CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The Side Quest
I went through the rest of the workday in a daze. Partly there, partly not there. Tom tried to offer me some assurance, and Evelyn tried to talk to me, but all I could produce were muttered half responses. Summer texted me not long after.
How did it go?
I didn’t want to tell her, but I’d promised to hold nothing back. I found a terse way to respond.
Complete disaster.
When I got back to my office, I still had the flying design open on my workstation. I loaded the simulator and watched the three-dimensional dragon rotate slowly in midair. It was utter torture, but I felt like I deserved it. One minute Tom and I were helping hatch those dragons, joking while we fed the ravenous little things their first meal. The next minute they were dead and gone. I couldn’t think, I couldn’t work. Eventually I gave up and headed home.
An eerie and unexpected silence greeted me at my condo. That meant one of two things. First, the dragons could be hiding on purpose. They liked to make me come and search to find each of them. They were pretty good at it, but I’d started to learn some of their quirks and it helped a lot. Hadrian, the emerald green, inevitably chose my cactus collection to conceal himself. Nero and Otho sought out earth tones. Titus usually tagged along; his orange scales gave them away. Marcus Aurelius would only hide somewhere warm, which almost always meant the top of the fridge. I had a distinct feeling the proximity to food played a role in that as well.
Octavius and Benjy, the two cleverest dragons, were usually the hardest to find. Octavius gave me plenty of trouble on his own. Both of them working together took it to a whole new level. A month ago, I’d given up searching for them after half an hour and had to bribe the others to sniff them out. Octavius and Benjy had fallen asleep in my chest of drawers on a stack of T-shirts.
A week before that, I found them in the HVAC system. I still don’t know how they got in there.
So when I got home after the terrible day of the field trial, I was kind of looking forward to finding all of them. Yet there was not a dragon to be found. It was too quiet. No scurrying sounds, no whisper of scales on ceramic as one of my dragons tried to hide. Not only that, but all of my motion-activated lights were off, which meant that nothing had moved inside for the last ten minutes. None of it made sense.
“Octavius?” I called.
No response.
I checked the top of the fridge. No Marcus Aurelius. That’s when I really knew something was wrong. Maybe they finally got out.
The idea had always terrified me. The dragonets were too clever for their own good, and I don’t think they appreciated the danger of the outside world. Octavius knew better, but he could also open doors. If his siblings put him up to it . . . well, no. He wouldn’t be that foolish. At least, that’s what I told myself as I searched the condo with a rising sense of panic. That’s when I spotted the bright orange piece of paper in the middle of my dining room table. An unfamiliar piece of paper. Maybe I should have seen it when I came in, but I didn’t. There were no words on the paper, just numbers. In Summer’s handwriting.
GPS coordinates.
I cursed, even as a twinge of relief broke through. I didn’t have any idea what was happening, but if Summer was involved it might not be all bad. I thought about changing out of my work clothes, but I’d wasted enough time already. I grabbed my hiking boots from the closet and punched in the coordinates on the way to the car.
“Good afternoon, Noah Parker,” said the car over its speakers.
“Hello, gorgeous.”
“Where would you like to go today?”
“I’m not sure yet, but you can back us out.” And while she did that, I strapped on my hiking boots. I beamed the coordinates to the Tesla’s nav computer, which confirmed an inkling suspicion that had just started forming in my mind. I knew that place. Red Rock Run, one of my first geocaches. The route from the parking lot to the cache itself was a straight shot with several intermediate stops on the way. Based on the satellite image of the nav computer, however, the coordinates wouldn’t take me to the usual cache. It showed a rough swath of unimproved terrain. Reddish boulders, brown earth, and blots of green that were probably saguaros. No structure was visible, and based on my GPS history, I’d never set foot there, either. Which either meant that something unusual was happening, or she’d made a mistake. The latter seemed unlikely.
I suppose I could have texted Summer to be sure, but it seemed like I should just show up in person. She’d gone to some trouble to make this a game.
“Unable to find route to destination,” the car said.
I wasn’t sure I heard correctly. “What?”
“Unable to find route to destination.”
She couldn’t drive across boulders and scrub brush, in other words. “Oh, right. Sorry.” I changed the coordinates to the parking lot, which she accepted with far less of a fuss. I kept the controls, though, because I needed the distraction. Otherwise I’d start wallowing in what had happened, and that wouldn’t be productive.
We had to win the flying trial to have a chance at securing the DOD contract. The thing was, I believed in our fliers, right up until they’d collided in midair. Now I found myself second-guessing the whole design. Maybe I hadn’t engaged my designers as much as I should have. Wong and Korrapati together possessed more experience than I did at genetic engineering, even if I’d been the one who managed to pull off some key breakthroughs. She designed models methodically, one system at a time, split-testing different changes. Wong took a completely different approach, sort of chaotic genius, but he put in the time to make it work. They’d done a hell of a job with the AquaWong. Even though we weren’t calling it that.
“Now arriving at your destination,” said the car, jolting me back to reality. I eased gingerly into a spot on the gravel lot beside Summer’s Jeep. Judging by the angle at which she’d parked, she’d driven straight across the drainage ditch and then parked wherever she wanted. The gravel lots in places like this didn’t have painted lines, but somehow she made a statement anyway.
I armed my car’s first-tier alarm and plunged down the trail, glancing at my watch for guidance. At the first waypoint in the official geocache, the destination I’d put in required a sharp left turn. I hesitated, if only because this meant I’d step off the well-worn trail and down something that looked like an old ATV path.
“Stick to the trail” is generally good advice for the Arizona desert. ATV paths didn’t count. But I hadn’t come this far to chicken out, especially with my girlfriend involved. So I took a breath and stomped down along the sunbaked tread marks. It felt strange to be out alone in the hot sunlight without a cloud of flying reptiles to guide me. Or a domesticated pig to lead the way. I had to admit, I didn’t care for it very much.
The sun beat down on me, and the scrub brush on either side of the narrow trail kept pulling at my clothes. I knew I should have changed. My watch encouraged me to keep going, though, as I was less than half a mile from the waypoint. It beeped again at a quarter mile, which told me I was zeroing in. That’s around the same time I noticed the clever scaled creatures concealed atop boulders or behind scrub brush. Then, at last, a glimpse of blond hair and there she was, in the shade of a jagged pillar of rock almost two stories tall. She had her water bottle—another thing I’d forgotten in my rush out the door—and a casual hand on Riker’s collar.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey.” She overtly checked her watch. “An hour and five minutes. You are slow.”
Everything about her posture and the way she spoke was relaxed, but I still had to be sure. “Everything kosher?” That was one of our code words, the one that meant Tell me if you’re under duress.
Her brow furrowed. “What?”
“Is everything kosher?” I asked, hitting the word more this time, and reaching casually for my phone in case this was really a bad situation. Not that I had an elaborate plan or anything if that turned out to be true. More like I’d call Connor and hope for the best.
“Oh right, that.” It was hard to tell since she was wearing sunglasses, but she seemed to half-roll her eyes. “Everything’s fine.”
“That’s not the response!” I hissed.
“We’re five by five.” She definitely rolled her eyes this time.
“Good.”
“Not everything is a life-or-death situation, you know.”
Sure, she said that now, but when it really had been a life-or-death situation, I didn’t remember any complaints about my secret phrases. “So, what’s this about?”
“You need a distraction,” she said.
She wasn’t wrong, and it made me smile to think that she’d picked up on that from a few texts. “You know, this was my first successful geocache.”
“I know. You finally figured out how the comments worked so you wouldn’t chase nonexistent caches, and you picked the one that everyone described as easy.”
“Hey now, this is the cache that put NPdesign on the leaderboard.”
“And who was at the top of that leaderboard?”
“I think it was someone named SumNerdOne.”
“SumNumberOne.”
I grinned. “Oh, right. That’s quite different.”
“Anyway, I thought we’d create a side-cache for Red Rock Run.”
“Hey, cool idea.” We’d created a geocache of our own once before, but that had been a surprising amount of work. You had to establish the cache, of course, but also map out waypoints and little challenge questions to make it difficult. Side-caches were different—they weren’t required to log the main cache, so most competitive geocachers ignored them. Summer and I usually put ourselves in that category, but we took on the occasional side-quest from time to time. By unwritten rule, they took you to spectacular, sometimes overlooked areas of the outdoors.
“I knew you’d like it.” She looked past me and raised her voice. “Octavius?”
My dragon zoomed into view, swooped right past me, and landed on her shoulder.
“Um, hello!” I threw up my arms. You’re supposed to be my dragon.
Summer was heaping praise on him, then held out her phone and set the timer. “All right, Octavius, sky shot!”
Octavius flapped his wings like mad, circling upward. I reluctantly jogged over to make sure I was in frame. I looked up and reminded myself to smile, even though inside I fought a twinge of jealousy. The sky shot was our thing. I taught it to him. He didn’t even drop her phone until he was coming back down. If I hadn’t caught it, the thing would have landed on my head.
“You two are getting thick as thieves.” I admired the photo while Summer uploaded it to the cache’s drive.
“Well, we’ve been spending a lot of time together because some people have been super busy.”
“Where are the other dragonets?”
“Hiding. I told them they had to stay until you find them.”
I turned around and took stock of the field. First I pointed to the old saguaro I’d passed on my way over. Hadrian blended in rather well. Unfortunately for him, bright orange Titus did not. “Hadrian and Titus!” I called. Obediently, they gave up their perches and took to the air. I pivoted to the high, rocky ridge to the west. “Nero and Otho, I see you!” They chittered and took off, probably surprised. They matched the color of the rocks perfectly, but probably didn’t realize they were silhouetted against a bright blue sky. Benjy would have hidden by Octavius, so I drew a line from how he’d flown in and spotted him in a jumbled pile of rocks. “And last of all, Benjy!” I turned back to Summer. “I think that about wraps it up.”
“Um, you didn’t find Marcus Aurelius.”
“He’s on the boulder behind you.”
She turned and made an exasperated sound. “You little bum! You were there the whole time, weren’t you?”
Marcus Aurelius made a big show of waking up from where he’d stretched out in the sun. It made us both laugh.
I moved closer and hugged Summer. “Thanks for this. I needed to get away.”
“Was it really that bad?”
“The two dragons collided in midair.”
“Oh.” She grimaced. “Were they all right?”
“No.” I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “They died instantly, Tom said, but it was still hard to watch.”
“I’m sorry. That sucks.”
“Yeah.”
“Wow, you just don’t have good luck at that coliseum.”
I laughed without humor. “You know what? I really don’t.”
We placed the cache right on the boulder where she’d waited for me, then we both took GPS measurements.
“Ready to walk back?” I asked.
“Always.” She held my hand, and we let Riker find the way for us. He was good at sniffing out the easiest route. The dragonets formed an aerial escort overhead, gliding back and forth, chasing one another, and generally burning off the energy from having kept still for so long. Watching them reminded me of the mini field trial, and I shuddered.
“Speaking of seeing people, I was talking to my dad last night,” Summer said, in a not-so-subtle attempt to distract me.
“Yeah?”
“He’s all worked up about the latest pipeline.”
“That doesn’t surprise me.” Her dad was a bit of an environmentalist nut. It was probably where Summer got it. I wasn’t following the latest pipeline debate too closely, but it had sounded like run-of-the-mill stuff: fossil fuel company wants to build a pipeline through protected land, bribes the right people, and gets the approval despite vociferous protests.
“He asked about you,” Summer said.
I nearly missed a step, and half-stumbled. “Really?”
She laughed at my reaction. “Yes, really.”
“I wasn’t sure you’d even told him about me.”
“Well, I didn’t at first.”
“Um, ouch.”
She shrugged. “I didn’t know if you were serious, and he’s . . . kind of overprotective.”
“I would be, too.”
“You’re sweet.” She hesitated. “You should meet him.”
She wants me to meet her dad? This was unprecedented. I knew they were close, but she hadn’t shared a lot about him. Maybe he wasn’t the only overprotective one. “I would like that,” I said carefully.
“Good,” she said.
“Do you think he will? Like me, I mean.”
She smiled, but there was a hint of nervousness behind it. “For your sake, I really hope so.”