I avoided spells as much as possible in my line of work — setting off the wrong magic detector was a guaranteed visit from the police; not to mention that spells could be countered, and enchantments suppressed, to fail you exactly when you needed them most — but sometimes there was no substitute for magic.
My makeshift cloak, for example, had started life as an earth-pony raincoat, projecting a minor water-repulsion field. A bit of tinkering with a storebought thaumic amplifier — itself modded to remove the limiter field — had supercharged the spell. The cloudcrete of the upper city was light-as-air stone, but Cloudsdale was still built atop clouds; the maintenance tunnels had been built for pegasi like myself, and normally I would have hit the floor with a soggy smack, but a microsecond before my own personal field could interact with the cloud floor, the fabric's field cut through it and shoved it aside like the vapor it was, blazing a self-sealing tunnel straight down through the foundations into open sky.
As soon as I was clear, I rolled out of the blanket and spread my wings, swooping in a lazy circle to retrieve the fabric and stuffing it into one saddlebag. I made sure that there was nopony in sight, then flew over to a small alcove I'd hollowed out of the cloud during my planning, and allowed myself the luxury of a long, deep breath.
First priority: Take a seat and check the hind ankles. They were tender and swollen from the jolt of the sloppy buck — probably light sprains. I dug through my saddlebags for the travel medikit I'd assembled from off-the-shelf drugs and a few homebrewed surprises, painted on some contact anti-inflammatories, and filled a syringe with my small concealed vial of changeling-chitin trait. My ankles stiffened at the injection, growing a hard outer layer without changing appearance. I wiggled my hooves experimentally — I wouldn't trust them for an evening of line dancing, but the trait would get me back on my hooves without the paper trail of a hospital visit or the exorbitant cost of an under-the-table healing spell.
With that fixed, it was time for some changes.
Goodbye Jimsonweed, mildly pudgy botanist with modest dreams of small-business entrepreneurship; hello J.K. Greyson, thin and long-muzzled repairer of corporate automatons. Jimsonweed's paunch came from a pair of kangaroo-pouch traits, their openings concealed in my wingpits, packed with shaped nullfoam to keep my disguise tools in comfortable stasis. J.K.'s muzzle would be a similar application of alchemy from those tools: a tiny touch of elephant trait on the bridge of the nose.
Traiting used magical reagents, but it wasn't magic in the traditional sense. It involved injecting a specific extract of Poison Joke, prepared with a homeopathic solution of animal parts, to splice one of that animal's characteristics into your body — permanently, unless an injection of an equally specific Joke remedy undid the effect. Because Poison Joke merely altered your personal morphic field, its changes didn't scan as active magic and couldn't be suppressed or countered by spells; every alteration did mean your inherent magical trace changed, but that was less a problem than a feature for someone like me.
I double-checked my flight feathers: running low, but I still had at least one of each type. They, too, had been traited, but their special properties were the result of years of careful experimentation — trollskin on the wing-struts to speed feather regrowth; a bizarre mixture of manticore-tail, porcupine-quill and rattlesnake-fang to turn the feathers into detachable reserves of magical toxin; and then various other injections to alter the magical potential of that poison into something useful to me. Some ridiculously expensive black-market essence of windigo had turned those feathers into fog bombs, flash-freezing the water vapor in a large volume of surrounding air; further applications of blood samples liberated from the Everfree Memorial Zoo had given many of those clouds extra punch, with soporific or nauseating qualities. The flash-bang was a simple conversion of a feather's magical potential into noise and light, and the explosive thaumic discharge simpler still — releasing the energy in a way that mimicked the surge of spellcasting, as I'd done escaping from Spike. The obvious conclusion for a spellcaster like him would have been that I'd signaled a unicorn accomplice for teleportation, and for the next several hours he'd be scouring the upper city's hundreds of preset destination pads for my drop point.
As I injected the antidotes for my pouch traits, I couldn't help but replay the whole encounter in my mind. Maybe dragons were just that irrationally scrupulous about their bits, but I couldn't shake the feeling that I'd been played from the first moment. And what about his job offer? All the history books said that organized crime had been stamped out centuries ago, and my every encounter with the simple and scattered grifters that passed for a criminal underworld was firsthoof evidence of that. Had I finally stumbled across a deep underground organization snapping up all the real talent?
Or … wait a minute. "Spike." The Spike, from the old legends of the First Friends? Was he Rainbow Corps?
A chill ran down my spine at the thought. Equestria's police and Guards were like the rest of the nation — fat, soft and lazy after centuries of harmony. When it came down to it, the few ponies like me who had the smarts for a life of crime were providing a public service, giving the police something to do beyond dreary days of writing traffic tickets. The Rainbow Corps were something else — a small and secretive cabal of heroes who were sent after the worst of the worst. They'd taken down the Chrysalid Cartel, back when changelings were still infiltrators into pony society; they'd broken the back of the Gryphic Raiders, bringing peace to the eastern continent; they'd even captured the great Inseam — the Tailor of Terror, the Celestia of Crime. Had Spike's "desk job" been some sad ploy to rehabilitate me?
I snorted. Whether kingpin or hero, he was crazy if he thought I'd play along. Living outside the law meant not being bound by rules — escaping the soft and gilded trap of society, and carving out a life that was truly your own. That freedom was a rush with no equal, and solitude was the price of admission.
It hadn't always been that way. Crime had flourished when society's rules were looser — for the same reason that ancient granaries, with wooden walls and padlocked doors, had more rats than the modern ones with steel siding and deterrence wards. It was simple to be a rat in the old days, but the modern era required vision and drive. A different breed tough enough to make their own holes and smart enough to foil the magical countermeasures. A cold-iron rat, if you will.
Speaking of which … a smart rat didn't stick around once the exterminators came knocking. It was time to start the job I'd come to Cloudsdale to do. I had unintentionally created a perfect diversion — my little altercation with Spike would tie up half the city's cops — and I could hit my target and be halfway across the continent before the Corps picked my trail back up.
I applied a storebought personal alterant to my mane — it was what had originally given me the idea of traiting — shifting it to a function-over-form buzz cut, and used the color-shifting trait I'd discovered early on to turn my pelt into J.K.'s dull grey. My Cutie Mark was a different matter entirely; traiting it was beyond my skills. I squirted on a few drops of the solvent for the skin-adhesive holding on the image of the bouquet, revealing underneath the crowbar Mark that had first earned me the name "Jimmy." In its place went a screwdriver grip over the curved end of the crowbar, and a mallet crossing over it. A perfectly nondescript Mark for a repairstallion. The old Mark, along with the used syringes and padding, got wadded up in the raincape, and then I triggered a tiny disintegrator-bomb I'd modded out of an office wastepaper-atomizer.
All traces of my past life gone, I pinned on my forged Harmonicorp ID card, flew toward the center of the donut-shaped cloud holding up the city, and spiraled up the central updraft. Sticking scrupulously to the flight lanes, I landed at Central Station. First, I went into the station's Honest Tea franchise and grabbed a caff-cider, paying for it with a two-hundred-kay bill from my saddlebag — which got me some odd looks; it was a little-used denomination. Then I discreetly spit Spike's five-kay out of my mouth-pouch and bought an airbus ticket for the Northedge Express. Finally, I ducked into the bathroom, pulled out the blunt back ends of my lockpicks, and added a few extra punches to the cards — altering it into a ticket into Northeast Industrial.
I'd lost 1500 bits in the bargain. That was the guiding principle of petty misdirection: anything that shorted the system would be flagged and scrutinized, but anything which benefited it would be glossed over as an accounting error. What sort of thief would rob himself?
I settled into a seat near the front of my airbus, directly behind the driver. Except for a few earth ponies in the back, whose conversation suggested they were heading out to an overnight road-maintenance job, the bus was empty — a welcome bonus, since it would give me an extra chance to think back through my heist plans. However, that idea was scotched when a tall, pudgy unicorn galloped up to the bus as the doors were closing, and sat down directly across from me as she caught her breath. She glanced up at me, and our eyes locked for a second. "Oh, my," she said with a smile. "It's not often you see a pegasus in an airbus."
I took in the pristine curls of her indigo mane — perfectly coiffed into the hairstyle of Rarity of the First Five; copying the look of long-dead heroes never seemed to fall out of fashion — and the immaculate curves of her long eyelashes over sparkling azure eyes. Probably colored contacts to go along with the hair, but I had to admit they were an exquisitely tasteful match for her mauve coat and sea-green beret. It was too bad I didn't go in for the heavyset types, because she was certainly easy on the eyes.
What the hay, a little conversation couldn't hurt. "I'm new in town," I said, pushing my costume glasses up the bridge of my nose. "I figured this was the simplest way to navigate to my new job."
"Oh! You're heading to work, too?" She glanced at the clock display above the automaton. "There certainly aren't many ponies who go to work at 5 p.m."
"Not many ponies want their automatons repaired during business hours." I gestured to my Mark, then glanced at hers. "What about you? A geode with a gem inside? I can't imagine there are many after-hours geologists."
She giggled vapidly, breaking the Rarity illusion and making me wince. I admittedly took disguises far more seriously than the average pony, but had she no pride at all in her costume work? "Dear me, no," she said. "I'm a talent scout; my job is to discover diamonds in the rough. There's an audition tonight I don't dare miss."
"Ah," I said, my tolerance for small talk waning. "Well, good luck with that."
The airbus slowed and pulled out of the traffic lanes. A squadron of air police screamed by in the opposite direction, followed by two Guard patrols and an air-wagon with sirens ablare, all on a beeline toward Cloudsdale Square.
The unicorn's eyes widened as the bus accelerated back into traffic. "Oh, my."
"I imagine some criminal is on the loose," I said, then shrugged. "I'm sure the Princess' finest will give him what-for. That's what we pay them for, right?"
"We pay police to keep the peace," she said. "To step into disputes, and to help ponies who make mistakes. But a criminal?" Her muzzle curled. "Somepony who chooses to reject Harmony. Standing against everything the Sisters hold dear. What could drive a pony to such an extreme?"
I sat up a little straighter, and adjusted my glasses again. "It is an interesting question, isn't it? But I don't think they see it that way. I read a book a few years ago —" I didn't mention that I'd written it myself, under a pseudonym — "that dissected the careers of famous criminals. Take Inseam, the greatest thief ever. She only stole from corporations and from the ultra-rich, and he uncovered evidence that she set up a series of philanthropic shell organizations to donate the profits from all of her heists to the poor. Why would a criminal do that if it was about rejecting Harmony? Maybe she was rejecting a false interpretation of Harmony that was holding her back."
"That's rather an intriguing point," she said, leaning forward. "Come to think of it, I believe I recall that book. Wasn't it written by that 'cast-iron rat' fellow?"
"Cold iron."
"Right," she said. "He talked at great length about famous criminals of the past, but he himself was an enigma, wasn't he? He was bluntly disdainful of Inseam's charity, yet his heists all had similar targets to hers, and he never seemed obsessed with personal gain. He talked a great deal about proving himself and about being the best, yet he also described walking away from several heists that would have put his name down in history. He had nothing but scorn for the sort of thug who would hurt innocent ponies — a stance which cannot be reconciled with a desire for domination." The unicorn tapped a hoof to her chin. "A pony like that … driven not by wealth, nor fame, nor power … I dare say there's a yearning in his heart he dare not name, warped and stretched into a je ne sais quoi."
I snorted. Just another soft pony trying to romanticize a subject she could never understand. "You're overthinking it. He's a criminal, and the book was about the criminal mindset. All you have to do is look at the life they all chose. He said it himself, 'a rat is a rat is a rat.'" I glanced out the window, then leapt to my hooves. "Unfortunately, as much as I'd love to continue the conversation, this is my stop."
The unicorn gave me a small smile and inclined her head. "Thank you for such an insightful discussion, darling. I hope you enjoy your new job."
I stepped out of the airbus on the second-tier grid, on a walkway about twelve stories up from the cloud layer, and stared up at the Harmonicorp skyscraper that dominated the northeastern skyline. Below me were layers and layers of warehouses, and above were hundreds of stories of offices; here, nestled unobtrusively in the middle, lay the accounting department of their Honest Tea division.
Every Sunday at closing time, every Honest Tea in Equestria bundled up their cash collections and used a special target-locked teleporter to send the week's profits in. All of those bundles of large bills arrived in a single fully automated room. The bundles went one-by-one into a central bill-scanner, to verify the totals against each store's receipts, and the processed bills were collated into a single giant bundle. Then a targeted exclusion was briefly opened up in their cash vault's magical seals while that mega-bundle was teleported inside. Meanwhile, return shipments of low-value coins were prepared and teleported back to the stores, so that they could make change for the following week. It was elegant and foolproof — the teleportation automatons, being dragonfire-based, wouldn't transmit living matter, and ponies were kept out of the room during the process.
My plan was simplicity itself. I'd done the hardest part weeks ago — getting a fake security clearance and employee keycard for automaton repair contractor J.K. Greyson, and adding myself to the bottom of the on-call list for Sunday repairs. The 200-kay bill I'd slipped the Honest Tea cashier was specially treated with a material that, once primed by the dragonfire, would melt into adhesive under the infrathaum light of the bill scanner. All I had to do was beat the legitimate repairpony to the machine once it jammed — trivial, since I would already be on site — and I was in the controlled-access room with nearly a billion bits. A simple tweak to one of the automatons — which weren't target-locked, as they were reprogrammed for new stores all the time — and I could send that bundle anywhere in the city I wanted. As an extra precaution, I could check the manifests for a change bundle with the same weight as the one destined for the Vault, and reprogram that automaton to make the vault's deposit as usual — as long as the weights matched, the only discrepancy immediately flagged would be that one of the change bundles didn't reach its store, which was a common enough annoyance to have its own writeoff code in their reconciliation database.
I killed a bit of time at a food-stand around the corner, eating a late lunch of fried kelpcake as I kept an eye on my ankle-watch. I wasn't a fan of fast food, but J.K.'s cover story required a strict budget, and there was little point to playing a role if you weren't willing to stick with it. At exactly 5:12 p.m., I threw away my leftovers and walked around the corner. My keycard got me through the outer door, and I walked through the labyrinthine halls toward Cash Processing, against the flow of outbound traffic from the hundreds of employees leaving for the day.
Next came the guard station securing the restricted area around the counting room. The equine element always introduced unknown and unknowable complications into any plan, but there was no reason for this to be anything but routine; all my paperwork was in order. Today's equine element was a bored-looking ex-Guard, if the military service medals on his civilian uniform next to the "P. REST" nametag were any indication. He was flanked by two hulking gryphons with massive goop guns holstered between their wings.
Ex-Sergeant P. Rest stared at me as I approached. "Got a scroll about a machine jam," I said, and he rolled his eyes and waved me forward. I walked through the magic detector — clean, of course — and then stood still for the field scan. Rest raised one eyebrow. "Hell of a signature you've got there, son."
That was the traits' fault, but I'd accounted for that by registering my race as Changeling; their thaumic signatures were typically the same sort of incoherent melange. "Everyone says that, sir. Sorry if it's a hassle."
Rest squinted at my badge, understanding dawning, then leafed through a filing cabinet in the guard station. "It does all seem in order. Can't say I recognize you, though."
I inwardly sighed. Guards who took their duties seriously were always so tedious. "Just transferred to this division, sir. It's all there in the records."
"It is." He scribbled some notes down on the station record, then stood up and walked over to a side door. "In here, please."
I glanced at the hallway beyond the guard station, and the small, glass-windowed door leading to it that Rest wasn't opening. "Uh, but you just said everything was in order."
"So far. One last routine test."
I didn't like the sound of that — we'd been through all the routine tests I knew — but the gryphons' trigger-claws were looking predictably itchy, so when Rest opened the door into a small and totally empty room, I tamped down my panic and followed him in. He closed the door behind us, hoofed a button labeled "PRIVACY" by the door (which obligingly lit up green), and said in a bored tone: "Hatched form, please."
I stared numbly at him for a moment. "What."
"The form," he said, voice strained, "you came out of your egg in."
"That's ridiculous!" I protested. "My thaumic signature matches — even changelings can't forge that!" That was the point of using it for ID validations, after all. "This is — that's ridiculous, that's discrimination, do you even know how many equal-treatment regulations you're breaking right now?"
"Tell it to Equine Resources," Rest snapped. "The rules here are clear. You shift back to hatched form, or you walk out of this room in hoofcuffs."
In my line of work, it's essential to be able to read your adversary. In a situation like that, some ponies are vulnerable to the emotional appeal. Some are willing to look the other way for a large sum of money. Some are amenable to … other favors. But Sergeant Rest was that most aggravating of guards: a scrupulous one. The best I was going to get out of him was the element of surprise.
So I sighed, brought a wing to my face, and bit off one of my sleep-gas feathers.
The instant it started glowing, his eyes widened and he lunged for the door, shouting. I tackled him and we went down in a tangle of limbs. The element of surprise wasn't much help against earth-pony strength — he quickly lifted and slammed me into the wall, and had enough time to land a hard hoof upside my head before the feather went off.
As the room swayed around me, I clamped my jaw shut, desperately forcing myself to breathe through my nose — I'd hydra-traited it long ago so I could use their miasma resistance to escape the effects of my own bombs. Rest's eyes instantly rolled up, and he sagged to the floor, breathing slowly and evenly. Outside, I heard a further shout, the scrambling of claws, and the ominous whine of a goop-gun cycling up. I was still too rattled from the blow to think straight, but I dimly realized that if I gave the guards time to sound a general alert, that meant big trouble. A facility lockdown would ruin most of my escape routes.
I plucked my remaining flashbang, kicked it under the door, then turned around and closed my eyes as the whump of detonation hit. I could barely hear the gryphons screeching above the ringing in my ears, followed by the deep coughing of blind-fired goop and the jarring shudders of random bursts impacting the nearby walls. Walking out into suppressive fire wasn't anyone's idea of a good time, so I fumbled a small ball of clay out of my saddlebags, plucked a nausea-gas feather, and quickly jabbed its quill into the weight. I cracked the door open and flung the makeshift shuttlecock as far out the door as I could. About ten seconds after the soft paf of its detonation, the firing finally stopped, replaced by the twin sounds of retching.
The pause had also given me time to recollect my wits. Not enough to do the smart thing and abort the mission, unfortunately — all my rattled head could focus on was how close I was to those billion bits, and how unfair it was that an illegal anti-changeling corporate policy was about to blow my scheme apart. Maybe my pride was still a little stung by that close encounter with Spike, too. Whatever the reason, I found myself shouldering the door open and dragging Rest's body over to the lockpad in the middle of the hallway. I yanked his keycard from his belt, straining against the retractable chain to swipe it through the lock, and when the light turned yellow I hauled his hoof over to the sensor until it registered his thaumic signature and turned green. I threw a fog bomb toward the retching gryphons as a parting gift, closed the hall door, and hauled back to buck it as hard as I could, right underneath the lock mechanism —
OW sweet motherrutting Luna OW
— and as the quick patch-up job from the traits gave out, pain exploded through my senses.
On the bright side, while I could barely walk any more, the screaming agony had done a fine job of waking me back up.
I fumbled two quick-absorb opiates from my medikit, and crunched them between my molars, burning precious seconds as the gentle numbness kicked in. Pain drugs were like magic — harmful as a crutch, occasionally necessary as a tool — and a dull head was going to get me through the mission much better than lancing pain. I checked my work — thank the Sisters, I'd at least accomplished my goal by jamming the guard station lock, which meant that they weren't going to be sending anypony through the door after me.
… Until the security mages arrived right behind the guards and disabled the teleport suppression. I facehoofed. In exchange for buying myself the 30 seconds that I'd burned on downing my pain-pills, I'd just cost myself an exit. I gritted my teeth, took to the air, and flapped down the hallway toward Cash Processing. Deal with that later. Finish the job first.
Just past a T-junction, I carded open the Cash Processing door. It was a huge two-story room with walls lined with dual levels of automatons, a tangle of conveyor belts funnelling endless bales of bills toward a boxy central unit. The air smelt of burnt machine oil and tasted of copper, and a red light atop the bill-scanner in the center gave the dimly lit room a Tartaric feel. Not for the first time that day, I paused, tallying up another problem in the "stupid Jimmy mistakes" column: since the entire scanning unit had halted at my application of glue, about three-quarters of my billion bits were still scattered throughout half a roomful of smaller bundles. If I'd arrived without attracting suspicion, that wouldn't have been a show-stopper, but the clock was ticking and letting the scanner process and rebundle all the bills was out of the question. Well, there was nothing for it now but to take what I could — with an adversary as dangerous as Spike on my tail, I had a feeling I'd want as much cash as I could get to cloud my trail as I left Cloudsdale behind.
As I limped forward, I must have triggered an automatic sensor, because the room's lights sprang to life. I was startled enough to glance around, and a second-story window up above the door caught my eye. Two surprised ponies in business collars stared down through the glass at me. One turned to the other and mouthed something I couldn't make out, pointing at a panel in front of them. The other pointed at me, said something back, and dashed out of the room. Great — now I was really on a timer.
I hit the manual override on the scanner output tray, disengaged the bale-wrapper holding the loose pile of bills, and heaved it down the conveyor toward the Vault teleporter automaton, my hind ankles protesting severely. Then I jimmied open the automaton's maintenance panel, glancing at the grid of jumper pins that coded the delta to its destination. I'd practiced on these models enough so that I could have reset it in my sleep to hit my drop point. With a number of precise tongue-flicks, I connected the shunts for the X coordinate and pulled the lever to lock it in. I quickly reset the grid for Y and Z, locking them into volatile memory with lever-pulls, then slammed the panel closed, switched the automaton to manual activation, and stabbed the starter. The central flywheel whined to life, gears spun up, and the air began crackling with magical energy. With a flash, a quarter of a billion bits had vanished, replaced with the subtle tang of ozone.
Time to leave.
In the distance, I heard a muffled shout, then the hard crunch of bending metal. I flew back over to the door and peeked down the hallway — what looked like a full squadron of guards was trying to break through the guard-station door I'd jammed, but for the moment my sabotage was holding. I said a silent thank-you to fickle fate for that spot of luck, then glanced around for an exit. In one direction, the hallway had quad and biped restrooms, an elevator with a prominent "OUT OF ORDER" sign, and a row of office doors out to the distance. In the other direction, a few vending machines and then a break room, with plush carpeting, a few sofas, and a window-wall looking out over the city. Bingo. I dashed over to the break room, tapping on the window — from the dull, metallic sound, it was about a centimeter of clearsteel, and given that I was inside a secured area, I wouldn't have expected any less.
That gave me one chance, at least.
I took a deep breath, fished another ball of clay out of my saddlebags, then flexed my wing and plucked my last fog-feather, quickly tilting my head against the window and mashing the clay over the feather with a hoof. I jerked my head back, grabbed a chair with my forehooves, and reared back to lift it, gritting my teeth through the pain. I wasn't going to be bucking anything for a while, but a short, sharp pressure at exactly the right point …
The feather went off, most of its cold confined to the window by the surrounding clay. With the mightiest heave I could manage, I swung the chair forward, the tip of its metal leg aimed squarely at the flash-frozen spot.
There was a sharp crack. A hoof-sized network of cracks spiderwebbed out from the impact.
My heart sank. Not enough. If I'd just had a good buck left in me —
No! There would be time for regrets later, when I was safe. I backed away from the window and spread my wings — though my rapidly decreasing supply of flight feathers was going to hamper my speed, it was that or galloping. I had just reached the T-junction when I airbraked — at the far end of the corridor I was advancing into, a second squadron of guards had just burst from what looked like a stairwell door, and the lead gryphon was raising his goop gun ominously. At the same time, I heard a final sharp crack from my left, and the first guard squadron broke through the jammed door.
I dove back into Processing as the first goop-bursts spattered around me, wings already up to my muzzle as I rolled into cover. Out of smoke and flashbangs — rats. I plucked all three of my remaining nausea-gas feathers and flung them just outside the door — that would at least create a logjam as they tried to enter, and leave me the sleep feathers for when they got through.
I glanced wildly around the room. Ventilation ducts? Not likely, given the concentration of scents in here. Other doors? None; everything that entered or left this room did so through teleportation.
Teleportation …
It came in two flavors, neither of which would help me. Spell-based teleportation, like Spike's stunt earlier, required a caster. Even if I'd had one, any secured building would have blocked it with an inhibitor field as a matter of routine policy, and given the active countermeasures that followed a security breach, nopony short of Princess Twilight would be going anywhere. The machines that surrounded me, though, used dragonfire technology. No caster necessary, and not affected by anything a unicorn response team could do on short notice. Perfect … except for one little catch.
There were giant screaming warnings on every teleportation automaton in existence: DO NOT USE WITH LIVING MATTER. The problem was, dragonfire burned thaumic fields. An object to be transported — with a single, static field — could be caught in the fire all at once, and carried through the ether to the destination before getting hot enough to catch fire. A creature's field, on the other hoof, continuously fluctuated as blood flowed, muscles moved, nerves signaled. Applying dragonfire resulted in a few milligrams of teleported ashes from their outermost layers of skin and fur, and a very toasty creature that went nowhere.
I stared at my wings, and desperation sparked into inspiration. If a shifting thaumic field was the problem, what if an outside effect flattened it for the split-second the dragonfire needed to take hold …?
The first guards reached the door. There was a deep thump, then an ominous splat half a meter to my right, before the retching started.
Right. One way or another, this was going to hurt.
I vaulted the conveyor belt, ducked behind the bill scanner, and dove onto the pad of the automaton I'd reprogrammed, hoofing the activation switch along the way. I yanked the override lever as hard as I could, hoping that it would catch in place long enough to start the fire despite the organics on the platform. Then I bit down on my one remaining thaum-surge feather, tearing it from my wing and swallowing it, feeling my gag reflex fighting the twin wars of the throat-tickling and the nausea gas.
My world became fire.
And somewhere in my neck, something began strangling me from the inside out —