“Hand it over, now!”

Cassius froze. He’d been alive long enough to know that those words were rarely good. He edged closer to the wall, peering around the corner.

Three guards loomed over a slim figure in the loose clothing of a non-Rider. She was clutching something to her chest—a book, he thought. She couldn’t be more than twelve years old.

The girl glared up at them. “No.”

“Um—no?” The guard seemed baffled. “Give us the book, girl.”

“No,” she repeated.

“Girl, I’m warning you, you’d better hand us that book right now, or—”

She moved so abruptly that it took a moment for Cassius’s brain to catch up. One moment she was standing stock-still, glaring at them. The next, she was diving forward, sliding between the guard’s legs and scrambling to her feet, then running, running, running, a blur of motion down the semi-crowded corridor.

“Get her!” The guard shouted, and all three gave chase, yelling for bystanders to get out of the way.

Cassius stared. In his five years living here, he’d not seen anything like that. It was the sort of thing he’d seen all the time in the streets back home, although it was usually food thieves running from shop-owners, rather than book thieves running from Dragonguard.

“Hey,” someone whispered behind him.

He whirled around, looking back and forth in bewilderment.

“Look down,” the voice said again.

He did, and found a cat staring up at him, wide golden eyes seeming to look right into his soul.

“Oh, sorry,” the cat said, and a moment later turned into the book-thief girl, squatting on her haunches and staring up at him through the same golden eyes. “You’re really tall,” she commented.

“What—how—”

“Never mind that now. You seem like a nice person who knows things. Do you know how to get to the Dragonring?”

“Do I—yes, I know how to get there.”

She leapt up, bouncing with childish energy that made her seem either half her age or at least a decade older. “Great, then you can take me! Come on, come on, we need to get going!”

He shook his head, trying to clear the fog. “No, no, no. I have to get to work right now.”

She stopped, tilting her head. Disappointment saturated every bit of her, with underpinnings of hopelessness. “You . . . Can’t help me?”

He sighed. “Not right now. How about I take you when I get off work this evening, seventh hour past noon.”

“Oh, fine. I’ll find you then.”

Her form shimmered strangely, and then the girl was gone. In her place was a little bird with golden eyes who hopped once, then took off in a slight puff of air and was gone.

Cassius gazed after the creature, feeling like he’d been hit in the head. He’d felt like this before—the first time, it was dragons. The second time, it was Quinn Meredith.

“What just happened?” He muttered to himself, running a hand through his hair. “Did I . . . Those eyes . . .”

He would be late to work that day.