The Other Side (8 page)

Baby
follows Randon through a jagged opening in the airport roof, toward the far side of the terminal, illuminated faint red by Grackel's prone form. Fractured tiles, shattered glass, and unidentifiable debris litter the area. The old dragon opens one green eye when we land, mumbles,
It is about time,
then resumes her throaty snores.

Keith emerges from the shadows, a large-caliber rifle looped over his shoulder. He looks as if he's aged ten years since he dropped me off on Saint Matthew Island three months ago. A beard, scraggly and streaked gray, sprouts from a face wrought by fatigue.

He embraces me. “You're looking good.”

“You too,” I say, and we share forced smiles. “Oren took Allie, Keith. We haven't been able to contact her in
almost fifteen hours—”

“We can discuss this later. You must be tired.”

“We didn't fly all this way to sleep.”

“What happened? Where is everybody?” Colin asks.

“Just me and Preston for now. Come on, let's get out of the cold.”

Keith takes us to an access room that resembles a cross between an anarchist's bunker and a hacker's paradise. Gun racks and ammo cabinets occupy the left wall. Touchboards and thinscreens cover the rest. Several are set to the twenty-four-hour news stations, currently focused on mounting tension between U.S. forces and their European counterparts; a few seem to track military operations, and one large screen on the right displays a map of the U.S. similar to the one I saw in the escape crate, with a couple of key differences.

Fewer
Avoid at All Cost
locations—black pushpins—than before. The drone zone's been pushed east into Kansas, which explains the lack of drones in the area. The ruins of Denver are now part of the evacuated territories. I wish I could feel relief, but my gaze keeps coming back to the red pins that represent insurgency hideouts.

Only two remain.

“You'd be surprised how much can change in a few weeks,” Preston says from the doorway. He sets a tray with four coffee cups on a nearby table. He joins me at the map
and offers me one. “Sorry, Cosgrove, no special sauce.”

Shoulders slumped, dark blotches beneath his eyes, black hair rumpled, Preston appears even more defeated than he sounds. On the flight in, I'd prepared quite the diatribe about the emergency cell phone, but decide on a hug. He almost drops the cup. I let go and smile at his bemused expression.

Colin gestures at a screen on which soldiers and tanks are traveling across barren countryside. “The Russians have mobilized?” he asks as I sip my coffee. Definitely needs vodka.

“The Germans and the French, too.” Keith removes his rifle and places it on the gun rack. “They've given us a deadline of three weeks to abandon our bases in Europe. Full U.N. backing.”

“Three weeks? That's not enough time,” Colin says.

“It's that or war. Things are already getting pretty hostile. Another embassy got torched last night. It's not a good time to be an American.” Keith sighs. “Makes you miss the good ol' days when everyone was united against the dragons.”

“At least we weren't killing each other.” Colin grabs a cup and leans against the console. “It was a mistake to release the battle-room footage.”

“Oh, you mean footage that showed humans using dragons to kill humans?” Preston says, livening. “The world has a right to know.”

Colin waves a hand at the screen. “Haven't enough people died already, Jedi?”

“I guess we should just let the government do whatever they want, right, Sarge?”

I slump into the chair beside the portable heater as their discussion intensifies. They both seem so damn certain. A year ago, I had the world figured out, too. The government was good. Dragons were evil. I miss those days.

“What do you think?” Preston asks me at some point.

“Leave her out of this,” Colin says.

I pinch the bridge of my nose. “I don't care. I want to rescue Allie. Does anybody know where Oren's headquarters are?”

Keith massages my shoulders. “I'm sorry, Mel.”

“You have to know something.”

“We're working on it, but nothing useful right now. Our capabilities have been severely hamstrung.” Keith takes the seat beside me, runs a hand over his naked scalp. “A couple weeks ago, the Dios ambushed us when we were transferring hideouts. We've disbanded for the most part.” He indicates the touchboards. “We're running skeleton surveillance, and that's about—”

“I don't understand what this has to do with Allie,” I say.

“We thought they were after Baby. James thought it could be Allie,” Preston says.

Keith frowns at him, then gives a brief shake of his head before he can say anything else.

“That ship's sailed, Keith. I know,” I say.

Preston furrows his brow. “You know?”

“Yeah, Evelyn was in Dillingham to rub it in.” I try to get the timeline straight in my head. A month ago, James contacted me to say good-bye. Right before he defected? A couple weeks later, the Diocletians waylaid Keith and the Grunts. Shortly after, the Greens began their mental assault in search of Allie. “Was James with you when they attacked you?”

Neither of them can meet my gaze.

“He was on the other side? Why? He knew Allie and Baby were on the island.”

Keith stares into his coffee. “No, he didn't. We never told him where you were.”

My breath knots in my chest.

“After Georgetown, we were worried he'd go rogue,” Preston says, “so we kept him out of the loop. He was so angry. At the military. At the dragons. At us for not rescuing you guys sooner. I'm sorry.”

“He never asked me where we were,” I mumble. In all our conversations about being fine, he never asked. “Wouldn't he have asked? If he was after Allie, wouldn't he have asked me where we were?”

“He knew you had strict orders to stay silent. Maybe he didn't want to make you suspicious,” Colin says.

I shake my head. “Why come after you? He knew you didn't have Allie.”

“We've been running interference against them for the past several months,” Keith says.

“They came after all our groups,” Preston adds. “James probably didn't even realize it was us.”

“Dragon exposure,” Colin says. “It screws your head up.”

“That's government bullshit,” I say. Keith lays a hand on my arm, but I shake him off. “In Dillingham, Oren mentioned something to me about multichannel telepathy and Allie. Do you know what he's up to?”

“We've been trying to figure that out,” Keith says. He nods at a screen tape labeled
Drone Network
. Little black dots crawl across a white map of North America, with the heaviest concentration in the pair of drone zones, fifty-mile-wide swaths of land that enclose the evacuated territories. He points out a green blip in the evacuated territories, about a hundred miles north of Denver. “This is the first positive signature we've seen in weeks.”

Colin examines the screen. “That one's us,” he says, then explains our ruse with the drone.

“Didn't make sense,” Preston says. “Not enough bang.”

“Bang?” I ask.

“We thought maybe Oren was setting a trap. He's done it before,” Preston says. “But except for blitzing us, he's been pretty quiet for the past month. A few of his standard propaganda vids threatening retribution and mayhem, but nothing major. There couldn't be a better time, either. The military's focused on Europe, and the new conscripts aren't battle-tested. Only one reason he's gone to ground. He must be constructing his death star.”

I barely hear that last part. “They reinstituted the draft? What's the entrance age?”

Keith rises. “You guys need sleep.”

Last time, the government lowered it to fifteen. Sam's birthday was in November. He wouldn't have waited for conscription notification, either. Could already be in boot camp. Could already be at war. “Where's my brother, Keith?”

“You need sleep. We can discuss this later.”

“I'll sleep when you tell me where Sam is.”

Colin nods to Preston. “Show her.”

I gape at him. He gives me an apologetic smile, then drops his gaze.

Preston pulls a computer tablet from a cabinet.

“Put that away,” Keith says. “She doesn't need to see this.”

This? Show her? “I know you think you're all protecting
me.” I push myself out of the chair and set my mug on the table so I don't hurl it at somebody. “I've seen the way you look at me. I get it, I really do, but I will not be a victim of your sympathy. And if you stand in the way of me and my family, I'm done with you.”

Keith takes the tablet from Preston. “A couple of weeks ago, the government launched another
Kissing Dragons
spinoff called
The Frontlines
.” He angles the tablet so I can see the screen and taps the play button on a video titled “KDF—Welcome to the Suck.”

The screen remains black as a dragon roars and the crackle of fire escalates from the tablet speakers. Transitory silence is followed by breathing—quiet, quick—and the nearby clamor of tumbling rocks. The camera cap is removed to reveal a town in ruins. The view zooms in on a Green as it paws its way through a heap of rubble. A dusted sign at the heap's bottom identifies the wreckage as Kiddy Kare Preschool. The view pans up. In the distance, seen through a fissure in a building, Greens and their insurgent riders lay waste to the rest of the town.

There's a triumphant yowl, and the view returns to the heap of rubble. Risen to full extent atop the fallen preschool, gold eyes gleaming, the dragon clutches a child's lifeless body in its claw. It raises the corpse to its mouth.

“Now!” someone shouts. A half-dozen All-Blacks burst
into view. They dash forward, blasting away with their machine guns. The Green recoils under the barrage and unleashes a ball of flame that fills the screen.

When the orange haze of fire fades, the dragon lies limp and glowless atop the rubble. A soldier sits beside the Green's head, the dead child clutched in his arms. A flash of silver catches my attention. Before I can identify the source, the video shifts to dragon jets that just appeared from offscreen. They engage the remaining Greens in a dizzying firefight.

The view pans left to show the close-up of a smiling teenager wearing body armor over dragon camos. The green-and-red scales that adorn his helmet glitter in the sun. He scuttles toward the dead dragon. Three other men—no, boys—converge around him.

“You all right, newb?” the teenager calls.

The video zooms in on the soldier atop the rubble. He looks up, and it's Sam. I knew it would be, but I can't check my gasp. The Sam I left in Mason-Kline was full of mischief and laughter.

That Sam is gone.

He climbs down the rubble, kicks away some debris, and sets the body on a patch of asphalt. I think it's a girl, no older than five, but it's hard to tell because smoke obscures her face. Sam unclasps his bloodstained silver necklace and puts it around her neck.

He glances down the road, where an injured dragon has fallen. He readies his weapon, then looks back, his grimy face tight with anger. “Let's kill 'em all.”

He looses a primal scream and leads the charge forward.

As the racket of footsteps and gunfire recedes, the video hones in on the silver pendant of Saint George that dangles from the necklace Sam laid on the child's body. The screen darkens around the famed slayer until nothing remains but his silver spear and the crimson-touched dragon pinned beneath it.

“Join us for the premiere of
The Frontlines
,” says Simon Montpellier, the narrator for all the military's propaganda shows. “Watch boys become men, and men become heroes.”

The video ends.

“Rewind it,” I say, glad my voice comes out strong.

“Melissa, I don't think . . .”

I snatch the tablet from Keith and return to the portion of the clip where I'd seen that flash of silver. I pause and zoom in. I'd hoped it was the Saint George pendant reflecting the sunlight, prayed Sam didn't share our family curse, but the starburst of light appears at the corner between his helmet and his close-cropped red hair, where there should be nothing but receding darkness.

The tablet winces in my grip. I set it down. “How long have you known?”

“They aired the first episode a few weeks ago. Storm-trooper boot camp,” Preston says. “Sam and Alpha Squad just went on their first salvo. Don't worry, Cosgrove, it's mostly fake.”

Mostly fake, but not that glint of silver.

“If Oren's been off the radar, it must be. Your brother's safe, Melissa,” Colin says.

“Safe?” I trace the CENSIR line along my head. Colin reaches for me, but I shrug away. I look at Keith. “Do you have a way to contact my uncle?”

“He's an FBI analyst, Melissa. He won't have access to military or BoDA databases.”

“I remember him telling Sam that he knew some D-men.” Back when Sam wanted to interview a BoDA agent for a “dream job” class project. “He can point me in the right direction.”

Preston shakes his head. “They'll be monitoring his phone lines.”

Plan B. “You got a car?”

“Your uncle's actions are already under intense scrutiny.” Keith doesn't say it, but I know he means because of me. “It's too dangerous, Mel. You need to lay low until we figure things out.”

“I've figured things out, Keith. Allie's gone silent. My brother's trapped in some military prison camp being
tortured and exploited just like I was. I can't sit here and lay low. Help me, or get out of my way.”

“There is one thing you could do that could help them both,” Preston says.

“We discussed this,” Keith says. “Absolutely not. I don't want her involved.”