“Making them? Like inventing a machine or something?”
“Yes, only they are using biology instead of machinery.” She hurried to the next cylinder several feet down. Although it was still dark, there was enough light to see the panel at the tube’s base. “This has whale DNA. I’ll bet it’s the blue dragon.”
She looked around the room. “Turn on all the switches. Especially the ones toward the end.”
Trenton ran back to the console and began flipping switches. With each switch, another cylinder lit up. Each one had a dragon inside. Some were as small as the black-and-red, but others were almost full-size.
Thoughts raced through his head. This had to be what Kallista’s father was working on. But who would want to make dragons? And why? How long how it been going on? He glanced at the notebook Kallista had dropped, and his hand froze above switch number sixty.
The lab results had gone back to 1903. Three years before the San Francisco earthquake. One year before the dragons appeared. This was what he and Kallista had been searching for. This room was the origin of the dragons. But if they came from here . . .
He’d always assumed the dragons were something terrible that had happened to humans, like an earthquake or a flood. He’d imagined the dragons as a disease and the humans as heroic doctors trying to find a cure. He thought that if he and Kallista could track down where the disease came from, they could figure out a cure.
But the dragons hadn’t happened to humans; humans had created the dragons. They had done this to themselves.
Trenton turned back to Kallista. “Why would they do it? Why would humans create something as terrible as a dragon?”
“Because that’s what we do.” Kallista laughed wildly, sounding slightly crazy. But why shouldn’t she? This was crazier than anything Trenton had ever imagined.
Kallista paced back and forth in front of the control panel. “Everyone knew war was coming, right? So they gathered the greatest minds in science, brought them here, and told them to build the biggest, strongest weapons they could imagine.” She gave the closest tube a sharp rap with her knuckle. “The deadliest weapons they could.”
“You’re saying they intentionally released dragons into the world?” Trenton asked.
“Who knows? Maybe they released one or two as a test. Maybe the earthquake broke open some of the cylinders. Or maybe the earthquake was a result of what they were working on. It doesn’t matter now.”
Trenton walked from one cylinder to another. He’d seen most of the dragons before, but some were completely unfamiliar to him, like a silver dragon with wings so wispy they looked like tissue paper and a crimson one with pincers like a crab.
Since the day he and Kallista had first read the newspaper articles her father had hidden for her, they’d asked the same question over and over. Where had the dragons come from? Now that he finally knew the answer, he wished he didn’t.
He looked at a dragon with a birdlike beak, long legs covered with tiny barbs, and wings that looked like fins. “When we were in Seattle, you and your father said creating a new species was impossible.”
Kallista spread her arms. “It takes centuries, even millennia, for a new species to come about. But the dragons aren’t a new species. They’re simply a mishmash of species that have always been here. All it took was a bunch of scientists to put them together in different ways. They created monsters.”
Trenton shook his head. “The leaders of Cove said the outside world was destroyed by technology. They said creativity was evil. They were right all along. I wish my mother was here so she could say I told you so.”
Trenton turned on the switches from sixty through seventy-two. The last two cylinders were empty. At first, he thought the five before that were also empty, but as he got closer, he saw something tiny—not much bigger than the tip of his pinky finger—floating inside. Each speck was white with a pair of tiny silver horns.
“Five white dragons,” Trenton said, his voice trembling.
Kallista touched the plate at the bottom of one of the cylinders. Unlike the other plates, which were old and dusty, these looked as bright as if they’d been installed yesterday. “Bat. Parrot—that explains how the monarch speaks so well. But what’s a jewel wasp?”
“Jewel wasp?” Trenton repeated. Why did that mean something to him?
Kallista looked up at him, her hands clenching and unclenching.
Someone had told him something about wasps not too long ago. About being stung by them . . .
“Clyde!” he shouted. “Clyde said that when they sent him to retraining they made him stick his hand in a jar full of wasps. He said they were shiny green, like jewels.”
Kallista shook her head. “Why would they have done that?”
Trenton racked his brain. “Clyde said after he got stung by the wasps, his mind started acting funny. The guards talked to him, said strange things to him while he was drawing, and after they were done, he didn’t want to draw anymore.”
“You think the wasps they used on Clyde might be the same jewel wasps they’re using to create the white dragons? But why?”
He studied the tiny white shape floating in the liquid. “I don’t know. Wasps are dangerous but not exactly deadly.”
Kallista pressed her clenched fist to her mouth. “Tell me again what happened to Clyde.”
Trenton tapped his foot, trying to remember exactly what Clyde had said. “They didn’t let him sleep, then they stung him with the wasps, and then they made him draw while they whispered things to him. After awhile, his hand started to burn and his brain felt strange. When the retraining was done, he didn’t want to draw anymore. He’s just now getting back to being able draw again without getting sick.”
“Maybe the wasp’s sting was the trigger. Like it poisoned his mind or something.”
“Or changed it.” Trenton ran his hand across the plaque. “But could a bite or a sting like that really change the way you think? Is that even possible?”
Kallista gestured to the laboratory surrounding them. “At the moment, I think anything is possible.”
Trenton rubbed his forehead. He felt like he was close to figuring out something important. Like he had all the pieces of a machine working except for one last piece and no matter how he tried, he couldn’t get it to fit with the rest of the parts.
“Let’s say we’re right. That there is something about a jewel wasp that can—I don’t know—override a person’s mind. Like an extra cog in a machine that makes it turn a different direction. The venom can make a person think something they didn’t really believe, do something they didn’t really want to do.”
“Like Clyde thinking drawing was bad even though he used to love it.”
“Exactly.”
Kallista’s brow furrowed. “Maybe. But what you’re talking about is—”
“Mind control,” Trenton finished. He slammed his palm against the cylinder in front of him, and the tiny white dragon wobbled in its liquid cocoon. “If the jewel wasp DNA can be used to control people’s minds, then that’s how the monarch is forcing everyone to obey it. The white dragon’s power is mind control.”
The color drained from Kallista’s face. “That’s why my father has been acting the way he is. He didn’t betray us. The monarch is controlling his mind.”
Trenton nodded grimly. “And not just his. I think the monarch is controlling all the adults in San Francisco.”
• • •
Kallista ran back to the console and pulled out one of the earliest notebooks. “Look at these results,” she said. “It says here they only had two dragon types at first. The Ninki Nankas—which seem to be kind of a trial run—and reds, which were the first real dragons.” She tossed the notebook aside, thumbing through a few more until she found the first mention of a third dragon type. “The black dragons didn’t arrive until 1955.”
&nbs
p; Trenton looked over her shoulder. “The dragons had already attacked the humans by then. Why would scientists keep creating new types of dragons after knowing what they’d unleashed?”
“They wouldn’t. It doesn’t make any sense.” Kallista continued to flip through the notebooks, tossing each successive one onto the floor in a growing stack of horror.
Trenton picked up the earliest notebooks, moving from one to another. “1903. 1904. 1906.” He stopped. “Where’s 1905?”
Kallista looked down at the notebooks she’d dropped on the floor. They went through them again, one by one. The one for 1905 was definitely missing.
“Hang on,” Trenton said. “Where’s the book for the white dragon?”
They searched each of the notebooks from beginning to the end. There was no mention of a white dragon. It was like the white dragon didn’t exist.
“What if the black dragon wasn’t the third dragon?” Trenton said. “What if the third dragon was created in 1905? The year with the missing book.”
“The white dragon,” Kallista said. Suddenly it all made sense. “What if, after creating the Ninki Nankas and the red dragons, they created the white dragon? Maybe they didn’t realize what the jewel wasp venom would do. Or maybe they created the dragon, intending to keep it controlled, but—” She dropped the notebook she was holding. “What if the earthquake released the white dragon before they were ready for it?”
“And it took control of their minds,” Trenton said. “It could have forced the scientists to release the dragons they already had into the world.”
“It could have forced them to make more dragons,” Kallista said. “That could have been how it all went wrong.”
Trenton nodded. “That would also explain why there weren’t any new dragons until 1955. By then, the dragons had finished taking over the world. Then they came back here and forced the scientists to invent new dragons. But how did the dragons spread so quickly?”
“There could have been other labs,” Kallista said. “Other scientists working on the same weapons in different locations. All the original white dragon would have to do would be to force one scientist to free all the others.”
“But where does your father come in?” Trenton asked. “If they’ve been making dragons here for a hundred and fifty years, why do they need him now?”
Slowly they both turned to look at the five cylinders numbered sixty-six through seventy. The cylinders with the new white dragons in them. The cylinders with the brand-new plaques.
“Maybe they lost the plans for white dragons in the earthquake,” Kallista said quietly. “Maybe they needed someone to . . . to figure how to make copies of the monarch.”
She picked up the last book, the one with her father’s handwriting in it. She read through the pages more carefully now, paying special attention to the handwritten notes. She finally found what she was looking for scribbled in a margin.
“Improved effects appear to work best on mature prefrontal cortexes. Subjects younger than twenty years of age show minimal control with new formula.”
“It doesn’t work well on kids,” she said, holding the notebook up for him to see. “The part of the brain it controls doesn’t develop in humans until they are older.”
Trenton nodded. “Alex and Michael both said that when members of the Runt Patrol got older, they changed their minds about wanting to escape the city.”
Kallista remembered how the monarch had stared at her with its purple eyes and she’d felt dizzy for a minute. Like it was trying to hypnotize her, but its power wasn’t strong enough. “Maybe the jewel wasps in Discovery have a slightly different strain of venom—one that works better on kids. Maybe that’s why the retraining didn’t work perfectly on Clyde and how he’s been able to fight it off.”
Something still bothered her, though. “If the monarch can control all the adults in the city, then why have guards at all? It can’t be just to keep an eye on the kids.”
“This might explain it.” Trenton pointed to a series of hastily sketched lines and numbers at the back of the notebook. It was a graph comparing the monarch’s mind-control power to the number of people affected. “It looks like the more people it tries to control, the weaker its power gets. According to this, the monarch is already over the limit of what it can handle.”
Is that why her father had been able to give her just enough clues to lead her here? Was he fighting against the dragon’s control?
Trenton squeezed her shoulder. “I think there’s more to it than that. The white dragon controls people, but some people have a stronger reason than others to fight against it. Alex and Michael have the Runt Patrol. Your father has you. He must have been fighting the monarch’s control like crazy to drop those clues you followed.”
Kallista looked at the tiny white dragons floating in their tubes and felt anger rise up inside of her. Her father was the most brilliant person in the world, and to know that some terrible creature and stolen his ability to think and forced him to do something he never would have done otherwise made her vision crinkle around the edges.
“No,” she said. “I won’t let them control my father anymore.” She kicked a pipe connected to the console, knocking it from its bracket. She kicked it again, and one end of the pipe snapped loose. Air hissed from the broken end as she grabbed the pipe, bending it back and forth until the other end broke loose.
“What are you doing?” Trenton asked.
She grabbed the pipe and ran toward the nearest cylinder containing a white dragon.
The things her father had said were so unlike him, but she’d been too scared to question his decision until it was too late.
“Stop!” Trenton yelled. “We don’t know what will happen if you—”
She raised the pipe over her head and smashed the side of the cylinder. A small crack formed in the glass. She knew that these white dragons were not the ones controlling her father, but she had to do something.
Trenton ran toward Kallista, screaming for her to stop. But she raised the pipe again and again, slamming the glass until she smashed a hole in the cylinder. A stream of brown liquid shot from the opening.
Instantly, alarms blared around the room. Thick metal covers slammed down over every cylinder. Red lights flashed.
“We have to get out of here,” Trenton yelled.
Kallista stared at the puddle of liquid at her feet, the pipe hanging limply in her hand. The room swayed around her; she wasn’t sure where she was.
Trenton grabbed her by the arm. “People will be here any minute. We can’t let them find us.”
Kallista shook her head, her senses returning. “Right,” she said. “You’re right.” But when she tried to open the door, the lever wouldn’t turn. She pressed the keypad, but the buttons didn’t beep. “We’re locked in.”
Footsteps sounded outside the door. She looked around wildly. There was no other way out.
“I’m sorry,” Kallista said. She let go of the pipe, and it clanged to the ground.
Voices yelled outside. The door lock clicked, but before it could swing open, Trenton grabbed the pipe from the floor and jammed it under the handle. The lever rattled up and down, and a voice said, “It’s stuck.”
The door rattled again. The pipe wouldn’t stop them for long.
She searched for some place to hide, but except for the console and the cylinders, the room was bare. If they tried to climb up the copper ball, the electricity would kill them, and they couldn’t go under—
Her eyes stopped on the metal grate in the floor.
“Come on!” she yelled, pulling Trenton after her. She grabbed the metal grate, sliding her fingers through the holes. “Help me.”
Trenton grabbed the other side of the grate, and they both tugged.
With a screech, a section of the floor lifted up. She stared down into the water below. All she could see
were two large tanks with a metal wheel on one wall. There was no door or even a ladder, but she could hear water rushing somewhere in the darkness.
Behind them, something heavy slammed against the door, and the pipe fell with a clang. She flipped the section of grate aside. “Take a deep breath!”
At the same time, both she and Trenton filled their lungs with air. She closed her eyes, grabbed Trenton’s hand, and jumped.
“Stop!” a voice yelled, but they were already falling.
They hit the water and plunged into icy darkness. She tried to swim back up, but if felt as if something had hold of her legs, pulling her down. Her shoulder hit hard against the side of the tank, and for a moment she thought she felt Trenton grab at her.
Then she was hurtling through darkness. Her body banked left and right, smashed like a rag doll against rocks and pipes. She fought her way to the surface, gasped for air, was pulled back down, and felt herself slammed against something sharp. Pain flared in her shoulder.
She felt her head starting to spin just as a pair of hands grabbed her, pulling her out of the water.
“It’s okay,” Trenton said, breathing heavily. “We made it.”
Slowly she sat up. They were on a rocky shore near the entrance to a dark cave cut into the side of a cliff. She looked up and saw the top of the white tower high above.
Lightning flashed over the water, and a cold drop of rain splashed against her face.
Trenton grabbed her hand. “We have to stop them.”
A second cold drop hit her face, and a wave crashed over her legs.
“We will,” she said. “I don’t know how, but we will.”
By the time they returned to the Seven Hills, it was after midnight. Rain slashed from the sky, and the wind coming off the water cut like an icy blade. There were guards on nearly every corner, and dragons soared overhead. It took them more than an hour to get back to their quad and another hour to make it to the neighborhood without being seen.
Although everyone should have been in bed, lights were on in buildings all over the city.
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