Voices of Dragons

13

The next day at dawn, three dragons perched on a cliff ledge less than a mile from the border. The sentinels stood upright, wings tucked close, faces turned toward human lands, barely moving. One of them would shift a hind claw or stretch its neck for a moment. One was a deep ocean blue, shimmering to black and gray as the light shifted. One was green, the color of a cartoon dragon, like you’d expect a dragon to be, except the green turned lighter and lighter, almost becoming a creamy yellow on its legs and belly. The third was mottled brown, camouflaged like a lizard. CNN kept a box in the upper right corner of its broadcast showing the scene, just in case they did something. News crews returned and took over Silver River. Network commentators couldn’t say enough.

Kay kept watching the dragons, noticing how they were different from Artegal—this one a little stouter, this one’s tail a little shorter, this one larger. She wondered at how many different colors there were. In Dracopolis, the dragons had been drawn in at least a dozen colors, every pigment the artist had. Did a dragon inherit its color from its parents? Was it random? What did a dragon’s color say about it, if anything?

Jon called her early. “I’m not going to school. Mom and Dad want me to stay home. Just in case.”

“Just in case of what?” Kay said.

“I don’t know.” He sounded frustrated, not actually excited about getting a day off school. “It’s like they think it’s the end of the world or something.”

Maybe it was. But the dragons were just sitting there, watching. “Maybe the dragons just want to remind us they’re out there.”

“What do your parents say?”

“Mom’s pretty stressed out. She left really early. She started getting calls as soon as the dragons showed up.”

“I’m sorry I won’t be there. I really wanted to see you.”

In case it was the end of the world, she thought. So they could be together. But surely things couldn’t be that bad.

“If they were going to do something, they’d have done it already,” she said, trying to convince herself.

“Maybe we can get together this evening, assuming my parents let me out of the house.”

Kay’s father hadn’t left yet. They had breakfast together—juice, toast, cereal—and she told him about Jon’s call.

“So, you going to let me stay home?” she finished.

Grinning, her father explained. “If the sheriff’s daughter doesn’t go to school, people will think the worst. It’ll be mass hysteria.”

She hadn’t looked at it like that. It was a little unfair, in her opinion. She pouted. “I’m not that important.”

Jack Wyatt got a funny look on his face, a kind of half smile, furrowed brow, and sad gaze. It lasted only a moment. It was gone before Kay could ask what was wrong.

Then he looked into his cereal bowl with his usual amused expression. “I guess you lost the parent lottery. Sorry, kiddo.”

“It shouldn’t matter that I’m your daughter. I should be able to do what I want to. Right?” Like speed on the highway, like stay out late with her boyfriend…

“Kay, after high school you can move away to where nobody knows you’re the sheriff’s daughter. Until then, you’re stuck with it. And if being the sheriff’s daughter means that maybe you can make a difference, like showing people there’s nothing to get in a panic over, don’t you think you ought to do it?”

This was a long-running argument, the unfairness of being Jack Wyatt’s daughter. If she really hated it that much, she supposed she could have run away from home. But she didn’t hate it that much.

She sighed. “I’ll just have to go out and be a role model then, won’t I?”

“That’s the spirit,” he said, smiling.

A lot of kids weren’t at school. Their parents apparently thought it was the end of the world. In first period, a third of the seats were empty, but class went on as usual.

Tam showed up.

Kay said, “You couldn’t convince your mom it was the end of the world?”

“I didn’t think of it,” she grumbled. “I bet I could have. And you?”

Kay took on a fake-official tone of voice. “As the sheriff’s daughter, I’m a role model to the community.” She rolled her eyes.

“Wow. Sorry. So that’s why you never speed.”

In the cafeteria at lunchtime, the librarian had brought in a TV on a cart and turned it to the news. The room was quieter than usual, and not just because so many people were gone. Conversation was subdued.

The three dragons hadn’t moved.

Someone in a uniform came on the TV. Labeled General somebody-or-other, he’d just arrived at Malmstrom Air Force Base from the Pentagon to deal with the crisis. Kay couldn’t hear what he said.

The news didn’t say anything about photographs showing someone riding a dragon. Despite her mother’s fears, the pictures hadn’t leaked yet.

“All those drills we do,” Tam said, watching Kay watch the TV, “I never thought we might actually have to do it for real.”

Kay shook her head, tried to think positive. “We’re not there yet.”

For days, the dragon sentinels didn’t move. They might have been statues perched on the mountainside. Some people wondered if they were really the same dragons, if maybe new ones arrived to stand watch while no one was looking. But someone was looking at them constantly, and they didn’t move, didn’t eat. Dragons, somebody on one of the news shows said, were timeless. They’d reappeared after World War II, just as they’d always been, unchanging. They could sit on that mountain forever, looking down on Silver River. Kay noticed that much of what people said about dragons on TV wasn’t based on reality, but on old stories, half-baked legends, and old cultural memories rather than real knowledge. She kept wanting to argue with people.

The military issued a statement supposedly explaining the new jet and why it had crossed the border, and the international coalition issued a statement advising caution regarding the border, without outright condemning what had happened. The dragon territory border on the Taymyr Peninsula in Siberia had remained quiet. There was a press conference, which Kay watched live on TV because her mother was there and called, telling her to watch. Her mom sounded agitated on the phone—more so than usual—but she wouldn’t tell Kay what was wrong and hung up quickly.

The guy behind the microphone was almost a stereotype: broad shoulders, square jaw, balding, with a hawkish, hooded gaze. He wore a blue air force uniform decked out with insignia. GENERAL MORGAN H. BRANIGAN, the TV caption said. The Pentagon guy who’d arrived a few days ago to make everything better.

For the first five minutes, he read from a written statement explaining the new jet: an experimental fighter called the F-22, designed for maneuverability and speed, exceeding all expectations, and so on. What he didn’t say, but what was clear, was that this was a jet sixty years in the making, a plane specifically designed to be able to hold its own in flight against dragons. His staff presented visuals: drawings, a poster showing simple schematics, a video.

Then, with the might of the air force’s new tool displayed behind him, the general announced, “An aircraft this unique requires special consideration. We would hope to negotiate with our neighbors about the use of portions of this territory—portions they are not using—in order to fully test our new aircraft.”

So, the plane accidentally crossed the border because it needed more room to practice? Kay might have bought it if the guy didn’t look like he wanted a war.

The general stopped talking, and the reporters shouted questions that he didn’t answer. Kay spotted her mother off to the side, arms crossed, looking surly. Her pantsuit was rumpled, and Kay wondered when was the last time anyone had done laundry. The stress must have been just killing her.

Everyone made it home for dinner that night. Kay’s mother was furious. She went through the motions of making food—pasta again—but slammed the fridge door, cupboard doors, and pots on the stove. Kay made a salad—poured it out of the bag and into a bowl, really—and tried to stay out of the way.

“They’re not telling us everything,” her mother said.

“It looks to me like they’re poking a wasp nest to see what comes out,” said Dad, as he sat at the table and skimmed the newspaper.

Mom dropped the bag of pasta on the counter and put her hands on her hips. “That’s the problem. The military doesn’t think they’re going to respond. They don’t think the dragons are actually going to do anything, no matter what the coalition says about it.”

“And what do you think?” Dad said.

“I’m not paid to think, apparently,” Mom said, and slammed an empty jar of sauce into the trash.

When they were all finally sitting around the table with food on their plates, Dad asked Kay how school was, and for once she rambled on about classes and grades, eager to change the subject until her mother calmed down.

Kay knew she was getting only half the story. She knew the dragons were talking about this as well, and she was desperate to talk to Artegal about it, call him up on the cell phone, tell him what was going on here. Although, it occurred to her that someone like General Branigan would call that spying.

She and her father cleaned up while her mom went to take a shower and lie down. She hadn’t gotten much sleep over the last couple of days, and Jack quietly urged her out of the kitchen. She touched Kay’s shoulder as she passed, as if needing the contact for reassurance or for balance.

The only useful thing Kay could do was load the dishwasher, so she did.

Her father was usually laid-back. It was hard to read him. But there was a tension in the room, as if he were worried. Kay wondered what he was thinking and didn’t know how to ask. By way of observation, she said, “She’s really upset.”

He was sealing leftovers into plastic tubs. He didn’t look up but smiled his wry, thin-lipped smile. The small-town sheriff smile, as she thought of it. Like he’d give the richest guy in town—maybe the Hollywood star who owned a ranch twenty miles south—just before writing him a speeding ticket.

“She’s upset because the military is kind of telling her that her job doesn’t matter anymore,” he said. “The military’s snubbing the bureau and the coalition.”

It made sense, because her mom’s whole job was to protect the border, and this jet had crossed it as if it weren’t there, and wanted to keep crossing it.

“She’s just tired,” Dad added, and he patted Kay’s shoulder, too. Rather than comforting her, the gestures made her more worried. This wasn’t normal, and nothing was the way it should be.

The news channels got tired of showing the same footage of the dragons not doing anything, though the image still enthralled Kay. She found herself staring at it, moving closer to the TV to see it better, waiting, hoping the reptilian statues would do something. She wondered what they were thinking, what they felt about the human town they gazed over.

But the channels cut away to do what they called in-depth reporting. Instant history they used to fill time, showing mini documentaries and historical film clips, reviewing the background that had led to this moment. Kay had seen a lot of this in school, in history class. History classes at Silver River High maybe spent a little more time on the subject than schools in other places. It was history that lived within view, every day.

Kay remembered one of the old film clips from a documentary—the first footage of the dragons’ return, after they’d faded into myth hundreds of years before. Black-and-white, scratchy, shaky, the footage hardly seemed real. It showed dragons in Anchorage, Alaska, right after the war. Two of them, as large as airplanes, flew back and forth over the city, mouths open, heads up. The film didn’t have sound, but clearly, they were screaming. No one had known where they came from. Later, people speculated that they must have been hibernating in the far north for hundreds of years. Anchorage was just the first place with any kind of population they arrived at. No one believed it at first. The war had just finished, so when civil air defense spotted large figures swooping in, dark shapes against the sky, they thought of Japanese fighters. But as they came closer, it was clear the figures had long tails that curled and waved, and translucent wings that stretched behind long, slender fingers. The two of them landed on the mucky coast that lined the city, roared in what had to be anger, and spat flames from gaping, fang-filled mouths. They set fire to a section of the city. The weathered wood buildings burned quickly. No one was killed.

Then they flew away before the army could respond. The planes tried to follow them, but the dragons flew faster.

No one believed the reports until more dragons were spotted, flying down the Pacific coast to Vancouver, Seattle, San Francisco, and west to the Soviet Union, Korea, Japan. They were seen in Siberia, Norway, Iceland. Dozens of them.

All the aircraft involved in World War II were still on alert, and they confronted what was seen as a new threat. There were battles, violent skirmishes over London, Tokyo, Seattle. Then after a week, the dragons stopped attacking and fled the aircraft instead. Some so-called experts speculated that the dragons were surprised to find that people could now fly, and that the two sides were now evenly matched.

The so-called experts were often medieval scholars and mythology experts who had studied the stories and lore of dragons, most of it so old it was assumed to be fiction. People had forgotten.

The Silver River Treaty came about when three dragons landed in Washington, D.C., London, and Moscow, asking to negotiate a peace. That was another shock, learning that dragons could speak English, Russian, and even Icelandic. They asked to have their own territories, and to be left alone. They were even willing to take uninhabited regions, far to the north, if it included a portion of the mountains in North America. They loved the mountains.

The human governments appointed delegates. It took a year of negotiations and serious economic incentives to the Soviet Union, Canada, and the United States, who were being asked to cede most of the territories. The treaty was established and was named for the town where the U.S. bureau was formed to enforce the human side of the treaty in the Rockies. A Soviet version of the bureau existed on the Taymyr Peninsula in Siberia. Humans and dragons had been at peace for over sixty years.

Now the talking-head commentators on TV were saying it could never have lasted more than that.

Newsreel footage and a few recordings of the Silver River negotiations made up most of what modern agencies knew about dragon diplomacy. Only a few of the people who had been at those negotiations were still alive. While people like Kay’s mother had been trained to deal with dragons, none of them had any experience. No one knew how to negotiate with the dragons further, because, after the Silver River Treaty, the monsters retreated and never spoke to anyone again.

Still licking its wounds from World War II, humanity had been unprepared. The creatures were supposed to be myths, legends, something invented by the unenlightened to explain the odd dinosaur fossil. Even after the horrors of the war, of the Holocaust, of atomic weapons, no one had been prepared for the dragons that rose from a long sleep in the earth.

It had been clear that the two sides could annihilate each other. The new weapons, machine guns, and high explosives could kill dragons when little else in human history had succeeded. But the dragons still had their fire and their sheer size, speed, agility. Kill one, and another would burn a city to the ground in revenge. A continuing war between the two species meant destruction for both, so they’d reached the compromise.

People asked: Dragons lived long lives, so were any of the ones involved in the original treaty negotiation still alive? Why didn’t they try to talk as they had before? Didn’t they remember? Or did they not care? Did they want to fight as well?

The pundits kept saying that no one knew how to talk to the dragons; most of the people who’d been alive then were now dead. If the dragons didn’t want to talk, they said, the humans had no choice but to defend themselves. But Kay knew they were wrong.

She knew how to talk to at least one of them, if only she dared tell anyone. And if only she could be sure she and Artegal would see each other again.

It was early when the jet, the F-22, flew out again. Kay was in the parking lot at school locking up her Jeep when a roar boomed over the town. She couldn’t see the border or the dragon sentinels from where she was, but she followed the jet’s sound to that direction. She spotted a contrail, but the jet was already gone, headed toward the border.

Everyone outside the school had stopped to stare at the northern sky, knowing what was happening.

Kay heard the first-period warning bell ring, but she didn’t care. She ran to the cafeteria, hoping the librarian still had the TV out and still had it turned to the news. She wanted to yell, What’s happening? Is anything happening? There was already a crowd of teachers and students gathered around the TV at the front of the big room.

Kay peered over a dozen heads to see the screen. The sound was turned up loud enough that she could hear easily. A reporter was talking over video footage of the three dragons across the border, the same scene they’d been watching for days now. The man sounded excited and spoke too quickly.

“…ten minutes ago. It’s presumed to be the F-22 jet fighter described at yesterday’s press conference. It was traveling very fast, and it passed, I don’t know, it must have passed within a mile of the dragons that have been stationed within view of Silver River for several days now. It continued on and is now out of sight. We’re still waiting for some reaction from them. And—what’s happening? I’m trying to talk to someone at the location….”

But those watching the live video could see what was happening without the chatty commentary. The dragons—the mottled one first, then the green, then the blue—roused themselves. They shook their heads, stretched their necks as if waking from a sleep—had they really been asleep all that time? Turning their pointed snouts to the sky, they spread their wings wide and launched. They seemed to fall off the rock gracefully, like divers. Then their wide wings caught the air, and they sailed, one after the other, spinning into the sky. They were big, bigger than the jet, even. But their flight seemed to take little effort. Air bladders, biologists said. Maybe even filled with helium, the only way to keep such bulk aloft. They flew after the jet. Sunlight shimmered off their scales.

They were so beautiful.

She felt a hand on her back and turned, startled. Jon was at school today. He glanced at her then returned to watching the TV.

They were all thinking, What will happen now?

“You okay?” Jon asked.

“Yeah, just a second.” Kay pulled out her cell phone and called her mother. They weren’t supposed to use their phones during class hours, but none of the adults stopped her. In fact, a few of the teachers and kids watched her anxiously. Small town—they knew who her parents were.

She wandered a few paces and turned her back to them to try to get some privacy.

Her mother didn’t even say hello. “Kay, are you okay, is everything okay?”

“I was going to ask you that,” she said. “I’ve been watching the news at school.”

“I don’t know anything. Malmstrom Air Force Base isn’t returning calls. Honey, I have a call waiting on the other line. I only took this call because it was you. If I find out anything I can tell you, I’ll call, I promise.”

“Okay, Mom. Thanks. Be careful, okay?” That was a stupid thing to say—her mother wasn’t actually doing anything dangerous except talking to bureaucrats.

“I love you,” her mother said, and clicked off the line.

She turned to the eager faces looking back at her and shook her head. “My mom doesn’t know anything. Sorry.”

Now, the scene on the TV screen was empty. No jet, no dragons, nothing happening. The news repeated video of the jet speeding past, the diamond-shaped craft flying at low level, close to the mountain where the dragons sat, wagging back and forth as if to tease them. Then the reporter came on-screen, his face a determined blank, and started talking, saying little in particular.

Students and teachers drifted away. Kay didn’t know what to think. If anything was going to happen, it would happen soon. Maybe they’d hear the alarm, and maybe it would be for real this time.

Then again, maybe the military was right. Maybe the dragons wouldn’t do anything. Nobody had any way of knowing. Kay just about decided then and there to go over the border that afternoon, on the chance that Artegal may be there.

She sneaked into first period late. The teacher gave her a look, but didn’t say anything. Kay pretended to pay attention and not worry.

But that afternoon, Kay’s mother called her. Kay had left her phone on and took the call in class. Math this time, and Mr. Kelly gave her a dirty look, but Kay said, “It’s my mom,” and ducked into the hall.

“Hi, Mom?” she said, leaning against the wall in the hallway.

“Kay? Kay, I want you to go home right now. Go home and stay there. I need to know where you are.”

Somehow this was worse than the siren, worse than the drills, worse than thinking about the worst that could happen. Kay had never heard such concern, almost panic, in her mother’s voice.

“What happened? What’s going on?”

She took a deep breath, a tense pause, and said, “Three more jets crossed the border.”

“Why?” Kay said, confused. It was the first thing she thought. It made no sense. Not unless they really were trying to start a war.

Mom didn’t bother answering. “Until we know what’s happening, I want you to go home.”

“School’s not out for another hour.”

“I know, but I need you at home. If anyone tries to stop you, have them call me.”

“But what about Dad? Dad said that if I stayed home people would panic—”

“I’ve talked to him, and he agrees with me.”

Kay hadn’t really been scared until then. “Okay. Okay, I’m going right now.” They hung up.

She went back to class. Her face burned, because she felt like everyone was watching her. She stepped carefully, as if the floor were made of glass. Tam looked at her, brows raised, questioning. Kay shook her head and gathered up her books and things.

Her voice seemed small when she turned to Mr. Kelly. “I have to go.”

The teacher called after her, but she ducked out before anyone could ask any questions and ran out to the parking lot.

The skies above Silver River were clear.