CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Shadows
We got to the turnoff at nine thirty, about fifteen minutes faster than my GPS watch had predicted. Summer had a bit of a lead foot. Or maybe she was anxious to get this over with and be rid of me for good. I couldn’t be sure. She pulled over to the shoulder at the head of the unmarked road leading north.
It was hot by then, Arizona hot, but I really felt it when the Jeep stopped. The desert heat hit like a wall. Riker started bouncing around the back seat as if he could sense the excitement. Octavius chirped in annoyance—in danger of being squashed, too—and flew up to the Jeep’s rail.
Summer and I both peered down at the single-lane unpaved road that led down off the highways and into the saguaros. The satellite map coverage for this part of the desert was suspiciously over ten years old, but based on the terrain, it couldn’t be far.
I looked back at her. “What do you think?”
“Are you sure there’s something here? Looks pretty abandoned.”
“No. Look at the tire tracks.” A set of them led unerringly down the road, and they were fresh enough that the wind hadn’t blown the sand flat.
She looked doubtful. “Anything could have made those.”
I knew what had made them—a stout pickup with an aluminum cage in the back, hauling a defective dragon. “That’s it.”
“All right, so we’re here. What now?”
“Well . . . this thing has four-wheel drive, doesn’t it?”
She snorted, spun the wheel, and floored it. We bounced off the shoulder and plunged downhill.
“Whoa!” My stomach dropped. I grabbed the oh shit handle.
She kept the jeep in first gear so we wouldn’t skid down the slope. Smart. We leveled off and followed the winding track through a maze of cacti and craggy boulders. Maybe half a mile from the road, after it doubled back on itself, a jagged ridge rose up to one side. Up ahead, the track appeared to make a hard turn, leading through a gap in the ridge. And something lay beyond that. I couldn’t see what, but once we reached that turn, we’d be exposed.
“Hey, why don’t you stop here?” I asked. “I don’t want to surprise anyone.” And I don’t exactly have permission to be here.
We both had our hiking boots on—it was kind of our thing, to wear our gear when we went somewhere—so we set out at an easy pace down the road. Riker kept pace with us, snuffling the rocks and debris along the edge of the road. Octavius wanted to fly overhead, but I made him land and ride on my shoulder. If there were other dragons here, live ones, they might attack without warning.
We approached the turn, where it looked like the land opened into a small canyon, with cliffs rising up on either side. The terrain lent the area some natural privacy.
“How big is this place?” Summer asked.
“Maybe a few hundred square feet. We don’t have that many failed designs.” Again, I felt a stab of guilt that I’d created a defective dragon just to find this place.
“Let’s find it, then. I don’t want my baby out in the sun all day.”
I grinned at her. “I’m fine, actually.”
She elbowed me in the side. “I was talking about Riker.”
“Oh, right.”
We reached the turn and looked right. I was expecting a small structure, maybe a dozen fenced enclosures. Instead, a massive complex sprawled from rim to rim across the floor of the vale. Solar panels glittered on the roof over what had to be hundreds of enclosures, all of them occupied with dragons. Their purpose became clear when I spotted movement on the left side of the facility. A boxy metallic robot—almost like a warehouse bot—moved on a track that encircled the building, dispensing something into the cages in systematic fashion. Food and water, probably. The whole place must be automated. There was no sign of any human workers, other than the ruts of Jeep tracks from where the wranglers turned around after making deliveries. Which they obviously did far more often than I realized. It would take forever to find my fliers in that maze.
Summer shaded her eyes. “It’s . . . a little bigger than you said.”
“Yeah.” I was too shocked to even make the obvious joke. Then Octavius dug his claws into my shoulder. “Ow! Knock it off!”
The moment I loosened my grip, he launched into the air. Shit. “Don’t go too close!” I called after him.
“He’s acting weird,” Summer said.
She wasn’t wrong. Octavius paid almost no attention to the huge desert vivarium but glided off to the right, toward a jumbled mound of wood almost two stories tall. It was strange to see that much timber in the desert. We had rocks and saguaros, but not a lot of real trees. Octavius circled it twice and then returned rather abruptly. He folded his wings and practically crashed into my shoulder. If I hadn’t caught him, he’d have plummeted right to the ground. He made a sound I’d never heard before, a low-pitched moan.
“What’s wrong?” Summer sounded apprehensive.
“I don’t know.” I cradled Octavius against me and stalked over to the stack of discarded trees. But they weren’t trees. They were bones. The closest one to me, about ten yards away, was a Laptop model. I could tell from the size and the teeth. Farther off I saw the lean, lithe skeleton of an attack dragon. The sun had bleached the bones to pure white. They looked so tiny, so delicate. Yet there was a wrongness to them as well. The Laptop model was larger on one side than the other, a genetic condition called hemisomia. The attack dragon was missing a rib, even though the rest of the skeleton looked undamaged.
How can this be?
I’m not sure how long I stood there staring. I just couldn’t fathom it. My mind knew what I was seeing, but I didn’t understand how it could be real.
Faint footsteps approached from behind me. “Oh my God,” Summer whispered.
Octavius sighed against my chest. I held him close to me and stroked his back. I felt like I should say something to comfort him, but words failed me.
Summer slipped her hand around my elbow. “Come on, let’s go.”
I let her pull me away, then. I felt like I was walking through gel. Everything moved in slow, terrible motion. Riker took the lead without being asked, picking a way for us among the jeep track. Summer pulled me along. Thank God for them. I don’t know that I would have made it out before nightfall. We climbed into the Jeep without a word. She cranked it up and flicked on the headlights, because the sun was rapidly dipping beneath the horizon. How did it get to be dusk already? A little part of my brain pondered that, but the rest of it was numb.
So much of what I thought I knew about Build-A-Dragon was a lie.