Michael rammed the throttle all the way forward just as JoeBob yelled “Look out!” and pointed to the right. With a clash of gears and metal legs, the quad raced down the middle of the street.
“Come back here!” The guard ran after them, but by the way he was coughing and spitting, Kallista suspected he wouldn’t make it a block before giving up. She hoped the Runt Patrol had a good ride and didn’t crash into anything.
“Let’s go,” she said to Trenton. Sticking close to the buildings, they trotted down to the tower.
“You’re sure you want to do this?” Trenton asked. “I mean, I bet the penalty for breaking into one of these places is pretty severe.”
She nodded. She had to know what was going on. What if her father was in trouble? What if she was the only one who could help him? She tugged at the door, afraid it might be locked, but it swung open without any resistance. They quickly stepped through and pulled it shut behind them.
The tower was lit by flickering gas lamps. A walkway curved along the inside wall. She led the way, and twenty feet or so later, she saw a metal staircase spiraling up through the roof. Unlike the automatic stairs in the white tower, they would have to walk up these one by one.
Trenton had placed his foot on the first step when Kallista held up one hand. She tilted her head to listen for the sound of footsteps clanging against metal stairs. She heard nothing. By now, her father could have reached wherever he was going, but she had a feeling he hadn’t taken the stairs. “Let’s keep going.”
They left the staircase behind and continued to follow the curving walkway. The narrow corridor was thick with the smell of the dragons living overhead. Trenton’s and Kallista’s shadows grew then disappeared as they passed each of the wall-mounted lamps. Almost exactly halfway around the tower, she saw a plain metal door set into the wall. There was a lock on the door, but the door itself was hanging open a few inches, as though the last person to go through had neglected to pull it shut.
Trenton looked at Kallista. “You think he went in there?”
She was sure of it.
Behind the door was another staircase. Unlike the fancy, wrought-iron one going up the center of the tower, this one was plain stone, the steps worn with usage. And instead of going up, they went down. There were no lights on the wall, so when Trenton pulled the door shut behind them, they were plunged into complete darkness.
Reaching out, she found Trenton’s hand, and the two of them followed the staircase around and around. Soon, the air began to feel damp, and the smell of sulfur was replaced by a dank, mossy scent.
Kallista stopped. “Do you hear that?”
They stood silently for a moment, and she heard the sound again. Clank, clank, clank. Like metal banging against stone.
“Come on,” she said, pulling Trenton behind her as she charged down the stairs.
A moment later, her knee buckled as she went to take another step down and instead found smooth floor beneath her. Trenton stumbled over her foot, and the two of them crashed into the far wall.
Kallista shook her head and tried to get back to her feet.
“Look,” Trenton said, and Kallista found there was a faint light filling the area, enough that she could make out Trenton’s silhouette in the darkness. Behind him, a lantern moved down the passage.
For a moment, she almost called out. But what if it wasn’t her father? Or what if it was and he was upset that she had followed him?
Staying far enough back to avoid being seen, they followed the lantern through an array of twisting and turning passages. Several times they noticed staircases disappearing into openings in the stone walls.
At one of the openings, Kallista caught the distinct scent of dragons. “I think these passages connect all the city towers,” she said.
Trenton looked at the narrow staircase. “There’s no way a dragon could fit down that. Unless it was one of the smaller ones.”
“No. But servants could, bringing food and whatever else the dragons might need.”
Up ahead, the lantern went out, and Kallista feared they had lost the trail. Then she realized the hallway widened ahead with lights fixed to the walls again. They crept forward until they could make out a small alcove. Unlike the rest of the tunnels, this hallway was lit by electric bulbs.
Why? What was different about this area?
A figure stood facing a door on the other side of the alcove. As they watched, the man pulled out a pocket watch, glancing briefly at it. The electric lights lit the man’s face, and Kallista set her mouth in a grim line. It was her father. But what was he doing here? And where was he going?
He tapped a metal panel beside the door, and four clear beeps sounded. He pulled the door open and disappeared inside.
“Let’s go,” Trenton said as the door began to swing shut.
“Wait,” Kallista said, staying in the darkness until the door closed with a heavy metal thunk.
Trenton groaned. “How are we supposed to get in now? Those beeps were a code. Now it’s locked.”
Kallista chewed on her thumbnail, thinking. “He led us here on purpose.”
“What are you talking about?” Trenton asked.
“Think about it. What are the chances he would conveniently show up where we were tonight? The unlocked tower, the metal banging sound, the lantern that waited until we saw it?” Had her father followed them from the house? Had he let them see him on purpose?
“This doesn’t make any sense,” Trenton said. “Your father had a chance to help us the night we tried to get our dragons back, and he betrayed us. How can we possibly trust him now?”
“I don’t know,” she said, wishing she had a better answer. “I know I shouldn’t trust him. He’s been lying to us ever since we got to the city. But why? He’s never lied to me in my life. Why start now?”
Trenton pressed his palm against his forehead like he was trying to stop a headache. “You think someone is forcing him to lie? Like blackmailing him or something?”
Kallista nodded. “I don’t know how or why, but I think he’s been trying to give me clues.”
Trenton stared at her, and she hurried on. “The day I saw my father in the white tower, he said a bunch of weird things. Like that he was working in a laboratory. Not a workshop—a laboratory. That’s also when he said the thing about me coming to the dragon towers.”
He studied her eyes. He wanted to believe her, but she’d been keeping so many secrets. They both had.
“You could be leading me into a trap. You and your father could have set this up together.”
She took his hands in hers. “I know you have no reason to believe me, but I’m telling the truth. I swear it.” She thought for a moment. “I swear as a mechanic, and even more, as your friend.”
Trenton nodded. That’s what it came down to, really. They may not have been friends when they first started building Ladon together, but after everything they’d been through, he couldn’t think of anyone he was closer to, anyone he wanted to believe as much. “All right. I trust you.”
Kallista threw her arms around him. “Thank you! I swear I’ll never keep another secret from you again.”
He looked across the alcove. “We should go through the door, right?”
She shook her head. That moment when her father pulled out his pocket watch felt too intentional. A signal? Maybe it was a charade. Maybe there was something he wanted her to know. Something that, for some reason, he couldn’t say out loud. “Let’s wait a minute.”
The beeping sound came from the door again, and Kallista pulled Trenton back. As the door swung open, she glanced down the hallway, trying to remember how far back the nearest staircase was. Would they be able to find it in the dark?
It didn’t matter because her father walked through the door, waited for it to swing shut, then turned down a different hallway without even a glance in
their direction.
As soon as he was out of sight, they hurried to the door. Trenton tried the handle. It was locked. He glanced at the metal keypad set into the wall. “Any idea what the code might be?”
If her father wanted her to see what was behind the door, it would be a code she would know. If not, she’d made a huge mistake.
She tried her father’s birthday, her birthday. Simple combinations like 1-2-3-5—the first four prime numbers—and more complex ones like 3-1-4-1—the first four digits of pi. Had he used any other four number combinations in any of the games they’d played?
“Maybe it’s something as easy as 1-2-3-4,” Trenton said. “Or four random numbers.”
She shook her head. “He doesn’t do anything without a reason.” But was there a reason this time? Did he intend for her to discover what he’d been working on? Or was she simply trying to convince herself of something that wasn’t true?
She thought back to the last two times he’d spoken to her. In the white tower and that night in the warehouse. She’d tried to push it out of her mind, but now she closed her eyes and remembered the feel of his hands on her face.
She’d asked him, “Why are you doing this?”
He pulled her close and . . .
Her eyes popped open.
“I know the code.” With shaking fingers, she punched in four numbers: 1-2-2-4. “Please be right. Please be—
The locked clicked. The latch swung open.
He did want her to know. He did. His last words to her had been a clue. The day your mother died, I swore I’d take care of you. Since the day she died, I’ve tried to do what was best for you.
The day she died.
Her mother had died the day before Christmas.
She gripped the handle and looked at Trenton. “Let’s find out what’s inside.”
The first thing Trenton noticed when they walked through the door was the buzzing sound that cycled up and down like waves crashing against a beach. The room appeared to be round, but it was so large the far side was lost in shadows. Green light pulsed in time with the buzzing, starting at the center of the room and moving outward in flickering circles.
He reached toward Kallista, and she closed her fingers around his.
Even from a distance, he could see the source of the light was a large metal console at the center of the room. It was covered with hundreds of dials and gauges and flashing lights. Tubes ran up the console to a copper ball suspended from the ceiling. Porcelain conductors bigger around than his waist and five or six feet long stuck out all over the ball, making it look like a strange undersea animal.
As they watched, bolts of electricity ran up the tubes, out the conductors, and across bare metal cables that stretched to the ends of the room.
“What is it?” he asked. Although they seemed to be alone in the room, he kept his voice to a whisper.
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Hands clasped tightly together, they walked across the room. “Do you feel that?” Kallista asked. The floor was rumbling beneath their feet, along with the buzzing and the lights. The closer they got to the center of the room, the stronger the rumbling grew.
Trenton paused. There was a pattern to both the rumbling and the flashing lights that felt familiar. Grum-rum-rum-bump. “I know where we are,” he said, looking at the ceiling. “I felt this vibration the day we met with the monarch. We’re somewhere under the white tower. But this room is much too big to be a part of the tower itself. It must be in a cavern underneath it.”
As they neared the console, the stone floor was a replaced with a metal grate. Kallista sniffed. “It smells like saltwater.”
Kneeling on the grate, they heard the sound of rushing water and breathed in the unmistakable smell of the ocean. Trenton tilted his head to try to get a better view. Twenty feet beneath the grate there were two large tanks separated by a sheet of gray material. The same kinds of tubes going into the copper ball were connected to the gray material as well.
“Is it possible there’s a steam engine down there?” he asked.
Kallista shook her head. “You can’t run a steam engine on saltwater without corroding the tank.”
It was a mystery, but they didn’t have time to worry about it. The room was obviously a laboratory, and even though it was after work hours, Kallista’s father or someone else could come in at any time.
They walked across the grate, footsteps echoing in the darkness below.
Drawing closer to the console, Trenton saw a series of metal plates that ran the length of a panel on one side. The plates were numbered from one to seventy-two. Beneath each plate was a column of gauges. Some were easy to understand, like pressure and temperature, but most of the others made no sense.
“What does Ca stand for? Or NaCl?” he asked, tapping one of the needles.
“They’re abbreviations for chemical elements,” Kallista said. “Ca is calcium. Na is sodium and Cl is chlorine, which you combine to make salt.”
Why would dragons be measuring salt and calcium?
As he moved to get a better look, his shin banged against a drawer that had been left a few inches open.
Kallista pulled out the drawer all the way, revealing stacks of notebooks. She grabbed the one on top and flipped it open. It was filled with columns of scientific notations with a number on each side and the current date at the top.
Trenton studied the numbers. He’d been the best math student in his class, but this was pretty advanced. “These look like lab results. They must be running some kind of experiment.”
Kallista ran her finger down one of the columns. “This is my father’s handwriting.”
Trenton dug through the piles to see if there was anything else beneath them. Halfway down the stack, the covers changed from paper to leather. The deeper he dug, the older the leather looked. He pulled one out and checked the date. “Look at this—1945.”
“Let me see.” Kallista took the notebook from him. “It’s the same type of notations. Whatever they’ve been doing down here, it’s been going on for a long time.” She dug to the bottom of the pile and pulled out a book whose cover was almost in shreds. Trenton feared it would fall apart if he breathed on it wrong.
Holding the book gently in both hands, Kallista tweezed open the cover. The date at the top of the page was March 13, 1903. “Three years before the San Francisco earthquake,” she muttered.
Trenton stepped closer to the console. He noticed there were switches above each of the plates. “What were they doing here?” he asked, studying the dials and buttons. As he took another step closer, his foot caught on the metal grate and he stumbled forward. As he reached for the console to steady himself, his hand knocked against one of the switches.
Kallista dropped the book she was holding. “No!”
Trenton reached to turn off the switch, but it was too late.
On the other side of the room, a light turned on, revealing a large glass cylinder running from the floor to the ceiling. The tube, which was at least twenty feet across, was filled with a dark, bubbling liquid. It looked like something was suspended inside.
Kallista put a hand to her mouth. “No. Oh, no.”
“What’s wrong?” Trenton asked. But she kept staring at the glass cylinder, her face ghostlike beneath the flickering green lights.
Trenton approached the tube. The closer he got, the clearer it became that there were wires and tubes running from whatever was inside to the top of the cylinder. Still twenty feet away, he realized what he was looking at. It was small, barely the size of a young pig, but he already could make out the wings, tail, and the hint of a snout.
“They’re experimenting on dragons?”
Kallista rushed forward and grabbed his arm, her fingers sinking deep in the muscle of his bicep as she squeezed.
“Ow,�
�� he said, trying to pull away. “Ease up.”
But she squeezed tighter. “They aren’t experimenting on dragons. They’re growing them.”
“That’s ridiculous. How could a person grow a dragon?”
Kallista placed her hands against the glass tube. “They’re growing embryos. The tube must be filled with nutrients. That’s what they’re measuring with the gauges.”
Trenton walked up behind her and studied the creature floating in the murky, brownish-yellow liquid. It was definitely a tiny dragon. Scales as small and pink as his little fingernail were just beginning to appear on skin so thin he could see the creature’s internal organs. A tiny heart pumped like a fist, opening and closing as it pushed fluid through the creature’s veins.
“Why are they doing this?” he asked. “Can’t the dragons just have babies like every other animal?”
“I don’t know,” Kallista said. “And I don’t know why they need my father’s help with it now. This has been going on for years.”
Trenton looked more closely at the tube. At the base was a metal plate marked with the number seventeen. Below that was a bunch of writing that was hard to make out. “It looks like the kind with poison fangs. See the black-and-red stripes?”
Kallista leaned over the small writing. She gasped.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
She pointed to a line of text. “This is DNA sequencing information.”
He felt a shiver run along the base of his skull. “Deoxyribonucleic acid,” he whispered. “The building block of nearly every living organism. In my food production class, I learned that the founders of Discovery modified the DNA of some of the farm animals to help them survive better inside the mountain.” He brushed away dust from farther down the plate. “Look, this says it’s the DNA for a Gila monster. And this is for a snake.” He ran his finger down the list. “Bat. Frog. I don’t understand. What do bats and snakes and lizards have to do with dragons?”
She grabbed both his arms, shaking him. “Everything. Don’t you see? I thought they were growing dragons down here, but they’re making them.”
Embers of Destruction Page 21
