CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Strange Allies
For the rest of the week, I waited for the fallout from the birthday dragon incident. I jumped every time someone passed my office, thinking it was Greaves coming to yell at me. Or worse, Fulton arriving to escort me out of the building. I figured it was only a matter of time until one of the customers spoke to a reporter, and the online news channels started bashing us again. Then the ranks of the protestors outside our building would swell again, and I’d have to leave even earlier to get to work on time.
The guilt ate at me. I should have told the hatchers about the attack dragon so that they kept it in solitary. No one knew that—once the eggs left the God Machine, they fell under the hatchery staff’s purview—but I could easily take the blame for this. Hell, if the fallout was really bad, they might even fire me. I confessed these fears to Evelyn, and she told me not to worry about it. It was a hatchery issue, not our department. I wasn’t sure I believed that.
The week dragged on forever. I only got through it by looking forward to Saturday, when I thought we had a good shot at finishing Big Mesa Star. I’d rested, I’d planned, I’d checked the rankings of geocachers far too often. I’d also scoured the boards for hints of how to find the waypoints on trail number four. Only a handful of people had completed the Big Mesa star, but the most recent had only been a month or two ago. That told me it was beatable.
I hadn’t slept well all week. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the attack model snapping the pink dragon’s neck. Heard the nauseating crunch of bone and cartilage. It was like a song I couldn’t get out of my head. Saturday morning was no exception, so I just got up, roused Octavius, and drove out into the desert.
Fog still shrouded the rocks of the parking lot at Big Mesa Star; that’s how early we were. Octavius still dozed in the passenger seat while I laced up my boots. We had the lot to ourselves; even the highway traffic was quiet.
Then I heard the steady rumble of a big truck coming down the road. Luckily, I hadn’t woken Octavius yet. Dragons were becoming more common in Arizona, so it was reasonably safe for us to take these little excursions into the desert. I wasn’t brave enough to stroll around with him in downtown Scottsdale or anything, but out in the desert people knew better than to ask too many questions. Still, this close to the road, it would be just my luck to encounter a park ranger or something. I edged closer to the Tesla as the truck rolled into the lot with fog lights ablaze, crunching gravel beneath its oversized tires. When the lights swept over me, I finally got a look at the profile. It’s not a truck. It’s a Jeep.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I muttered.
I tried to ignore it and lace up my boots as quickly as possible. Which would have worked, except the Jeep parked haphazardly right next to me.
“Still trying to beat me?” Summer called.
“Don’t flatter yourself. I’m trying to beat Big Mesa Star.”
Riker popped up in the back seat and grunted at us. “Hush!” she told him.
Octavius stirred once but went back to snoring in my passenger seat. Some watch dragon.
“So. How many times have you tried Big Mesa Star?” she asked.
Once last month, and another time about a year ago. But I didn’t want to admit it, so I shrugged.
“This is our third try,” Summer said.
“Wow. Really?”
“I keep losing signal in the basin.” She had the doors off her Jeep, so I had a good view as she put on her boots.
God, she’s got long legs.
I figured I might as well pony up some honesty. “It’s our third try, too.”
“Ha! I knew it.”
“Yeah, well, we’re serious this time.” After the week I’d just had, I really needed to win something. “Didn’t get as far as I thought I would last weekend. Some of the markers were a little hard to find.” I made the last bit slow and accusing.
She looked at me flat-eyed, not giving anything away. “Maybe if you’re nice, they won’t be.”
It wasn’t that I’d been trying to be mean to her. It had just come naturally. It reminded me, strangely, of the attack dragon that had killed the birthday dragon. Which I still felt terrible about but had come down to pure instinct. Just like my instinct of sniping at Summer back when she’d started becoming a problem for me and Jane. But that was the past. We’d sparred so often, Summer and I, that Jane got a little jealous. Which was ridiculous, if you actually listened to the barbs we exchanged, but whatever. All that stuff was well in the past and I intended to keep it there. “I can try that.”
“This geocache is hard enough as it is.”
“That’s for damn sure.” I chuckled. “Maybe we should help each other.” The words came out before I really gave them thought. Then again, if we sabotaged one another like we did last time, neither of us would get the cache. Watching her might be informative. It might even help me figure out how to beat her.
She gave me a side-eyed look, as if she’d heard that thought. “What are you proposing?”
“An alliance.”
“Until the cache is found?” She mulled this for a few seconds. “Deal.”
“How far did you get last time?”
“Two points. But I marked the coordinates of the next one, so I can go straight to it.”
“So did I.”
She held her wrist beside mine for a double-check. That’s when I realized we had the exact same watch.
“Hey, we match,” I said.
“Yours looks like it was in a plane crash.”
I noted that her watch didn’t have a scratch on it, though the wristband showed some age. “Psh. It just means we’re more willing to get dirty.” I walked back to the car and roused Octavius from the Tesla. “We’ve got some company.”
He craned his neck past me to get a look at them. When he recognized them, he raised his wings and started hissing.
“None of that, now,” I said. “They’re friends today. Got it? Friends.”
He cut off the hissing, but never took his eyes off Riker.
Summer clipped the pig onto a retractable leash. “You ready?”
“After you, Number One.”
She snorted. Riker took the lead down trail #4, pulling at his leash like a rotund sled dog. It started off at a gentle incline, heading right down into the basin. I told Octavius to scout ahead; it never hurt to have eyes up above. Summer and I kept comparing the distance to target on our watches. If those numbers started to jump around, it meant we were losing GPS signal, and couldn’t trust any directions. We’d have to backtrack and start again.
Riker kept his snout to the ground, sniffing everything. Now that I thought about it, a pig’s peerless olfactory abilities could be useful on a geocache. He seemed fairly well trained, too. More than Octavius, at least, which wasn’t saying much.
“I’ve never seen a dragon like yours,” Summer said.
“He’s one of a kind,” I told her.
“A customized one?” Her eyebrows went up a little. “You must be doing well.”
“Well, I sort of get the employee discount,” I said, by way of avoidance.
“I thought you were all about playing God with human DNA. Back when, you know . . .”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m still working on that.” But maybe not hard enough, a little voice inside me said. Causing dragon-on-dragon violence didn’t offer much in the way of accomplishment, though. That poor little birthday dragon. It shouldn’t bother me as much as it did.
“With dragons?”
“It’s complicated.”
We walked in silence for a moment.
“Have you heard from her?” she asked, meaning Jane.
“Not for a long time.” I knew better than to stay in touch. I didn’t want to hear about whatever guy she was dating, or what color she’d dyed her hair. Just thinking about it tore at me. “You?”
“The same.”
We fell into silence. I sure as hell didn’t want to say more about her, and from Summer’s tone, it sounded like she felt the same. Well, not exactly the same. I doubt her heart hurt the way mine still did when I thought of her. At least they weren’t in touch anymore. That would have made it even more awkward than it already was.
Octavius came to the rescue. He glided back a minute later, trilling a little victory call.
“I don’t speak dragon, but that sounds promising,” Summer said.
“Yep, I think he found it,” I said.
We crested a ridge, and Octavius led us right to a metal trail marker sign, the kind that told you how far it was back to the parking lot.
“Oh. It’s just a mile marker,” Summer said.
Our watches beeped, though, which meant we were in the right location. And Octavius kept dipping his head down at the sign. I searched the ground around it but saw nothing. “I don’t see anything.”
Octavius gave a sharp trill.
I crouched to inspect the sign itself but saw nothing on the front. I craned my neck to look at the back of it and saw the little metal tube. It looked like stainless steel, and shinier than the sign’s cheap metal.
“No way,” I breathed. Hidden in plain sight. Geocache designers loved to get cute like that. I gave it a little tug, and the tube came free from the back of the sign. Two circular magnets had held it in place.
“Bingo,” I held it up for Summer to see.
“Are you serious?”
I found the tube’s cap and flipped it open. A slender, flat piece of metal slid out, with coordinates stamped plainly on the front.
“Damn, so he found it after all.” She gave Octavius a considering look. “Smart little dragon, isn’t he?”
I scratched him behind his ears. “That he is,” The smartest one in the world.