Talker 25 (7 page)

I collide with something, or maybe it collides with me. I laugh but can’t be sure because I can’t hear, and this makes me laugh more. It suddenly seems quite funny, quite ridiculous, all of this. Terrible, but hilarious how bad things have gone, like one of Sam’s twisted dreams.

Yes, it must be, because this can’t be real. Why would my vision be narrowing on that hot farmboy in the hospital gown? Why would the numbness spreading through my shoulder feel so wonderful? I glance down. Red everywhere.
My favorite shirt ruined by blood. Mine? Must be a dream because I think I’d remember being shot.

Now I’m falling and spinning, a drunk ballerina on a shifting tectonic stage. The dream boy catches me in his arms, scoops me up. I blink, and we’re in the remnants of the corridor. Medical equipment everywhere. A couple bodies, too. Everything vibrating to the earth’s rumble.

The tent’s disintegrating, the ground’s splitting into a chasm. Dream boy jumps out of the way as a gurney goes tumbling by. He leaps from perch to precarious perch, somehow dodging the arsenal of growing debris.

And then we’re out in the open, where All-Blacks are retreating toward us, hiding behind broken homes and abandoned vehicles to fire their weapons at the spectacular blue wall emerging from Mason-Kline’s smoky center. The dragons move like a tornado, blind and wild and full of destruction. At the front is Old Man Blue.

“What’s he doing?”

“She’s protecting the children,” James says. His voice sounds a mile away.

I look up at him and see a red dragon swooping toward us. At least a dozen more reds plunge in and out of the clouds. Jets follow close behind. Explosions and geysers of flame illuminate the heavens.

A-Bs turn their weapons on the diving dragon. It roasts
them. As the Red comes closer, I spot the rider atop it. He aims his rocket launcher at a unit of A-Bs and fires.

The dragon hovers a few feet overhead, its airplane wide wings flapping a slow beat. A rope ladder unrolls down its side and comes to a stop a few inches from our heads. James tightens his hold on me and loops his other arm around the ladder’s bottom rung. He yanks once. We spin about, and then we’re gliding from the fiery devastation that’s overtaken Mason-Kline.

I lift my head, close my eyes, and let the rushing wind carry me from this nightmare. It cascades over me, its soft touch tickling my skin. I unwrap my arms from the farmboy’s neck and arch back. I am a bird skimming across a lake. My wing tips skip along the water’s surface.

But the ride ends too soon, and when I open my eyes, the lake has become a cornfield, and I am nothing but a wingless girl in a bloody blue shirt. The Red lies a dozen yards away, munching on cornstalks.

The rider shimmies down the ladder, hurries over. Wearing a black trench coat, a fitted black cap with a chin strap, massive goggles, thick leather gloves, and a red bandana over an oxygen mask, he resembles a cross between a mad scientist and a stagecoach bandit.

He looks familiar—a sudden dizziness takes me, and a burst of agony ignites in my shoulder. My legs give out.

I start to fall, but James catches me. A black halo forms around his head, and soon there’s nothing but him and me. He says something. I try to tell him I can’t hear, but words won’t come. He presses a finger to my lips.

Then another set of arms is beneath me, and a new face hovers in my closing tunnel of sight. The goggles are on his cap now, greasy tufts of hair protruding everywhere. Preston Williams’s beady eyes gaze into mine.

“This day’s been totally Jedi, huh, Callahan?” he says, and then everything goes dark.

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I
awaken to groans, growls, and the dull buzz of a generator. I’m on a cot in some sort of large crate. A low-power light hangs in the corner, a red glow seeps through the gaps between slats. I lurch up. Pain burns through my shoulder, and I scream.

I’m in a hospital gown; my gunshot wound’s bandaged. An IV in my hand connects to a bag of clear liquid. Maybe Preston dropped me off at the clinic, which must have lost power in the attack, hence the generator. Maybe I’m in a crate because there wasn’t enough room in the building. Maybe that red glow and those growls belong to downed dragons awaiting transport to the Fort Riley dragattoir.

I hold on to those maybes as long as I can, but any hope that I’m somewhere normal disintegrates when the wall in
front of me swings back on a hinge. I’m in a stadium of a cave filled with reds and their riders.

A middle-aged woman steps inside, introduces herself as Gretchen. She takes my pulse, unwinds the bandage around my shoulder. I barely notice, my attention fixed on the surreal world beyond the crate.

Most of the dragons lie slumped on the right side of the cave. Several leak blood through gauze-wrapped injuries; a few nurse bullet-riddled wings; one licks the stump of a lost tail. Rows of cots occupied by bruised and bloodied humans form a square on the opposite side of the cave. One of the men checking on the wounded comes our way.

Keith.

I blink several times, sure that I’m mistaken.

“You’re an insurgent,” I mumble as he enters the crate.

He shuts the wall behind him. “How are you feeling?”

Confused. Betrayed.

“No signs of infection,” Gretchen says. I look at her as she redresses my wound. Wrinkles and scars adorn an already weathered face. A livid gash, recently stitched, runs the length of her forehead.

I chew at my lip. “Dad . . . Sam. Are they okay?”

“Your brother’s fine,” Keith says. “He’s with your aunt and uncle in Michigan.”

His words take awhile to register. “Why isn’t he with
Dad?”

“Your father was injured pretty badly.” Keith lays a hand on my good shoulder. I shrink away. “He broke his neck, Melissa. He went into surgery before I left.”

“I need to see him,” I say, reaching for the IV in my hand.

Gretchen intervenes. “You need to rest.”

I glare at him. “Don’t suppose I can call?”

Keith shakes his head. “We’re in the evac territories. Even if we got a signal, it’d be too dangerous.”

Too dangerous? I almost laugh. “When can I leave?”

“You’re hurt,” he says. “And you’re flagged in the government system.”

“It was just a prank—” I can’t believe this. “Preston set me up. And you did, too. Why?”

“That wasn’t us.”

“Why are you doing this, Keith? I thought you were my friend.”

“I am your friend. I—”

A thunderous rumble interrupts him. The crate trembles; the glow through the slats intensifies. Mostly Red, but some Silver, too. More dragons. I can feel them milling about, hear their deep-throated groans and higher-pitched mewls.

The rumble subsides, enough for me to hear people someone shouting for a stretcher. Keith glances at me.

“Go, I’m fine.” I’m not sure that’s true. I’m not sure I’ll
ever be fine again.

Keith nods, opens the crate.

James is striding toward us, cast in the brilliant light of the silver dragon that prances after him. I cringe. The thing glows twice as bright as any other dragon in the cave.

A dozen more reds crowd the floor. Most are dim. Several are bleeding. One flickers like a faulty lightbulb.

Their riders aren’t in much better shape. Several stagger down their ladders; a few lie hunched over, too injured to dismount. The insurgents offer aid with the calm proficiency of people well practiced in the art of war. Or at least its aftermath.

A pair of men rush by, Preston laid out on the stretcher they carry. Blood streaks his face, some of it fresh. His eyes are closed, but I see him give a weak thumbs-up to somebody before he disappears from view.

Keith hugs James. “How’d it go?”

“We got the kids at Rez Three into the evac tunnels, but the army met us at Four,” James says. He hooks at thumb at the Silver. “We were able to recover her. The others returned to Cave Eight to resupply . . .”

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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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.”

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