Beyond the fissure: darkness.
“Uh-huh.”
“Seriously?”
“It’s our only option,” said Clay.
It was the way he’d flown out in his dream. That was why he felt sure it was the right way to go. Of course, that was the same dream in which he’d shot out of the volcano and rocketed into outer space. Maybe not the easiest dream to replicate.
“You’re insane,” said Brett, despairing once again. “We’ll never get up there.”
“I can help,” said a muffled voice.
Brett turned around, startled. “Who said that!?”
“I’m down here, you idiots, behind the boulder on your right.”
They looked down into the rubble behind the boulder, expecting to see one of Brett’s father’s men. Instead, it was Flint, immobile and covered with dust and soot. One of his legs and both of his arms were lodged under rocks. His torn, filthy backpack lay in front of his mouth. He tried to nudge it away with his chin.
“I said I can help—if you get me out of here,” he said.
“Jeez. You okay?” said Clay. The fire-happy junior counselor was the closest thing Clay had to an enemy, but he didn’t necessarily want to see Flint buried alive.
“Oh, yeah, never better,” replied Flint. “You should try lying under ten tons of rock. It’s a blast.”
“Sorry for asking. Flint, this is Brett. Brett, meet Flint.”
“Pleased to meet you,” said Brett. “Guess, um, I won’t try to shake your hand?”
“Ha-ha.” Flint peered up at Brett through dusty eyelashes. “You’re the missing guy?”
Brett nodded. “Well… I was.”
“I didn’t think you were real.”
“That’s okay. My dad didn’t, either.”
“I know what you mean.” Flint started to laugh, then grimaced in pain. “Come on, dudes. Get these rocks off me. I have ropes and stuff, but you guys won’t be able to use them by yourselves. That climb out of here is going to be hella hard.”
Clay shook his head scornfully. “Like we would just leave you there if you couldn’t help us? Not everyone’s as much of a tool as you are.”
“Easy to call me names when I can’t move,” said Flint, spitting dust out of his mouth.
Clay turned to Brett. “Come on.”
They bent down and started pushing rocks away from Flint, until there was just one left—a big rock sitting on his leg.
They tried to push it off.
“Ow! You trying to kill me?” Flint complained. “Stop pushing. Just pick it up… gently!”
The rock was heavy, but together Brett and Clay lifted it off Flint’s leg and dropped it onto the ground next to him. There was a collective sigh of relief.
“Can you move it?” Brett asked.
Flint rolled his leg a little. “Yeah, it’s fine—I’m fine,” he said, even though it was pretty obvious that he wasn’t.
Wincing, he stood up. He looked like he’d been through a war, bloodied and bruised all over.
“What were you doing down here, anyway?” Clay asked him suspiciously.
“Trying to stop those guys. Same as you.”
Clay’s eyes narrowed. “Oh yeah? I thought maybe you were helping them.”
Ignoring Clay, Flint leaned over to pick up his backpack, and—
“Aaah!”
—cried out. “Just a sore muscle,” he said quickly. “No big deal.”
“Remember Leira and me saw you talking on the phone?” said Clay. “You weren’t telling them where to go?”
“Maybe I was.” Flint pulled a climbing rope out of his backpack and started uncoiling it. “And maybe I changed my mind.”
“Maybe you changed your mind?” Clay shook his head, trying to control his rage. “The coolest, raddest, most awesome creature in the world—probably the last one in the world—is gone. Because of you—”
“And you did such an awesome job protecting it, huh?” said Flint, tying a grappling hook to the end of the rope.
“Man, you are such a—”
“Can you two not fight right now?” Brett interjected anxiously. “It’s time to get out of here.”
“Just what I was thinking,” said Flint. “Now, watch and learn, boys—”
With more than a touch of his old swagger, he began twirling the rope high above his head. If the movement caused him pain, he didn’t show it. The shiny hook reflected the orange glow of the lava, and as he twirled the rope faster and faster—faster than seemed humanly possible—Clay and Brett watched the hook blur into a perfect glowing circle.
Murmuring a few words to himself, Flint finally released the rope; the hook end flew straight into the gap in the cave ceiling and locked onto the rocks inside. It would have been an astonishingly precise hit even for someone who wasn’t injured. A hole in one.
Brett shook his head in wonder. “How did you—?”
“How else are we supposed to get up there,” said Flint, tugging on the rope to make sure it was secure.
“Yeah, but that was—”
Flint laughed. “Magic?”
Oh well, Clay thought. At least it was somebody else who’d said it, not him.
“Brett doesn’t know about you,” he explained to Flint. “Or the camp or anything.”
“Huh? Oh. Oops.” Flint laughed again. “Well, that was nothing. Check this out—”
Making a gun with his hand, he shot a series of bright white flares out of his fingertip. They died out only after they’d entered the gap in the ceiling and illuminated the craggy space above.
“Now we know where we’re going,” said Flint with a grin.
A moment later, they were off. And up.
Even Brett, who had terrible memories of trying to climb ropes in gym class, was pleasantly surprised to find himself rappelling out of the lava cave as if he’d been doing it all his life. Of course, it was a little alarming to see the rope burn away behind him like an oversized candlewick, but he tried not to look.
Things got much trickier when they got through the fissure into the cave above.
Flint had shot more flares out of his finger to light up the space—these flares lingered much longer than the previous ones—and they could see that while the cave was not very wide, it was very, very tall.
In front of our heroes: forty feet of near-sheer rock. The only opening: at the top.
“Now what?” Brett asked. “No way are we going up that rock.”
Without answering, Flint tied the three of them together with another rope and started doing just that.
Swallowing, Clay and Brett followed.
It was slow going, and very nerve-racking, but it wasn’t quite as difficult as they had expected. That is to say, it wasn’t impossible. When they imitated Flint’s movements.
Whenever Clay tried to find his own spots to hold, he noticed that the rock was cold and slippery in his hand; and at one terrifying moment, he actually started to fall—only to be stopped by Flint’s rope. In contrast, whenever he grasped a handhold that Flint had established for them, the rock was almost searingly hot, but Clay’s grip held firm, and he was able to keep ascending. It was as if Flint were melting the rock just enough to make it mold to their fingers.
Brett, who was following close behind Clay, seemed to notice the same thing. “I didn’t think I was such a good climber,” he said, breathless with exertion but somehow managing to keep up. “And I’m really not, am I?”
“Let’s just say I wouldn’t count on being able to do this again,” said Clay. “At least not without Flint leading the way.”
About twelve feet above them, Flint was pulling himself up the last portion of the rock face. There was nothing overtly magical about what he was doing, but every once in a while, when his hand touched rock, sparks would fly from his fingers, as if they were knives on a grindstone.
“Does everyone at your camp have talents like he does?” Brett asked.
“Like Flint? Not exactly,” said Clay. ??
?Some of us don’t have much talent at all.”
It was clear that he meant himself.
“You? You talk to dragons!” said Brett, incredulous. “I would call that a talent.”
Clay shook his head. “A lot of good it does now that the dragon’s gone.”
His anger rising again, he looked up at Flint.
“Hey, how did you hook up with those guys, anyway?” he called out, as if they’d just been talking about it. “Brett’s dad and everyone.”
“It wasn’t his dad,” Flint called back. “It was this woman his girlfriend works for.… Come on, pick up the pace!”
Clay found Flint waiting for them on a blissfully wide ledge. His expression was impatient, but Clay suspected that he needed the rest. His injuries were catching up with him.
“What woman?” asked Brett, hoisting himself up to join them.
“I don’t really know anything about her,” said Flint. “Not even her name.”
Clay frowned. “But you met her?”
“When I was eleven. I was back in court for lighting a fire—just a few flames in a toilet, but they acted like I tried to burn down the whole school.”
“People tend to take fire seriously,” Brett noted. “It’s a thing.”
“Yeah? What about the whole you-need-fire-to-have-a-civilization thing?” retorted Flint.
“You were trying to build a civilization in a toilet?” said Brett.
Flint glared. “Up yours.”
Clay smirked.
Flint started to walk along the ledge toward what looked like the entrance to another tunnel. Far below was the opening into the lava cave. Clay and Brett followed, trying not to look down.
“Anyway, all the shrinky-dinks testified that I was a nut job,” said Flint. “And they were ready to lock me up, when this woman arrives like a freaking fairy godmother or something. Most beautiful woman I ever saw, but kind of spooky. Her face never moved, and she always wore these white gloves.… She told me I wasn’t crazy; I was special.”
“You’re pretty special, all right,” said Clay.
Brett laughed.
“You guys better watch it,” said Flint angrily. “I’m the one leading you out of here, remember?”
“Don’t worry,” said Brett. “We remember.”
“So then what happened?” asked Clay. Flint’s description of the white-gloved woman had sounded familiar to him; he wasn’t sure why.
“Then, next thing I know, she works some kind of voodoo, the charges against me are dropped, and I’m being shipped off to Earth Ranch. Learn everything you can, she says. And don’t ever mention me. For three years, those were my only instructions. But this summer she gives me the phone and says, They trust you now. Start looking. Look everywhere. You’ll know it when you see it. And when I saw the dragon paintings, I knew—”
“You were a spy,” said Clay. “A traitor.”
“So? I’m supposed to feel bad about it?” Flint scoffed. “Mr. B, Buzz, everybody—they all make great speeches about the Other Side and the sacredness of magic and all that, but they aren’t protecting magic; they’re just scared of it.”
“Maybe,” said Clay. “Or maybe they know what they’re talking about.”
“Whatever. This woman, she says there are no rules when it comes to magic, because magic is the breaking of rules.”
It was indeed the entrance to another tunnel that they’d seen, but a very steep and very narrow tunnel. There was no other way to go, however, so Flint shot a few more flares into it, and in they went.
“If she’s so smart, what made you change your mind?” Clay asked, keeping pace with him now. “Feeling guilty?”
“As if!” Flint snorted. “She said they would make me a Dragon Tamer, but she lied.”
“Nobody can make you a Dragon Tamer,” said Clay. “You are one or you aren’t.”
Flint stopped and pointed at Clay. “So you took the book after all! I knew it.”
“What do you care?” said Clay. “You’ll never see a dragon again anyway.”
“Maybe you won’t,” said Flint.
“Come on, face it, she’s done with you. And it serves you right.”
Flint’s eyes burned. “Nobody’s done with me until I say they are. The Midnight Sun will be sorry they ever met me.”
“The Midnight Sun?” An unexpected chill traveled up Clay’s spine.
Flint nodded, and started walking again. “That’s their group. International secret society or some junk like that. Bunch of creeps in white gloves. I only ever heard the name once, but I never forgot.”
The Midnight Sun.
When Clay was little, he had heard his brother talk about the Midnight Sun a few times with his friend Cass—always in hushed tones, and only when he thought Clay wasn’t listening. As a rule, Max-Ernest was compulsively talkative. The Midnight Sun must have scared him quite a bit for him to stay so quiet about it.
Could it be the same Midnight Sun that had sent Flint to Earth Ranch and that was now in possession of Ariella? Was that why the description of the white-gloved woman had sounded so familiar?
“What does the Midnight Sun want with a dragon?” he asked.
“My dad said they were taking the dragon to a sanctuary,” Brett volunteered.
“Yeah, that’s what they call it.” Flint’s laugh was more of a wheeze. He didn’t sound good. Or look good. “It’s where they’re going to breed their army.”
“Army?” Brett and Clay repeated together.
“Yeah, an army of dragons, they said. Hundreds of ’em.”
“What are they going to do with hundreds of dragons?” Clay tried to imagine it. A single dragon had seemed difficult enough to manage. He thought of the Secrets of the Occulta Draco. What did the book say? He who has power over dragons has power over us all.
“Whatever they think they’re going to do, they’ll do it over my dead body,” said Flint. “I’m not letting them take that dragon without a fight.”
“Oh yeah? How are you gonna stop them?” said Clay.
“I thought you read the book. If you master the Occulta Draco, you can do anything.”
“But you have to have a dragon for that,” said Clay. “And the only dragon around has gotta be on that boat by now. For all we know, they’re already sailing for the Sahara or wherever-the-heck.”
“Then we’ll just have to move faster, won’t we?” said Flint.
The tunnel was almost level now, and Flint took the opportunity to increase his speed.
“Are you serious?” Clay asked, struggling to keep up. “You really want to go after them?”
Was it possible his enemy was becoming an ally?
“You know it. Are you in?”
Clay hesitated.
“Yeah,” he said finally, a little flame of hope flickering inside him. “I’m in.”
“Cool. Shake?” Flint extended his hand, but when Clay reached for it, Flint pulled his hand away and mimed slicking back his hair.
“Oh, that’s a new one,” said Clay, but he laughed anyway.
“Look!” said Brett, catching up with them. “Is that sky?”
About fifty feet ahead there was an opening; the tunnel was coming to an end.
“I think so,” said Clay, excitedly striding toward it. “Flint—we going fast enough for you now?”
There was no answer.
“Flint?”
The other boys turned around. The talented teenager was lying on the ground behind them, the contents of his backpack strewn beside him. They rushed back.
“Jeez, you okay?” asked Clay.
“Does it look like I am?” said Flint, his eyes closed.
Brett scanned him for new injuries. “What happened? Is it your leg?”
“It’s my everything.”
Clay and Brett eyed each other. Their exit from the mountain was about to get a bit harder.
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
A CRASH LANDING
I knew there was a re
ason I kept this thing around, thought Captain Abad.
Holding her didgeridoo like a baseball bat (or maybe, since she was from Australia, I should say like a cricket bat), Captain Abad took a few practice swings.
She didn’t normally resort to shattering windows—she was a grown woman, after all, and a captain at that—and she couldn’t help worrying that her precious didgeridoo might get scratched, but these were exceptional circumstances. The guard who’d been posted beneath her window all day had just left, presumably to go to the bathroom or call for a replacement, and she might not have another opportunity to break out of her quarters.
Ready to swing, the captain took one last look outside—then froze with her didgeridoo suspended over her shoulder. The guard had returned, and he was motioning to a helicopter that was hovering a mere thirty feet or so above the Imperial Conquest. Dangling from the helicopter was the rusty shipping container that she’d last seen occupied by a twelve-year-old boy who would later be pushed off the ship. She wondered what was inside the container now. Had the mysterious Operation St. George been a success? What prize was so valuable that a gang of criminals had commandeered an entire cruise ship to attain it?
The container was being lowered onto the ship’s loading deck when, suddenly, it started swinging wildly in every direction.
As the captain watched, transfixed, the container door slid open and a long, jagged reptilian tail slipped out. What kind of animal would have such a tail? A giant crocodile? The tail swung back and forth like a whip, thwacking the sides of the container and causing it to jerk this way and that.
Outside the captain’s window, people started screaming and running in every direction. The helicopter pilot tried to rectify the situation by pulling back from the ship, but that only made the container swing more violently. SMASH! The captain heard the container collide with the ship at a spot high above her, probably taking out the ship’s radio antenna and radar equipment, by the sound of it. She shook her head in dismay. It would be that much harder to call for help once she escaped.
She figured that the container had become unhooked from the helicopter. But, no, there it was again a moment later, swinging into view, the strange tail still sticking out the door. As the container careened by her window, she caught a quick glimpse of the thing that was thrashing around inside. The captain’s heart beat wildly in her chest, and she wondered for a moment if she were losing her grip on reality. The great beast’s jaws were muzzled and its wings were bound, but there was no mistaking it for anything other than what it was. And yet—