Embers of Destruction

by J. Scott Savage

  “What?” Clyde’s head jerked up before he realized it was only Trenton. He set down the pencil and gave a weak smile. “Just trying to make the map. Some days drawing is harder than others.”

  “You don’t remember the city?” Trenton asked. “It doesn’t have to be perfect. Do the best you can.”

  “It’s not that.” Clyde flexed his fingers before picking up the pencil as though it were a poisonous snake. “I know art isn’t bad, but . . .”

  All at once Trenton understood. “The retraining?”

  Clyde hesitated before nodding. “Most of the time I’m all right. But every now and then it’s like trying to punch my way through a brick wall.”

  Back when creativity had been against the law in Cove, Trenton had constantly found himself risking punishment by building new things, but it was Clyde who had been caught sketching on his chalkboard.

  Clyde had returned a day after being seized by the guards and put into retraining. After that, it had been months before he could even look at a piece of chalk without trembling. He’d never discussed what happened that day.

  Trenton traced a line in the sand with his foot. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  Clyde sighed. “No. I’m fine.”

  “Okay. If there’s anything I can do . . .” As Trenton turned away, Clyde spoke up.

  “What do you love most in the world?”

  “Building things,” Trenton said at once. “I mean, you know, after my parents and all that.”

  Clyde nodded. “Imagine if building things made you so sick you felt like you were going to barf. If even the thought of it gave you stomach cramps and cold sweats. You still loved it, but you also hated it.”

  Trenton rubbed the back of his neck. “I don’t understand. How can you love something and hate it at the same time?”

  “I don’t understand either. Not really. That’s why I’ve never told anyone about it.” He ran a finger down one edge of the tablet and shivered. “The day the guards took me for retraining, they questioned me all afternoon. Why was I drawing? What was I drawing? Did anyone else know? How long had I been drawing? It was the same questions over and over, only asked different ways in different order.”

  “What did you say?”

  “What could I say?” Clyde gave a shaky laugh. “It was a mistake. I didn’t know what I was thinking. I’d never done it before, and I’d never do it again. I was terrified. When they finally threw me into a cell, it was after midnight. I would have said anything to get some sleep. It must have been an hour or two later when they woke me up and put me in the . . .” He swallowed and nearly gagged. Sweat beaded on his forehead and his upper lip.

  Trenton placed a hand on Clyde’s shoulder. “You don’t have do this. Don’t put yourself through it all over again.”

  Clyde wiped his forehead. “No. I need to tell someone. Maybe getting it out will help.” He took a long breath and released it with a slow whoosh. “After they woke me up, they put me in this room. They made me put my hands into . . .” He gulped hard. “At the time I thought it was a jar of bees, but they were shiny, like green jewels, and now I know they were—”

  “Wasps,” Trenton said. “That’s why you were so terrified of them back at the campsite.” He remembered Clyde’s fingers and hands had been swollen when he returned from the retraining. He’d been stung by wasps. “Why would they do that?”

  “I don’t know.” Clyde wiped his face again, his eyes staring out to sea. “Afterwards, they handed me a slate and told me to start drawing. I didn’t want to, you know, because it was wrong. But they made me. At first it was all right. I drew pictures of little things—tools and plants.

  “Then something changed. I started to itch, like I was allergic to the chalk. My fingers began to swell, and I had a hard time breathing. The guards were whispering something to me, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying. My head was swimming, and the room kept going in and out of focus. I wanted to stop drawing, but my hand wouldn’t obey. And then it was like my hand was burning. The chalk was on fire, but I couldn’t let go. I couldn’t—” Clyde’s lower lip trembled.

  “Stop,” Trenton said. “Don’t relive it.”

  Clyde hiccupped and took a gasping breath. His face was scarlet. A tear leaked from one eye. “I could live with the pain. Only it’s like they stole the best part of me and replaced it with something horrible.”

  “I’m so sorry. I had no idea,” Trenton said, thinking of how close he’d come to being sent to retraining himself. Would he have come out shaking every time he thought of building something? “You never have to draw anything again.”

  “No.” Clyde wiped the tears from his cheeks. “It would be so easy to give up. I’ve thought about it every day since I got out. Each time I start shaking, I ask myself why I’m putting myself through this. Is drawing worth it? But the day I quit drawing is the day I give up that part of me for good. If I stop, it means they won. I won’t let them take my art. I won’t.”

  Trenton had never heard his friend speak so forcefully about anything.

  Clyde seemed to realize the same thing. He shook his head, the fierce scowl on his face replaced by an embarrassed grin. He looked down at the pencil in his hand. “Get out of here and stop bugging me. I have a map to draw.”

  “Sure.” Trenton took one more look at his friend before heading back to the campsite. To think he’d believed Clyde just liked to tell jokes, draw pictures, and cook weird stuff. You never really knew what was inside people.

  Kallista had hoped the fog would roll in with the setting sun. But other than a few stray clouds, there was nothing to hide their approach as they neared land—except for the darkness, and the darkness was about to disappear. Lights were coming on in buildings and towers and along streets until the sky above the city was nearly as bright as day.

  “Do you think we should call off the plan?” she asked, scanning the sky for dragons.

  Trenton hesitated, and she didn’t have to see him to know he was struggling with the pressure of his new leadership role. She didn’t envy that. On the one hand, she didn’t want anyone telling her what to do. On the other hand, Simoni was right. There were too many of them in the group to have everyone going their own direction. She was okay with one person running things, as long as she wasn’t the one.

  “What do you think, Plucky?” Trenton asked, keeping his voice low.

  “Right bright for a proper look-see, ain’t it now?” Plucky called. “Might be all right to take a peek through the window, see if the latch is ajar, yeah, yeah? As long as we keeps an eyes out for them rusty dragons.”

  Kallista had spent enough time around Plucky that she barely noticed the Whipjack slang anymore. “You want to fly around the edges of the city and check the security?”

  Plucky tapped her nose. “Plummy.”

  “Okay,” Trenton said. “But keep your engines running slow. No talking unless you have to. And absolutely no fighting. If you even think a dragon might see you, head out to sea.”

  “Gingerly as a clucker among the tabbies,” Plucky agreed.

  Trenton waved one hand in a straight line above his head, and the three dragons formed a single-file column with Ladon in the lead, Rounder second, and Devastation taking up the rear.

  Kallista glanced toward Angus, wondering how long he’d keep taking orders. She assumed the only reason he’d agreed to let Trenton lead the team in the first place was because Simoni had pushed it. Angus didn’t like people telling him what to do either.

  As they reached the edge of the cliffs, Trenton gave Kallista’s left shoulder a firm tap, and she turned north to follow the edge of the coast. Even from a distance, the bright lights of the city made it easy to make out what was going on.

  At this time of night in Discovery, all of the businesses would be shut down while people went home to eat dinner or go to bed. Here, thou
gh, trains loaded with coal, ore, and grains continued to run across the city. Most of the buildings appeared closed for the night, but fires glowed in a few factory windows, and trails of gray steam issued from a few smokestacks.

  Outside one of the buildings, she saw at least a hundred of the strange spiderlike vehicles parked side by side. It looked as though some of them had trailers hooked to the back, and a few had cutting or digging implements on the front or sides.

  For the most part, the streets were empty. But why keep them so brightly lit? Then she looked closer and realized at least some of the people walking outside were guards. Another thing to keep an eye on.

  The dragon towers were illuminated as well, but the arched doorways were all closed.

  “You think the dragons are asleep?” Trenton asked.

  “Not all of them,” she answered, pointing out a dark shape to the north gliding along the edge of the city lights. It was a dragon—although in the darkness she couldn’t tell what kind—and it was flying in their direction. She scanned the skies for somewhere to hide. The bridge would hide them nicely, but they couldn’t reach it in time without increasing their speed and making more noise.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Trenton said.

  Simoni whistled twice softly. To anyone else, it would sound like a birdcall, if they could hear it at all. To the six dragon riders, though, it was the signal for something coming up on the left.

  Kallista looked over her shoulder to where a second dragon flew behind them over the water. That ruled out heading back to sea.

  “Rusty galoots,” Plucky muttered. “Keeping a right tight watch on the nest.”

  She reminded herself that tonight’s mission was about gathering information, not fighting dragons. If they kept their heads down, they should be fine. “Which way?” she asked. When Trenton didn’t respond, she pushed the right foot pedal, sending them sailing past the cliff into the city.

  “What are you doing?” Trenton demanded.

  “Keeping us from being spotted.” She waited for him to argue.

  Instead, he pushed the flight stick forward, sending them into the shadow of a nearby tower. “Good call,” he said. “Our best chance to avoid being spotted is to stay near the light without actually going into the light.”

  Flying along the edges of the light was like a game—swoop low between a pair of houses, follow the shadow of a tower, swoop beneath a factory wall, come out under an elevated pipe. Except in this game, the consequence of losing was death.

  As they darted from one building to another, she began noticing things about the city she hadn’t before.

  Along the outside edges of the city were rows and rows of small, square buildings that had to be houses. There were hundreds of them, and every single house looked exactly the same. Farther to the north, on the hills overlooking the bay, were other buildings that also looked like houses, but those were much bigger.

  The best spots around the city were reserved for the magnificent towers she now knew were home to the dragons. Each tower stood away from the other buildings, and she thought she could make out people standing guard at the base of each one. She would need to keep an eye on the shuttered archways. If they began to open, it’d be time to get out fast.

  The center of the city appeared to be composed almost entirely of factories and industrial plants. They soared above a large building that reeked of fish. In front of another plant were tall stacks of something vile that gave off a horrid stink like rotting meat.

  “Cowhides,” Trenton whispered.

  How many cows must have been killed recently to leave that many skins? How many dragons fed?

  The gleaming metal train tracks crisscrossing the city looked like a mixed-up puzzle at first. But now she could see a pattern. Tracks came from outside the city directly to the factories. To bring in coal and food? Another set of tracks ran out of the factories toward huge open spaces and several other large buildings.

  “That’s where they feed them,” Trenton said from behind her, his voice far too loud.

  “Shh,” she hissed. “What are you talking about?”

  “That was a fish-processing plant back there. We had one almost exactly like it back in Discovery—well, a smaller one, obviously. And did you see that pile of animal bones? That must be what the fields are for, and the machines with the claws. I’ll bet if we look around, we’ll find ranches with cows and sheep. The dragons are using the humans to provide them with food. Those empty courtyards and factories are where the humans feed the dragons.”

  No wonder the city was so big. The ranches alone had to be massive.

  He pointed to the right. “I want to get a closer look at that building over there. The one with the people in front of it.”

  Unlike the beautiful dragon towers, the factories were unimpressive buildings, three stories of dull concrete. The one Trenton was pointing at had its lights on and steam coming out of its smokestacks. Where the towers were clean and sparkling, this factory was covered with soot. Copper pipes ran up the outside of the walls, and metal grates covered most of the windows. Pieces of rusty ladders hung outside of a few windows. Whatever they’d been used for in the past, the ladders were nothing but leftover junk now.

  Groups of men and women walked out of the large open doors on one end of the building, loaded down with bags and boxes that they dumped into trailers hooked up to the spiderlike vehicles parked outside.

  Bright lights illuminated the building from all angles. Fortunately, the lights were all focused toward the building, leaving the sky overhead somewhat dark. Still, it would be tricky getting close enough to see anything useful without being heard.

  She twirled her hand in the air, signaling for the three dragons to fly high above the building. Several hundred feet up, she stopped twirling her hand and made a fist. Behind her, Trenton shut off Ladon’s engine. The others did the same.

  Flying silently, they could use their broad wings to glide through the night. They wouldn’t be able to stay airborne long, but if they were quiet, no one would be able to see or hear them.

  Keeping far enough away to avoid the building’s lights, Kallista banked around to get a better look. Trenton brought them even with the top of the building, and she could see through the windows running along the side of the factory.

  The top floor appeared to be empty, but the bottom two floors were an open warehouse filled with conveyer belts and a large machine that chunked, cut, and ground. A processing plant.

  Clusters of people worked along the line of moving belts and pulled levers on the machines. There were a few men, but it was mostly women with their hair tucked up in caps and stained aprons covering them from their necks to their knees.

  Trenton leaned close and whispered, “Everyone’s wearing the same gray clothes. You think it’s some kind of uniform?”

  Kallista shook her head. “Not all of them. A few are wearing gray pants and white shirts. I’ll bet those are the bosses.”

  A woman stepped out of the building, and Plucky gave a surprised squawk. It wasn’t much, but in the silence of the night, it sounded like a siren.

  The woman put a hand to her eyes, searching the sky in their direction. “Who’s there?” she called. “Is someone out there?” The woman’s voice carried through the nearby streets, and several other women came to see what she was yelling about.

  Kallista cut hard the other direction, but it was too late.

  Angus gave a single whistle as a dragon approached from the right.

  “We have to find a place to hide,” Kallista whispered.

  Trenton started the engine, and they rose back into the sky. “There.” He pointed to one of the fields where the people had been driving the spiderlike machines. It was the only area nearby that wasn’t brightly lit. It would be a difficult landing in the dark, but it looked like the only option.

 
Kallista steered toward the field, staying as close to the edge of the light as she could before darting into the darkness. Trenton dropped them into a steep dive. Tall plants slapped at Ladon’s feet. They hit the ground with a clunk. Dirt exploded around them.

  Two thuds sounded behind them as Rounder and Devastation landed.

  Digging Ladon’s talons into the ground, Kallista came to a sliding halt and cut the engine. She whipped her head around, studying the sky to see if they’d been spotted.

  It was easy to make out the shapes of two large dragons outlined against the city lights. They circled in the air, screeching, then flew toward the building, making ever larger loops. It would only be a matter of time before they reached the fields.

  Had the dragons seen them land or were they simply patrolling the area? Either way, it wasn’t going to matter if they kept coming in this direction.

  Hands on their dragons’ controls, the six riders kept the engines running. The creatures were getting closer and closer. Any minute they would fly directly overhead.

  “Get ready to take off,” Trenton whispered.

  The two dragons were nearly on top of them when something exploded inside the city. A white ball of flame lit the night, and shouting echoed in the distance.

  Immediately the dragons flew away to investigate.

  Kallista held her breath, afraid to make a single noise, until the dragons were finally out of sight.

  “What was that?” Simoni asked.

  “No idea,” Kallista whispered. “But it couldn’t have been more convenient.”

  Trenton turned to Plucky. “What were you doing back there over the factory? You almost gave us away.”

  Plucky hunched her shoulders. “Couldn’t help me’self, could I? Saw someone I recognized out front of that building.”

  Kallista tilted her head. “How could you possibly know anyone here?”

  Plucky set her jaw. “Don’t know what she’s doing here, but I know her, all right, yeah. Known her since I was a chit.”

  Kallista frowned. “Are you telling me that you saw someone you recognized from . . . ?”