Domesticating Dragons

by Dan Koboldt

  “It’ll be flush with the wall. Probably on one of the corners.”

  “Stay here.” I jogged past her, counting cells as I went. After I hit fifteen, the cells ended, and I came to a large metallic plate set in the wall. Maybe two yards wide and one tall, covered in a grid of heavy-duty buttons with green LEDs above them. And here I’d been concerned the controls might be too complicated to figure out. I started at the rightmost switch and counted back fifteen, then found the next one over. I waved at Summer and shouted, “You ready?”

  She pulled Riker back away from the cages and waved back.

  I jabbed the button. A deep motor thrummed behind the wall. Octavius and his mates had located another one down the right-hand side. With luck, the control panel would be right around the corner rather than the far end of the other side. My first Condor was emerging timidly from its cell as Summer and Riker watched in fascination. Yeah, it does have that effect. I jogged around the corner and the panel was right there. But fifty yards down the line, so was Ben Fulton.

  “Parker!” he shouted.

  Shit. What the hell was he doing here? I had no time to carefully count the switches. I made a guess and jabbed the button. Then, on impulse, I pushed several more.

  Fulton cursed. “What are you doing, kid?” He broke into a run.

  I ducked around the corner, preparing to shout to Summer that we had to go, we had to run. But I looked up and saw she was already up. Pulling Riker toward us, and in the custody of two men. They wore desert-style fatigues and heavy combat boots, the kind you could walk right over a cactus wearing and not feel a thing. Sunlight glared from the assault rifles in their hands.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  Dark Wings

  I refused to acknowledge the men with rifles who stood over me and Summer. We’d been ordered to sit on the ground. Fulton stood off to the side, talking on his phone. To Greaves, almost certainly. It was midday and blisteringly hot. I could feel the heat of the sand through my clothes. Summer clutched Riker against her chest. Octavius and his mates wheeled overhead, chasing one another, completely oblivious. They still thought this a game. There was no sign of the Condor I’d set loose. A few Rovers were milling around the metal tracks, probably waiting for the big food-delivering robot to return.

  Fulton hung up his phone and marched over. “It’s not looking good for you, Parker.”

  Of course, it wasn’t. If that was Greaves on the other end, my plans were well and truly borked. “How did you find us?”

  “I saw you tagging the dragon wranglers’ vehicles in the parking garage,” Fulton said. “Thought I might find out why.”

  Well, shit. I’d forgotten his surveillance obsession. “It’s Saturday. Do you work seven days a week or something?”

  “When someone trips an alarm on a secure facility, yeah.” Fulton frowned at me. “This is private property, son.”

  “We didn’t know,” I said flatly.

  Fulton gestured up at the small cloud of dragons circling overhead. “You want to tell me where you got those?”

  “Right after you tell me where you got yours,” I answered.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. If I had an unlicensed dragon, I sure wouldn’t be stupid enough to bring it onto someone’s private property in front of witnesses.”

  I shook my head wordlessly. There was nothing for me to say.

  “Call them down to you,” Fulton said.

  “What are you going to do to them?”

  “Well, it just so happens we have some vacancies at this desert facility.”

  No. He didn’t just mean the dragonets, either. He meant Octavius. Keeping my smart little dragon in a steel-barred prison cell would be worse than torture.

  “Don’t make me ask again,” Fulton said.

  I met his eyes, pleading. “Come on, man.”

  “It’s better than the alternative, Parker. Trust me.”

  Behind him, and out of his view, the two gun-toting psychos both made a strange gesture, putting two fingers to their right ear. Who’s talking to them? I didn’t know what that was about, but a heavy sense of dread pooled in my gut.

  “I understand.” I climbed to my feet. “Octavius! Gemini!”

  Octavius wheeled and chirped at his fellows. I closed my eyes and prayed he’d remember what to do. I felt Summer’s hand slip into mine. I squeezed it and closed my eyes.

  It took Fulton a second to realize what I’d done. “Oh, hell.”

  Octavius and the other dragons had scattered, bolting for cover. Gemini meant go to ground. I only prayed they’d reach shelter and stay hidden.

  His men cocked their rifles. The harsh, metallic sound echoed among the boulders.

  Fulton waved at them. “Stand down. Those little dragons won’t get far.”

  The guard on the left, the one with the square jaw who’d shot my Condor at the field trials, shook his head. “Orders, sir.”

  Fulton rounded on him. “You get your orders from me, and I said stand down.”

  “Sorry, sir. This comes from the top.”

  They lifted their rifles and began firing. The noise was deafening. Summer screamed. I did, too. My mind started to go. Apparitions swept across the pale desert sand behind Fulton and his men. Sleek reptiles crested the ridge on clawed feet, their tongues flicking in and out. Dark shapes rose into the sky behind them, gliding over the ridge and down on silent wings.

  I’m hallucinating. I knew it when I saw my own Condor with them. Not the one I’d freed, but the one from the field trials. Twice as large, twice as majestic as I remembered. If only that were possible. Visions, then. These were the dragons of my past. All my failures had come back to haunt me. They were beautiful, though. I didn’t regret having made them. The ground trembled as they charged at us. My Condor passed in front of the sun, casting us in shadow.

  Fulton glanced back over his shoulder. His eyebrows shot up. He opened his mouth, closed it, and took two slow steps away from the ridge. Was he hallucinating, too? I still doubted what I saw, until the wind from the Condor’s wings rose to a tempest and on my face. Oh, shit! I dove on Summer and Riker, carrying them to the ground.

  Fulton’s men spun around. The sun went dark. Then light bloomed again, and a man screamed.

  The square-jawed mercenary squirmed on the ground, clutching his face with bloody hands. The Condor swept around to make another pass. But the element of surprise was gone, and the remaining mercenary trained his rifle on it. The crack-crack-crack of the rifle made the Condor fold its wings and drop behind rocks for cover. More dragons were pouring over the ridge, but they scattered when they heard the gunfire. The Condor swept back into view, flying almost straight up into the sky. My heart sank. The mercenary spun and tracked it with his rifle.

  He did not see the shadow ghosting toward him on the ground. It had a lean, muscular body and flowed over the rocks with a serpent’s grace. An attack dragon. The gunman got off two shots at the Condor. Then he must have sensed the danger. He tried to bring the gun down. The dragon slid in like an assassin’s knife. Its jaws closed on the man’s thigh. Then it wrenched its whole body in a violent gesture. Blood fountained across the sand. The man bellowed and went down beneath a blur of teeth and claws. His bellow became a scream. A high, terrible scream. I had to look away. A wave of nausea swept over me and made my knees week.

  I felt Summer’s arm around my chest. She pulled me back and away. Something snapped with a wet crunch. The man no longer moved. The attack dragon coiled itself over him and looked around. Its catlike eyes fixed on us. All of us froze.

  Fulton looked down at the ground beside him. One of the rifles had fallen there, almost at his feet. Fulton flexed his hands.

  “Don’t!” I whispered.

  “Stay where you are,” Fulton said. Whether he meant me or the dragon, I couldn’t be sure.

  “That’s an attack dragon. If it sees you as a threat . . .”

  He glanced at the gun again but straightened and backed tow
ard us.

  The dragon looked from Fulton to me. I met its gaze. Not challenging but acknowledging.

  It flicked its tongue in and out, smelling me. Smelling us.

  “We’re friends,” I whispered.

  The dragon cocked its head, as if it heard my fervent prayer. Then it hissed and advanced on us.

  Small energetic wings flapped in my ear. A familiar weight settled on my shoulder. Octavius curled his tail around Summer’s neck and crooned two short, high notes.

  The attack dragon halted in its tracks. Then, almost in slow motion, it turned its eyes to Fulton, who stood apart. Who didn’t have his little dragon friend to vouch for him. I knew what would happen next, but there was nothing I could do to stop it.

  Fulton dove for the gun. The attack dragon reached him before he could fire. It pivoted and lashed out with its back leg. A three-inch killing claw slashed Ben Fulton’s throat. He groaned and sagged to the ground.

  The attack dragon gave Summer and me one last look, then bounded off.

  I ran forward and crouched by Fulton. Blood stained the front of his shirt. I ripped off the bottom half of mine to try to staunch it, but there was just so much. He was still alive. He looked at me and tried to say something, but only a gurgle came out.

  “Hold on, man. Just hold on.”

  He gurgled again. Two syllables. My house.

  “Your house?” What did he want? My brain wasn’t working. Neither were my efforts to stop him from bleeding. It was pointless.

  Fulton looked at Octavius, who still clung to my shoulder. Then I understood.

  “He’s at your house?” I asked.

  Fulton gave a nod, and then coughed blood.

  “I’ll look after him.”

  He stiffened, then went completely still.

  I don’t know how long I stayed there, kneeling in the sand beside Fulton. Summer had come up and put her arm around me. A shadow fell across us both, and we looked up. An old man with a shock of white hair and a beard to match stood before us.

  It can’t be. Maybe I was having heatstroke. Or the psychotic break had finally come.

  “Looks like you were right about this place,” he said.

  I stared up at him. “Thought you were dead.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Summer blurted out. “Are you Simon Redwood?”

  “Who’s asking?”

  I scrambled to my feet. “This is Summer Bryn. She’s a friend.”

  Redwood looked from me to her. “Yeah, I’m him. Or I was, at least.”

  “Your house burned to ashes,” Summer said.

  It was a nonsensical thing to say, because obviously the man knew it. Then again, I’d been just as eloquent the first time I met him.

  “Yeah, how in the hell are you still alive?” I asked.

  “I was warned a minute before the arsonists set fire to my place.” He raised an eyebrow at me. By the dragons, he seemed to be saying.

  “That was lucky,” I said.

  “Got out just in time.”

  I had the sudden and completely irrational urge to ask him if he’d escaped with the jetpack. Because it would be such a Simon Redwood thing to do. Before I could, he looked down at Fulton.

  “What happened?”

  “It was an attack dragon.”

  “A custom?”

  “Yeah.” One of mine.

  “I’m sorry. We didn’t always see eye to eye, but I liked him.”

  “Me, too,” I said.

  A pack of small flying dragons—Laptop models and Couriers, as best I could tell—arrived and began circling overhead, chattering excitedly. Octavius and his mates had flown up to perch on the roof of the facility in a row. They watched the new arrivals with rapt admiration.

  Redwood cocked his head. “My friends tell me that there’s something inside the facility that we need to see.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  Ghosts

  We made an odd procession as we hiked around the perimeter of the desert facility. Redwood led the way, accompanied by a motley assortment of dragons. Some were recognizable Build-A-Dragon production models—most commonly Rovers and K-10s—but others had a wilder look to them, like the ferals I’d encountered at his house. The facility’s layout reminded me of a medieval fortress, with the long lines of holding pens as the outer walls. Redwood’s dragons led us to the middle of the southern edge where there was a gap.

  Summer hesitated on the threshold and glanced behind us.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “The tracks don’t come in here.”

  “Maybe they don’t keep dragons on the inside.”

  She furrowed her brow but said nothing. We passed into the inner ring. There were no enclosures on the inside of the walls. Only the tall, unmarked steel inner walls. There was another building within, a dark hexagonal building whose glass-and-steel walls reminded me, strangely, of Build-A-Dragon’s office downtown. It had an oddly corporate feel that contrasted sharply with the rugged vivarium. The air around was hot and still, but the building itself hummed.

  “What’s in there?” I asked.

  “No idea,” Redwood said. “It wasn’t part of the specs for this place.”

  The dragons were acting strangely. They perched on the vivarium’s inner rooftop, or sat on their haunches below, keeping some distance between themselves and the black building. There was a single door on the front with a metal frame and tinted glass panels. I saw the access panel beside it and felt a wave of disappointment. A biometric lock. All this time, all this way, and now we’d never know what lay at the center of this odd place. Time was running short, too. I could sense it. Whoever Fulton had spoken to on the phone would be trying to reach him, demanding an update. When he didn’t respond, they’d send another team.

  I approached the panel and touched it with a knuckle. The screen flickered to life and confirmed my fear. “It’s a biometric lock. I’m sure I don’t have access.” There was someone who probably did. Ben Fulton. But I knew what that would probably take, and I didn’t have it in me. “Damn.”

  Redwood stumped up next to me. “Here’s a crazy idea.” He put his hand on the scanner. The light scanned it, and two wonderful words flashed in bright green letters. Access Granted.

  I stared in disbelief. “How?”

  “Funny thing about being dead. No one thinks to remove your profiles from the biometric locks.”

  A buzzer sounded, and I yanked the door open before the system could change its mind. A roaring cacophony sounded from the opening, a noise so loud and unexpected that I nearly let go of the door.

  “Is that—” Summer started to say.

  “Dogs barking,” I said.

  The dragons around us shrank back even more, hissing and unfurling their wings. And no wonder. It was a daunting, staccato sound that no dragon had ever heard. I pulled the door open and walked in. Motion-activated lights illuminated the entryway as Summer and Redwood followed me in. The light quieted the barking some and made its source clear. Holding pens lined both sides of the central corridor, and each one of them held a dog. A living dog. The first one was a black lab. Beyond that was a small terrier, then a yellow lab, and then . . .

  “Ooh,” Summer breathed. “A golden.” She reached through the bars and scratched him behind the ears.

  “I’m not sure we should—” I started, but there was no point in protesting. Summer laughed as the retriever panted and basked in her attentions. God, I’d forgotten the warm fuzzy feeling that a joyful dog brought, even to the darkest of times.

  “It’s probably all right,” Redwood said quietly at my shoulder.

  “What about the disease?”

  “See the scars on his muzzle?”

  I saw them just as he said it, the hairless furrows along the bottom jaw. “He’s already got it.” I felt a pang of sadness, remembering when the unmistakable signs of fate had marked my own dog.

  “Had it,” Redwood said. “Those scars are old.”

  “So he go
t better?” That didn’t sound right. Dogs didn’t survive the epidemic.

  Summer glanced back at us. “How is that possible?”

  Redwood scratched his head. “If I had to guess, this dog was successfully treated.” He marched forward, checking the other enclosures. Each one held a dog of a different breed. I couldn’t pick out the scar on the bulldog, but they were plain on the snouts of the German shepherd and the beagle.

  “I feel like I’m watching the AKC dog show,” Summer said.

  She was right. I shook my head, still amazed. “It’s like, one of every major breed.” I turned to Redwood, who’d pursed his lips in thoughtfulness. So why isn’t he surprised? “What is this place?”

  “A ghost of Robert’s past.”

  “What?”

  Redwood turned to face me. “You seem to know your recent history, so let me ask you this. Do you know what Robert Greaves did before he came to Reptilian?”

  “Biotech,” I answered. “One of the big pharmas. I can’t remember which.”

  “Bingham Pharmaceuticals. He ran the Canizumab trial.”

  Which failed right after he left. I still remembered the news cycle from that week. We’d been waiting for them to announce the trial’s success, which would mean that every dog still alive had a shot at effective treatment. Instead, Canizumab totally failed, and the collective dismay robbed the world of any meaningful enthusiasm for finding a cure. That was the week we knew dogs were doomed. “These are the test cases. The ones that got the medicine.”

  “Why would he intentionally sink his own trial?” Summer asked.

  “Because if dogs come back, we’ll sell a lot fewer dragons,” I said.

  Redwood pointed at me and touched a finger to his nose.

  “What an asshole,” Summer said.

  “Seriously.” I turned to Redwood. “So, what are we going to do?”

  “Don’t ask me.” He grinned. “I’m dead, remember?”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I assure you, I’m not. Death suits me for the time being.”

  I chewed my lip, thinking. Well, we need a record of this at the very least. I took out my phone and took a video of the healthy, boisterous dogs as we walked back to the door. They must have sensed that we were leaving, because their barks grew to a near-deafening level. I was forced to stop my video to cover my ears.