back.

Lina’s hand shot out, catching Roa before they fell.

“Got you!” she yelled, holding Abel’s best friend by one wrist. Below their dangling feet, the broken hole in the concrete flashed red. The distant mechanical voice announced one minute to decontamination.

“Abel!” Silas called his name over the loudspeaker, for all the kinners, cops, and TV cameras to hear. “You have to surrender!”

There was panic in his brother’s voice. He was supposed to arrest the Sky Knights inside the facility, not have them burst out into the street. He’d been taken by surprise, and Abel had known since stealing Silas’s towel one time at Serpent’s Paradise Water Park, his brother was most dangerous when he was surprised.

Back then, the worst he could do was pummel Abel until their parents stopped him. Now he had an entire battalion of wyvern riders at his command.

Brazza thrashed and bucked, trying to escape the bright lights.

“Don’t make this harder!” Silas pleaded over the loudspeaker. He sounded desperate, which was even worse than surprised. “Don’t make us—”

He didn’t get to finish his sentence. At that very moment, the eyeless spike-headed dragon shot out from the lab, burst past Brazza, and slammed directly into Silas’s wyvern with a blood-boiling screech.

An all-white dragon with gleaming red eyes blasted huge blobs of sticky tar from its mouth; they smacked into the spotlights and blotted them out. The rest of the hacked dragons swarmed after them, and a new battle over the streets of Drakopolis began: military dragons against berserker mutants.

“They’re supposed to be going free,” Abel cried out. “Not attacking each other!”

Silas’s wyvern was tangled claw to claw with the spiked dragon, turning and tumbling in the air, while Kai tried to blast the attacking dragon’s soft underbelly with a flamethrower. It had no effect. The spiked dragon didn’t have a soft underbelly. It was engineered to have no vulnerable spots, not even eye sockets. Silas’s wyvern was holding her own in the fight, but she couldn’t last forever.

The other military Reapers, wyverns, and long-wings engaged with the attackers, crashing into them, firing their breath weapons—and being met with breath weapons in return. The military dragons had armor and enhancements like lasers, blades, and super-heated flame. They were a living deck of DrakoTek cards.

But the mutants had been designed not to need that stuff. They were their own living weapon systems, and they were out of control.

A brown-scaled dragon the size of a bus opened its huge mouth in front of three military Reapers, but instead of hitting them with a breath weapon, it shot rainbows. The Reapers roared in confusion, crashing into one another to scramble away, unsure if it was some kind of poison rainbow.

It was.

Their armor sizzled, melting away.

On the ground, the kinners saw the chaos as their chance to escape. Drey hopped onto the back of a Sky Knight’s Diamond Drake, and the two blew past Brazza. Drey glared at Lina as they passed. She’d chosen a side, and it wasn’t his.

He made a claw with his hand, then mimed tearing out his own throat.

“Rude,” Lina grunted, masking the hurt in her voice.

She’d given her all to the Sky Knights, and she wasn’t just kicked out now: She was dead to them. If they caught her, they’d give her a lot worse than a snapdragon wedgie.

“I’m sorry, Lina,” Abel told her. And he meant it.

Before Drey flew into the night, he pointed at Abel and made the same gesture.

“I don’t think Drakopolis is going to be safe for any of us,” Abel said as Lina finally hoisted Roa back onto Brazza.

“It never really was,” Lina sighed.

Brazza beat the air, hovering in place. She dodged the occasional rainbow or bolt of lightning. The final alarm sounded below the street, and a sickly green gas filled the underground lab. A little mist of it seeped onto the street, sizzling on the concrete.

“Anything left in there is destroyed,” Roa said.

“Anything left up here is gonna be destroyed too!” Topher’s voice shouted in their ears. Abel saw Arvin doing his best to fly through the chaos of the police line and the escaped dragons, but the sky was too thick with breath weapons. He couldn’t find a path out. Other kinners were having the same problem. Some of their dragons were injured and forced to land, where Dragon’s Eye agents had been forced down too. Some were taking cover, others chasing down kinners on foot.

Jazinda Balk had been surrounded by a dozen more officers. They weren’t about to let two kin bosses escape their blockade. She was being led to her own private armored prisoner transport, though she didn’t look worried about it. She kept looking to the sky to see if her son had gotten away.

Sax and Grackle were currently cornered by a group of agents. Abel thought they’d be caught again, but Lu’s Steelwing swept over them with its claws extended and scooped the two goons away. Rescued from the law by Abel’s bully.

Her uncle’s wyvern, now a cyborg, was past rescuing. It was currently grappling with a Dragon’s Eye Infernal, high above the Mbalia Bank and Trust building.

Meanwhile, Silas had escaped the spike-headed dragon and made a high turn to chase down Drey and the Sky Knights. He’d almost caught up when Carrot Soup Supreme crashed into him.

Silas’s wyvern fought the orange dragon with everything it had. The sounds of their fight made Abel’s skin crawl. Silas was a good rider, though. He fought hard and smart and kept his dragon safe, never exposing a weak spot to the orange dragon’s talons. He even got a few good blasts from his own weapons in.

More of the hacked mutants escaped into the city to wreak havoc on civilians. Already, the rainbow-shooting dragon was firing its deadly colors into late-night traffic, melting stoplight drones and causing buses and taxis to crash into each other in roaring tangles.

“They’re all so angry,” Abel despaired. How could he tame over a hundred angry dragons that humanity had so thoroughly broken with their technology? If the experts could even access the data on his broken phone, it might take weeks to unscramble and deactivate the dragons. By then, they might have wrecked half the city or all been hunted down and killed in the process.

Abel didn’t know what to do. Not even Dr. Drago had ever faced a situation like this. These dragons weren’t anything like the ones in comics. Each was unique in all the world, and each was angry in its own unique way.

Just like Brazza.

That was it! He thought he was supposed to be the hero of his plan, saving the dragons as only a noble human could. But what if dragons had to save dragons? What if being a hero was knowing when you couldn’t be the hero?

“Hey, B,” Abel said to her, leaning forward. She could always hear him, even if he wasn’t shouting, and he knew by now that she understood most of what the people around her said. Maybe that’s why she’d fallen silent. People had talked around her and about her and at her for her whole life. Maybe she just needed someone to talk with her.

“So, like, I don’t know what to do here,” he said. “But you’ve felt just like these dragons do. And, well, I really need them to stop attacking the city. Do … um … you have any ideas how to get through to them? Because I could use your help.”

For a while, Brazza just beat her wings against the sky like she hadn’t heard. Then he felt a ripple in her muscles below the saddle. Abel wondered if she was about to bolt away again, leave this whole sorry scene behind, and drag Abel, Roa, and Lina along with her.

Instead, she rose, flapping her wings in long strokes like she was pulling the skyscrapers down around her. Soon, they were at the top of a gleaming office tower, and she perched on its spire.

“What’s she doing?” Roa asked.

“I think she’s helping,” Abel replied.

Brazza settled her back feet on the ledge. She looked up at the moon and the stars. She bathed in the neon lights of the city below, and she opened her mouth to roar.

But she didn’t roar.

She sang.

The first note was a high, screeching sound that warbled and dropped to a deep bass. Then it rose again in short, staccato bursts. Soon, it turned from one note into two, each sung simultaneously. Somehow, Brazza was able to use the vibrations in her throat and movements of her jaw to harmonize with herself! Two notes became four, four became six, a whole chorus from one mouth.

“BURRRREEEERRRREEE!” Abel’s earbuds screeched feedback. He popped them out quickly with a hiss of pain. Looking around, he saw everyone else on dragonback was doing the same. Dragon’s Eye agents took off their helmets, and kinners popped out their headphones. The holographic ads around the city flickered and changed into strange pulses of light and color.

“Is she doing that?” Roa marveled.

“What is she doing?” Lina cried.

Abel couldn’t find the words to answer, didn’t dare add his own voice to the glorious and terrifying music she was making.

Every dragon stopped fighting. The ones on the ground and the ones in the air all turned their heads toward Brazza.

She kept singing.

The kinner dragons and the police attack dragons and even the civilian dragons snarling in traffic calmed themselves. No matter what their riders commanded, they fluttered to the ground. They listened to the music.

Arvin’s Blue Colossus had settled on a high landing platform of a nearby building, and Abel saw Arvin and Topher scurry off its back. The earbuds didn’t work, so Abel waved down at them, trying to tell his friends it was okay, everything would be okay.

He couldn’t explain how he knew it, but with the music pulsing through his bones, he simply felt it. Feeling was a kind of knowing, wasn’t it? It was hard to measure, difficult to describe, and impossible to argue, but none of that made it matter less. Maybe that was how dragons spoke, in a language that was absolutely true and absolutely impossible to translate. You just had to feel it.

And the mutant dragons felt it. They understood Brazza’s song.

They flew toward Brazza, a hundred of them sweeping up to her eye level and hovering in place. At first they arrived one at a time, then by the dozens. None of them made a sound. Only Brazza’s song filled the air between them.

As she changed pitch, the entire wild scrum of winged beasts spread out into a formation, creating the shape of a single giant dragon in the night sky. A hundred different dragons with a hundred different minds formed one giant dragon, and then the giant dragon answered Brazza’s song in one perfect, ear-rattling harmony.

There wasn’t a human below who didn’t shed a tear at the mournful beauty of the sound. Abel felt Brazza’s weight shift. She leaned to the side and lowered one wing to the rooftop.

A ramp.

She stopped singing and looked down her neck at Abel. It felt like the entire city, in its tens of millions, simply vanished. There was only Abel and the dragon perched between the city and the star-soaked sky.

“You want me to get down?” Abel asked. He was vaguely aware as Roa and Lina climbed off, but he stayed in the saddle, not ready to dismount his thrilling, frustrating, ferocious, and surprisingly loyal friend.

The dragon nodded. Abel tightened his hands on the reins.

“You’re going to lead them away,” he said.

Again, Brazza nodded her head one time.

“But we’re not finished reading our book yet,” Abel pleaded, his voice cracking. “You don’t know the end!”

He knew it wasn’t a convincing argument, but held some hope that a good story might keep the dragon with him a little longer. His goal all along had been to set the dragons free, Brazza included, but now that the time had come, he didn’t want her to go. He wasn’t ready. She was exciting and generous in her own dangerous way. And funny too, if an eight-ton dragon could be said to have a sense of humor. She was his friend.

He remembered Karak right then, the Sunrise Reaper who’d let him become a dragon rider, and how he’d let him go too. Abel didn’t want to then either. It wasn’t fair! Why did he always have to let go? Why did doing the right thing have to hurt so much?

Normally, in school and at home and just living his life, Abel’s mind flickered and threw out sparks like a malfunctioning neon sign. He had trouble paying attention and was forgetful, and sometimes he fixated on a minor setback and turned it into a major catastrophe. But with Brazza he felt calm, focused, and even, for flickering moments, heroic. He didn’t want to give that up. He liked how the dragon made him feel.

“That’s not fair to you, though, is it?” he said aloud, like she could read his thoughts. “You don’t exist to make me feel good. Your life is your own.”

She just stared at him more; her eyes were gentle, but unwavering.

“I have to let you go,” he said, surprised that he wasn’t crying. He felt a calm kind of sadness wash over him, like listening to a sad but beautiful song.

Brazza blinked. She was patient, but she would not be changing her mind. Abel let go of her reins. He dismounted slowly and slid down her wing to the rooftop. He rested a hand against her scaled side and felt the warmth through his fingers.

She turned to face the formation of dragons, but then she hesitated. She looked back at Abel, and his heart thundered. Then her head snapped forward, jaws open and long teeth gleaming.

Abel flinched as her mouth snapped shut on a hovering drone just above his head. It sparked and whirred where she crushed its motor with her fangs. Then she set the broken thing at Abel’s feet. The lights on the drone still blinked in vibrant colors.

“Is that for me?” he asked, laughing.

The dragon snorted. She wasn’t a talker and wasn’t about to waste her song answering a question Abel already knew the answer to. Dragons don’t give away their treasure to just anyone. Whatever became of Brazza out in the wilds beyond the city, her gift had told Abel, much clearer than words could, that they were friends.

Abel smiled. “Goodbye, my friend.”

Brazza opened her wings and leapt. She flew right through the center of the formation of mutant dragons, and with a single note from her booming voice, the entire flock followed her. They flew together, fast from the city and into the endless Glass Flats, beyond the reach of humans.

Abel let out a long breath. Roa and Lina approached from behind, each putting a hand on one of Abel’s shoulders. They let him take all the time he needed to watch Brazza become a distant speck in the neon sky.

“Sorry, fam.” Silas’s voice rose behind them. Abel snapped around to see his brother mounted on his armored battle wyvern, now perched on the rooftop opposite them. The spotlights snapped back on as dozens of police dragons regained their blockade.

“But you’re still all under arrest.”