by Dan Koboldt
She smiled at me, took her hand from the stick-shift and put it on top of mine. “It’s in the past.”
She moved her hand away, but the feel and the warmth of it lingered. I looked out the window so she wouldn’t see my face—I’m sure it had turned bright red—and I just held on to the memory of what it felt like.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Shadows
We got to the turnoff at nine thirty, about fifteen minutes faster than my GPS watch had predicted. Summer had a bit of a lead foot. Or maybe she was anxious to get this over with and be rid of me for good. I couldn’t be sure. She pulled over to the shoulder at the head of the unmarked road leading north.
It was hot by then, Arizona hot, but I really felt it when the Jeep stopped. The desert heat hit like a wall. Riker started bouncing around the back seat as if he could sense the excitement. Octavius chirped in annoyance—in danger of being squashed, too—and flew up to the Jeep’s rail.
Summer and I both peered down at the single-lane unpaved road that led down off the highways and into the saguaros. The satellite map coverage for this part of the desert was suspiciously over ten years old, but based on the terrain, it couldn’t be far.
I looked back at her. “What do you think?”
“Are you sure there’s something here? Looks pretty abandoned.”
“No. Look at the tire tracks.” A set of them led unerringly down the road, and they were fresh enough that the wind hadn’t blown the sand flat.
She looked doubtful. “Anything could have made those.”
I knew what had made them—a stout pickup with an aluminum cage in the back, hauling a defective dragon. “That’s it.”
“All right, so we’re here. What now?”
“Well . . . this thing has four-wheel drive, doesn’t it?”
She snorted, spun the wheel, and floored it. We bounced off the shoulder and plunged downhill.
“Whoa!” My stomach dropped. I grabbed the oh shit handle.
She kept the jeep in first gear so we wouldn’t skid down the slope. Smart. We leveled off and followed the winding track through a maze of cacti and craggy boulders. Maybe half a mile from the road, after it doubled back on itself, a jagged ridge rose up to one side. Up ahead, the track appeared to make a hard turn, leading through a gap in the ridge. And something lay beyond that. I couldn’t see what, but once we reached that turn, we’d be exposed.
“Hey, why don’t you stop here?” I asked. “I don’t want to surprise anyone.” And I don’t exactly have permission to be here.
We both had our hiking boots on—it was kind of our thing, to wear our gear when we went somewhere—so we set out at an easy pace down the road. Riker kept pace with us, snuffling the rocks and debris along the edge of the road. Octavius wanted to fly overhead, but I made him land and ride on my shoulder. If there were other dragons here, live ones, they might attack without warning.
We approached the turn, where it looked like the land opened into a small canyon, with cliffs rising up on either side. The terrain lent the area some natural privacy.
“How big is this place?” Summer asked.
“Maybe a few hundred square feet. We don’t have that many failed designs.” Again, I felt a stab of guilt that I’d created a defective dragon just to find this place.
“Let’s find it, then. I don’t want my baby out in the sun all day.”
I grinned at her. “I’m fine, actually.”
She elbowed me in the side. “I was talking about Riker.”
“Oh, right.”
We reached the turn and looked right. I was expecting a small structure, maybe a dozen fenced enclosures. Instead, a massive complex sprawled from rim to rim across the floor of the vale. Solar panels glittered on the roof over what had to be hundreds of enclosures, all of them occupied with dragons. A boxy metallic robot—almost like a warehouse bot—moved on a track that encircled the building, dispensing something into the cages in systematic fashion. Food and water, probably. The whole place must be automated. There was no sign of any human workers, other than the ruts of Jeep tracks from where the wranglers turned around after making deliveries. Which they obviously did far more often than I realized. It would take forever to find my fliers in that maze.
Summer shaded her eyes. “It’s . . . a little bigger than you said.”
“Yeah.” I was too shocked to even make the obvious joke. Then Octavius dug his claws into my shoulder. “Ow! Knock it off!”
The moment I loosened my grip, he launched into the air. Shit. “Don’t go too close!” I called after him.
“He’s acting weird,” Summer said.
She wasn’t wrong. Octavius paid almost no attention to the huge desert vivarium but glided off to the right, toward a jumbled mound of wood almost two stories tall. It was strange to see that much timber in the desert. We had rocks and saguaros, but not a lot of real trees. Octavius circled it twice and then returned rather abruptly. He folded his wings and practically crashed into my shoulder. If I hadn’t caught him, he’d have plummeted right to the ground. He made a sound I’d never heard before, a low-pitched moan.
“What’s wrong?” Summer sounded apprehensive.
“I don’t know.” I cradled Octavius against me and stalked over to the stack of discarded trees. But they weren’t trees. They were bones. The closest one to me, about ten yards away, was a Laptop model. I could tell from the size and the teeth. Farther off I saw the lean, lithe skeleton of an attack dragon. The sun had bleached the bones to pure white. They looked so tiny, so delicate. Yet there was a wrongness to them as well. The Laptop model was larger on one side than the other, a genetic condition called hemisomia. The attack dragon was missing a rib, even though the rest of the skeleton looked undamaged.
How can this be?
I’m not sure how long I stood there staring. I just couldn’t fathom it. My mind knew what I was seeing, but I didn’t understand how it could be real.
Faint footsteps approached from behind me. “Oh my God,” Summer whispered.
Octavius sighed against my chest. I held him close to me and stroked his back. I felt like I should say something to comfort him, but words failed me.
Summer slipped her hand around my elbow. “Come on, let’s go.”
I let her pull me away, then. I felt like I was walking through gel. Everything moved in slow, terrible motion. Riker took the lead without being asked, picking a way for us among the jeep track. Summer pulled me along. Thank God for them. I don’t know that I would have made it out before nightfall. We climbed into the Jeep without a word. She cranked it up and flicked on the headlights, because the sun was rapidly dipping beneath the horizon. How did it get to be dusk already? A little part of my brain pondered that, but the rest of it was numb.
So much of what I thought I knew about Build-A-Dragon was a lie.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Ghosts
I tried to keep my mind on the little things while Summer drove. The sound of Riker’s heavy breathing from the backseat. The feel of the sun-warmed seat at my back. The blur of yellows and greens out the window as the desert landscape rolled by, painted in twilight. Then something black and gray flashed past my window. It jarred me back to active consciousness. “Stop!”
Summer let off the gas and glanced at me. “What?”
“Stop for a second, will you?”
She gave me a weird look but jammed the brakes. The Jeep ground to a halt on the rough dirt road.
I stuck my head out to look back the way we’d come, and there it was. A gray metal post mounted in the ditch beside the road, topped with a dull steel lockbox. A black wire ran out of this down to the ground, toward the road. It looked a lot like the sensors that parks use to measure visitors, but this box had a stubby transmission antenna on top. “Shit.”
“What’s wrong?” Summer asked.
“It’s a road alarm. I didn’t see it on the way in.” That explained why there wasn’t a locked gate sealing off this road from the
public. Locked gates drew attention. Rough jeep-tracks into the desert did not.
“Maybe no one’s—” Summer cut off as headlights splashed against the ridge ahead of us where the road turned. A car was coming.
I thought about telling her to gun it, but the road was probably too narrow. “Pull over!”
She wrenched the Jeep over onto the rocky shoulder. The other vehicle came into view; it was a dark SUV with tinted windows. If they hadn’t spotted us already, they would in a minute. They can’t catch me out here. If they did, I’d have a lot to explain. Greaves might guess my real reason for coming out here. If he didn’t, Evelyn certainly would. I needed a plan. I needed time! But my brain wouldn’t work. Not after the shock it had just received.
Summer threw on her parking brake and turned up the music.
“What are you doing?” I shouted.
She grabbed me by the front of my shirt and pulled me to her. Then she was kissing me. It caught me by surprise. Total surprise. My brain still wasn’t operating, but my survival instinct died. A new one kicked in. I slid my hands around her waist, wrapped my fingers in the belt loops of her jeans, and pulled her in tight. She was warm and so soft. The road and the ghost-images of dragon bones faded into the background of my mind. Summer became my entire world.
A horn blared from very close by, and a man’s voice intruded. “Hey!”
Summer and I broke apart, doing our best to seem flustered. Which didn’t take a lot of acting on my part. The dark SUV had pulled alongside us. A man in security fatigues and aviator sunglasses stared at us through his open driver’s side window. The others were too tinted for me to see anything.
“Oh my God.” Summer sounded breathless, and I decided to believe it was because of how I’d kissed her. She turned the radio down. “Uh, hi.”
“This is private property,” the man said. There was a second guy in the passenger seat, but the interior of the SUV too dark to see their faces. I kept my own in the shadows, on the off chance that they might recognize me. I didn’t dare glance back at Octavius, but I prayed he’d stay asleep. If they spotted him, this would go south in a hurry.
Summer twirled a strand of her hair between two fingers. “Oh, sorry. We were just, um, talking.” Her cheeks flushed. “I swear.”
Damn, she was good.
“Yeah, sure.” The man glanced at his companion, who spoke into a phone. “False alarm. Just a couple of kids.”
I might have bristled at that a little bit, but I damn well kept quiet.
The guy with the phone hung up, and the driver made a shooing gesture. “Move it along.”
Summer made a big show of flipping her hair and thanking the “gentlemen.” I wanted her to floor it, but she drove off slowly. The SUV just sat there. I watched them in the rearview, waiting for them to whip it around and come after us. I didn’t breathe again until the Jeep’s tires crunched across the shoulder gravel and rolled onto the quieter highway.
We didn’t say a word until we’d put some distance between us and the SUV. At last, I couldn’t hold out anymore, and turned around to look behind us. The desert was all inky darkness. I let out a heavy breath. “I think we’re clear.”
“God. That was close,” she said.
“Yeah.” Some of the tension drained from my shoulders. “You’re a hell of an actress.”
“Oh, do you like that?” She did the hair-twirl again.
“Heh. I kind of did,” I admitted.
She gave me a side-look, and I could have sworn she was blushing.
Then I remembered what we’d found in the desert valley, and the little bit of happiness faded.
Summer must have seen it on my face. God love her, she kept the music off and just drove.
I stared out the window and tried to make sense of the screwed-up world.
We rode in silence back to the parking lot for Big Mesa. My Tesla was there, apparently undisturbed. The usual thrill of seeing it was muted, now. Summer shut the engine off and helped me disentangle Octavius from Riker.
I put my thumb on the Tesla’s biometric scanner to disarm the security system. It beeped in soft recognition.
“What are you going to do?” Summer asked.
“I don’t know.”
“I’m sorry. This really sucks.”
“Yeah.” I wasn’t ready to talk about it yet. I tucked Octavius into the passenger seat. He was so small and pitiful then, still fast asleep, as if trying to dream the visions away. Then I felt her hand on my shoulder and turned. She surprised me with a hug. A real hug.
I hugged her back. “Thanks for coming. Sorry it was, well, you know.”
She sighed. “Yeah.”
I didn’t want to let her go, but I’d already exceeded the proper hug duration. I let my arms fall against her sides. Maybe a little slowly. She eased back. Our faces brushed against one another. I held my breath.
Then her lips found mine and for three heartbeats, I forgot everything.
She pulled away, looking about as surprised as I felt. She was smiling, though. “Call me, okay?” She hopped into her Jeep. The engine roared to life, and she drove off with a wave.
I stood there like an idiot for a couple minutes, watching the Jeep disappear in a cloud of sand-dust. Then I saw Octavius, still asleep. He’d have ended up in the valley facility too, if I hadn’t smuggled him home with me. I brushed his rough back with my fingertips, lightly enough that I wouldn’t wake him. So little, so defenseless.
Dragons had never had a champion of their own, someone to look after them. Maybe they should. But it wouldn’t be easy to advocate for them without catching all the wrong kind of attention at the company. I could defend dragons, or I could work quietly on Connor’s problem. I probably couldn’t do both.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Crises
Mondays are never great, but the next one sucked. I dragged myself into work at the usual time. The other designers were busy and hard at work. The God Machine hummed with activity. Orders were piling up in my queue, too, but I couldn’t bring myself to create another dragon when it might end up imprisoned out at the Farm. Or worse, a pile of bones bleached white by the sun. The images kept playing through my mind. Dragons packed like sardines in tiny cages. Misshapen skeletons.
So I sat and tinkered with designs without ever finishing anything.
My phone rang right as I was packing up to go home. Mom again. I’d ducked her last two calls and felt bad about it, so I hit the green button.
“Hi, Mom,” I answered.
“Connor is in the hospital.”
“What?” A heavy foreboding settled in my gut and leeched all the warmth from my body. “Why?”
“He collapsed. I had to call an ambulance.”
I scrambled to find my keys, pressing the phone against my ear so I wouldn’t drop it. “What hospital?”
I let the Tesla drive me there, because I didn’t trust my hands to drive. Or my foot, to keep it below a hundred miles per hour. I parked in the visitor garage and hustled inside.
The harsh utilitarian style of the university hospital makes me long for the children’s hospital in Tempe where we spent so many days when Connor was younger. Pediatric hospitals are warm, friendly places with all kinds of kid-friendly nooks and crannies throughout. Visiting Connor there was almost an adventure to discover new things—animal statues in the halls, or the soft tweets of electronic birds beneath the artificial trees.
The university hospital is a colder and less welcoming place from the entrance, with its massive and permanent sign about washing hands because It’s Flu Season.
I’ve always hated the way the hospital smells. From the moment you walk in the door, you’re assaulted with countless harsh odors. The antiseptic cleaners, and the hand-soap in the scrub-in room. The dusty-dry smell of the sterile cotton gowns. There’s a sound in the hospital, too, a muted white noise from the machines. The air feels thicker somehow, as if gathering in the wide overhead spaces to press down on those who wait unc
omfortably for any sort of news.
Normally, Connor’s hospital room bustled with activity. He reigned from the hospital bed like a prince, always jovial, laughing and joking with the staff. The nurses and medical techs all loved him. Even when they had to put in an I.V., you’d have to watch closely to see the discomfort flicker across his face before the smile returned. He took it a hell of a lot better than I would, I’ll say that much.
This time, an uncommon quiet reigned. My eyes drifted past my mom, who was half-asleep in her usual seat by his bed, to where my brother lay with his eyes half-closed. His chest rose and fell in slow breaths. The only sound came from the soft, persistent beep of his monitors.
“What’s wrong with him?” I demanded.
My mom sprang to her feet. “Noah.”
She tried to hug me, but I fended her off. “Why isn’t he talking?”
“He’s resting, but the doctors think he’ll be fine. They were worried he had a myocardial infarction. That’s a—”
“Heart attack, I know,” I said irritably. It had been a long drive, and I felt like she weren’t giving me information fast enough. “Did he?”
“The troponin test came back normal.”
That was something. “Where’s the doctor?”
“He went home for the night.”
“He went home?”
“Shush. You’re going to wake Connor.”
But he was already awake. His eyes were moving. They flitted from us to his bed to the vital monitors on the walls. Confusion wrinkled his brow.
Mom made her voice calm, but it sounded forced. “It’s all right, honey. You’re in the hospital.”
He leaned back a little and groaned. I knew that groan. It twisted my heart a little more than usual. Maybe because we’d argued the last time I saw him. Maybe because while I was chasing that dream of getting him a diagnosis, I really hadn’t been around. Now all I wanted was to distract him. To take his mind off it for a moment.
I put an overconcerned look on my face. “Hey, buddy. Listen, if anything happens . . . do you mind if I take your gaming system?”