The llamas looked at him expectantly, waiting for him to finish his thought.
“Anyway, thanks for your help!” said Clay cheerily. “You guys are really cool.”
He was about to turn to go, when they started nudging him with their noses. “What? Oh, man, I’m sorry, I would totally give you guys a carrot if I had one, but…” He shrugged helplessly.
Just then Satya walked over, shaking her head. “You really commit to a joke, I’ll tell you that much.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve been talking to those llamas for almost five minutes.”
“I was waiting for you to notice,” Clay improvised.
Shoot. He thought he was being more discreet. Had anyone else seen?
“Oh, I noticed, all right. Not too many people have full-on conversations with farm animals. Plants maybe.”
Satya leaned against the fence near him. Hero was perched on her shoulder again.
Tentatively, Clay reached out, intending to pet the bird’s cheek. Hero squawked angrily, and Clay jerked his hand away.
Satya laughed.
“Does she eat chocolate?” Clay pulled a leftover piece of chocolate out of his pocket. It was melted.
“No, she eats meat. And, by the way, that’s gross.” She reached into her own pocket and pulled out a cube of meat—just like the cubes they fed to the baby dragons. “Here, give her this.”
Clay made a face as he took it. “That was in your pocket? And you thought the chocolate was gross?”
Clay was about to say something else (devastatingly charming, no doubt), when a jangling sound announced that Amber was strolling toward them, wearing a ridiculous army-green safari bodysuit.
“Heyyyy, guys! How’s everything going over here?”
As Amber came closer, Clay saw what had made the jangling sound: Gyorg’s brass key ring, hanging from a belt loop on Amber’s bodysuit. There were so many keys on the ring that Clay was sure one of them must be for the silo.… But how to get it?
“Such a beautiful eagle you have,” she said.
“Falcon,” Satya corrected.
Amber leaned in and tried to pet Hero. Hero snapped at her, even more fiercely than she had snapped at Clay, he was happy to see.
Insulted, Amber pulled away from the bird. “Sheesh, you’re not the friendliest thing in the world, are you?”
“She’s a bird of prey, not a pet,” said Satya stiffly.
Clay thought back to what Leira had taught him on his last day at Earth Ranch: What were the three Ds of pickpocketing? Oh, yeah. Divert. Detach. Disappear.
“Hey, Amber,” said Clay, acting fast, “if you want to make friends with Hero, hold still.”
Before Satya or Amber could see what he was doing, he showed the cube of meat to the hungry bird, then placed it on Amber’s arm, just the way Satya had placed meat on his arm a day earlier.
Immediately, Hero spread her wings and lunged for the meat.
Amber screamed and swung wildly. The bird clung to her in a panic, wings flapping.
“Oh, sorry, sorry!” said Clay.
“Hero, stop that!” shouted Satya.
Clay’s heart thumped. It’s now or never, he told himself.
Under the guise of helping, he leaned into Amber, unhooked the key ring from her belt loop, and slipped it into his jeans. Success! He felt light-headed.
“Ugh, Satya,” Amber scolded when Hero was safely resting on Satya’s wrist. “That bird is a menace. I’m going to have to talk to Antoinette about it.” She rubbed her arm where she had been scratched by the bird’s claws.
“Sorry,” Satya said, calming Hero down. “I don’t know what happened. Just… just don’t get so close next time.”
Satya darted a look at Clay. If she didn’t know what he had done, she definitely suspected it.
“Come on. The Wandsworths have a question about the llamas that I need you to answer,” Amber said, dropping the sweet girlie tone of voice. “I guess it’s obvious I don’t know anything about animals.”
Satya shot a last accusatory look at Clay, then followed Amber out the gate to where the Land Rover was parked and the others were already waiting.
Clay felt bad; he had acted impulsively, without thinking about how it would affect Hero or Satya. However, he had the keys now; there was no backing out.
Glancing around to make sure there were no human eyes on him, he stepped over to the gate and lifted the latch. Quickly, he shoved the gate open a few inches and beckoned to the llamas nearby.
“Hey, guys, wanna get out and see the world?” he said, nudging the gate with his foot. “Here’s your chance—run!”
The llamas blinked at him for a minute, but then the pig came squealing past them and shoved its way through, forcing the gate open even wider. Blazing out of the barnyard, the pig ran right through Amber’s legs, making her scream and grabbing the attention of everyone else on the tour.
Soon the goats, the chickens, and even the llamas were making for the fence and scattering in a million directions. While Amber continued screaming and Charles retreated to the safety of the Land Rover, Satya and her father sprinted after the rampaging animals, trying desperately to steer them back toward the barn.
The Wandsworths, meanwhile, stood in the middle of the melee, scowling at everyone, apparently counting on their aura of disapproval to keep the animals from trampling them to the ground.
Under the cover of all that chaos, Clay ran to the third silo. Luckily, the door was on the far side of the silo, out of view of the group. Breathing heavily, Clay chose a key from Amber’s ring at random and fumblingly inserted it into the padlock. The first one didn’t fit, and neither did the second, third, fourth, or fifth. Just as he was getting really worried, Clay tried the sixth key.…
Click!
The door swung open and Clay peered in, trying to make out any shapes in the silo’s dark interior.
A second later, there was an arm around his neck, and he was being dragged, choking, into the silo.
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
THE PRISONER IN THE SILO
Moments earlier
The beetle must have thought it was safe.
It was the middle of the day, the middle of summer, the middle of the desert. (Well, the desert-turned-jungle, but how was the beetle to know that?) Most of the beetle’s natural predators—the owls, the anteaters, even the snakes—would be fast asleep. And if they weren’t asleep, they wouldn’t have been able to get in here anyway, this cool, dark space that could only be entered through cracks and crevices in that round metal wall.
With single-minded determination, the beetle tiptoed across the dirt on its six bent legs. The goal: a lone crumb lying on the ground, in a narrow shaft of light.
Alas, before the beetle could reach its target, a hand darted out from the darkness—and snatched up the beetle.
The hand belonged to a woman whose nose was smeared with dirt, who hadn’t washed her hair in weeks, and whose black clothes had long ago turned a dusty gray. And yet her pointy ears were as alert as ever.
She held the beetle between her thumb and forefinger, admiring its shell in the sliver of sunlight. A Namib Desert beetle! Adapted for the arid conditions in just the way the San people had described. At any other time, the Namib would have made an excellent specimen for study.
“I’m so sorry about this,” she whispered.
CRRRUNCH—
Cass sighed discontentedly.
She was still hungry, though she hated to admit it. Gram for gram, insects are a great source of protein. Unfortunately, you have to eat a lot of them (hundreds, probably) to equal what you would get in a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, let alone in a hamburger. Not that she would ever eat a hamburger. She’d been a vegetarian—okay, vegetarian-ish—for as long she could remember. She ate meat, even bug meat, only when it was a matter of survival.
Naturally, she had been doing her best to maximize the meager rations that were delivered
to her every morning. On the ground in front of her were tiny seedlings sprouting up in the spots most often hit by the sun: There was a tomato plant grown from a seed extracted from a quarter of a cherry tomato that had miraculously appeared in a so-called salad, a potato plant grown from a barely cooked potato that was supposed to have been her dinner one night, and an entire row of oats grown from a sack that had spilled before being removed from the silo. Soon she would have a veritable indoor farm.
Based on the tally marks she’d carved into the metal wall, it had been three weeks to the day since Ms. Mauvais had found her attempting to save a baby dragon on the lip of the crater. Three weeks that she’d been living in silo-tary confinement, as she’d taken to calling it. A pun she thought worthy of her friend Max-Ernest. (I’m not so sure about that, but who am I to judge?) Her goal was total self-sufficiency. Every day she followed an intense workout regimen to keep her body in tip-top shape: push-ups, sit-ups, lunges, and squats, followed by an hour of running in place. To keep her brain sharp, she challenged herself to recite facts about Richter scale earthquake measurements and the epidemiology of infectious diseases. And, of course, she kept a journal, writing on the paper she made from pulped hay, with a quill made from a stray pigeon feather and ink made from crushed leaves and an old goji berry she’d found stuck in a fold in her pocket.
Ms. Mauvais had been visiting almost daily, sure that she could make Cass crack and reveal the secrets of the Terces Society, but Cass had only grown more resolute over time, and Ms. Mauvais more frustrated. “For your sake, I hope you have some information of value in that dull, plodding brain of yours,” Ms. Mauvais had said the previous evening. “The Secret Keeper, they used to call you. But do you really know how to get to the Other Side? Alas, I think not, and I’m beginning to tire of our little chats.”
The fact that the Midnight Sun knew of the existence of the Other Side was a huge blow. Exactly how much the members knew about it—and what their activities at the Keep had to do with the Other Side, if anything—Cass had yet to ascertain. Her hope was to keep the conversations with Ms. Mauvais going for as long as possible; every question Ms. Mauvais asked told Cass more about what the Midnight Sun knew or suspected. By the time Ms. Mauvais gave up on her, Cass intended to have a comprehensive outline of the Midnight Sun’s plans and, of course, to have her own exit strategy worked out in detail.
That was the idea, anyway, until Max-Ernest’s little brother showed up.
The rattling of keys and fumbling attempts to open the door came as a surprise; Ms. Mauvais customarily visited Cass at night. As the struggles with the padlock became more and more frantic, Cass became increasingly suspicious. Whoever was at the door, it wasn’t Ms. Mauvais. And moreover they were very clumsy.
Clumsy enough to let Cass overpower them and escape from the silo? The timing wasn’t perfect, but experience had taught her to take advantage of opportunity when it knocked—or in this case, when it broke in.
When the door finally burst open and a boy stepped in, squinting, Cass was waiting, ready to put him in a headlock.
“Hey! Ow!” the intruder said in a muffled wheeze. His voice was oddly familiar, like the voice of a sitcom star or some Internet comedian. Then again, Cass never watched sitcoms or funny online videos.
Cass loosened her headlock and leaned around to see the intruder’s face. “Paul-Clay?”
“It’s just Clay now,” he said, coughing.
Cass released Clay and pulled him inside the silo, shutting the door behind him. “When did you get so tall? And more to the point, what the heck are you doing here?”
“Max-Ernest sent me to rescue you,” said Clay, dusting off his shirt and pants.
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope.” Clay looked over his shoulder. “I got her!” he said excitedly.
Cheers erupted in his ears. “Awesome!” “Congrats!”
Cass whipped around. But there was nothing behind her except her empty silo cell. “Um—who are you talking to? Is your brother here somewhere?”
“Oh, no—” Clay pointed to his ski hat. “My hat is like a walkie-talkie. My friends at Earth Ranch say hi.”
“A walkie-talkie? This isn’t cops and robbers! The Midnight Sun don’t play games—do you know how dangerous this place is?”
“She says hi back,” said Clay.
“You know we can hear her.…”
“Why don’t you guys just take a break for a while, huh?”
Cass shook her head. “What was Max-Ernest thinking, sending a child!?”
“Didn’t you and my brother go on Terces Society missions when you were my age?” said Clay, more than a little miffed. “And you’re welcome, by the way.”
“Okay. You’re right.” Cass held up her hand—a truce. “So tell me, Special Agent Paul-Clay—sorry, Special Agent Just Clay—what’s your big escape plan?”
“Uh.” Clay shoved his hands in his pockets. “To fly out of here on a dragon.”
“I’m serious. You must have some idea.”
“That is the idea.”
Cass stared at him, incredulous. “You’ve been reading too many fantasy books.”
“I’ve done it before,” said Clay defensively. “I’ve flown on a dragon.”
“Your brother might have said something about that,” Cass admitted.
“Well, it’s true. We thought Ariella would be here, but, anyway, there’s no reason I can’t fly on another dragon,” he said, trying to sound confident. “I know the Occulta Draco.”
“The what? Never mind. Say you can fly a dragon, even though… well, say you can—isn’t there something stopping them from flying away?”
“You’re talking about the dome,” Clay said. “I found the tower where they control it. We just have to go there, turn it off, and then…”
“Find a dragon and ask it politely not to eat us?”
Clay took a breath. “If you really want to know, Owen was supposed to be here, too, but he got called back to the island. And his plane got stuck in some lava. So…”
“Dragons are all we’ve got,” Cass finished for him.
“Yeah. Pretty much.”
Cass nodded. “All right, then.”
She made a quick circle around the interior of the silo, saying a silent good-bye to her seedlings, then looked at Clay.
“Well?”
“Well what?” Clay asked.
“Lead us to that tower. I assume you’ve got the password or key or whatever we need for the job?”
“Um…” Clay paused.
Cass pursed her lips. “Right. Well, we’ll figure it out.”
“Yeah,” said Clay, relieved. “Hey, it’s really good to see you.”
Cass patted him on the head. “That’s nice, but let’s have the tearful reunion later, okay?”
“Okay.” Clay gave her a little salute and turned around to lead them out of the silo.
Outside, the rest of Clay’s tour group was still battling renegade llamas.
It meant he and Cass had to take the long route, but Clay figured it was best to run in the opposite direction. They crept from the silo door toward the tree line, glancing backward the entire way to make sure they weren’t being seen.
Once under cover of the jungle, they doubled back and started pushing their way through bushes and vines. They tried to stay parallel to the road as they went, but even so they almost lost their way a few times.
It took more than thirty minutes to come in sight of the clearing where the control tower was located. Cass was too busy looking at the tower to notice that Clay had stopped in his tracks. She was about to step into the clearing, when Clay grabbed her arm and put his hand over her mouth. “Shh! Don’t move!”
Lying on the ground in front of them, no more than ten feet away, was the spiky end of a huge green tail. It twitched, then swung out of the way, but when they leaned forward to see where the tail had gone, it swung back toward them, coming within inches of where they stood.
The tail was attached to a gigantic green body topped with delicately folded wings. On the dragon’s snout was a distinctive white mark.
“That’s Snowflake,” Clay whispered.
“Cute,” Cass whispered back.
He pointed to the line of white posts on either side of the dragon. Snowflake’s tail was sticking out from between them.
“See those posts with the blinking red lights—they send out the electric currents or whatever that make the dome. The good news is that the dragon can’t go all the way outside that line. Only up to its collar.”
“And the bad news is…?”
“The rest of the dragon is outside the line.”
“And to get to the control tower…”
“We have to pass the dragon, yeah.”
Cass nodded, calm and businesslike. “Is it sleeping?”
“Yeah… Well, maybe… not…”
Frozen in place, they watched as the dragon heaved itself up and stretched. Then it turned its massive head their way, nostrils flaring.
“Ow!” Clay squeaked. As calm as Cass seemed, she was digging her nails into his shoulder.
“Sorry.” She released Clay and took a step back. “Does it see us?”
“No… Well, maybe… yeah…”
The dragon was staring at them but not making a move.
“If it wanted to kill us, it already would have, right?” Cass asked after a moment. “I mean, you think we can just walk by it?”
“Yeah… Well, maybe…?”
“I thought you were the dragon guy,” said Cass. “You’re going to have to be a lot more decisive if we’re going to get out of here.”
“Okay, let’s walk, but… be prepared to run.”
Palms sweating, they started to walk as quickly and quietly as they could across the clearing.
The dragon watched, its strange lizard eyes giving them no clue whether it was happy, mad, or indifferent. Then, all of a sudden, one of its wings unfolded and stretched to full length, blocking them from seeing its face. With a quick move, the dragon shifted its weight and craned its neck around. It looked at them and roared briefly, just enough to make Clay feel like his heart was about to stop.