“They’re coming right at us,” Justin announced.
“Where else would they be going?” Bethesda said irritably. “We’re the only things out here.” She slammed her fists on the console. “Itoldyou we were going to be invaded!”
“Let’s not jump to conclusions,” Julius said. “We don’t knowit’s an invasion yet.”
“Oh, comeon, Julius!” she cried, whirling around. “Even you can’t be this naïve. The day after I explain to you we’re sitting ducks, a flock of foreign dragons charges our airspace. What do you think they’re here to do? Say hello?” She cast a nervous glance up at the screen. “I’m just glad Chelsie’s gone.”
“Why?” he asked, suddenly suspicious. “What does she have to do with this?”
“I’dloveto tell you,” his mother replied. “Alas, you made me swear on my fire to keep that secret, so I’m afraid you’ll just have to wallow in your own irony. In the meanwhile, we need to prove that a wounded clan is a far cry from a dead one. Justin?”
The knight’s head popped up at his name, and Bethesda shot him a deadly smile. “Show these snakes the price of trespassing on Heartstriker land.”
The words were barely out of her mouth before Justin’s grin grew to match her own. “On it,” he said, striding over to tap the surface of a very black, very deadly-looking console in the far corner of the room. Unlike the others, though, this was one he clearly knew how to use, tapping his fingers through the AR until the whole interface turned an ugly, angry red. “Missiles armed.”
“Wait, missiles?” Julius said. “We havemissiles?”
“Of course we have missiles,” Bethesda said as the red interface appeared on her command console as well. “Whose mountain do you think this is?”
Before he could reply, she swept her hand through the tangle of menus floating in the air above her console, painting the undulating shapes of the dragons on the screen above with candy-red target icons. She was halfway through by the time Julius made it to her side.
“Mother,stop!” he cried frantically, grabbing her arm. “We can’t just shoot down any dragon who flies over our territory!”
“Of course we can,” she said, yanking out of his grip. “It’sourterritory. They’d do the same thing if we flew into Beijing.”
That was probably true. Still. “We don’t even know for certain why they’re here yet! Shouldn’t we at least fire a warning shot or—”
“And waste a surprise attack?” She rolled her eyes. “You are clearly not a wartime consigliere.”
“But—”
“You can ask them about their intentions all you like once they’re on the ground,” she said in a patronizing voice. “For now…”
She brought her fist down on the command grid with a bloodthirsty grin, and a new set of sirens began to scream as missile launch warnings flashed on every monitor in the room. The ground above them began to rumble a second later, but as Julius braced for the inevitable roar of rockets, everything went suddenly quiet.
The triumphant smile slipped off Bethesda’s face.
“What happened?” she demanded, hunching over her console. “Why aren’t they launching?”
“It’s aborted,” Justin said, nodding at the cascade of flashing warning messages covering the missile system’s AR. “Looks like a system failure.”
Growling low in her throat, Bethesda shoved away from the central command console and marched over to his. Pushing Justin out of the way, she stabbed her manicured nails through the floating mesh of missile commands, grabbing the floating error messages and yanking them closer so she could read what had gone wrong. The longer she stared at them, though, the more confused she appeared.
“That’s impossible,” she said at last.
“What’s impossible?” Julius asked, hopes rising.
“This!” she cried, flinging her hands up at the interface. “It’s not a system failure. Every single missile just threw an error, and not even the same one. If they’d all failed the same way, I could see it being a hacker or a bug, but one hundred and forty-four missiles having unique fatal malfunctions at theexact same time? That doesn’t happen! The odds would be—”
She stopped cold, green eyes going wide. “Oh no,” she whispered, looking back up at the dragons on the screen. “No, no,no.”
She started cursing after that, spewing a crescendo of profanity in an impressive number of languages. The outburst was even more shocking for Julius than the panic alarm had been, because though his mother often lost her temper, she rarely cursed. It was low class, she’d claimed, a mark of vulgarity. But she seemed to be making it up for it now, and the worst part was, Julius didn’t know what had set her off. Other than getting closer, the knot of dragons looked the same now as it had before she’d tried to attack. He was staring at the beautiful shapes on the screen, trying to figure it out, when the rising sun broke over the peak of Heartstriker Mountain, lighting up something shiny and golden hidden at the center of the pack.
“What’s that?” he said, squinting at the lovely spark of gold that was blinding even through the cameras.
“The end of the road,” his mother said bitterly, finally switching back to English. “That, my dear idiot son,is the Qilin. The Golden Emperor, which is only appropriate, because we areimperiallyscrewed.”
He stared at the screen in wonder. “But I thought the Golden Emperor never left China?”
