Page 78 of Dragon 7

I wanted to turn the cart around.

Every animal part of me wanted to point the headlights east and drive until I found her. I wanted to feel the heat of her in my arms instead of at a distance through my chest. I wanted to hold her. I wanted to kiss her fury away, let it burn against me, so she understood she was facing nothing alone.

She is safe.

I know but—

War.

Yes.

Our men are here.

I stopped the cart, grabbed my mask, and headed off. Show me.

Chapter twelve

Pieces on a Board

Kenji

I smelled my men before I saw them. Gun oil. Fresh sweat. The sharp mineral bite of recently fired casings. Then the forest thinned by degrees—trunks spacing wider, canopy pulling back, moonlight falling through in larger pieces.

Goryū dropped low, folded his wings, and coiled into the dark above a ridge of high brush.

There, I saw silhouettes of many men off in the distance.

I walked on.

The noise of war sounded louder here. The crack and stammer of sustained rifle fire pressed close enough that I felt each shot in my sternum. Men shouted. Metal scraped across metal. A voice screamed a name, and then was cut short.

Then more gunfire, continuous, overlapping, a tearing roar that filled the whole sky and pressed down through the canopy like a second darkness.

The ground shook again.

An explosion came from the south.

Leaves trembled on every branch around me.

I moved through the brush toward the sound and saw dozens of Scales crouched in the undergrowth, pressed against trunks, or prone in the leaf-litter with rifles at their shoulders. They wore their plain masks—solid red, black, or gray. In the broken moonlight, they had stopped looking like men and more like demons with horns, hollow eyes, and open mouths. Row after row. Absolutely still and watching the open ground ahead.

I moved past them toward the tree line, and then the open space beyond the trees stopped me.

A landing zone was up ahead. Exactly as Reo had planned it. The cleared ground ran wide under the moon, and it already held one of Akiro's transport planes at the far edge—ramp down, engines still turning, heat distortion shimmering above.

Men poured from the huge plane, armed and forming up in tight columns that broke apart the moment the first fire found them from the tree line and many of the masked Scales raced out of the forest.

Akiro’s men looked shocked out of their fucking minds. Surely, they thought the Scales were insane.

They were masked and everywhere, screaming out their dismay.

The fight moved in bursts—advance, fire, fall back, fire—and the noise was enormous, a concussive wall that pressed against the chest and made the back of my teeth ache.

Muzzle flash strobed the dark in white and orange. Tracer rounds drew long red lines through the black. Shell casings caught the moonlight as they arced, fell, and disappeared into the grass.

Many of Akiro's men went down.

Many of mine moved forward and then hit their demise.