My skin prickled. “How many?” I asked.

“Two.” His expression darkened. “Both armed. They won’t be expecting us, but we’re going to have to be fast if we want to take them out before they sound the alarm. Think you can pull off another crazy ninja Viper attack? We’re not going to get another shot at this. Once I open that door, there’s really no going back.”

My stomach dropped. After a moment, I took a deep breath, steeling myself. Whatever it took, I would find Garret. Even though these new instincts freaked me out. Even though I wanted nothing more than to be done with this place, with its armed humans and dead dragons hanging on the walls. We were almost to the soldier; his life depended on us reaching him, and I wouldn’t let anything stop me now.

I glanced at Riley and nodded. “I’m ready. Let’s do this.”

Garret

One hundred and twenty minutes till dawn and counting.

The hardest thing about waiting to die is being torn between wanting more time and wishing they would just get it over with already. You can’t sleep, of course. You can’t focus on anything else. Your mind keeps tormenting you with questions and memories and what-ifs, until you wish they’d just do you a favor and knock you senseless until it was time. Maybe that was a coward’s way out, but I didn’t want to show up to my execution looking beaten down and exhausted. I would not beg, or cry or plead for mercy. If this was my last day on Earth, I wanted to end it well, facing Death on my feet with my head held high. That was all a soldier of St. George could hope for.

As I lay on the cot, unable to sleep, unable to stop the relentless countdown in my head, my nerves suddenly prickled, making my breath catch. It was faint, but I recognized it instantly. The same feeling I got when I was about to kick down the door to a target’s residence, or when I suspected an ambush lay just ahead and we were about to walk right into it. A soldier’s instincts, telling me that something was about to happen.

Carefully, I swung my legs off the mattress and walked to the front of my cell. The room on the other side of the bars remained empty and dark, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. Were they coming for me early? No, that wasn’t right. The Order was nothing if not punctual. I still had another hour and fifty minutes before I was scheduled to die. Maybe the pressure was finally getting to me. Maybe I was having a nervous breakdown.

A sudden boom in the absolute stillness made me jump, the familiar crash of a door being flung open or kicked down, and I instinctively went for the gun at my belt, though of course I was unarmed. Shouts and cries of alarm rang out from the guard room beyond the cell block. Helpless, I clenched my fists around the bars, listening as a battle raged just a few yards away, muffled through the wall. There was a short scuffle, the scrape of chairs and the thud of bodies hitting the floor…and then silence.

I waited, holding my breath, my whole body coiled and ready for a fight. I didn’t know what to expect, but whatever was coming, I was ready.

And then the door to the guard room opened, and I met a pair of vivid green eyes across the hall. Turns out, I wasn’t ready at all.

The breath caught in my throat, and for a moment, I could only stare. Not only a nervous breakdown, I’m also hallucinating. Because there was no way she could be here. No sane reason she would show up in the middle of a St. George base, minutes from my execution. My mind had snapped; I was seeing things that weren’t there. The Perfect Soldier, unable to face his own death, goes crazy at age seventeen.

Numb, I gaped at her, unable to look away. Bracing for the girl silhouetted against the light to writhe into shadows and moonlight and disappear. She didn’t vanish but smiled, in a way that made my heart twist, and hurried to the door of my cell.

“Ember?” Still incredulous, I couldn’t move as the figure drew close, gazing up at me. A hand reached through the bars, pressing against my jaw, and I drew in a shuddering breath. It was warm, and solid, and real. Impossible as it was, this was real.

My hand closed on her wrist, and I felt her pulse, rapid and steady, under my fingers. “What are you doing here?” I whispered.

“I came to get you out, of course,” Ember whispered back, her breath fanning across my cheek, further proof that she wasn’t a ghost or a figment of my imagination. Her gaze met mine through the bars, flashing defiantly. “I wasn’t going to leave you, Garret. Not after you saved us. I’m not going to let them kill you.”

“You came here for me?”

“Ember,” growled a new, impatient voice, one that was vaguely familiar. I gazed past her shoulder and saw a second figure, dark haired and dressed in black, scowl at me from the open door of the guard room. With a start, I realized it was the other dragon, the one Ember had fled with when she left Crescent Beach.

“No time for this, Firebrand,” he snapped, and tossed something to her, something that glittered as she caught it. “Come on. Those guards won’t stay down forever. Open the door and let’s get the hell out of here.”

I was still reeling from the fact that Ember was here, that two dragons had shown up in the middle of the night to save me, but the second dragon’s words jolted me out of my trance. As Ember shoved the key into the lock and wrenched the door open with a rusty creak, I suddenly realized what this meant, what was really happening.

“Garret,” Ember said as I paused, staring at the open door. “Come on, before someone sees us. What are you doing?”

At the edge of the hall, the other dragon gave a snort of disgust.

“I told you, Firebrand.” He gestured sharply in my direction. “You can open the monkey’s cage, but you can’t force it to leave. He’s not moving because we’re the enemy, and he’d rather stay and let them put a bullet through his skull than escape with a pair of dragons. Isn’t that right, St. George?” The figure turned to me, mouth curled in a sneer. “Never mind that they sold you down the river without a second thought. But you know, I don’t care one way or another about your loyalty hang-ups. You have three seconds to choose before I say the hell with it and leave you here. So what’s it gonna be? Come with us, or stay here and die?”

Escape. Leave St. George with two dragons. With the enemy. I’d been fully prepared to die a moment ago, but now freedom was staring me in the face. If I did this, if I stepped through that door, there was no turning back.

For just a moment, the Perfect Soldier recoiled at the idea of accepting the help of our greatest enemies, even now. But I knew the truth, and it cast an ominous shadow over my thoughts. There was something wrong within the Order, something I’d never seen before I met Ember. It was treason to speak against St. George doctrine, treason to consider that the Order could be mistaken. No one in St. George was willing to hear the other side of the story, that a dragon, a creature whose race they had hunted and killed for hundreds of years, could be more than just a monster. No one was willing to accept the idea that the Order of St. George had slaughtered those who did not deserve it.