Talker 25 Read online

  Keith shuts the crate. Their voices fade.

  Gretchen says she’s going to get me dinner. I tell her I’ll live, that she should help her friends, which it’s obvious she’s eager to do. She thanks me, presses a bottle of painkillers into my palm, indicates the location of the urinal bottle. On her way out the wall door, she looks back.

  “You look a lot like her, you know?”

  I almost choke on the pills. She meant it as a compliment, but it feels more like a knife to the heart. She must have thought I’d already figured it out. Maybe I avoided the truth because today’s already been hard enough, but I can’t avoid it any longer.

  My mother was an insurgent, too.

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  ..................................................................

  10

  The distance between sympathizer and insurgent isn’t that far, I guess, but I never fathomed that Mom could be anything but Mom, doing her army work, protesting cruelty against dragons behind Dad’s back. But Mom never did anything halfway.

  “You don’t have any more secrets up your sleeve, do you?” I ask Keith when he returns to check on me. Things have calmed down somewhat in the cave—I guess everybody’s asleep or licking their wounds—but I’m at full boil. “Dad’s not an insurgent, too, is he? Were you and Mom—”

  “No, Melissa. I know this is a lot to deal with, but—”

  “A lot to deal with? I’m God knows where, surrounded by dragons, lying in a—” I throw my arms up to indicate the crate/hospital room, and pain explodes in my shoulder. “Whatever the hell this thing is. I’ve been shot. The government thinks I’m a traitor. Runs in the family, evidently. And Dad . . .”

  I lose it completely, dissolving into heaves and sobs. Keith holds me, rocks me, whispers words of comfort that don’t make a damn bit of difference. At some point, the crate door opens. Somebody enters, but I can’t make out anything more than a fuzzy silhouette.

  When I’m too tired to cry anymore, Keith lets me go with a kiss to the forehead. Over his shoulder, I see James in the corner of the crate, looking anywhere but at me. He’s carrying a glass of water and an MRE packet. I can think of only one reason why he brought me dinner.

  I wipe my eyes and glare at Keith. “You’re leaving?”

  “I need to head back to Fort Riley for a debrief,” Keith says. “James—”

  “Take me with you,” I say. “I have to see Dad. Please.”

  “It’s too dangerous. You need to lay low until things settle down. I’ll let you know how he’s doing when I come back tomorrow night. It’s the best I can do. Baekjul boolgool, right?”

  “Right,” I mumble.

  He says something to James I can’t hear, then he’s gone.

  “What’s that mean? Baekjul boolgool?” James asks.

  “Indomitable spirit. Some crap I learned in tae kwon do.”

  “You do martial arts?”

  “Not anymore.” Not since Mom died.

  “Well, I’ve got something that’ll make you as right as rain,” he says with sarcastic cheer. He sits and waves the MRE packet at me. “Beef ravioli. Yum.”

  MREs (meal, ready to eat), stocked in dragon shelters and army depots across the world, come in multiple varieties. The best ones taste like cardboard, the worst like wet cardboard. The beef ravioli’s on the soggy end of the spectrum, but I am hungry.

  “How’s Preston?” I ask between bites.

  “He cracked his head pretty good when Syren made a sharp about-face to avoid a missile.” He smiles. “He’s already embellishing. Listen to him tell it, and Syren was doing loop-to-loops.”

  “Syren’s his dragon?”

  “Or Preston’s her human,” James says with a little laugh. “They’re not horses, Melissa.”

  “No, they’re definitely not.”

  “They’re not monsters either.”

  “That’s what my mother thought. Look how that turned out.” I take a couple of deep breaths. “Maybe they’re not the evil monsters the media makes them out to be, but they are dangerous.”

  James regards my wounded shoulder with an exaggerated eyebrow raise. “They’re not the only ones. If you talk to them, you’ll understand.”

  “Can all of you talk to dragons?”

  He looks down. “I’m one of the few left in our group anymore.”

  He’s thinking of his mother, I suppose.

  “My mom?” I ask, hoping I’m wrong.

  “Yeah . . . she taught me a lot.”

  Welcome to the cave, Melissa. Your dad broke his neck and your mother was an insurgent. P.S. She didn’t just ride dragons when she was away on fake army missions, she also talked to them.

  I look over James’s shoulder, toward the mouth of the cave. The scarlet glow obscures most of the stars, but the brightest shine through. I find Sirius.

  Why didn’t she tell me? Sam was the one who wanted to exterminate the dragons, not me. I never hated them until they killed her. I would have understood.

  Maybe she knew I wouldn’t. Not really. When she sent me her first protest picture—from a march around the Pentagon to protest the government’s research methods—it brightened my week. I was sharing a secret with her. But later, when I understood more, I begged her to stop. I was worried about her job, but I was more worried about myself. What would everyone at school think if it got out that my mom was a sign-carrying, dragon-loving nutjob?

  She made her choice; now I have to make mine. I can hide away, build up thicker walls, pretend that everything’s going to be okay, or . . .

  “I want to learn,” I tell James.

  “Keith doesn’t want you involved in this. Anyway, you’re injured. You need to rest.”

  “If I rest, I’m gonna go crazy,” I say. He starts to argue. “Please. It’s the least you could do after kidnapping me.”

  He smiles at that, eventually nods. “Tomorrow morning, if you’re better.” On his way out, he pauses. “Hope you’re not afraid of heights.”

  “Why?” I say, sure I won’t like the answer.

  “Before you can really talk to a dragon, you’ve got to fly one.”

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  11

  Icy Pegasi flap through my dreams, the cold cutting into me with insistent sharpness until I wake. When I open my eyes, there’s a silver dragon at the foot of my cot, its head crammed halfway into the crate. Crystalline blue eyes regard me with eagerness. Ice drips from the thing’s snout onto the blanket.

  Squinting against its brightness, shivering against its chill, and praying it doesn’t think I’m breakfast, I scramble to the rear wall of the crate. I shoo it verbally and mentally, but either it doesn’t understand or doesn’t care. It just sniffs the air, perhaps trying to decide whether I’m edible.

  “She wanted to see you,” James says. With the quickest glance, I see that he’s crouched in the crate corner.

  “Call it off,” I plead.

  “You can’t be scared of them, Melissa.”

  Perhaps emboldened by his words, the Silver stretches its neck forward until it’s but a foot from me. Frost collects on my arms.

  “Get away!”

  The Silver retreats with a tremendous lurch, bursting through the crate. Fragments of wood fountain everywhere. I cover my head. James throws himself over me. As I grimace against the pain in my shoulder, I hear him give a couple of muffled grunts. I think he’s hurt, maybe stabbed by a big splinter, but then I realize the lunatic’s laughing.

  I shove him away. Half of the crate’s obliterated. The Silver, looking quite proud of itself, has withdrawn to a spot between two slumbering reds on the other side of the cave. People hurry toward us, concern shifting to amusement when they see we’re all right. They disperse, several of them clapping; somebody requests an encore.


  James flourishes a bow I might find endearing if my shoulder weren’t throbbing—never mind the fact that I’m sprinkled in glitter made of sawdust and ice. He turns to me with a sheepish smile. “That didn’t go as expected. You okay?”

  Breathing warmth into my fingers, I stare at him like he’s a few neurons short. “What exactly did you expect? Who the hell wakes somebody up with a dragon?”

  “She really wanted to see you.” He surveys the destruction with pursed lips and gives a mock sigh of disappointment. “Children.”

  “The thing needs to be on a leash.”

  “You’ll hurt her feelings,” James says.

  “Good. Maybe she’ll learn boundaries.”

  “She doesn’t understand stuff like that yet. You should be thrilled, Melissa. She likes you.”

  “You and I have far different definitions for thrilled. I’m thrilled she didn’t eat me, if that counts for anything.”

  “You’ve got to stop looking at them like that,” James says. “They’re as foreign as foreign can be, and at first glance, terrifying. I understand.”

  “If you understand, maybe you should have eased me into it.”

  “I believe in the deep-end approach.”

  “Throw me in, see if I can swim? Seriously?”

  He waves a hand at what used to be the crate wall. “Think about it. After this, flying one won’t seem so bad.”

  I can’t help but laugh. “Asshole.”

  “On my good days.” He gives me a once-over that reminds me I’m in a flimsy hospital gown. “As much as I like the ensemble, I think we might want to get you into something a little warmer for your first flight.”

  “My shoulder’s too stiff,” I say as he clears debris from a footlocker bolted to the floor.

  “Good thing we’re flying tandem then.” He props open the lid to reveal a miniature thrift store of worn clothes, musty books, and random baubles. He retrieves a pair of jeans and tosses them to me.

  “I still don’t see how this is necessary,” I say. “What’s flying have to do with talking to them?”

  “Nothing and everything.” He chucks a basketball toward the Silver. The dragon bounds after it. The floor trembles. I’m monitoring the stalactites overhead when James says, “Cartha told me that you think I’m cute.”

  Heat flushes my cheeks. I fold my arms over my chest and glare at him. “Who the heck is Cartha?”

  “The dragon you called Old Man Blue.” He holds up a hand. “I’m not trying to make you uncomfortable. Strike that, I am, but not because I care whether you think that. Not that I don’t care.”

  Frowning, he returns his attention to the footlocker. “We’re kind of like antennae, you and I. If the dragons know our frequency, they can talk to us. That’s baseline. But if we’re in a state of upheaval—scared, angry, that sort of thing—the signal’s amplified and your thoughts become visible. Dragons become a lot more interested in you.”

  I think of Dragon Hill. “The watching sensation.”

  He nods. “Ghost eyes.”

  “So you give me a dragon wake-up call and want me to go fly around the block a few times to get over my fear?”

  “The thing is, most dragons won’t violate your thoughts if they respect you.” He digs out a sweatshirt, a jacket, and a pair of thick-rimmed goggles. “Show them you can handle yourself in the sky, it gives you some street cred. Or cloud cred, I guess.”

  I change in another crate, which belongs to Gretchen and a dark-haired woman sedated on a cot. Hooked up to machines, she’s recovering from her own gunshot wound. While I slip into my new clothes, Gretchen offers advice. Hold on tight, recognize storm clouds, stay within the perimeter, listen to James, don’t disrespect your dragon, hold on tight (I get this one—quite unnecessarily—at least three more times) . . .

  Dressed, I meet James outside the crate. The Silver’s with him, frozen basketball between her lips. She drops it at my feet, looks at me expectantly.

  I squat down slowly, my gaze never leaving the Silver. She tracks me with growing impatience. I grab the ball and hurl it. Off she goes. Wings pulled tight to her body, she barrels around insurgents and dragons with no concern in the world but retrieving that ball. On the list of things I thought I’d never do, playing fetch with a dragon ranks right near the top.

  “It’s really a child, isn’t it?” I say.

  “A baby, a beautiful baby,” James says as the Silver returns with the ball.

  “What about the others?”

  “We saved some of them, but she’s the only one big enough to fly yet.”

  He steers me toward a group of insurgents eating breakfast around a fire. As we walk, James plays tour guide. The crates that line the back of the cave are for the medics, those with serious injuries, and guests. He points out one in the middle. “That’s mine.”

  “You’re a medic?”

  “No. I’m kind of grounded. Keith has gotten particularly paternal with me.”

  Over there, supply crates—food, water, drugs. We take a detour past a clothesline, a washbasin, and a couple of bathtubs to an alcove ringed with porta potties. We pass dragon-riding equipment and a couple medics tending the reds’ injuries.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way,” I say, “but the reds don’t seem to like people.”

  “Most dragons aren’t fond of humans.”

  “So why exactly do you help them?”

  James regards me with a fierce expression. “Everyone thinks they’re giant cockroaches who need to be exterminated.” He taps his temple. “But they hurt and suffer as much as we do.”

  “They’re the ones that showed up out of nowhere and attacked us,” I remind him.

  “You condemn an entire species for the actions of a few.”

  “A few?”

  He waves his hands at the reds. “Once the war started, were they supposed to just sit back and hope the military knew who the good ones were?”

  “I don’t know, James.” I gesture toward a nearby pallet of weapons: machine guns, rocket launchers, and several objects I don’t recognize. “I’m just tired of all this.”

  “It’s not war for them. It’s survival.”

  “Protect the children,” I whisper. Old Man Blue and her army were trying to stop the military from murdering the children. But how many people did they kill in the process? I shake my head. “You can’t do it this way, James.”

  “We have no choice.”

  I bite my lip before I say something I’ll regret, which happened all too often in my arguments with Mom. She believed there were no bad guys, only victims. I believed she was crazy, told her so more than once. Then she died, and I didn’t care about being right anymore.

  We finally reach the campfire. After a whirlwind of introductions, James grabs MREs from a storage container and we sit on folding chairs beside a heavy guy with a friendly face who’s busy examining a long, narrow bullet. I think his name’s Howard.

  “Tracker?” James asks.

  “New model.” He points at a microscopic hole in the casing. “They put the tracer in there. Pulled it out of Myra. We found two dozen more in the others.”

  “Deactivated?” James asks.

  “For sure,” Howard says. He grins. “We sent some out with the morning crew.”

  “We run sentry shifts to secure our perimeter,” James says to me.

  “Except this time they’re going to go a bit farther,” Howard says. “Activate these suckers and drop some false trails. Enough shop talk. We have more important matters to discuss.”

  “No, Howard. We talked about this,” James says.

  “You talked. I did not listen.” Howard raises his voice. “Grunts, may I please have your attention.” Everybody quiets. “As you know, we have a newbie in our ranks. And all newb Grunts must play our game.”

  “Loki run! Loki run!” the crowd chants.

  “She’s a guest, not a recruit,” James says.

  Ignoring him, Howard holds up three fingers. “It’s sim
ple, Melissa. You must tell us three things about yourself. Two must be the truth, and the third must be a lie.” He waves an arm at the others gathered about the fire. “If we choose correctly, you make a lap around the cave in your skivvies.”

  “She’s not doing this,” James says. “She’s injured.”

  Jeers answer him. Three quarters of the people around the fire are wounded. Across the way, a guy with a prosthetic left leg hobbles to his feet, strips off his shirt, and makes a loop around the fire. He plops back onto his rock to vivacious applause.

  Everyone turns to me. Take away the dragons, the crazy outfits, the slings and bandages, and we could be off at summer camp somewhere. Or at one of Trish’s parties.

  It’s normal wrapped in ridiculous, or maybe ridiculous wrapped in normal. Maybe that’s the way of it, the way to stay sane in this insane world. Or maybe it’s just a way to get a girl to take off her clothes.

  “You don’t have to do this,” James says as the silence intensifies.

  I look around the cave, at the unfamiliar faces of these riders—many of them my age—at the dozen Reds who sure as hell seem like monsters, and at the Silver hunkered behind us, who seems nothing like a monster at all.

  Whether I like it or not, this could be home for a while.

  “What do I get if I win?” I ask. The crowd cheers.

  “You get to make one of us do a Loki run,” Howard says.

  “I don’t think so. If I win, everybody has to.”

  After a discussion, they grudgingly agree.

  Before I give my answers, Howard has me write them down on a piece of paper, indicating which is the lie. He tucks it in his pocket and opens the floor to me.

  “Truth number one: when I was ten, I won the Northern Virginia tae kwon do championship for my age division.” I demonstrate a side kick.

  “Sign her up!” somebody says.

  “That’s a big region. She’d have to be cream of the cream to win. Lie!” someone else calls.