"My back left leg... it’s shimmering, Midnight. It feels cold."​"What does that mean?!" Midnight whispered, his body completely rigid under my invisible grip.​"It means the magic is unstable in this sector. The invisibility is breaking early! Look at your tail!"Jax, the heavily armed Spire guard was already staring right at us. Or rather, he was staring at a disembodied black cat tail that had suddenly popped up in the middle of the empty hallway.​Jax rubbed his eyes. "Ryle? Are you seeing this?"​"Seeing what?" Ryle asked, adjusting his cybernetic eye over the comms.​"I'm seeing a floating black tail. And now... an ear." Jax raised his laser rifle aiming it right at Midnight’s head. "What the hell is that? A phasing feline?!"​The cyber-hound Brutus let out a roar. The metal plates on its neck snapped open revealing glowing red cooling vents. It lunged directly at us. ​"Run!" I screamed.​I detached from Midnight’s fur kicking off his neck with all six legs just as he exploded

The roar of three hundred voices hit the rotunda at the same time. ​It was the raw sound of people who had absolutely nothing left to lose. Fathers holding rusty metal grates. Mothers wielding broken pieces of glass. Children throwing heavy stones they had pried from the cell floors.​The Warden’s dark eyes widened. ​"Get back in your cages!" he roared raising his glowing purple cane.​"Get him!" a massive man from the front of the crowd yelled. His prison uniform hung loosely off his starving frame but his eyes burned with hatred.​The crowd crashed into the Warden before he could swing his cane. Dozens of bodies piled on top of him. ​The magical stasis field holding me in the air instantly shattered as the Warden lost his concentration. I dropped like a stone.​"Zilu!" Midnight leaped onto the pedestal and grabbed me by the scruff of my neck with his teeth.​He jumped down just as a pipe smashed into the pedestal where I had been seconds before.​"I've got you, bug!" Midnight mum

The glass vial smelled faintly of rubbing alcohol.​I pressed all six of my legs against the curved wall, pushing with every ounce of strength I had left. It didn't even smudge. ​"You absolute imbeciles!" Dr. Clove’s voice echoed through the room. She slammed her hand onto the counter. "Do you have any idea what you've done?!"​Commander Vance stood in the doorway. "We contained the riot, Doctor. The Arch-Chancellor’s property is fully secure. You should be thanking me."​"Thanking you?!" Dr. Clove marched up to him, "I asked for prime stock! I asked for clean, frightened, docile subjects! Look at the monitors, Vance! Look at them!"​She pointed a bony finger at a row of glowing screens on the wall. The camera feeds showed the holding pens. It was a nightmare.​Hundreds of prisoners were crammed into the cages, stripped down to their undergarments. They were covered in their own blood. Many were weeping openly, clutching broken ribs and bruised faces.​"They are filthy!" Dr. Clove sc

​"I still think this is a terrible idea," Midnight grumbled. "We are a cat and a bug. We are supposed to be hiding under a porch."​"A thousand years ago, I commanded an entire army of elite warriors with a single word," I replied crawling a few inches ahead of his wet nose. "And let me tell you a secret, you are a much better listener than half my old generals. Plus, you have sharper claws."​"Flattery will not save us if they turn me into a rug," Midnight huffed though I could tell his chest puffed out just a little bit. "So, what is this grand strategy of yours, your majesty? We just walk up to the control console and ask nicely?"​"We'll create chaos." The Phalanx guards are trained for riots. They have zero training for a tiny flying menace."​We reached the main extraction lab.​The room was shaped like a giant bowl. At the bottom dozens of extraction chairs sat in perfect rows. IV tubes hung from the ceiling, connected to massive glass vats filled with a glowing liquid. That w

The alarm bells of the Spire were blaring, but they sounded like a victory song to me.​I clung tightly to the black fur on the top of Midnight’s head. We were bounding down the staircase of Sector Four. The whole facility was tearing itself apart. The sound of breaking and guards screaming echoed up the shafts below us. The super-charged prisoners were doing exactly what we needed them to do. They were wrecking the place.​Midnight leaped over a security drone, landing gracefully on a desk at the end of the landing.​With a totally casual flick of his right paw, he slapped a highly expensive computer monitor right off the edge of the desk. It smashed on the floor below.​"Oops," Midnight purred, not sounding sorry at all. "My paw slipped."​"You absolutely did that on purpose," I yelled over the noise. "Focus, you giant furball! We are on a rescue mission, not a vandalism tour."​"Why not both?" Midnight shot back trotting down the next hallway. He swiped his tail against a rack of