“Why didn’t they see my wrist cuff?” Blue asked. “Or the broken glass and the flamesilk thread in the watering can?”
“I cleaned it all up, of course,” she said. “You didn’t notice, in between your snores?”
“I wasn’t — did I? I didn’t, did I?”
Cricket laughed. “No, you’re a very polite sleeper, don’t worry.” She glanced out at the library again. “The only thing I couldn’t do was replace the missing light globe. But those burn out or get stolen all the time, so hopefully no one will connect it to you.”
“So every light globe in the Hive has a bit of flamesilk inside it?” he said tentatively.
“Of course,” she said. “Every light globe in every Hive. It would be tough to live the way we do without flamesilk. We’d all be bumping around in the dark, treading on everyone’s claws. Plus we need it for everything else that’s made with fire: metalwork, glass … ” She touched her spectacles self-consciously.
“Do all the HiveWings know about flamesilks?” he asked. “Because I’d never heard of them until today.”
“I think they know the queen has a source of flamesilk,” she said thoughtfully, “but most of them probably don’t think about where it comes from very much … it’s just something you order when you need it.”
Blue opened and closed his mouth on his next question. He remembered the eerie golden lava erupting from Luna’s wrists and weaving around her scales. Her silk was a … a commodity to the HiveWings. Something to be ordered and bought and sold and used.
“If your sister’s a flamesilk,” Cricket said, reaching for his wrist, “does that mean you’re going to be a flamesilk, too?” She traced one claw over the spot where his silk would come out, and he shivered.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Io said I would be, but we weren’t taught anything about flamesilks at Silkworm Hall.”
“But that must be why they’re chasing you, right?” she said. “Queen Wasp would never let a flamesilk wander around her Hives unguarded.”
“I’ve never been guarded before,” he said. “I’ve never done anything wrong. I’m really good at following the rules. She doesn’t have to worry about me.” He frowned, touching the spot on his forehead that was starting to hurt. “Maybe she just doesn’t know that. Maybe I could go to her and explain that I’m a loyal SilkWing. Maybe if I promise I’ll be careful, she’ll let me go back to my normal life. And Luna, too. Luna isn’t dangerous.”
Cricket hesitated. “I think … I think HiveWing policy is that all free flamesilks are dangerous, no matter what they say.” She unlatched the trapdoor and crawled back into the library. Blue followed her as she pulled a book off one of the high shelves, fluttering her wings a little to lift herself up to where she could reach it. She flipped through the pages, then slid it under his nose.
Scarlet colors leaped off the page, assaulting his eyeballs. The picture was of a Hive on fire, burning from top to bottom, with screaming HiveWing faces dimly visible through the smoke. At the top, huge dark letters proclaimed: THE CONSEQUENCES OF UNCHAINED FLAMESILKS.
“Yikes,” he said.
“I guess that’s supposed to be you,” she said, pointing to a SilkWing standing in the middle of the burning Hive with fire pouring out of his wrists. The illustrated dragon had a gleeful, unhinged grin on his face as he torched the city.
Blue shuddered. “I would never,” he said. “Why would anyone ever — that’s just horrible.”
Cricket tugged the book back over to her and turned to the next page, studying the words. Her eyes darted so quickly across the text that Blue couldn’t believe she was actually absorbing any of it, until she said, “OK, here. Flamesilk genetics. A dragonet with one flamesilk parent has a fifty percent chance of being a flamesilk, too. So we know Luna is, but you might or might not be.” She looked over the top of her glasses at him. “Do you think you are? Do your wrists ever feel like they’re burning? What symptoms did Luna have?”
“She didn’t have any!” Blue said. “I mean, not until today, when her silk started coming in all arrrrrgh-now-there’s-lava-everywhere. But she’s been totally normal before now.”
“So there’s no way to know if you are or not until your Metamorphosis Day,” Cricket said. “Hmmm. They must want to keep you locked up until then anyway, in case you try to run away.”
“My friend Io’s the one who made me run away. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to run,” Blue pointed out, “at least, not until they started chasing me.”
“What’s the Chrysalis?” Cricket asked.
“The — what?”
“When we first met, in the shed. You asked if I was with the Chrysalis.”
Blue felt a twist of guilt in his chest. He was pretty sure that whatever the Chrysalis was, HiveWings weren’t supposed to know about it. Even smart, sympathetic HiveWings with interesting glasses. Io would be furious if she found out he’d blurted it out to the first dragon he met.
Cricket was studying him curiously. “Is it a secret?” she said. “A SilkWing secret? Do you guys have lots of secrets from us? Can you tell me some of them? I promise not to tell anyone! There’s so much I don’t know about SilkWings, but Father won’t let me ask the servants anything.”
“I don’t really know what it is,” he admitted, trying to stem the tide of questions. “My friend just told me they’d help me if I could find them. But I have no idea how to do that.” He slid the flamesilk book over and studied it himself, hoping he hadn’t hurt Cricket’s feelings. “So … if flamesilk is so useful, then Queen Wasp probably isn’t killing them. Right?”
“Of course she isn’t!” Cricket said, startled. “We’re not barbarians, Blue. The queen’s a little scary, but she’s not a murderer.”
Blue would have said the same thing himself this morning. But something about watching those guards surround Luna and then hiding from white-eyed, mind-controlled dragons was making him a little less certain about the queen’s trustworthiness.
“Do you think I should turn myself in?” he asked hesitantly. That sounded like the right thing to do, except that it felt very very wrong. Io’s warning that he couldn’t trust any HiveWings rang in his ears.
And here I am, of course, doing exactly that.
Cricket thought for a moment, tapping her claws on the book. “No,” she said finally, slowly. “They won’t kill you, but if you are a flamesilk, they’ll — well, you’ll end up with the other flamesilks, I guess.”
“Where is that?” he said with a sudden rush of hope. That’s where Luna will be.
“Oh, I’m sorry I made you look so excited,” Cricket said anxiously. “Nobody knows where the flamesilks are kept.”
“Are you sure?” Blue asked. “Someone must know.”
“You’re right,” she said, leaping to her feet. “Let’s think. Flamesilk orders go out all the time, because each thread only burns for about one cycle of the smallest moon before it fades. Which means someone has to get the flamesilk from the dragons producing it, to fill the orders. So whose job is it? And someone must keep them fed and taken care of —”
“And guarded,” Blue put in.
She flinched. “Yes … probably that, too.” She started pacing up and down between the library tables. “And of course Queen Wasp knows. So there must be a way to trace the flamesilk back to wherever the dragons are. This is definitely a solvable mystery.”
Cricket hurried over to the librarian’s desk and opened one of the bottom drawers. “All right, forms, where are you? She’s always complaining about how many there are to fill out. Order forms … replacing library supplies … you would think a librarian would be all about alphabetizing her folders, wouldn’t you? Do you think she’d notice if I alphabetized them for her? … Oh, light globes! Here!” She pulled out a sheaf of papers and narrowed her eyes at them.
Blue glanced at one of the lamps. It was weird to think that there was a tiny thread of silk in there, glowing and burning. It was even weirder to think that the th
read had come from a dragon very much like him, or Luna. A dragon trapped somewhere, spilling flame from her arms for HiveWings to gather and snip into little useful bits that could be packaged and sold across the continent. A dragon whose whole life would be about producing flamesilk for HiveWings and nothing else.
Maybe it came from my father.
The thought dazed him for a moment. His father was a flamesilk, kept under guard wherever other flamesilks were kept. That’s why Blue had never met him. He’d only been brought out for a moment to father more dragons … in the hopes of creating more flamesilks, Blue guessed.
Which meant Queen Wasp knew exactly what Luna and Blue might become. She’d created them on purpose, for that purpose.
“Hmmm,” Cricket said. “It looks like the order forms get sent to a department in Wasp Hive. So maybe the flamesilks are there, or maybe that department forwards it on.”
“If we can figure out where they are,” Blue said, “maybe I could go see what it’s like. Maybe it’s not so terrible. Maybe that would help me decide whether I should turn myself in.”
Cricket tipped her head up at him. “And if it is terrible?” she asked. “Would you want to rescue your sister?”
“I … yes,” he admitted. Of course that was what he was really thinking, and of course Cricket had figured that out. “But I’m not exactly the right dragon for that job.”
“Why not?”
“Well … I mean …” He waved vaguely at himself. “I’m not very … I don’t like … making trouble.” Troublemakers. “I need Swordtail,” he blurted. “He’s the one who should rescue her.”
“All right,” Cricket said, whisking the forms back into the drawer. She smiled brightly at Blue. “Then let’s go get him.”
“It’s not that simple,” Blue argued, following Cricket into the dim hallway beyond the library. “Swordtail attacked a bunch of HiveWing guards. He’s either on Misbehaver’s Way or somewhere worse by now. And I can’t exactly stroll around the Hive with everyone looking for me.”
“I bet I can solve that problem,” Cricket said. “Let’s think. Both problems, maybe? Will you let me try?”
“Um … sure,” Blue said, distracted by the school around him. Rows of cubbyholes lined the corridor, many of them overflowing with crumpled papers, books, sticky bags of half-eaten nectar snacks, seed packets, and little buckets of dirt. Every few steps there was a glass terrarium embedded in the wall with something growing in it: tidy clusters of blue forget-me-nots in one, long white carrots in another, prickly cactus balls bristling in an orderly row from a third.
“Whoa,” Blue said. “It’s so plant-y in here.”
“We’re an agriculture-track school — do SilkWings have those?” Cricket said. They passed one glass case that was full of water, crowded with dark flaps of purple seaweed. Blue squinted at it and realized that it was lit by a small light globe on the roof of the terrarium — they all were. Tiny flamesilk suns kept these plants alive.
“Maybe,” Blue said. “But I think they usually figure out which job to assign us after we finish school. Our lessons are things like the history of the LeafWing War, silk weaving, reading, web structure, and following directions. Lots of following directions.”
“I wish I could go to your school for a day,” Cricket said, her wings twitching as though she might fly out one of the skylights at any moment. “I’d love to hear what other dragons are learning, wouldn’t you? Are your teachers interesting? How big is your library? Do you have music classes? I wish we did; I don’t understand music at all and I really want to. But our curriculum is very focused so we can all become farmers and gardeners. That’s what this is all about.” She waved her claws at the corridor walls. “Every student is assigned a terrarium for practice.”
“Oh,” Blue said. “You … don’t seem like a farmer to me.”
“I’d be an awesome farmer if I wanted to be,” she said, “which I don’t. I want to be a librarian or a scientist or an inventor. But I’m a terrible farming student. Apparently there’s only one way to do things and that’s how it’s always been done and there’s no point in trying to ‘innovate,’ Cricket, it’s a waste of seeds and oh dear why can’t you just grow potatoes like a useful dragon.” She paused at one of the terrariums and tapped it lightly with her claw. “This is mine.”
Blue was pretty sure he could have guessed that on his own. Unlike the other, orderly terrariums, this box was a riot of leaves and color, as though a host of sunflowers had thrown a gala and some marauding butterflies had crashed it. Velvety orange petals jostled for space with elegant trailing spider plants; sapphire-blue bulbs peeked out from behind heart-shaped leaves with pink edges.
“It’s like your brain as a garden,” Blue said wonderingly.
Cricket laughed. “And equally popular with my teachers,” she said. “Cricket, what a disaster. Why didn’t you use one type of seed like all the other students? Why must everything you touch be such a mess?”
Blue stepped closer and peered through the tangle of foliage. Deep in the heart of her terrarium, well hidden by the other plants, there was a tiny tree. It was no taller than the length of two claws, but it had a trunk and miniature branches and little perfect tufts of forest-green needles all over it. It was beautiful.
“That’s —” he breathed. “That’s a real — How did you —?”
“I found the seed on one of our gathering field trips. I had no idea what it was until it started to grow.” She smiled at it wistfully. “I had a feeling you’d see it. Most dragons don’t. They think my terrarium is too messy to look at for very long; it offends their eyes or something. But my botany teacher finally spotted it last week. He wants me to uproot it and throw it away.” She sighed. “Poor little innocent tree.”
She turned and kept walking and Blue followed her, although he wished he could stay and stare at the tree a bit longer. He couldn’t believe it was real. Surely Cricket loved it. It looked like a loved little tree.
“That’s so sad,” he said. “What an awful thing to ask you to do. You brought it to life.”
“I’m not going to let my tree die,” she said firmly. “But where can I hide it? Somewhere with light, where I can visit, but no one will find it. I’ll figure something out.”
She pushed open a door at the end of the hall, revealing a room with long desks covered in glass beakers and small pots of soil. A metal cabinet at the back of the room was lit by a tiny globe inside, and the shelves were lined with neatly labeled bottles of liquid, organized by color. The top shelf ranged from a bright ruby red to a pale pink; the two middle shelves were shades of lemon and emerald and lime; and the bottom shelf held a few milky-white bottles and several with nearly colorless liquids in them. Blue crouched to look at one of them and realized it was slightly aquamarine when the light hit it in a certain way. He didn’t understand any of the labels printed on the bottles — there were letters and numbers and some obscure squiggle symbols in between, but none of them formed recognizable words.
“This is our chemistry lab,” Cricket said. “We use some of these to help plants grow; others will kill certain weeds, if you apply them the right way. But a lot of these have other non-botanical uses, too. How many do you think I can take without Professor Earthworm noticing?”
“Take?” Blue said, startled. “You can’t steal from your school!”
She paused with a vial the color of chamomile tea in her claws. “But … Blue, these will help us. Don’t you want to get your friend?”
“Yes, but — but stealing is wrong —” he stammered. He imagined the chemistry teacher coming in tomorrow morning and finding bottles missing. Wouldn’t she be upset? Wouldn’t she feel guilty and worried about who had taken them and what might be done with them? She might blame her students; someone might get in trouble unfairly.
“You really are good at following the rules, aren’t you?” Cricket said, intrigued. “Like, you really believe in them.”
“Don’t you?” he said.
“Doesn’t everyone?”
She thought about that for a moment. He liked the way she stopped and thought carefully about the things he said. Most dragons already had their ideas settled in their heads; if they paused to think before responding, it was only about how to explain to you that you were wrong. But Cricket seemed to take in information and questions and hold them up against the things she thought she knew, to see if there was anything new she’d missed.
“Weird,” she said finally. “I usually think of rules as things that get in the way of all the stuff I really want to know. I mean, how can don’t ask questions ever be a good rule? Or only borrow one book at a time from the library. That’s just ludicrous. No one ever explains rules like that in a sensible way. But don’t hurt other dragons — that’s a rule I think everyone believes in, right? So … I guess I believe in some rules, and I think rules in general can be useful, but I also think it’s all right to stop and question some of the rules sometimes, if they feel wrong to you. Doesn’t that make sense?”
“But don’t steal is a rule everyone agrees on, too, isn’t it?” he asked.
“I think that help dragons who need help might be more important than don’t steal,” Cricket said. “I mean, turn over fugitives to Queen Wasp when she’s looking for them is probably a rule, too, you know? But I don’t think you’re dangerous. And I want to know more about flamesilks and SilkWings. And I think I can help you. I’d — I’d like to help you.”
Blue looked back at the citrus-colored vials. He didn’t want to drag her into more danger than he’d already put her in, but he did need help. And more important, Swordtail and Luna needed help.
This isn’t the first rule I’m breaking, he thought. The first rule I broke was running even after the guards told me to stop. He still felt shaken all the way through his scales at the memory of disobeying HiveWing orders.