ER surgeon Lena Cross, 29, once saved a dying "sea snake" on the beach—her first CPR compression cracked its rib. Three years later, on a beast-tide night, Drawer Seven in the morgue slides open from the inside: a man sits up, pupils pitch-black, split by a single vertical line of gold. He is the hatchling she saved. His name is Night Watch, and he has waited three years for her. He leads her to Level Negative Three beneath the hospital, where more than a hundred juvenile wyverns have been locked in military cages for 1,800 days. The oldest one remembers her: twenty-two years ago, two-year-old Lena slipped a pacifier through the bars. It has kept it ever since. The release order requires three human signatures; a retired colonel writes not "Approved" but "Guilty." The cages open, the dragons fly toward the sky—but a larger cage still waits. He asks her: "Would you build a home—for a dragon?"
