out of this?
I could warn him… But no, I was sure all communication channels were being monitored, including my phone. And warning him wouldn’t necessarily solve the problem. I had to bring the Legion irrefutable evidence that Damiel was innocent.
How was I going to do that? What would convince them of his innocence?
I’d just returned the clipboard to the Interrogator in black for the second time, when an ominous boom shook the building. The quake was followed by a cacophony of blaring alarms. Soldiers ran down the halls, called to action.
I stopped one. “What’s going on?”
The soldier shook his head. “I don’t know, Colonel.”
Then I spotted someone familiar in the hallway. It was Major Grant, the first soldier Damiel had interrogated when we’d gone to the Legion’s Florence office twenty years ago. A pin on his uniform jacket identified him as the commander of this facility.
He stopped beside me. “Something hit the building.”
“What kind of something?”
“Something explosive, fired by the airship that just arrived.”
“Could this be a breakout?”
“More likely a break-in,” he replied. “The explosives hit lower than the prison cells. They hit the vault.”
“The vault? Just what are you hiding in this prison?”
“Nothing short of the Legion’s most valuable secrets.”
9
The Vault
“What kind of secrets?” I asked Major Grant.
“Formulas and schematics for all our potions and Magitech designs.”
That was…bad. Perhaps even catastrophic. The Legion’s potion formulas and Magitech schematics could be very dangerous in the wrong hands. Or even in the right hands.
I was stuck. I had to act now, to prevent the Legion’s vault from being looted. But every second that I stayed here, Colonel Holyfire got that much closer to apprehending Damiel. I knew he wouldn’t risk ordering Damiel’s own soldiers in New York to arrest him. They feared and respected Damiel. And so they would hesitate. That hesitation would be all the advantage Damiel needed. Even injured, he was a formidable force.
No, Colonel Holyfire would collect his own loyal soldiers and go after Damiel himself. That gave me time. Not much time, but some.
The question was what I was going to do with that time. First things first, I had to buy myself a little extra time to come up with a way to save Damiel.
“Call Colonel Holyfire’s airship back here,” I told Major Grant. “Tell them we have an urgent emergency that threatens the Legion and all the people of Earth. The prison is under attack by unknown assailants. They have breached the vault. We require their immediate assistance.”
The Major looked at one of his soldiers. “Do as Colonel Lightbringer commands. We’ll be in the vault.”
“Tell me about the markings on the airship that attacked us,” I asked Major Grant as we and sixteen other soldiers ran down the stairs, deeper into the underground levels. “Is there anything to indicate who they are?”
“It’s an unmarked craft.”
“So it’s someone who doesn’t want us to know who they are.”
We’d reached the breached area. Another dozen Legion soldiers were exchanging gunfire with the intruders. I couldn’t see any of the intruders through the smoke.
“Did anyone see anything on their clothing to indicate who they might be?” Major Grant asked the soldiers.
“They set off smoke bombs before they came in,” replied one of the soldiers. He didn’t stop shooting.
“There’s too much smoke to make out more than silhouettes,” said another Legion soldier.
He was right. It was hard to see anything through this fog soup.
“So then I’ll just go in for a closer look,” I declared.
I ran through the smoke, moving so fast that the intruders’ blind shots didn’t hit me. They couldn’t see any better than we could.
Once I penetrated the mist, I made a quick visual sweep of the intruders. Then I ran back to the Legion soldiers on the other side of the smoky curtain.
“There are thirty-two that I can see, but I could hear more people deeper inside,” I said. “Their clothing is plain and black. There are no markings of any kind that would give them away. And they are wearing masks over their faces.”
“They really don’t want us to know who they are,” said a soldier.
“Of course not,” said another. “No one wants the Legion of Angels to hunt them down to the ends of the Earth.”
“They are set up in defensive positions, guarding what appears to be a hallway to the vault,” I told them. “And I could smell magic explosives.”
“There are magic wards to protect the vault from explosions,” said Major Grant.
“Will the wards hold?”
His face was grim. “That depends on how much