“I guess,” Toussaint said. “But I don’t like it.”
“You don’t like anything,” Briggs said. “It’s your whole style.”
“What are we looking at?” Magdalys asked, coming up beside her brother and gazing out over the water.
“There,” Montez said, pointing off to the side a little, where a tiny light flickered against the darkness in the distance. “It’s the signal fire.”
“Gear up,” Wolfgang said. “We don’t know what we’re gonna find when we reach the shore.”
They glided gently toward the flame, guns loaded, cocked, and pointed over the water. Magdalys realized it was a bonfire. She could make out a few figures standing around it, and the towering forms of dinos in the darkness around them.
“These better be our contacts,” Wolfgang said. “Or we’re fried.”
“Ain’t no such thing as fried,” Redd scoffed. “If they ain’t them, we turn around and head back. Maybe take some of ’em out on the way if they try anything cute.”
“¡Oye!” someone called from the ocean below. Everyone turned their guns toward the man’s voice. “¡No me maten!”
“He said not to kill him,” Montez said. “¿Quién eres?” he called.
The man had slipped up close to them on the back of an armored plesiosaur. He stood in its saddle and held on to the dino’s long, slender neck with one hand, waved with the other. “¡Soy Ernesto Gael Ocampo Monserrat del Ejército Nacional! ¡Bienvenidos a México!”
Everyone looked at Montez. “Uh, he says welcome to Mexico. I think he’s one of the good guys.”
“I don’t even know what good guys means anymore,” Magdalys muttered. She wished she’d paid more attention when Montez had tried to teach her Spanish a few years ago. It seemed like such a faraway language now, but it was part of her, one way or another. She’d learn one day.
“We the good guys,” Redd said. “Which means we gotta watch each other’s backs.”
“Hit him with the passcode Parker gave us,” Wolfgang instructed.
“¿Dónde está el cuerpo de John Brown?” Montez called.
There was a brief pause, and then, in struggling English, Ernesto Gael Ocampo Monserrat yelled, “A-moldering en su grave!”
Magdalys saw more plesiosaur necks rise from the water around them. The dinos had approached underwater because they were riderless. They were there to bring them to shore. She glanced at Wolfgang. “Do you want me to hop on Grappler and get a feel for what’s out there?”
He shook his head. “There’s no way to do that without making it look like we’re planning an attack. Everyone’s on edge right now, and we don’t want to give them any more reason not to trust us. They had the code, so we don’t have any move but to trust ’em. Plus, we outnumbered. Redd?”
“Yes, sir?”
“I want you to stay on board Phoebe here and drop an anchor somewhere. We’ll send you a microdactyl when we’re ready to go.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Magdalys wished he’d be with them, but she knew there was a good chance they’d have to make a hasty exit.
“Let’s move out.”
A GROUP OF FIGURES awaited them at the shore. Magdalys couldn’t tell if the dinos were still there; the night seemed impossibly dark. Tall shapes loomed near the horizon, but she wasn’t sure if they were trees, or sauropod necks, or something else entirely.
“¡Apúrense, apúrense!” someone called from the shore, and the figures began scurrying about, their weapons glinting with the light of the campfire.
“Uh … everything okay?” she asked.
Montez cocked his head. “I think so? Hard to tell.”
The plesios slid forward on the surf and then, one by one, the Louisiana 9th hopped off and made their way to the shore.
The cold ocean water shocked its way through Magdalys’s system like a splash of lightning. She had a carbine holstered on her hip, a dagger in her boot, and a backpack full of supplies. She still felt wildly unprepared and vulnerable. They could be mowed down at any moment, she realized. And no one would ever know what had happened to them.
“So,” a gruff voice said as they climbed out of the waves onto the beach, “this is the help that the generous General Grant has deemed us worthy of, eh?”
Magdalys blinked up at the tall, mustached man standing before them with his hands on his hips. On either side, bedraggled soldiers looked around warily, cradling their rifles.
She gathered herself and stepped forward. “I’m Private Magdalys Roca of the Louisiana 9th, a newly created special division of soldiers and dinowarriors. We’ve been sent to —”
“Dinowarriors!” the man spat. “We ask for help and these idiotas in Washington send a bunch of …” He paused, whatever word he was about to say dying on his lips as all seven members of the Louisiana 9th stepped up beside Magdalys, their expressions promising a bloody international conflict. “… a tiny battalion of soldiers and a child.”
“Two children,” Mapper amended helpfully.
“And who exactly,” Wolfgang said, stepping past Magdalys and throwing some growl into his voice, “are you to condescend to a group of soldiers who have put everything, including their very lives and the country they fight for, at risk to help salvage your cause?”
For a moment, the two men glared at each other, their faces just inches apart. Anyone could fire a shot at any moment, Magdalys thought, and we’d all be toast.
“General Manuel Vicente Zalaka,” the man said finally, and then, with an exaggerated sneer and a curt bow: “A su servicio.”
“Well,” Wolfgang started.
“And our cause does not need salvaging, thank you very much, but how very typical of you to think you could ride in and save the day, mm?”
“We have intel for President Juárez,” Magdalys said. “There’s a plan to destroy your entire army.”
“Oh?” Zalaka seethed. “Tell me something I don’t know, child! We’ve been hiding in these mountains for over a year, trading potshots with the French Imperialistas and their false emperor, Maximilian. We defeated one of the greatest armies in the world at Puebla, and we’re wanted in every French-controlled state of México. Of course there’s a plan to destroy us!”
“No,” Mapper said. “Like a real plan. One that will work.”
“Did a white man with bright red hair pass through your camps?” Magdalys asked.
“¡El gringo colorado!” someone said.
Zalaka shot her a fierce glare. “What if he did?”
She stepped in front of Wolfgang, who still was staring bullets at Zalaka. “That man was Earl Shamus Dawson Drek, a Knight of the Golden Circle. He tried to join up with you guys, didn’t he?”
“¡Claro que sí!” someone else yelled.
“¡El gringuito colorado!” another agreed.
“The Knights are trying to set up a slave state across all the Americas. An Imperial victory would allow them to sweep upward from here and crush our army between theirs and the Confederates. Drek is one of their first-rate dinomasters. He’s going to reroute an entire cluster of migrating T. rexes to stampede through your forces and wipe you out!”
Zalaka was staring at her, looking like if he clenched his jaw any tighter it might shatter. “Ocampo.”
“Mande, mi general.”
“¿Qué pasó con este gringuito colorado, eh?”
“Se desapareció ayer, mi general.”
“He said he disappeared yesterday,” Mapper informed everyone. Everyone groaned.
“I know you don’t like strangers coming in and telling you what to do,” Magdalys said. “I wouldn’t either. And there’s a lot we don’t know about your war. I get that. But we’re both in the middle of wars right now, and it’s about to become one big war. And when it does, it’ll be one that we lose if we’re caught off guard and don’t join forces. We need to work together.” She realized she was out of breath and didn’t know why. “I can stop Drek. I might be the only person who can stop him
.” She almost believed it herself. Part of her did, maybe. But Lafarge’s voice kept echoing through her, reminding her of all the things she didn’t know.
“How?” Zalaka demanded.
“I can do what he does with dinos. And I can do it better.”
“We already have dinowra —”
“I’m not talking about regular dinowrangling,” she said firmly. “This is different. This is something you’ve never seen before.”
He held his icy gaze on her, still sneering.
“We need,” she said again, as if somehow he would agree just on the sheer force of her willpower, “to work together.”
The small band of soldiers had gathered closer as she spoke, all of them staring with wide eyes at this young, hardheaded girl in their midst. Magdalys was pretty sure if anyone demanded she prove her prowess with dinowrangling, she would explode. It was a fair thing to ask; she’d just had it with showing off. She was tired and about to face imminent death again, and she could barely be bothered with yet another hotheaded general who wanted to stand in her way.
Ever so slightly, Zalaka’s face slackened. Then he nodded. “Break camp and load their gear on the brachys, compadres,” he barked, without taking his eyes off Magdalys. Then, quieter: “I do not fully understand or believe you. But I will take you to see the president.”
THE SKY GREW purple and then gray as this strange caravan of soldiers and pack dinos rumbled along a winding dusty path between looming mountains and rock formations. The Mexican soldiers rode scutosaurs, a thick-bodied, flat-snouted beast that stomped along evenly on four flabby legs, glancing around with beady eyes and an alarmingly small head for such a stocky frame. They didn’t move very fast, but those fiercely armored flanks looked like they could take more than a few direct hits without much toll, and a head-on collision with such a beast would not go well for the other guy.
Magdalys and the rest of the 9th rode one of the four brachys that had been brought in the expectation of a much larger landing party.
Zalaka, who had found no end of things to complain about (“we would have had use for these other brachys, you know … if! your little president had decided we were worth more than a meager landing party!”), stood at the front of the saddle and delivered a brief, testy roundup of the upheaval in Mexico.
The Imperial Army had shown up at the tail end of a brutal civil war, in which President Juárez and his liberal forces had routed a coalition of conservatives and church supporters. The remnants of the coalition had regrouped in Europe and gone to Napoleon III for support, swearing they’d back any despot he wanted to put into place over Mexico. (Zalaka had scrunched up his face and spat something nasty over the side of the brachy at this point of the story.) Napoleon sent an Austrian duke, Maximilian, to run things, and the Imperials had marched on the city of Puebla.
But Juárez’s army had been ready for them, and their scutosaur-mounted shock troops rammed the Imperials with a surprise full-frontal assault and smashed them away with one desperate charge. Zalaka seemed to come alive with the memories of that warm May afternoon. The world hadn’t seen a major world power crushed like that since the Haitians had overrun the French and decimated the first Napoleon’s army. Everyone would remember that day for ages to come, etc. etc.
“But?” Montez asked, breaking Zalaka from his excitable jibbering.
The general’s face soured. “But they regrouped. Napoleon sent more troops. They got better supplies. They marched on us again, and this time they shattered our front line of shock troops.” He shook his head, scowling. “Puebla fell. We had to evacuate the capital. Juárez sent Porfirio Díaz to hold the south and marched with us up here to open a new front along the northern border….” His voice trailed off.
“And?”
“Pues nada.” Zalaka shrugged. “We have been here ever since.”
Magdalys was pretty sure there was something the general wasn’t saying. His back had gotten very straight, and he gazed off toward where the sun had just begun to peek over the mountaintops. “We will be triumphant,” he said quietly. “It is God’s will. And God has sent us our great presidente to assure us of victory.”
Who was this legendary Juárez? And what was the general hiding?
“What is your strategy, General Zalaka?” Wolfgang asked.
The general raised his eyebrows. “¿Estrategy? Heh, Colonel Wolfgang, my friend, our estrategy is to win!”
“I feel like that ain’t it,” Mapper said, but his voice was clipped by the sudden hooting of brachys.
“Ah, we have arrived,” Zalaka said with satisfaction. “Let’s see what our honorable presidente decides to do with you, hm?”
The caravan wound downhill around a narrow path surrounded by boulders. They came out to an open area shielded by steep, dust-covered hills on all sides — a perfect little hideaway.
“You don’t need help, huh?” Wolfgang shook his head. “No offense, General Zalaka, but that’s not what it looks like to me.”
Soldiers stood scattered around the valley below. Almost all of them were limping or missing arms and legs. Some had bandages wrapped around their heads. Their uniforms bore the bloodstains of more than a few epic, terrible clashes. Some scutosaurs lingered at the far edge of the campsite, along with a couple knuckleheads and a small squad of microdacts. The dinos looked about as worn and busted as the soldiers.
“How many you figure?” Briggs said, nudging Magdalys.
She shook her head. “Two hundred, two fifty tops?”
“It’s just under three, but I can see why you think that.”
“General Zalaka,” Wolfgang said. “This isn’t an army, it’s an infirmary. These men are in no condition to fight.”
“Half of them can barely stand up,” Toussaint added.
The general whirled on them. “You Americans don’t know what it means to fight against impossible odds and win. We did it once, we —”
“Excuse me?” Briggs said, standing to his full bulky six feet and looking extra mean. “I don’t think I heard you over the sound of us overcoming slavery.”
“Hey, hey, hey,” Wolfgang said, getting between them.
“You don’t know the meaning of —”
“General Zalaka.” The voice was quiet, serene even. And it came from above them. “Why are you being rude to our guests?”
The general’s eyes went wide. Above them? Everyone looked up. A few feet away a man in a suit sat astride a dactyl.
But it was the dactyl Magdalys was staring at.
“Beans?” Mapper said.
Zalaka rounded on him. “Don’t you dare address nuestro presidente as anything other than —”
“He wasn’t talking to your president,” Montez snapped. “He was talking to his dactyl.”
Presidente. Everything had happened so fast, Magdalys hadn’t had time to take in the man riding Beans. He had dark brown skin, intense brown eyes, and a tightly pressed mouth that curved ever so slightly into a smile. His thin hair lay flat against his head, parted sharply to one side. The president of Mexico was a brown man. He was Indigenous. She remembered someone saying he was Zapotecan, but she hadn’t known what that meant.
But … how? How could a country right next to the biggest slaver state in the world have a democratically elected brown-skinned man as its leader? While the US was fighting a war of extermination against Native people, Mexico had elected one president.
“General Zalaka!” President Juárez said again, his soft voice suddenly sharp as a gunshot. “You disgrace yourself with your rudeness. I have already been alerted to how you’ve treated these fine soldiers. I wonder, sometimes, how you would treat me if I wasn’t your president, hm?”
“¡No, Señor Presidente!” Zalaka stood up straight and snapped a salute. “I would never …”
“I have been waiting for the arrival of these men, but especially this powerful young girl they travel with.” Juárez looked directly at Magdalys, smiled. “You are the one named Magdalys Roca?�
�
He said her name slowly, but not because he was trying to pronounce it right like almost everyone else. He said it like it was a melody he wanted to hear each note of.
She nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“I apologize for the behavior of my top general.”
“How did you know they were coming, mi presidente?” Zalaka asked anxiously. “Did you foresee it? In a dream?”
The president of Mexico rolled his eyes. “I foresaw it in the words written in the message I received. Now help, please, make the others feel at home as much as possible in our humble campsite, General Zalaka. I would speak alone with the young Magdalys.”
THE SUN WAS still low in the sky when Magdalys and President Juárez took Beans as high as he could go over the ranging sierras and wide plains of Tamaulipas. It threw long shadows across fields of waving mesquite grass and cypress and palmetto forests.
Magdalys had a million questions, but she wasn’t sure where to start, or even if she was supposed to speak first.
“It is a very sweet thing, to ride a pterodactyl,” Juárez said.
Magdalys smiled. “It’s one of the greatest joys I know.”
“It is important … to find joy.” He sighed. “Even in difficult times.”
“I sent Beans to scope out the territory,” Magdalys said. “How did you end up on him?”
Juárez let out a rumbling chuckle. “I was on my morning walk, partway up one of the hills around our camp, and he landed right beside me. I reached out my hand and stroked the top of his head, just the way the pteros back home liked. They also love it when you give them scritches underneath the jaw, you know. And then he let me climb up! I was very surprised.”
A wild idea occurred to Magdalys, but she didn’t know how to even ask. “Are you … Can you …”
“Am I special like you, Magdalys?” He shook his head, still chuckling. “I only wish. No, the dinos don’t care what I am thinking. But my parents had a number of them on the farm I grew up on, and I have always loved them deeply. They seem noble, to me. Nobler than us humans, somehow.”
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