Voices of Dragons

by Carrie Vaughn

  “What did you do today?” he asked.

  Kay’s gut lurched, and she was sure her father would see the lie written on her face. “I just went hiking, out by the Bluebell trailhead.” Exactly the opposite direction from where she’d been, and she could feel the depth of the lie.

  “See anything interesting?”

  Kay’s heart skipped a beat. But she managed to keep her voice steady when she answered, “No. Nothing at all.”

  2

  Nothing happened. No one found out. That didn’t stop her from flinching every time someone talked to her.

  “Hey, Kay. I said hello like three times.”

  Startled from her thoughts, Kay looked up to find Tam sliding into the seat across from her, lunch bag in hand. Kay’s own sandwich lay uneaten before her. She’d been staring at it while her mind turned.

  “Oh, sorry.” Kay forced a smile.

  “So, you talk to Jon yet?”

  She winced, and Tam looked disapproving. Tam looked about ten years older than Kay felt most of the time: She wore makeup and did it perfectly, her silky black hair always hung gracefully around her shoulders, and even wearing a T-shirt and jeans, she looked like she ought to be on the cover of a magazine. She made the outfit look sexy instead of just thrown together, which was how Kay felt. Kay’s skimpy brown hair never seemed to stay in its ponytail; she was always pushing strands back behind her ears. Maybe she liked being outdoors so much because it didn’t seem to matter if you were sweaty, grungy, and not perfect looking.

  “I’ll give you a hint. Say yes,” Tam said.

  “I’m just not sure I want to go to homecoming at all.”

  They’d had variations of this conversation a dozen times, and Tam always got that frustrated, motherly expression when Kay seemed to be dragging her feet.

  “Come on, you know you’ll have fun once you get there. Besides, I won’t have any fun if you don’t go.”

  Kay had to smile. Tam’s enthusiasm was more than enough to pull her along, if she’d just let it. That was how it had worked since middle school—Kay made Tam go hiking, and Tam made Kay go to the mall or to the Alpine Diner to hang out, or to any of the other things that Kay wouldn’t have done on her own. They lent each other confidence, and it had worked. Until Tam started dating Carson. Tam wanted Kay to have a boyfriend, too, and wouldn’t listen when Kay said she wasn’t sure she wanted one.

  “Quiet. Here they come.”

  Kay craned her head around to the cafeteria doorway to see Jon and Carson approach. Kay still didn’t know what to tell Jon. She tried to act normal, tried not to blush, and went back to staring at her sandwich when Jon took the seat next to her.

  Carson—tall, lanky, with unruly blond hair and a handsome smile—sat next to Tam, and the two started making out. Carson put his arm around Tam’s shoulders, she leaned in, and their lips were together. They didn’t seem to need to come up for air. They’d been going out for six months now. Tam loved having a boyfriend. She thought everyone should have a boyfriend.

  Kay and Jon squirmed and didn’t look at each other.

  When the couple finally broke apart, Tam was giggling. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes shining. Carson looked at her with this proud, possessive expression on his face. They both seemed to be enjoying themselves.

  Maybe I should just say yes, Kay thought.

  “I can’t wait until you guys get written up for that,” Jon said.

  “It’ll be worth it,” Carson said, grinning. The couple only had eyes for each other. Kay and Jon may as well have been alone.

  Tam would have argued that Carson was cuter than Jon, but Kay thought Jon was more natural—more honest. He was fit and tanned from all his time outdoors, and when he listened to Kay, she was sure he was really listening. They had conversations.

  At least, they didn’t used to have any trouble talking. Now they avoided making eye contact, and avoided looking at Tam and Carson. There wasn’t much else to look at.

  Jon shook out of the funk first, focusing on her and donning a bright tone to his solid tenor voice. “How’ve you been?” he asked.

  “Okay,” she said. “You?”

  He shrugged. “Okay. I tried calling you yesterday.”

  “I got your message. Sorry about that. I went climbing and was gone most of the day.”

  “Oh? Where’d you go?”

  She wasn’t going to be able to keep this secret if she couldn’t come up with a good answer to that question. What had she told her dad? “Out by Bluebell. Mostly bouldering. Just messing around.”

  “By yourself? You should have called me. I’m always up for climbing.”

  In fact, they’d learned to climb together, back when they both ended up in a climbing safety class her dad taught at the rec center. She’d known Jon from school, but climbing gave them something in common. They discovered they had the same passion for it. He was right, she was chagrined to realize. She should have called him. Except that she’d wanted to be alone.

  She didn’t want to tell him he was exactly the reason she’d wanted to be by herself. “Yeah, I know. Next time.”

  That turned the conversation to other topics, like school and parents and next year’s college applications. Tam and Carson sat hip to hip, body to body, on the bench at the cafeteria table, on the verge of kissing again, Kay was sure.

  Kay finally ate, managing to finish before the bell rang, and they all had to slink back to class.

  Jon touched her arm and pulled her aside before they entered the hallway to the classrooms.

  “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

  Her stomach knotted, because she knew what he was going to ask. “Just a minute, I guess. I don’t want to be late.” She bit her lip.

  “I’ll try not to make you late. Wouldn’t want to get you in trouble.” He smiled a goofy smile.

  This was the problem with all this relationship stuff, this boyfriend-girlfriend thing. Why couldn’t they just come out and talk about it? They could talk about everything else. When it came to this, he got all tongue-tied. They both did.

  “You thought any more about it? The dance, I mean,” he said.

  She couldn’t figure out what to say to one of her best friends in the world. She licked her lips and blurted out the question. “Why? I mean, why me?”

  He looked at her sharply, a disbelieving expression. She flushed, her cheeks burning, because she felt like she’d missed something. Like this whole business was obvious to everyone but her.

  “You’re my best friend. Why would I want to go with anyone else?”

  “You don’t go to dances with your best friend. Do you? You go with someone who’s pretty or…or…”

  “Who puts out?” he said, and she blushed again. “I don’t understand why you’re so down on yourself.”

  She took a breath and looked at him square on, meeting his gaze at last. He had green eyes, a tight smile.

  “This is just really weird. I’ve known you since the fifth grade, and it’s not that I don’t want to go, or I’d just come out and say it, really I would. But I don’t know. I really don’t know what I want. Sometimes I think you’re just asking me because we’re supposed to have dates for the dance, and I’m the most available girl you know—”

  He held his hands up in a defensive gesture. “Hey, I didn’t mean to freak you out or anything. You don’t have to say anything. The dance is still a month away.”

  She smiled gratefully and felt better, because he sounded like he meant it. No pressure. This probably wasn’t the big deal she was making it out to be.

  She sighed. “I’ve just seen what happens when people break up, and they hate each other. I don’t think I could stand it if that happened to us.”

  “I just want to go to the dance with my friend.”

  That made it sound so simple. That’s all it was, then. Going to the dance with her friend.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Okay? Okay what?”

  “Okay, I’ll go
to the dance with you.” She smiled.

  His eyes lit up. He grinned and looked so pleased, she was glad she’d said yes. He fidgeted, like he wanted to hug her. Boyfriend and girlfriend would have hugged. But they were just friends. So they didn’t.

  “Okay. Cool,” he said. “Um…I guess I’ll see you later then.”

  It didn’t seem fair, that they’d made this momentous decision and then had to go off to something as mundane as class. “See you.”

  He had math in the next hall over and turned in that direction. She had to backtrack to English class. They were both going to be late. Kay was the last one in the room when she slipped through the door.

  Before Kay even sat down, Tam leaned over and hissed, “Well? What did he say? What did you say?”

  Surely Tam could guess what had happened, as hard as Kay was blushing. Kay wasn’t sure how to say it. “I—”

  Mrs. Ryan stood at the front of the class. “All right, people, we’re starting Act Three of Romeo and Juliet today, so please open your books.”

  Saved by classwork. Tam managed to glare even as she retrieved her book from her pile of belongings. Mrs. Ryan was writing vocabulary words on the chalkboard. Kay hunched over her book to avoid looking at Tam.

  Everyone jumped when a howling siren rang out. Dragon-raid drill. Or maybe it wasn’t a drill. Someone had found out what happened, one of the dragons, and now they were coming to get back for the one little incursion over the border. One little mistake, and the decades’ long peace was over.

  Don’t stop to look. That was the drill. Go inside if you were outside. Leave your classroom single file, go to the hallways in the center of the building—fireproofed with steel, lined with cinder blocks. Crouch on the floor, arms over your head. If you stopped to look for them, even glancing out the window for a moment, it would be too late.

  They did the drill several times a year—every year since preschool—until it was routine. A few kids goofed off, elbowing each other and giggling, and the teachers yelled at them. All of it just like it always was. The only person who was nervous was Kay. She looked down the hall, trying to see where Jon was, but couldn’t find him.

  Dozens of kids lined the hallway, crouched on the floor, arms over their heads, waiting.

  “Like this would even do any good if a dragon really wanted to set fire to the place,” Tam said, leaning over to whisper at Kay. “It’s not like anyone even sees them anymore.”

  “I saw one,” said a guy named Brad, from her other side.

  “Where?”

  “In the air, kind of way off.”

  “That doesn’t count.”

  Across the hall, Pete said, “We should just go in and bomb them all. They’re just animals, it’s not like they can do anything about it.”

  But they’re not, Kay almost continued the argument. They talk. They’re intelligent. One of them saved my life. And they could be coming right now because she’d crossed the border and broken the treaty. She gritted her teeth to keep from saying anything.

  “Then why do we even do the drills, if they’re not dangerous?” Tam said.

  Pete answered, “I don’t know—it’s stupid. We’ve got the air force base—they could just bomb the hell out of the dragons, then we’d never have to worry again.” In fact, jets from the base patrolled the border, flying over the town of Silver River a couple of times a week. It wouldn’t take much for them to continue on to the mountains where the dragons lived.

  “Quiet!” one of the teachers called to them.

  The alarm kept going, and they huddled in rows on the floor. Kay waited for the fires, the conflagration, to sweep over the building.

  Nothing happened. It was just a drill. No one had found out about what Kay had done yesterday. She tried to calm down. The alarm stopped after another minute, and everyone filed back to their classes.

  The Federal Bureau of Border Enforcement organized and encouraged the dragon alarms. At home that evening, Kay tried to think of a way to ask about what was worrying her, without really asking. Dad was on duty that night, so it was just her and her mother.

  “We had a drill at school today,” Kay said, over a dinner of chicken casserole out of a box.

  “Oh, was that today?” her mom said, still chewing. “I knew there was one scheduled, but I wasn’t keeping track.”

  “So it was scheduled. There wasn’t a particular reason for it or anything.” No increased dragon activity because of a certain stupid girl getting caught on the other side of the border…

  “Yup. It was on the schedule.” Her mother was distracted by food and by the stack of reports on the table next her and didn’t seem to wonder that the question was maybe a little strange.

  Kay tried to make the conversation sound innocent. “So…why do we even have drills? There hasn’t been an attack in, like, sixty years. Does the bureau really think they’d attack now?”

  “It’s just in case, Kay. We don’t know anything about them. They did it before, they may do it again. If someone crossed the border, if they decided we were a threat—we don’t even know what they’d consider to be a threat.” Her mother sounded frustrated. “We just have to be ready for anything.”

  “Would we ever attack them instead?” Kay asked, thinking of Pete, who wanted to bomb them.

  Her mother set aside the packet of papers she’d been reading and regarded Kay. “My job is to uphold the integrity of the border established by the Silver River Treaty. That’s the official line, and I’m sticking to it.” She quirked a lopsided smile.

  “But unofficially? Do you think we’d ever attack them?”

  “What brought this up?”

  Kay shrugged. “Some guy at school talking.”

  “Repeating what his parents say at home, I’m sure,” her mom said with a sigh. “Some fanatics think we gave up too much territory to the dragons and that we should take it back.”

  “But that wouldn’t ever happen, right?” Kay asked, suddenly uneasy. They treated the drills like a joke—she didn’t ever want to have to do one for real. She tried to think of what a war with the dragons would look like, but couldn’t. If that ever happened, Silver River would be in the middle of it.

  Her mother went back to looking at the report and said flatly, “No, I don’t think so.”

  That didn’t really convince Kay. She didn’t know how many more questions she could get away with before her mother got either frustrated or suspicious. “They talk, right? Why don’t we still talk to them?”

  “That’s the way they wanted it. They thought we’d all be safer if we stayed isolated from each other. Don’t they teach you this in history class?”

  “A little.” They did cover dragons in history class, especially in Silver River, but mostly with broad strokes. There wasn’t much detail to go on, and the dragons came across as this distant, mysterious enemy. What else was there to know? seemed to be the attitude. Kay wished now that she’d been paying more attention. “No one seems to know much about it. Couldn’t we have, I don’t know, told them we wanted to keep talking?”

  Her mother said, “At the time, I don’t think it occurred to anyone to argue with something that can breathe fire.”

  It wouldn’t have occurred to Kay either, until yesterday.

  3

  Kay had an atlas, one of those picture-book-type deals for kids that she’d gotten one Christmas, with a world map across two pages, all the countries shown in different colors. She’d marked places all over the world she wanted to go. Climbs she wanted to conquer: Yosemite National Park; Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa; Trango Towers in Pakistan. She didn’t quite know how she was going to do it, besides making a lot of money somehow. Winning the lottery, maybe. She wasn’t the best student and didn’t see herself in a fancy high-paying job. Never mind that many of those dots she’d marked on her map were in dangerous places. The regions of Dragon were in the north, shaded gray. Shadowy, unknown, off limits. “Here be dragons,” the map may as well have said. So wasn’t cross
ing the border another adventure? But rather than seek this one out, it had come along and plucked her out of the river.

  Crossing the border by accident was one thing, and she hadn’t crossed very far then. Just washed up on the riverbank. No one could blame her; no one could punish her. But crossing intentionally?

  Kay stood on the human side of the creek and looked across. The other side didn’t look any different. Going over there shouldn’t have been such a big deal. And why did she have to be the one to cross anyway? Meeting like this was the dragon’s idea. He should be the one to cross. Except she was a little easier to hide than he was, wasn’t she? Her tracks would be easier to cover up on his side of the river than his would be on her side.

  The log he’d dragged across for a bridge was still in place, maybe wetter than it had been. It would hold up.

  She ran across it before she could second-guess herself. Her hiking boots didn’t slip on the wet bank, and the log didn’t budge. This could have been any makeshift bridge across any creek, and the forest on the other side was just the same: tall pines, earthy smell, calls of distant birds. The only difference was in her mind, knowing she had crossed the lines on the map. It was enough to make this another world. She stayed by the side of the creek, perching on a smooth boulder. She pulled her knees up and waited. No dragon appeared.

  Half an hour, she told herself. That was how long she’d give him. If he didn’t appear by then, she’d run back home and pretend that none of this had happened. Then again, maybe it hadn’t happened. Maybe she’d been knocked on the head and imagined the whole thing. But she wanted to know. She hadn’t thought about how the dragons had their own side to the story; now that she had, she wanted to know what that side was. And she would never, ever get another chance at this. This was another impossible rock face, and her uncertainty was the usual fear vying with exhilaration. Sure, she might fall. But she’d rather reach the top.

  She heard the dragon’s breathing first. A short gust of wind rustled nearby trees, then another, and the gusts, like those that sometimes came suddenly from the mountaintops before letting the forest fall still again, were too regular. These gusts didn’t rustle, murmur, and startle. They breathed.