Free End Times in Dragon City by Matt Forbeck Page B

fast. 
    “Shouldn’t we go back for them?” Moira said, peering back through the night sky at the prison’s illuminated facade. “I mean, we only have certain death ahead of us. What’s the rush?” 
    “The Great Circle is about to fall,” I said. “Yabair pulled all the jailers out of the prison to help with the city’s defense.” 
    “That doesn’t sound like a bad thing,” Belle said. “And since it gave us a chance to extract you from that horrible place, all the better.” 
    “They’re not going to help out on top of the wall,” I said. “They’re setting up a secondary line of defense for the rest of the Guard to fall back behind once the zombies enter the city.” 
    “Where?” Kai said. I could hear the suspicion in his voice. He knew what the answer had to be. 
    “In the Village,” I said. “At its downslope edge.” 
    Everyone on the carpet fell silent. They all knew what that meant. They just needed some time to absorb it. 
    “Those bastards.” Kai spat the words out like they tasted of poison. “They’re just going to give up Goblintown to the zombies? Without a fight?” 
    “They’re fighting on the wall,” Belle said. “They’re fighting for us all.” 
    Kai focused a withering glare at her. “They’re fighting for themselves. How many orcs you see in the Guard? They won’t even take us in the Auxiliary.” 
    “We are one city.” Despite Kai’s anger and resentment, Belle didn’t give him an inch. “We live or die together. If those guards on the wall don’t have a place to fall back to, they’ll be overrun.” 
    “Sacrifices sometimes have to be made,” Danto said. 
    “Right.” Moira’s voice dripped with sarcasm. “Just as long as it’s Goblintown making them.” 
    “We can’t control the geography of the city,” Belle said. “It’s been set this way for hundreds of years.” 
    “It’s set the way you set it up,” Kai said. “Not you personally, Belle, but your parents and all their friends. Them and the Dragon made the city this way, and they damn well did it on purpose.” 
    Belle’s cheeks flushed at that. She and Kai had been through this conversation countless times back in the day, and I don’t think she’d missed it one bit. She hated feeling like she was being held responsible for things that happened before she was born. Despite that, Kai had a good point. 
    “It’s worse than that,” I said. “They’ve planted explosives in the tunnels that run under Goblintown. They’re going to drop back, corral the zombies into that part of town, and then blow it all to pieces.” 
    Kai’s eyes bulged out. He screamed at me in utter fury and frustration. “I knew it,” he said. “I damn well knew it!” 
    Belle clung to me in some combination of fear and shame. I put an arm around her to comfort her. As an elf, she had a natural tendency to side with the Guard. They had, after all, always been there to protect her. 
    That had been the opposite of Kai’s experience though. The Guard only rarely entered Goblintown and never to help the people there. They had a long record of treating Goblintown as an open-walled prison into which they tried to keep the people that troubled them corralled. They might show up to quell a riot, but only if and when it looked like it could spill out into other parts of town. 
    I’d spent time with Kai down there. I knew his family and his friends. Most of them were hard people living in a hard part of town, and there wasn’t an innocent among them. 
    But none of them deserved to die like that. 
    No one did. 
    “We have to do something,” Kai said. “We have to stop them.” 
    “How?” said Danto. 
    “How?” Kai stared at the wizard as if he’d gone mad. 
    “Yes, how? I don’t want this to happen any more than you do, but —”
    “Ha!” Kai put every bit of his bitterness about this into that laugh, but Danto sloughed it off. 
    “But what kind of options do we have? What