She slacks off the whip, but I can tell she doesn’t want to.
By the time we reach the first camp, the sky is deep purple and everyone except Singh is already there. Amelia jumps off the cart and stretches gratefully.
“Go into the station and get the dragons some straw to sleep on,” I tell her. “I’ll mix up their food.”
I unpack the kerosene stove and mix up some gruel from water, meat, and kibble. The dragons greedily shove their muzzles into their dishes, splashing gruel all over the salty ground in their eagerness. Soon they’re licking the bowls clean. But there’s no bedding.
“Amelia, where’s that straw?” I call.
Amelia pops her head out of the cart. She’s holding her backpack. “Oh—I’ll get it in a minute.”
“Get it now. The more time we waste, the more tired the dragons will be tomorrow.”
She sighs and trudges into the station.
When the dragons are bedded down and we’re drinking our soup, I tell her, “You have to remember this is a real race, not a joyride. Every minute matters. Anything we do could be the difference between winning and losing.”
Amelia sighs and rolls her eyes. “I’m sorry I’m not perfect.”
I try to keep the frustration out of my voice. “I don’t expect you to be perfect. But you do want to win, don’t you?”
“Sure I do,” says Amelia. But her voice is distracted.
My heart aches at the distance that has grown between us. When she was a toddler, she rolled around on the floor with the new hatchlings. At six, she was dressing up our guirs and bringing them to show and tell. By twelve she was breeding her own clutch of dragons.
She threw herself into the project, memorizing family trees and poring over books of dragon biology. But when they hatched, I discovered that she’d done the unthinkable and crossed two different lineages, allowing dangerous recessive genes come to the surface. The hatchlings came out too small, top-heavy, burdened with overlarge wings that got in their way but couldn’t carry them aloft. I yelled at Amelia when I saw what she’d done. I shouldn’t have, but those were real living creatures she’d condemned to suffer.
The kind thing would have been to euthanize them on the spot, but Amelia begged me not to. She loved the poor creatures and she promised to be responsible for them. They still live at the far end of the stable. Amelia visits them every day.
The dragon-breeding incident opened a rift between us that has never closed. Amelia used to tell me everything, but now she’s cagey and spends all her time by herself. I never know what she’s up to. And it’s only getting worse.
Even now, in the middle of her first race, all she can pay attention to is that backpack. She has it on her lap.
“What’s in there, anyway?” I ask.
Amelia’s face colors a little. Reluctantly she pulls out a battered, once-white teddy bear.
I smile. “Johnny Bear! I haven’t seen him in a while.”
“I just wanted to bring him. For luck or whatever.”
I chuckle. “You’ll fit right in with the other drivers. I hear Freedman won’t race without his lucky underwear.”
That gets a snicker out of her.
It’s a warm night, and the dragons snuffle soothingly in their sleep around us. As we crawl into our sleeping bags, I feel I’ve made the right choice in bringing Amelia along.
The next day, the sun comes out in force. Heat shimmers over the sparkling surface of the salt flat and our shirts stick to our backs. Only the dragons are delighted. Their blood running hot, they charge ahead, kicking up clumps of salt.
By now the teams are so spread out that I can’t see any more than a faint trail of white dust far in the distance. All around us is still. The sharp basalt peaks of the Blacktooth Range jut up to our left while to our right, the crystalline plain seems to extend forever. The team needs no direction and I fall into a trance, listening to the clack of the wheels and the jingle of the harnesses.
A piercing whistle cuts through the air.
I stiffen and look around. “Did you hear that?”
Amelia nods. The whistle is how dragon drivers let each other know there’s danger. It isn’t reliable; plenty of drivers will happily let another team drive into a sinkhole or lava flow, so if the team ahead is warning us, something must be really wrong.
I put up a hand to shield my eyes from the glare and squint at the dust cloud ahead of us. There’s something funny about it. After a moment I realize it’s going the wrong way. Someone’s team is coming back towards us. Farther off, I spot a second dust cloud, a larger one. There’s something on the course. Something that isn’t a cart.
“Stop the team,” I say abruptly.
“What? No! We’re making good time!” says Amelia.
“Stop the team. Now. There’s an ignipede ahead.”
She slams the brake. The claw digs into the salt. The dragons come skidding to a halt, huffing in annoyance.
“How can there be an ignipede?” asks Amelia. “I thought they only lived in the mountains!”
“They come down into the lowlands to hunt. Now keep your voice down. They have very sharp hearing. Hush, Sylph! There’s a good dragon.”
We hunker down in the cart and watch the dust cloud. Amelia is biting her lip, her eyes wide. She’s never encountered an ignipede before, but she’s heard the stories.
I can recognize Ray Freedman’s guirs by their blue backs. They’re headed toward us at full tilt. And behind them, undulating through the salt, is the ignipede.
Its scales are glossy black, the skin between them fiery orange. It slithers on dozens of tiny legs, its head perched on top of a long, curved neck. Rapier-sharp teeth line its open jaws.
Ray Freedman plies his whip and shouts at his team. Foolish man. Not even a team of guirs can hope to outrun an ignipede. If you’re unlucky enough to attract its attention, common wisdom says to cut the traces of your lead dragon and release it as a decoy. Better to lose one dragon than your whole team and yourself as well. But Freedman is clearly not willing to do that.
The ignipede tilts its head this way and that, sizing up whether a human or a guir would make a better first bite. Then it lunges. It catches the cart by one wheel and flips it on its side, sending Freedman flying out onto the rough salt and his team plowing to a halt in a tangle of harnesses.
Sylph trills.
“Amelia, keep her quiet!” I whisper.
Amelia jumps off the cart and slips forward to stroke Sylph’s neck. “Shh, shh, girl. Easy.”
But it’s too late. The ignipede’s head jerks up. It stares straight at us.
“Amelia!” I hiss. “Shut her up or we both die!”
“I can’t! She’s trying to help!” Amelia whispers back.
The ignipede swerves away from Freedman and slithers towards us. Sylph is still trilling. If I cut her traces now, we might still survive. I flick open my pocket knife and leap from the cart.
I reach Sylph and grab hold of the trace. As I’m about to cut, Amelia grabs my hand.
“No!” she says. “Sylph’s the only one who can protect us.”
The ignipede is upon us. I can smell the charred-meat smell of its breath. I can see the claws on each of the countless rippling legs.
Sylph rises on her hind legs and trills again.
The ignipede trills back.
It slows and bends its head toward the weaver, blinking its tiny half-blind eyes. It’s barely five feet away from Amelia. I can hardly suppress my urge to throw myself between her and it, even though that would be a death sentence for both of us. Amelia is trembling, but she stays still.
Sylph and the ignipede sniff each other. Then the ignipede raises its head again and slithers away, leaving a shallow channel through the salt in its wake.
We stay frozen in place, not daring to breathe, until it’s out of sight. Then I throw my arms around Amelia. “Are you all right? Did it hurt you?”
“N…no, I’m fine,” she says in a shaky voice. Slowly she rises to her feet.
“I’m not sure what just happened,” I admit.
“She’s a weaver,” says Amelia, stroking Sylph’s head. “That lineage—they have ignipede blood in them. When she started trilling…I think she was calling to it. Telling it not to attack.”
I look at Amelia in astonishment. “How do you know that?”
She shrugs. “It was in a book, I guess. I’ve read a lot about dragon lineages.”
Pride and surprise mingle within me. When I try to teach Amelia about our dragons, she always seems like she’s not paying attention. But somehow she knows more about weavers than I do.
We drive over to Freedman, who lies sprawled on the ground beside his overturned cart. Amelia checks on his dragons while I kneel beside him, trying to size up his injuries. The coarse salt crystals ripped his forearms and the side of his face raw.
“Are you all right? Anything broken?” I ask.
“Just bruised, I think,” he says, wincing as he tries to get up.
“His dragons are fine,” says Amelia, coming to my side.
“Should we get the medical team?” We’d have to give up the race, but it would be low to leave an injured driver stranded out here.
He shakes his head. “If my guirs are all right, we can make it back to camp. You’ve done enough. Whatever you did back there…it saved my life.”
“I didn’t do anything,” I say truthfully, putting my hand on my daughter’s shoulder. “It was Amelia.”
The foothills rise around us, black and rugged. The dragons put their heads down to haul the cart up the rocky slope. One step, then another. Our hexapods huff and strain. Amelia and I get off the cart to lighten its load.
The encounter with the ignipede left us dead last out of the teams that were still running. But we pass one or two during the ascent. Drakes and guirs skid and stumble while our weavers confidently navigate the steep trail.
At last the trail levels out as we reach the plateau. But as soon as we crest the ridge, we find half the teams bunched up ahead of us, the dragons huffing and screaming in frustration.
As I crane my neck to try to spot the source of the disturbance, a smell like hot asphalt hits me. Lava.
I call a halt and our dragons flop onto their bellies to rest. Leaving the team with Amelia, I thread through the crowd. An expanse of ripply, corded black rock greets me. A few patches still glow reddish-orange. A fresh lava flow.
“It happened an hour ago,” says one of the drivers. “Covers half the plateau. No one can get across.”
“Wait—Singh’s going for it!” calls someone else.
Everyone swings around to look. There he is, slowly driving his hexapods onto the still-hot flow. I tense up. Hexapods are tough, but even they can’t step directly onto lava—and the cart can’t handle it either. If he gets lucky and manages to stick to the patches where the crust is coolest and thickest, he might make it, but one false step and that dragon will never race again.
“Haw, Kamala!” he calls, steering his team to the left. “Whoa—slower, slower. Now gee!”
“He’s insane,” laughs Arianna Cross. She’s standing on her cart with her arms crossed. “He’ll never make it.”
Singh’s lead dragon picks her way forward step by step. Then, a crack. Her leg breaks through the crust. There’s a hiss and an agonized squeal as her scaly skin contacts molten rock. Singh runs forward to pull her free and release her from the traces. Eventually seven dragons pull the cart back to safety while the eighth—the wounded hexapod—whimpers in the cart.
The rest of the drivers decide to wait.
A spiny head rubs against my leg. Goldface is next to me, dragging her traces. The rest of the team meanders aimlessly behind her, threatening to get tangled. Behind them they pull the unattended cart. There’s no sign of Amelia.
“We’ve got a loose team,” someone calls.
Arianna smirks. “You need to keep better control of your dragons.”
Letting your dragons wander off while stopped is a beginner mistake. Cheeks burning with embarrassment, I take Goldface by her harness and lead the team away, muttering apologies to the other drivers.
I stake down the team—more securely than Amelia did, hopefully—and go to look for her. Some of the other drivers have unpacked their stoves to heat up a snack while they wait, but Amelia isn’t among them. Could she be lost? The mountains can be treacherous. Echoes bounce from one cliff face to the other, leading the unwary astray. There are cliffs and unstable slopes.
I pick up my pace. The mountains suddenly seem unfathomably vast. Every rock taunts me. What was I thinking, bringing a fifteen-year-old out here?
At last I come around a bend and find her in a secluded cleft in the rocks. She’s sitting on the ground, her backpack open beside her, holding something in her hands. Johnny Bear lies abandoned on the ground beside her.
“Amelia!” I cry, rushing up to her. “You can’t just wander off like that! You scared me! I thought something had happened to you!”
“I’m fine,” she says.
“Well, the team wasn’t. They got loose while you weren’t watching them,” I say, my nervousness bubbling over into frustration.
Then I spy what’s in her hands. It’s a smooth, oblong object speckled with green. A dragon egg.
“What are you doing with that egg?” I demand.
“I wanted to keep an eye on them,” says Amelia quietly.
I look at the open backpack. There are two more eggs inside, carefully swaddled in rags.
“You stole eggs out of the hatchery and brought them on the race?” I say incredulously. “What were you thinking? They’ll get broken!”
“They won’t! I’m being careful!” Amelia insists, cradling the egg to her chest.
“Wait a minute.” I pick up one of the other eggs from the backpack and study the pattern of speckles. “This egg isn’t from any of the purebred lineages. You’ve been crossbreeding dragons behind my back!”
“I had to keep it a secret!” says Amelia. “You wouldn’t have let me if I’d asked.”
“There’s a good reason for that! Don’t you remember what happened last time? Those poor beasts in the stable?”
“They’re not poor! They’re…special.”
In the distance, Goldface screams.
“We’ll discuss this later,” I say. “Pack up those eggs and get back to the team. We’ve got a bigger problem right now.”
Our dragons are fluttering their wings and pulling against their harnesses—they want to race. Amelia moves from one dragon to the next, making soothing noises.
“They’ll be eating each other alive at this rate,” I say. “And the worst part is that half the course is probably safe. If we could only tell which part!”
“Goldface could,” says Amelia.
“What?”
“Goldface could tell which path is safe. With her heat vision. Remember those obstacle courses we used to do where she had to find the hot objects?”
In a flash I see that she’s right. Goldface can see the temperature of the ground ahead, and she’ll instinctively pick the safest path. The weavers will keep the other dragons following her trail.
It’s astoundingly risky. But if we can pull it off, we could gain hours of advantage while the other teams wait for the lava to cool.
My first instinct is that I can’t try something so dangerous with Amelia here. It’s one thing to risk my own safety. Putting her life on the line is something else entirely. She’s never raced before. She’s never seen someone’s flesh melted by molten rock. She has no idea what she’s risking.
I can’t tell Amelia that, of course. She’d roll her eyes and tell me to stop treating her like a baby.
But then it strikes me: Trying to protect her is what’s driving her away. If I want her to respect me, I have to show that I’m willing to let her take risks.
/> “Let’s do it,” I say.
Amelia grins.
I make a path through the crowd and lead our team to the edge of the lava. Goldface and Thunder sniff the fresh black rock experimentally.
“Another contender!” says Cross. “This should be fun.”
“Ignore her,” I whisper to Amelia as I take my place in the cart. “She likes to get under your skin.”
Amelia gives Cross a withering look. Few looks are as withering as Amelia’s.
“All right now, Goldface, slowly,” I say. The drake sets one forefoot onto the hardened lava, then the other. She sniffs. She looks this way and that, peering into the distance with her large black eyes. Then she begins to cross the flow.
The rest of the team is unsure. I can feel their fear as they begin to move. The traces pull taut. With a bump, the cart rides up onto the surface of the lava. My muscles tense as I wait for the heavy cart to break through, but the surface holds.
“She’s doing it,” whispers one of the other drivers.
Painfully slowly we creep across the lava flow. The wheels rattle and jolt over the bumpy surface. Heat rises off it, making sweat drip down our faces and plaster our hair to our foreheads. Beside me, Amelia grips the edge of the cart, her knuckles white.
Goldface steps, looks around, steps again. Sometimes she changes direction for no apparent reason. The other dragons huff in confusion. They want to run straight ahead and get off the lava flow as soon as possible. But Thunder and the weavers keep them in line.
Behind us comes the crunch of another set of wheels. I look over my shoulder. Cross is driving her team onto the lava, following our trail. Where our team jagged to the left, so does hers. Where we swerved to the right, so does she. And she’s gaining on us.
“Get lost!” says Amelia. “Find your own way across.”
“This is a race, you know,” says Cross.
As the plateau stretches on, Goldface grows more confident. She’s up to a regular walking pace, though she still carefully scopes out the path in front of her. Cross is right on our tail by now. Her drake screams and snaps his teeth at the back of our cart. It’s an extra level of pressure that we don’t need right now.
Hear Me Roar Page 6
