The Mark of the Dragonfly

by Jaleigh Johnson

  Piper bundled the big coat around her and headed for the train station, a worn, two-story brick building on the outskirts of town. The 401 had pulled alongside, sunlight gleaming off its tracks and driving wheels.

  Despite all the other things on her mind, excitement fluttered through Piper at the sight of the immense black steam engine with its mile-long tail of boxcars and passenger carriers. Though aged, the 401 was still an impressive specimen. Every time it came to town, Piper itched to get her hands on the old girl to see what secrets she held in her metal heart.

  And there were secrets. Piper could tell just by looking. Dozens of strange pipes, vents, and valves covered the train’s exterior, far more than should have been needed to operate the various systems of an ordinary train, and an extra layer of thick armor plates had been bolted to each of the cars. Stories floated around town that the best machinists in the Dragonfly territories had fitted the train with a formidable set of defenses, and that it hauled cargo through some of the most dangerous lands in Solace, fending off sky raiders and saboteurs along the way.

  Whether the stories were true or not, Piper thought the 401 was a heavy, stern-looking, capable old girl—one who’d seen practically every corner of Solace—and Piper envied the big train and everyone who had ever traveled on her. Her crew had seen more of the world than Piper was ever likely to.

  But maybe that didn’t have to be true, Piper thought as an idea came to her. Her heart beat excitedly as she considered it. Getting an express letter all the way to Noveen was going to cost a small fortune, yet wouldn’t the capital be very interested to learn that she’d rescued one of Aron’s marked people from the harvesting fields? Interested and maybe grateful enough to reward Piper with the money she needed to get out of the scrap town for good.

  Running through the possibilities in her head, she was almost to the station when she heard a male voice call her name. Turning, she saw Jory running toward her, his blond hair flapping in his face. Piper swallowed. What if he was coming to tell her bad news about Micah? For just a second, a tiny part of her wanted to run away, even though she was desperate to know how Micah was doing. She pushed her fear aside and greeted Jory when he stopped, out of breath, in front of her.

  “I was on my way to your house when I saw you headed out of town,” he said. “Micah’s still unconscious, but the healer thinks he’s going to be all right.”

  “Thank the goddess!” Piper breathed. Light-headed with relief, she didn’t immediately notice the worried expression on Jory’s face. “What’s wrong?” she demanded. “You said he was going to be all right.”

  “It’s not that,” Jory said. “I came to find you because there’s a man wandering around in town—says he was with the caravan. He’s looking for the rest of his people, asking if anyone found anything in the wreckage.”

  “Another survivor?” Piper felt a quick surge of relief. That meant the girl wasn’t alone. It also meant Piper wouldn’t have to spend the money to send a message after all, and she could get rid of the girl—and maybe get her reward—much sooner than she’d expected. Finally, things seemed to be looking up. “Where is he?” Piper asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jory said. He shot an uneasy glance back toward the town. “I didn’t tell him about you finding the girl.”

  “Why not, for goddess’s sake?” Piper felt a flash of irritation. “It’s not as if she can stay here.”

  “I know that, but I didn’t like him, Piper. He wasn’t friendly.” Worry furrowed Jory’s brow. “I didn’t like the look in his eyes either.”

  “He’s from the cities,” Piper said scornfully. “His type doesn’t like to mix with us scrappers. Of course he’s uncomfortable.”

  Jory didn’t look convinced. “Why’s he here, then? Why did that caravan go out in the storm? I never heard of anyone from the cities doing something that stupid.” He bit his lip. “And Micah, he never should have—” Jory’s voice cracked.

  Piper laid a hand awkwardly on his shoulder. “Once this story gets out, nobody will ever try it again,” she said. “Thanks for telling me about the man.”

  Jory nodded. “Watch yourself,” he said seriously. “If you need help—”

  “I’ll get by.” But his offer made warmth spread through Piper’s chest. Even though his brother was hurt, Jory still thought to look after her. “You just take care of Micah.” Piper stepped away from him. Again, tears stung her eyes. She’d come so close to losing Micah. But she didn’t have time to cry anymore. “Take care of yourself too,” she added as she turned and headed in the direction of her house.

  Since she no longer needed to arrange to send a message, Piper decided to check back in on the girl and then go looking for the other survivor. Maybe hearing that one of her companions was close by would make the girl a little less afraid of her.

  When Piper opened her front door, her mouth fell open. Had she fallen and hit her head? Come to the wrong house? She couldn’t believe what she was seeing.

  The place was a shambles. Pillows stripped off the bed, all the plates, bowls, and cups taken down off the shelf and scattered on the floor. The little blue chest of drawers by her bed was only a shell. Someone had pulled all the drawers out and strewn her clothes across the room. Her tool belt was empty, her precious tools piled in a heap by the stove. Piper didn’t have many possessions, but those she did have were all over the floor, leaving barely enough space to walk. In the middle of the chaos sat the girl, sorting through a stack of pictures Piper’s father had drawn while he was away working at the factory. He’d tucked one in with every letter he’d sent to her.

  At first, Piper was too shocked to feel anything. She stripped off her coat and let it fall to the floor. Then she saw the girl with her fingers all over her father’s pictures, how she traced the lines curiously, wonderingly. Her sleeves were pushed up, and Piper saw the dragonfly tattoo peeking out of one. A burning sensation started deep in her gut and slowly spread until her blood pounded a harsh rhythm in her ears.

  She crossed the room in two strides and slapped the pictures out of the girl’s hands. The girl looked up in surprise that quickly turned to confusion when she saw Piper’s furious face.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Piper said, fighting to keep her voice level. “You have no right to touch my things!”

  The girl blinked. “But I fixed them,” she said.

  “Fixed them!”

  The girl nodded vigorously. “You see, everything was hidden. Hidden away in the boxes”—she pointed to the empty chest of drawers—“or hidden away on the shelves.” She crawled over to the cups and bowls and began lining them up in rows in front of the stove. “Now you can see where everything is, remember the name for everything, although the furniture is still a problem …” With a clatter, she dropped the cups and wandered over to the bed. She spread her arms as if measuring. “I don’t understand the logic at all.”

  “Understand?” Piper said through gritted teeth. “Understand this—if you ever put your grubby little hands on my things again, I’ll—”

  “The problem is size!” the girl said, interrupting her. “Everything is too big.” She stabbed a finger at the bed, then at Piper. “The bed is too big for one person. Your boots are too big, and your coat is absolutely hopeless.” She spoke very fast. “It’s all out of proportion. Nothing fits. Nothing makes sense.” She looked at Piper with a pleading expression. “It has to make sense.”

  I was wrong, Piper realized. This girl is the one with the head injury. “Who are you?” Piper demanded. “And what did you do with the girl who was here before—the quiet one with the knife? I think I liked her better.”

  But the girl wasn’t listening. She gathered up the pictures Piper had slapped out of her hands. “Now, these make sense. Graceful lines, proportions perfect—and I’ve seen these buildings before, though I don’t know their names.” She held up a drawing of the factory where Piper’s father had worked. “What is this place?”

  “The fa
ctory at the capital,” Piper said. She sat on the floor next to the girl. “Noveen—it’s in the Dragonfly territories—that’s where you came from. Don’t you remember?”

  The girl stared at the drawings as if she might burn holes through them with her eyes. “I remember pictures, objects, voices—a clock on the wall, ring the bell for tea, the white dress, no, the yellow one, look at the sunset colors, the waterfall, the scale models, send the guards away, shall we have music, hold her there, put the needle in just so—” She sucked in a breath and threw the picture down. “No, no, that’s painful.” She looked at Piper helplessly. “They’re all jumbled. I can’t sort them out.”

  “Slow down,” Piper said. “A little while ago I thought you didn’t speak at all, and now your mouth has a life of its own. Let’s start with something easy. Do you remember your name?”

  “My name?” She looked at the other pictures as if they might give her a clue. “Of course. In theory. Hypothetically. Everything has to have a name. Look at the picture of the salamander—now say the word. Picture of the dog—now say ‘dog.’ I said them every time, over and over, but they couldn’t hear me. Why couldn’t they hear?”

  She ran out of breath, trembling, squeezing the drawings in her hands. Piper didn’t understand half of what came out of her mouth, but the girl was obviously suffering. She looked at Piper, half afraid, half in a dream, and Piper sighed. “It’s all right,” Piper said. She picked up a cracked mirror off the floor. She usually kept it hanging on the wall, but for whatever reason the girl had moved that too. Piper held it up in front of the girl’s face. “Can you tell me who’s in this picture?”

  The girl stared at the mirror. Slowly, she nodded, and in a dreamy voice said, “Anna.”

  “Hello, Anna. My name is Piper.”

  Piper held out her hand to the girl, who took hold of it, but instead of shaking, she held on tight. “Piper,” the girl repeated. “Piper. This is where you live?”

  “Yes. We’re in Scrap Town Number Sixteen, in the Merrow Kingdom,” Piper said. She waited, but none of this information seemed to register. The girl looked at her with a blank expression. “Scrap Town Sixteen. See, they don’t give them proper names, just numbers on the map because there’re so many.” And more seemed to crop up every day. Still there was nothing, no sign of recognition from the girl. “You know what the Merrow Kingdom is, right?” Piper said, a little desperately.

  This stirred something. The girl—Anna—pointed to the drawing of the factory. “Merrow Kingdom—that’s not where that is,” she said.

  “There are factories in the Merrow Kingdom,” Piper said, though factories in places like Ardra primarily made weapons, not ships, and most of them had been shut down as a result of the iron shortage. “But the place in the drawing is in one of the Dragonfly territories. Do you know the difference?”

  The girl thought about it and nodded. “I remember—the Merrow Kingdom is the north. Dragonfly is the south. To the west live the archivists. The crown over it all is the scrap fields. We are all … Solace.”

  “Good to know you’re not as far gone as I thought,” Piper said. “Listen, you’ve had a shock. The explosion knocked you out and probably shook up your memory. I’m sure it’ll all come back to you as soon as I bring your friend here.”

  “Friend?” Anna repeated the word as if it were something ominous, and the expression on her face turned cautious. “What friend?”

  “You were with a caravan,” Piper explained. It was time for the truth, no matter how much it might hurt. “Goddess knows what you were doing out in the fields. Most of the people on it were killed by a meteorite. I’m sorry.”

  Piper patted the girl’s shoulder. She expected Anna to be upset, but if she felt anything at hearing about the deaths, she didn’t show it. Instead, Anna began softly humming a tune. Piper didn’t recognize it until she added words. “Hurry hurry, make the journey, come across. Unwanted things, forgotten things, they all end up in Solace. Unwanted things, forgotten things, they all come home to Solace.”

  She was repeating the old children’s rhyme. Piper remembered hearing kids in the scrap town skip rope to it when she was a little girl. She’d done it a few times herself. “That’s right. In the scrap fields, the earth and the sky—something about them is different from the rest of Solace. The boundary between worlds is thin there, and on certain nights, it dissolves completely. That’s where the meteors come from. No one knows how it got that way—some people say it happened when the goddess left the world after she created Solace—but the first machines came from the scrap fields, from other worlds.”

  “All theoretical,” Anna said, shaking her head. “Maybe mythical. But it’s accepted, so we can’t do anything to change it, can we? That’s what they say.”

  Piper raised an eyebrow. “ ‘They’ say that, huh? I don’t suppose you remember who ‘they’ are? People on the caravan? At least one other person who was on it survived. He’s probably looking for you right now.”

  “I don’t remember,” Anna said. She put the pictures down and went to sit by the stove. Tucking her knees beneath her chin, she said, “I remember the wagon, the bumps and the cold, but I don’t remember any faces.” She looked around the room. “I still don’t understand why it’s so big. Makes it difficult to think when everything’s out of proportion.”

  “Out of—” Piper looked around the room, at her father’s coat, his boots—now hers—and suddenly realized what the girl meant. “Most of this stuff belonged to my father. Sure, it doesn’t fit me, but I don’t have anything else,” she said, irritated and a little self-conscious.

  “Your father?” Anna brightened. “Where is he? With him in the room, the proportions would be perfect.”

  “No argument there,” Piper said softly. She picked up the drawings and her father’s letters that Anna had scattered over the floor, gathering them carefully into a bundle. “He used to be a foundry worker in Ardra until Aron decided to stop trading iron to the Merrow Kingdom because he needed all of it in his own factories. Pretty greedy, right? I mean, how much iron does one king need?” She felt that ugly burning sensation in her gut again and fought to quell it. “Anyway, people like my father lost work and turned to scrapping in the harvesting fields to get by. We weren’t making enough money, though, and since the Merrow Kingdom didn’t care enough to help the people who were out of work—they’re too busy trying to make weapons without iron—Dad went south to the Dragonfly territories to work at one of the big factories in Noveen, hoped that eventually he’d save enough to buy us a house there. He sent letters and money every week until about a year ago, when he died.”

  “He died?” Anna’s forehead wrinkled, as if this didn’t make sense to her. “How?”

  “Breathing the factory smoke made him sick—I didn’t know for sure he was dead at first. The letters and money stopped coming. Then I got a letter from the factory boss. He said the illness came on so quick there was nothing they could do. They buried him in one of the cemeteries down south.” Piper shrugged, trying to be nonchalant, but the memory of seeing Micah’s fragile body in the fields, the absence of her own father’s body, made her sick inside. At least if the worst happened, Micah’s family would have something to bury. The people who died in the factories were only sent home if their families could pay to have the body shipped. Since she couldn’t, Piper had laid a wreath of flowers behind the house and pretended it was a grave.

  “I’m sorry,” Anna said. Her cheeks turned pink. “Sorry for touching the pictures. I was wrapped up in the analytical, not the social. I should have asked before I tried to make sense of them.”

  “Forget it,” Piper said. She shook out a wadded-up shirt that had been lying on the floor. “If you’re feeling better, maybe you could help me straighten things up in here?”

  A sudden, loud knocking made them both jump. Piper’s first thought, before she remembered, was that it was Micah—he was the one who came to see her most often, rapping urgently at the door
just like that, as if he couldn’t wait to get inside—but she quickly reminded herself that that was impossible. Micah was still unconscious and recovering at home.

  Goddess, she hoped it wasn’t the Consortium already. She knew that sooner or later she was going to have to answer for running out of the shelter into the storm, but she didn’t think they’d get around to punishing her this soon. Piper glanced at Anna and saw her eyeing the door uneasily.

  “It’s all right,” Piper said, wanting to reassure the girl. “Stay by the stove where it’s warm, and I’ll see who it is.”

  Piper went to the door, unlocked it, and lifted the bar. She opened the door partway to see a man standing on the threshold. He was dressed in the remains of a suit and trousers that had once been very fine but were now torn and bloodstained. His right arm rested in a sling made out of part of the suit. His face was gaunt, as if he hadn’t slept or eaten in days. A black beard contrasted sharply with his pale white skin.

  Automatically, Piper slid sideways a step, putting the protection of the door between her and the man. She didn’t recognize him, and she knew most of the faces of the current crop of scrappers in town. Strangers didn’t necessarily mean trouble, but sometimes the hungry or hurt ones were desperate, and they weren’t above breaking into houses for food and warmth. This man looked like he was in sore need of both. But his injured arm might also mean that this was the other survivor of the caravan that Jory had mentioned. Piper hoped so, anyway.

  Before she could open her mouth to ask him what he wanted, the man spoke.

  “Are you Piper Linny?” he asked, a mixture of hope and impatience in his voice. “I was told this is her house.”