The Mark of the Dragonfly

by Jaleigh Johnson

  Light bathed her, so bright it was like midday. Piper shielded her eyes until they adjusted. When she lowered her arm, her mouth dropped open.

  Green streaks of light rained from the sky. Against the backdrop of the dark mountains, it looked like the end of the world. She saw the outline of the ice dragon clearly by the light of the falling meteors. The air burned with the stench of brimstone and dust, making her eyes water. Out of breath, Piper sucked in the fumes, coughed, and instinctively spat to expel the poison from her body. Luckily, Micah was right about the dust. Breathing in small amounts wouldn’t kill a person, but long-term exposure to multiple storms was dangerous. No way was she going to test how far her body would tolerate the stuff.

  Piper looked back to the shelter to see if anyone had chased her, but the door stayed closed. No one would follow her into this storm. They’d be crazy to take the risk. The Consortium would find her later and punish her.

  “Micah!” she screamed, even though she knew the boy would already be in the fields and too far away to hear her. Blindly, she ran through the town, cutting a path through yards, trampling wire fences and dormant gardens, making her way to the foothills. Micah said the last time he’d been in the fields he’d taken cover under the rock ledges. If he had a drop of sense, which Piper wasn’t at all counting on, he’d use the same path this time.

  At the edge of town, Piper found a set of fresh tracks. The land was completely devastated. The assaults by the meteors meant no trees or grasses would ever take root here, and wild animals avoided it even when the air wasn’t choked with poisonous dust. Craters littered the ground, some of them glowing with a faint emerald light. Piper didn’t stop to look at what treasures they might contain, though for an instant, she was tempted. She’d been poor for so long it was hard to step over what might be a trinket worth a month’s supply of food.

  The pockmarked ground made the footing chancy, but Piper couldn’t slow down. She jumped from the lip of one crater to the next, her foot sinking in mud and snow. Her ankle twisted. She fell on her hands and knees. Stifling a cry of pain, she got up and went on, half running, half limping.

  “Micah, if you can hear me, I’m going to beat you until you can’t hold a thought in your head! They’ll slide right out your ears!” Piper’s voice squeaked with rising panic. She was well into the fields now, and the craters were getting much bigger.

  A teeth-rattling explosion shook the ground to her left, spraying her with mud and snow. Piper wiped the debris from her eyes as another fit of coughing overtook her. The green mist hung thickly in the air, threads of it drifting toward the snowy foothills.

  “Piper, over here!”

  Whirling, Piper saw Micah waving to her frantically from beneath a narrow rock outcropping. She ran for the protection of the ledge, though with the meteors falling around her, it seemed a hundred miles away. “Stay there!” she shouted when Micah started to come out to meet her. Fiery pain shot up her ankle. She bit her lip and kept running, trying not to look up at the sky and the green death hanging over her head. Forget about beating him; Piper was going to make Micah wish he’d never been born.

  Her ankle gave out just as she reached him, and she went down on her knees again. Micah hauled her under the ledge by her armpits. The ledge was barely enough to cover both their bodies. Piper could imagine a meteor shattering the flimsy rock and pulverizing the two of them at any minute.

  “Are you”—she could barely speak, teeth chattering with cold and fear—“out of your mind? I told you we’d scavenge together when it was safe!”

  “I know, but I just couldn’t stand to wait. I think this is the biggest one ever, Piper,” Micah said, his body trembling with excitement. He pointed to the violent sky. “Look at the size of those meteors.”

  “I am looking at them!” Piper shouted. “I’m looking at the humongous, deadly meteors raining from the sky, wondering why we’re not safe and warm in the shelter right now instead of cowering under this rock!”

  Micah ignored her ranting. “We’re not the only ones who came out early. See that?” He pointed to the field, where dark shapes moved slowly in the direction of the town. “It’s a trade caravan—two wagons. Got here a few minutes ago. They think they’re going to get the jump on the whole town, but they didn’t notice me.”

  “A caravan?” Piper asked as she turned to look. “It can’t be.” No one in his right mind would bring a caravan into the middle of a meteor storm. Piper had never heard of such a thing.

  But Micah was right. In the distance, a pair of high-walled wagons pulled by four sintees rolled across the shattered ground. The shaggy, half-blind beasts stumbled often among the craters, their trunks outstretched to feel the terrain while their bellies dragged the ground. The traders were probably too busy watching the skies to guide them. Sintees were a bad choice for caravan animals, but they were the only beasts Piper knew of that might tolerate a meteor storm without balking. They were too deaf, blind, and stupid to know any better.

  “Whoever they are, if they don’t manage to get themselves killed, the Consortium will ban them from the trade markets for good,” Piper said. “Why would they risk coming out here? They’ve always let the scrappers do the dirty work of harvesting.”

  “Hoo, boy! See that gap in the clouds? It looks like a huge hole in the sky!” Micah wasn’t listening to her or paying attention to the caravan any longer. The falling meteors had transfixed him. “Do you think that’s where Hiteria went through?”

  “What—the goddess?” Distracted, Piper shook her head. “That’s a bedtime story, Micah. It’s not real.”

  “I know, but they say when she left Solace, she tore open the sky.” Micah shook Piper’s shoulder to make her pay attention to where he was pointing. A swelling vortex of green clouds hung over their heads. At its center was a vast darkness devoid of stars. “Isn’t that a big enough opening for a goddess to fly through?” he demanded.

  Piper stared up at the shattered sky and tried to push past the fear that had her clenching her teeth and digging her nails into her palms. Micah had a point. She’d never seen anything like this before. People in the scrap towns made up all kinds of stories to explain how the strange objects came into their world. Some believed it was the goddess’s doing, while others thought the objects had been forgotten in their own worlds and somehow slipped through the cracks into this one. Piper didn’t know about the latter story, but as a tiny speck cowering before the unimaginable sight above her, she could believe a goddess had ripped a celestial tear so big that it allowed things from distant worlds to fall through.

  Then she glimpsed a spark of green in the center of the darkness. With a dawning horror, Piper was pulled from her daydream of goddesses to—reality. A huge meteor, the largest she’d yet seen, roared from the darkness at the center of the swirling vortex, heading straight for the slowly moving wagons.

  There was no way the traders would be able to get clear in time. The meteor was falling too fast. Micah dug his fingers into her arm, and Piper watched in horror as they jumped from the wagons. Too slow. The meteor looked as big as a horse, and the screaming sound it made as it neared echoed the cries of the doomed caravan.

  Piper threw her body over Micah’s and covered her ears as they fell to the ground.

  The world erupted in a ball of heat and light. The meteor’s impact shuddered through the ground, sending debris from their stone shelter falling all around them. Piper squeezed her eyes shut, praying the ledge would protect them. Micah wrapped his arms around her in a painful grip and yelled something incoherent.

  They stayed like that, terrified, until gradually the storm passed. The whole thing was over in less than twenty minutes, but it felt like Piper spent an eternity pressed against Micah under the small rock ledge. As the minutes ticked by, the impacts grew fewer, and finally an eerie quiet fell over the field, broken only by the ringing in Piper’s ears. She knew it was truly over by the smell of the air. Each breath passed more easily into her lungs, u
ntil the cold mountain wind finally chased the last of the green dust and brimstone stench away to the south. It would probably take another hour or so for the mist to blow out of town. The scrappers would stay in the shelter until then.

  Piper opened her eyes, eased away from Micah, and looked across the field. As she expected, the enormous meteorite had torn the caravan apart. The battered shell of the second wagon was intact, but a sintee head and two wheels were all that was left of the first. “I don’t think you’ll have to worry about the traders taking any of your treasures, Micah,” she whispered, her voice shaking, a lump rising in her throat.

  Micah didn’t answer.

  Piper turned back to the boy. He still lay on the ground, his body scrunched underneath the rock shelter, eyes closed. He wasn’t moving. “Micah?” she asked, silently adding, Open your eyes. A sick feeling clawed at Piper’s stomach. Why wasn’t he answering her?

  Gently, Piper eased his body out into the light. The sky was no longer green but gray with a line of pink on the horizon. Micah was breathing but unconscious. Blood streaked the right side of his face and soaked the hair near his temple. Some of the caravan debris must have hit him in the head. All those jokes Piper had made about getting his skull smashed …

  Tears blurred her vision, and her throat got tight. With trembling hands, she felt Micah’s chest. A strong heartbeat; but with a head wound, that might not last. She ran her hands up and down his body, looking for more injuries. “Tell me what’s wrong, Micah,” Piper sobbed. “Tell me where you’re hurt, and I’ll fix it, I’ll—”

  How would she fix it? She was a machinist. Machines were so much easier to fix than people were—hadn’t she told Micah that herself? Piper put her head in her hands. She didn’t even have her tools with her. She had nothing.

  Except the caravan. Piper’s head snapped up. Traders from the big cities were wealthier than any person in the scrap town could ever hope to be. Their caravans carried extra food, supplies, and medicine. It would have taken a miracle for any of it to have survived the storm, but Piper needed to check.

  Ignoring the pain in her ankle, Piper pushed herself to her feet and ran unsteadily across the field to the ruined caravan. The bodies of the two traders lay nearby, but she didn’t look at them. Instead, she went to the remains of the second wagon. She hadn’t noticed it at first, but now she realized a good portion of the wagon had escaped the meteorite.

  “Let’s see what you’ve got here,” Piper said out loud. She rubbed the tears from her eyes and got down on her hands and knees to tear into the wagon. With every breath she drew, anger bubbled up inside her. “See what we can scavenge off of you. You make us animals, clawing at each other, killing ourselves for food down here in the scrap heaps, so let’s see what we can take from you.” Piper hated that she couldn’t stop crying, but Micah’s blood-covered face was all she could see in her mind.

  Someone had tied the goods down in the back of the wagon, under a thick black tarp, and the storm had tangled the tarp in the wreckage. Piper lifted her shirt and took a knife from a small sheath strung on her belt next to the coins she’d been saving. She punched a hole in the tarp and dragged the blade down toward her. The cloth parted easily, and the contents of the wagon spilled out onto the ground.

  Medicine kits, food packs with meat kept on ice, and clothes fell into her lap. Not just any clothes, either, but the thin, bright-colored stuff the southerners liked to wear. To Piper, all those sky blues, fiery yellows, and ivories looked foreign and strange set against meteor green, but Micah wouldn’t have been able to contain himself at seeing all the pretties.

  Piper carefully laid the medicine kits aside and cut away the rest of the tarp. She would use it as a litter to take Micah back to town. The tarp seemed to be the only thing holding the wagon together. Once she freed it, the wagon collapsed.

  An arm fell across Piper’s lap.

  With great effort, she held in a scream. Scrambling back, she let the arm drop to the ground. Piper tore the tarp away and uncovered the body of a girl lying in the wreckage.

  Judging by the face, she appeared to be only a year or two younger than Piper, but she was smaller, delicate-boned and frail. She wore petticoats and a pale yellow dress with flowers embroidered on the collar. Mud and snow had ruined these, and her wet skirt clung to her legs. Her dark hair hung in braids coiled at the back of her neck. Several strands had come free and lay limply across her cheek.

  For the second time that day, Piper found herself checking for wounds, her hands tracing the girl’s limbs and face, looking for the cause of her death. It took her a minute to realize the girl’s skin was still warm. When Piper reached her chest, she drew back in shock at the steady rise and fall, the breath that blew softly on her fingers.

  The girl was alive.

  The tarp was just big enough to carry Micah and the girl. Briefly, Piper considered leaving the two of them to go get help—it was risky to move Micah, especially if he had a head wound—but the howling, frigid wind made her decide against that. The sooner she got them both back to town and got them warm, the better.

  Piper took as much medicine and food from the caravan as she could carry, which wasn’t much, but once she got back to town, she would tell Micah’s brother where to find the rest. She’d taken bandages from one of the medicine packs and used them to wrap Micah’s head, but she could see no visible wound on the girl. She did a quick search but found no other bodies in the caravan wreckage. If there were any other passengers, they’d either escaped the meteorite impact and run off—or there was nothing left of them.

  She dragged her burden out of the fields, trying to be gentle as possible as she passed over the crater-marked earth. When she finally reached the town limits, she was half fainting with exhaustion, and a fiery ball of pain had settled around her ankle.

  The townspeople were still in the shelter, which meant all the healers were there too. Piper didn’t think she had the strength to get both Micah and the girl all the way to the center of town. Her own house was closer. That would have to do.

  She dragged the tarp across her yard, kicked open her front door, and pulled it into the house. Her legs wobbled as she lifted the girl by the armpits and propped her up by the stove, the warmest spot in the house. Piper put Micah beside her, then stripped the two blankets off her bed, one for each of them. As far as Piper could guess, the girl would be fine—she’d probably just passed out from the force of the meteor blast or from the thick fumes in the air. She’d been the lucky one. But Micah needed help, now.

  Voices filled the air, breaking the heavy silence that had settled over the fields in the wake of the storm. Stumbling, Piper went back outside. While she’d been tending to the injured, the rest of the town had emerged from the shelter and were now running for the fields. Piper was torn. She could try to chase down one of the healers or go find Jory and bring him here, but that meant leaving Micah. A wave of panic washed over her at the thought of leaving her friend alone, even for a few minutes. What if he woke up and she wasn’t there? What if he got worse and he was all alone?

  Just like her father—alone when he died. She hadn’t been able to be with him.

  Piper clamped her jaw tight to stifle a whimper. She’d brought Micah this far—she had to get him home to his brother.

  Her arms leaden, Piper put Micah back on the tarp and dragged it outside. She headed toward the center of town, shouting frantically for Jory as she went. Halfway there, she met him running.

  “What happened?” Jory’s face went ashen when he saw his brother lying on the tarp.

  “He got hit in the head. It was a meteor … or … maybe debris—just help me!” Piper stammered. She’d been calm before because she had to be, for Micah, but she could feel herself starting to come apart. “We have to get him inside and warm.”

  Jory had been staring at Micah—lifeless and pale, blood soaking through his bandages as he lay on the tarp—but Piper’s words galvanized him. He took one end of the tarp an
d helped her drag it to his house, which thankfully wasn’t far. She didn’t think she could have made it back to her own house.

  “There’s a caravan wrecked in the fields,” Piper said haltingly. Even with Jory pulling most of Micah’s weight, her arms shook with weariness, and her breath came in sharp gasps that burned in her chest. “Meteorites destroyed most of it, but I found some medicine packs, food, and clothes. I couldn’t carry it all. You should go back and get them.” Piper waited for him to say something, but he didn’t even look at her. His face was frozen in a mask of shock. “Are you listening, Jory? Get the healer for Micah, then go out to the fields and get the medicine packs. You can use them to pay for the healer. Do you hear me?”

  “I hear you,” Jory said hoarsely, coming out of his trance. “We need to get him inside first. I’ll take his head and shoulders; you lift his legs. Once we get him there, we’ll put him in bed and I’ll go.”

  As gently as she could, Piper did as he told her. She couldn’t stand seeing Jory like this—she’d never seen him look so scared. “I’m telling you, there’s a week’s supply of food out there in the fields,” she said, trying to distract him from his brother. “So much I couldn’t carry it all. If you hurry, you can get the rest before anyone sees the caravan wreck.” She babbled on, her voice shaking, but she couldn’t make herself shut up. She just kept telling Jory to go get the medicine packs, to use them to pay for a healer, as if that would somehow make up for the fact that his brother was unconscious with a bleeding head wound and maybe wouldn’t wake up. But Piper kept repeating the words until her throat was so tight she couldn’t talk anymore. Then she noticed that, aside from them, the house was empty.