Kyla pressed her back against the wall as she slipped around the inside of the stadium. This building was a cavern in and of itself. It would be huge even in the city of the Deep, but if she understood its purpose, no one even lived here. It was a building that only existed for entertainment, which was so strange. It was simply too large. How did the humans ask questions, or pick the next howl?

Mei brushed against her leg, and she looked down, seeing that the fuergar hadn’t brought her anything for once. This was unusual enough that she looked more closely at the rows of blue-painted benches Mei had been investigating. They looked just like all the others, but her ears twisted as she caught the barest hint of…was that music?

Kyla liked music, and had even been allowed to strike the bell to call her tribe for meals a few times. This wasn’t the sound of niu-fur strings, though, nor was it drums, or the tap of bone against stone draperies.

Her eyes followed her ears, and she caught a glimpse of movement between the bottom-most blue bench and the short wall directly in front of it. Was that dark fur or shadow? Were there still humans hiding up here, rather than joining the huddled crowd down below?

There were several sets of stairs going down, one at each end of the long benches, so Kyla made her way to the next one over. Mei followed silently, and the two went down until they could see into the gap between bench and wall.

Kyla wouldn’t have guessed that three humans could fit into that space, but there they were. A tall, black-haired female who Kyla really should have seen sat by a brown-haired female who was so short Kyla almost missed her behind the first. The third person was the one playing the music, their face pale and tired beneath short brown hair. They held an instrument with slender strings connecting a long neck and a round belly , and their fingers looked raw from plucking those strings, even from where Kyla stood.

The trio certainly didn’t look like they were here to help the xiyi, and when the black dragon roared again before shooting another stream of flame directly overhead, they all winced. Kyla was fairly certain they were just humans, and she remembered what the female who’d stumbled from the stairs had said. Were these the warriors she’d mentioned?

Looking at the bench next to her, Kyla saw a small metal plate on the end. She’d noticed these already, and quickly figured out that they indicated how many benches there were. Why the humans wanted to mark that number, Kyla didn’t know, but this bench said it was number forty-five, and if she understood the numbering system, that would make the one the females hid beside number forty-two.

So, Kyla now had some kind of confirmation that these humans were simply that, not spies working for the xiyi. According to the females escaping earlier, they had been here before the xiyi arrived, and hadn’t joined them since. The question was, what should Kyla do about it? She and Kaz would look like monsters to them, so even if they weren’t really enemies, it was still dangerous to ignore them. When Kaz did whatever he was going to do, they might attack him simply because he wasn’t human-shaped right now.

So what should she do? If she approached them, they might turn on her instead. Then she would have to hurt or even kill them to get them to stop, and that might draw attention that none of them wanted. But if she ignored them, they might do something when she wasn’t ready.

Then the black-haired one, who had her back to the wall and was curled up into an extremely awkward position, shot upright before quickly sinking down again. She pointed, and the short female turned to look, though the musician just kept playing.

Kyla turned as well, wondering what they’d seen, and almost lost control of her power as she saw Kaz, apparently walking across empty air toward the dragon’s colossal foot. He had seemed so tall and strong when she first met him, but surrounded by humans and now dwarfed by the dragon, he was small. His ears were up and his eyes determined, however, and Li ran along behind him, wings raised and mouth open as if she would leap over Kaz and take a bite from the gargantuan dragon.

Kyla’s mouth went dry as her cousin stopped next to the black-scaled limb, and she almost howled out a warning as that limb lifted and then came down again, right on top of his head. Even from here, she could hear the gasps of the humans, but there was no burst of gore, no crunch as a body was crushed to nothing. Instead, Kaz simply vanished, and Li waited, watching. There was no way the golden dragon would be so calm if Kaz had just been squashed.

Then the tallest of the three females turned to the others and said, “Isn’t that Kaz’s wyvern? Why does it look like a mini dragon? Are my eyes playing tricks on me now? And was that a kobold?”

The short female rubbed her eyes , then looked back up where Li crouched, watching the leg beside her without any apparent concern for her own safety. “That’s what I saw, Eve, but-”

“I told you Kaz and Li were more than they appeared.” The human playing the instrument howled rather than spoke, each word rippling into the next.

“Yeah,” Eve said, “but maybe that isn’t Li, did you think of that? Maybe it just looks like Li, and it really is a dragon. Maybe it’s the big one’s baby.”

Kyla blinked at that absolutely ridiculous suggestion, and burst out, “That is too Li!” Then she clamped her hands over her muzzle, hoping that the three humans hadn’t heard her. But even Mei was looking up at her, the pointed little face and long whiskers somehow conveying the rodent’s shock.

Instantly, the one called Eve rolled over onto one knee, a peculiar weapon appearing in her hand. It looked a bit like a hammer, but instead of a normal handle, the other end was a deadly-looking blade, and the female gripped it halfway down the haft. It was fascinating, actually, both useful and lethal, and Kyla would have liked to look at it when it wasn’t swinging threateningly in her direction.

“Who said that?” Eve hissed, glaring around.

Kyla remained silent, but suddenly the music swelled, surrounding her, and her power faltered, causing her to flicker in and out of sight. Eve focused on her, lifting her odd weapon, but frowned, hesitating before attacking.

“Another kobold? What in all the hells is going on here? Giant lizards blowing people up, dragons the size of the stadium, and now kobolds? And why is this one wearing clothes?” This last almost sounded plaintive, and Kyla shifted her power from hiding to shielding.

“You wear clothes, and no one wonders why. And we came with Lianhua from the mountain,” she said quickly, pointing up toward Li, who was now raising her wings as if she couldn’t decide whether or not to take flight. “My cousin Kaz has been pretending to be a human, but now he’s a kobold again, and his dragon is a dragon, too. I have a fuergar, and she’s even better than a dragon, but-” She broke off, because they didn’t need to know that last part, especially since Mei should be hidden by Kyla’s body and the bench behind which they stood.

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The tall and short females adjusted their positions, one readying herself to attack, while the other took a small, round shield from somewhere. The musician, however, laid their hand on the strings of the instrument, stilling them, and smiled. “That’s why my spells didn’t work on him. He wasn’t human.” Then they fell backward, going limp.

“Harper!” the other two exclaimed together, turning back to their friend. The tall one looked between Kyla and the unconscious form, clearly undecided, while the short one somehow switched the small shield for a larger one and held it between Kyla and her companions. Which was probably what saved all three of them when the world exploded.

Kyla was blown away from the wall where the ‘dragon’ had perched, but most of the impact of the concussion and the following debris was taken by her shield. She went from feeling full of power to almost empty in an instant, however, and when she looked up, she found that she was lying on her back against the same wall the three humans had been huddling against. That wall now had a distinctly Kyla-shield-shaped section that was relatively intact and clean, while the rest of it was broken and filthy.

She groaned as she tried to sit up, finding that her right side ached terribly. She must have come down on that side, though she had no memory of the moments between the explosion and opening her eyes again. Had she lost consciousness? How long had she been out? And where was Mei?

“Mei?” she called, coughing as dust filled her nose and lungs when she inhaled. She ignored the pain as she struggled to her paws, only vaguely aware that blood was dripping into her eyes from somewhere. “Mei?”

A small squeak answered her, and she slumped as a dusty but apparently unharmed fuergar emerged from the remains of the bench in front of her. Kyla had made sure that her shield was around the rodent, and either that or the bench had protected her little friend.

Kyla’s ears twitched as she heard someone groan, and she looked from Mei to the humans. At first she thought they weren’t where they had been, and then she realized that she’d been blown further than she thought. They weren’t a whole staircase and three benches away any more. Instead, they were less than ten feet to her right.

There was a large chunk of wall laying across the short female’s shield, but that female was making a valiant effort to push it away. She couldn’t seem to get it, though, so Kyla staggered over and started tugging. Seeing what her kobold was doing, Mei came, too, and began to gnaw away at one side of it, quickly destabilizing the whole thing so the shield-wielder and the kobold were able to roll the four-foot-wide layer of bricks and mortar over the short wall, where it crashed into the benches below.

Kyla met the female’s eyes as they both flinched, hoping that no one had been down there to be hurt. They each leaned over the wall, staring down to see that everyone had crowded away from the blast, creating an open area below. Moreover, hardly anyone was even looking up in their direction, because a pitched battle had begun in the middle of the circle of bare dirt occupying the center of the stadium.

Together, they watched as humans poured through a wide entryway, some of them mounted on horses, while others ran with long spears thrust out ahead of them. Many of the xiyi were already down, while others were standing shoulder to shoulder around a crumpled figure. The black-scaled xiyi who had been speaking so arrogantly was on his knees, clutching his head as the others protected him.

“Wha’…hap’n’d?” a groggy voice asked, and Eve pushed a few chunks of brick away from her face as she sat up. She actually seemed to be in fairly good shape, other than a trickle of blood coming from one ear, matting her black curls. Her head-fur was almost as wild as Kyla’s usually was.

“How should I know?” the shorter female snapped. “Ask the kobold while I find Harper.” Her blue eyes were sharp with fear as she began to shove at the debris surrounding them. Like Kyla’s resting place, there was a clearer, shield-shaped area around them, but the musician wasn’t there.

Rather than interrogating Kyla, Eve, too, began moving rocks and pieces of wood aside, looking for their friend. Kyla took a moment to close her eyes, gingerly rubbing at her forehead. Her hand came away sticky, but not worryingly so. Head wounds always bled a lot, which meant she probably only had a small cut, and she didn’t feel dizzy anymore, though her side still ached.

The short female gave a yelp, and Kyla looked back at the humans. The two females had found the musician beneath a broken bench that had come to rest against the wall. Without hesitation, Kyla went to help, and they got the piece of wood, which was so large it must once have been an entire tree, out of the way. The slim figure beneath breathed easily and evenly, and no blood stained their clothes, so Kyla thought they might have simply slept through the entire experience.

The short female plopped back onto her rear with a grunt, one hand on the shoulder of her unconscious friend, and the other on her shield. She stared straight at Kyla and demanded, “Now, who are you? You were saying something about Kaz and Li. How do you-?”

She was interrupted by the golden dragon herself, who swooped and dove directly between them, letting out a long, rough sound that was something like a whistle and something like a roar. Li wobbled a little as she flew, which was slightly worrying, but she very definitely wanted something.

Once she saw she had their attention, Li glided in a circle, flying back up toward the wide hole in the wall. She gave the whistling roar again, looking back at them for so long that she almost ran into a shattered piece of stone that teetered precariously on the edge of the wide gap. She managed to stop by awkwardly flapping her wings in a way that looked like she was trying to fly backwards, then landed on the stone, which creaked and swayed beneath her weight.

Ignoring the humans, who didn’t seem to be in any better condition to attack her than she was to attack them, Kyla began to climb what remained of the stairs. Mei ran ahead of her, scurrying from one hiding place to another until even Kyla lost track of her. Li had her wings half up, and seemed to be bouncing on the stone, making it swing gently up and down. When Kyla got close enough, she could see why.

The stone, which looked like it might once have been a piece of the flat section at the very top of the wall, had fallen across several benches. Somehow the thick rectangles of wood were still holding up beneath the weight, and beneath them lay Kaz. He was awake, his blue eyes blinking slowly, but he didn’t respond when she called his name.

“Ah, hells,” a voice muttered behind Kyla. She flinched, but Eve wasn’t there to hurt her. Instead, she stared at the blue-furred kobold trapped beneath the rocks. “He doesn’t even look that different,” she muttered. “I mean, there’s the fur, but it’s the same color as his hair, and those eyes are exactly the same. The big nose, too.”

Turning, she looked at Li. “All right, Li, all right. We get it. But once we pull him out of there, he’s going to have a lot of explaining to do.” She put her back to the section of wall and began to push with her legs, causing the thing to shift, but it didn’t fall.

Kyla watched as the dragon bounced up and down while the human shoved, then said, “Li, go to the other end.”

The dragon looked at her, and Kyla could almost see the moment when she realized she’d been doing the exact opposite of what she needed to. Her golden eyes flicked away, and she hissed softly, then flew up and away, landing again on the far end of the chunk of wall. At first it didn’t seem like it was going to work, but then Eve grunted, muscles bulging as she straightened her legs. The wall tumbled over, leaving Li flapping wildly in suddenly empty air.

Li somehow managed to get back to Kaz even before Kyla could, and the dragon pressed herself against him, clicking and hissing in a way Kyla had never seen before. Her body trembled, and when Kyla and Eve approached, the dragon bared her teeth at them, releasing a thin stream of fire.

It was Mei who managed to get through to the dragon. The fuergar appeared from Kaz’s other side, dropping a copper coin beside his ear. She used her nose to push it closer, and Li went to snap at the rodent, but pulled back as she realized who it was. Kyla took a step closer while the dragon was distracted, and when Li looked back at her, she seemed to realize who Kyla was, too, and that she was there to help. With a soft sigh, the dragon laid her head on Kaz’s chest.