—a dragon?!?
The captain considered herself a rational, scientifically minded person; she was not a fan of fairy tales and fantasy stories. On the other hand, part of being a scientist, as she understood it, was accepting empirical evidence when it was presented to you. You didn’t simply deny the existence of a thing because it didn’t fit into your theory of the universe; the existence of the thing meant that your theory of the universe was flawed. And a dragon—a real dragon—what an amazing discovery that would be! For a dragon, you might do far more than commandeer a cruise ship. You might travel to the ends of the earth. There was still enough of the adventurer in Captain Abad for her to feel more than a small tingle of romance at the sight of the ancient beast.
Here be dragons, it said on the old maps. Well, here be one at last.
Then—CRASH!—there were screams and the sound of shattering glass. The container had collided with the ship again, this time landing much nearer to the captain’s quarters.
Wasting no more time, she took advantage of the noise and mayhem to smash her window open. As she leaned out and looked aft, she saw that the container had crashed into somebody’s stateroom.* It had broken free from the helicopter and was now hanging off the stateroom’s small balcony. The container hung there for a second longer; then there was a terrible creaking sound, and the balcony gave way. The container smashed through two more balconies before coming to a crash landing on the deck below.
It is a terrible thing for a captain to watch her ship being destroyed, but Captain Abad’s first thought was not for her ship but for her passengers. As far as she could tell, no one had been hurt. The screams she’d heard were screams of terror, not pain. The dragon, though—how had it fared in the fall? Now that the dragon was on her ship, she was responsible for it; it was her passenger.
Craning her neck, she could see the dragon standing half in and half out of the container. Its wings were still bound together, and at least one chain was still bolted to the container floor, but somewhere along the way the dragon’s muzzle had come off.
The dragon looked upward, it eyes briefly meeting the captain’s, and then let out a tremendous roar, sending a ball of fire high into the sky.
The captain was awestruck. And terrified. One more breath like that in the right direction and the entire ship could go up in flames.
The dragon was just raising its head again when it was shot with hundreds of darts. It staggered, then fell to the ground, chains hitting the container with a clang.
The captain didn’t know whether she was more relieved for her ship or more furious for the dragon.
The intercom crackled, and in a moment Amber’s cheerful, reassuring voice could be heard. “Ladies and gentlemen, please do not be alarmed. There has been an accident involving a shipping container, but it is now under control, and there have been no injuries reported. Some people are saying that they saw a giant lizard inside the container, but of course they saw no such thing. A coiled fire hose got loose, that is all. There was no swinging tail.…”
Captain Abad shook her head. If anyone could get people to disbelieve their own eyes, it was Amber. But there was no time to worry about what the passengers thought. The captain had to reconquer the Imperial Conquest before it was too late.
Doing her best to avoid the broken glass, she climbed out the window and lowered herself to the deck below.
CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN
TITANIC MEETS GODZILLA
As an author, I regard my characters as my children. (Especially those who happen to be children.) In my eyes, they can do almost no wrong. Nonetheless, I am duty-bound to report the truth about them, and all in all, it hadn’t been the Worms’ finest hour. Nor Mira’s. Nor even, I confess, Leira’s.
From their mountaintop hiding place, they heard multiple explosions. They knew that all kinds of terrible things were happening inside the volcano, and they knew that their friend Clay was stuck right there in the middle of it.
And yet what did they do?
Nothing.
Even when the dragon was dragged out in chains and shoved like the world’s biggest sack of potatoes into the shipping container, they only watched in horrified wonder. It was hard enough to comprehend that a mythical creature like a dragon might live and breathe like any other animal. And then that a beast so magical and mighty could be treated so ignobly!
For a moment, it had looked like the helicopter might be unable to lift the combined weight of the container and the dragon, and our friends were briefly hopeful that the dragon would get to stay on the island after all. But after a few false starts, the container was airborne, and the caged dragon was on its way.
In defense of my not-so-brave-acting characters, I will point out that there was no way they could have stopped the helicopter from where they were—at least no way that I can imagine. As for saving Clay, the only way into the mountain that they were aware of was guarded by at least twenty grown men and women, all well armed with firearms and explosives and who knew what else. In contrast, there were only five on the campers’ side, none over the age of fourteen, and none of them armed.
Only when the sun started to go down did Leira, who, by virtue of being the first to know about the dragon, had become group leader, tell the others to stand up and get moving. By then Brett’s father’s crew had dispersed, and she felt reasonably confident that the campers were alone.
They were about to head down to see if there was still a way into the cave, when Jonah stopped his friends and pointed.
“Looks who’s there!”
Three people were silhouetted high up on the mountain. It was clear from their shapes and sizes that Clay, Brett, and Flint had all made it out of the volcano alive.
Alive—but in Flint’s case, barely so.
With Clay and Brett propping him up from behind, Flint had just managed to walk the last twenty feet of the tunnel. The walk took all his strength, and as soon as he was in the open air, he collapsed to the ground again, his face sweaty and pale.
“Gotta get up,” he mumbled to himself. “Gotta get…”
But when he tried to push himself back up, he couldn’t.
“Dude. Stop,” said Clay. “We’ll carry you.”
“No, no, I’m okay,” Flint said, gasping for breath. “I’ll catch up. Go get the dragon!”
Clay and Brett looked at each other, then back at Flint.
“Sorry, man, but you are not okay,” said Clay.
“Definitely not,” agreed Brett. “Besides your collarbone, I’m guessing fractured rib, broken tibia, and a sprained ankle, to start. And then there are the internal organs.…”
A moment later, Clay and Brett were doing their best to carry Flint down the mountain as promised—first carrying him over their shoulders, then holding his legs and arms, then carrying him over their shoulders again. Nothing quite worked. Eventually, they had to start dragging him.
“Hope we’re not hurting you too much,” said Brett.
Flint looked at him through heavy-lidded eyes. He seemed about to make a sarcastic rejoinder, but the effort to speak was too much.
After the other campers had joined them, and Brett had been introduced to everyone, and all of them had expressed their amazement about the events of the day, an argument erupted about what to do with Flint. The campers had so little love for the pyromaniac junior counselor that there were several half-serious jokes about leaving him to fend for himself, just as he had suggested.
“He left you on the beach, remember?” said Kwan to Clay. “Turnabout is fair play and all that.”
“Yeah, but I could walk by myself,” said Clay. “C’mon. There has to be somewhere safe we can put him.”
“Nowhere is safe for Flint if he doesn’t get some medical help,” said Leira.
“But Nurse Cora is locked in the library with everybody else,” Mira pointed out.
“Then that’s where we have to take him,” said Clay.
And let’s make it
fast, he thought.
Far out in the ocean, he could see the Imperial Conquest. It looked as though it was still anchored. But for how long? He had to get on the ship before it sailed too far away. He owed it to Flint. And, more important, to Ariella.
In groups of three, the campers took turns carrying Flint, walking close together in single file with him over their right shoulders, like lumber at a construction site. Somehow, they managed to get him to the vicinity of the library without dropping him—and without seeing anyone from Brett’s father’s crew.
But at the library tower two of the armed men were still standing watch. Evidently, Brett’s father still feared that someone would try to stop him.
And someone will, thought Clay.
“Perfect,” said Kwan, gritting his teeth. “Now what?”
“No worries, I’ve got this,” said Pablo. “Clay, give me a hand, bro—”
Two minutes later, this is what you would have seen if you were one of the men guarding the library: a teenage boy, Flint, stumbling toward them, waving and yelling, “Take me inside! I need to see Nurse Cora!” Until he fell to the ground, unconscious, and very possibly dead.
If, however, you had witnessed the same event from a vantage point behind Flint, you would have seen something else entirely: Clay and Pablo propping him up while Clay shouted Flint’s lines and Pablo manipulated Flint’s hands and arms like a puppet’s. As soon as he dropped to the ground, they dived under a bush. Just in time to escape the guards’ notice.
Hidden by the shrubbery, the campers watched as the guards walked over and prodded Flint with their rifles. They appeared to be arguing about what to do with him, and for a moment Flint’s fate was uncertain, but finally the guards lifted Flint by the arms and dragged him into the library.
The kids high-fived one another. Success!
“It’s just like a crime show,” whispered Mira. “You know, when the bad guys are too afraid the police will catch them if they walk into a hospital, so they leave somebody bleeding on the hospital steps instead?”
“I thought we were the good guys,” said Jonah.
“We are. And now we’re going to prove it,” said Clay. He looked at his friends. “Who here knows how to get on that boat?”
“You mean the cruise ship—why?” said Kwan.
“Yeah, why?” echoed Pablo. “Those things are just giant floating displays of everything that’s wrong with the world… mass consumerism… destruction of the ecosystem… old people…”
“Wait till you try the Jell-O parfaits before you dis cruise ships,” said Brett. (It sounded as though he were joking, but you and I know that he wasn’t. Or wasn’t quite.) “And by the way, you’ll be old, too, someday.”
Leira sized up Brett and Clay. “You guys want to go after that dragon, don’t you? Nice idea, but—”
“Totally cray cray?” volunteered her sister.
“I was going to say a total disaster in the making,” said Leira. “But, sure, cray cray works, too.”
“They’re trying to build a dragon army; and if they do, trust me, it will be a total disaster,” said Clay, thinking again of the Secrets of the Occulta Draco. He who has power over dragons has power over us all.
“Don’t you need, you know, two dragons to make more dragons?” said Kwan.
“Maybe they’re going to clone it,” said Brett.
“Either way, Clay’s right. It sounds bad,” said Leira.
“And who knows what they’re going to do to the dragon in the meantime!” said Clay. “We have to save Ariella from those guys.”
“Ariella? That’s the dragon’s name?” said Jonah. “Sweet.”
Pablo frowned. “Do you mean like sweet sweet, or like sarcastic sweet, or like Man, your ride is sweet sweet?”
Jonah shrugged. “All of the above?”
“Question,” said Kwan. “How’re you going to save your dragon when people are guarding it with guns? And it’s on a ship with thousands of people that’s going to take off at any moment, if it hasn’t already? Sorry, but my life is worth more to me than some magical fantasy animal that I didn’t even know existed until two hours ago. I mean, sure, I played Dungeons and Dragons a few times, but…”
“Are you finished?” asked Jonah. “Because there’s another possibility you’re not thinking about. What if the dragon escapes on its own?”
“Yeah, so?” said Kwan. “Then it’s all good, right?”
“No. Think about it—the dragon breathes fire, right? If it escapes, it could torch everyone on board.” Jonah closed his eyes, seeing the scene in his mind. “Even if the dragon didn’t do it on purpose, it could burn the whole ship. We’re talking Titanic times ten.”
“Or maybe Titanic meets Godzilla,” Mira reflected morbidly.
Pablo laughed. “I’d like to see that.”
“You’re deranged,” said Leira.
“True. That could all happen—full-on Dragon-maggedon,” said Kwan. “But it could happen if we’re the ones who free the dragon, too. The difference is, if we’re there, we’ll be the first ones to get toasted.”
“You don’t understand,” said Brett. “The dragon won’t hurt anyone if Clay is there. He’s Ariella’s friend.”
“Friend?”
“Not really,” said Clay quickly. “But yeah, kinda.”
Leira looked at him. “You really think you can keep that dragon from burning the ship?”
Clay smiled weakly. It was true that Ariella seemed to like him—in a dragon sort of way—but that didn’t mean the creature would be inclined to listen to him. Unless—
“No problem,” he said. “I just have to do a little reading first—”
Flint had sounded very confident about the power of the Occulta Draco. Clay only hoped Flint was right.
“Oh, don’t worry,” said Kwan sarcastically. “There’s plenty of time for reading. You just sit down with a book while the rest of us swim across the ocean, hijack a giant cruise ship, get shot by armed thugs, and then get eaten by a dragon.”
“So you’re saying you’re in?” Clay asked.
It had only been a short while since Flint asked him the same question.
Kwan sighed. “Yeah, I’m in. I’m always in.”
“Cool.”
“Fantastic—I can’t wait to see all you magic kids in action,” said Brett. “But did I miss something, or have we still not figured out how we’re getting across the ocean? Is there maybe a boat, for instance? Because I’m not swimming again.”
“Who says we have to go by water?” said Leira, staring into the near distance.
The others followed her gaze.
Mr. B’s teepee was still hiding behind the boulder near the library, floating a few inches off the ground. It seemed to be bouncing slightly, as if it had a case of the jitters.
As if it knew it was about to go on a dangerous journey.
FROM Secrets of the Occulta Draco; or, The Memoirs of a Dragon Tamer
Despite all that I have just written, there comes a time when every Dragon Tamer needs to convince a dragon to do something the dragon does not want to do—even if it is simply to fly home rather than burn down a village.
How do you persuade a beast that is so much older, wiser, bigger, and stronger than you are to do something contrary to its will? The answer to that question, young Tamer, lies at the heart of the Occulta Draco, the arcane body of knowledge that I will endeavor to pass on to you now.…
CHAPTER
NINETEEN
THE VERY TIPPY TEEPEE
Probably, it wasn’t necessary for Leira to have snuck up on the teepee. Yes, the teepee bent away from her when she came near, but it didn’t fly away altogether, as it might have. She grabbed one of the poles and held on tight as if the teepee were a wild horse, but it only pulled slightly, seemingly resigned to welcoming the motley crew of passengers.
“Do you think it will hold all of us?” asked Pablo, looking from his friends to the tattered canvas structure floating in front
of them. “I mean, that’s a lot of weight for a teepee to fly with.”
Jonah laughed. “Any weight is a lot of weight for a teepee to fly with.”
“Mira can stay behind,” suggested Leira. “Then we’ll be one less.”
“What? I will not,” said Mira.
“It’s just because I love you and I want you to be safe.”
Mira gritted her teeth, furious. “That’s so not the reason and you know it!”
“Is so.”
“Is not!”
They glared at each other, continuing their fight in silence.
The boys looked knowingly at Clay. It seemed obvious that he was the source of the sisterly disagreement.
“You really gonna let them fight over you like this?” Kwan whispered.
Clay shrugged, horribly embarrassed. The last thing he wanted to do was intervene, but they weren’t going to get anywhere until Leira and Mira made peace.
He forced himself to speak. “It’s okay. We can all hang out as much as you want later,” he said, avoiding their eyes. “You don’t have to fight about it.”
Mira looked at him. Leira looked at him. There was an awkward silence.
Then both sisters started giggling. Then laughing. Then full out-and-out guffawing.
“You thought we were fighting over you?!” said Leira.
“Why would we ever—” said Mira. “Wait, oh no, you didn’t think we had crushes on you, did you?”
Leira stared. “That’s… I can’t even—”
“You did, didn’t you?!”
The truth was evident in Clay’s blushing face.