“Just to the top of it,” I said. “I think the critter’ll go to her when he sees her. They’re, like, connecting. I’ll come right back down after that.”
“You can feel them, can’t you? Connecting.”
I hesitated. Shrugged.
“Bryn. You remember that shell thing I told you? At school, the day we met?”
“Yeah?”
“Sometimes it’s wrong. Sometimes you have to, you know, trust. Let people in. It’s too lonely otherwise. Anyway, if you’re scared I might, like, unfriend you for being different and strange … just think about it. How dumb is that?”
I smiled. Then searched her face, memorizing it. The face of a friend.
“We call it kenning,” I said. “We do it in my family. With birds, like in those books. But you can’t tell anyone, ever.”
“Okay, then,” she said. “Okay.”
I started toward the berm.
“What happens when those guys catch up to us?” Sasha asked.
“You could hide. But I don’t think they really care about us. I think they’re after dragons.”
“Right.”
I headed up. The loose rocks shifted under my feet.
“Hey, Bryn.”
I turned back.
“You want company?”
She looked scared. It was clearly a big deal for her to offer. And, yeah, company would have been nice. But I knew this was something for me to do—just me.
The critter was thrumming, thrumming loud. Still clinging to me with his sharp little talons.
“Be right back,” I said.
It was hard to keep my balance on the rocks. They kept moving, sliding. A big stone clattered, echoing, down the heap to the cave floor. A couple of steps farther up, some smaller rocks dislodged, and my feet slipped out from beneath me. I came down hard on one hand, breathing dust, trying to lever myself up so I wouldn’t squish the critter.
The rumbling in my mind trembled deeper, and now everything seemed to shudder—the rocks, the air, the cave walls. I got to my feet, unsteady. Climbed higher.
I could go back down now. No one would blame me.
But, strangely, I wanted to know. Not just about whatever was in there. It had to do with me. With some mystery that had haunted me all my life.
I stretched up, peered over the top of the heap.
And there she was—staring at us from across another cavern.
I couldn’t take her in all at once. I had an impression of great size, black and looming, bulking out to the edges of my peripheral vision. Green eyes, as long as my forearms. Older than anything; fierce and wise and sad. Framed in fold upon fold of black skin—wrinkles, pouches, bags.
She began to move, limping away from the back opening of the cavern, toward us. Making dry, scraping sounds, like rustlings of dead leaves blown by wind across a sidewalk.
Something shrunken about her. Something wizened. Things were broken. Broken scales, I saw—some with ragged, chipped edges and others full-out missing, leaving black, naked patches of skin. One of her wings jutted out at a weird angle, wouldn’t fold in all the way.
She was totally alone.
Outsider.
Outside of everything.
“Go on now,” I said to the critter. “That’s your mom. Go.” I tried to unhook his talons from my coat, but he clung to me, wouldn’t let go.
She drew nearer. The air shimmered in the heat of her breath. I could feel it now, her hot breath on my face, lifting my hair, drawing out beads of sweat on my forehead. It smelled like campfires, like barbecue coals, like pots with metallic glazes firing in a kiln.
My whole body wanted to run, get away, slide back down the berm. I forced myself to stand still. The thrumming ramped up, began to vibrate the rocks beneath my feet. A stream of gravel trickled down. The critter lifted his head off my shoulder. Seemed to be listening.
And now, all at once, he changed his mind. He struggled to get loose, to unhook his claws from my coat. I helped, hands shaking. When finally the last toenail snicked free, he lunged toward the big dragon with more spirit than I’d seen in him in days. He tumbled down the far side of the berm, flapping his flimsy little wings and scrabbling uselessly with his claws. At the bottom, he collided with a thump against a great, black talon—knobby, warped, arthritic.
Right away, he started rooting around underneath the dragon. Looking for something.
For milk.
The dragon bent down her head to nuzzle him.
I couldn’t see exactly where he found it, but I could tell that he had—by the eager way he pushed into his mother’s leathery belly, by the warm, contented thrill I felt when I kenned him.
So she had milk, then.
Dragon’s milk.
I could feel them talking to each other in some thrumming language I could only partway grasp. I sensed a deep, lonely pulse in her kenning. She had a name for the critter, but nothing I could put into words. It was like Fire, but more precise than that. Some particular kind of fire. Lively. Happy. A laughing kind of fire.
I kenned the critter good-bye, but he wasn’t listening. My heart swelled in my chest.
Time to go.
I started to back away—then pain shot through my head: white-hot, explosive. I flinched, closed my eyes, pressed my palms against them. The flood of pain cooled, ebbed back to a dull, aching throb.
I looked up. Those old, old eyes held mine. I felt a second kenning, milder this time, and understood that she wanted something from me.
Help. With the wing. The gimpy one, the one that wouldn’t fold.
I tried to hold in my thoughts, but I could feel my fear seeping out. She lifted the wing, still gazing at me, and the kenning softened to a plea.
I stood breathing, unmoving. Caught by her eyes and the deep, rhythmic throb of her ken.
Slowly, I edged myself over the crest of the berm. Slowly, I clambered down.
Into the heat of her breath.
It was like standing at the edge of a bonfire. Waves of hot air washed over me; sweat ran down my face.
The dragon shifted her weight, brought the sticking-out wing to hover just above me. It looked like a bat wing—but seismic huge—with leathery skin stretched between many narrow, bony ribs. I reached up, felt the skin. The wing twitched, as if in pain. I pulled my hand away.
Those eyes again. Looking at me.
I swallowed. Reached out again. Touched the wing.
It didn’t move.
I wiped the sweat from my face, then began to explore the wing with my fingers. Gingerly, at first. The skin between the wing ribs felt thin as paper, crinkly. Parts of it were tattered and ripped; other parts seemed to have fused together, like an old umbrella I’d once left too long on the heater vent to dry. Some of the ribs had twisted, buckled. Others had snapped; they poked out from the wing in ragged splinters.
It smelled musty here, under the wing. Like ancient, leather-bound books, brittle with age, their pages yellow and torn. The dragon looked away, her breath heat suddenly less intense. But sweat still trickled into my eyes, and, under my coat, my shirt clung damp to my body.
I ran my fingertips along one of the crooked wing ribs until I came to the bend, then tugged gently on either side of it. I was afraid it would crack, or the skin would tear. But the rib bent back, mostly into shape, though a little flat where the bend had been.
I straightened more ribs, then went to work on the parts where layers of skin had fused. I peeled apart the gummed-up edges and carefully picked at the larger areas, like pulling price tags off plastic packaging.
My fingers went on working, bending the ribs back into shape, teasing apart the fused layers of skin, straightening, smoothing, mending. The dragon began to thrum again, quivering the rocks, spilling runnels of sand down from the berm, from the walls of the cave. The thrumming deepened, filled me up. It trembled in my mind, and I felt some boundary between us dissolving. The thrumming became a song, a mother’s song, mournful and old.
&nb
sp; I could feel that she was dying.
My fingers froze.
I forced them to move again, to pull apart the fused skin layers, to straighten the bent ribs.
Dying.
What would happen to the critter when she died?
“Bryn!”
I turned around. Sasha peered over the edge of the berm.
“Those people are coming. I can hear them.” She eyed the dragon warily and crept over the top of the pile, as far from us as possible.
The dragon turned, leveled a hard gaze at Sasha. Then, seeming to sense something else, she lifted her head, sniffed at the air. She picked up the critter in one foot and limped away from us, toward the rear cave opening.
A clattering behind. I looked back. Two men climbed over the rocks.
A crack of gunfire. A loud clank. I threw myself to the ground, saw the dragon twitch. She swiveled her head around, spat out a gout of blue flame. A roaring sound. A shout. Smoke stung my eyes and filled my lungs. In the dissolving haze, I looked for Sasha. Found her.
Not hit.
Two men, still coming. More shots. A hail of clanks. I got up and sprinted toward the critter, caged loosely in the massive gnarled talons. Beside me now, the dragon swiveled her head and flamed at the men again.
Someone screamed.
A tiny ledge jutted out beyond the cave, into the sky.
Birds. The sky was black with them. Circling, crying.
The dragon tensed, seemed to gather herself together. Her wings unfolded, the gimpy one and the good one.
I looked down. There, on the steep slope below, was a guy with a rifle aimed at us.
And Josh.
A crack. I felt it hit her, high above me. Not with a clank, this time, but with the soft, wet thud of lead burrowing into flesh.
Shouting, from the cave behind us. The dragon rocked back, stumbled. She roared, belched out flame, then gathered herself up again. She leaned forward, into the air.
In the back of my mind, I heard the whine of the scaredy-cat kid, distant and thin. But it was drowned out by the shouting, by the roar, by the cries of the birds, by the commotion in my head.
She couldn’t protect him if she were dead.
I lunged for one of the dragon’s front legs, braced my feet on her toes. I held on.
With a sickening lurch, the ground dropped away beneath me.
44
UGLY ORANGE COAT
RESURRECTION PEAKS, ALASKA
“Josh. Check it out.”
Josh looked up where Zack was pointing: the back entrance of the cave.
Finally!
It hadn’t been easy to find. They had the coordinates, sure. But that didn’t mean they could get there, even when they’d been there before. Distances were fluky with GPS. GPS didn’t tell you about things like brambles and boulders and cliffs. GPS hadn’t warned them about that creek they’d had to ford or the rock slides they’d had to climb over. Racing against time. The whole while, Josh had kept wondering about Cap and Quinn. Where they were. If they’d found Bryn. The more time passed, the heavier the dread weighed in him.
Now Josh squinted at the cave mouth, up a steep, rocky slope from where they stood. He untied his bandanna, wiped the sweat off his face. Lots of birds in the sky here. Ravens, eagles, hawks.
“We should go in,” Zack said.
“Yeah. Listen …” It felt different, being with Zack when Cap wasn’t around. And maybe Zack was having as much trouble with this as he was. Now that Zack had seen Bryn and the dragon on the blog. “Look,” Josh said, “this is going to be rough on her. On Bryn.”
Zack gave him a sideways look. “What’s the matter? You like her?”
Josh shrugged. She was a strange girl, no doubt about it. But she’d grown on him, somehow. He wished she were a little older, maybe a harder kind of girl. Tougher to bruise.
More than anything, he really didn’t want to see her hurt.
“If we find them first, couldn’t we just let them go?” he said. “The thing’s alive, not a fossil. This doesn’t feel right to me.”
Zack shut down. It was a physical thing; Josh could see it in his eyes, in his face.
“Stop,” Zack said. “Just shut up. I don’t want to hear that kind of talk. Not now, not ever.”
Halfway up the slope, Josh heard a deep, throbbing sound. Felt it too, up through his feet, like the far-off rumbling of a train. He stood still, listening. Uneasy.
The flat crack of a rifle shot startled him. Josh hit the dirt; Zack thumped down beside him, already unslinging his rifle.
A shout from the cave. A deep, roaring, crackling sound.
Fire?
More rifle shots above, from the cave. The birds were calling now. Hundreds of them.
Zack gasped, pointed up at the cave. Something moving there. Almost completely blocking the entrance.
Josh tried to make sense of what he was seeing.
Somehow, he had never quite grasped the scale of them, how enormous they would be, full-grown. It seemed more tree-size than animal-size, with those gnarled talons rooting it to the rocky ledge. Its body, shingled over with rows of broken scales, was all shades of faded black, except for a wash of emerald where sunlight seeped through the membranes of its crippled-looking wings and bled green across its belly. Wisps of smoke trailed out through its nostrils into the sky. Its great, long eyes gleamed green.
Intelligent.
Aware.
Zack raised his rifle.
“Don’t!” Josh said. “Look.”
And there she was, in that ugly orange coat, under one of the dragon’s wings:
Bryn.
What was she doing?
Near her, clutched in the dragon’s foot: her “lizard.”
Zack fired.
Was he crazy?
The dragon lurched backward, roared, spit a sizzling blue flame ball in their direction. Josh ducked. Zack raised the rifle again. The dragon unfurled its wings—wider than the de Havilland’s. It gathered itself to fly. But something was happening, some kind of scramble there near its feet.
“Hold your fire!” Josh said, but Zack was aiming again; he was going to shoot.
Josh flung himself at his brother. The rifle discharged just as the dragon tipped its body forward, off the lip of the cave. It plummeted toward them; its massive tail scraped against the hillside, sending rocks and gravel flying. Josh ducked, but looked up as it passed on his left, in time to see the smear of color go whizzing by.
Ugly orange coat.
The dragon dropped down past the cliffs, toward the valley: down and down and down.
45
FREE FALL
RESURRECTION PEAKS TO THE GULF OF ALASKA
We dropped. My stomach lurched up into my throat. I thought I heard another shot, but the wind was howling in my ears. I could sense the riffle and snap of wings above me, the calling of birds, the wild beating of my heart. Then a jolt: a harsh, rasping noise. Flying rocks and gravel. I looked back. It was the dragon’s tail, scraping along the slope.
I hugged the dragon’s leg tighter, locked my arms and legs around it. We bounced away from the slope, into the air beyond.
Free fall.
The valley rose up to meet us, zooming in. My eyes stung. My nose ran. Tears streamed sideways into my hair.
I closed my eyes. Dropping down and down through black nothing.
Something changed. G-forces, shifting. I opened my eyes to see the horizon tip sideways. We were still falling, but somehow not as fast. The horizon righted itself again and we were soaring—a shaky kind of soaring—out over the icefields, ice that went on forever, studded with the massive, craggy tips of hidden mountains. And nearer, in the air all around us: a rock-star entourage of screeching birds.
It was cold. Prickly, biting cold at first, then numbing. Tears and snot froze solid on my cheeks; my ears burned. I shivered all over. The rough knobs and ridges of the dragon’s leg dug into me, and then I began to slip. My arms had morphed to rubber. I
couldn’t hang on …
The great talons beneath me stretched, spread wide. My arms gave out; I slid, with a spasm of panic, between the dragon’s toes. The talons snapped shut beneath me; I sat cradled and caged within them.
They felt solid, the talons. For now. I turned my back to the wind and gingerly leaned against their bony curves. I pulled up my hood. The cold still penetrated, though not so painfully. I looked for the critter. The dragon’s belly blocked him from view, but I kenned him, felt him. He seemed stronger. He seemed … happy.
Where were we going?
Would she take me someplace safe?
Or would she drop me, like a gull with a clam, and crack me against the ice?
I brushed her with a quick ken—wary of the white-hot pain from before. I couldn’t sense what she intended, only a wall of bass vibration that throbbed all down through my body.
A great weariness came over me. I was too tired, or too numb, for terror. I tucked my head, huddled myself into a miserable ball, and just endured.
A while later, maybe a long time, I lifted my head. Something seemed different. I felt the huge wings teetering and quaking above me. No longer soaring but struggling. Currents of frigid air tossed us up and down and sideways. I peered through the ribs of my cage and saw seabirds among the mob of ravens and hawks. The wrinkled sea stretched out below. I could smell the brine; I could see foam blowing off the whitecaps; I could make out the shape of each separate wave.
Too low now. Weren’t we? Too low to the water.
Tilting hard one way. Correcting. Tilting too far in the other direction.
The sea crept up beneath the tips of the talons. They scored it, drilled into it, sent out sheets of frigid water. The waves lunged up, swallowed my feet.
I screamed.
With a tortured, heaving groan, the dragon wrenched us up out of the sea and back into the air.
Rising now, slowly, up through the throng of birds. Dragon wings creaky, straining. My eyes streamed with tears, and the pounding of my heart made a roaring sound that filled my head.
Ancient, Strange, and Lovely Page 21