Talker 25 (26 page)

The other teams meander over.

“I got a Benjamin on Tim!” somebody shouts.

“Double on Lester!”

The pace picks up, a race with eager spectators cheering them on. Tim wins. The other A-Bs swarm the slab. They grab hold of Vestia’s attached wing. Twisting, tugging, wrenching, they tear it free, along with a good length of bone.

Lester wipes the blood from his gloves, pulls a camera from his pocket, pushes it at me.

“Rot in hell.”

Evelyn bounds up beside me. “I’ll do it.”

After removing their goggles and masks, the soldiers gather beneath Vestia’s wings, some with hands beneath chins and mile-wide grins, others making peace signs and goofy faces. In the middle, blood pumping down her scales onto the slab, glow fading fast, Vestia continues to smile.

And if she can smile through all this . . .

I pull back my filtration mask, suck in a lungful of frigid air, and loose the loudest roar I’ve got.

A sharp jolt from my CENSIR drops me to my knees, a brilliant explosion of light blinds me, a wave of heat washes over me. At first I think it’s the CENSIR’s doing—maybe a malfunction—but then somebody cries, “I can’t see!” One of the soldiers posing beneath Vestia’s wing, I think.

The light fades. The cold returns.

“A death nova,” Fourteen says, excited.

Soldiers curse at me. Patch delivers a few more sharp shocks.

As I blink back the black spots in my vision, I hear Vestia’s voice in my head. She sounds a universe away. “Just because the wind fights you, it does not mean you are flying the wrong direction. Thank you, Melissa Callahan.”

Her voice plays from the tablet speakers, monotonous, before turning to static. I smile. Vestia has moved on to the next tomorrow.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

After
Patch announces that both the girls’ and boys’ barracks will be on heat reduction through the night, he sends me to the principal’s office.

“You’ve had an interesting few weeks here, Twenty-Five,” the colonel says from behind his desk. “You have proven inadequate in the call center and troublesome in the battle room. Your willfulness has cost me the life of one of my pilots and the skills of one of my finest talkers. And now I understand that you’ve caused a disruption in the ER on your very first day.”

“What do you want from me, Colonel?”

“Tell me, if you were in my position, what would you do?”

I don’t answer.

Colonel Hanks cups his chin, rubs his lower lip with his finger. “Major Alderson is convinced that our family would be better off if we rectified your behavior. Maybe he’s right. Families need to get along, otherwise families get hurt.”

“I’m doing the best I can. If that’s not good enough, recondition me. But leave my family out of this.”

“We’re not the ones who put them in this situation. Who knows where their allegiances lie these days? We must be vigilant, Twenty-Five. Surely you understand that?”

“What do you want?”

His eyes narrow. “You’re asking the wrong question, Twenty-Five.”

I stare at him.

“You should be asking, ‘How do I make myself a valuable member of this community?’”

I roll my eyes.

“I have been lenient with you, but do not make the mistake of thinking yourself irreplaceable.”

He turns on a thinscreen, taps at his tablet. I expect another terror video, maybe a doctor holding a syringe at my father’s throat or something. What pops up isn’t much better.

A flashy, silver-themed website. Dedicated to me, or the TV version of me. The site already has over a hundred thousand followers.

And based on the comment wall, almost everyone sympathizes with my plight. Most because they think I’m crazy, though a few admire me for flying a dragon or sticking it to the government or for just being “hot.”

I almost laugh.

The colonel turns on another screen, which displays an overtanned man with a face stiff from too much Botox. His smile makes me think of Evelyn.

“Hello, Melissa. I’m Hector, the director of
Kissing Dragons
. First off, well done. You absolutely smashed the ratings. . . . We’d like you to reprise your role in a crossover show with the fab four. A redemption episode.”

I almost cry. “Seriously?”

“It’ll afford you some time off from your other responsibilities,” the colonel says, as if he’s doing me a favor. “Who knows? If things go well, maybe we can figure out a way to better accommodate your talents.”

I do laugh. “Quite a coincidence, don’t you think?”

“What’s that?”

“Vestia.”

“Oh?”

“Oh.” I smile at him.

He smiles at me. “I am sorry you had to witness that.”

Super sorry. Asshole. I shrug. “What about my family?”

I intended the question for the colonel, but Hector’s the
one who responds. “We hope to incorporate your father into the episode.”

I look to the colonel for the answer I want, but he only says, “Consider this your opportunity to make things right.”

“Right?”

“A lot of these people blame you, Melissa, for what happened,” Hector says.

I gasp. “You’re doing the episode on Mason-Kline?”

Hector nods. “It’s where your journey to evil began. It’s where your journey to redemption will end.” He lays out details. I stop listening.

If the situation weren’t so ridiculously horrible, I’d laugh. Agree to this charade and suffer the wrath of Mason-Kline, never mind helping to fund the military. Or decline, and hope that my decision doesn’t result in my family’s demise.

“I need some time to think about it.” I need forever.

“This isn’t open for discussion,” the colonel says.

“Then you better go ahead and recondition me.”

“We’ll let you know, Hector.” Scowling, Colonel Hanks shuts off the screen. He checks his tablet, then picks up his phone. “Major, who do you have on the Duckworth assignment? . . . Hold off on that. I want Twenty-Five to handle it. . . . Yes, Major, I’m sure.”

The colonel hangs up. “I’ve got another battle-room mission for you. It’s simple but important. I know you won’t
disappoint us.”

Elvin Duckworth, the ranking senator from Alaska—the only state untouched by dragon flames for the past decade—is the sole member on the armed services committee who voted against the bill to exterminate dragons. In and of itself, not a big deal, but since he’s the chair of the military research subcommittee, Major Alderson and his superiors fear the senator’s decision will lead to a cut in funding.

I’m not sure why the major tells me this. I guess to justify what he wants me to do, or maybe just to pass the time while we wait for mission clearance. Duckworth’s nephew, a thirty-something councilman from Anchorage, is on vacation in Jamaica.

Which means he’s ripe for the torching.

An easy assignment, at least according to Major Alderson. All I need to do is fly my dragon into Montego Bay, a coastal resort town, and instruct it to open fire when Alderson gives the order. Get in, get out. A few deaths, for sure, but that’s the cost of victory.

“We are green for mission go.” Lester’s voice echoes through the battle room. It’s practically empty in here. Just me, Lester, and the major.

Alderson hands me a pair of those wraparound sunglasses. “Enable communication and activate VR-HUD.”

On the lenses, a herky-jerky video appears—from the camera attached to my dragon assassin, a Green named Almac. He’s inside one of those compartments. Animal remains, dragon crap, and something I’m guessing is vomit cover half the floor.

“Initiate communication.”

My CENSIR loosens. “Hello, Almac.”

The dragon scans the compartment, looking for something. Me, I suppose. “What do you want, human? Where is Lorena?”

“I’m in charge today,” I say. “You ready?”

“To kill humans? Always.”

Grimacing, I give a thumbs-up.

“Release the hound,” the major says.

The compartment hatch opens from the top, revealing an expanse of gray sky. Almac launches himself toward the clouds, then glances back. The compartment bobs up and down with the roll of the ocean.

“Discard the package,” the major orders. Seconds later, the evidence is gone. “Twenty-Five, have your dragon bank left to a due south heading.”

“Almac, bank left . . . level out.”

“Where are the humans, human? I want to kill humans.” He scans the darkening skyline, searches the seemingly endless ocean. “Where are they? Where is my fire?”

“He’s getting angry,” I say to the major.

“It’s thirty minutes before landfall. Tell him to keep his temper in check until then.”

Almac continues to grumble, but stays on course with an occasional shock and reassurances of the slaughter to come. I tell myself that this is nothing more than a video game, that the bloodthirsty dragon and the wicked major are characters in some twisted plot; I must carry out this mission with them to keep my brother and father safe. No do-overs. No extra lives.

Besides, if I don’t take out the senator’s nephew, someone else will. That’s the piece of this puzzle that doesn’t fit. “Why aren’t you attacking the senator himself?”

“
We
are not attacking Senator Duckworth because he’s a powerful man with powerful connections,” the major says. “It would be in our interest to gain his allegiance.”

I grunt. “So you’re going to show him how dangerous the dragons are.”

“He already knows how dangerous they are. He just doesn’t consider them much of a threat anymore. It’s out of sight, out of mind for him. We want to open his eyes.”

“You ever wonder if what you’re doing is wrong?”

I expect him to reprimand me, but instead he says, “Every day, Twenty-Five. That’s what makes us different. You believe you’ve got the world figured out, you—”

“I don’t have anything figured out,” I say with a bitter laugh. “Less makes sense today than it did yesterday. But I know what you’re doing is wrong. What
we’re
doing
,
I guess, but
we
only help you because
we
have little choice. You do.”

“The world’s a dark place. Sacrifices must be made for the greater good. I don’t always agree with them, and I don’t often like them, but every atrocity you think we commit here, I see as a means to an end that gets us closer to the light at the end of this dragon-riddled tunnel.”

“A brave new world, huh?”

“No, Twenty-Five, a peaceful one. Let’s focus now.
We
have work to do.”

In short order we reach land, veer south toward rows of brightly colored villas and homes . . . none of them black. Guess these people never worried about dragons. Not until today.

“Activate Almac’s fire,” the major says, and my heart jumps into my throat. “Tell him to open fire, Twenty-Five. . . . Open fire, Twenty-five . . . think about your family.”

“Almac, your fire’s active,” I whisper.

“It’s about time, human,” he says, then goes silent because I guess he can’t talk and incinerate at the same time.

At the major’s orders, I direct Almac lower, until we’re skimming the rooftops. We create an ocean of flame behind us that consumes everything. People spill into the streets.
My attempt to convince myself that this is just a video game collapses when some of the victims look over their shoulders. I see the stark terror in their faces; they know they’re going to die. And then they do. I force myself to watch the first few melt into the dragon’s fire, to implant the memory of my horrible crime.

I close my eyes for the rest of it, ordering Almac to shift course at the major’s discretion. The dragon doesn’t talk while he works, but I hear a funny noise in my head, something between a growl and a purr.

“Target neutralized,” a soldier says.

“Contact the
Gerald Ford
and request DJ countermeasures,” Major Alderson says.

“Dragon jets have been launched, Major. Anticipate intercept in two minutes.”

“Set Twenty-Five to inhibit,” Major Alderson says.

I open my eyes. Half of Montego Bay still burns. The rest is charred ash. Soon the resort town will be nothing but black death. Almac spins around. From the distance, five dragon jets zoom toward him. “I can hear the invisible monsters! Where are they, human? Where are—”

My CENSIR warms and tightens; the line goes dead. The dragon sweeps his head back and forth to create an arc of fire in front of him. Useless. The jets disappear off the video, but I can see them on the radar, yellow icons closing
in on the green target.

Almac dies fast, in a blur of gunfire and missiles. Tumbling head over tail, he crashes into the jungle. His collar explodes; the video blacks out.

Major Alderson jerks the video glasses from my face. “Good job, Twenty-Five,” he says in the same sardonic way he congratulated me for killing Claire. I don’t know why he’s not happy. We destroyed the town. We destroyed everything.

“I didn’t do anything. . . . I did nothing,” I mumble. Nothing at all.

“You don’t know much about dragon talking, do you?”

“More than I’d like. What’s your point?”

“Greens feed on talker emotion. It fuels them, literally. We figured Almac would destroy half the town before he ran out of juice, but he obliterated everything and caused far more collateral damage than was necessary because you couldn’t get it together.”

“Don’t you blame this on me! I did everything you told me. You could have launched those jets at any time. Turned on his fire restrictor—”

“That would not have been within the scope of reality.” He waves Lester over. “Sergeant, remove Twenty-Five from my battle room. Take her back to the barracks and let her think about what she’s done.”

That evening, as I get drunk with Lorena, we watch a news report about an unprecedented attack on the heretofore dragon-free nation of Jamaica. The Green that perpetrated the massacre was shot down by dragon jets launched from a nearby aircraft carrier. With the help of the U.S. government, the Caribbean islands are now scrambling to institute a mass blackout policy.