Kael's mind scrambled, looking for a way out. His eyes caught the stairs - the only exit from the pit - and the two guards at the top.

  His stomach dropped. Those were Ashford guards. His father's men.

  Kael's body began to move before his mind caught up.

  He ran toward the far side of the pit - away from the stairs, away from Dorian - drawn to the darkest corner he could make out, where the shadows seemed thick enough to hide in. His bare feet splashed through the sand, arms stretched out.

  "There's nowhere to go," his brother said from behind him. "You know that."

  Kael kept moving. His hands hit stone, he pressed himself against the wall, following its curve.

  "Where do you think you are going, Kael?" Dorian's voice echoed off the walls.

  A gap. A grate. A crack wide enough to disappear into. Kael's fingers searched desperately for a way out, tracing the wall cracks, the scarred surface, the iron rings made for the chains. Then Kael's hands found bars. Waist-high, thick with rust, set into the pit wall.

  Behind him, Dorian's footsteps stopped.

  Kael pulled. Rust flaked off under his cramping fingers.

  "Don't."

  The bolts began to squeak. Kael pulled harder.

  "Step away from the wall!" The boots started running.

  The metal screamed against the stone.

  "I said stop-"

  Stone cracked. Something shifted.

  Then the grate came loose in Kaels hands. He dropped it and threw himself into the dark.

  A drainage shaft. A way out. Kael crawled on hands and knees, rough stone and darkness pressing in from every side.

  "Kael!" Dorian's voice followed him into the shaft. "You're only making this worse."

  The narrow shaft teared through his robe. Kael's hands and knees scraped forward, blind.

  Behind him, muffled by stone, Dorian's voice turned sharp.

  "Find where that leads. Now!"

  Kael crawled faster. His ragged breath choked on rust and mold. The shaft sloped downward, then went flat, then forked.

  Kael's hands moved left.

  Then there was nothing.

  When he came to, the first thing he felt was cold. The second was pain. Deep stabs with every tiny gasp he took.

  His vision was blurred. Everything was dark and hazy, but he began to feel the stone beneath him and his memory returned in fragments.

  The shaft. The fall.

  Slowly, the air came back. Then came the smell of damp rock and torch oil. He forced himself to sit up against the wall and look around.

  Low ceiling, mud-colored walls, roughly cut and low. Torch brackets lined the corridor, half of them empty. Kael blinked until his vision cleared. Somewhere in the distance, storage crates were stacked against the opposite wall. The kind servants used to go back and forth between the kitchens and the pantry.

  He knew this place. The Underbelly.

  He didn't know which part of it. The large network of service corridors beneath the Crucible stretched for miles in every direction, carved for the unbonded workers. Cooks, cleaners, stable hands. The people who kept the dragon lords fed and comfortable.

  Kael held his breath and listened.

  No footsteps. No voices. Only the drip of water off the ceiling and the faint, muffled celebration leaking through the rock above. The feast had pulled everyone upward.

  Suddenly, a sound: Tap.

  Kael flinched. His body prepared to run - they had found him.

  Tap. Tap.

  Kael forced himself to listen past the hammering of his own heartbeat.

  Tap.

  That rhythm. The realization hit him, and something in his chest loosened.

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  Tap. Tap.

  Kael closed his eyes. It was the one sound in this entire fortress that had never meant danger.

  The old man stepped into the faint light. Isak moved slowly, the cane sweeping a half-arc ahead of each step. He turned his face toward Kael, though his pale and clouded eyes saw nothing.

  "Dorian -" That was all Kael could manage.

  Isak tilted his head. "How close?"

  "I came through the shaft." Kael said. "I don't think he knows where it leads."

  "Doesn't have to." Isak lowered himself beside him, one hand still on the cane, the other reaching until his fingers found Kael's shoulder. "He has his men. Can call the guards to find out."

  Isak's fingers traced Kael's neck and chin. "You're crying."

  Kael couldn't answer.

  The old man steadied himself on the cane and reached into his coat. He pulled out a cloth bundle and pressed it into Kael's lap. Bread. Dried meat. A skin of water. All tightly rolled up with a thin rope.

  "Packed it before the ceremony." Isak's head turned toward the corridor. "Should have packed it weeks ago."

  "Isak-"

  "Don't." Isak reached up and cupped Kael's face with both hands - rough hands, that belonged to another life. "Listen to me."

  "You are not what they think you are" Isak said. "You are not a failed candidate. You are your mother's son. And she would have burned this whole place to the ground before she let them treat you like this."

  The tears came. And Kael didn't fight them.

  Isak had known him by touch since the day Kael's mother died and left a screaming infant behind. A child he had watched over ever since.

  "Your mother wasn't noble blood. Everyone knows that. The bond favors bloodline. Not fair, but it's how it works."

  "I was never meant to bond, was I?"

  Isak's hands dropped from Kael's face. He was quiet for a moment.

  "He staged it, right?" Kael whispered. "That egg was dead."

  "The ship goes to Saltmere," Isak said instead. "Free trade port. Rough water, rough people. But they don't ask where you came from. And they don't care whose name you used to carry." For a second, something in his voice had shifted. Then it was gone. "You can find work. Forget the Empire. Forget the dragons. Build something real.

  Kael shook his head. Didn't trust his voice.

  Isak stood, one hand on the wall, the cane finding its place on the stone floor. "Ship leaves at dawn. Eastern cliff. Main corridors will be full of guards. Take the deep stairs." He pointed down the tunnel with the cane. "Straight through, left at the forge junction."

  "Will I see you again?"

  Isak's hand found Kael's shoulder and squeezed - once, hard. Like he was pressing something into him he couldn't say out loud.

  "Go. Now. Don't stop."

  "Isak-"

  "Don't you dare say goodbye to me, boy." His voice cracked. "You just go. And you live. You hear me? You live."

  Isak didn't look back.

  Kael sat there and listened to the cane tap once, twice, three times, then fading into stone, then there was nothing left.

  He thought about the first time he had heard that sound. Five years old, maybe, or six. A blind old man tapping his way through the underbelly. He put a bread roll into his tiny hands without a word. Kael had never understood why.

  He still wasn't sure he did.

  The deep stairs were at the end of the eastern corridor. Straight through, left at the forge junction. Simple.

  Kael stuffed Isak's bundle under his arm and walked down the empty tunnels.

  He would be in Saltmere in- what, three days? Four? He could forget his name, build something real. That's what Isak had said. Kael just wasn't sure these words were meant for someone like him. The bastard son of Lord Commander Ashford. What exactly was he supposed to build?

  Then he stopped. The air had changed.

  The forge junction. It should have been here by now.

  The tunnels, they all looked the same: rough stone, low ceilings, the same carved rock. Kael realized he had walked too deep. He had been counting torch brackets but lost track somewhere around the ninth or tenth.

  The air here was thicker down here. Hotter. Carrying a strange burnt smell that was different from the sulfur of the Bonding Pit.

  As he turned around to go back to the junction he missed, he heard the boots. Too many feet, too steady. The boots of people who were looking for something. And who knew where they were going.

  Kael held his breath.

  In the distance he could hear a voice from maybe two corridors back. A voice giving instructions.

  Dorian.

  Kael ran. Left turn. Right turn. He didn't care where - he just needed distance between himself and his half-brother's patrol. Another left. Another right. Then another, then-

  Kael stopped. He pressed himself flat against the tunnel wall and listened. The boots had faded. Slowly, his breathing settled.

  Ahead of him, the tunnel had widened into a corridor that looked older than the service tunnels, but with newer torch brackets bolted into the stone with heavy iron mounts. The walls here were different too. Smoother.

  Then he saw the sign. Red paint on iron plate:

  Sector nine. Do not enter. By order of the Four Thrones.

  Every kid in the Empire knew about it: the Condemned Wing. Where they kept the dragons that couldn't be bonded. The ones caught in the wild. Beasts too aggressive or too damaged to serve the Empire. The stories said you could hear them screaming on quiet nights, if you pressed your ear to the tunnel walls in the lowest parts of the Crucible.

  Except it wasn't a story anymore. He could smell them. That raw, animal heat. This was the smell of something wild, kept alive in a place that was never meant for living.

  They held them here until the executioners came.

  He should turn around. Find the forge junction. Find the Eastern cliff and get out of this place forever. This was not a place to hide.

  But the corridor ahead was lit. Torches were still burning. And at the end of the corridor: a massive iron door.

  Behind him, somewhere in the dark tunnels, Dorian's patrol was working its way through the underbelly corridor by corridor. The guards who had just left this place must have joined the sweep. They checked their section, and when they didn't find him, they'd circle back here. And when they did, there would be nowhere left to run.

  Kael looked at the bolt.

  The drop-pin was old - the kind that lifted straight up and out. He pulled it. First it resisted, but then slid free with a grinding sound that echoed off the stone walls. Kael grabbed the iron bar and hauled it sideways with both hands.

  He walked through the door.

  The corridor opened into a vaulted chamber, ceiling lost somewhere twenty feet above. Iron cages lined both walls, massive things, floor to ceiling, their bars as thick as a forearm. The stone floor was scored with deep claw marks.

  Kael moved along the wall, staying close to the stone. The cages were empty. Until he passed two that weren't: sleeping dragons - or what passed for it. Iron braces clamped their jaws shut and chains looped their bodies in thick coils. Their sides were barely rising.

  Bond-iron, he had heard it called. The metal that killed a dragon's fire from the inside. They weren't sleeping either. He had heard about it one time: dragons dosed until there was nothing left but the breathing.

  Kael moved on.

  And he noticed that the cage at the far end was different. Twice the size of the others. Triple-reinforced bars. And the dragon inside - even chained and iron-muzzled - it could have filled the Bonding Pit on its own.

  Kael stopped breathing.

  It was awake.