Moon Rising

by Tui T. Sutherland

  Turtle nodded at the lake. “You should wash your shoulder. I’d take you to the infirmary, but I imagine Clay is busy with Tamarin right now.”

  It had started to hurt in earnest while they were walking. Moon peered at it again, then slowly edged into the lake. The water was colder than she’d expected, sliding around and under her scales, and when it hit her wound, she yelped with shock.

  There was a small splash as Turtle dove into the lake beside her. He surfaced and studied her shoulder as she gingerly dipped it under, washing off the dried blood. It started to bleed again, but after a minute it stopped, and she could see the prickly thing stuck in it more clearly.

  “This might hurt,” Turtle said, and without any more warning than that, he pincered his claws around the object and yanked it out of the wound.

  “Ow!” Moon cried. Turtle pressed his talons to her shoulder as another spurt of blood fountained out. She felt a little faint, and caught herself wondering what he would do if she collapsed here in the lake. Would he leave her to drown?

  He lifted his claws, checked that the blood had stopped, and then dipped his talons in the lake to wash them off. He was still holding the strange object, and now he rinsed it off and peered at it.

  “What is that?” Moon asked, scooping water over her shoulder. She could see that it was a blackish-brown misshapen sphere, about the size of a rainforest frog, and covered in those sharp thorns.

  “I think I know,” he said, “but I should look at it in better light, and maybe check the library. How’s your shoulder? Can you fly?”

  “Probably,” Moon said. She glanced up at the moons shining through the hole in the roof and caught herself wishing she could fly all the way to one of them and just stay there, surrounded by silver and silence.

  “Go ahead and try,” he suggested. She knew he meant “try flying,” but she looked into his unreadable eyes and wondered if he was offering her the chance to escape. She could be out that hole and on her way to the rainforest in no time. Or even farther; she could run to somewhere where Winter wouldn’t be able to track her down and scrape out all her secrets.

  But then he’d really believe I did it. And so would everyone — why else would I run away?

  Moon hesitated for a moment, then took to the air, soaring over the lake and circling in the moonlight. Her shoulder hurt, but she could still move her wings. The silvery touch of the moons on her scales calmed her a little, but then she remembered Winter’s furious expression and felt sick all over again.

  She swooped around in an arc, watching Turtle swim below her.

  Will they tell everyone my secret? I guess there’s nothing I can do to stop them, if they decide to do that.

  Do I wish I didn’t have this power?

  If I couldn’t read minds, everyone I met would be like Turtle — completely unreadable. Strange and blank. I’d have no way to know if they were kind or cruel. I’d never understand why they act the way they do. Everyone would be all surface.

  I’d think Winter was just mean; I wouldn’t know about his dead brother and how he hates himself more than anyone else. I might think Qibli was just goofy and ordinary, if I didn’t know about his layers and his amazing mind and his childhood. I’d have stayed away from Kinkajou, because I wouldn’t have known or believed that she really liked me.

  I guess that’s how other dragons live … never knowing how complicated everyone else is.

  That’s what it would be like, to be normal.

  But if I could choose, would I want that?

  And since I can’t choose … should I run away from what I can do, or risk revealing it to dragons who won’t understand?

  Moon tilted her wings and sailed down until she landed on a craggy boulder that jutted out of the lake. Spongy, bluish moss clung to its sides and squelched under her claws. Turtle swam over and clambered up beside her.

  “How did you find this place?” Moon asked.

  He shrugged. “I went exploring. There are a couple of underground lakes, but this is the biggest, and the only one with a view of the sky.”

  He leaned back to look up at the visible moons. Moon studied him for a minute. I don’t know him at all.

  “So,” he said slowly, without meeting her eyes. “I guess you must know my secret.”

  “No,” she said, stopping him before he could say too much. She was desperately curious, but she didn’t want to trick him. “Turtle, I — I don’t know why, but I can’t read your mind. With a few dragons, I just don’t hear anything.”

  He gave her a startled expression. “Like there’s nothing in there?” His snout crinkled, amused. “That’s alarming. What are you saying about me?”

  “I’m saying you’re safe,” Moon said. “Your secrets are safe. I can’t hear your thoughts.” She hesitated, wondering if she should mention the vision about Anemone. Something made her hold back.

  “Oh,” Turtle said. “Awesome? I think?” He thought for a moment, then shook his head. “I’m not very interesting anyway.”

  I’m sure that’s not true, Moon thought.

  “Thanks for letting me keep my secrets, then,” he said, giving her an easy smile. “So what are you going to do about Winter?”

  Moon dug her talons into the rock. Her stomach hurt and she had this horrible, prickling, tense feeling everywhere, as if she might erupt out of her scales. She made herself lie down on the boulder and reached to drag one claw through the pool below her. “I guess I have to tell him the truth,” she said finally.

  “Not if you don’t want to,” Turtle said. “Why don’t you figure out who really caused the explosion, and tell him that instead?”

  Moon gave him a bemused look. “Oh, all right, I’ll just go solve that mystery by midnight tomorrow. No problem.”

  He shoved her off the rock and she landed with a splash, coming back up startled and sputtering.

  “What was that for?” she cried.

  “You’re a mind reader,” he reminded her. “All you have to do is walk around the school until you hear someone’s mind going, ‘Well done, me; tip-top explosion I caused today; aren’t I a clever arsonist.’ ”

  “It’s not exactly that easy,” Moon said, spreading her wings to stay afloat and shivering in the chilly lake. “It’s really noisy out there; you have no idea. And you’re not the only dragon who can shield his thoughts from me. What if it was someone like that — someone like you?”

  “Well, it wasn’t me,” he said, not sounding the slightest bit offended. “So anyone else you can’t hear, put them on your list of suspects and keep listening to everyone else in the meanwhile. Why wouldn’t you? You could figure this out in an hour if you just hear the right dragon.”

  “And if they’re thinking about it when I do hear them,” Moon said. She climbed back onto the boulder and shook the water off her wings. “But if it were that easy, I should have heard them planning it. I should have heard something from someone….” She stopped, realizing she had.

  The conversation with the dreamvisitor. Planning to kill someone — multiple someones. She couldn’t believe she’d forgotten about that, even in the chaos of the explosion. Was the fire in the history cave the plan she’d overheard?

  And if so … then perhaps the dragon with the dreamvisitor (Queen Scarlet?) would return tonight to find out if it worked. Maybe there’d be another conversation between killers in the dark, under the cover of dreams.

  And if Moon was listening at the right time, maybe she’d have a chance to catch them.

  “I have to get back to my sleeping cave,” Moon said, leaping to her feet and slipping on the wet stone.

  “Oh,” Turtle said, “uh, sure. Did you figure something out?”

  “I hope so,” she said. “Can you lead me back?”

  As they hurried up the tunnel, leaving wet footprints behind them, she told him about the conversation she’d heard two nights ago. “I wonder if I should tell someone,” she said nervously. “Like Starflight or Sunny? Or — Tsunami?” S
he shivered all the way to her toes at the thought of trying to tell the ferocious SeaWing something like this.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “I say keep it to yourself until you know more. You never know how someone will —”

  “Shh.” Moon put out her tail to stop him from moving. They were near the history cave again; the lingering smell of smoke filled the air, along with a deep chill from all the frostbreath Winter had sprayed. The corpses of Bigtail and Carnelian were gone, leaving dark imprints on the ash-covered floor, surrounded by the marks of several talons.

  Someone was in the cave, poking through the ashes…. She could sense two dragons arguing. She motioned to Turtle to stay quiet, and they crept forward until they could hear the voices clearly.

  “We’ll use the dreamvisitor to tell Glory tonight. She needs to know about Bigtail, at least — but maybe she can also tell us what to do.” It was Sunny, all her thoughts twisted in a knot of guilt and grief and distress.

  “I’m the Head of School,” Tsunami said. “I can tell you what to do. That’s my job and my favorite thing in life, I mean, seriously.”

  She was trying to break the tension, but Sunny was barely listening. “Should we shut down the school? Send everyone home?”

  “That’s what she wants,” Tsunami said fiercely, her mind bristling like it was full of spears. Moon heard her pick up a piece of debris and throw it at the wall. “Sunny, you know Queen Scarlet must have been behind this. She’s trying to destroy this great thing we’re building, and we won’t let her.”

  “But what if she hurts more students? And who’s working with her? And how can we stop her if we can’t find her? And how can we keep them all safe?” Sunny’s voice broke.

  “We’ll catch the dragon who did this,” Tsunami said. “I promise, Sunny. I will rip them apart myself.”

  “I should send a message to Queen Ruby about Carnelian,” Sunny said, watching the ashes of a map crumble under her claws. “Maybe we should notify all the queens, in case any of them want to withdraw their students.”

  Tsunami groaned. “That means my mother will be here by sunrise, and Anemone will be gone twenty seconds later.”

  “How did it start?” Sunny wondered. There was a shuffling noise as she came closer to the entrance. “Umber said there was an explosion … and it must have been something near the doorway, where Carnelian was … Tsunami, what’s this?”

  Out in the tunnel, Moon and Turtle exchanged glances.

  “I don’t know,” Tsunami said. “But I know I hate them. There are others all over the floor, buried in the ash. I’ve already been stabbed a few times and it’s like they have TEETH. I practically have to dig them out of my scales. No, don’t give it to me; it’ll just attack me like the others did.”

  Turtle held out the little ball of thorns and gave Moon a look. She nodded, guessing it was the same kind of thing Sunny and Tsunami had found.

  Apparently that wasn’t quite what the look meant, though, because he nodded back and then stepped right into the history cave. Moon jumped back, startled, and then hurried after him. That would have been a useful moment for mind reading, she thought to herself. She would have voted for staying hidden, but it was too late for that.

  Tsunami and Sunny whirled around and blinked at them.

  “Turtle!” Tsunami said. “You shouldn’t —”

  “Hey, sorry,” he said. “We heard what you were saying and — I might know what this is.” Turtle held up the thorn ball, which matched the one in Sunny’s palm.

  Moon tried to take shallow breaths. The air in here smelled worse than smoke; it smelled like scorched dragon flesh. It was colder, too, this close to the melting film of frostbreath. The ashes drifting over her claws were heavy and damp; they got in between her scales and stuck to her wings like insidious gray cobwebs. It was horrible, in every way.

  Horrible, too, to hear the instant flare of suspicion from Tsunami’s mind. What is Moon doing here? Why was she listening to us? Sunny’s reaction was less suspicious, but perhaps only because she was too tired and worried to think of it.

  “Yeah? What are those?” Tsunami asked her brother. “And where’d you get that one?”

  “Moon got hit by it when the explosion went off,” he said, pointing to the wound on her shoulder. “I’m pretty sure I’ve seen these before. After the attack on the Summer Palace, we found things like it on several of the surviving SeaWings.” He turned the ball over and cut into it with one of his claws, revealing a bright green interior. “It’s a seed pod. It comes from something called a dragonflame cactus, which grows only in high altitudes, in the mountains.”

  “How did you figure that out?” Sunny asked.

  “My mother tortured a SkyWing prisoner until he told us,” Turtle said matter-of-factly. Sunny and Tsunami both winced. “He said the SkyWings use the cacti as bombs, because when they come into contact with fire, they explode, sending fiery bits of cactus and seed pods everywhere. I think the idea is that if you tried to exterminate them by burning them all, they’d first of all attack you back, and second of all release all these seeds so that a hundred more cacti would grow from the ashes. Kind of a cool evolutionary thing that makes sense if you’re a plant trying to survive on a mountain full of fire-breathing dragons, right?”

  He looked up and caught the expressions on their faces. “But, uh, horrible, obviously.”

  “So it’s a SkyWing weapon,” Tsunami said. She studied the floor. “Probably set with some kind of long fuse, slowly burning until it reached the cactus. Hidden somehow. Hmmm.”

  “You think one of our SkyWing students did this?” Sunny said, running through the list in her head. Flame is pretty angry at the whole world — Fatespeaker and Glory were both worried about his aggression problems. But he’s more the type to lose his temper and start a fight over prey, not plan to set a fire from a distance.

  “Or someone who was told what to do by a SkyWing,” Tsunami pointed out. “A SkyWing like Queen Scarlet, for instance.” She paused, then added, “Or … there is another SkyWing here. One who’s betrayed us before.”

  Sunny was already shaking her head. “It couldn’t be Peril.”

  “Why not?” Tsunami said. “We don’t know what she’s capable of.”

  “No, I mean, it couldn’t be,” Sunny said. “She couldn’t touch a cactus like that without it blowing up. Think about it.”

  Tsunami frowned, then snorted grudgingly. “I hate it when you’re smarter than me.”

  Sunny suddenly seemed to remember that Moon and Turtle were there. “You should go back to your sleeping caves,” she said. “We’ve told everyone to stay there until we figure out what to do next.” Oh, I shouldn’t have let them hear me speculate. What if they tell everyone? I keep forgetting to act like I’m in charge instead of one of them. “Please don’t say anything about this for now, all right?”

  Moon nodded, and Turtle handed the seed pod over to Sunny.

  “I’m sorry about all this,” Sunny said. “It’s so awful. It shouldn’t have happened here.”

  “But we’ll get to the bottom of it,” Tsunami promised. “We’ll find the dragon who set that bomb, and then I will tear off his wings and hang him from the eastern peak of Jade Mountain.”

  Sunny winced. “Tsunami, yuck.”

  “Can we check on Tamarin before we go back to our caves?” Moon asked softly.

  Tsunami shook her head. “Clay is taking care of her. We’ll let you know soon how she’s doing.”

  Moon nodded, and then followed Turtle out into the tunnel again.

  The sleeping corridor was quiet to dragon ears, but Moon could hear the churning fear and rumors and guesses rolling through everyone’s minds. Very few of them were actually asleep, although by now it was fully dark outside.

  She hesitated before they reached her cave, thinking of Carnelian and Kinkajou, and how different everything had been this morning.

  “It’ll be all right,” Turtle said. “You’ll find out who did th
is. Let me know if I can help.”

  Moon watched him disappear into his sleeping cave, where Umber was worrying about Marsh and Sora. She closed her eyes and found Sora in a deep sleep, somewhere farther away … the infirmary, Moon guessed. She must have been given tranquilizer darts, too.

  She listened to the minds around her for a long moment, but no one was chuckling gleefully over their arson today. Icicle, Pike, and Mightyclaws were asleep. She could feel the strange fuzz of Onyx’s brain but couldn’t tell whether she was asleep or awake. Flame was not in his sleeping cave at all; he was somewhere else in the mountain, and she could only hear a distant echo of his bitter, angry thoughts.

  What can you hear? she asked Darkstalker. Do you know who did it?

  You could leave, you know, he answered without answering. You don’t need these dragons. Your friends are furious with you and that IceWing is dangerous. But you have me. If you leave now, I could help you find my talisman, and then you could free me. Who would care about a small fire then? We could change the world, Moon. No more war. No more killing. We could do that together, you and I.

  Moon didn’t know what to say to that. She could hear Kinkajou, Qibli, and Winter all thinking about her, and Darkstalker was right. It would be safer to get out of here. But she didn’t want to leave them. She didn’t want to lose them from her life if there was any chance of keeping them.

  She folded in her wings and ducked into her sleeping cave.

  Kinkajou was curled in her hammock with her eyes closed.

  Moon slid over to her nest, trying not to look at Carnelian’s ledge. It felt empty in here without her fuming and muttering in the background.

  “All right,” Kinkajou said suddenly, without opening her eyes. “I know this is silly. Of course you know perfectly well that I’m awake and pretending to be asleep. But can you do me a favor and pretend you believe it, please?”

  “I will,” Moon agreed.

  She lay down and wrapped her tail close around her. She wished there were a way to shut out Kinkajou’s thoughts, which were bouncing and tumbling all over the place like monkeys that had eaten the wrong berries: I wouldn’t have lied to her like that. I can’t believe Carnelian’s dead. What would it be like to hear what everyone is thinking? Who would I want to listen to? Maybe Winter, he seems very mysterious, but I guess he isn’t to Moon. I hope Tamarin is all right. I wish they’d let me see her. Maybe I can sneak out and see her tonight. Is Moon listening to all this? Does she know anyone else who can read minds? Would she tell us if we asked? What if all the NightWings have these powers? But Bigtail obviously didn’t, or he wouldn’t have gotten blown up. Is she asleep yet? I wonder if I should tell someone about her. Maybe Glory. Glory would know what to do.