“Don’t say you appreciate it if you’re going to blow it off. Say what you mean.”
“Okay. What I mean is, I’m sticking with Skip. He loves me. I love him.”
“He loves you. You love him.” Dianna licked her lips and looked carefully at the doctor. “You realize what a horrific cliché you sound, dear.”
“Yes. The cliché of the teenager nobody ever listens to or believes.”
“Oh, give me just a small break . . .”
“Dianna, if you’ll let me—”
“No, with all due respect we’ve tried it your way, Dr. Georges-Scales. You’ve gotten a fine blood-pressure reading on Jonathan’s murderer here, but you haven’t gotten much else to show for it . . .”
Andi closed her eyes and began to hum. It was time to go. This place was perilous—not because of Evangelina or Jennifer, or even the great Dianna Wilson.
It was because of Dr. Georges-Scales, and the sweet care she had shown Andi. She knew she didn’t deserve it. She didn’t feel comfortable with it. She didn’t know why someone would do that, unless they were trying to get something from you. At least she knew what Skip wanted from her. That was easy. Dr. Georges-Scales was hard.
She didn’t want hard anymore.
The hum rose in volume and pitch. Another note rang, and another and three more, and soon her throat was unleashing a chorus through closed lips.
“What is she—”
She’s going to escape. We must kill her, now!
“NO!” Andi opened her eyes in time to see the doctor tackle the changing, darkening shape of Evangelina to the floor. A cart crashed against the wall, and Jennifer gasped. There wasn’t much time—soon Evangelina would slip away from the grab and capture Andi again.
The window overlooking the parking lot melted gently from the vibrations and crept down the flowered wallpaper. She found an air current outside, listened to its melody, and sang harmony. Astonished, it swept into the room and carried her away. Only the voice of Dianna Wilson could keep up.
“Andeana Corona Marsabio, you tell my son I am not through with him yet!”
CHAPTER 26
Jennifer
“Oh, mighty and benevolent Ancient Furnace—”
“Ah, geez, don’t start up with that.”
“I, the humblest of your many subjects—”
“I don’t have subjects, and you damn well know it, Goat.”
“—beseech thee to aid me into confronting mine own blood for the sake of peace.”
The Ancient Furnace snorted and banked left. She and Gautierre weren’t scheduled for patrol tonight, but she’d been restless and had volunteered. Anything was better than listening for another wailing alarm.
Then Susan’s boyfriend had tagged along, jumping off the roof and shifting to dragon form in midair; within seconds his powerful wings had brought him abreast of her.
That was when things started to get weird(er).
“Gautierre, will you kindly cut the crap? And speak English?”
“Okay.” He turned serious. “I want to talk sense into my mother.”
“Who doesn’t have mother issues in this town?”
“I think there’s an eight-year-old on the edge of town who has two daddies.”
“Brilliant. Look, I will gladly help you find and confront Ember Longtail, anytime you’re available. But only if you never call me the Ancient Furnace ever again.”
“Agreed, Elderly Heating System.”
“You and Susan really deserve each other.”
“Ah! Speaking of the light of my life—”
“No. Let’s focus on the purity of your revenge, on how major a smackdown we’re gonna give your—”
“I love her, and we’ve been talking about sex.”
Jennifer dropped thirty feet in about a second and a half, nearly crashing into a tree. “Yerrrgg,” she managed, spitting oak leaves. She stole a look behind; the poor tree was still shaking like it’d been hit by a gale. “What about me, or about any of the talks we’ve had in the short year we’ve known each other, indicates to you that I have any interest in talking about this, ya goob?”
“Oh, come on. Girls talk about everything. Pretend I’m a girl.”
“Okay. You’re a girl dating my best friend. Oh, wait—you just made it worse. How about we pretend you’re a mute instead?”
He laughed, swooped close, and managed to clumsily brush the large clump of leaves that had been sticking to one of Jennifer’s wing claws. “Wow, you’re going to be spitting toothpicks for a week.”
“A small price to pay on patrol, I s’pose. So let’s focus on what we’re supposed to be doing—confronting your mom—as opposed to what you’d like to be doing, which is violating my sweet and innocent best friend.”
“Violating? There’s no romance in your soul, Decrepit Blast Kiln.”
“Yeah, my soul’s all crowded with survival instinct and foraging for food.”
“Do you think if Susan and I do it, I’d be taking advantage, because I’m bigger and stronger and faster? And also because she’s really supergrateful I saved her life?”
“Ah, geez . . .”
“Maybe she’s not really in love with me, maybe she’s just happy she isn’t dead, and that would be how she wants to express it. Isn’t making love the ultimate expression of the thirst for life? I read that somewhere, once.”
I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to get ambushed more than right now. Come on, Ember, would you please show up and try to kill me already?
“Yes, she could love me as a physical expression of gratitude. Like sending a thank-you note!” he enthused. “Except naked. What if I do something weird and dragony while we’re doing it for the first time? If I set her on fire by accident, that would be so weird and . . . weird. Did your father ever do that to your mother?”
“My father and my mother never touched each other.”
“Oh, how we all wish that were true.” This new voice was older, more feminine, nastier . . . and came with an extra surprise.
A hind claw ripped through Jennifer’s wing as the black, streaking form of Ember Longtail dropped like a meteor from an incredible height. A meteor strike, Jennifer realized. Without the landing or explosion. Tricky.
Before either teenager could adjust to the ambush, she was ascending again, the peach markings under her wings flashing as she pumped harder and harder, until she had rammed into her son.
“Ooomph!”
“Fool!” she spat. “You’ve gotten weak. You’ve lost your training. You depend on this hybrid freak to protect you.”
“Also, he talks too much about sex.” Jennifer was relieved to see Gautierre looked okay—Ember was not trying to kill him. Yet.
For Jennifer, however, she would show no such restraint. Nor would the half dozen others who abruptly rose from the treetops to surround them.
Flying too low, Jennifer chastised herself. Classic mistake. She banked high, avoiding a cascade of sparks as three different dashers tried to pin her with their tails.
“Your gang’s getting slow, Stumpy.”
They were chasing each other up the river, from south to north along the east edge of town. Jennifer could see the downtown area in the distance—the fire department, the post office, the western abutment of the bridge, the remains of city hall. Beaststalkers would have spotters in all of those locations, and more.
As she was trying to gauge the distance and likelihood of a rifle shot, she heard five or six gunshots.
One of Ember’s gang—an indigo dasher who didn’t look all that different from Jennifer’s father—took a bullet in the throat and fell hundreds of feet to the ground.
“Snipers!” Ember called out. “Spread out, ascend, and find them!”
It was good advice—at least the first two parts—and both Jennifer and Gautierre took it. From a much higher holding pattern, they could be reasonably certain no rifle could touch them.
That’s why the surface-to-air missiles were such a su
rprise.
Four of them streaked from nondescript buildings on the south end of downtown. Portables, Jennifer guessed. More surprises from the armory Hank inherited from Mayor Glory Seabright.
Two missiles converged on a careless sea-green dasher who had been flying too low. What was left of her splattered over a fifty-yard radius of streetscape.
The third missile came for Ember, and the fourth for Gautierre.
They both tried banking out of the way, but the missiles changed course.
Infrared homing, Jennifer realized. Awesome.
Up and up the two Longtails went, the guided rockets in pursuit.
Someone’s got to take out those rockets, before they fire again.
She descended to a height of a few hundred feet until she could make out some of the figures on the rooftops. There were a dozen of them—four pairs of portable SAM operators, who were in the process of reloading; and three snipers; and Hank Blacktooth.
“Hank!” she called out. “Call off your brownshirt brigade! We’re trying a diplomatic solution with these dragons.”
Seeing him motion to his snipers, she camouflaged herself to cloudy sky and dumped the air from her wings. Their shots were way off.
Hank raised a black, wicked-looking rifle to his shoulder. Jennifer wasn’t a gun expert; she had no idea what that thing would shoot—armor-piercing rounds, or rattle-snakes, or hydrogen bombs.
She started to scramble back, only to be clipped by the racing form of Gautierre. The bump cost her in altitude, but ended up saving her life, since the heat-seeking missile was still tracking him only thirty or forty yards behind. Both soared overhead, followed closely by Ember and her own dedicated missile.
It was immediately clear that they were returning the missiles to sender, by finishing a large circle and flying low over the rooftops. Inevitably, the missile’s guidance system would try to keep up with a sharp bank downward—and hit whatever was closest.
Clever. Suicidal, but clever.
Hank, seeing the dual threat approach, aimed and fired at the near dasher.
The powerful rifle blasted a hole in the young dasher’s wing.
“Gautierre!” Jennifer and Ember both cried out. His trajectory suffered immediately, and he crashed through a third-story window of the four- story building Hank and the others were standing on. The missile followed shortly afterward, exploding on impact with the brick side of the building. Beaststalkers stumbled and rolled on the roof.
Ember accelerated, hissing. She passed over them, roaring an inferno that bathed the entire rooftop. Then she dropped, leading the missile to do the same right behind her—on top of the beaststalkers’ burning heads.
Shaken by the sudden violence and loss, Jennifer fled. The last she saw of Hank Blacktooth, the self-proclaimed mayor of Winoka was screaming in midair, limbs withering and flaming, as he tumbled from the rooftop and came to an end on the pavement below.
CHAPTER 27
Susan
It wasn’t true. It absolutely wasn’t. It was a trick, or a practical joke, or a mistake, or a bad dream, or a secret hidden message that meant something else, anything else, but did not, did not mean Gautierre was dead.
If Gautierre was dead, it meant that all the books and movies and stories were wrong. If he was dead, it meant that anyone could die beneath this stupid dirty grimy dome. She could, Jenn could, anybody could.
If he was dead, what did that leave for her? What did that mean for her?
The other deaths to date—Glory Seabright, Winona Brandfire, even Jonathan Scales—were sad, a shame, a bummer, too bad, so sad, but they were—what was the word?
They were abstract. They were sad like it was sad to read about an earthquake in Chile. If Chile was your best friend’s father. Even with a relationship that close, there was life to return to: school and work and friends and fun and Gautierre and none of that because he was dead, it wasn’t abstract at all, it was extremely real, extremely concrete and unshakeable: the boy who had risked his life for her, who thought she was beautiful and smart and cool, the boy who could have picked anyone, the boy who picked her and thought she was cooler than Jennifer, that boy was dead; he wasn’t a boy anymore, he was abstract.
She had walked and walked, running out of the hospital when Jennifer told her the news, her sick stupid eyes big in her sad long face. She’d said something about Hank Blacktooth, how Ember killed him for killing her son and the boy had died a hero and blah-blah-blah and do-si-do and she’d run away from those sad eyes, run until a stitch in her side forced her to jog, then to trot, then to walk fast, then just to walk.
Now she was in a quiet part of town, deserted and boring, a part she’d never had any interest in before—not really convenient to anything Winoka needed, not near the hospital or a gutted drugstore or a water supply. Sure, before Big Blue came, these were nice apartments, but all they offered now was the view.
The view of the willow. The tree beneath which Gautierre, when he wasn’t abstract, when he wasn’t dead, had fed her Pez and teased her for not trusting grapes. It was far away from the building, but still clearly visible, along with some of the random destruction Ember and her gang had visited upon the far reaches of this town.
Rudduddudadudduddudadud
The faint, familiar, clipped whirring sound broke her train of thought. She had fled the hospital and been so upset about her abstract boyfriend, she’d barely noticed the thing that was new, the old thing that was new: the helicopters.
Pre Big Blue: not such a big deal. They’d occasionally fly over, usually traffic or news copters circling to get closer to the Twin Cities. Sort of a “ho, hum, there’s the WTCN traffic chopper, lost its way again” situation.
But now: more and more often they could be spotted (and heard) outside the dome. And they were never news choppers; nope, those were Army Hueys, each and every one.
She didn’t like to look at them, even before the abstract thing had happened. They reminded her of her father, which reminded her that he had done nothing to contact her and, very likely, nothing to help her.
And who wanted to be reminded of that when you were stuck under a dome and the whole world was apparently adopting a wait-and-see attitude toward you and all your friends?
How could they watch and wait? How could they not try to contact them? Heck, holding up a damn sign to the window would have been something. But no . . . nothing. They did nothing.
So: under the best of bad circumstances (to wit: the day of the picnic) it made her feel weird to hear and see the choppers.
Today, though. Today that sound was wretched, it was the sound of failure and loss and fathers who were waiting and seeing instead of caring and trying.
It was the sound of people who didn’t give a tin shit that a wonderful weredragon named Gautierre had been brave and strong, and had gotten his ass handed to him as a reward.
“Nope. I’m done. That’s it. I am out. Tilt. Overload.” She paused. Nature had no reaction to that; there wasn’t even a lone bird chirping. Winoka was silent around her, and at last she knew what that meant, what it had always meant: Winoka would be her tomb. She just wasn’t smart enough to lie down and be dead.
“At least you’re out, Gautierre,” she said. Then, “Screw everything.” She forced her feet to resume their trudge.
CHAPTER 28
Susan
“Susan? Hello?” Jennifer rapped on the door . . . for some reason, since Gautierre died, Susan had holed up in one of the empty apartments in the complex directly across from the abandoned radio station.
Before Big Blue, these “2 BR, 1½ BA” townhomes would have rented for a brisk $1,800 a month, utilities not included. The radio station wasn’t the draw for renters who weren’t Susan; the draw was the river view, and the new construction, and the ice-cream shop less than two blocks away.
Jennifer had no idea why Susan would have left dozens of other spots to stay, by herself, in a part of town that wasn’t convenient to the hospital, the tra
in, or the grain elevators.
Hell, the only thing this place did have was that nice river view right beside the big willow tree where she and Gautierre had seen Ember—
Oh. Right.
“Susan?”
“For cripe’s sake.” The door was yanked open. “What?”
“Yeesh.”
“I’m aware,” her best friend retorted, “of how I look.”
“Um. If you say so.”
Susan looked wrecked. Jennifer had no idea when she’d last washed her hair, which was floppy, more stringy than curly, an unattractive length, shiny with grease, and needed a trim in the worst way. Not to mention deep-conditioning treatments.
Her skin was blotchy and uneven, too pale in some spots, flaring with acne in others. The circles beneath her eyes were enormous and dark; she’d lost at least eight or nine pounds, and Susan hadn’t needed to lose an ounce. Shit, these days in Domeland, nobody needed to lose weight.
“You look like you can’t find your heroin dealer.”
“Well,” she replied, turning and walking away, “I can’t.”
Jennifer followed, closing the door, and followed her into the living room. Her friend had done nothing to make this apartment a home; it was furnished—it had been the model apartment—but looked like a page in a catalog, not someone’s refuge.
All she’d done was bring in a sleeping bag, a backpack, and two rolls of toilet paper. No books. No knickknacks.
“Um.” How have you been? Nope. How’s it going? Uhuh. So what’s new? Definitely not.
Under Big Blue was no place for irreverent small talk.
“How awful is it?” she finally asked.
“Pretty damn awful.” Susan sighed, and flopped down on her sleeping bag.
“Yeah. I figured.”
“What do you want, Jenn?”
“Me?”
Susan snorted. “Please. You’re not here to check on me. You need something.”
“Maybe it’s both,” she replied, stung.
“It’s not. You’ve remembered I exist because someone—probably your mom—has an updated plan of attack, and someone—probably your mom—has realized I can play a tiny, stupid part in it. And lo, the Ancient Furnace approacheth.”
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