We Sled With Dragons

by C. Alexander London

  Oliver frowned as his mother leaped into the sky.

  14

  WE FEEL LIKE FALCONS

  “AAH!” OLIVER YELLED, and also, “WAH!” And then he added, for good measure, “BAH!”

  It seemed like the airplane fell away from them, racing toward the horizon, as they hurtled toward the ground. The wind roared and Oliver kept shouting, at first with terror and then, suddenly, with glee. He didn’t feel like he was falling at all.

  He felt like he was flying.

  With his mother behind him, in control of the parachute, strapped and buckled securely together, he actually had an amazing new thought, something he couldn’t remember ever thinking before: his father was right.

  Jumping out of an airplane was a lot of fun when you did it on purpose.

  “Look!” his mother shouted in his ear. He looked up and saw the curve of the Earth, like the top of a big blue balloon, water and ice and sky and clouds arcing before him.

  “Whoa!” he yelled, because what else was there to say?

  Celia saw her brother and mother below.

  “Ready?” her father yelled, but before she could say “No, I am certainly not ready to jump out of an airplane,” her father jumped.

  She wanted to frown or scream or complain about the noise, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t even wipe the grin off her face. It was amazing.

  Suddenly, her father reached around and hugged her, pinning her arms to her sides and leaning forward. They shot downward like a bullet, racing straight for Oliver and her mother.

  This time Celia found her scream. “AAH!”

  She streaked past her brother with a whoosh. Oliver felt his arms pinned down to his sides.

  “We’re gonna get them!” his mother yelled, and they too were off, racing through the sky after his father and Celia.

  While a family vacation to an amusement park or a nature hike is quite enjoyable, it must be said that nothing brings a family closer together than racing to the Earth at two hundred miles per hour. Dr. Navel would have liked to note, were he able to speak at this moment, that they were currently moving at the same speed as the peregrine falcon when it dives after its prey.

  Oliver, at that moment, did not feel like a peregrine falcon diving after its prey. He tasted the bitter bite of adrenaline at the back of his mouth, and a tingle raced from his bellybutton up his spine. This wasn’t fear or terror, but it wasn’t bored or annoyed either. It didn’t exactly feel good. It was dangerous and crazy and scary, but also . . . thrilling.

  “Faster!” he yelled and straightened his body out as much as he could, which he noticed lowered the wind resistance against him and gave them some extra speed. They were catching up. They were gaining on Celia. Maybe he did feel a little like a peregrine falcon for just a second.

  In a flash they shot past Celia. His mother let his arms go and they slowed beside his sister.

  Oliver tried to stick his tongue out, but with his mouth open the wind grabbed his cheeks and they flapped like he was pressing them onto a window and blowing.

  Celia laughed, and the wind pulled her mouth open in the same way. For a moment, all four of the Navels were diving together through the sky, laughing and making crazy windblown faces at each other.

  Svalbard grew larger and larger beneath them. The ocean around it was a crackling sheet of ice, webbed with channels of water running in the cracks.

  Dr. Navel tapped his wrist and gave a thumbs up. Claire Navel returned the thumbs up, and suddenly Oliver felt himself jerked back and up. There was a billowy thump as their parachute opened. They swirled and swooped and slowed. They weren’t so much diving like falcons anymore. They were gliding.

  But Celia and Dr. Navel below them were still diving. In fact, it looked more like they were just falling. They grew smaller and smaller as they tumbled toward the icy patch of land.

  “Why aren’t they opening their parachute?” Oliver yelled, but his mother couldn’t hear him. Suddenly, the taste at the back of Oliver’s mouth wasn’t the metallic bite of adrenaline, but the acid taste of dread. Something had gone horribly wrong.

  Dr. Navel pulled the rip cord.

  Nothing happened. He pulled again, and still nothing.

  He shook his head in disbelief. Of course they would have a problem now, just when he thought he was getting his daughter to enjoy a little excitement. He hoped Celia hadn’t noticed there was a problem.

  She had.

  “Dad?” Celia yelled. “Daaad!”

  He couldn’t hear her. Svalbard had turned from a white speck in the ocean to an unforgiving expanse of rock rising up to flatten them.

  “Open the chute!” Celia yelled. “Open it now!”

  She should have known, she thought. Oliver would have added this to his list of rules. If you jump out of an airplane on TV, the parachute is always going to fail. Even if it almost never happens in real life, it always happens on TV. And that meant it would happen to Celia. Was that irony, Celia wondered, or just cruel fate?

  Dr. Navel pulled the cord for the emergency parachute and it billowed and filled, slowing their fall. Celia exhaled with relief. Sometimes, she thought, having her dad around made things go a lot better than they did on TV.

  They landed with a bump and skid, but they were safely on the ground. Only a few minutes had passed since they had jumped out of the airplane, but it felt like a lifetime.

  Dr. Navel hauled in the parachute so the wind didn’t lift them off the ground again. He unclipped his daughter. She stepped away from him and crossed her arms, giving him a withering glare.

  “Good news!” Dr. Navel said. “It went better than our first skydive together, right?”

  “I guess,” said Celia, remembering their plane ride to Tibet when they fell out of an airplane with no parachutes and her father had been unconscious. Even with things going wrong, it had been more fun this time.

  Now that they were on the ground and the thrill of the jump had worn off, she realized how cold it was. She shivered, and her father put his arm around her. They looked up at the sky together, watching as Oliver and his mother came down for a gentle landing.

  “Your mother was always the better skydiver,” Dr. Navel observed.

  Once he was safely on the ground and unclipped from his mom, Oliver trotted over to Celia. Dr. Navel rushed over to his wife.

  “We just went skydiving,” Oliver said, studying her face to see how she felt about that.

  “Yeah,” said Celia, trying to do the same to him.

  “It was . . . you know . . . ,” Oliver said.

  “Kind of fun?” said Celia.

  “Yeah!” Oliver almost danced in place. “It was awesome. I felt like Agent Zero! I can’t wait to tell Corey about it. I can’t believe we raced in the air! I can’t believe you had to open your emergency chute . . . I thought you were doomed. I mean, that’s like a rule! It’s crazy! I want to do it again!”

  “Oliver,” Celia stopped him. “Calm down. You sound like Dad.”

  That stopped him. He looked over at his father and mother, who were studying the parachute that didn’t work and trying to figure out what went wrong.

  “I guess I do,” said Oliver. “I never liked excitement before.”

  “Me neither,” said Celia. “What’s happening to us?”

  “I think we’re getting old.” Oliver sighed. “We’re almost twelve. I guess pretty soon we’ll like eating brussels sprouts and fried scorpions and going deep-sea diving like all the other old people.”

  “I don’t think most old people like eating scorpions and going deep-sea diving,” said Celia. “That’s just Mom and Dad.”

  “They’re so weird,” agreed Oliver.

  “It could be worse,” said Celia.

  “Yeah,” said Oliver. “Brussels sprouts.”

  “No,” said Celia. “Mom could
still be missing.”

  “Oh yeah, that,” said Oliver. “Right.” He was still wondering how anyone could ever like brussels sprouts.

  “Okay.” Their mother came over to them. “If my bearings are correct, we’re near the Danskøya research station.”

  Celia looked around. She didn’t see anything that looked like a research station. She didn’t see any signs of civilization at all. The ground was rocky and icy. Frozen glaciers loomed on the horizon and the light was dim, like twilight, and the temperature was dropping fast.

  “Can we get there quickly?” Celia asked, her teeth starting to chatter with the cold.

  “Oh, we’ll have to,” said her mother. “Otherwise we’ll freeze to death in a matter of minutes.”

  Her mother wrapped the parachute around Celia’s shoulders to give her some extra warmth. Oliver got the other one. They started to shuffle across the ice, looking like royalty trailing their robes behind them.

  That made it quite easy for the grave robber in white camouflage to follow them from a distance so they would never see her coming. At least, not until it was too late.

  15

  WE SEE A DRAGON

  THE ENTRANCE TO the research station was a mouth in the ice, an open tunnel supported by steel beams. Normally, Celia and Oliver would not have wanted to rush into a dark tunnel carved out of solid ice. As far as their rules went, there were certain to be unpleasant surprises in store for them, but in this case, it should be noted that they were the first inside, running through the ice and blustery wind for the promise of warmth. Celia didn’t even make Oliver go first, although this time he wouldn’t have minded.

  Inside, the air hummed with the sound of machinery. The tunnel was carved directly in the permafrost, which was the layer of ground that was always frozen, even in the summer. There was a metal walkway down the middle where they walked, with lights hanging over it every few feet, but no railings. The walls had streaks of ice running through them, like layers of icing inside a cake. They could see a large steel door ahead that led deeper into the tunnel and there was an intercom box next to the door.

  “Cozy,” grumbled Celia.

  “Why do they need such a heavy door?” Oliver wondered.

  “Wouldn’t want polar bears dropping in for a visit,” their father said.

  “And there are much older dangers than polar bears in the frozen realms of the north,” their mother added.

  “Why’d she have to say realms?” Oliver muttered. “It makes it sound so . . .”

  “Enigmatic?” said Celia.

  “Is that like mysterious?”

  Celia nodded.

  “Then, yeah. Enigmatic. She could have just said ‘places’ or something.”

  “She’s an explorer,” said Celia. As if that explained everything.

  “That hum,” said Oliver. “That sounds like air conditioning.”

  “It is,” their mother said.

  “What?” Celia wondered. “Who would turn on the air conditioning in a freezing cave?”

  “If it gets too warm down here, the ice will melt and the ground will be too heavy. The tunnel would collapse, crushing the research station,” their mother said.

  “Oh,” said Celia, pulling her parachute robe tighter around herself. She wiggled her toes and was happy to note that she could still feel them.

  Dr. Navel hit the buzzer.

  Nothing happened.

  He hit it again.

  No answer.

  “Where is he?” Dr. Navel shook his head. “The researcher never leaves his post up here.”

  Oliver pushed on the big steel door and it creaked slowly open.

  “Of course,” he groaned. “Now I bet there will be something creepy on the other side.”

  “Why don’t you go find out?” Celia suggested.

  “Why do I have to go first?”

  “I’m older,” said Celia. “And anyway, that’s your catchphrase.” She shoved him through the door.

  “Gah!” he screamed.

  His sister and his parents rushed in after him to see Oliver crouched on the floor beneath a saber-toothed tiger.

  “It’s not alive, stupid.” Celia shook her head. The tiger was half embedded in the ice of the wall and half dug out, so it looked like it was leaping. “It’s, like, a fossil or something.”

  “I know that,” said Oliver, standing up again.

  “It’s a perfectly preserved specimen,” said Dr. Navel. “The saber-toothed tiger has been extinct for over ten thousand years. Who knows how long this one has been preserved in the permafrost?”

  “Thirty-two thousand years,” said Celia. She pointed to an information card next to it. “They’re calling it a smilodon.”

  “That’s from the ancient Greek for ‘smile’ and ‘knife,’” their mother said.

  “Knife smile,” said Oliver with a gulp. “Nope, not creepy at all.”

  “Don’t worry,” Celia smirked. “I’ll protect you from the extinct animals.”

  He stuck his tongue out at her.

  “Come on,” their mother called, and they continued into the cave. Dr. Navel stayed behind to study the smilodon in the ice.

  “Extraordinary.” He practically shoved his face into the creature’s mouth. The twins imagined it must smell a lot like Sir Edmund’s breath.

  Farther down in the cave, where the air was warmer and the hum of the air conditioner even louder, their mother stopped in front of a row of bones sticking out of the wall. Each was about the size of a dinner plate. She pointed proudly at them.

  “Look at this!” She smiled.

  “It’s bones,” said Oliver.

  “You know, guys,” their mother said. “You can’t just be couch potatoes forever.”

  “We’re not couch potatoes,” said Oliver.

  “We’re audiovisual enthusiasts,” Celia corrected her mother.

  “And I guess bones are cool,” said Oliver.

  His mother smiled. “These are dinosaur bones.”

  Oliver stepped closer.

  “They are a hundred and fifty million years old,” she added. “And they belong to the largest sea monster ever to have lived, the pliosaur. Some call it the Tyrannosaurus rex of the ocean. These bones here are just the vertebrae from the spine. Look.”

  She rushed deeper down into the cave and Oliver followed right behind her. The row of bones that made up the spine blossomed into a rib cage bigger than their living room at home, then long flippers that were taller than their mother, and then to a skull that was ten feet long with teeth the size of Oliver’s arms.

  “It is the largest and most complete reptile fossil ever found,” Claire told her kids. “These were fierce hunters of the deep—sea dragons. This one sank into the mud when he died and was perfectly preserved. Look at the claws. This one was probably amphibious.”

  “That means he could go on land too,” said Celia.

  “I know what amphibious means,” said Oliver. “Like a frog.”

  “Imagine when these dragons filled the oceans and wandered the earth.” Their mother sighed, delighted.

  “I’d rather not,” said Oliver, who liked giant lizards even less than regular lizards, even if this giant lizard happened to be extinct.

  “How do you know so much about this place?” wondered Celia.

  “This is where your father and I met.” Her mother smiled. “We were both doing research here and we fell in love digging for Viking gold. All we found were dragon bones,” she sighed, “and each other.”

  “Ew,” said Oliver. Imagining his parents being romantic was worse than getting eaten by a pliosaur.

  “It’s such a romantic place,” she continued. “In the myths, dragons love gold, they can smell it, and we thought maybe the myths were based on these dragons. We could have stayed here searching fo
r a long time.”

  “Why’d you leave?” Oliver wondered.

  “You two were coming along.” Their mother smiled. “But I always believed I’d be back. There’s so much wonder here. So much unknown. The deeper explorers dig in the ice, the more remarkable species we find.” She was almost breathless with excitement. “In Tibet they have discovered mammoth rhinoceroses, and here, a dragon.”

  “Mom,” said Celia. “How is all this going to help us find Atlantis?”

  “Well, I had hoped to discuss that with the researcher here, but the place seems to be empty.”

  “That’s not a good sign,” said Oliver.

  “Where’s Dad?” asked Celia.

  “Oh, I’m sure he’s just studying that fossil,” said Claire. “Oggie? Ogden!”

  “Oh no,” said Oliver.

  “Not good,” said Celia.

  “What’s wrong?” Their mother turned back to them.

  “We’re in trouble,” said Oliver.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s about his rules,” said Celia.

  “They’re not my rules,” said Oliver. “They’re just, like, the rules. Watch any movie. If you’re in a creepy place and you call somebody’s name and he doesn’t come, well, you know something terrible is about to happen.”

  Their mother looked doubtful.

  “He’s right,” said Celia. “This is always when something terrible happens.”

  “I’m sure your father just has his head stuck in the saber-toothed tiger’s mouth,” their mother said. “We’re perfectly safe down here.”

  “See?” said Oliver. “Someone always says that too.”

  “Oggie?” their mother called again, worry starting to etch lines on her forehead.

  “I’m here!” he called, coming slowly toward them.

  “See?” said their mother. “Everything is fine.”

  “Not exactly,” said another voice from behind their father. That’s when their father stepped into view, his hands held high in the air. Behind him walked a woman in a white snowsuit and white wool cap. She had a snarl on her face and a pistol in her hand.