Page 104 of Dragon 7

In the death of it all, hitting both sides.

Ghosts rose into the night air.

Dozens of ghosts. They climbed out of their falling bodies on the field as rippling smoke in human shape. Wispy. Pale. Carrying the wounds that had ended their life.

A Scale lifted out of his own body with his throat opened wide. The wound stayed with him as he rose. The wet red of it had become a thin silver line of mist that hung at his neck like a torn necklace.

One of Akiro's men climbed out of his corpse with the left side of his face gone. His ghost looked around for the missing half. His right eye blinked.

A man rose without a chest. The hole in him was wide enough that the moonlight passed straight through where his heart had been, and on the other side of the hole I could see the field continuing through his body.

Another rose with a hand missing.

Another with both legs gone, his ghost climbing upward in a slow seated posture as if his body had forgotten he no longer had anything to sit on.

A Scale ghost with bullet holes across his vest drifted up with the holes still steaming. Six of them. He looked down at himself, counted them slowly with his eyes, and then turned his face toward the moon.

The new ghosts continued to rise.

So many.

The air above the field filled with wispy figures floating.

Then the right side of the field erupted.

Someone must have stepped on a mine.

The explosion lifted a column of dirt, grass, and red mist twenty feet into the air. The shockwave hit my chest a half-second later, and the earth under my boots punched once, hard.

Bodies tumbled.

Masks flew.

A man came down out of the cloud with his arm pointing in the wrong direction.

A second explosion went off on the left.

Dirt rained sideways across the field. Smoke billowed thick and gray and ate the moonlight in a wide circle. Through the haze I caught the brief silhouettes of men diving for cover or being thrown by the blast.

Fuck.

Reo cursed beside me. "Two mines down. Eight to go."

A third explosion blew open the grass on the far right.

A fourth went off near the west of the field.

The ghosts must be real.

Yet, the living fought on, and the grass beneath them became trampled open and the dark green soon shimmered wet with red and the scents of sweat, death, and blood rode the wind.

I could now taste the war in the back of my throat.

Then, another person stepped on a mine and the blast threw bodies into the air, and the ghosts of the men inside those bodies rose too—the dead and the debris parting in arcs in the dark sky.

No. Those were Scales that died.

My chest tightened.