The Mark of the Dragonfly

by Jaleigh Johnson

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2014 by Jaleigh Johnson

  Jacket art copyright © 2014 by Nigel Quarless

  Map illustration copyright © 2014 Brandon Dorman

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House LLC.

  Visit us on the Web! randomhouse.com/kids

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Johnson, Jaleigh.

  The mark of the dragonfly / Jaleigh Johnson. — First edition.

  pages cm

  Summary: Since her father’s death in a factory in the Dragonfly territories, thirteen-year-old Piper has eked out a living as a scrapper in Merrow Kingdom, but the arrival of a mysterious girl sends her on a dangerous journey to distant lands.

  ISBN 978-0-385-37615-0 (hc) — ISBN 978-0-385-37645-7 (glb) — ISBN 978-0-385-37646-4 (ebook) [1. Fantasy.] I. Title.

  PZ7.J63214Mar 2014

  [Fic]—dc23

  2013019716

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  To Tim, for being the hero of my favorite story. You know the one.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Scrap Town Number Sixteen

  Merrow Kingdom

  Micah brought the music box to her on the night of the meteor storm. Piper never slept on these nights, when debris from other worlds fell from the sky. Restlessness kept her awake in bed, staring at the slanted ceiling of her tiny house. She counted the widening cracks in the gray scrub-pine planks and then counted the seconds as they ticked by on the tarnished silver watch she wore around her neck. Beneath her cotton nightdress, the metal lay warm and comfortable against her skin. Micah’s knock made her lose count, but the watch ticked on steadily.

  She pulled on a pair of her father’s old boots, slung his brown coat over her nightdress, and opened the door. Wind blew a harsh breath of snow and ice crystals into her face. Piper wiped her eyes and fixed a look of annoyance on the boy huddled in the doorway.

  “I must be seeing things,” Piper said. “This can’t be Micah Howell standing at my door, dragging me out of bed in the drop dead of night. Look at me—I’m stunned stiff. I’m speechless.”

  Micah snorted. “That’ll be the day, then. Let me in, Piper, will ya?” He stomped snow off his boots. “Stinks out here, and it’s so cold my teeth are cracking together.”

  “That’s your own fault for being out on a storm night. Most scrappers have the sense to stay inside.” He was right, though. The air already reeked of brimstone. The storm was coming. Piper moved to let him in, then shut the door behind him. He immediately ran to the cast-iron stove to warm his hands. Piper nudged him aside and adjusted the dampers. “Hand me a log before you make yourself at home,” she said. It was her habit to pretend to be bothered by her friend, even though she was happy to see him.

  Micah handed her a piece of wood from the basket near the stove and reached into the bulky sack he had slung over his shoulder. “I brought it, just like I said I would.”

  “That’s great, kid, but I thought you were going to bring it a few hours ago—you know, before I made a comfortable nest in the middle of my bed.” Piper tended the stove, and then she went to the window and looked out at the sky, which had begun to lighten, though it was still several hours until dawn. The moon waxed a sickly greenish color, as it always did before the meteors fell, making the clouds around it look like swelling bruises on the sky.

  Piper’s skin itched. She had the urge to go outside and watch the fields, to see the first of the meteors streak from the sky, but it was too cold, too dangerous. And besides, she’d promised to fix Micah’s toy.

  A musical box—Piper rolled her eyes. Machines couldn’t make proper music. You needed a person for that.

  She lit an extra kerosene lamp and placed it on the small kitchen table. Piston rings, bolts, and cylinders littered its surface. Piper shifted these aside, wishing she had a bigger work space, one she didn’t also have to eat at. “Let’s see it, then.”

  Micah set the music box between them. “Isn’t she beautiful?” he said, his fingers lingering on the lid. It was decorated with a painted figure of a woman in a white silk robe. She reclined on a strip of grass, her long black hair falling around her waist. At her back grew a tree full to bursting with pink blossoms that hung over her like a veil.

  Whoever had made the music box was a skilled artist. Piper could practically smell the flowers, each one hand-painted in white, coral, and cerise. In a few places, the paint had cracked and faded, but those were hardly noticeable. Overall, it was an incredible piece. Micah had been lucky to find it.

  “But she won’t sing?” Piper lifted the lid to get a look at the musical components. She’d seen contraptions like these before. A series of pins arranged on a metal cylinder struck the teeth of a steel comb while the cylinder turned, making the tinkling notes of a song. She’d heard this type of music and had always thought the sound was a little annoying. “Did you clean the inside after you dug it out of the crater?”

  “Course I did.” The boy was indignant. “You think I’m stupid?”

  Piper glanced up from the box and raised an eyebrow.

  “Ha-ha. You watch—the coin I get from that thing will feed my family and me for a month. She’ll look smart in one of those fancy mansions in Ardra. Don’t you think she will, Piper?” His excitement faltered, and he looked at her anxiously.

  “Yeah, it’ll look smart. Just make sure you find a buyer with a stiff hip at the market,” Piper said. “They’re the ones who’ll be looking for these kinds of pretties.” She felt the cylinder and its tiny pins. Micah had done a decent job cleaning it, but flecks of dirt still caked the comb, and something was keeping the cylinder from turning. She heard the soft, strangled notes of a song trying to play.

  “Why a stiff hip?” Micah asked. He had a thin face and a stubby nose that always scrunched up when he was confused.

  “It means he’s got a lot of coin on his belt.” Piper swayed back and forth in her chair like a drunk man to illustrate what she meant. “Poor thing, he can’t walk right with all that money weighing him down. You have to know what to look for or you’ll never make any decent coin.”

  “I’ve sold stuff before,” Micah said. “I did all right.”

&nb
sp; “A handful of trinkets at most—you’re still a puppy at this game.”

  “Am not!” At eleven, Micah hated it when he was made to feel young.

  Piper went on as if she hadn’t heard him. “Every trader’s got a different story. Greasy fingers means you’re dealing with a machinist.” She waggled her stained fingers at him significantly. “She’ll be looking for spare parts. The ones who come in from Ardra will want iron, always iron. If you have books or pictures to sell, you want an archivist. Stiff hips have money to waste. You can sell them just about anything if you can convince them it’s a one of a kind.”

  “Oh, I forgot! I have a book to sell too,” Micah said. He rummaged in the sack and pulled out a red leather-bound book with spidery cracks on the spine. The smell of aged paper tickled Piper’s nose. Embossed on the front cover was a picture of a girl and a small dog. Next to her stood a grinning scarecrow, a lion, and a man who looked like he was made entirely of metal. “I can’t read any of the words. What do you think?”

  Piper examined the book. “If it’s a language they’ve never seen before, the archivists will go nuts. Can’t be a very good story, though—that picture doesn’t make much sense.”

  Micah shrugged. “I don’t care, as long as it’s worth something.”

  “Don’t worry. Archivists always pay good,” Piper said. She didn’t know much about them, only that their life’s work was collecting meteor-storm artifacts in order to learn as much as they could about the other worlds. Piper had heard stories about their museums, vast vaults built in mountain strongholds to the southwest. They didn’t much care for outsiders either. As far as Piper was concerned, they could be as mysterious as they wanted, as long as their prices were fair. And they would love the condition of Micah’s book.

  “Where did you find these?” Piper asked, comparing Micah’s two items. “The book’s got most of its pages, and I’ve never seen a music box this pretty. There’s hardly a scratch on it.”

  “Got it at the last harvest,” Micah said proudly. “I beat everybody else to it—found it in a crater, just under the ice dragon’s tail.” He gestured vaguely to the north, where the Hiterian Mountains rose up sharply to snow-covered peaks and marked the northern border of the Merrow Kingdom. On clear days when clouds didn’t obscure the view, if you closed one eye and put your thumb over the top of the jagged peaks and valleys, the spaces between flesh and rock formed the rough shape of a dragon with one wing dipping, as if the mythical beast had frozen in midflight.

  Below the dragon lay the harvesting fields, a crescent-shaped stretch of land that covered roughly fifty miles of cratered plains and foothills. For as long as anyone could remember, the meteor storms had happened there on each full moon.

  Over the years, the scrap towns had grown up on the outskirts. People had become scavengers, scrappers digging out whatever the storms brought from other worlds, hoping to find some machine, artifact, or trinket, like Micah’s, that was worth selling at the trade markets. Becoming a scrapper was a way for people to make a living, though not a very good one. Most things that fell from the sky were hopelessly broken. The storms were so violent it was a mystery how any objects remained intact after they hit the earth.

  “How did you get out there so fast?” Piper asked suspiciously. Micah was nimble, but neither he nor his brother ever ate really well, so they didn’t have as much energy as some of the other scrappers in town. At thirteen, Piper was stronger and faster, and she made extra coin from fixing machines people brought her from the fields.

  “Well, I might’ve gone up the mountain before the storm was over,” Micah said guiltily.

  Piper almost dropped the music box. “You’re telling me you went out to the fields before the meteors were done falling?”

  Micah waved his hands as if trying to hold off a different kind of storm. “Just once, and I promise I was careful! Mom and Dad were away fishing at the lake, so it was just me and Jory at home. We went to the shelter together, but I told Jory I was going to be with you so I could sneak off. I was scared of the storm at first, but once I squeezed under some rock ledges, I didn’t have to worry about the meteors.”

  Micah and Jory’s parents would have had a fit if they knew what Micah was up to, Piper thought. But they were fishermen who went south to the Meljoy lakes every other week for the trout and pike while Jory, the eldest, looked after Micah. Fishing was what really kept Micah’s family fed, not scavenging in the scrap fields, but Micah always thought he’d find some priceless trinket, something valuable enough to sell and bring his parents home for good.

  “Oh, well, that’s fine,” Piper said, though it wasn’t. “For a minute there, I was worried, but now that I know you had some pebbles to protect you from the deadly meteors raining from the heavens, I won’t think any more about it. So how about let’s go back to the part where you snuck off and used me to lie to your brother?” Piper caught Micah by his shirt collar and shook him. “You know going out in a storm is illegal, not to mention a hundred and fifty kinds of dangerous. Do you want to get your skull smashed? It’d probably smarten you up, a couple good knocks to the head.”

  “Let go, Piper!” Micah wriggled in her grasp and bared his teeth as if he might bite her. Piper let him go, but she scowled fiercely at him until he turned red from his hollow cheeks to the tips of his ears. “I told you I kept under the rocks. I was safe,” he insisted.

  “It’s not just the meteors you have to worry about,” Piper said, exasperated. “Meteors bring the dust too, or did you not see the green clouds hanging in the air like pretty little death curtains?”

  “I wore gloves,” he protested, and wilted under her black glare.

  “I don’t care if you picked that box up with your brain like the sarnuns do!” Piper poked his temple until he slapped her hand away. “There’s a reason the Consortium crams everybody down into the shelter during a storm, Micah. You have to wait for the wind to blow the meteor dust away, or you’re just breathing poison. The thickest gloves in the world won’t protect your lungs from that stuff.”

  “No human ever died from that,” Micah said stubbornly.

  “It’ll kill you slower than a meteor to the head, sure, but it’s just as nasty as the black smoke that belches out of the factories in Noveen,” she said. Her voice wavered. “You knew people from this town who died of that.”

  “I’m sorry, Piper,” the boy said, subdued. “But I’m not as fast as the others. If I don’t get out there first, there’s nothing good left.”

  “Sure there is. There’s plenty of good stuff if you know where to look.”

  Micah didn’t answer, just stared at the music box with a defiant, hungry look. Piper sighed. Boys were so stubborn. Her father used to say he thanked the goddess every day that he’d had a girl. Boys were too much trouble. “Look, I’ll prove it to you,” she said. “When the storm’s over, we’ll go out together—you and me. I’ll get you a trinket that’ll make this music box look like a cheap windup toy.”

  Micah’s face brightened. “You’d do that?”

  Piper smiled. “Absolutely, if only so I don’t have to step over your smashed skull in the field. Now hush up a minute. I think I found your problem.” Piper rested her fingers on the music box’s cylinder. The tinny vibration of the strangled music beat a little rhythm against her fingertips. She felt the steel teeth, which were supposed to pluck the pins on the cylinder and create the melody. One of the teeth had a clot of dirt stuck on the end, which had crusted on the cylinder and kept it from turning. Piper reached into the box with her smallest finger, but she couldn’t scrape the dirt off without risking damage to the fragile tooth. “Go get my tool belt, will you?” she said to Micah. “It’s under the bed.”

  The boy crawled over, pushed aside a stack of dog-eared, greasy-fingerprinted repair manuals, and reached underneath the bed to grab the small tool belt. It was little more than a thick leather strap with pockets sewn all over it. Her father had made it for her a long time ago when she’d
first started fiddling with machines. Back then, all their nuts, bolts, and gear wheels had seemed like fun mysteries that needed solving. She’d had no idea her talent would one day become what fed her.

  Piper took out a small horsehair brush. As gently as she could, she rubbed the bristles over the comb, dislodging the dirt from them and the cylinder. “What I’m doing here will probably bend or break off part of the tooth—these pieces look pretty old—so it might miss a note or two, but just tell the buyer it’s all part of the song. Here, I’m done,” she said, handing the box back to Micah.

  Micah lifted the box lid and looked at the cylinder. “Which tooth?” Piper pointed to the place, but the boy shook his head. “It looks the same as the others, doesn’t even look bent. How’d you do that without leaving a mark?”

  “Look, you said to fix it, so I fixed it,” Piper said crossly. “Stop bothering me and try it out.”

  He took hold of the windup key and turned it until it wouldn’t move anymore. When he let go, a tinkling melody drifted out of the box, soft and—Piper had to admit it—sweet, with no missing notes at all. The boy’s eyes widened. “How do you do it, Piper?”

  “I told you how.”

  “Yeah, but …” He hesitated, and Piper’s stomach clenched. She knew what was coming. “People in town say you’re weird with the machines. You’re like a healer with them. Only, when the healer treats a bad cut, it always leaves a scar. When you fix the machines, it doesn’t leave a mark.”

  “Machines are easier to fix than people,” Piper said, trying to shrug it off. “A lot louder and dirtier too—well, sometimes, at least.”

  “But you even fixed that watch,” Micah persisted. He lifted the trinket from around Piper’s neck and held it in the palm of his hand. “When I gave that to you, I was sure you’d never get it going again. Now it looks almost new.”

  Piper didn’t have an argument for that one. Micah was right. The watch had been in pieces when he brought it to her. Micah’s brother had taken it from a small crater at the edge of the harvesting fields. He’d gathered up as many of the broken pieces as he could, but it looked like some scrapper had trampled the watch in his rush to get on to bigger treasures. Piper spent weeks working on it, painstakingly reinserting its brass gears, escapement, and mainspring into the case. Her patience paid off the day she heard the distinctive ticking sound coming from the thing. Micah ended up giving the watch to her as a gift.