“Get her!” someone cried, rather unhelpfully.
Ari would’ve been nervous or scared by the proclamation if anyone actually competent was on her tail. She bounded down the hall, each long stride of her muscled legs carrying her toward freedom, success, and a tidy sum of dunca. She threw her shoulder into a door as she opened it, letting the momentum swing her around a corner to another access hall.
Footsteps were incoming from the left, but Ari was too fast. She ran with her life on the line and, instead of fear, she felt elation at the fact. Blood pumped through every inch of her, racing as fast as her feet. Her skin tingled with the magic that mended the tiny tears from exertion in her muscles as soon as they formed.
Ari bounded through a door at the end of the hall and was met with the early light of a gray dawn. With near mechanical precision, she clipped onto, and leapt from, the railing surrounding the suspended walkway. Ari fell harmlessly, slowing just before the ground rose to greet her.
“It won’t work,” she called up to the grunts trying to cut through her clip. “For working at a refinery, you’re certainly imbecilic about gold.”
With a touch that was befitting of the White Wraith’s reputation, Ari snapped her fingers at the clip high above her. It unclipped itself and reared back before slapping across the grunts’ faces like a barbed whip, leaving a sharp crimson line across their tattoos in its wake. She swung her arm and watched with curt satisfaction as the clip soared to a balcony on the other side of the refinery wall. The winch on her hip couldn’t have moved faster; Ari didn’t have time to properly brace herself and her head shot back with the force of the pull. It wiped the smug grin off her face.
Magic was electric in the air, sending tiny daggers prickling against her exposed skin.
The seconds she took to move her line were almost too long. The ground rattled right where Ari had been standing, imploding inward in what should have been a lethal attack. Bloody, steaming, Chimera, circled Revo.
This was not like the Chimera Alchemist Ari had encountered in the reagent preparation chamber. This Chimera was a hulking creature whose skin was a scarred patchwork of a dark Fenthri gray and Dragon rainbow. Ari turned, straining her neck in spite of the pain to get a good look at him. If he had been chasing her from the onset, she would’ve been in trouble. He hadn’t been in any of her notes.
She braced herself, slammed into the balcony railing she’d chosen, and flipped over it. The Chimera roared, foaming at the mouth. Imperfect, poor soul. The powers that were at the refinery had taken a circled Revo—a master of his craft—and stuffed as many Dragon parts as they could into him. He was a Chimera in the worst of ways, and he wasn’t long for the world now. No matter how many organs or how much blood the Alchemists pumped into that “experiment” of a creature, his core was still Fenthri. And that much magic was breaking down his body, starting with his brain.
Ari thought he might not see more than another dawn, but that was enough time to make trouble for her.
The Chimera raised a hulking weapon. A crackle of magic filled the air and Ari was off with barely enough time to fill her lungs again. She wasn’t there to slay any forsaken Chimera—that was way above the pay-grade for this job, even at the insane amount she’d been contracted for. Ari was proud, but she wasn’t stupid. She didn’t fight battles she had a slim chance of winning if there wasn’t a reward on the line.
The creature gave chase the second Ari was on the move. She bounded from rooftop to rooftop as more grunts poured out from the refinery. The stone and concrete skeleton of a building under construction had her skidding to a halt over roof shingles. She pulled a small canister from her belt, three notches marring the otherwise flawless exterior. Ari drew her revolver from its holster on her left leg and popped the canister into one of its open chambers.
Malice.
It surged through her, the will to destroy—the desire to burn and crash. The want to explode things into a million tiny pieces that could never have any hope of being put back together. Alchemical runes on the outside of her gun shone white as she pulled the trigger, and let go of it all.
Florence hadn’t been lying. The girl had outdone herself with the canister, which demanded an exhausting amount of magic, but in turn shot a beam of pure power to the structure Ari had chosen. The explosion was as bright as sunlight and nearly blinded her with the magnification of her goggles.