The Art of Saving the World

by Corinne Duyvis

  “Yes?” the dragon asked. “Are you done?”

  We only stared.

  A dragon. An actual dragon. And the kelpie, and the other Hazels . . . The rift hadn’t even spat out anything this bizarre the week I’d been born, when I’d gone a much farther distance and been away much longer than today. This couldn’t totally be my fault. Yet all this happening on my birthday couldn’t be a coincidence, either. The odds were literally 1 in 365.

  This was connected to me. Everything about the rift was. But somehow, I had the fewest answers.

  The dragon ruffled its wings. “At least there’s no screaming.”

  “We were supposed to find you?” I asked, recovering my words.

  “Yes. I was in a cell across the building.” It moved closer, its elbows pointed outward and its paws inelegantly dragging along the floor until it stood in front of Rainbow Hazel’s cell. Red and I edged back. “Recent events allowed me to break out. Forgive me for not awaiting your rescue. I was very uncomfortable.”

  I’d never heard an apology so accusatory.

  “The note said you’re supposed to have answers?”

  “Oh, yes. Those.” It glanced at me sideways. Its scaly, alien mouth twitched into something resembling a smile. “That’s my favorite part. I suppose all of you should be here to listen to it, though. I hate repeating myself.” It looked back at Rainbow in the cell. She’d been plastered to the back wall, but now slowly approached, her eyes round and flitting up and down and side to side to take in every part of the dragon. It studied her right back, murmuring, “It’ll be interesting dealing with this many of you.”

  Rainbow said something inaudible. The dragon lifted a paw, tapped the window, and dragged one claw along the surface of the glass to draw a half circle. I clamped my ears to shut out the screeching of claw on glass.

  The bottom half of the circle was made up by the metal window frame. The dragon dragged its nail parallel to it. All it took was a tap after that, and the glass half circle dropped into the cell with a crack.

  Rainbow stepped slowly forward.

  “If I wanted to eat someone,” the dragon told her, “I would take the two who are out here already.”

  Rainbow took a blanket from the ground and placed it on the window frame, where blocky bits of glass still protruded. She stuck her arms through, then her head, her glasses hanging crooked. By the time she’d made it through to her belly button, she eyed us and said, “Help?”

  Red and I didn’t get the chance. The dragon exhaled wearily—steam rising from its nose—and bent its head. Rainbow froze. Gently, it nipped the back of her shirt, then lifted her up and out into the hallway.

  She stood shakily on her feet. “Thank. You?”

  The dragon inclined its head. “You’re welcome.”

  Rainbow met the dragon’s eyes, then ours. She adjusted her glasses. “Where am I?” She kept her voice impressively steady.

  “West Asherton,” I said. “Just . . . not your West Asherton.”

  She stared at the dragon again. “I was starting to suspect that.”

  “Dragons actually, um, aren’t normal here, either.”

  “Oh.”

  The dragon sniffed. “Thankfully. I would pity whatever sibling of mine had to live in this dimension. No offense.”

  “Dimension,” Rainbow repeated. “What is happening?”

  “Well, we’re not dreaming.” Red’s smile trembled. She fisted a clump of her dress. “I think.”

  “I got that far. I’ve been stuck in that cell nearly an hour.”

  The dragon sniffed again. “We ought to leave.”

  The four of us walked down the hallway, Red and I quietly filling in Rainbow on what little we knew, and vice versa. Like Red, Rainbow didn’t have a rift in her world; she’d been out to dinner for her birthday (not at Franny’s Food) and the next thing she knew, she was on a gray mat in the rift barn.

  “I think I saw that rift.” Rainbow was dazed, but not as badly as Red had been. She kept swallowing visibly—sometimes audibly—and looking around with uncertain eyes, but that was the extent of it. “Everything was blurry, at first, but I saw something over me, unclear and flashing . . . and there was a voice through a speaker. I don’t remember what it said. Not long after that, two people came in and helped me up. They wore these big hazmat suits. They took me into another building. They knew my name. They asked what I’d seen. They wouldn’t answer my questions. They just kept saying I was in America, I was with the government, and I was safe. Then they put me in that cell, telling me to rest and they’d come back later to explain everything. They seemed rushed. Next thing I know, the lights go out, people are running past, and eventually you two show up.”

  “Neither of you saw other Hazels?” the dragon asked.

  Rainbow and Red shook their heads.

  The dragon’s claws tapped on the floor as it walked.

  I had lived a lifetime of being at the center of our government’s—our world’s—best-kept secret. I dreamed every night about what the rift might mean and where it might lead to. While I’d never considered this particular scenario, I had imagined ones far worse and far stranger.

  So why didn’t I feel like I could handle this?

  For the first time in sixteen years, the situation had changed. That had to be a good thing. That had to mean answers. It couldn’t mean what every part of me feared it meant: that the rift had been a sixteen-year warning. A sparking wall outlet. An unsteady stair. A crumbling dam. The rift might have been leading up to something all this time, and we’d failed to realize. Now that moment was here, and we were so underprepared we might as well have been blindfolded.

  Every day, every minute, I felt like I was missing something vital that’d bring everything crashing down on us.

  I never wanted to be right.

  We exited the building. The other Hazels and I leaped over the closed security gate while the dragon barged right through it, bowling over the port and gate and practically stampeding out into the night. Its wings snapped open, stretching to their full length, all gnarly brown-gray spines and leathery membrane between. The dragon tossed its head back. It breathed in deeply, its mouth half open.

  “That cell,” it said upon catching our stares, “was very uncomfortable.”

  “How long were you . . .?” I asked.

  “Every second in a cell is a second too long.”

  The dragon stretched its legs and extended and flexed its neck. Its scales caught the light of the moon and the surrounding fire. Emerald shimmered across its dry skin, like oil flecks only seen from the right angle and in the right light; a moment later, the scales were back to dull brown.

  The dragon stamped its feet on the grass, shaking its muscles loose. “Very well. We should leave.”

  “Leave for where? Can you take us home?” Rainbow asked.

  “And what about those answers?” Red added. “We could really use them.” Her voice went higher in those final few words, and she swallowed the same way she and Rainbow had both been doing before, as though trying to force back the fear that’d crept in.

  The grounds were busier than when I’d gone into the building. Agents and researchers were everywhere I turned. Flecks of light buzzed in the air, looking at first like burnt debris, then like bugs. In the distance, a group of agents surrounded a deep crater, while others were taking aim at a trio of small bipedal forms scampering over the grass.

  “It’s out!” the nearest agent screamed. He scrambled away from us. His voice belled across the lawn: “Forget the trolls! The dragon’s out!”

  The grounds exploded into action—some people fleeing, others bolting toward us without hesitation, already reaching for their weapons.

  “Yes, yes, answers, just climb on, will you?” The dragon flattened itself to the ground. “We’re leaving.”

  “On . . . your back?” Red asked, even as Rainbow stepped closer.

  I didn’t move. “Leaving for where?” I said, echoing Rainbow’s word
s from before. “The rift is going wild. I can’t leave. I’d make it worse.”

  The rift barn was only a few seconds’ run away. I could still find help and try to get it back under control.

  The dragon narrowed its pitch-black eyes. “It won’t matter, Hazel.”

  “I have to try. Director Facet—”

  “It won’t matter,” the dragon said, “because the rift is no longer on the grounds.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “What?”

  “That barn is empty. The rift leaped away.”

  “Leaped away?” I repeated.

  “It shook loose shortly before you arrived.”

  I caught myself swallowing the way Rainbow and Red had been doing. “What do you mean, shook loose? Leaped? It never moved before!”

  “Has any of this ever happened before?” the dragon inquired.

  “How can you know—”

  “Your world has birds that can sense electromagnetic fields, snakes that can detect infrared light, insects that can see in the ultraviolet, shrimp with twelve color receptors rather than humans’ paltry three—and you wonder whether a dragon could pick up on something as spectacularly unsubtle as a nearby interdimensional rift?”

  “The dragon makes a compelling point,” Rainbow said.

  Agents were approaching from multiple directions. I recognized Sanghani, Emerson, Washington. They were cautious and steady, looking more like extras from an action movie than the professionally patient agents I’d grown up with.

  “Hazel Stanczak!” a voice shouted through a loudspeaker. “Um, all three of you! Move away from that dragon!”

  Things clicked together. “Maybe that’s why the rift went out of control,” I told the dragon. “It moved out of my radius. I need to find it.”

  The dragon shook its head. Its long neck made the movement strange and coiling. “The other way around. It did not go out of control because it moved; it moved because it went out of control. Your proximity stopped mattering for that same reason. The cause is complicated, but it comes down to this: Your sixteenth birthday arrived, which means you’re ready.”

  “I’m ready?” I glanced sideways. The agents were creeping closer.

  “Hazel, there are seven weapons currently trained on me. I have been shot before. It’s unpleasant.” The dragon stared me down. “Let’s take this conversation elsewhere.”

  Rainbow made up her mind. Despite the agents’ protests, she climbed onto the dragon’s back. Her sneakers slid off thick, wrinkled skin as she tried to get a foothold.

  “They locked me up.” Rainbow nodded at the agents. Next, she nodded at the dragon. “This one got me out. That’s enough for me.”

  Red climbed on behind her.

  “Hazel! Careful! That thing is dangerous!”

  Agent Sanghani shouted. “Agent Sanghani?” I stepped forward, closer to the dragon and agent both. “The dragon hasn’t hurt us. It says it has answers. Can you put down the weapons? Maybe we can talk, all of us?”

  “We can’t risk it. Go inside the barn. We’ll take care of this.”

  I took another step. “Is it true what it told me? Is the rift gone?”

  “I’m a she, if you don’t mind,” the dragon interjected. “Carry on.”

  “Agent Sanghani?”

  “We’ll get to the bottom of this, Hazel. We promise.”

  My fists clenched, more from frustration than anger. I’d heard that for sixteen years straight. The MGA probably meant it, they were probably trying—but now, for the first time, I was offered an alternative.

  “We have new data now, Hazel. We can make progress. But we need your help.”

  “So the rift is gone.”

  Sanghani’s hesitation said enough.

  Sixteen years of safety and rules and smiles and careful experimentation. Sterile rooms on my lawn. Windowless vans in the school parking lot.

  I wanted to stay. The MGA had the equipment and experience to deal with this. Mom would arrive any moment—she had to hear the commotion—and Dad had to be close. We’d put out the fires and clean up the grounds, and the brightest minds in the country would put their heads together. I’d follow their instructions; I’d know I was making the responsible choice. I’d help solve one of the world’s greatest mysteries.

  But wasn’t that the point? Perhaps the rift no longer needed to be a mystery. This dragon had already hinted at more than I’d learned my entire life.

  And if the rift was no longer here, did I still need to be?

  I took another step closer. Rainbow extended a hand to pull me onto the dragon’s back. A strand of violet hair flopped into her eyes.

  “I—I’m sorry,” I called at Sanghani, “but it says it has answers—”

  “She,” the dragon said.

  “I have to know. I’ll be back! I’ll tell you everything!”

  “Hazel!” Sanghani shouted. “Don’t!”

  “Hazel!” another agent called.

  Rainbow and Red helped me climb on. The second I swung my leg over the dragon’s shoulders, it—she—stood waveringly upright.

  “Shoot me,” the dragon told the agents, “and you may injure me enough that I can no longer fly properly. I could accidentally drop these girls from a great height. It would be tragic and gory. I thought you should know.”

  I clutched the dry scales of her neck. There was nothing else to hold on to—no horns, no spikes, nothing. I ended up clenching my legs tight against her for extra support.

  “We’ll talk! We’ll lower our weapons!” Sanghani’s voice caught. “Don’t leave!”

  The dragon kicked off the ground with a lurch. Her great wings gave a snap in the air. I jolted forward, weightless for a half second. I wrapped my arms around the broad neck in front of me. Was I making a mistake? Oh, God, I was making a mistake, wasn’t I? The dragon hadn’t even told us where we were going. Away from the house and destruction and armed agents, yes, but I didn’t know whether that meant the clearing at the edge of my perimeter, or whether that meant . . . beyond.

  The dragon thumped back to the ground, sending a shock through us. She ran on heavy feet, jostling us left and right. Rainbow’s face pressed into my shoulder. Her arms around my waist clenched so tight it hurt. Then, another snap of the dragon’s wings, and we were in the air—

  One wing tip smacked into a barn. Her front feet touched down again. We careened left. My legs started to slip, but the dragon righted herself on time, galloping between the barns.

  “Sorry, sorry,” the dragon muttered. The wind whisked away half her words. “It’s been a while.”

  Past me flashed fire, barns, trees, wrinkled wings, swift silhouettes. I saw a bent arm jutting out from under a fallen chunk of wall, deathly still. We went past so quickly that I hoped I’d seen it wrong.

  We cleared the barns. I glimpsed Mom, her mouth agape—a flash of what might’ve been Director Facet, crouching by an unmoving body on the grass—then the dragon flapped her wings again, and we were back in the air, and this time we stayed there.

  We rose.

  We flew.

  Wind whipped past me. We could’ve been up there for half a second or half a minute, I didn’t know, before I dared glance down.

  We hadn’t gone far. The road stretched below us: the yellow plant that’d materialized in front of the van, the skid marks from the crash, and, farther down, the van itself. The hood was crumpled against a tree. Two doors stood wide open.

  We flew on, past the mini-golf course, past Franny’s Food (where, for all I knew, Marybeth and the others might still be sitting), and finally, past that one hollow tree by the side of the road that marked the end of my perimeter.

  I should’ve been terrified. But though my heart thudded in my throat and my arms wouldn’t let go of the dragon’s neck for the life of me, though I felt hot from adrenaline and cold from the wind, I wasn’t scared. I’d made my choice. Even if I wanted to go back—and a large part of me did—I no longer had that option, unless I wanted to fli
ng myself to the ground fifty yards below.

  It was oddly freeing.

  I’d sit this out. I’d wait for this day to be over. I’d leave the dragon in charge and ask for my answers.

  It was all I could do now.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Goose bumps pricked my skin as we flew.

  I barely breathed as I looked at West Asherton laid out beneath us. I’d seen a satellite map online; I’d seen photos; once, Carolyn and Mom had spent an hour showing me around town using their phone cameras.

  The real town was different. I recognized the layout of the streets, but no more. I soaked in every similarity to the picture in my mind, studied every unexpected difference, watched people stop and stare and point at us in the sky until they faded behind us.

  The dragon had to be correct about the rift moving locations. The damage hadn’t contained itself to the grounds or road near our house. There were car crashes and small fires in town, too. Firefighters surrounded the Dunkin’ Donuts, and for some reason I couldn’t determine, at least two dozen people had gathered around what looked like a fallen streetlight. Others rushed down the street to catch an animal I suspected wasn’t simply a lost dog. I couldn’t see the rift itself; it must’ve already moved away.

  Neither of the other Hazels said anything. We passed over the town without a word and set down a few minutes south of it, by a long stretch of highway and a truck stop that’d seen better days.

  I climbed off the dragon’s back, my legs numb. I nearly slipped on the wet grass.

  The dragon stretched, catlike—rear in the air, front legs stretching flat to the ground. Her claws curved into the dirt.

  I wanted to ask why we’d landed, when I’d get my answers, where we were supposed to go—and a dozen more questions besides—but I found myself rubbing my arms and wheeling around slowly. I craned my neck as though it would help me see more, more, more.