To my right, mechanized syringes insert a human-length needle into a Green’s neck. Veins of viridescent light race through its broken body before vanishing at its tail stump. The Green flickers off and on, arrhythmic. I see Fourteen flinch, a soldier laugh, as another pantomimes a spasm. The Mengele controlling the syringe system gives a thumbs-up.
“Clear!” shouts Patch, my Mengele supervisor.
I turn my attention back to my victim, a Red named Ryla. I clamp the hood of my jacket tight to my ears. Nothing in this place is as loud as Mjöllnir. Well, almost nothing.
The giant hammer swings down from the wall onto her left shoulder. Bones shatter. Her eyes burst open. She shudders, rattles her bindings, defecates.
Despite my improvised earmuffs, despite her muzzle, I hear her anguished squeal anyway, though it is a whisper compared to the scream that blasts through my head.
I breathe through my mouth, slow and deep like Lorena told me as I exited the bus this morning. Doesn’t matter. Breakfast rises in my throat. I swallow it back for the third time today.
Patch shows me an incomprehensible graph on his tablet. Subject 247-R (Ryla): Impact Force. “It’s got brittle bones, this one.” He pulls up another graph. Subject 247-R (Ryla): Telepathic Volume. “It maxed out at one hundred and twenty-two decibels. We’re getting to it.” Using the computer console adjacent to the slab, he repositions the hammer over the Red’s right shoulder. “Ask it again, Twenty-Five.”
“Ryla, what are the names of your friends?”
“Kill me.”
In my head, her voice remains defiant. From the speaker in Patch’s tablet, the words are robotic, monotonous.
“Tell it this is not a killing blow,” he says. “Tell it if it continues to resist, we will prolong its suffering.”
I tell her.
“Kill me.”
Patch taps his goggles. Lester and Tim, the other A-B from our research team, bound onto the slab. From a tool chest, Lester retrieves a device that resembles a trowel. He uses it to peel back the dragon’s eyelid. Tim draws his combat knife. Modern-day executioners. With the filtration masks, tinted goggles, and floor-length jackets—everything black—we look quite the part.
I shut my eyes.
My CENSIR shocks me.
“We talked about this, Twenty-Five,” Patch says.
“But she can’t even see me.”
“She can sense it,” he says.
“Stop being the weak link, Twenty-Five,” Lester snaps.
I force myself to think of Sam waving at the drone. I will be strong for him. I have to be. I open my eyes.
One quick thrust. One gigantic scream. I fall to my knees, clutching my head. Breakfast fills my mask. Ryla dims.
Patch jerks me to my feet, hands me a splatter rag. “Get it together. Ask it again.”
After cleaning my mask, I repeat the question.
“Kill me,” she mumbles between soft mewls.
I think of Sam. “Answer the question.”
“Please, human.”
“We’ve almost broken her.” Patch points at her other eye. A vicious thrust later, Ryla’s blind and screaming again. I tremble, but keep my balance. Thankfully my stomach’s empty. Empty enough.
“What are the names of your friends?”
“Kill me.”
“Tell her that if she continues to resist, we will prolong the suffering of every dragon in here.”
I do.
Patch gets in my face. “Do it with conviction, Twenty-Five. Don’t be a glowheart.”
I pretend I’m talking to him, put violence into my words.
Ryla brightens momentarily; her nostrils flare. “Kill me.”
We crush her tail, then a wing, cut off two of her feet with a hatchet, pausing after each blow for me to ask my question. Her glow fades, but she’s done screaming. Her responses turn to groans. Two-syllable groans.
A buzzer goes off. The flamethrower car wash shuts down. That dragon still glows a semihealthy red.
The overhead loudspeaker activates.
“Teams, please proceed to your next station. Team One, return to Intake. Team Four, take over at chemics.”
My CENSIR warms and tightens. Patch snatches the radio from his belt. “Why are we being swapped?” Something from the other end.
Patch frowns. “The colonel?” He glances at me. “You’re sure?” Another glance as he shoves the radio back in his belt. “Let’s go.”
The intake bay opens. A red is towed in, pulsing brightly, lips drawn back in a snarl as far as the muzzle will allow.
“A rager,” Patch says. “Your lucky day, Twenty-Five. Even you can’t screw that up.”
Evelyn saunters from the opposite direction with Team Four. Blood stains her jacket.
I hug myself against the cold. With the flamethrowers off and Ryla’s warmth dwindling with her glow, the cold draft that blows through the ER has become noticeable.
“Still don’t have your Antarctic skin, Twenty-Five?” Evelyn says.
“What’s the scenario?” Team Four’s Mengele asks Patch.
“It’s stubborn. Probably in shock. Give it some adrenaline and some hallucinogens.”
“You think it’s crackable?”
“In the right hands.” He shakes his head at me. “My talker’s a little too much of a glowheart, though.”
Four’s Mengele laughs. “Taste of a rager will work that right out of her.”
“One can hope.”
Evelyn pulls a half-eaten Baby Ruth from her pocket, unhooks her filtration mask, and takes a bite. She offers the rest to me. “You look hungry, Twenty-Five.”
My stomach knots up. “I’m fine.”
She shoves the rest into her mouth. I force myself to watch until she’s finished. She gives this phony embarrassed smile, straps her mask back into place. “Don’t worry, Twenty-Five, I’ll pick up your slack.”
Our team returns to the beginning of the torture line, where our newest victim awaits, shiny and whole. Patch lowers the cylindrical sheath over the dragon’s body. It hovers there, emitting a low hum for a couple of seconds before rising back to the ceiling.
His tablet beeps. Two 3D scans of the dragon appear. Subject 249-R (): Luminal Map/Thermal Map. He beams. “Haven’t seen a Red this bright in a while. Approach, Twenty-Five.”
As I enter the dragon’s line of sight, its glow dims. I mount the slab and take my mark on the X, a dozen feet from its snout. Though it shouldn’t be able to see me, its green eyes track me the entire way. Its snarl fades. Warm puffs of breath wash over me in gentle waves.
“Ah,” Patch says. He runs the scan again. He looks from me to the dragon, then back to me. He taps his tablet. My CENSIR loosens slightly. “Initiate communication, Twenty-Five.”
“What’s the dragon’s name?” I ask him.
“It’s a battlefield recovery. We don’t know . . .” If he says more, I don’t hear it.
“Hello, Melissa Callahan.”
I gasp. I recognize the voice.
My CENSIR tightens. Patch looks smug. “Tell me its name, Twenty-Five.”
“Vestia.”
“One of your friends.”
Not a question, but I answer anyway. “Yes.”
“Proceed.” He puts me back in transmit mode.
Painted on the wall behind her are three columns of questions. I recite the words printed above the red column. “Vestia, answer our questions truthfully and we will limit your suffering. Do not, and you will beg us to die.”
“It hurts?”
Her question catches me off guard. “Yes. They will hurt you very much if you do not cooperate.”
“No, that is not what I mean, human. It is strange. I cannot sense your thoughts, but I can . . . smell them. Do not hurt for me, Melissa Callahan. I am tired of this world. The next tomorrow awaits. I go to it with joy.”
I try to think of something happy, something to somehow alter my scent, but every memory that pops up—Mom teaching me the piano, Dad pullin
g me out of school early to go see a movie, Sam hiding with me in the attic during a thunderstorm—is fleeting and bittersweet.
“Hurry it up, Twenty-Five,” Patch says.
I look down the wall, focus on the questions. “Vestia, how old are you?”
“I do not know.” The same answer Ryla gave. And Blaklik before her.
“Where do you come from?”
Sadness creeps into her voice. “I do not know.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Two hundred three cycles of your moon.” Two moons longer than Ryla and Blaklik.
“How did you get to our world?”
“I do not know.”
“Where did you arrive?”
“I woke here.” She sends me an image of a forest. Ryla and Blaklik came from the mountains.
“What was your role in your clan?”
“Warrior.” The sadness deepens. “Paladin.”
“What is the status of your clan?”
“I do not know.”
“How many dragon holes are there?”
“There were five. They are gone.”
We continue like this. I ask, she answers. Not once does she ask me anything. Nothing about James, nothing about Baby. At first I figure she’s trying to spare her own emotions, but at some point I realize she’s probably trying to spare mine. This gives me no joy, but it does give me courage, which I desperately need as I ask the final question on the list.
“What are the names of your friends?” Out of the corner of my eye, I see Lester grab a hatchet from the wall. The opening salvo. Didn’t work on Ryla or Blaklik, but that’s not the point.
Vestia does not hesitate in her answer. “I have none.”
I brace for her pain, but Patch waggles a finger at the soldier. “Tell your dragon friend that if it wishes to fly into the next tomorrow with the glory of flame, that we need to go no further.”
“I do not understand,” she says after I tell her.
“Fight for us, and you will get to die in battle,” Patch says.
As I relay his message, Lester runs the edge of his hatchet along Vestia’s snout.
Her lips peel back in what I believe to be a smile. “Tell the invisible men that they are not worthy of death in battle. They are not even worthy of a funeral by worms. How many of their brethren have passed through my belly?”
An instant after the robotic voice speaks the words from Patch’s tablet, the hatchet is embedded halfway into her snout. I flinch, but she does not. Tim rushes her with his knife.
“Halt, you fools.” Patch orders. “It’s baiting you.” He looks to me. “It’s sure?”
“She’s sure,” I say.
My CENSIR shocks me. “I didn’t ask for your interpretation, Twenty-Five.”
I repeat the offer.
“Tell the invisible men that they reek of cowardice. In the next tomorrow, I will pray that their god grants them courage.”
“Ground it,” Patch says to the A-Bs.
“Gladly.”
They use the serrated portion of their knives and start sawing into her wings. I try to shut my eyes, but Patch shocks me. When I take a step back from my mark on the slab, he shocks me harder.
He doesn’t have me interrogate her any further. We just watch.
It’s slow going. The membrane slices apart with relative ease, but the bone’s tough. Vestia flares here and there, sometimes I hear the slightest grunt, but her smile remains as they treat her like poultry.
They switch out their knives halfway through for fresh ones. Vestia’s wings flicker on and off. By the time they’ve winked out, the various experiments have shut down. The chain saws have gone quiet.
The other teams meander over.
“I got a Benjamin on Tim!” somebody shouts.
“Double on Lester!”
The pace picks up, a race with eager spectators cheering them on. Tim wins. The other A-Bs swarm the slab. They grab hold of Vestia’s attached wing. Twisting, tugging, wrenching, they tear it free, along with a good length of bone.
Lester wipes the blood from his gloves, pulls a camera from his pocket, pushes it at me.
“Rot in hell.”
Evelyn bounds up beside me. “I’ll do it.”
After removing their goggles and masks, the soldiers gather beneath Vestia’s wings, some with hands beneath chins and mile-wide grins, others making peace signs and goofy faces. In the middle, blood pumping down her scales onto the slab, glow fading fast, Vestia continues to smile.
And if she can smile through all this . . .
I pull back my filtration mask, suck in a lungful of frigid air, and loose the loudest roar I’ve got.
A sharp jolt from my CENSIR drops me to my knees, a brilliant explosion of light blinds me, a wave of heat washes over me. At first I think it’s the CENSIR’s doing—maybe a malfunction—but then somebody cries, “I can’t see!” One of the soldiers posing beneath Vestia’s wing, I think.
The light fades. The cold returns.
“A death nova,” Fourteen says, excited.
Soldiers curse at me. Patch delivers a few more sharp shocks.
As I blink back the black spots in my vision, I hear Vestia’s voice in my head. She sounds a universe away. “Just because the wind fights you, it does not mean you are flying the wrong direction. Thank you, Melissa Callahan.”
Her voice plays from the tablet speakers, monotonous, before turning to static. I smile. Vestia has moved on to the next tomorrow.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
..................................................................
29
After Patch announces that both the girls’ and boys’ barracks will be on heat reduction through the night, he sends me to the principal’s office.
“You’ve had an interesting few weeks here, Twenty-Five,” the colonel says from behind his desk. “You have proven inadequate in the call center and troublesome in the battle room. Your willfulness has cost me the life of one of my pilots and the skills of one of my finest talkers. And now I understand that you’ve caused a disruption in the ER on your very first day.”
“What do you want from me, Colonel?”
“Tell me, if you were in my position, what would you do?”
I don’t answer.
Colonel Hanks cups his chin, rubs his lower lip with his finger. “Major Alderson is convinced that our family would be better off if we rectified your behavior. Maybe he’s right. Families need to get along, otherwise families get hurt.”
“I’m doing the best I can. If that’s not good enough, recondition me. But leave my family out of this.”
“We’re not the ones who put them in this situation. Who knows where their allegiances lie these days? We must be vigilant, Twenty-Five. Surely you understand that?”
“What do you want?”
His eyes narrow. “You’re asking the wrong question, Twenty-Five.”
I stare at him.
“You should be asking, ‘How do I make myself a valuable member of this community?’”
I roll my eyes.
“I have been lenient with you, but do not make the mistake of thinking yourself irreplaceable.”
He turns on a thinscreen, taps at his tablet. I expect another terror video, maybe a doctor holding a syringe at my father’s throat or something. What pops up isn’t much better.
A flashy, silver-themed website. Dedicated to me, or the TV version of me. The site already has over a hundred thousand followers.
And based on the comment wall, almost everyone sympathizes with my plight. Most because they think I’m crazy, though a few admire me for flying a dragon or sticking it to the government or for just being “hot.”
I almost laugh.
The colonel turns on another screen, which displays an overtanned man with a face stiff from too much Botox. His smile makes me think of Evelyn.
“Hello, Melissa. I’m Hector, the dir
ector of Kissing Dragons. First off, well done. You absolutely smashed the ratings. . . . We’d like you to reprise your role in a crossover show with the fab four. A redemption episode.”
I almost cry. “Seriously?”
“It’ll afford you some time off from your other responsibilities,” the colonel says, as if he’s doing me a favor. “Who knows? If things go well, maybe we can figure out a way to better accommodate your talents.”
I do laugh. “Quite a coincidence, don’t you think?”
“What’s that?”
“Vestia.”
“Oh?”
“Oh.” I smile at him.
He smiles at me. “I am sorry you had to witness that.”
Super sorry. Asshole. I shrug. “What about my family?”
I intended the question for the colonel, but Hector’s the one who responds. “We hope to incorporate your father into the episode.”
I look to the colonel for the answer I want, but he only says, “Consider this your opportunity to make things right.”
“Right?”
“A lot of these people blame you, Melissa, for what happened,” Hector says.
I gasp. “You’re doing the episode on Mason-Kline?”
Hector nods. “It’s where your journey to evil began. It’s where your journey to redemption will end.” He lays out details. I stop listening.
If the situation weren’t so ridiculously horrible, I’d laugh. Agree to this charade and suffer the wrath of Mason-Kline, never mind helping to fund the military. Or decline, and hope that my decision doesn’t result in my family’s demise.
“I need some time to think about it.” I need forever.
“This isn’t open for discussion,” the colonel says.
“Then you better go ahead and recondition me.”
“We’ll let you know, Hector.” Scowling, Colonel Hanks shuts off the screen. He checks his tablet, then picks up his phone. “Major, who do you have on the Duckworth assignment? . . . Hold off on that. I want Twenty-Five to handle it. . . . Yes, Major, I’m sure.”
The colonel hangs up. “I’ve got another battle-room mission for you. It’s simple but important. I know you won’t disappoint us.”
Elvin Duckworth, the ranking senator from Alaska—the only state untouched by dragon flames for the past decade—is the sole member on the armed services committee who voted against the bill to exterminate dragons. In and of itself, not a big deal, but since he’s the chair of the military research subcommittee, Major Alderson and his superiors fear the senator’s decision will lead to a cut in funding.
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