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CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

The Good News

The next morning was rough. I got up ten minutes later than usual and had to drag myself into work. I’d gone easy last night, but even one margarita before dinner did not mix well with weeknights. Naturally, Evelyn summoned the entire Design team to the conference room first thing in the morning.

Something about her summons seemed ominous. I mean, there were only three of us and her office was huge. We could have met up there and been quite comfortable. As we walked down the hallway to the door, I tried to remember, historically speaking, whether meetings in the conference room meant good news or bad news.

She’d announced the domestication challenge in her office when the Design team was twice as large. That was arguably good news. We’d watched the auction of the first domesticated dragons—the funds from which kept the company afloat in the early days—in the conference room. That, too, had counted as good news, though we hadn’t known how it would go. We hadn’t been certain that the world truly wanted dragons. Looking back, it still boggled my mind. Who wouldn’t want a dragon?

The world was a better place with dragons in it. Most people took it for granted. Most people didn’t realize how fragile the whole system was. Only Build-A-Dragon had the assets and infrastructure to produce dragons at scale. If the company failed, all of it would be sold off piecemeal. Maybe that’s what Greaves wanted to happen. Of course, it was unlike him to have selfless ulterior motives. This was a guy who deprived the world of dogs for years to keep his company profitable.

Then again, given how Build-A-Dragon’s financials looked now that dogs had returned, it was hard to question Greaves’s business acumen.

Wong and Korrapati were already waiting in the conference room. She sat in a chair, notepad and pen square in front of her, perfect posture and somehow appearing patient. He slouched two chairs over, looking like he could be half asleep. The handlebars of his mini scooter said that he’d rolled here to save himself the walk, even though it was all of two hundred feet down the hall.

“Hey, guys,” I said. “Good morning?”

“Not enough work,” Wong said.

“Really? What about the customs for China?”

He shrugged. “We finish Tuesday.”

“Sorry. Not much we can do about that for the moment.” I’d already briefed them on how the third field trials went, so there was no point in rehashing it. I even told them about the wing design and our suspicion on how Greaves had gotten the intel. Beyond that, all we could do was wait.

High-heeled shoes clacked down the hallway toward us, and the door slid open. Evelyn bustled in looking frazzled and high-energy, but there was a positive vibe to her manner. “Oh good, you’re all here.”

“Waiting on tenterhooks,” I said.

“Tenter hooks, Noah Parker?”

I grinned, enjoying the rare event of an American idiom that Evelyn hadn’t yet encountered. “Waiting for something to happen, like cloth hung up to dry.”

“Well, you can get off your tenterhooks now. I’ve been talking to the DOD all morning.”

Wong, Korrapati, and I looked at one another. I’m sure I had the same look of excitement and alarm on my face.

“And?” I asked.

“The good news first. We have been awarded a DOD contract.”

“Yes!” I pounded the table a little too hard in my excitement. Luckily it didn’t break.

“Good news. Very good,” Wong said.

“That’s fantastic!” Korrapati said.

“Congratulations, all of you,” Evelyn said.

“So, it’s all three models, right?” I asked. “Aerial, marine, and infantry?”

Evelyn’s smile flickered. “It is for aerial and marine only.”

“What about the third model?”

“The DOD elected not to contract us for it.”

“Is it going to Greaves?”

“I don’t know yet.”

I ground my teeth to keep from saying more. This was a victory, even if it wasn’t a complete one. It rankled me that part of the contract might go to Greaves, but I had to put on a brave front for the team. “That’s still fantastic news.”

“We’re going to be very busy to meet these specs. The DOD wants some adjustments to the field-tested dragons, and based on their confidence in them, they would like prototypes for seven additional models.”

Seven models?” I shook my head. We wanted work to do, of course, and seven run-of-the-mill custom jobs ordinarily wouldn’t make us break a sweat. But the DOD was no ordinary customer. No doubt they had performance specs for each and every model.

Evelyn seemed to read my mind. “And they’ll have to meet a variety of minimum performance thresholds.”

I sighed. “Remind me, why did we want this contract again?”

“To keep the company going,” Evelyn said.

Oh. Right. “Well, Wong was just telling me he needed more work.” I grinned at him. “You’re going to be busy. Both of you.”

“Bring it on,” Korrapati said.

Wong grinned back at me. “Busy is good.”

“Any word on the legal front?” I asked Evelyn.

“Nothing yet.”

“If Greaves gets a contract, what do you think is going to happen on that front?”

“If there’s money on the line, he’ll put new resources toward fighting us in court. To stall things so that he can keep the contract.”

That’s exactly what I’m worried about. Maybe Greaves hadn’t fought us yet because he didn’t think he had a chance at landing DOD money. If his resources were limited, he probably gambled everything on the flier trials. Which we won fair and square. However, if the DOD decided to give him a contract for even the infantry model, that would be a huge influx of financial security. Not to mention prestige and experience, which would enable him to fight us for future DOD contracts. Hell, he might even decide to compete with us for the last scraps of the open market. Bottom line, this meant that the Greaves problem wasn’t going away. He could harass and hound us at every turn. And he would, too. This was a guy who confined healthy dogs to living in cages for years, simply because of something a dog had done when he was a child.

“What if he . . . no longer had a Redwood Codex?” I asked.

Evelyn frowned at me. “What do you mean?”

“If he doesn’t have the Codex, he can’t print viable eggs. And with Redwood gone, that effectively restores our monopoly on dragons.”

“Robert knows that. He’s not going to give up his Codex.”

“Oh, I wasn’t planning to ask him.”

Evelyn frowned at me. “Noah, I want to be clear. You should not do anything to interfere with Robert’s operations. Corporate sabotage is off the table.”

“I know.”

“Promise me you won’t try anything foolish.”

“All right, I promise.”

But in my head, the wheels had already begun to turn.


Korrapati and Wong ambushed me even before I’d left Build-A-Dragon’s property. It was the end of the day, I was walking toward my car in the underground parking garage, and both of them materialized in front of me.

“Noah,” Korrapati said.

I nearly jumped out of my skin. “God, Korrapati, you scared the crap out of me!”

“Oh. Sorry,” she said.

“What are you doing here?”

“Want to talk,” Wong said.

In a dark parking garage, after work. Yeah, this isn’t good. “About what?”

“You’re going to try to go for the other Redwood Codex,” Korrapati said.

I stopped myself from blurting out something incriminating, but only just. I took a deep breath and made sure my voice was steady. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Korrapati tilted her head as if speaking to a child. “We know you, Noah.”

“You don’t know everything I do.”

“We do. You go rogue, do the crazy thing,” Wong said.

That, coming from him, miffed me a little. I like to think of it as the brave and selfless thing, but whatever.

“So listen. We want in,” Korrapati said.

“In on what?”

“Whatever you’re planning.” She gestured at herself and Wong. “We can help.”

“Guys, I’m not planning anything.” More accurately, I hadn’t had the time or mental energy to plan anything.

“Good, then we can help you plan.”

I glanced up at the corner near the stairs where the red light of a security camera glowed steadily. That was the camera, I was pretty sure, where Ben Fulton had caught me tagging the dragon wranglers’ trucks with GPS trackers. It felt like a lifetime ago. I remembered what it had felt like to be so isolated. Just me against the big corporate machine. They were dark times to say the least. The idea of having good, smart people on my side this time held a lot of appeal. I knew I should refuse them, especially since I was technically the group leader, but I really didn’t want to go it alone. Nor did I have any real idea what to do.

Still, the red light was watching and we were standing on company property, no matter the hour.

“Have you guys ever gone on a geocache before?” I asked.

“No . . .” said Korrapati, looking nervous.

Wong just furrowed his brow. “Yes. Why?”

“Because we’re going to do one Saturday,” I said. And while we’re out in the desert, we can talk.


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Framed