Dactyl Hill Squad

by Daniel José Older

  Magdalys had had enough. She stood, rustled around in her pocket, then pulled Riker’s note back out and put it on the table. David picked it up. Cymbeline and Louis looked over his shoulder. David read it out loud to Louis.

  “Did …” Louis said.

  “Do …” Cymbeline said.

  “But …” David said.

  All three shook their heads. “Eleven tonight,” David finally managed. “That gives us a couple hours …”

  “It corroborates what Marietta and I found out earlier,” Louis said. “That all but forty-five of the orphans are accounted for by the Anti-Slavery Society.”

  David nodded, his eyes far away. “Louis, get the —”

  Louis Napoleon was already halfway out the door. “On it.”

  “We need to make moves and we need to do it fast,” David said. “Meet back here in an hour.”

  Magdalys turned around and walked away from the table.

  “Magdalys,” David called. “I’m not through talking to you.”

  “Give her a minute,” Cymbeline said quietly.

  “Meet back here?” Mapper gaped. “So we can —”

  “So you can tell me what plan you’ve come up with,” David said grimly.

  The Dactyl Hill Squad let a single second of silence past before jumping into action. “Mapper,” Two Step said, “let’s get mapping!”

  “Yes, sir!” Mapper called back. Amaya followed him as he started gathering papers.

  Magdalys walked out of the room and closed the door behind her.

  “Save it,” Magdalys said when Two Step appeared in the doorway. She’d just finished packing her satchel and she wasn’t interested.

  “What are you doing, Mag-D?”

  She shook her head. “And people say I don’t listen.” She brushed past him, holding back tears, and headed down the hallway.

  “Magdalys, you can’t just leave!”

  She spun around, barely breathing. “Watch me.”

  IT FELT GOOD, this clarity, and it felt terrible.

  A fierce wind flushed against Magdalys’s face as she guided her dactyl in reckless dips through the purple-and-orange clouds. Far below, cows speckled the rolling pastures, their shadows stretching toward the silo.

  She knew what she had to do. For the first time since finding out Montez was wounded, Magdalys knew what to do. The dactyl panted beneath her. She could feel its exhaustion in her own weary muscles, that heaviness a relentless clucking fuss in her mind. But she was so close.

  “Wait!” Two Step’s voice came to her over the rushing wind. She shook her head, glancing back with a frown. Kid didn’t know when to quit. And even though his dactyl was swooping wildly through the clouds, they weren’t far back. “Mr. Ballantine just told you not to come near this place!” Two Step yelled.

  “Yep.”

  “And here you are.”

  Magdalys didn’t bother answering.

  The dactyls swooped and spiraled above the bone factory en masse, just like before, and she and Two Step had to do some fancy flying to avoid collisions as they came in for rocky landings on the edge of the wall.

  The stench, growing at a steady pace as they approached, rose up suddenly to greet them like an excited puppy. And then: Yeeeeeeeoooooooorrrrrrrrrrmmmmmghhh!!!!

  “I know,” Magdalys whispered. “I’m here.” It almost sounded like it recognized her; like it was maybe glad she’d come back to visit again. Could that be?

  Ooooooooooooooghhhhrrrraaaaaahh!!! But the sorrow was still so palpable; she could almost taste it.

  The beast wanted freedom. It wanted to … She closed her eyes, ignored the rumble of nervousness she had about leaving, her cycling spiral of worry about the kidnapped orphans, the fierce nudge of Two Step’s anxiety, and her own guilt. She let the world fall away for a moment and then she saw it: wide-open skies. Clouds zooming past. The setting sun on one side and rising moon on the other. The whole world from above. Freedom.

  Magdalys turned to the dark, stench-filled pit below and whispered, “It’s time.”

  “Mags,” Two Step said. “Okay, I get that you can leave, but … don’t? Please?”

  Magdalys just stared at him. She didn’t have any words, so there was no sense in speaking.

  “We …” Two Step ran a hand over his fro. “We need you, Magdalys. The other kids need you. All of us do. I need you.”

  Something inside Magdalys felt like it was tearing in half. Was this what Montez had felt? Why he’d run off to fight a war in a whole other part of the country? Of course Magdalys wanted to stay. And of course she wanted to go. She’d never been needed before; at least, she’d never felt that way. But Montez needed her too. Or she needed him. She needed him to be okay. And this was the best way to make sure of that. The only way.

  She looked Two Step in his eyes. “Come with me.”

  For a second, he just stood there, a tear worrying the edge of his eye, and she thought maybe he’d say yes. A gentle rain splattered the silo and played tiny pings against the tin roof. Two Step shook his head. “I can’t.” He turned around, walked back to his dactyl, and took off.

  “Tell them I’m sorry,” Magdalys said, but she didn’t know if he heard her over the wind.

  The chains fell away pretty easily with a little help from the hatchet Magdalys had borrowed from the Bochinche’s storage room. And then all that was left was that tin roof, halfway covering the gaping entrance of the silo. In the darkness beneath it, something huge stirred, grunted, and then growled. The rain started falling in earnest as Magdalys heaved it aside with a clang.

  “Hey, girl,” Magdalys said. A huge head emerged from the shadows, and Magdalys could make out some of the wings and body. Majestic as she was, the poor creature’s skin looked too pale and sickly. Old scars and some festering blisters stretched along her hide. A few of her claws were chipped, and Magdalys could count the ribs running along her torso.

  Eeeeyoo? The pteranodon seemed to be posing a question for her, but Magdalys had no idea what it was.

  “Magdalys!” she yelled. “That’s my name. And I’ll call you … Stella!”

  Rooooooaggghh! Stella howled, and it felt like a yes.

  “Yes, girl,” Magdalys said. “You’re free now. Come on through.”

  The pteranodon was even bigger than Magdalys had thought she would be.

  Way bigger.

  Magdalys’s mouth fell open as the humongous beak surged out of the silo, followed by the head. And then more of the head, then the long bony crest stretching back over the wide neck. And finally, what felt like a full couple of minutes later, the pteranodon’s torso and giant wings.

  Magdalys crouched, preparing to jump. If she timed it right, she should be able to grab onto her arched back and hold tight, and then the wind would whip through her hair and they’d be off and away. Free.

  Magdalys steadied herself, legs trembling with anticipation. Not yet. The huge beast kept on going. Almost. The torso narrowed to a long, long tail.

  Magdalys watched her pass. At some point, she’d stopped crouching. Now she was just sitting.

  Arrrrrroooooooooooooooooooooogghhhh!! the pteranodon howled in Magdalys’s mind, and it sounded something like joy. The joy of sudden freedom after being kept for so long in that dank hole.

  Magdalys remembered the recoil she’d felt just a little while ago when David had mentioned going back into the orphanage’s custody. She wondered what the pteranodon had been through, what she felt like, tasting the sky for the first time in so long after only seeing glimpses of it. To be so huge and trapped by such tiny, useless creatures.

  Dactyls scattered to either side as Stella exploded into the air above the silo. Magdalys’s mouth dropped open. The pteranodon was bigger than enormous. Magdalys could still beckon her, demand a ride, or at least ask for one. Maybe the huge ptero would listen. Instead, Magdalys sat, letting the rain cascade down on her.

  Stella swooped a long, joyous circle, hooting her thanks and excitement, and then
took off into the cloud-strewn skies.

  For a long time, Magdalys watched her fly.

  BY THE TIME Magdalys stepped back into the Bochinche, she was soaked to the bone, but she felt like a tiny weight had lifted off her heart. She wouldn’t be able to go find Montez just yet, and accepting that truth was as freeing as it was sad. She had to let go of that dream, at least for now, and concentrate on the people closer to home who needed her help.

  “Mag-D!” Two Step yelled, bolting across the bar and embracing her. “You came back,” he whispered. “I knew you would!”

  “No you didn’t,” Magdalys said, but she was smiling. That hushed tone meant he hadn’t told the others that she’d been about to abandon them. “I didn’t even know I’d come back.” She hugged him back and squeezed with all her might.

  “Why you soakin’ wet, Mags?” Mapper yelled from a table in the corner. “Come help me draw up these secret plans!”

  Magdalys shook her head, still smiling, as Two Step broke into a wild dance and Sabeen came over to see what the commotion was. “You okay?” she asked, gazing up at Magdalys. “I saw Two Step leave after you and I got worried.”

  “I wasn’t,” Magdalys said, hugging Sabeen. “But I am now. Kinda.”

  “It’s time!” David called from the backroom door. “Squad report!”

  “Oh boy!” Mapper said, rolling up his papers and hopping down from the table.

  Magdalys shook her head. “Let me change out of these wet clothes so I can see what wildness you guys came up with.”

  “Now, what you got?” David said. He and Louis Napoleon pulled up chairs, spun them around, and sat backward in them. Miss Josephine and Cymbeline sat on either side of them, and all four were gazing at the complicated mess of arrows and pictures that Mapper, Two Step, Amaya, and Sabeen had scribbled over the map. Cymbeline leaned over the table like a master strategist, face scrunched up. “Looks like that time David tried to write a novel,” Louis snickered.

  “Hush, you,” David snapped.

  Mapper stood and cleared his throat. “Alright, here it is. We figure the Ocarrion is docked in New York Harbor, right? And they’ll probably have a gang of Kidnapping Club goons out and about for security on the docks, yeah? So we dactylride rooftop to rooftop down to the water, then we each hide out in one of the docked boats, and when the Ocarrion heads out to sea, we swoop in after ’em and take it over, kick all the slavers over the side and commandeer it back to the bay and turn the orphans back over to the Anti-Slavery Society and boom! Mission accomplished.”

  As all five kids waited with eager eyes, Louis and David exchanged a look, then returned their gaze to Mapper.

  “That’s not bad,” David said. “Not bad at all.”

  “I sense a big but coming,” Amaya said.

  Mapper snickered.

  “Not that kind of butt!” she snapped.

  “Look,” Louis said. “David and I are going to tear your plan apart, but not because it’s not a good plan. Because that’s what we do in the Vigilance Committee when one of us makes a plan.”

  “You shred it?” Two Step asked.

  “I mean, kinda,” David said. “But not in a mean way. It means we’re taking you seriously. Means you’re one of us.” Magdalys felt a little burst of warmth in her chest — one of us. She was glad she’d come back. “And we do it,” David continued, “because we know that during an operation, everything that might go wrong will.”

  “Plus about five hundred other things you didn’t expect to,” Cymbeline added.

  “Exactly,” David said. “And why Miss Cymbeline here knows so much about handling firearms and conducting covert ops will apparently remain a secret.”

  Cymbeline smiled in a self-satisfied kind of way. “I am but a humble actress, sir!”

  “Will remain a secret for now,” David added sharply. “In the meantime, you can help us shred the youngens’ plan, as Two Step so aptly put it.”

  “Good,” Cymbeline said. “I’ll start then. What if the boat isn’t in the harbor?”

  “Then it’s either already left,” Amaya said.

  “Or?”

  “Or it’s leaving from somewhere else,” Magdalys said.

  “Or?”

  “Or it’s not leaving at all, the note was wrong, or they changed plans,” Two Step said.

  “Good,” David and Cymbeline said at the same time.

  “So we put a guy on Riker and a guy on this Weed dude,” Mapper said. “And the guys —”

  “Or girls,” Amaya put in.

  “Or girls, or whatever, send word via minidact about their movements.”

  “Excellent,” Louis said, eyebrows raised, grin wide. “We already did that. Haven’t located Magistrate Riker yet, but Mr. Harrison Weed is currently busy having what was left of his stuff moved to a nearby apartment.”

  Two Step high-fived Magdalys and Mapper. “It wasn’t us,” Magdalys pointed out. “Credit where it’s due. Miss Josephine really made that happen.”

  “De rien,” Miss Josephine said.

  “It’s all well and good that we inconvenienced that maniac,” David said, “but the real haul from Magdalys and Mapper’s little Manhattan sojourn is the paperwork.” He gestured to the vast collage of documents pinned to the walls around them. “We’ve long suspected there was coordination amongst the international slavers in Havana and Rio and the New York pro-slavery forces. It’s called the Golden Circle, and it spans locations all across Central and South America and the Caribbean. Now it looks like we — or should I say, you all — have uncovered one of the key linchpins in that connection. Harrison Weed, who we now know is a member of a secret society called the Knights of the Golden Circle —”

  “K of the G C!” Magdalys blurted out. Everyone looked at her. “The seal that’s all over Weed’s paperwork! And Riker’s medallion!”

  “Exactly,” David said. “Weed has been communicating with shipping companies and other ‘knights,’ plantation masters and politicians mostly, all throughout the Americas. Including Riker, whose Kidnapper Club is basically a local offshoot of the Golden Circle. And it’s pretty clear that the cargo they’re all discussing is … human.”

  Magdalys shuddered. She’d known it, but still, hearing it said out loud again brought a sick feeling inside her. All those people, shoved into the bellies of ships and left to die … If Weed was coordinating with slavers, and he’d brought her and her family to New York, did that mean …

  “More than that,” David continued, “you’ve drawn a direct line connecting him to the one and only City Magistrate Richard Riker, head of the Kidnapping Club. You should be proud of yourselves.”

  General congratulating and hooting ensued. David cut it short: “But! But. What that means is, both Riker and Weed probably suspect someone’s onto them, and they probably suspect that someone is us.”

  “They’re gonna have to prove it,” Mapper said.

  Louis Napoleon stood up and shook his head. “Ah, but they’re not. They’ve never bothered proving anything before — that’s what makes them so dangerous. With an officer of the city involved, they make the law do whatever it wants for them.”

  “They certainly haven’t needed any proof to send our folks down south in chains over and over,” David said. “And they won’t be waiting for proof now either. That means we all have to be extra, extra on guard and ready for anything.”

  Everyone nodded. Magdalys noticed Two Step and Mapper had spun their chairs around and straddled them backward the way David and Louis did. She smiled inwardly. It was good to see the boys had some role models. And she was pretty sure she wanted to be exactly like Cymbeline when she grew up, except for the acting part.

  “Anything,” Cymbeline added, standing. “So the mission is this: Find the Ocarrion, and seize it. If the kidnapped orphans are already on board, we free ’em and commandeer the Ocarrion back to port.” Magdalys noticed David nodding. “If they’re not, we lay in wait, catch whoever’s bringing them red-handed, an
d bring them down to the courthouse, after freeing the orphans. We stay in touch via messenger dactyl. Any questions?”

  Magdalys raised her hand. “What’s going to happen to Miss Josephine?”

  Miss Josephine chuckled. “Oh, I will be alright, mon cherie. Monsieur Ballantine has arranged safe passage for me on a ship bound for Haiti tomorrow.” Magdalys loved how Miss Josephine pronounced the name of her homeland: Ayee-tee. On the way back from Manhattan, she’d regaled them with tales of her life in Paris, where she’d been educated, and the few memories she had of being a young girl in Port-au-Prince. Magdalys had read stories about Haiti in the papers: a free black state. One day she hoped to visit.

  “Point number two,” Cymbeline said. “What if the Ocarrion is there, but it’s fast, makes it out to sea before we can catch up?”

  “Or what if the dactyls get tired and can’t make it all the way out to wherever it is?” Louis added.

  Magdalys opened her mouth but then realized she had nothing to respond with. Neither, it seemed, did anyone else.

  David laughed. “That’s why it’s a good thing the Vigilance Committee has access to a mosasaurus.”

  Everyone, including Cymbeline and Louis, gaped at him. Some people didn’t even believe the mosasaurs existed, certainly not anywhere near New York City. They weren’t even technically dinos, as if the creatures were so huge and ridiculous they needed their own entire type of monstrosity to encompass them. And the mosasaurus — that was the biggest, meanest, toothiest, most unstoppable mosasaur there was. Magdalys was rendered speechless.

  “We do?” Louis said.

  “Yeah.” David’s brow furrowed. “Now if only we knew someone who could ride it …”

  Everyone looked at Magdalys.

  “I DON’T LIKE IT,” David said for the fifty-thousandth time since it had been decided.

  Everyone groaned. They were in a top-secret, even further back back room of the Bochinche, loading all kinds of fierce weapons into shoulder bags.