Embers of Destruction

by J. Scott Savage

  Kallista studied the horizon, wondering what good it would do. They’d been lucky to escape the city. If the dragons found them out here, there was nowhere to go, nowhere to hide.

  Trenton rubbed his jaw. “Once the fog comes in, whoever is on guard will be lucky not to fall off a rock and break an ankle.”

  Simoni climbed down from the rock and moved closer to the fire. “You want to sleep without a guard and hope no dragons find us?”

  Trenton shuddered. “I’ll take the first shift.”

  Simoni nodded. She tried to brush her fingers through her knotted hair, realized it was impossible, and took a bowl of stew from Clyde. “What’s the plan?”

  “Clyde tells us we have three weeks of food left,” Trenton said.

  “Three weeks, tops,” Clyde corrected.

  Trenton sketched a salute toward his friend. “And we still have to get the dragons in flying condition.”

  “How long will that take?” Angus asked.

  “Reckon we could have ’em ready by tomorrow?” Plucky asked.

  Kallista shook her head. “There are hardly any resources on this island. It’ll take at least two days, but more likely three.”

  “And what will we do once the dragons can fly?” Clyde said.

  Trenton tossed a rock from hand to hand. “I guess we could go back to Discovery, let them know what we’ve found, and refill our supplies.”

  “You want to run?” Angus slapped the ground next to him with a beefy smack. “We came here to kill dragons.”

  Clyde curled his fist around his ladle. “You want to fly back into the city and blast away? You’re going to get us killed,” he said, his voice rising.

  Angus sat partway up. “You have a better idea?”

  “Stop bossing people around,” Kallista said to Angus. “No one put you in charge.”

  “No one put anyone in charge,” Angus fired back. “I can do what I want.”

  Simoni, who’d been scooping up handfuls of sand and letting it trickle between her fingers, shook her head and said, quietly, “No. You can’t.”

  Everyone went quiet. Angus plopped back, a stunned expression on his face. “What?”

  “You can’t fly a dragon unless I go with you. You aren’t the one deciding what we’re going to do.”

  So this was her plan. Start by convincing Trenton to let her make the attack plans, then twist Angus around her finger. “Let me guess,” Kallista said, “you want to be in charge.”

  Simoni ignored her and turned to Clyde. “When the dragons attacked, you were flying around like a baby calf out of the barn for the first time.”

  Clyde blushed. “I was just trying to come up with a plan.”

  Angus cracked his knuckles. “Maybe you should stick to cooking and painting pictures.”

  Simoni glared at him. “You should talk. Your decision was to attack head-on. If we’d done that, we’d all be dead.”

  That quieted Angus. Simoni looked at each of them, one by one. “None of us had any idea what to do. We were all flying in different directions, panicking, and with good cause. The only reason we’re here, and alive, is because one person came up with a plan and led us to safety.”

  Every set of eyes turned to Trenton.

  “Wily shaver you was,” Plucky said. “Quick as a whip, yeah, yeah.”

  Trenton twisted his hands together, looking like he wanted to disappear into the fog. “It wasn’t like that. I just thought if we could make it to the ocean . . .”

  Simoni waved away his protest. “Last night you asked me what you were best at. The truth is, I’m not sure you’re the best at anything.”

  Angus guffawed, but one look from Simoni and his mouth shut with a snap.

  She looked back at Trenton. “We might not be willing to admit it, but right now all of us are trying to prove we belong out here. We’re all hiding how terrified we are; Angus maybe most of all. We need someone to pull us together, to make us believe. Maybe your job on the team isn’t to be the best at any one thing but to make the rest of us better. A leader doesn’t lead by proving how great he is—he leads by making the people around him great. I think you’re that person, Trenton. If you’re willing to lead, I’m willing to follow you.”

  “So am I,” Clyde said at once.

  Plucky nodded. “Yeah, yeah.”

  Angus dug the heels of his boots in the dirt, but when Simoni said, “Angus will follow you, too,” he didn’t argue.

  Trenton looked at Kallista. “It was your father’s dragons that got us here in the first place, so if you—”

  Kallista shook her head. “I’m not a people person.” The last thing she needed was everyone wanting her to settle their arguments. But if anyone, even Trenton, thought they could tell her what to do, they were mistaken.

  Simoni clapped her hands. “Then it’s decided. You tell us what to do, and we’ll follow you.”

  “Okay, well . . .” Trenton ducked his head and rubbed his hands on his pant legs. “I guess I’d like to sleep on it.”

  Simoni stood up and began kicking sand onto the fire. “Great idea. Let’s all get some sleep. I’ll take the second watch.”

  “I’ll take third,” Kallista said. When she was a little girl, her father had introduced her to a woman who was one of the most skilled mechanics in the city. Kallista had watched in amazement as the woman took apart, then reassembled, a steam engine with her eyes blindfolded. What she had witnessed tonight was no less amazing.

  The others might not realize it, but they’d just been taken apart and reassembled like pieces of a machine. And Simoni was the skilled mechanic who had done it. Apparently she was full of surprises.

  After his shift, Trenton thought he would fall asleep as soon as he wrapped his blanket around himself. Instead, he found himself shifting from one position to another on the rocky ground. In the past, he’d complained about sleeping on roots or the occasional pinecone. Now he’d give anything for a pile of leaves and pine needles to curl into.

  What really kept him awake, though, was the thought that his friends had willingly placed their lives in his hands. Was he worthy of that trust? He didn’t feel like it. What had he accomplished that made him worth following?

  He’d helped build the dragon, but only because he was the one who’d found the part in the mine. He’d discovered the truth about Cove, but only because Kallista had helped him. Everything in Seattle had happened because Plucky shot him and Kallista down.

  Simoni wanted the others to believe that he’d been so smart ordering everyone to fly toward the ocean when the dragons attacked. But how much of that had been an actual decision and how much had been pure instinct? You get chased, you run. Thinking back to that moment now, everything felt like a blur.

  Still, there was a big decision to make, and they’d asked him to make it. Wrapping his blanket around his shoulders, he got up and walked through the dense fog. Boulders appeared like ghosts out of the mist, and after banging his shins on them twice, he slowed his pace.

  The city they’d found had to be San Francisco, although the people living there might have another name for it by now. Had he expected to find a secret message like the ones Leo Babbage left in the games he’d played with Kallista? Here is where the dragons came from, and here is how you can defeat them. Had he expected to find a group of people ready to follow him, like the Whipjacks? Look how that had turned out.

  For years, the people of Cove had locked themselves away from the dangers of the outside world. Trenton had been incensed to discover the leaders of his city had lied, not just to him but to everyone. Now, seeing what the outside world was really like, he wondered if maybe the leaders of Cove had been right all along.

  Was it better to live in ignorance of the dangers around you or to realize you were nothing more than an ant crawling on top of a log poised to crash into the fire at an
y minute?

  How could he go back to the people who’d trusted him and explain that no matter what they did, no matter how hard they fought, they would never defeat the countless dragons who would root them out sooner or later?

  On the other hand, now that they knew what was here, didn’t they have to do something about it? He and the others had been so proud of the dragons they’d killed—painting skulls like trophies. How insignificant that looked when compared to the fact that dragons had nearly wiped out the whole human race and driven human technology almost back to the Dark Ages. Except for here, in a city run by dragons.

  Looking back on it now, he and his friends had been incredibly naïve to think six kids could change the world. How could they possibly stop a race of creatures so powerful they had destroyed human civilization?

  Or had they?

  San Francisco appeared to be the dragons’ headquarters. There had to be at least three hundred of them living in the city, with far more humans than that. Why were the dragons allowing people to live among them? He doubted it was generosity or mercy keeping the humans alive.

  A face appeared out of the fog, and Trenton stumbled backward before realizing it was Angus. “What are you doing out here?” he asked. “Simoni has the second shift.”

  If Angus was surprised to run into Trenton, he didn’t show it. Then again, he didn’t show many emotions other than anger or frustration. He’d probably learned it from his father. Marshal Darrow, who had been the head of Cove’s security forces, wasn’t exactly known for his winning smile.

  Angus picked up a rock and bounced in his palm. “Took her shift so she could sleep. I wanted to check on things. Make sure everyone’s okay.”

  That was about as likely as him asking to take over cooking duties. What did he really want?

  Angus tossed the rock into the fog where it made a soft bloop as it fell into the water. “Guess you’re deciding what to do once our dragons are fixed, huh?”

  “I assume you have an opinion,” Trenton said.

  “I have lots of them,” Angus said. “Not sure which one is right.”

  Well, that was a first. Trenton felt unexpectedly awkward. It wasn’t like he and Angus had a lot of discussions. Mostly they either argued or ignored each other. “Do you, um, want to talk about it?”

  Angus glanced up into the night sky as though searching for dragons, although the odds of seeing anything in the fog were pretty much zero. “You know why I agreed to come with you guys?”

  “To impress Simoni?” Trenton suggested, and Angus actually laughed. Trenton grinned. “I assumed it was to kill dragons.”

  “Yeah, those are both true. But mostly it was because my dad told me to.”

  Trenton nearly stuck his finger in his ears to clean them out. He couldn’t have heard that right. “Your father wanted you to fly with us?”

  “Don’t look so surprised,” Angus said. “I know most people don’t like my dad.” Trenton started to disagree, but Angus shook him off. “He can be kind of tough, and there’s only one thing he cares about more than himself.”

  “Bossing people around?” Trenton suggested. Mr. Darrow was a loudmouth, a jerk, and a bully—a lot like his son.

  “Okay, two things. He cares about keeping the city safe. He talks about it all the time. He said dragons are the biggest threat to Cove—he refuses to call it Discovery—and if I was any kind of son at all, I’d go out and kill so many of them that our city would never be in danger again.”

  “You want to go back to San Francisco and kill more dragons?”

  Angus rubbed his arm in the sling and winced. “To be honest, I’m not sure. If this trip is all about killing dragons, then yes. We might as well go out in a blaze of glory, right?”

  Trenton thought there would probably be a lot more blaze than glory.

  “On the other hand,” Angus said, “if this is about keeping Discovery safe, shouldn’t we go back and warn them of what’s out here?”

  Trenton wasn’t used to hearing Angus say so much at one time. How long had he been thinking about it? “What would your father say if you went back?”

  “That I’m a coward,” Angus said immediately. “But, honestly, after what we faced in the city today, nothing else is all that scary.”

  That was a point they could both agree on. Which brought him back to what he’d been considering before Angus showed up. Even if they managed to get their dragons in perfect working order, there was no way the six of them could even make a dent in the number of dragons in a head-to-head fight. Clyde was right about that. All they’d accomplish would be getting themselves killed.

  “What if there was another way to fight the dragons?” he said, not realizing what he’d been thinking until the words came out of his mouth.

  Angus’s eyebrows rose. “Your girlfriend has another secret weapon no one’s told me about?”

  Ignoring the girlfriend jab, Trenton frowned. “Not a weapon, exactly. There are too many dragons to fight, and they’re too powerful. But what if we could find a way to, I don’t know, maybe poke around the city and look for weaknesses—use our brains instead of our muscles.”

  “Thinking’s your department. But if you figure out a way to kill more dragons without us getting killed at the same time, I’m in.” Angus sniffed and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “Guess I better finish my shift before Kallista wakes up.” He nodded to Trenton and walked away into the fog.

  Trenton thought back to what he’d seen in San Francisco and how much of it had been centered around the humans. The dragons lived in the towers, but most of the buildings were designed for people. Dragons didn’t need bridges or roads or the spiderlike vehicles that crawled through the fields. And even if they had wanted them, they couldn’t have built them. Talons were great for ripping and tearing but not much else.

  After the dragons had sprung their trap, Trenton remembered wondering what the humans were doing there. Why had the dragons let the humans live? The answer was obvious. The train cars of fish, the piles of food on the conveyor belts. Even for a city of that size, there was way more food than necessary. San Francisco wasn’t a city of a humans fighting against dragons; it was city of dragons being fed by humans. It was the Order of the Beast all over again.

  Was it possible the dragons needed the humans? That they’d become dependent on them? And if so, was there a way to use that dependency against them?

  He wasn’t sure. And he didn’t know how the knowledge could help him and his friends in their current situation, but at least it was a start.

  With that in mind, he went back to camp and was finally able to drift to sleep.

  The next morning, after breakfast, he presented his thoughts to the rest of the group.

  By the time he finished, Kallista was nodding. “I bet almost all of those machines were built by humans specifically for the purpose of feeding the dragons.”

  “You think the dragons are using people as slaves?” Simoni asked.

  “They have to be,” Angus said. “I mean, no one would willingly serve those monsters.

  “Order of the Beast did, yeah, yeah,” Plucky said quietly.

  Trenton nodded. The Order of the Beast not only willingly served the dragons but actually worshipped them. But the people in Seattle were living in a hole in the ground, looking for any help they could get. The people in San Francisco weren’t that desperate.

  “I’ll bet they don’t see a lot of outsiders,” Simoni said. “If we could find a way to talk to them, we could tell them what we know and find out what they know. Maybe we could even help some of them escape.”

  Trenton was relieved that they’d come to the same conclusion he had. “If we could get a few people out of the city, we could ask them about the city’s weaknesses. They live with the dragons. They have to have some ideas.”

  Angus stripped the sling from his
arm and tossed it away. “That sounds exciting and all, but do you think we can just stroll into a city full of dragons and ask the people, ‘Hey, how’s it going?’ without someone noticing?”

  “We won’t know for sure until we go back and have a look around,” Trenton said. “It’s better than running away. And it’s much better than launching a full-scale attack.”

  “Catch a look, yeah, yeah?” Plucky seemed excited by the idea. “I’ll sneak a peek. See what’s what, won’t I?”

  “What do you think, Clyde?” Trenton asked.

  “Would this look-see be from a distance or would we actually be going in the city?” Clyde asked.

  “Definitely from a distance. I’m thinking we fly by just after twilight when the dragons aren’t so active. Do you think you could draw a map of what you remember of the city’s layout?”

  Clyde nodded. “I’ll get on it.”

  Trenton took a deep breath. Just like that, they’d agreed to go back to a place where they should have died the day before. It felt like the right thing to do, but he hadn’t been prepared for the weight it put on his shoulders. “All right, then. We get the dragons fixed today and tomorrow morning. Then, tomorrow night, an hour before sunset, we head out.”

  That next afternoon, Kallista and Plucky stayed busy cannibalizing materials from nonessential parts of the dragons and using them to repair the wings and legs. It left some odd-looking holes in the dragons’ bodies, but Kallista said they’d be airworthy by that evening.

  Simoni was on guard duty, and Angus was out gathering more wood. Realizing no one really needed his help, Trenton wandered down the shoreline to where Clyde was sitting on a rock with a pad of paper on his lap and a pencil in one hand.

  He held the pencil poised over the tablet, poked it toward the paper, paused, pulled back, and tried again. When the pencil tip touched the sheet, he winced as if in pain.

  “Is everything all right?” Trenton asked.