I woke in the thrumming dark. The critter’s back rose and fell beneath my hand. I could tell that he was sleeping. I kenned him. Still weak and shaky. Something not right.
I blinked, stretched up, looked out the cockpit window between Josh and Sam Mills. Samantha, she’d said. Ms. Mills, to you, she’d said.
There was Anchorage, framed by snowy mountains, glittering with lights, speeding toward us across the darkness. The tallest buildings, mirrored in the inlet, stretched wobbly, luminous ribbons across a sheen of mud and water, drawing us in.
Anchorage. Where Mom had gone, and Dad. I leaned toward it, wishing I had like satellite vision, so I could zoom in on every avenue, every back street, every space between every building.
The plane banked. Now I could see the airport lights below, and the dark, empty space of a lake. Seaplanes clumped around lighted slips near the shore. I felt a thump as we touched down, then a solidish floor of water moving beneath us. Twin plumes of gleaming spray rose up on either side.
We taxied in. Ms. Mills was talking on the radio; Josh was talking on his phone. The engine had throttled down; I could hear some of what Josh was saying. “Yeah,” he said. And, “You’re kidding.” And, “How many?”
I rubbed my eyes. Checked my watch: just past eleven. I’d need to be alert now. I’d ask Josh to take me to a motel. I could call Dr. Jones tomorrow. Or no, not call him. Sasha had said I should show up on his doorstep, and she was probably right. I could take a bus or a cab.
Josh turned around. Smiled at me. “That should work,” he said into his phone. “Okay. See you in a minute.”
He beeped off. “Cap says there’s a crowd there, on the other side of the fence. We’ll have to go through them to get to the car.”
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Don’t know,” he said. “But Cap says it won’t be a problem.”
Ms. Mills cut the engine. She slid out to stand on one of the plane’s floats and tossed a line to a tall man waiting in a puddle of artificial light at the edge of the slip. Josh’s dad? Ms. Mills stepped onto the dock; Josh scrambled out behind her. I could see the crowd at the shore end—a dark mass of people behind a chain-link fence. Before I could get out, though, Ms. Mills ducked back into the plane and fiddled with the controls. “A friend of yours is here,” she murmured. “She’ll find you. Go with her.”
A friend? I started to ask who, but Ms. Mills said, “Shh,” and tipped her head for me to go.
Josh’s dad, a graying, square-jawed man, introduced himself as Cap. He reached to take my duffel but I clutched it to my chest. The critter had wakened. I felt his ken: jittery and thin.
Cap’s hand stayed out there. “No, really,” he said. “I’ll take it.”
I shook my head.
“Cap,” Josh said. “It’s okay.”
Cap shrugged. Let the hand fall. “Suit yourself,” he told me.
Ticked. I could tell. He smiled, though, hiding it. A smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “Let’s go, then,” he said. “Stay close. We’re going to have to navigate the crowd.”
I followed Cap down the dock. Glanced back at Ms. Mills. Who was watching us. She didn’t smile.
A friend? What friend? And how did she know?
“Mr. Lizard!”
I whirled around. The fence was shaking, making a ringing sound.
“Mr. Lizard!”
“Mr. Lizard!”
I stopped. Stared. People were climbing the fence. “Let’s get a move on,” Cap said. He grabbed the duffel, yanked it out of my hand, and marched on up the dock.
“Hey!” I said. “Give it back!”
“Just move,” he called over his shoulder.
“Make him give it to me!” I said to Josh.
“I will,” he said. He looked straight into my eyes, reaching toward me, as if to take my arm. Then hesitated. Didn’t touch me. “I will. But first, let’s get out of here, okay?”
A clang. A thump. I tore my eyes from Josh. People dropped over the top of the fence, poured down the path, onto the dock. They surrounded Cap now, blocking him. Chanting: Mr. Lizard. Mr. Lizard. Mr. Lizard.
Somebody yelled, “Bryn!” A bright white halo of hair in the crowd, just ahead.
Sasha.
I gaped at her.
“Don’t just phaging stand there,” she said. “Snag Mr. Lizard!”
Josh said, “Wait! It’ll be fine,” but all at once people were forcing their way in between us. I cut through the crowd, which actually seemed to be yielding, giving way before me. I reached Sasha and kept going as she ran interference. I could see Cap now, clutching the duffel against himself, pushing back against a clump of people who were trying to take it away. Like a huge old bull caribou, harried by wolves.
I kenned with the critter. Jaggedy. Off balance.
Combustible.
Somebody lunged for the duffel. Cap jerked it away.
A blinding blue flash. People screaming, running, jumping into the water. Smoke bloomed up, swirled in the dock lights, surrounded us. For a moment, I couldn’t see anything: not Cap, not the duffel. Then Cap reappeared in the thinning blue haze. Holding his arm, as if it hurt.
“There it is!” Sasha pointed to where the duffel lay charred and smoking on the dock ahead.
I ran to the critter, kenning him not to flame. I tried to unzip the duffel, but it was hot—too hot. Parts of it were melting.
High polyester count. Why didn’t they make these things out of cotton?
I pulled my shirtsleeves over my fingers and tugged at the zipper. The critter slithered out and hooked his talons into my coat. He climbed up a sleeve until his head pushed into my neck, until I was breathing his smoky breath.
I looked up. People had formed a silent circle around us; I blinked in the glare of their flashing phones. Josh stood toward the back, looking stunned.
Sasha smiled. “Quite the celebrity, your Mr. Lizard,” she said.
“Josh! What are you doing? Get it!”
Cap shoved toward us through the crowd; Josh didn’t move. People jumped in front of Cap, tried to block him, but he was strong. They couldn’t hold him forever.
We ran.
37
VIRAL
ANCHORAGE, ALASKA
The crowd opened up, letting us through. I heard a siren, coming near. I followed Sasha toward the gate—now open. But something jerked me backward. Someone was holding me, an arm clamped hard about my waist.
The critter stiffened, hissed. “Sasha!” I called.
“Hey!” She appeared at my side. “Let her go!” I heard some thuds, a crack, some oofs. “Help!” Sasha yelled. “They’re after Mr. Lizard!”
And the crowd thickened all around us. Someone swore. A yelp of pain. Then I was free again, running, holding tight to the critter and following Sasha through a dark parking lot. She opened the back door of a black car with tinted windows. “Get in!” she said.
I did. She jumped in after me, yanked the door shut. I settled the critter in my lap; the driver peeled out onto a frontage road and headed toward the highway, going fast.
Behind us, the siren cut out. I looked back and saw flashing lights, back near the gate.
“Woo hoo!” Sasha said. “We busted out in a blaze of phaging glory.”
I blinked at her. I had so many questions, I hardly knew where to start. The most obvious one rose to the surface. “What are you doing here?” I asked.
Sasha laughed. “I’m everywhere!”
Not helpful. I was so confused. “Where are we going? Who were all those people? Who is …” I nodded toward the driver, in the seat in front of me.
“Long story. Mungo, here—” The driver flicked his eyes at me in the rearview mirror and nodded. “Mungo sent for me.”
Mungo? “Dr. Mungo Jones? From the university?”
“At your service,” he said. We squealed around a corner; I clutched the grab bar. Dr. Jones said something into his earpiece; he was making a call.
Dr. Jones! I leaned back, br
eathing in the leathery smell of the seats, feeling safer, somehow, than I’d felt in weeks. I hadn’t had to find him at all. He’d found me. He’d know what to do.
The critter had melted into my lap. Not sleeping. More like tapped out, completely drained. We accelerated onto the highway. I relaxed into it, let the g-forces squish me back against the seat.
Another question surfaced. “How do you two know each other?” I asked Sasha.
“I’m getting to that,” she said. “So, Mungo saw you on the blog and called Taj.”
“What blog?”
“You don’t know about the blog?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Do you know a guy named Anderson?”
“Anderson! He’s not a guy; he’s a kid.”
“He’s a blogging kid. Anderson Blogs the Universe dot com. He’s put up pictures of you—you and Mr. Lizard. Lots of comments. Mr. L’s got quite the fan base. New Zealand. Sweden. Japan.”
Anderson! That little twerp!
“Those people with their phones tonight?” she said.
“Yeah?”
“They’re taking pictures. Uploading to the blog. Mungo put out the word to his students, and it went viral. You know that pet carrier I bought?”
“Yeah?”
“There’s a picture of it, all wrecked and melty and stuff.”
“Anderson found that thing?”
“And posted it. That energized the base.”
Anderson! I was going to strangle him.
And yet … that blog of his might have saved the critter’s life.
I looked down at the little guy, curled up in my lap.
Listless. Not right.
Hopefully, he was saved.
“That guy you were with on the dock?” Sasha said. “He and his dad are poachers! Mungo knows all about them.”
Poachers. So Josh had meant to rat me out. Had he ever wanted to help me—even when he rescued me in Haines? Or had he known about me from the blog? Planned it all along?
The painful part was, I’d liked him. I’d thought he maybe liked me. Not girlfriend liked, but still. I felt all twitchy, halfway mad and halfway mortified.
“Phew!” Sasha said. “Do you smell that? It’s, like, dead fish.”
Superb. That would be me.
The critter flicked his tail. Beneath my hand, his breathing felt different. Labored.
“Can we turn on the light for a sec?” I asked.
Sasha flipped on the overhead. “What is it?”
“Something’s wrong with the critter.”
He looked even worse than before. Super-pale, speckled with funny white spots. He lay limp, like he was sleeping, but with eyes half-open. Even when I scratched his jaw, he didn’t thrum. I kenned him. Felt a feeble, sickly tingle in my mind.
“Is that normal?” Sasha asked.
I looked at her.
“Right,” she said. “Normal, not so much.”
“Maybe he’s dehydrated,” I said.
“Try this.” Dr. Jones handed back a small, metal water bottle. I wedged the nozzle between the critter’s jaws and tipped the bottle. A thin stream of water trickled out of his mouth and onto my jeans.
Usually, he’d at least try. He’d lick at the nozzle and if that didn’t work, he’d bite it.
“Think he’s hungry?” Sasha asked.
“Could be.” But definitely he was sick. I thought about all the junk food I’d given him. I should have been more careful. Even the cheese could have been bad. What if he was, like, lactose intolerant? I’d been lazy. I should have stuck with the ReliaVite. And on top of everything, I’d been drugging him. That stuff was way toxic if you overdosed.
“Hey, little guy.” I stroked the tips of my fingers across his eye ridges. “We’ve got to stop,” I said. “We’ve got to feed him. He isn’t right.”
We stopped at a grocery store. Dr. Jones handed Sasha some money. “We’re going back to the ReliaVite,” I said.
“Strawberry, right?”
I nodded. “And the baster and the cup. You know the drill.”
The door shut behind her. Suddenly quiet in the car. Dr. Jones had hardly spoken to me at all—he’d been talking on the phone—but now he turned around. I scooted to Sasha’s side of the seat, to see him better. Green eyes. I remembered them from his website.
“How is Samantha?” he asked. His voice was deep and somehow comforting.
Samantha: the pilot, Ms. Mills. “She’s, ah, fine,” I said.
“Friend of mine,” Dr. Jones said.
“Oh.” That explained some things.
He leaned toward the critter. Drew in breath. “Will you look at that,” he said. He reached his hand toward him, then hesitated. “May I?”
I nodded.
He moved his hand along the critter’s jacket, tracing the ridge of the spine. Gently, he stroked a talon, then picked it up, examined it.
I kenned the critter a wave of calm. Thinking that a stranger’s touch might upset him. But he seemed too sick to care.
Dr. Jones pointed to the bulges under the jacket, on the critter’s sides. “Wings, I presume?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve known about these creatures for years. But to actually see one …”
Something clicked. The sketches on his wall, in the website photo. “Those sketchbooks Mom had. Were they yours?”
“I gave them to her for safekeeping, along with the egg. I do have other sketches, but … They’re evidence, you see. Old eyewitness reports. Substantiation that they’ve been here before.” He brushed his fingertips across the critter’s eye ridges. I sent another calming ken.
Dr. Jones looked at me. Cocked his head. Something different in his face, a kind of listening. “You’re doing it now, aren’t you?” he asked.
“Doing what?”
“Kenning.”
Kenning. He knew.
“Do you know any other kenners?” he asked. “Outside of your own family?”
I shook my head. Other kenners?
“There aren’t many of us,” he said. “Though perhaps more might ken but don’t know it. But, yes. We’re a small band. And every so often, more of us turn up.”
I sat perfectly still, astonished at the crashing relief I felt, to hear that there were others.
Dr. Jones looked down at the critter. “Is it different with … a dragon?”
“A little. There’s a deeper under-vibe, like a bass guitar. But sort of jaggedy sometimes. A little bit … hot. That’s not a good description, but …”
He nodded. “Words won’t do, for kenning.”
“Do you want to try?” I said.
“I couldn’t possibly presume. The bond is yours.” He studied me for a moment. “I have to admit, though, I’m envious.”
“It hasn’t exactly been a picnic.”
He laughed, low and rumbly. “No, I can’t imagine it has.” He sighed. “Much has transpired,” he said. “Events you will need to know of, and a favor I must ask. I wish I had longer to explain, but we’re in a bit of a rush.”
In the short time while Sasha was gone, I learned a truckload of stuff.
I learned that Anderson’s blog had the scientific community buzzing: cryptozoologists, zoologists, wildlife biologists. And also, unfortunately, poachers.
I learned that Dr. Jones had first heard about the critter’s egg from a student last fall. Dr. Jones had talked the student into giving it to him and had passed the egg to Mom because he’d feared that poachers were out to steal it from him. And as it turned out, he’d been right. Both his office and his home had been raided.
I learned that Mom had paid the student to take her to the mountain cave where the egg had been found. She’d taken the dirt samples and found the fossilized egg. She hadn’t known what it was until she’d chipped it out of the rock. She was going to turn it in. It’s illegal to take them out of Alaska. But then, a little while later, she’d disappeared.
I learned that several weeks ago
, Dr. Jones had hired a different student to search the cave and set up a camera trap—a motion-activated camera in a tree outside the cave entrance.
Now Dr. Jones pulled out his phone. A sat phone. “Would you care to see what we recorded?”
I hugged myself, uneasy. “I guess.”
He tapped at the screen, handed the phone to me. It was running a vid. I watched.
I couldn’t tell what it was at first. A large, moving something—black or super-dark green—seen from a camera above. The air around it shimmered like hot pavement on a summer day. I made out the shapes of things that could be nostrils, things that could be eyes, things that could be ears, or maybe horns. Then came a long neck and back—sharp ridges along the spine.
At first it was like those old bogus vids of Nessie or Bigfoot: the thing could possibly be what they claimed it was, but it looked completely fake.
The scales were what started to get me. Chipped and broken pieces along the ridge of the neck and spine. Variations in the color—veined and mottled, darkening around the edges like maybe they were tarnished.
I shivered, drew in a sharp breath. “Is it …”
Dr. Jones said, “Watch.”
The thing kept coming. Enormous. It didn’t move like you’d expect, not powerful and smooth. No, it hobbled, sort of. Stiff. Like an old guy with arthritis. And then, incredibly, wings: folding as I watched, turning from stained-glass translucent green in the slanting daylight to flat black in the shadows of the cave.
The vid ended. Dr. Jones took his phone.
I leaned back in the seat. Laid my hand on the critter’s back and felt him breathe. Something was squeezing on my chest; tears sprang into my eyes. “His mother?” I asked.
“We think so.”
“Where’s she phaging been?”
He shrugged. “Not all egg-laying animals stay to incubate. Some leave, and return for the hatching. Some never return at all. In this case, the incubation period may have been extremely long.”
“Like years?”
“Or decades. Perhaps many decades. Tests have shown that the one live egg”—he nodded at the critter—“was nearly a hundred years old. I’m guessing these creatures live for centuries.”
I sat there a moment. Breathed.
Ancient, Strange, and Lovely Page 18