Fires of Invention

by J. Scott Savage

  “That would explain why the deaths aren’t mentioned in the book,” Kallista said.

  “It would also explain things like how the fish tanks down below are stamped with the years 01 and 02, when the level they’re on couldn’t have existed then. And why no one ever comes up here. But I still can’t figure out why they’d start over with worse equipment.”

  “Maybe . . .” Kallista tugged at a strand of hair, clearly working the idea over in her mind. “Maybe they blamed the equipment for the war. They could have decided that they’d be better off going back to older technology. What I can’t understand is how they could convince everyone to go along with that idea.”

  Trenton knew how she’d react to what he was going to say, but he pushed forward anyway. “We have to bring people up here, show them what we’ve found.”

  “Are you crazy?” Kallista jumped to her feet. “No one would ever believe us. They’d lock us up.”

  He turned around and faced the dragon. “They’d believe us if they saw Ladon.”

  “No!” Kallista shouted. “Absolutely not. He’s a gift from my father to me. The people in the city would see it as an invention. They’d say, ‘Look what terrible, crazy thing Leo Babbage has done now.’ I’m not letting them have this. I won’t.”

  Trenton tried to take her hand, but she pulled away. He exhaled. “Miss Huber said your father understood people’s thoughts as well as he understood machines. He probably knew you’d react this way.”

  “So what?” Kallista demanded, once again the girl who’d fought Trenton in the street to get what her father had left.

  “Your father made sure the dragon required two operators so you’d find a friend,” Trenton said, his voice soft. “Maybe he wanted you to have a friend so that person would tell you the things you didn’t want to hear but needed to know. It’s been great up here—working with you, talking to you, getting to know the real Kallista who hides inside her angry shell—but we can’t keep this a secret anymore. I think that’s what your father has been trying to tell us. Maybe that’s why he died. Maybe that’s why we’re in extreme danger.” He reached for her hand again, and this time she didn’t stop him.

  She looked at the dragon, her eyes glistening. “They won’t let us keep him.”

  “Probably not,” he admitted. “And they could do to us whatever they did to your father.”

  She tilted her head, chin trembling. “Why would they tell so many lies? Why would they make things worse for everyone?”

  Trenton shook his head. “Your father might have known why, but I don’t.”

  “Give me some time,” Kallista said. “I know that showing Ladon is probably the right thing to do, but it has to be my choice. You can’t show anyone the dragon unless I agree first.”

  Guilt welled in his chest. He shouldn’t have brought Simoni here without telling Kallista. But if Simoni was okay with it, maybe everyone else would be too. They had to find a way to explain how much better things could be if they used Leo Babbage’s discoveries.

  “It’s your decision,” he said.

  “Thank you.” Kallista squeezed his hand. “But first I want to take Ladon out for a real flight.”

  “I think he deserves it,” Trenton said.

  She smiled. “I think we do.”

  • • •

  Trenton snugged his new leather helmet onto his head. It was amazing, with padding all around and built-in goggles. “Where did you get these?” he shouted over the roar of the turbines.

  “I made them,” Kallista said, tightening her own helmet.

  “Since when can you sew?”

  She glared at him. “I can do a lot of things you don’t know about.” She grabbed the leg controls. “Ready to go?”

  He raised the tail. “Let’s do this, big Don.”

  Kallista walked the dragon out of the gate so smoothly that Trenton barely had to use the tail to balance the dragon. She worked the front and back legs so it hardly felt like they were moving at all.

  “You’ve been practicing without me,” he said.

  She looked back at him and arched an eyebrow inside her goggles. “Maybe.”

  After they’d cleared the gate, she opened the wings. The mesh crackled a little, but it looked amazing.

  “Give the wings a slight angle,” she said. “That will keep us from running too fast, and I think it’ll help us take off, too.”

  He pulled back on the stick ever so slightly.

  “Strapped in?” she asked.

  Trenton patted the leather harness he’d designed, showing that it was tightly buckled across his chest. “Go for it.”

  Kallista increased their speed, moving the legs faster. “Pressure okay?”

  Trenton checked the gauge. “Holding steady at eighty percent.”

  “Here we go.” She pushed the throttle all the way up.

  The sudden acceleration threw Trenton back against his seat. With each step, they moved fifteen feet, then twenty, thirty, thirty-five.

  “Take him up!” she yelled.

  Trenton pulled back on the flight controller. The wings tilted and began to flap. Forty feet, fifty. The mesh-clad wings clawed at the air, and, just like that, they were flying. The first time they’d taken off, it had felt like rolling down a hill in a barrel—thrilling but completely out of control. This time, it was like watching a dancer leap gracefully into the air.

  “Higher,” Kallista called.

  Trenton tugged on the stick, and the great metal wings strained toward the ceiling. He pushed the stick forward slightly, and soon they were gliding like a bird.

  Kallista pointed the dragon’s head downward, and the eyes lit up the ground below as they raced over buildings and equipment. She banked to the left, and Trenton held his breath, watching the wings. There wasn’t so much as a ripple across their glittering surface.

  She turned left so sharply that Trenton’s stomach rolled.

  “Don’t forget the tail,” she called.

  He whipped the tail around to even them out. “Let’s dive-bomb something,” he suggested.

  Kallista nodded and pointed the dragon’s head toward a tall metal tower. Trenton pushed the stick until they were diving toward it. Fifty feet from the tower, he pushed the flame button. A ball of fire blasted the tower into a heap of slag.

  “Bull’s-eye!” he yelled.

  “Ladon says it had a suspicious mustache,” Kallista called back, and the two of them howled with laughter. “Let’s take him all the way up,” she said.

  Trenton pulled the stick back again, letting the dragon climb. They got so close to the top of the cavern he felt as if he could touch the ceiling by standing up. He quickly leveled the wings.

  It really is like being a bird, he thought as Kallista maneuvered, flying them from one end of the level to the other.

  As he was about to take them back down, she pointed to their left. Trenton turned in time to see something red flash past.

  She circled around and edged closer to the wall, where he could make out some painted words. But how could they have gotten there so high up on the wall? Whoever left the text must have scaled the wall itself. The letters were ten feet from the top of the cavern—impossible to see unless you were this high up and had bright lights to read by.

  He slowed as they flew past, but even so, he made out only part of the message.

  To learn the

  Then they were beyond it.

  “Did you get it all?” he called.

  Kallista shook her head and flew back around. On their second pass, he got more of text.

  To learn the truth, go to

  “I didn’t catch the end,” Kallista called.

  “Me, either,” Trenton said. “One more time.”

  She circled for a third pass, and Trenton slowed their speed as much as he could without losing altitude.

  To learn the truth, go to the beginning. L. B.

  The letters at the end were crooked and paint had dripped onto the wall, but the
re was no question who had painted them.

  Leo Babbage had intentionally written a message somewhere they’d never find it until the dragon was complete.

  35

  Going back up there is a really bad idea,” Trenton said as they headed into the mine shaft.

  Kallista glared back, hands on her hips. “He told us to go back to the beginning. That’s what I’m doing.”

  “How do you know he was talking about up there?” Trenton asked. He tried not to look at the coal chute they’d climbed up a few days earlier, but the dark hole seemed to watch him like an empty eye socket. The idea of returning to the top level terrified him far more than he wanted to admit. “For all we know, he meant for us to go down to the feeder belt where I found the first tube. That’s where this whole thing began for us.”

  “He didn’t mean that,” Kallista said. “I played hundreds of these games with him, maybe thousands. I always thought he wanted me to improve my reasoning skills, and that might have been part of it. But now I wonder if he was planning something like this all along. He knew that someday the only way he’d be able to communicate with me would be by leaving messages.” She checked the fuel level in her mining helmet and tightened it on her forehead.

  Trenton rubbed his arms, trying not to think about the growling they’d heard outside the sealed entrance. “So what? You two played a lot of games. Why does that mean the next clue is upstairs?”

  Kallista looked back at him, and the glare of her lamp forced him to shade his eyes. “My father could come up with more bizarre clues than you can imagine. Sometimes I got so frustrated, I cried. But eventually, by thinking through the puzzles logically, I figured them out. He always stuck to two rules: First, just when you thought the game was done, there was always one last clue. Right when you thought you knew where the game was headed, he’d throw in a twist. Second, no two clues were ever in the same place. There won’t be another clue where you found the first one.” She pointed to the ceiling. “Whatever he wants me to find is up there on the first level.”

  She turned around and marched toward the mine shaft as though an invisible spotlight led the way.

  Trenton tried to force down the dread building up inside him. Something terrible had happened up there. It felt cursed. Never mind the fact that they’d already searched it. But it didn’t matter what he thought. When Kallista had her mind set on something, it was impossible to talk her out of it. Forcing aside his doubts, he followed her into the mine shaft.

  When they reached the chute, she climbed in without hesitation. As Trenton climbed in after her, he thought he heard something behind him. He looked back. “What was that?”

  Kallista barely paused. “Wind again?”

  “No, it . . .” He listened, but whatever it was had gone. He turned back to the shaft, only to find Kallista already out of sight. “Wait up,” he called.

  By the time he reached the top level, she was already walking across the cavern. “Why are you in such a rush?” he said, trying to ignore the shattered rock and smoke stains.

  “This is what he’s been leading us to all along,” Kallista said. “It’s the final piece of the puzzle. I can feel it.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “I just am,” she said, puffing from the climb. “He’s been teasing us along—a little bit here, a little bit there. Remember how upset you were when you found out that my father was the one who left that tube?”

  Trenton didn’t like to think about how close he’d come to throwing the tube away. If he had, none of this would have happened. “I didn’t understand.”

  Kallista stopped to catch her breath. “If someone had told you back then that the city was intentionally denying us paper, that we were using old equipment, and that the two of us could build a mechanical dragon that actually flies, would you have believed them?”

  He shook his head. “I would have thought they were crazy.”

  “I might have, too,” Kallista said. “And that’s coming from the daughter of Mad Leo Babbage. He had to feed the information to us slowly, like a baby learning to eat solid food. The dragon kept us going. It helped us know that my father wasn’t crazy. But you believe all of those things now, don’t you? The paper, the equipment, the dragon?”

  She clenched her fists, hands shaking with fear and excitement. “My father has been leading us to something important—even bigger than the dragon. Whatever it is, we’re about to find out. She spun around and headed off.

  “Where are we going?” Trenton asked.

  “To the entrance,” Kallista said. “Where Cove began.”

  When they arrived at the rock wall, Trenton cocked his head and listened for the growling. Nothing. Maybe it had been the wind after all.

  “Check for loose rocks,” Kallista said. “Or false fronts. Anything. My father was a master at hiding things in plain sight.”

  Trenton wasn’t too excited about the idea of pulling at rocks that were the only things protecting them from the poisonous air outside, but the wall was solidly mortared and he figured one rock wouldn’t make a difference. Taking off his gloves to get a better grip, he pulled, prodded, and twisted every rock he could find.

  Kallista worked with a manic energy, moving from one stone to another as if the next one might hide a vast treasure. The longer they searched, the more frantic she became. After two hours, they hadn’t found so much as wiggly piece of mortar.

  “Maybe we should come back tomorrow,” Trenton said. “It’s getting late.”

  “Go if you want to,” Kallista said. “I’m not giving up.”

  Trenton sighed. “I’m not giving up either. But I have to leave soon, or I’ll miss curfew. For all we know, the clue might be a rock we can’t reach. We can bring a ladder with us tomorrow.”

  Kallista silently continued checking rocks, ones that Trenton was almost certain she’d checked earlier. Exasperated, he walked away and found himself beside the gold letters on the wall. COVE. Early on in school, they’d all learned the definition of the word cove: a recessed place, a protected bay or inlet. That’s what the city had been for the people who founded it—a place of protection, shelter, safety.

  The founders had come here to lock themselves away from the dangers of technology that had destroyed the rest of the world. But had they gone too far? Had they abandoned technologies that were actually helpful?

  As he started to turn away, his headlamp shined at an angle that illuminated something he hadn’t noticed before. “Look at this,” he said, running his fingers over the wall to the left of the C in Cove. “Does this part look less shiny than the rest of the rock to you?”

  Kallista hurried to his side. She touched the wall. “That’s not rock. It’s some kind of plaster. Like they filled something in or covered it over.” She pulled out a chisel, placed it on the right spot, and tapped it with her hammer. A chunk of black fell away. She cleared off more of the black substance, uncovering a few specks of gold.

  Trenton looked from the word on the right to the gold on the left. “It’s the same color,” he said. “It looks like someone covered up another letter.”

  Together they cleared away the rest of the filler, revealing the letter S.

  “Scove?” Trenton said. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “There’s more,” Kallista said, chipping to the left of the S. Tapping away at the letters, they uncovered an I and a D.

  When they were sure there was nothing more on the left side, they moved to the wall on the right side of the E, but by then Trenton already knew what they would find. His heart raced as he tried to comprehend it. They chipped the last of the black away from an R and a Y, and then stepped back to examine their work.

  D I S C O V E R Y

  “They didn’t name the city Cove,” Kallista said. “They named it Discovery.”

  “Even the name of our home is a lie,” he whispered, feeling slightly dead inside. Discovery. Not a place of hiding, but a place of learning, of exploration.
<
br />   What did this mean? Why would the government change the city’s name?

  Kallista knelt and tapped a lower section of the wall. “There’s something here.” She continued working her hammer and chisel. On the first strike, a small section of the wall gave way, revealing an opening. She worked at the rest of the covering until she’d revealed a hole roughly twelve inches high, twelve inches wide, and two feet deep. A metal box lay inside, taking up the full width of the compartment. An envelope rested on top.

  “Your father dug this out?” Trenton asked.

  Kallista nodded. With trembling hands, she reached for the envelope but pulled back. “I don’t think I can do it. I want to, but . . .”

  He put an arm around her shoulder. “Do you want me to?”

  Her chin quivered. “Would you? Please?”

  “Of course.”

  Trenton slid the box out of the opening. The box was maybe six inches tall. He handed the envelope to Kallista, but she shook her head. “Could you read it to me? Please.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She nodded.

  Setting the box to one side, Trenton carefully slid his finger under the flap of the envelope and took out a piece of paper made of the same rough, slightly brownish stock the dragon plans had been drawn on. The handwriting was clearly the same person’s. He wet his lips.

  “My Dearest Daughter,

  “If you are reading this, it means you were able to follow my clues. Congratulations. You always were good at my games. It also means that you built and flew the dragon. I wish I had been there to see it. Unless you modified my plans—something I wouldn’t put past you—you have also made a friend. Please offer him or her my thanks.”

  Kallista laughed shakily. “Thanks,” she said, her voice husky with emotion.

  “You’re welcome.” He checked to make sure she was okay, then continued reading.

  “Unfortunately, it also means that I am no longer here. I’ve considered several ways such an event could occur, but I want you to know that however it happened, I always had your safety foremost in my mind.