Smoked - Mari Mancusi Page 0,32

this, baby girl—I’m going to give it my best try.”

PART 2:

EMBER

Chapter Twelve

The Surface Lands—Year 190 Post-Scorch

What a waste. What a horrible waste.

Caleb grimaced as the ’vator’s doors slid open, and he stepped out into the middle of the carnage. The grounds that had once housed a small, experimental garden had now been mutilated into nothing more than a blood-soaked graveyard. The Council had, once again, done its worst, stealing the lives of five magnificent dragons and abandoning their corpses to rot out in the hot sun.

Stomach roiling, he forced himself to pull out his transcriber in order to properly catalog each beast. One of his jobs as a member of the Dracken was to keep a ledger of Council kills. This ledger was then compared to the roster of known dragons some of the other Dracken had been compiling. Ultimately, Darius hoped to complete a sort of dragon census to help him study the habits and family trees of the mighty beasts.

Caleb leaned down to examine the foot of one of the saffron-colored corpses nearby. He groaned as he recognized the Dracken brand, burned into the dragon’s right paw. Bastards. He sighed, releasing the leg and then turning back to his transcriber, looking up the dragon’s number on his list.

He found it almost immediately. Daisy. It had been Daisy. One of the study dragons and a Pureblood to boot, now nothing more than a black, bloody stain on the landscape. Caleb scowled, now angrier than ever. Killing hybrids he could understand. But this indiscriminate slaughter without even doing a blood check first—this was too much.

He’d always liked Daisy. She was silly, greedy, goofy—like his own dragon, Trinity, had been before she’d needlessly been slaughtered as well. He remembered watching Daisy flip through the sky, as fond of barrel rolls as she was of barrels of food. Darius was not going to be pleased that the Council had gotten one of his own this time.

God, what a flecking waste. It made him sick to his stomach. How could these Dragon Hunters live with themselves? How could everyone laud them as heroes? They were clearly nothing more than mass murderers.

“Better to murder than be murdered, don’t you think?”

Caleb jerked his head at the sound of the voice. Lost in his revulsion, he hadn’t realized someone had come up behind him. No, not just someone. Connor himself. The biggest murderer of them all. Having the nerve to jack into his thoughts without even asking permission.

“Is that your new catchphrase?” he sneered, turning around to take in his brother’s crisp Academy uniform, glistening with a multitude of medals. One medal for each murder. He wondered, not for the first time, which shiny pin Connor had received for killing his dragon. His stomach clenched again.

“It’s just a fact,” Connor said simply. “The dragons know they’re not allowed to come within five miles of the Sector. If we hadn’t killed them, who knows the damage they could have done?”

“They were probably coming for the cows,” Caleb protested. “They’re starving. There’s not a lot left to eat on the Surface.”

“Yeah, well, whose fault is that?” Connor shot back. “They burned all the life off the earth. What did they expect would happen?”

Caleb rolled his eyes. Here we go again. “Seriously, Connor, do you ever have even a single original thought in your head?” he demanded. “Or is too stuffed with Council propaganda?”

“I should ask you the same thing about your little Dracken cult,” his twin shot back without missing a beat. “I mean, really, Caleb. Why on earth would anyone want to save these hideous beasts?” He kicked Daisy’s helpless corpse with his heavy boot. “They’ve destroyed our world. They’ve made us prisoners underground.” He paused, pursing his lips. “They killed our own father, Caleb.”

“Yeah, well, who could blame them?” Caleb ground out, the fury rising inside of him. “They didn’t ask to be brought back here. They didn’t ask to be genetically manipulated and cloned and made into Frankenstein monster dragons.” He looked down at poor, pitiful Daisy, his heart aching. “Maybe if we had respected them. Maybe if we hadn’t been so greedy. Maybe if we had been nice to them—maybe things would have turned out a lot differently.”

Connor sighed. “Look, I know it’s a bad situation,” he said. “And hell, if I could go back two hundred years and stop the scientists from creating those first hybrids, I would. But that’s impossible. Which means we have no choice but to live in the world

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