“We’re not going without the dragon,” said Clay.
“What? Are you joking?” Max-Ernest looked from Clay and his friends to the dragon and back again. They were clearly very serious. “Fine, there’s no time to argue.”
He pulled an odd assortment of skeleton keys from his pocket.
“Here—these were Houdini’s for his escape routines. My old mentor, Pietro, gave them to me. If any keys can unlock the dragon, these can. I’ll try to distract the baddies—”
“Thanks,” said Clay, but his brother had already turned away.
“Bye,” Clay added.
“Yoo-hoo, Amber! Over here!” he could hear his brother saying.
A moment later, it was silent outside the container.
Clay looked back at the dragon. “Ready to get that muzzle off, Ariella?”
As the dragon craned its neck toward him, Clay examined the skeleton keys, trying to determine which was the most promising one. Each was more oddly shaped than the next.
“Oh, give those to a professional,” said Leira, grabbing the keys from him.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO
SUNK
I would like to tell you about the brave exploits that followed. How our heroic friends from Earth Ranch vanquished all their enemies in the service of freeing a dragon. But the truth is, when you have a dragon on your side—an unchained, un-muzzled dragon; a dragon that isn’t being shot with hundreds of tranquilizer darts—escape isn’t terribly difficult.
That doesn’t mean there wasn’t some collateral damage, however.
In order to make an exit route, Clay had had no choice but to encourage Ariella to burn a hole in the side of the hold. But perhaps the big, fiery exhale that burned the hole was a tad bigger and fierier than necessary. The plume of fire went all the way through to the room where the ship’s water tanks were held and out the side of the ship.* As a result, one side of the ship caught on fire, and the other side started flooding with water.
A disaster? Most assuredly. But I submit that it could have been much worse. If a nuclear torpedo had hit the ship, for example, that would have been worse.
Once Ariella shot out of the hole in the ship’s hull as if from a cannon, the dragon soared briefly upward, then dropped down onto the top of the climbing wall and spread its wings as if to declare victory over the paltry earthlings scurrying around the ship below.
From the bottom of the wall, our friends anxiously watched the beast. Would Ariella breathe yet more fire on the ship until it was nothing more than a pile of ash floating on the surface of the ocean? Or would the dragon stay where it was, guarding its spoils while the ship sank and people dropped helplessly into the water?
In the end, Ariella resisted any impulse to wreak vengeance on the ship’s inhabitants. Instead, the dragon performed what might best be described as a magic trick. As everyone stared, Ariella dove down from the wall and glided over the deck and pool, passing right by our friends from Earth Ranch. Then the dragon rose again, spreading its wings wider and wider as it flew, until they seemed to fade away altogether and the creature was completely camouflaged against the darkening sky. It was as though the dragon had vanished into the air.
Straining his eyes, Brett could just make out the blurry outline of the dragon flapping its wings and lifting itself into the clouds.
But in a moment, the dragon had disappeared. Even to him.
He stared into the sky, happy and sad at once.
“Hey, Brett, where’s Clay?”
Leira was tapping him on the shoulder. It was time to find a way off the ship. Before it sunk with them on it.
“Oh, he said he’d meet us back onshore,” said Brett, a little smile on his lips. “He caught an early flight.”
Leira followed his gaze into the clouds. Was Brett saying what she thought he was saying?
Was Clay responsible for the dragon’s magical and peaceful exit? I don’t know what the dragon would have done otherwise, but it’s true that Clay had been silently urging the dragon to leave for several moments beforehand. Then again, if dragons have perfect knowledge of past and future, as some claim, how can a mere mortal affect their actions? Or are there many futures? And if there are, do they branch off in separate directions, never again to touch, or do they all end in the same place, like tributaries of a single river? Perhaps there is even a future that reverses course and travels upriver, as it were? But these are questions for philosophers. Our story has a more modest scope.
The only question we need to answer now is the perennial one. The question every writer faces.
What happens next?
You know how I feel about cruise ships. Nevertheless, I must commend the crew of the Imperial Conquest. Captain Abad had spent the last few hours quietly prepping her already well-trained team for the disaster to come. She had an inkling that they would have to evacuate, and she didn’t want to overlook a single passenger or crew member. By that measure, she was very successful. She might have lost her ship, but she did not lose any lives.
She even found time to hand out a few treats as she did the rounds of the muster rooms, bidding her passengers good-bye. It was in this way that she ran into Brett Perry’s son, the boy who’d been pushed off the ship. There was no time to learn how he’d survived the fall, but she didn’t think she’d ever forget how grateful he looked when she handed him the last of the Jell-O parfaits. To think a little bit of sugar and gelatin and whipped cream could make someone so happy!
Unfortunately, there was not enough time for all passengers to get to their assigned muster rooms—some of which were on fire or full of water. Even so, most passengers were safely escorted onto tenders. A few were forced to jump, but they wore life preservers and didn’t have to swim far before being picked up.
Later, news reports about the sinking of the Imperial Conquest noted the surprising number of farm animals aboard. Sadly, a few of the animals could not be saved, but there were many heartwarming stories about people who had managed to fit chickens and sheep, and in one case even a pig, onto their tenders and taken them to Price Island, where they were released into the wild.
What went unreported—and almost but not quite unnoticed—was the part that sea animals played in the rescue work. Gulls circled the wreck, squawking loudly when they saw a person in danger of drowning or getting caught in the fire. Meanwhile, dolphins, seemingly obeying mysterious commands, picked up stray swimmers as they jumped from the flaming ship.
Only Brett thought to look up—and saw the shimmering shadow of the dragon flying overhead. But even he couldn’t see Clay, sitting astride the dragon’s neck, speaking the strange words of the Occulta Draco.
It may seem to you that somebody should have stopped Amber and Brett senior from escaping, as they did in a small but fast speedboat that had been stowed discreetly on the cruise ship for precisely this kind of eventuality. But I’m afraid nobody was thinking about them. You have the advantage of seeing the situation from a distance. “What about the villains? Get them!” you say. Our heroes were in the thick of the moment, alas. Now that the dragon was flying free, they were worried only about getting themselves and the people around them safely to shore.
I will report one further tidbit, however, in the hope that it appeases you somewhat. Not many hours later, that same speedboat rendezvoused with a sleek white yacht somewhere in the middle of the Pacific. When Amber climbed aboard, she was immediately slapped across the face by a beautiful blond woman with long white gloves. And Brett senior? He was pushed back into the water by one of the yacht’s crew members and forced to swim, angry and humiliated, back to his speedboat.
It is no use, our trying to imagine what it was like for Clay to ride on Ariella’s back. The thrill of flying with a dragon is surely like nothing else. But lest you be too jealous of Clay, I have it on good authority that Ariella flew a little higher than Clay would have liked—he apparently got a nosebleed—and that he feared for his life more than once during their fl
ight. Much worse, of course, was when the dragon landed—very close to the entrance of the dragon cave—and raised its neck so high that Clay had no choice but to slide off. I don’t think Clay necessarily expected to spend the night curled up in the cave with Ariella, but he certainly didn’t expect what happened next: As soon as Clay was safely deposited on the ground, the dragon beat its wings and was aloft again, heading not toward its volcano home but toward the sea. “So is this, like, good-bye?” Clay asked, unwilling to believe the dragon was really leaving. Dragons don’t say good-bye came the response. But as the great beast flew out over the ocean, it tipped its wing in a way that seemed to mean just that.
Later that evening, when Clay joined his friends on the beach, he noticed a glass bottle by his foot. Inside was a note in his brother’s handwriting.
What’s better than a knight who slays a dragon?
A knight who saves a dragon.
Clay looked around, hoping briefly that he might see his brother somewhere nearby, but of course he didn’t. No doubt Max-Ernest had left in pursuit of Amber and the Midnight Sun.
And yet, despite having been abandoned by the dragon and by his brother as well, Clay felt surprisingly happy. He didn’t even mind that it was Flint, risen from the half-dead, who was welcoming him and his friends ashore. He was just glad to be back on this island that was beginning to feel strangely like home.
Besides, he had an overdue library book to return.
EPILOGUE
It is not often that a dragon flies over that great smoggy basin known as Los Angeles. You might think that dragons would feel at home in a place once called the Land of Many Smokes, but to the best of my knowledge, there had been no dragon sightings there for thousands, perhaps millions, of years.
The time was barely five a.m., and the sky was still dark when the great winged serpent appeared on the horizon. It could have been a passenger jet returning from Japan or Hawaii, except for the slow, steady beat of its wings and the occasional swish of its tail.
A few sleepy kids boarding a whale-watching boat in San Pedro were the first to see it. They pointed excitedly, spilling their hot chocolates, but their parents were too absorbed in adult conversation to notice.
Soon others—sailors and dockworkers and truckers and sanitation workers—spotted the great flying beast. They captured fleeting images on their phones and sent them to their friends.
#giantseabird
#mutantflyingfish?
#lookslikeadragon
#theendiscoming
The dragon flew north along the coast, past the surfers of Huntington Beach and the Rollerbladers of the Venice Beach boardwalk. At the Santa Monica Pier, Latin American fishermen missed the first nibbles on their lines because they were staring up at la gran serpiente.
At Sunset Boulevard, the dragon turned inland and followed that legendary street as if it were a long winding river that stretched from the ocean through Beverly Hills and beyond.
As the dragon flew over the mansions of the rich and famous, normally reclusive residents stepped outside to catch a glimpse. Drivers gawked from their cars, causing more than one accident. Luckily, it was not yet rush hour. The traffic snarled but did not stop altogether, as it might have.
For its part, the dragon regarded the commotion with something like curiosity—if a beast as ancient and all-knowing as a dragon can be curious—but then seemed to lose interest, as if it had suddenly realized that all those smoke-spewing four-wheeled creatures below were metal, and wouldn’t make a very good meal.
The dragon passed more of LA’s postcard sites—Mulholland Drive, the Hollywood sign, the Griffith Observatory—without so much as a glance in their direction. But both Dodger Stadium and the Rose Bowl briefly caught the dragon’s attention. It circled the stadiums, perhaps mistaking them for volcanic craters or considering their possibilities as nests, and then it flew on.
By now, blurred footage of the flying beast was being uploaded all over the Internet. One picture that caught the dragon in a brown smoggy haze was particularly popular; #smauginthesmog was the most common hashtag.
The city was used to blimps and fireworks and movie-star sightings, but even in LA, a dragon was remarkable. Not since a decommissioned space shuttle had cruised over the city did a flying object command such widespread attention.
Amateur zoologists, special-effects specialists, and conspiracy theorists of all kinds examined every pixel of every picture on Instagram. They measured the dragon’s wingspan (just like a raptor!, a ten-year-old commenter noted) and its tail movements (too regular to be made by an animal, said one; too natural to be made by a machine, said another). They even took stock of the dragon’s chemical emissions and carbon footprint.
Most people assumed it was a fake, a drone aircraft dressed up as a dragon. Another movie was being filmed, probably. Or else it was a publicity stunt, a clever way to promote a new TV show or video game.
Some people speculated that the citizens of the City of Angels were experiencing a mass collective hallucination. With all the acting and filmmaking and general faking that went on in LA, Angelenos could no longer tell illusion from reality. Their lives had become a fantasy. Or so the logic went.
The people who came closest to the truth were, of course, the youngest children, whose minds were not closed to the possibility of a dragon. And the ranchers outside the city, whose livestock were soon lost to the dragon’s claws. They couldn’t afford not to believe.
In a matter of days, the dragon was largely forgotten. On to the next news cycle.
You see, when something exciting and inexplicable happens, the world wants to know about it; but if it remains unexplained for too long, the world turns away. We don’t want to know that there are things we don’t understand.
However, a few select and secretive groups of people around the globe—some of whom you have met in this narrative, others whom you may yet meet in another—knew exactly what they were seeing when they looked at pictures of the dragon on their newsfeeds. They knew the dragon was real, and they knew where the dragon had come from, if not where the dragon was going.
Some of these people rejoiced that the dragon was free; others were angry that it had escaped their grasp.
The bad guys had not won. But neither, it must be said, had the good guys. Not yet.
For the moment, at least, the dragon had won. And a dragon is neither good nor bad. It just is.
BACK MATTER*
MAGICA AND SCIENTIA: A MYTH
Long ago, when the earth had just learned to talk and the moon was still in diapers, a pair of twins was born. Magic and Science were their names—or Magica and Scientia, if you like your myths to sound mythological.
Magic and Science were smart, lively children, a girl and a boy respectively, and they loved each other very much.
Together they wondered at rainbows, studied the stars, and sailed the oceans; they concocted powerful potions and conducted explosive experiments; and they cavorted with all manner of creatures, many of which we no longer have names for, and most of which we would be very surprised to see roaming the world today.
When something happened that they didn’t understand, Magic and Science made up stories about it. When the earth shook or the skies stormed or a volcano erupted or they got pimples on their noses, they blamed the event on warring gods or raging monsters, or simply on the movement of the celestial spheres.*
These stories weren’t right or wrong; they were just stories. They were ways for Magic and Science to describe their world and their lives and their noses and other things that appeared in front of their faces.
But as they grew older, the siblings started to drift apart.
Magic was always showing off. Look at me, look at me, she would say. I can predict the future, I can make gold, I can live forever. Who needs boring old Science when you can have fantastic, fabulous, magical me?
Magic’s proclamations didn’t have much of a factual basis, and sometimes they were downright decepti
ve, but she was beautiful and fun, and her hair was always changing color, and for a long time she was more popular than Science.
Being only human, Science grew jealous.
One by one, Science started taking things away from Magic.
Look, said Magic. I can make a fire by rubbing two sticks together. They are my magic wands.
That’s called combustion, said Science. He stomped out the fire.
Well, watch this—I can make this apple move by itself, joked Magic. She let go of the apple, and it dropped to the ground. See, she said, and laughed.
That’s just gravity, said Science, not laughing. He picked up the apple and ate it.
Well, have you seen me light the night sky like Zeus himself? Surely that is magic, said Magic.
Lightning is electricity. It is science, said Science. And you’d better be careful or lightning might strike your umbrella and fry your precious hair—not that it isn’t already ruined by all that bleaching.
Science kept taking things for himself until even the stars themselves were his; no longer glittering jewels embedded in mysterious invisible spheres, they were just balls of gas floating in a void.
Once joyous and carefree, Magic turned cranky and careworn. You win, she said to her brother. Take everything. Just leave me alone. Rarely did she go out in public, and when she did, she wore tinfoil hats and walked her cat on a leash. She had been everyone’s favorite; now people called her a witch, a hag, a harridan.
Ha! I told you so, said Science. Magic is nothing. I, Science, am everything.
By now, Science was very strong and powerful; and, it must be admitted, he solved many of the world’s ills with his wide knowledge and his brilliant discoveries. Alas, he was not satisfied. For always there was something new that he did not understand. And when there was nothing new, there was still something very old, something that plagued him all his life; and his life was very long because although he was human, he was also a mythological figure, and mythological figures take a long time to die.