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CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

The Founder


For a minute, I didn’t know what to say. This was a moment I’d been waiting for most of my adult life. I’d daydreamed about how it would go, and what I might say. How I’d impress him.

Somehow I forgot all that and blurted out an obvious question. “Are you Simon Redwood?”

He gave me a guarded look. “Who’s asking?”

“I’m Noah Parker.”

“Never heard of you.”

“I work at your company. In Evelyn Chang’s group?”

“It’s not my company anymore.”

It’ll always be your company, I didn’t say. “I have some bad news, actually. Turns out that Build-A-Dragon is doing some horrible things.”

He snorted. “What else is new? That’s what happens when the money-grubbers get involved, son. People sell out.”

“But they’re killing dragons.”

“What?”

“They’re—”

He held up a hand to stop me. “Not here.”

“It’s all right. I came alone.”

He scanned the sky, a nervous rabbit wary of hawks. “They have eyes and ears everywhere. Satellites, you know?”

“Okay.” I didn’t think satellites could eavesdrop on conversations, but I figured this was his show. I bit my tongue.

He spun and marched back the way he’d come. “Safer to talk in the house.”

I glanced back the way the dragons had gone but didn’t see them. Their natural coloring matched the Arizona landscape surprisingly well. Idly, I wondered how many of our native reptiles had gone into the DGP. Evelyn would know that by rote; she was good with numbers.

I stumbled on a rock and nearly fell into the waiting spines of a cactus. Focus on the here and now. Redwood lurched over rocks and around bushes, his bathrobe flapping behind him like he was an escaping mental patient. Which he might very well be, for all I knew. His great stone house loomed overhead. The south wall bore no windows or markings of any sort, but Redwood marched right at it like we were going in. And then he walked right through the wall and disappeared like a goddamn ghost.

I skidded to a halt. “What the—”

I’m hallucinating. Maybe because of the heat. That seemed like the only rational explanation until Redwood’s head appeared out of the stone. “You coming?”

The stone around his head shimmered. I reached out and my hand went right through the wall. Like it wasn’t even there. Holy crap, a holographic door. It matched the house’s exterior color and texture perfectly. I put a foot through and forced my body to follow. Darkness enveloped me on the other side of the threshold. I took off my sunglasses and paused to let my eyes adjust.

Redwood grimaced. “Whoops, I should have warned you about the hologram.”

I couldn’t resist sticking my hand through the opaque screen. It disappeared up to the wrist, and the bright sun on the other side warmed my fingers. “That is so cool.”

Metal screeched as Redwood yanked open a battered white screen door that clashed rather nauseatingly with the house’s aesthetic. He held it open. I followed him in and let it creak shut behind me.

“You might need some WD-40 on that,” I said.

“Ha! You know what the WD stands for?”

I grinned. “Water displacement.”

“I’ll be damned, you are an engineer.”

So much preparation, all for this moment. Part of me still couldn’t believe I was in Simon Redwood’s house. The storm door led to a long hallway lined with doors, all of them closed. Not just closed but bolted shut with biometric locks. Who knew what treasures lay on the other side? The hallway opened into an alcove with stairs leading up. I had to step around a leather-and-metal contraption that looked like a backpack with a pair of charred mufflers at the bottom. A pair of antique pilot’s glasses dangled tantalizingly over the corner of it, their lenses coated with desert dust.

Oh my God. “Is that—is that a jetpack?”

Redwood marched up the stairs without answering. I fought the urge to snap a photo with my phone and ascended behind him. The staircase opened into a huge, bright atrium. Sunlight streamed in through the far wall, which was entirely made of glass. Cactus-topped dunes rolled away at a slight incline—we must be facing away from the highway—and I wagered the sunsets must have been pretty spectacular. I could see the route I’d hiked in from the highway, and the boulder where I’d encountered the dragons. No wonder he saw me coming.

But the real question was whether he’d simply witnessed what happened, or somehow ordered those dragons to intercept me. Wild dragons didn’t take anyone’s orders, or so I thought. Granted, something had seemed different about those prototypes. In the early days we’d always kept dragons isolated because of their innate aggression. This was the first time I’d seen a pair together. Not just in proximity but working as a coordinated team. Like pack hunters.

“What exactly do you do for the company?” Redwood settled into a sandalwood chair that faced the window-wall and gestured vaguely toward the matched one beside it.

I honestly didn’t think the thing would hold my weight, but it didn’t even creak as I settled into it. There were no joints or seams or visible bits of hardware.

“I’m a genetic engineer. I design the customs and the new prototypes.”

He grunted. “Hack jobs.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You’re just a code-tweaker.” He stared off at the dunes, as if I wasn’t even there. “Developing the first prototype, now that was a challenge.”

I bristled at his casual dismissal of what Evelyn and her entire group did. “Well, we did crack domestication.”

“That was you, huh? Never saw the point of it myself.”

“Not everyone wants a pet that’ll kill them as soon as look at them,” I said.

“Dragons aren’t meant to be pets.”

“That’s funny, coming from a guy who owns a couple.”

His brow furrowed, as if my jab confused him. “Oh, the ones outside. I don’t own them. They just showed up here, one day.”

“They’re ferals? That’s impossible.”

“Why, because they’re man-made?” He snorted. “Thought you knew genetics.”

I bristled a little at that, because I did know genetics. I knew it well enough to carry out my own little experiments in the dragons I designed. My few little acts of rebellion were nothing compared to Build-A-Dragon’s overall production. If enough dragons were left to die, some might manage to survive. “Unless there were compensating mutations. Or some rare, hidden resiliency.”

“Given how many species went into the Dragon Reference, it’s inevitable,” Redwood said. “Nature likes to find a way.”

“How many are there? Just those two?”

“No, I’ve seen others. They’re drawn to the desert. And to me.” He said this as a simple fact, not trying to brag or anything.

The meaning behind it struck me like a sock full of pennies. Either some fey biological undercurrent drew wild dragons to their inventor, or the dragons somehow knew. Somehow were aware of Redwood, and where to find him, and felt that they should go there. The two that had ambushed me weren’t screwing around, either. They sensed a threat and had just about eliminated it. Damn.

It was a vote of confidence, the dragons protecting him. It meant they trusted Redwood, and that made me realize that I should, too.

“Mr. Redwood, I came because I need your help. The company’s got this desert facility.”

“The Farm.”

“You know about it?”

“It was my idea.”

It took me aback to think that Redwood himself would have conceived the place. “It was?”

“Of course. Made sense to have few state-of-the-art pens to observe our creations away from prying eyes.”

Well, he’s got the state-of-the-art part right. “Well, the company’s grown a lot since you were running things. And so has their dumping ground for problematic dragons.”

His face darkened, but his eyes narrowed as if I’d confirmed something rather than broken the news. “How certain are you?”

I told him everything: my Condor design, the field trial. The huge scale of Build-A-Dragon’s desert facility, and the pile of bones nearby. He let me talk for the most part, interrupting only now and then with a gruff question. Nothing I said shocked him, but by the end of it he’d fallen silent.

“So Connor wants me to tell someone else what’s going on. Someone with actual clout,” I finished.

He barked a laugh. “And you think that’s me?”

“You started the company, didn’t you?”

“I did,” Redwood agreed, but he sighed. “It wasn’t supposed to become a corporate monstrosity.”

“What did you want it to be?” I asked.

“A workshop of sorts,” Redwood said. “A place where we could dream up more solutions to the world’s problems.”

God, I would kill to work with him at a place like that. “So what happened?”

“Same thing that usually does. People figured money was more important than anything else. And based on what you’re telling me, it’s only getting worse.”

“I’d try to stop it myself, but I’ve got zero power in that place.”

“That’s no accident. Greaves designs companies to keep down the little people. Reinforces the chain of command, with him at the top.”

I ran my hand through my hair, because he was right. “I didn’t know who else to tell. I figured, it’s your company.”

“Used to be my company.”

“Still, you’ve got to have some sway there.”

Redwood harrumphed. “Not as much as you think.”

“People will listen to you.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re Simon Redwood. You probably have a lot more fans than you realize. Greaves can’t ignore you.”

“Maybe you’re right.” He gave me a crooked grin. “Besides, I owe him a lump or two.”



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