The Other Side

by Joshua McCune

  The tears come. Allie’s smile vanishes. She leaps from Baby, lands in a graceful somersault, and races into my arms, where she cries apologies into my shoulder.

  Sorry to interrupt your strange ritual of fake death, Grackel says, but you should probably ask yourself why your boyfriend felt the need to inject Arabelle with a tracker tonight.

  He’s not my boyfriend. I wheel on Colin. “What were you thinking?”

  Allie tries to wriggle free, but I hold her tight, afraid she might go hunting for her gun. She settles on sticking her tongue out at him.

  “Was just trying to keep her safe,” he says between labored breaths. Blood seeps through the fingers covering the hole in his side. He gives me a wan smile. “Sorry. Should have . . .”

  He crumples to the floor. I release Allie and kneel beside him. I press my hands over the wound, feel the blood pump against my palm. “Get me the first-aid kit.”

  Allie doesn’t move.

  “Come on, Allison. You know he wasn’t trying to hurt Baby.”

  “Fine, but he has to leave the island when he’s better, yes, yes.”

  I nod. She skips off, humming to herself.

  The blood’s leaking more slowly now. Not sure if that’s because I’m doing something right, or because he’s already lost too much. “You better not die on me. Why tonight, Grackel?”

  Listen, she says. Feel.

  “I don’t have time for riddles.”

  You are angry, scared, worried.

  “Yeah, kill emotion, I know. Go to hell.”

  Listen, feel.

  “You just enjoy watching us suffer, don’t—” Watching. The watching sensation is gone. I listen for the distant, garbled voices of Greens but hear nothing.

  Two things occur to me, both frightening, though for far different reasons.

  Colin’s a dragon talker.

  “They’ve found us.”

  4

  Colin’s breaths come short and fast, and sometimes with blood. The blankets beneath him are spattered crimson, and the bandages taped over his ribs are soaked through, but at least that bleeding’s stopped.

  “We need to go, Grackel.” He’s pale and won’t stop shivering, even with Grackel lying beside him to provide extra heat.

  Too dangerous. She doesn’t sound concerned. Never does. It could be a ruse, human.

  “Oren and his Diocletians are coming, Grackel. Help me move Colin to the crate.”

  The old Red doesn’t budge. They want you to panic, human, and you are doing a good job of it.

  “Please.”

  Will you sacrifice Arabelle for him? What if the Greens do not know our location? I protest, but she interrupts me. This is what they want. They are sly, the Greens. Perhaps they are looking for someone else altogether.

  “Perhaps pigs can fly,” I snap.

  How can you be certain it is Arabelle they are after? They never mentioned her by name.

  “Who else could it be?”

  If it is Arabelle, you must ask yourself why they went silent.

  “I don’t know, but I can’t let him die, Grackel.”

  Because of his sister. A statement, not a question.

  Because of that, because the short list of people I care about in this world might already be significantly shorter. Keith, Preston . . . James . . . “Stop reading my thoughts, dragon.”

  The truth is on your face, human. You know my opinion, but I will follow your lead.

  “I can’t let him die.”

  You and your emotions, she says without malice. With surprising deftness, she scoops up Colin in a claw and carries him across the cave to the escape crate, a modified military drop box that Preston and his dragon brought to the island two months ago. She kneels and sets him on the bed bolted into the side wall.

  I prop him up with pillows. “You got the go bags?” I ask Allie, who’s sitting in one of the jump seats on the opposite side of the crate.

  “Yes.” She doesn’t look up from her book of poems. “Under the bed.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Kim Cosgrove.”

  “And I am?”

  “Sarah Cosgrove.” She smiles over her book. “My sister. Always.”

  I ruffle her ever-unkempt hair. “Yes. Sisters forever. I’ll be back in a second.”

  When I’m out of the crate, I retrieve the hypodermic needle. My hand drifts to the scar on my arm where my best friend, Trish, once injected me with a tracer. It’s the only reason we escaped Georgetown. The only reason Baby’s alive right now.

  Oren and his legion of cold-blooded insurgents and colder-blooded Greens won’t kill her, not in the bullets-and-chainsaws, Georgetown sort of way. But they will in a deeper way, in a way Georgetown killed part of me.

  I can’t allow that. I refuse to allow them, or anybody, to hurt her or Allie ever again.

  No, Melissa, Baby says, blue eyes focused on the needle clutched in my hand. She skitters away, shooting a narrow stream of ice at the space in front of me.

  “I can’t lose you.” I step around the frozen puddle. “If we become separated, we need to know where you are.”

  I know you’re mad at me. I’ll behave better.

  “I’m not mad.”

  She darts past me to the back of the cave, sheltering behind an uninterested Grackel. You can’t make me.

  “We don’t have time for this, Arabelle,” Allie says. She stomps from the crate, shoots me a glare, then marches over to Baby and waggles a finger under her nose. “What if you get lost? We won’t know how to find you.”

  Baby snorts thin slivers of ice over her. Allie brushes the shards from her hair and kicks the Silver in the shin. It couldn’t possibly hurt, but Baby yowls.

  Based on their changing expressions and the occasional physical exchange, they must be continuing their conversation in private. Baby’s no longer focused on me. I tiptoe my way into her blind spot and thrust the needle into her flank. It takes all my strength to break through her scales, but she doesn’t seem to notice.

  “Fine. Be lost,” Allie says. She folds her arms across her chest but can’t suppress a grin as she stalks, with comic exaggeration, into the crate.

  Baby shifts her attention to me. We decided. No needles.

  “Nope.” I show her my empty hands. “I’ll make you a deal. You promise to listen to Grackel out there, everything she says, and I won’t ever bring up a needle again.”

  She leans down until her snout’s an inch from my face. Kiss on it.

  I gladly do, then wipe the frost from my lips and return to the crate.

  I close the wall door, press my palm to the adjacent handprint scanner, and enter the numeric passcode Preston made me memorize. The magnetic lock engages; a strip of LED lights powers up along the rim of the ceiling, and an electronic map flickers to life along the back wall.

  “You did a good job with Baby,” I tell Allie as I secure Colin to the bed with buckled straps.

  “You should have told me what you were going to do. Sisters don’t have secrets. Don’t be like him.”

  “You’re right, but you can’t shoot people just because they upset you.”

  “It was like the Georgetown vultures who came in at night sometimes while we were sleeping,” Allie says. “Sneaking up on Baby. I thought he was going to hurt us, yes, yes.”

  Her words make me think of Lorena and Whiskey Jim and how we did whatever was necessary to survive. And how some of us didn’t.

  “That’s over,” I say, as much for myself as her. I retrieve her book of poems from the floor. “Find one you think I’d like.”

  Allie takes it and buckles into a jump seat.

  I grab the overhead hand railing. “Ready when you are, Randon.”

  The screech of talons on metal ripples through the crate. We rock back and forth slightly, lift up a bit, and move forward. Slow at first, jerking along, then faster, and I imagine myself back in Arlington, where I grew up, shooting out of a Metro station, the constant thrum of wind coc
ooning us. We reach our cruising speed, and I no longer need to brace against falling.

  I’m tempted to turn on the LCD that connects to cameras on the outside of the crate, but there’s nothing to see but darkness, and Preston encouraged us to save power whenever possible. After making sure Colin’s secure, I reacquaint myself with the rest of the escape crate.

  Besides the bed and jump seats that double as flotation devices, there’s an altimeter, an oh-shit lever in case we need to manually deploy the parachute, a thermostat—currently set at a balmy fifty degrees Fahrenheit—and an electronic map of North America decorated with colored circles and a red arrow in the Bering Sea with the words You Are Here written beneath it.

  The legend at the bottom of the map identifies the multitude of black circles as Avoid at All Cost locations, the few reds scattered through the evacuated territories in the middle of the map as Allies, and the remaining beiges, most outside the U.S., as Neutrals.

  I press the beige pin nearest our arrow. Aerial photographs, demographics information, and a street map of Dillingham, Alaska, appear beside it. A coastal town near a mountain range. Perfect for dragon anonymity. I search the street map until I find the hospital, a building not much larger than the minor-care clinic in Mason-Kline. Not perfect for gunshot victims, but Dillingham’s an hour closer than any of the other pins, so it’ll have to do. I send an image of the map to Grackel.

  “That’s where we’re going?” Allie asks.

  “Yes.”

  “Then what?”

  “After Colin’s all fixed up, we’ll get in touch with Keith and figure out what to do from there.” I force a smile. “Piece of pie.”

  She grins. “Easy as cake. Ooh, you think we can eat at a restaurant, and I can have some? I haven’t had cake . . .”

  She goes quiet, but I know she’s thinking of her parents, dragon-talking insurgents who were assassinated days before her capture and transfer to Georgetown. “You bet. You can have all the cake you want if you promise me you won’t try to hurt Colin again.”

  “Cross my heart, yes, yes.”

  As she returns to her poems, I sit on the floor next to the bed and retrieve the backpacks lodged beneath. I listen to Colin’s raspy breathing for a while, occasionally wiping the blood that dribbles from his lips, then investigate the contents of our go bags. Fake IDs, national registration numbers, backstories written on flash cards. A change of clothes, a bathroom kit, some cash, MREs, and one emergency cell phone.

  The phone won’t have a signal until we reach the mainland, so I attempt to contact the dragons again. Tell them where we’re headed. Plead for information and help.

  Nothing.

  Between the silences, I read over my flash cards until I know my new identity by rote. I check our location on the map, give course corrections to Grackel and Randon, talk to Baby, reexamine Colin. After memorizing his backstory, wondering if he chose the particulars or if it’s Preston’s unfunny idea of a joke, I quiz Allie on her character until she’s too tired to continue.

  I slide the book of poems from her small hands, roll up the sweatshirt from my go bag, and place it behind her head. Once I’m sure she’s asleep, I return to my spot on the floor and read the page she’d bookmarked with her finger.

  “The Fatal Sisters” by Thomas Gray. Long and dreary. My breath catches in my throat as I scan the final passage she’s highlighted.

  Horror covers all the heath,

  Clouds of carnage blot the sun.

  Sisters, weave the web of death;

  Sisters, cease, the work is done.

  I tear out the pages in a neat line so you wouldn’t realize they were missing unless you checked the numbers. Allie doesn’t notice that sort of thing. I search for other poems about death and war—a few here and there, but the ones most highlighted—and rip them free, too.

  The remaining pieces that she’s dog-eared revolve around sorrow and love. I used to seek those out myself, but now I skip them for ones I don’t quite understand, ones I’m happy not understanding.

  I must drift, because when I next look at the map, we’ve reached the mainland. I check on Colin, positioning my cheek inches from his lips. His breaths are uneven and shallow. I press two fingers to his neck. It takes a few more seconds than last time to find his pulse. Fast—as if he just finished a sprint—but weak.

  No signs of trouble, Grackel informs me. Drop will occur soon.

  “At the edge of town. Out of sight, right?”

  All will go well, human.

  It must. We’ll land safe as the dragons take cover in the mountains. I’ll call 911. On our way to the hospital, as the EMT informs me that Colin’s in no danger whatsoever, I’ll phone Preston, but James will be the one who answers. He’ll hang up fast, because he doesn’t want to waste another second . . . he’ll already be on his way to rescue us.

  I laugh because the alternative hurts too much. I climb into my jump seat, buckle up, and wait for reality to set in.

  5

  Reality sucks even worse than I thought.

  My ears pop, my chest tingles. The altimeter spins up. Allie clutches my hand until our knuckles turn white. We settle at fifteen thousand feet. High enough that the locals might mistake dragons for stars or comets, but now in radar visibility, according to Grackel.

  Which means the dragons need to zip in fast, drop the payload—us—and bolt. As Randon accelerates, I think about how eight months ago, my worst days involved suffering through Lieutenant Spencer’s boring lectures on projectile motion.

  Never imagined I’d actually be a physics problem.

  If a crate’s dropped from fifteen thousand feet, traveling at a horizontal velocity of two hundred miles per hour, how far will it go before it lands? A long damn way. What if the crate has a parachute attached to it? When should that be opened? And then there’s the real stuff like drag and wind shear that we never learned about because those weren’t ideal conditions. No kidding.

  You worry too much, human, Grackel says. Trust me. It is not much different than a rock thrown from a cliff.

  Even if Grackel’s an Einstein in the dragon world, there’s no way she can account for weather, parachute open time, Randon’s exact speed at release. . . .

  Too many variables.

  We’re gonna end up landing in the woods a mile out. Or maybe the tributary. We’ll plunge through the icy film and sink into the murky depths. The crate’s probably airtight, so we’ll sit at the bottom of a frozen river, waiting to run out of oxygen or turn into Popsic—

  Drop will occur in ten seconds.

  Allie tightens her grip, her face gone paler than Colin’s. I remind myself that there’s only room enough in here for one scared girl, and smile at her. “Kind of neat. Think about the stories you can tell all your dragon friends. How you flew a crate into Alaska.”

  She gives the slightest nod and squeezes harder.

  Five seconds.

  I reach over my shoulder and flip the switch that activates the LCD. Four squares appear onscreen. Grackel and Baby occupy most of the upper left-hand view. Two are tinged red by Randon’s glow but are otherwise dark. The final square, from the camera embedded in the crate bottom, shows a smattering of yellow lights, distant cat eyes peeking out at us through the abyss.

  Two. Good luck, humans. One.

  Grackel says something else, but I don’t hear, because my stomach’s suddenly lurching into my brain. I bite my lip hard to keep my shriek from joining Allie’s.

  Deploy the parachute, Grackel says.

  “Now?” I break a nail fumbling with the buckle. Why the hell is the oh-shit lever out of arm’s reach? “I thought it was supposed to open on its own?”

  You will overshoot if you wait.

  I finally work the clasp free, spring up, and tug the lever. The parachute unravels with a loud whoosh. I stare at the ceiling. There is no backup. Preston said we wouldn’t need one. Of course, he also said we wouldn’t need to manually deploy—

  The whip-snap
of fabric expanding and catching wind sounds a glorious melody. Then the crate jerks up, and I slam to the floor. Pain blasts my kneecaps, fades as the feed from the bottom camera settles enough to show a concentrated cluster of cat eyes staring back at me.

  We’re right over the town.

  But drifting.

  East.

  Toward wilderness and water and death.

  I spring up and hurl myself at the opposite wall. The lights of Dillingham continue to disappear off the screen. I try a dozen more times. My efforts only succeed in igniting a fiery ache in my shoulders.

  “Cover your ears,” I tell Allie, drawing my gun. I load the chamber and fire. The explosive noise of gunshot rattles through my head, and there’s now a small hole in our crate.

  Useless. The lights continue to wink out. Almost gone.

  Hold on, Grackel says. I spot a flash of red on the LCD and reach for the handrail as she smashes into the crate feet first. We hurtle sideways. I lose my grip, stumble backward, and collide with the edge of the jump seat.

  My ribs crack; I scream. A million tiny sparks ignite behind my eyes. The squeal of talons on metal shrieks through the crate. We lurch to a steady descent, and I tumble to the floor, gasping for breath.

  After my vision clears and air slips back into my lungs, I check the LCD. The bottom right screen shows streetlights and empty roads and quiet buildings awaiting our late-night arrival. Grackel’s a hazy red glow on the adjacent screen. She flaps toward the shadowed teeth of mountains in the distance.

  I examine Colin, grimace a smile. He somehow managed to make it through our joyride none the worse for wear. Grackel was right. Battered, terrified, but we’re alive, on course. Should land shortly.

  As I gain my feet, Allie breaks into a hysterical wail. I try to ask her what’s wrong, but my words come out a groan. I’m staggering toward her jump seat to comfort her when I hear the rumbling purr. Barely audible behind the ringing in my head, the hiss of wind, and Allie’s cries, but distinct and terrible. It is a sound I hear often in my nightmares.

  Real?

  I look at the LCD. Several pairs of fiery orbs dart across it. Headed in the same direction as Grackel.