This egg had only one mark on it. And instead of a name, the word written on the shell was ORPHANAGE.
Poor little dragonet, Cricket thought. He or she won’t even have a Katydid. Yesterday I thought for a while that I’d never known my parents — but this one really never will. And Queen Wasp will be able to control this dragonet whenever she wants; they’ll never have a chance to be free.
A strange instinct seized her, and she wrapped the egg in one of her scarves, tying it to her chest. Then she looked up, blinking back tears, and saw the rafters.
The Nest was not a perfect dome; it had cracked and shifted over the years since it was built. Four tall columns and a pair of crossbeams had been added at some point to keep the structure stable.
Up there, in the shadow where the support beams met … maybe she could hide up there.
Cricket spread her wings and flew up to the crossbeams. She crept cautiously along them, finally settling in what seemed to be the darkest corner, right above the door.
She might kill me for this. Cricket didn’t know where the line of treason was for the queen. Would she be content to take Cricket’s brain and freedom from her? Or would spying on her secrets mean certain death? If so, knowing about the Book was cause enough to kill her, surely.
I think it’s safe to say that if the queen catches me, I’m in enormous trouble no matter what she decides to do.
Cricket wrapped her wings around the egg and curled into the smallest ball she could make. She thought about Blue and Sundew and Swordtail, hiding somewhere. There was still time before sunset. If the answer to the mind-control question was here … she had to hope Sundew could get the message to her parents before they did something terrible and irreversible.
But sunset crept closer and closer, and nobody came into the dome.
Cricket began to worry that the queen wasn’t coming. What if she was so furious about Cricket escaping that she’d decided to skip the Nest visit in favor of taking over the whole tribe to search for her? Or what if she was busy punishing the dragons in Jewel’s palace for letting Cricket escape?
I hope Lady Jewel is all right. And Cinnabar and Tau. And Lady Scarab.
She hoped Jewel had had time to free Katydid, as she’d promised, before the queen arrived.
She could feel the sun sinking down the sky, and she was beginning to imagine the most terrible scenes happening back at the palace, when suddenly she heard a soft creak, and a bar of light lanced across the eggs.
It was Queen Wasp, at last.
The queen stalked forward into the Nest on soundless talons. The door snicked shut behind her, and Cricket watched the queen pause, surveying the eggs.
Or letting her eyes adjust, Cricket thought. Maybe she can’t see in the dark after all.
That thought did not make the queen any less terrifying. Queen Wasp was enormous, even from Cricket’s vantage point, up by the dome’s ceiling. Cricket knew, logically, that Wasp was probably smaller than Lady Scarab, as Scarab was older than her. But there was something about the way Queen Wasp stood and held her wings and radiated menace that made her seem quite possibly the largest dragon in the entire world.
Her name was well-chosen, too. From above, Cricket had a perfect view of the yellow and black stripes and black horns that made the queen look so much like one of the Pantalan wasps that could kill an elephant with its venom.
Cricket breathed as lightly, softly as she could, trying not to move or shift or twitch.
The queen stepped between the eggs, her head twisting abruptly to one side, then to the other, her tongue flicking in and out. She passed the hollows of eggs with the double marks. Her tail slid behind her like a cobra stalking its prey.
She reached the first group of newer eggs, those with only one stinger marked on them. Here she stopped, hissing for a long, terrifying moment.
Queen Wasp picked up one of the eggs. Her tail rose behind her and a long, needle-sharp stinger slid out of the tip.
Cricket fought back a gasp. Everyone knew about the stingers in Queen Wasp’s claws, and how much pain they could inject. She’d never heard anyone mention a stinger in the queen’s tail as well.
In a move like a flash of lightning, the queen struck, plunging her tail stinger into the eggshell. A pulse of something bright green seemed to move through the stinger into the egg — into the dragonet inside, Cricket thought with mute horror — and then the queen drew her stinger out and dropped the egg back into place. With one claw, she sketched the second half of the marking on the shell, and then she picked up the next egg.
Cricket could only watch a few more before she had to close her eyes and bury her face in the egg she held. The queen moved quickly, efficiently, ruthlessly. And Cricket knew what she was seeing.
This is how she does it. She poisons her dragons before they’ve even hatched. They come into the world already linked to her by whatever that is she’s injecting into the eggs. The moment they open their eyes, she can be there, inside their heads.
Does it take two injections to work? Or is one for backup? She glanced down at the orphaned egg she was cradling in the scarf. Would this dragon belong to the queen already, or could it be free if the queen never stabbed it a second time?
I came from a Nest, too. So why not me?
She thought for a while, trying to ignore the soft chilling noises from below her.
Scarab said Katydid was trying to hide my egg at first. She smuggled me into a Nest later, after I’d been an egg for a while.
She must have seen the marks, too, and not known what they meant.
I bet she marked my egg herself. So later the queen thought she’d already stabbed me.
That’s how I escaped.
She brushed her talons gently over the single mark on the egg. Which marking had Katydid put on the egg? Maybe Cricket had been injected, but only once instead of twice. She tightened her grip on the scarf. It was nauseating to think of the queen plunging her poison into Cricket — still worse to know she was doing it now to all these baby dragons.
I wish I could stop her. I wish I could fly down there and drop a deadly centipede on her head or drown her in flamesilk. I wish I were brave or fierce or dangerous.
But she couldn’t do anything … not here, not now. She had only one weapon: she knew the truth about the queen. And right now, she was the only one who knew. She had to stay safe to make sure she could get that information to Lady Jewel, and maybe to the whole tribe, if she could.
So she stayed in the rafters, as still as a mouse with hawks overhead, while the queen finished her gruesome work. The last egg was set down, the last shell marked, and Queen Wasp slithered out the door as silently as she’d arrived.
Cricket checked her internal sense of time and felt a spasm of panic. It was almost sunset. She wanted to leap off her perch and race down to the Glitterbazaar, but she needed to wait long enough for the queen to be definitely gone.
Now? Now? Is it safe? Can I go now?
She wondered if something about her humming anxiety translated through the eggshell in her arms, because she felt the dragonet inside move again, rolling and scrunching around.
Finally she’d waited as long as she could and she flew back down to the ground. She glanced around at the eggs, feeling her wings droop to either side of her.
“I’m sorry, little dragons,” she whispered. “I wish I could save you all.”
Cricket pressed her ear to the door and listened for a long time but heard nothing outside. Pulling her scarves closer, she opened the door a crack and peeked out.
The guards were gone. She could see dragons moving up and down the ramps, but she couldn’t tell if they were mind-controlled or not. It felt horribly likely that the queen would have the whole Hive on alert, looking for her.
She slipped out and around the curve of the dome, back toward the sky ledge. It would be safer to fly than to try creeping down all the levels inside the Hive, past the hundreds of eyes that could be looking for her.
Or perhaps not. Cricket hesitated on the ledge. The light drizzle from earlier had strengthened into a driving storm. Rain poured down with a vengeance, lightning crackled on the horizon, and the wind was strong enough to shake the Hive. Even standing inside the Hive, Cricket felt the spray of raindrops on her face, as though the entire sea was throwing itself around in fury.
Still safer than the zombie eyes, Cricket told herself. She didn’t want to get caught again. She would not get caught again, especially with this egg — and a dragonet inside who had a chance to be free, like her.
She took a deep breath and plunged into the storm. The wind howled furiously and tried to smash her against the Hive walls, but she folded her wings and dropped, plummeting toward the earth. Rain battered her face, nearly blinding her, but she managed to pull up just before she hit the outer Glitterbazaar canopy. Below it, she could see the shapes of dragons rushing to fix the leaks and protect their wares.
Her scarves felt like wet seaweed, clinging to her neck and legs. She landed in a mud puddle outside the market and squelched toward the end of the stalls. The egg vibrated in its soaking-wet makeshift sling, nearly slipping away from her a couple of times.
She had her head down and eyes nearly closed against the downpour, so when a dragon ducked under the canopy and stepped in front of her, she almost ran straight into him.
“Cricket!” he yelled over the rush of the wind.
“Blue!” she cried joyfully. “You’re all right!”
“You’re all right!” he shouted back, beaming. He swept her up in his wings, azure warmth surrounding her as she felt safe for the first time all day. “I worried about you so much.”
“Any luck searching for Luna?” she asked.
“No,” he said into her shoulder with a sigh. “Sundew thinks we should ask the LeafWings if they’ve seen her. Whoa … why do you have an egg with you?”
“I saved it from the queen,” Cricket said, pulling back a little so he could see the smooth white shell. “Where’s Sundew? Has she sent a message to the other LeafWings yet?”
“I don’t think so.” They both glanced up at the dark clouds overhead. Raindrops cascaded down Blue’s face like tiny sapphires. It was impossible to see the sun, but Cricket knew it was sinking.
Am I too late? What are the LeafWings planning? Can I still stop them?
“I have to talk to her, quickly,” Cricket said.
“This way.” Blue guided her to the canopy and lifted an edge so she could slide underneath.
Cricket found herself in a small, rickety-looking stall with rain dripping through a tear in the web overhead. A SilkWing was hovering by the hole, trying to patch it with his silk. Swordtail was up there, too, helping to hold it together.
She couldn’t identify right away what was for sale in here — the shelves seemed to hold a mishmash of items, from little pots of blackberries to damp silk pillows, a few cracked mirrors, a very unfortunate-smelling pile of wildebeest pelts, and a barrel labeled SEEDS. There was not much room to maneuver between the tent walls. Cricket felt oversized and wet and very muddy. She started unwinding all the wet scarves around her.
Tau appeared from under one of the tables. “I can’t believe you made it here,” she said. “The queen is livid. Everyone in the Hive is supposed to be looking for you.” She followed Cricket’s glance up to the SilkWing on the ceiling. “That’s my stepbrother; don’t worry, he’s in the Chrysalis. We can trust him.”
“Is Lady Jewel all right?” Cricket asked.
“She will be, I think. She’s made the queen this mad before and survived, mostly because the queen thinks she’s a butterfly-brain who could never execute an actual plan.”
“Can you take her a message for me? I found out what the queen is doing in the Nest — but I have to tell Sundew first.”
“I’m here,” Sundew said, pushing her way through a curtain from the next room. Her SilkWing disguise had been abandoned; she looked like herself again. Cricket felt a surge of relief at the sight of her serious green face.
“Sundew!” she cried. “We can tell your parents I know how the queen does it! She’s poisoning dragons when they’re still in their eggs — I saw her stabbing them with her tail stinger. She goes to every Nest in all the Hives to do it. That way when they hatch she can mind-control them right away. Apparently she can inject grown dragons, too, but it must be faster to do all the eggs at once.”
“To grown dragons?” Blue echoed. “You mean … could she do it to you?”
Cricket tried not to let it show on her face how scared she’d been, or how close she’d come to that exact fate today. “Yes, I think so,” she said. “I think she missed stabbing my egg because Katydid snuck me into the nest late. But if she got her claws on me now, she could force me into the Hive mind.”
“No,” Blue said passionately. “That is never, never going to happen!”
Cricket brushed his wings with hers. “We can save other eggs like I was saved. Sundew, don’t you see? What Queen Wasp can do, it’s not a power — I mean, it is, but it doesn’t have to be — HiveWings could be free. This one will be free.”
She held out the egg and Sundew touched it lightly, as though she wasn’t entirely convinced it was safe to have around.
“Wow,” said the LeafWing. “That is … a lot of information.”
“We have to tell your parents to call off their other plan,” Cricket said breathlessly. “It’s sunset; we have to do it now. How do we get to them?”
Sundew made a face — her trying-not-to-make-a-face face. “Cricket … it’s amazing and insane and creepy what you found, but it doesn’t change anything.”
“Of course it does!” Cricket pulled the egg back into her chest. “We can stop her from stabbing any more eggs! Once I tell Lady Jewel, I know she’ll come up with some way to protect them — maybe the other Hive rulers will, too.”
“But even if they can — and I don’t see how, with Queen Wasp still in charge — but even if we could save the eggs, we can’t save the dragons who are already in her Hive mind, can we?” Sundew asked. “We still have an entire tribe of Wasp-brains to deal with, right? There’s no way to shut it down.”
Cricket glanced around as Blue wove his tail through hers. “There might be,” he said. “Ask your parents for more time — maybe we can find out more.”
“They are really not going to like that,” Sundew said. “Our dragons want vengeance, HiveWing. The last time I saw my parents, they barely listened to my report at all.”
“But nobody wants another war, do they?” Cricket brushed rain and tears off her face. “Don’t they remember how terrible the Tree Wars were?”
“Of course they do,” said Sundew. “That’s exactly why they’re doing this. The HiveWings started it. The LeafWings are going to end it.”
“It must be awful,” Blue said, “thinking that war is the only solution.” He lifted the egg gently out of Cricket’s talons and dried it with his cape.
“Isn’t there something we can do?” Cricket said again. “There must be something. We know Queen Wasp’s secrets now. If we tell everyone … if dragons knew the truth …”
“They still couldn’t stop her,” Sundew said. “She controls them completely.”
“Not the SilkWings,” Tau said. “This information could make a big difference to the Chrysalis. And Lady Jewel.”
“You should tell them, then,” Sundew said. “But I don’t think my parents will care.”
“Would they listen to us?” Blue asked. “Could we try talking to them? What if … what if I offered to give them some of my flamesilk in exchange for more time? Cricket, maybe we could negotiate with them.”
“You don’t have to do that,” Cricket said, taking one of his talons and brushing her claws over the glowing scales.
“I would, though,” Blue said. “I want to stop this war, too. Sundew? Can we please try?”
The LeafWing spread her gold-dappled green wings and sighed. “We can try,” she s
aid. “I’ll take you to them. They’re waiting for me right now.”
“Can we also ask them to leave Jewel Hive out of it?” Cricket asked. “For as long as possible, anyway? Lady Jewel would be on your side if you don’t hurt her dragons, I really think she would.”
“I agree,” Tau said.
“We’ll ask,” Sundew said, looking torn. “But … Tau, if you can find a reason to get all the SilkWing dragonets out of the Hive, to somewhere safe … that might be a good idea, is all I can say.” She looked up at the ceiling. “Swordtail! We’re leaving!”
Swordtail hopped down to the ground and gave Cricket a nudge. “Glad you’re all right,” he said gruffly.
Cricket told Tau everything she’d seen inside the Nest while her friends gathered their things. Tau pressed her talons together, looking worried. “Are you sure that dragonet won’t have the queen in its head, too?” she asked, nodding at the egg.
“That’s what I want to find out,” Cricket said.
“Seems like a risky experiment.”
“I am a scientist,” Cricket said. “Sometimes risks are necessary.” She’d said those words many times in her life, although they had never gotten her out of any of the trouble her experiments had gotten her into. But it felt different now, real and serious.
She wrung out her scarves and wrapped up the egg again, tying it to her even more securely. She guessed they’d be flying all night in a thunderstorm, and she wanted to keep it warm and safe.
The truth was, the dragonet in the egg wasn’t just an experiment. It was someone who could be free of the Hive mind — the first dragon she could save from Queen Wasp.
Hopefully the first of many.
If this works. If we get away from here without being caught. If we make it to the LeafWings and convince them to give us more time and find a way to stop the mind control.
If nothing went wrong, this dragonet might have a chance at a better life … and all the tribes might have a chance at peace.
Cricket woke up the next morning into a feeling of lingering dread. She had dreamed about losing the orphan egg, about Queen Wasp stabbing her in the heart with her mind-control poison, about Sundew opening her palms and unleashing an army of swarming black insects that covered Pantala from coast to coast.
The Hive Queen Page 17