The Other Side

by Joshua McCune

  “Yeah.”

  Ten minutes later, it’s my turn. I secure myself, give the rope a yank, and up I go. I’m nearing the top when the wall in front of me disappears. The rope, too.

  We’re amid the clouds, hovering.

  Hunting.

  There. The faint odor of sweat, the low thrum of a pounding heart. Our heartbeat accelerates. We descend.

  In the distance, a climber scales a cliff.

  We glide in. A soft green glow appears on the sandstone. The climber looks over his shoulder. The scent of urine overpowers the sweat one.

  He freefalls down his rope. Fire warms our throat, but we do not release it. We swoop in wide arcs, ever downward, as if out for a casual flight and not an afternoon snack.

  The urine scent dissipates. The climber reaches a ledge, scurries toward a small cave. We can almost feel the hope swelling in him. He thinks if he plays it right, maybe he can escape. He is a fool, but his false belief excites us, so we let him have it awhile longer.

  A while passes. We give him warning with a full-throated roar. We could roast him in a second, but we want him to hold on to that hope. They are sweeter that way.

  He sprints into the cave, and he thinks he’s made it, but we are a lightning bolt. We dive at a steep angle, our wings scraping sandstone. We zip past his hideout, hear him exhale in relief even as he continues to tremble.

  Perfect.

  We make a sharp U-turn, flipping upside down. Our eyes meet. His widen for the briefest moment before disappearing with the rest of him into our claw. He struggles in our grip, so we dig our talons into him. Blood flows; a divine aroma rises. We quiver as he cries out.

  “Melissa, stop it!”

  I blink and that soldier boy’s there, teetering on the edge of the dragon hole. My fingers are embedded in his forearm. A black-haired boy stands behind him, arms wrapped around the soldier boy’s waist, tugging him backward. They are strained with their efforts. Weakening.

  “Fight it, Melissa,” Soldier Boy says. I hear the fear in him. “Think of something that makes you happy.”

  “I make my own happiness,” I say, digging deeper, feeling Soldier Boy’s blood pump around my talons. He winces. His feet slide an inch, then another. I could kill them with one quick jerk, prove to them that I am alpha. I smile up at them. “Does it hurt?”

  “Remember when you played fetch with Baby?” the black-haired boy says. “You remember that?”

  His words give me pause. “Baby?” The name is foreign to me.

  Melissa. Her voice crashes into my thoughts. An image pops into my head of a young Silver chasing after a tennis ball.

  I release my grip on Colin. He pulls me to the surface, dumps me there. He glares at James as he retrieves gauze from his backpack to dress his bloodied forearm.

  “Sorry,” I say, though I’m not. I know I should be, but I just don’t care anymore.

  He nods, never looking at me. He finishes, spools up the rope, grabs his pack. “It’s a long day. No point in delaying.”

  What’s wrong with you? Baby asks as James falls into step beside me.

  I ignore her. “If I get like that, stay away from me,” I say to James. “And never bring Baby up again.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says, more in understanding than apology.

  Baby continues to talk at me, grows more distraught by the second at my responding silence. The hollowness inside me swells in lockstep.

  Why don’t you talk to me anymore?

  It’s safer that way, I want to tell her, but I know she will never accept that. Unable to find a good answer, I finally say, I love you and mind Grackel.

  Melissa, please don’t go. Don’t leave me. . . .

  I listen a second longer, then block her out and push onward.

  Sometimes Praxus waits fifteen minutes, sometimes an hour, but he always returns. It’s only noon, and the boy at my side already wears a dozen fresh scratches and bruises thanks to me. More and more I find myself looking at his wounds and smiling.

  Yet he stays close.

  Soldier Boy does not. Except for a few directional commands and reminders to remain alert, he pretends to ignore me. But sometimes I see him glancing back, the hardness in his features ruined by the sadness in his eyes.

  “Where are we going?” I say to Black Hair as we hike across another stretch of long-abandoned farmland.

  “Somewhere safe. You’ll be safe, Melissa.”

  He uses that name whenever he addresses me. Melissa this. Melissa that. I hate that name. I leer at the gash in his shirt. “Safe? You can’t even protect yourself.”

  “You need to block him, just for a little while, Melissa. Find something happy.”

  My gaze travels from the gash to his lips. Last night, this morning. I know the kisses happened, but I can hardly remember them. I remember the blood, though. The way I bit his lip.

  “Kiss me, boy.” He shakes his head.

  “Kiss—”

  The world shifts.

  Jaw spreading wide, fire bursting forth, we chase a noisy yellow Volkswagen down a suburban street. Humans flee in their chaotic way. Black houses ignite left and right beneath our flame. Trees explode.

  The car continues to honk. Not in the panicked way of the weak, but in rhythm.

  A war cry.

  The warrior looks over her shoulder at us. The urine scent is thick in the air, but not from this one. She stinks of something different, something we do not have a name for. It sickens and enrages and thrills.

  Then we are atop her, bathing her in our flame. She screams, her stench gone in an instant, swallowed by ours.

  We are invincible!

  Another scream echoes from the depths, the world returns to its pathetic normal.

  I’m on my knees, cradled in the arms of a boy who reeks of impotence. I thrash in his grip as he pulls me to my feet. I break free and snap a side kick at him. He jumps out of the way.

  “It’s going to be okay, Melissa.”

  I trace my tongue along my lower lip, gnash my teeth.

  “It’s going to be okay, Melissa.”

  I lunge at him, he evades. “Coward!”

  “Think of your family, Melissa. Sam, your younger brother.”

  An image of a redheaded All-Black flashes through my thoughts. He sits on a pile of rubble beside a dead Green.

  “Scale chaser,” I hiss.

  “What about your father? He wrote you a letter. Preston delivered it. Remember the words, Melissa.”

  Another image.

  Cripple.

  I feign contemplation, swipe at the boy. He is too slow this time, and I slash him across the face. He recoils. Desperation tinges his face, but he does not relent.

  “Olivia Callahan. Army pilot. Looked just like you, Melissa. Bravest person I ever met. She loved you guys so—”

  “Mom,” I whimper, remembering. The yellow Bug. Washington, D.C. I was not in the sky chasing her, but in a dragon shelter listening to her play hero, listening to her die.

  Praxus stole the memory from me, twisted it around, had me kill her. I enjoyed it. Her screams linger, pained and wonderful. I bite hard into my lip to distract myself.

  Too hard. The skin breaks, and I taste blood. My blood. Her blood.

  And just like that, my tears are joined by laughter. Great, sobbing laughter.

  “Melissa?” James says.

  I get it together. Barely. “Praxus is reconditioning me, isn’t he?”

  He embraces me. “We will get through this, Melissa.”

  I don’t believe him, but I take small comfort in his “we.”

  Soon enough, the small comforts vanish.

  There is only desire.

  Praxus slakes my thirst more often now. In between flying high, I’m stuck trudging across barren fields with this coward boy who calls me a name I do not recognize and begs me to remember things that do not interest me. I am sick of his soft words and soft looks. I want to strangle him, hear those words suffocate in his throat, watch
those pathetic eyes bulge from his head. Yet he always hovers just beyond the reach of my talons.

  The soldier boy doesn’t simper or cower like this one. He’s all confidence and fire as he plows forward. I smell the delicious aroma of condescension on him, along with a delightful dash of sorrow.

  Near dusk, Praxus and I attack a new city. Black buildings, black smoke everywhere. Through the darkness, we hear a car honk at us. There! It honks again, beckoning. Another war cry. The driver emits that same scent as the previous one.

  Our skin warms, our hackles rise, our breath comes faster. We move to intercept.

  “Fire! Fire! Fire!” We exalt in the heat that rises in our throat, but it sticks there, and the car disappears around the corner. We crash through a building in chase and come face-to-face with another Green. The rider atop it launches a missile at us. Pain explodes through my chest, I fall to my knees.

  Explain, Praxus says, the first thing he’s said to me all day.

  I don’t understand.

  He zooms in on the flipped-over car, on the driver.

  A girl. She looks familiar. She looks alive.

  Explain, Praxus repeats.

  I don’t understand.

  He provides more images. A man in a red suit cuffed to a bike rack, along with four other humans. That girl from the car trying to shoot off their handcuffs. The girl fleeing the city, only to turn back around.

  Explain.

  I don’t understand.

  Explain.

  I growl, tired of this mystery and his demands. Why are we not killing them?

  I feel him smile. Soon.

  The girl disappears.

  Farmland returns.

  The sun sets.

  A green star rises with the gloaming.

  Black Hair yells a warning to Soldier Boy.

  Death comes.

  27

  A line of azure fire streaks through purple puffs of sunset clouds. A drone plummets, explodes. Soldier Boy orders us to a black barn two fields over. He looks at me as if he expects an argument. I give him a worthwhile scowl but a grudging nod.

  Black Hair interprets the situation with more clarity. “Run, Colin. As fast and far as you can. Praxus will kill you.”

  “Praxus.” Soldier Boy recites the name as if it’s an epithet. He steps up to Black Hair, eyes ablaze. “I should put you down for this.”

  “Maybe later. Right now, you’re the one who has to worry.”

  Soldier Boy shakes his head. “Drone goes down, dragon jets scramble. In a few minutes, your friend will be dead and Melissa will be free.”

  “Will there be enough?” Black Hair says. “Given everything that’s happened, how can you be sure the dragon jets will even show?”

  They continue to argue. They make the mistake of forgetting about me.

  I sift through dead weeds and find a suitable rock. I’m tiptoeing into position behind Soldier Boy when a raspy voice startles me.

  You condemn cowardice, yet only cowards sneak up on their enemies.

  True, but I don’t care. I cock my improvised cudgel, focus on his brain stem. Kill shot. Always go for the kill shot, somebody once told me.

  I swing. Somehow Soldier Boy ducks away, as if he has eyes in the back of his head. Or a raspy voice in it, I realize as he spins toward me. Before I can strike again, he grabs hold of me, whirls me around, and twists my arm behind me until I cry out and release the rock.

  Two Reds emerge from the clouds overhead. The dim one with the mangled tail descends toward us as the other bellows and launches itself at Praxus. Brightening, Praxus tightens his wings to his body and accelerates with his own roar.

  RPGs shriek back and forth; invisible bullets purr across the sky. The dragons evade and resume their collision course. The Red’s quicker, darting around Praxus’s bursts of fire, but it can never get close enough to do any real damage to the larger dragon. It’s nothing more than a pesky gnat.

  Soldier Boy’s grip on me loosens a notch. I glance at him. He’s fixated on the battle. I groan. “Colin, you’re hurting me.”

  “Melissa?”

  “Yes,” I whisper. “What’s happening to me, Colin? I’m scared.”

  He leans in. “It’s going to be okay, Mel—”

  I whip my head into his jaw. He staggers. I thrust my elbow into his gut, donkey kick a kneecap. He doubles over, letting go of me altogether.

  I throw another elbow at his Adam’s apple but am jerked away by Black Hair. He flings me to the ground, straddles me, pins my shoulders. I knee him in the groin, slip an arm free, and straight punch him in the nose, followed by a jab to the solar plexus.

  Blood pouring from his nostrils onto my neck, he grabs my wrist, smashes it to the ground. He clamps his legs around mine, flips me over, puts me in a chokehold. I thrash, but he is stronger than he acts.

  “I’m sorry,” Black Hair says, and presses hard against my throat. My breath weakens. The distant music of roars and gunfire fades, my resistance wanes, my vision tunnels on that dim dragon hovering above us.

  A rider dismounts via the rope ladder hanging from its shoulder. He hurries over, grapples with Black Hair.

  “Get off her, James.” His voice, muffled by an oxygen mask, sounds a mile away.

  Soldier Boy yanks the rider away. “She’s not right, Preston. Dragon exposure.”

  “That’s not real,” the rider says.

  “It’s very real,” Black Hair says. “She’ll be fine. Go. Now, before it’s too late.”

  “It already is,” I want to tell them, but I can’t speak.

  They argue, but I can no longer make sense of their words. A dragon scream pierces the night. The rider blanches, and in the moment before everything goes dark, I think I hear him say, “Keith.”

  28

  I wake with a headache. Not a normal one. CENSIRed.

  A heaviness weighs on my wrists. Shackles.

  I force my eyes open.

  The edges of a steel ceiling come into view.

  I struggle into a sitting position, clanking the entire way. I’m in the corner of a room of indeterminate size. The fading light from a pair of hand-crank lamps illuminates my cot, a nearby toilet, a shelving unit laden with water bottles and canned food. The steel walls around me disappear into shadow after a few feet.

  Chains thicker than my thumb connect my shackles to bolts in the concrete floor. I give them a yank. The metal bites into my wrist. The limits of my leash allow me to reach the toilet and shelving unit. After relieving my bladder, I forage through the pop-top cans of ravioli.

  “Sorry, Melissa, not the greatest selection.” Black Hair steps from the shadows, a tablet clutched in his left hand, his right arm bound in a sling. He cranks the nearest lamp to full brightness to reveal a dozen more cots and shelving units scattered throughout a large room, though my sleeping cubicle is the only one outfitted with a toilet, provisions, and manacles.

  “What happened? Where are we?” I ask as he sits in a chair beyond my reach.

  “Somewhere safe, Melissa,” he says. “Detox usually takes several days.” He indicates my manacles. “Until then, we need to protect you from yourself.”

  I offer up an agreeable smile. “I am harmless.”

  “There’s no point in lying, Melissa.” He taps his own CENSIR, shows me his tablet. CENSIR for Melissa Callahan is written above a 3-D image of a brain. Flashing red text on the right side of the screen indicates my Current synaptic state as Violent, dangerous to others.

  I lose the smile. “What do you want?”

  He loads a picture on his tablet of a stern-faced man in army dress blues. The name tag on his uniform says CALLAHAN. “Do you recognize this person, Melissa?”

  “The cripple.” Before he was crippled. “And stop saying that name.”

  “Melissa, he is your father. Peter,” Black Hair says.

  “I don’t see the relevance of who he was.”

  Black Hair pulls up another picture. A ginger in dragon camos. He sits atop
a pile of rubble beside a dead Green. “Melissa, this is your brother, Sam.”

  “If you want me to play this game, stop calling me that.”

  He nods, loads another picture. The woman from the yellow Beetle, in dragon-riding attire.

  I roll my eyes. “Has to be my mother. I suppose she’s alive.”

  “No.”

  “Too bad. Means I can’t kill her for real.”

  I grin at Black Hair. He moves on to the next image in his slideshow.

  At first I don’t recognize her. Not with the makeup, long hair, and full cheeks. She shares an obvious resemblance to her mother, though, which helps me remember. Cut away the brown locks and twenty pounds, and she’s that girl in the black car in the black city.

  I hone in on the wrinkle of expectation that creases Black Hair’s forehead. “My sister?”

  His tablet indicates my lie, but he doesn’t call me on it. Instead he tosses me a compact. “You don’t have a sister.”

  I check my reflection, gasp with feigned drama. Yes, we look alike, but that girl is not me. That girl was a fool. I toss the compact back. “You tried to save her, didn’t you? But you couldn’t. You couldn’t save her, could you? Could you?”

  He rises.

  “Couldn’t even save yourself,” I call after him.

  “Tomorrow will be better, Melissa,” he says calmly, though he makes his escape from the room a hair too quickly.

  Using my manacles as an improvised whetstone, I sharpen a half-dozen ravioli lids into jagged shivs. I slice up a bedsheet for handles. Then I practice, accustoming myself to the weight of the chains and the feel of my makeshift talons. They will no doubt fold against bone, but should make it through skin and sinew well enough.

  I wake with tears on my cheeks. Black Hair sits nearby.

  “A memory?” he asks.

  “A nightmare.” One of many. The girl was in all of them. Sometimes she was younger, and her mother was around and her father was healthy. Most were more recent: climbing a hill with her friends to take a picture around a dormant Blue; stargazing with Black Hair atop a stone tower; sitting in a room surrounded by people who stare at her with loathing, except for her father, who can express no emotion because of his crippled nature, but somehow the emotion—something far kinder than loathing; something I can’t quite wrap my mind around—leaked out anyway.