Chapter 24 Run!
Daisy's ears rang, her head full of lightning and glass. For a moment, she lay with her cheek mashed against scorched stone, a taste of copper thick on her tongue, waiting for her body to reboot. She flexed her fingers, numb, then stinging, then hers. Then her whole body remembered how to ache at once. Daisy pushed up to hands and knees, nearly face-planting again. The cave where she'd bled the dragon was half full of smoke and stank of roasted bone. Something in her brain kept repeating: Move, now. Move, now.
A noise like the end of the world rolled through the air: the bellow of the Ancient One, then the splintering, tearing, shrieking collapse of centuries-old wards. The entire menagerie vibrated, a spinal shudder. Every light along the corridor walls flickered, died, then came back twice as bright, burning blue spots into her vision. At the far end of the chamber, Xeris smashed his skull against the exit arch, gouging out blocks of stone the size of Daisy's torso. His tail lashed, snapping chains like brittle noodles. Each time he struck, the whole complex seemed to jump, dust cascading from cracks in the ceiling.
Somewhere deeper in, alarms started up: first a tinny mechanical wail, then a psychic ripple, a howl so high Daisy felt it in her molars. Above, the city alarms joined in a staggered chorus of bells and sirens, a warning that whatever was supposed to be caged here was now loose. A second explosion sent a ring of heat through the passage, searing her eyebrows. Daisy rolled behind a toppled crate, just in time for a hailstorm of glass and fire to rain past.
She peered over the edge. Xeris was halfway through the wall now, his claws scissoring the air, jaws blazing with a furnace glow. Blue flames poured from his mouth, but the stone didn't melt; it shattered, heat fracturing it into layers that flaked off and caught fire. The sound alone was enough to split her eardrums. Daisy watched, transfixed, as the dragon's body poured out through the breach, sinew and scale, wings collapsed tight to his flanks. For a second, she saw his face: eyes like gold coins held up to a lamp, slit-pupil and almost kind. Then the moment passed. He was through, gone, the passage behind him an inferno.
She didn't linger. There were other alarms now, shouting, bootsteps pounding the upper decks, the wet thunk of weapons being drawn. Daisy snatched up her satchel, checked her knife, and scrambled into the side corridor, away from the heat, away from the dragon. Her legs didn't want to work; she bullied them forward anyway. Every cell in her body howled at her to run.
The corridor tilted, then straightened itself. Daisy's vision lagged by half a second, everything blurry at the edges, as she ran past empty holding cells, smashed windows, and the occasional splatter of what used to be a security golem. Some cages were still locked, their contents screaming and hurling themselves against the bars. Others were open; the creatures inside had already fled or were dead. One cell held nothing but a heap of feathers, black as tar, still twitching. Daisy tried not to look too close.
She risked a glance at her wrist. The spiral birthmark was different. Larger? It writhed, twitching like it wanted to peel itself off her skin. The pain was gone, replaced by a deep, steady throb.
She slammed into a stairwell and took the steps two at a time. The air here was worse, smoke and dust, with an overlay of ozone so sharp it made her eyes water. Someone was yelling, words chopped up by the echoes. Daisy caught phrases: "Down!" "Containment!" "South stairwell, now!" A shot rang out, then another. Daisy pressed herself against the wall and waited for the footsteps to pass. Two guards, not city watch but menagerie handlers, dashed by at a dead sprint, eyes wide and wild. They held long poles with sparking blue tines at the ends, prods, the kind used to herd things much meaner than people.
Daisy didn't wait for them to come back. She darted into the next corridor, hoping the map in her head still matched the reality of the compound. The hallway was chaos. Shattered glass from the ward globes littered the floor, each chunk still sizzling with a residue of magic. Daisy's boots slipped and skidded; she caught herself, palm slamming down hard on a jagged edge. Blood welled instantly. She hissed, shook it out, and kept moving.
The next intersection was even worse: two creatures locked in a death struggle, one long and sinuous, with metallic scales, the other a tangle of limbs, fur, and mouths. Daisy made herself smaller, snuck along the far wall, never taking her eyes off the carnage. A limb twitched, almost snagging her ankle; she stomped it, hard, and the thing let go, convulsing. The metallic snake hissed, but Daisy flashed her knife at it, and it recoiled, more afraid of her than the other beast.
The further she went, the less the menagerie looked like a place built by people. The walls twisted, corridors merging and splitting in ways that defied logic, or maybe just followed a different one. Sometimes she heard the buzz of magic gathering; every hair on her arms stood up, and she ducked, pressed herself to the floor, waited for the jolt to pass.
At one point, she turned a corner and nearly plowed straight into a wall of webbing. It pulsed, almost organic, strung tight across the hallway. Daisy cut a hole with her knife, every stroke releasing a stench like rotting onions. She didn't linger.
Her path took her past the eastern cells, which should have been locked tight, but now gaped open. Shadows moved inside: small ones, many-legged, skittering over the ceiling; larger ones, hunched and glowering, too afraid of the open door to leave their sanctuary. Daisy knew the type. Even monsters could be cowed by a worse predator.
Something in her chest started to panic, but she clamped down, focused on the simple rhythm of movement: left, right, breathe, check corners. When her legs trembled, she cursed them into submission. Every time her hand stung, she ignored it.
A noise behind. Not footsteps, not animal, but the unmistakable purr of a patrol bot. Daisy pressed herself flat against the wall, barely daring to breathe. The bot rolled by, more charred than functional, a single ward crystal flickering in its glass skull. She watched it vanish down the next hall, then followed, steps careful, silent.
The air shifted again, colder, damp, reeking of bleach and iron. The next door was an emergency exit, but it was locked and rimed with blue fire. Daisy ran her finger along the seam and found the old wiring. She pried off the panel with her knife, shorted the lock, and ducked as a gust of magic arced past, singing the tips of her hair.
She burst through into the following passage and instantly regretted it.
The hallway was a slaughterhouse—bodies of all kinds piled against the walls, blood smeared in arcs across the doors. Something big had come through here. Daisy saw scorch marks, claw marks, and one whole section of the ceiling caved in. She hurried, keeping to the shadows, her ears tuned for anything not dead.
At the end of the corridor, a door hung loose on its hinges. Daisy slipped through and found herself in what had been an observation lounge: leather chairs, a big window overlooking the central dome. The window was shattered, shards still dripping from the frame. Through it, Daisy could see the heart of the menagerie.
Fire raged in a hundred places. Smoke rose in pillars, tinted blue or red depending on which chemicals were burning. The cages on the floor below were all open, some empty, some still occupied by the dazed and the doomed. Above, on the walkway, handlers scrambled, trying to herd anything that moved back into containment. Most had given up.
And overhead, circling the dome, Xeris. His body glowed with power, every scale outlined in electric red. He flew once, twice, then dove, smashing through the glass roof with a shattering, triumphant crash.
The menagerie was done.
Daisy ducked as a rain of glass and fire swept through the lounge, catching the nearest chair and setting it ablaze. She bolted for the stairs, taking them three at a time, barely noticing the blood she left behind on the railings. Every step was a new pain, but she forced herself down, down, toward the main exit.
At the bottom of the stairwell, the doors were chained. Daisy fumbled for her knife, but her fingers were slick with blood, and she dropped it. She cursed, wiped her hands on her shirt, tried again. This time, she got the blade between two links and twisted. It didn't cut, but the ward shimmered, stuttered, then broke, a blue spark burning her palm.
She shoved the doors open and stumbled into the night.
Outside, the world was chaos. People ran in every direction: some guards, some handlers, some just unlucky workers caught in the wrong place. A few tried to make a stand, turning their wands on the dragon, but most dropped everything and ran. Daisy followed the herd, keeping low, head down.
At the perimeter fence, a line of city watch had assembled, their faces white with terror, their hands shaking as they aimed wands and spears at the sky. Xeris circled above, ignoring them, instead strafing the upper floors of the menagerie, melting stone and glass with every pass. Daisy saw a handler she recognized, one of the men who'd chased her, now cowering behind a barricade. She almost pitied him.
The sky was red with fire and streaked with the smoke of burning magic. Daisy's lungs ached, but she kept moving, dodging between panicked guards and the dead who'd already been trampled. Every so often, a fresh jolt of pain shot up her arm. She glanced down and saw, to her horror, that her blood was leaking from dozens of tiny cuts, each one pulsing in time with the spiral on her wrist.
And the blood didn't just drip. It floated, forming tiny whorls in the air: spirals, some tight and sharp, others loose and unraveling. Each time Daisy ran her hand along a wall or brushed against a rough surface, new lines of red joined the dance, the spirals growing until they flickered like neon in the darkness.
She tried to wipe them away, but they only grew more frantic, whipping around her fingers, then vanishing as quickly as they'd appeared.
Her panic threatened to swamp her. But Daisy had lived her whole life in cages, some you could see, some you couldn't. This wasn't her first collapse.
She found a gap in the fence, a place where a broken support left just enough room for a person to squeeze through. She wrenched her body through, skinning her back on the jagged edge, and tumbled into the grass beyond.
She lay there, gasping, watching as Xeris made one last pass above the menagerie, then soared off into the night, his tail flicking contempt at the ruins behind. The alarms still wailed, but softer now, as if already mourning the dead.
Daisy pressed her palm to the spiral birthmark. The pain was gone. In its place, a pulse of bright living energy.
She looked up at the sky. It was red, streaked with fire, but it was still the same sky. For the first time, Daisy wondered what the world looked like to something that could fly.
She stood, knees shaking. She had survived.
Now, she just had to outrun whatever came next.