Riley sighed. “Come on,” he told me, turning from the row of vats, as if he didn’t want to stare at them any longer. “Let’s see if we can find some answers.”

As we went farther into the lab, passing the long rows of countertops, the feeling that I’d seen this all before continued to haunt me. Riley and I were the unsuspecting humans venturing into the monster’s lair and, at any moment, some twisted freak of nature was going to come leaping out at us. Of course, those movies never had protagonists who happened to be dragons, and when the raging monstrosity did finally appear, it always sank its claws into a soft, easily-ripped-apart human. I’d always wondered what the monster would do if its prey suddenly turned into a winged, scaly, sharp-toothed monster itself. Probably the reason that there were no dragons starring in horror movies—the real monster wouldn’t be quite as scary in comparison.

Will you stop thinking about that? This isn’t the movies. Focus, Ember.

“Look at this,” Riley muttered, shining his flashlight into the corner of the room. A door stood on the far wall with the words Danger! Authorized Personnel Only in large red letters across the front. “That looks like all kinds of fun.”

Riley strode across the room to push open the door. It swung back to reveal another long hallway, with one wall made of thick glass. The room beyond the glass was a mess: shelves tipped over, chairs knocked down, papers and debris strewed everywhere.

“What happened here?” Riley mused as we traversed the hallway and edged through the door. The hinges groaned as we pushed it back, and I wrinkled my nose. The place smelled of bleach and chemicals and sterilizer, but beneath all that, like a stain soaked deep into the carpet, it still reeked faintly of blood and fear. My dragon growled uneasily as the door creaked shut behind us. Something had happened in this room. Something awful. Continuing my movie comparison, this was the place where the aliens or monsters or clones finally escaped and slaughtered every living soul in a violent, bloody massacre. There were no bloodstains, no skeletons or mangled bodies lying on the floor, but judging from the smell, I guessed someone had cleaned up whatever mess was left behind.

I mentioned this to Riley, who snorted.

“Normally I’d say you’ve been watching too many Alien flicks, Firebrand,” he said, his voice echoing weirdly in the absolute silence. “But it’s kind of hard to argue when you’re staring at that.”

He swept his flashlight beam around, and my stomach knotted. In the center of the room, another large holding vat rose up from the tile, but this one had been smashed and broken, glass scattered about the floor in front of the machine.

“Looks like whatever they were trying to do didn’t turn out like they expected,” he muttered, walking forward. My dragon hissed, reluctant to get closer to that yawning tube, but I strode after him, glass crinkling under my feet as I got close. “What does that look like to you?” Riley asked, shining the beam into the cylinder. A tangle of clear tubes and wires hung from the ceiling, slowly dripping water into the vat, and I shivered.

“Like something broke out.”

“Yep.” Riley backed up, eyes dark as he gazed around the room. “So, the question is...what were they keeping down here? What kind of twisted experiments were they performing?”

“Maybe we can find something. If Wes could get into the computer system—”

He shook his head. “If I know Talon, they didn’t leave any information behind. All data will be wiped, all files removed, everything about this place will be gone. Frankly, I’m surprised we found this much—it’s not like the organization to leave a mess like this behind, unless they needed to clear everyone out as quickly as possible.”

I caught a glimmer in the glass—four slashes raked lengthwise down the wall—and felt my stomach drop. Whatever made those gashes wasn’t huge, probably no larger than a tiger. I knew, because I had seen claw marks like this before, when I had made them. They were the exact size of a Shifted hatchling dragon’s.

“Son of a bitch,” Riley breathed, sounding horrified. I glanced at him, and even in the minimal illumination from the flashlight, his face was deathly pale. “This is...this must be one of the labs Remy always talked about.” He looked at me, his eyes a little wild. “Remember, Firebrand? What he said, about Talon shipping their ‘undesirable’ dragons to a lab? Dammit, he was right all along.”

Remy. Remy was another rogue, a scrawny hatchling Riley had gotten away from Talon because he was “too small,” his bloodline “unsuitable” for the breeding pool. I’d briefly met him and another hatchling, Nettle, at Riley’s hideout in Crescent Beach, before we all had to flee from St. George. Remy liked to tell stories, and one of the stories he told was that Talon sent undesirable hatchlings to secret laboratories to be—in his own words—sliced up and poked and prodded and turned into something new.