The Alchemists of Loom (Loom Saga #1)(3)
Magic was electric in the air, sending tiny daggers prickling against her exposed skin.
The seconds she took to move her line were almost too long. The ground rattled right where Ari had been standing, imploding inward in what should have been a lethal attack. Bloody, steaming, Chimera, circled Revo.
This was not like the Chimera Alchemist Ari had encountered in the reagent preparation chamber. This Chimera was a hulking creature whose skin was a scarred patchwork of a dark Fenthri gray and Dragon rainbow. Ari turned, straining her neck in spite of the pain to get a good look at him. If he had been chasing her from the onset, she would’ve been in trouble. He hadn’t been in any of her notes.
She braced herself, slammed into the balcony railing she’d chosen, and flipped over it. The Chimera roared, foaming at the mouth. Imperfect, poor soul. The powers that were at the refinery had taken a circled Revo—a master of his craft—and stuffed as many Dragon parts as they could into him. He was a Chimera in the worst of ways, and he wasn’t long for the world now. No matter how many organs or how much blood the Alchemists pumped into that “experiment” of a creature, his core was still Fenthri. And that much magic was breaking down his body, starting with his brain.
Ari thought he might not see more than another dawn, but that was enough time to make trouble for her.
The Chimera raised a hulking weapon. A crackle of magic filled the air and Ari was off with barely enough time to fill her lungs again. She wasn’t there to slay any forsaken Chimera—that was way above the pay-grade for this job, even at the insane amount she’d been contracted for. Ari was proud, but she wasn’t stupid. She didn’t fight battles she had a slim chance of winning if there wasn’t a reward on the line.
The creature gave chase the second Ari was on the move. She bounded from rooftop to rooftop as more grunts poured out from the refinery. The stone and concrete skeleton of a building under construction had her skidding to a halt over roof shingles. She pulled a small canister from her belt, three notches marring the otherwise flawless exterior. Ari drew her revolver from its holster on her left leg and popped the canister into one of its open chambers.
Malice.
It surged through her, the will to destroy—the desire to burn and crash. The want to explode things into a million tiny pieces that could never have any hope of being put back together. Alchemical runes on the outside of her gun shone white as she pulled the trigger, and let go of it all.
Florence hadn’t been lying. The girl had outdone herself with the canister, which demanded an exhausting amount of magic, but in turn shot a beam of pure power to the structure Ari had chosen. The explosion was as bright as sunlight and nearly blinded her with the magnification of her goggles.
The building shuddered and groaned, coming to life. Ari pushed herself as hard as she could, the Revos from the refinery still hot on her tail. But she was several steps ahead, literally and figuratively. She knew how the building would sway and fall. She knew the way to run to narrowly miss the first colossal beam collapsing. Once more, it all came down to numbers: the number of load-bearing pillars, the weight distribution of the structure, the probability of how the collapse would occur.
The second she crossed onto the other side of the smoke and chaos, Ari dropped down into an alleyway. She’d had her grand finale. Now it was time for her to do as her namesake and disappear like a wraith with the dawn.
Ari didn’t have any safe houses in New Dortam. She could never feel safe in an area that worked so closely with the Dragons, their Royuk language was used as commonly as Fennish. Even if her eyes could make sense of the rectangles, lines, and dots, she avoided reading the Dragon notices and advertisements plastered on buildings.
Well, almost.
“That looks nothing like me.” Ari squinted at the drawing of a lithe and long-haired woman on a wanted poster that had White Wraith written in bold Royuk below, along with an impressive sum of dunca. The reward for her head had gone up, Ari noted with pride. She tore the notice off the wall. Florence would find amusement in it as well.
An unnatural scream tore through the sky, followed by a fast zip. Wind rushed through the alleyways and fluttered the mostly folded paper in her hands. Ari scowled at the rainbow trail glittering through the pale morning clouds.
Bloody Dragon Rider. What in the Five Guilds was going on to get a Rider involved? Ari felt in her bag for the three tubes she’d swiped from the refinery. It was a capital offense to engage in the illegal transport or harvesting of reagents, but that shouldn’t merit the King’s Riders.
A second time, the heavens themselves sounded like they were being torn apart as a Dragon descended from the sky world of Nova. The Dragon’s mechanical gliders swept arcs of magic across the impenetrable clouds that separated Loom and Nova as they darted over the city. Ari pressed the wanted poster into her breast pocket. She’d stick to the original plan. Now was not the time for panic or over-calculation.
The sewer systems of New Dortam funneled together into the older, original system in Old Dortam. Ari headed in a straight line, sticking to alleyways and hastening across the slowly crowding streets she couldn’t avoid. Eventually, she knew she’d hit a main line access, or she’d run into Old Dortam. She’d lost the Revo grunts from the refineries. So long as she moved quickly and confidently, people wouldn’t notice the unorthodox clockwork gearbox and chest harness she wore. People only ever saw what they expected, rarely what was actually there.