Luckless Read online

  The manticore had no time to celebrate its victory. Gorot and Kisthe converged on it from opposite directions, fire blazing so hot it was nearly white as it poured from their throats. The beast, still tangled with Lyra’s corpse, couldn’t avoid both jets. Half its body caught fire, the long, dangerous tail shriveling and curling like a dead match. It swatted fruitlessly at the sky, enormous paws grasping greedily until the very end. When it died, it did so with an enormous shudder that even Evan could make out.

  The dragons screamed with grief. The defenders watched with breathless dread. And the remaining crix reversed direction and scuttled, en masse, toward the carcasses.

  Chapter Two

  Evan stood beneath one of the goalposts of what had once been Denver’s football stadium, now Forge’s dragons’ den, and shivered, his hands tucked under his armpits. Yesterday’s fight was old news, leaving only the memory of dragonfire for warmth. Snow had come during the night, tiny, frozen flakes dropping bitter and desultory from the sky, an insult of a shroud for Lyra’s and Bram’s bodies. The bodies of dozens of crix were stacked above the far entry to the stadium, collected by the surviving dragons to be eaten later. Even grieving as they were, they had to eat, and the meat of their kills was the simplest option.

  The stadium blocked the worst of the wind, but the help it gave Evan was limited. He didn’t have the means right now to bargain for suitable winter clothes. His jeans were still a little damp from washing out yesterday’s blood, and had been patched so often they were almost more stitch than cloth. His sweater was thick and warm, at least, and the leather jacket helped, but his gloves were too thin to be much good against the cold.

  He’d tied his hair back and shaved away three days’ worth of brown stubble from his too-sharp jaw and cheekbones, a futile genuflection in the direction of respect. He still felt shabby compared to everyone else—most potential riders went out of their way to dress up for Choosings, like the dragons gave a shit what they wore when they could feel what was in their hearts.

  It was so strange, living in a place where some people were profoundly better off than others. In Marble, everyone had shared what they owned, whether they were a rider, a fighter, or a cook. Here, the riders were the upper echelon of society. They got to live in special apartments near the stadium that housed the dragons, they got extra rations, and they had first pick of everyone’s ammunition. Their lives were dangerous, of course—being a rider was never safe—but Evan didn’t think they were much more dangerous than fighting from the wall.

  He shivered, glanced around at the small crowd that waited uneasily with him—all fellow empaths—and thought about monsters.

  Evan had never known a world without monsters.

  He knew they hadn’t always been here, of course—not the way they were now. Even when he’d lived in Marble, the tiniest little mountain town still standing on this side of the continental divide, there’d been evidence of the way things used to be. Cabins without bars across the windows and doors, buildings that were designed to keep out bears, not beasts. Old Coca-Cola ads on the wall of the general store, once a bright, attractive red, now faded to a pinkish gray. Empty boxes of ammo that had been mass-produced—flawless bullets, lined up in neat row after neat row, with no fear of using them up because, according to what he knew of the internet, you could just go online and buy more. Amazing plenty. Astonishing variety. Delivery. Nothing came by delivery anymore, not between cities—the monsters would kill you in the dead zones that the Plains had become.

  Evan didn’t know exactly how the rifts had opened, those massive holes between dimensions that had ushered in a flood of the worst of another world’s offerings. The only way people had survived was by clustering in their most defensible areas—mainly cities that had been vastly reshaped to provide a safe haven inside of thick walls—and by making alliances with the dragons.

  Dragons, it turned out, had a peculiar empathic ability that a small percentage of humans shared. It didn’t stop at a simple connection, though—dragons loved the humans they bonded with, and protected that bond with their riders ferociously. If their rider was killed, the dragon almost inevitably left behind the city they’d helped, too brokenhearted to stay. Riders kept dragons close, and more importantly to the governor, controlled.

  Evan thought of Lyra and tightened his jaw. Word had gotten around that he had been the one to fire the flare that’d brought help to the wall. Some people—and the son of a bitch gunner, Dale was his name, was definitely one of them—thought Lyra was dead because Gorot hadn’t been there to fight the manticore as well, because he’d been off strafing the wall that didn’t need it, could have held, stupid, idiot, bring him in, KICK HIM OUT! Apparently, to them, Evan had cost the city a dragon. Bad enough he couldn’t keep his own alive, now he’s killing ours as well.

  Governor Townsend hadn’t agreed. Not because he liked Evan, really—in fact, Evan was pretty sure the man regretted allowing him to stay five years ago. Towns, even big ones with over ten thousand residents like Forge, were hostile to strangers in this day and age. Evan had been the only survivor of the Marble massacre, and the first newcomer to petition to live in Forge in a decade.

  But Townsend had let Evan stay in the hope that he would bond again with a dragon, however unlikely that might be. Evan had failed at every Choosing, and had instead proven his worth to the city as a smith instead of a rider. Still, as an empath, even a broken one, he was required to attend, and today was the fourth since he’d arrived. No one would meet his eyes, and no one came close enough to talk to, much less touch.

  Evan told himself it didn’t matter, and stamped his feet in an effort to get more heat into them. The sooner the dragons came out, the sooner he could get back to his workshop. He wasn’t going to get caught short of arrows again.

  “There,” a woman murmured, pointing to the far end of the field. Dragons were emerging from the massively-enlarged tunnel that had once welcomed men in uniform who’d made a living playing ball games, of all the ridiculous things. Evan snorted quietly and turned his attention to the fledglings. They were worth looking at, even if none of them were meant for him.

  Gorot and Kisthe were a mated pair, and every year they brought a new egg into the world. After a year’s careful incubation, a dragon was born from it. Over the past forty years, thirty-eight of those eggs had hatched. Three of them had grown mature enough to claim riders, but all had died in a truly terrible battle last summer. Too young, too green, their scales not tough enough yet and their riders not skilled enough to effectively defend them . . . their deaths had been tragedies. The entire city had mourned their loss, but none more so than their parents. Frankly, Evan thought it was a miracle that Gorot and Kisthe were letting more of their young emerge at all. With Lyra gone, though, they needed all the help they could get to stay alive to rear the rest of their hatchlings.

  That was why the Choosing was today. Whether the fledglings were ready yet or not, the city needed them. If they were lucky, the young dragons would last more than a single season.

  There were three of them total, the oldest of Gorot and Kisthe’s surviving offspring. The largest was as big as the courthouse back in Marble—which was to say, not big but not despairingly small. The littlest one was no larger than a one-room cabin. It had bright black scales and coppery eyes, and was so beautiful that Evan had to lower his head to hide his sudden, unwelcome surge of emotion. God, there was no way such a tiny dragon would survive in combat. Don’t pick someone, don’t pick anyone, go back to the nest and live and grow stronger.

  They couldn’t feel his urgency. Of course they couldn’t—Evan was broken. Still, it hurt a little bit to watch them advance across the dead field, catch the eyes of every human in the group in turn, and flinch when they encountered the blank spot that was Evan. The biggest veered to the right, heading for a young man dressed like a blacksmith. That was good, at least—a rider needed to be strong if they were going to keep themselves and their dragon safe in the sky.


  Evan saw the man’s grin, heard his, “Me? Really? Thank you, oh fuck, thank you!” He threw his arms around the slenderest section of the dragon’s neck and stood there for a long moment, gasping and trying not to cry, until one of the caretakers gently interrupted the moment to lead them both away. They needed time to bond, to get to know each other, before they could begin training together. A year was standard, but there was no way that was going to happen now.

  The pair would be lucky if they got a month. Idiot kid. It’s wonderful, it’s exciting, not a romance but a powerful, transformative love nonetheless, nothing you’ve ever known but everything you’ve hoped for—until you lose it.

  The second dragon was the color of milk that had gone slightly off, white with a tinge of yellow. Its snout was shorter than the others, and it had a heavier body and shorter legs. It was a tank of a creature, not a fighter jet, and just looking at it made Evan’s heart pang with remembrance. Juree had been built the same way. Built to last, his father had said, and she had lasted, from his grandfather through his father all the way down to him. He was the one who’d broken the streak. There was no dragon to pass on to his child now—which was for the best, really, since Evan knew himself well enough to figure that he’d probably never have one of his own.

  This dragon chose a woman, older than most of the other candidates, with faint streaks of gray marking her dark hair. She carried herself like a fighter, and if the tight nod she gave her dragon was any indication, she knew the odds they were up against. There was none of the young man’s exuberance in her, just a calm, almost resigned acceptance. For a moment, Evan wished he knew her name. She seemed like someone who might understand.

  Only the small one was left, and it practically frolicked from person to person, wide eyes gleaming with curiosity and excitement. As it came closer to Evan, he knew from the slow, cold curl in his guts that he couldn’t handle coming face-to-face with it. He didn’t want to see it recoil in disgust once it got a better sense of him. He didn’t want to smell the musk of its scales or feel the banked heat of its fire. Touching it would break him all over again.

  Evan gritted his teeth and turned his back on the dragon. The people closest to him murmured, and one of them whispered, “Rude bastard,” but he didn’t care. He would stay—as an unbonded empath he was legally bound to stay, it was one of the conditions of being here in Forge—but he wouldn’t look. It would be better for both of them.

  Instead he stared straight ahead, down the gray, dingy tunnel that he and the other candidates had been led out of, and tried desperately not to focus on anything at all. Not the barren walls that used to separate players from fans, not the few disjointed chairs that were left in the stands above the tunnel itself, not the man in the black suit and cloak standing to the right of it, his hands resting on the shoulders of a child—

  Wait, what?

  Evan blinked and refocused. There actually was a man there, tall from the looks of him, but that was about all Evan could make out from here other than the long, pale fall of his hair over his shoulders. The child in front of him had the same pale hair, but cut shorter, and was holding the edges of the man’s cloak in front of his body like a blanket.

  What were they doing here? If the man or his child was an empath, they should have been out with the rest of them for the Choosing. It was strange, though—Evan had done this before, he knew the other empaths in Forge by sight if not by name, and he didn’t recognize these two. Newcomers? Where the hell were they from?

  Almost nobody traveled these days; it was way too hard to get from one fortified city to another. Hell, the closest city to Forge at this point was Cheyenne up in what used to be Wyoming, and they still told stories about the disaster that had befallen the last group trying to make that trip. Had this man and boy just been kept under wraps so far? Were there special circumstances made for the child for some reason?

  Curiosity kept Evan staring at the pair, until a tiny wave from the boy made him realize that he’d been caught out. Shit, he was being rude now, right? If they were allowed to stand back that far, then the people in charge knew about them and had made arrangements and it was none of Evan’s damn business. He should turn around, he should—

  The boy waved again. Evan, despite himself, lifted his hand and waved back.

  “The choices are made!”

  A wave of relief swept over him, and Evan turned around just in time to see a sylph of a girl throw her arms around the black dragon’s neck. God, she couldn’t be more than fifteen. He felt like he was going to puke. He made himself stand with the others long enough for the newly bonded pair to leave and, permission given to retreat, then hurried out of the stadium as fast as his injured leg would let him.

  As he passed through the entrance of the tunnel, the boy and his father were nowhere to be seen.

  Chapter Three

  Evan wiped his forehead with the back of his hand and held up his latest arrowhead for inspection. It was a simple thing, forged from a piece of rebar and socketed onto the end of a treated pinewood shaft, but the metal was heavy-duty and could be made sharp enough to do the job. Rebar was the cheapest metal too. There was plenty of it lying around close to the city, close enough that scavengers didn’t have to endanger themselves too badly to get it. The more trouble a scav had to go to for what you needed, the more expensive it would be. Evan had once had his own arrowheads sold back to him for twice the price during a particularly bad stretch of fighting.

  Evan’s custom arrows were some of the best, bought or traded for by other archers, but his margin was still tight. Figuring out how to sell his wares to support himself—that had been a hell of a learning curve when he’d first arrived. For all that everyone in the city relied on their defenders to keep them alive, Evan had quickly found that in no way did their need equate to any sort of charity or assistance.

  He could have used the mass-produced arrows the governor provided to the archer corps, but those were made from shitty scraps and never flew the same direction twice. People who wanted to stay alive on the wall either made their own, or came to a specialist like Evan. He rented space in one of the larger smithies, just a corner in the back where he could craft his arrows in peace. People tended not to bother him in the shop, for which he was grateful.

  Of course, the day he could have most used the solitude was the day someone sought him out. Naturally. When he saw who it was, though, Evan’s irritation morphed into curiosity—and, well, shock, frankly.

  The man in the black suit was even more striking up close than he’d been yesterday. His pale hair, left loose over his shoulders, took on a golden cast in the light of the forges. His eyes were dark brown, but oddly reflective, and with his cloak pulled back, Evan finally got a look at his body. He was tall—well over six feet, he probably had three or four inches on Evan—and slim in a way that indicated a wiry strength hidden under good tailoring, rather than gauntness from hunger or illness.

  “Are you Evan Luck?” He held out a gloved hand, and it took Evan a moment to remember he needed to respond.

  “Oh!” He took off his forging glove and shook. “Hi, I’m— Yes, I’m Evan Luck. And you are?”

  “Lee Caldwell.” Those glittering eyes were quite captivating, actually, but not so much that Evan forgot just how strange this all was. He sold his arrows through middlemen, and nobody—seriously—ever came to meet with him here in person. He was suddenly, intensely conscious of his scarred leather apron over the same wool sweater he’d been wearing yesterday. At least he’d changed his pants, but the baggy canvas pair he had on now screamed laborer, about as far from formal as you could get in Forge.

  At least he’d shaved again this morning. Sparks and facial hair were never fun.

  “How can I help you, Mr. Caldwell?”

  “Please call me Lee. And actually, I’m here on behalf of my son, Jason.”

  Ah, so the kid was his. “What can I do for him, then?”

  “It’s a bit of a personal
matter.” Lee glanced around, and the dozens of eyes that had been fixed on them suddenly looked away. “One I’d prefer to discuss in a more private setting.”

  “I— All right, but . . .” Evan shook his head. “What could he possibly want from me?”

  “Come with me and I’ll happily tell you. And treat you to lunch,” he added, “if you need a stronger reason to let me pull you away from your work.”

  Evan was never one to refuse free food. He’d gotten his work done for the day, and his curiosity was eager to be sated. “All right.” He stood up and pulled off his apron, then glanced down at himself and grimaced. “I’ll need a few minutes to change, or you’re not going to want to be seen with me.”

  “We’ll be taking lunch in a private location, not a canteen, but either way I wouldn’t mind being seen with you.”

  You’re clearly new here, Evan wanted to say, but he held back. There was no need to antagonize the guy. “If you’re sure.”

  “I am. Oh, and please—” he gestured to Evan’s bench “—bring one of your arrows.”

  Ah. So he might be looking to buy, and wanted to cut out the middleman. “We can negotiate a price for them here, if you like.” Evan shrugged uncomfortably. “There’s no need to feed me first.”

  Lee’s head tilted slightly, and he looked at Evan like he wasn’t quite sure what he was seeing. “I’m not here just for your arrows, Evan,” he said at last. “I’m here for you. Please, come with me and I’ll explain.” He began to walk away and, more curious than ever, Evan followed him. His face heated from the strength of the open-mouthed stares he was getting, but if his sun-scarred skin was good for anything, it was hiding a blush.

  It was cool in the hall outside the smithy, and got even cooler as Lee led the way up a staircase in one of the enormous turrets of Forge’s inner city, going higher and higher until Evan shivered every time they passed an unblocked window. He was used to climbing to get on the wall, of course, but this staircase connected to the living quarters of the elite. Evan had never been up it before—hell, he’d never even gotten past the admin level of the inner city. His own room was ground level, like most people’s.