I growled lowly at the man as he put my cage back in its slot. The last three months had not softened my heart towards these scientists. I listened to the bored discussions in my head as the others conversed over the main mindlink. I didn’t bother blocking the rambling conversation – this place was boring enough as it was.

The red dragonet in the cage beside me hissed as the man walked by her cage. She was even less impressed with the situation than I was, having been taken from her husband and one-year-old daughter.

Having only hatched a month ago, she was a bit smaller than me, although not by much. There were 108 dragonets now, and the first three survivors had been here almost a year. After about six months, they had finished growing and were about a quarter bigger than the newly hatched dragonets.

That kind of disappointed the scientists; they had been hoping that we would grow larger than twelve inches at the shoulder. All of the dragonets held a grudge against the humans walking around this place.

The routine was predictable and terribly boring. We got three meals a day, were taken to a small room to exercise for an hour twice a day, and we sat in the cages for the rest of the time. We were kept carefully separated from each other to prevent physical contact. I guess they didn’t trust us to play nicely together.

The main discussion on the mindlink was a common theme: how to escape and what we could do after we managed it. So far, we had not had any luck in getting loose, other than one guy who had managed to rock his cage until it fell on the floor and shattered.

He had been unable to get out of the room with its fancy locks before the scientists came in for a routine feeding and noticed him. They had swiftly netted him, and now all of the cages had magnets securing them to the tables. A switch had to be flicked in order to release the magnets.

What we would do in the impossible event that one of us managed to escape was a widely debated discussion. If we pretended to be animals, we would probably end up in a zoo or in another cage. If we revealed our intelligence, which would be needed to free the remaining dragonets, it could lead to even more problems and complications.

A light male voice sighed in the mindlink as he entered the conversation. “I told you that it won’t work. Several governments are aware, or at least have a vague idea, of what this place is doing. How else are they smuggling hundreds of people across country borders? I was a secret agent when I saw a file on some sort of lab that was supposedly taking people who had no chance of surviving another month and giving them a new body. They obviously don’t know the fine details, but they will silence anyone who threatens to expose them – and any inquiry into this place will expose them.”

It was hard to argue with logic from someone who had been handed over to this lab simply because he had seen some of the paperwork. Considering he remembered being shot with bullets before being handed over to the scientist team, it was a miracle that he had survived to this point.

We all paused as the building shook slightly for a few seconds. A timid voice asked, “Was that an earthquake?”

“Possibly…”

Another voice weighed in. “I don’t think so; the earthquakes back home felt a bit different. That was almost like the vibration of an explosion.”

A huge explosion blew in part of the wall before anyone else could speak. Many shrieked in fear or surprise at the unexpected event. One table was knocked over before the power went out. The magnetic locks gave way, and the six cages dropped the last distance to the floor. The glass on four of them shattered with the impact.

The secret agent was swift to spot the opportunity. “Quick! Open the latches on the rest of the cages so we can all escape! Swiftly!”

One was too dazed to stand at the moment, but the other three jumped into action as they started opening up various cages. Each newly-freed dragonet quickly started freeing others. I waited impatiently for the green dragonet above me to manage to undo the latch on my cage. I quickly pushed the door open and sprang into the air with ease of practice. I opened another cage before we were all free.

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“Is everyone free? Good! Let’s go!” The purple scales of the secret agent headed for the hole in the wall where dim sunlight shone in. With a flurry of silent wingbeats, 108 of us flew swiftly into the bright light of the outside world.

I didn’t realize that we were on the edge of a city… Large apartments and stores were visible while skyscrapers stood proudly in the background. We quickly flew over the massive chain-link fence surrounding the compound, unanimously heading toward a nearby park with several leafy trees. The reverberation of explosions and something that sounded like a cannon filled the air.

“What is that?”

I turned to see what the green dragonet was looking at and slowed down as I took in the scene that was now in view. We were above a rather empty street and could now see around the building we had just escaped.

Farther down the road, it looked like a partial war zone. Tanks were lined up as men scrambled around with what appeared to be missile launchers. One of the missile launchers fired, and I followed its trajectory.

I felt the shock of the others roll across the mindlink as we only now saw that hundreds of huge spaceships covered the sky in one long line as far as the eye could see. Beneath the ships, some sort of yellow light shone down. It was so bright that it was hard to see through.

My breath caught in my throat as I realized that, whenever the light passed over a human, they turned into a pile of goo with clothing and stuff stuck in it. My wingbeats faltered as my fear edged closer to an unthinking panic.

“FLY!!!”

The command snapped us out of our trance as we turned to flee. I glanced over my shoulder, dreading what I would see. Like a storm driven by high winds, the spaceships were traveling unbelievably fast.

While looking back, I saw a tank fire at one, only to have the shell somehow rebound off a blue shield of light that appeared around the spaceship. The shell was bounced back towards the military, and when it hit the ground, it exploded, causing a nearby building to partially collapse.

My lungs burned with the effort of my flight; I had never flown so much at one time without pauses to rest. The others weren’t doing much better, but our fear was giving us plenty of incentive to keep trying.

I glanced back again to see that the ships were rapidly gaining on us. The light passed over the military, leaving piles of goo behind. I blinked as I saw a dog run through the light unharmed. I turned my head to face forward as I tried to push for more speed.

“It’s gaining on us!” The red female was terrified.

The ships were overhead, and I almost froze in terror as I saw the yellowish light in my peripheral vision – it was almost on our tails and rapidly catching up. As the light passed over us, several gave out high-pitched shrieks of fear and panic.

We pulled ourselves into a hover as the light passed by without harming us. We stared at it blankly as it kept going.

“Unless someone feels like chasing the light,” the secret agent said, “I suggest we fly to that park over there to recover and plan.” His voice was shaking and quiet, but he had a valid point.

Glad someone managed to keep their head during that, because it sure wasn’t me. We all headed to the park to rest while we tried to figure out what was going on.

~

Three days later, we managed to find a way out of the city, making it to a nearby forest. We hadn’t seen a single human since the light went by, even going so far as to look into many of the windows we flew past.

We saw plenty of smaller alien ships flying around, though. The spaceships had no qualms about landing and letting the slender, pale white aliens exit and wander around. Two of the braver dragonets carefully snuck closer to them, trying to get a better look at the aliens.

To our immense surprise, the two dragonets had been able to understand the alien’s speech despite never having heard anything like it before, and when they mindlinked what they were hearing to us, we also knew what they were saying. It was unnerving, to say the least.

From what we overheard, we now knew that this race had completely wiped out any human on the planet. They had left no place unscanned by the killing light that had been programmed to only destroy humans. As far as we could tell, the local wildlife didn’t seem to concern them unless something attacked them or seemed hostile.

Currently, they were levelling the human cities to build their own – one of the reasons we had left the city so quickly. We had snuck back into that terrible room where we had been held captive to try and move the remaining eggs, hoping that some would survive.

Once we looked at the notes by the eggs, we discarded that idea. Any sudden drop in temperature killed the one trapped within the shell, and with no power, the eggs had chilled before we came back to check.

I remembered my first week and how much I had needed the heat. We did crack a couple open, but those inside were truly dead. We left that area and never returned.