“Okay, Frogs, everything on this side of the line is yours,” Flint declared, the flames turning his blue eyes gold. “Worms, the other side is yours.” The Frogs were the younger girls, who resided in the cabin known as the Pond. The Worms were the younger boys, who resided in Earth Cabin—Clay’s cabin. “Winners get to eat the losers’ s’mores tonight. And don’t forget—camp rules, everybody!”
“Yeah, except for you, right?” Clay scoffed.
Flint glared at him. “What did you say, Worm?”
Clay hid his smile. “Nothing!”
Camp rules meant No Magic.
The kids at Earth Ranch were forbidden from doing magic without adult supervision, but for some reason the rule never seemed to apply to Flint, despite his being only fifteen and not yet a full counselor. Certainly, it hadn’t stopped him from making Clay’s bunk smoke as if it were on fire when he passed by the previous night. Nor had it stopped him from making Clay’s toothbrush start to melt that morning when he saw Clay brushing his teeth.
Someday, Clay had vowed, he would get Flint back.
Just… maybe not today.
“You have one minute to huddle, and then the game begins,” Flint declared as he started walking down the beach. “I’ll be back in ten to see the bloodbath!”
He started walking down the beach, alone.
The younger campers exchanged knowing glances. Flint had been disappearing a lot lately. The rumor was that he’d been practicing a new type of magic in secret. Nobody knew what this type of magic was, but it was undoubtedly difficult—and dangerous.
I don’t know whether you’ve ever played Capture the Flag, but like most so-called recreational activities, it can quickly become very competitive.* In their pregame huddle, Clay’s cabinmates, the Worms, strategized like they were plotting the crime of the century. No surprise, perhaps, given that they were criminals—or, rather, “struggling youth,” as Earth Ranch called them in its glossy brochure.** Also, of course, they were magicians-in-training, but at Earth Ranch the campers tended to confuse crime with magic. Both things, after all, involved breaking laws—the one the laws of the land, the other the laws of nature.
Kwan, a Worm with a big, slick, swooping hairdo and a big, slick, swooping ego to match, elected himself team captain. He pointed toward a boy with a gold-tipped Afro and started giving orders. “Jonah, you’re on recon. Scope out the opposition. When the target is vulnerable, give a sign.”
Jonah nodded almost imperceptibly. Among his peers he was known to have a special knack for seeing things that others couldn’t, whether in the future or in the dark. (It was an enviable skill because, unlike some other forms of magic, it could be practiced without attracting a counselor’s attention.)
Kwan turned to a second colorfully coiffed boy—this one with a green Mohawk. “Pablo, mi amigo, your job is to create a diversion.”
Pablo furrowed his brow, considering. “Explosives?”
“Tempting,” admitted Kwan. “But I’m thinking robotics. We could use another player on the team, even if it’s not human.”
“An automaton? But Flint said camp rules…” Pablo protested halfheartedly, even though his friends could see the gleam in his eye.
“Do you see any counselors?” said Kwan.
Pablo grinned. “How much time do I have?”
“About three minutes. Plenty for a man of your genius.”
Kwan sounded sarcastic, but it was true: Pablo had a fantastic ability to make robotic creatures—automatons—from unlikely materials, in record time. Indeed, Pablo was already picking up stray bamboo sticks and strings of seaweed and manipulating them as if they were steel rods and copper wires.
“So here’s the plan, my brother Worms,” Kwan continued. “While Pablo’s robo-man is distracting the enemy, I will secure the target. Then I will make a big show of passing off the flag to Pablo.…”
Seemingly out of nowhere, a playing card appeared in Kwan’s hand. He tossed it to Pablo, but by the time Pablo grabbed for it, the card had vanished into the air.
“But really, secretly, I will pass it off to Jonah, who will take it home and win those sweet, sweet s’mores for us.…”
Jonah looked down. The card was in his hand. A joker. He shook his head. “Show-off.”
The others laughed.
Kwan was a master of legerdemain and an expert swindler; his cabinmates knew better than to engage him in a serious game of poker or even a friendly game of gin rummy.* If anybody could steal a flag and then pass it off to someone else a second later, Kwan could.
“Anything I can do?” asked Clay, as casually as he could. (He didn’t want to come off like the last kid picked in a game of kickball, even if he felt a little bit that way.) “I know I’ve never robbed a bank like the rest of you reprobates—but I think I know how to play Capture the Flag.”
“What are you talking about, dude? You’re our MVP!” Kwan patted Clay on the head. “You protect our flag, and, uh, tag any girl who crosses onto our side and take her to jail, which is, um, that boulder over there.” Kwan, who fancied himself a ladies’ man, wiggled his eyebrows mischievously. “See, you have the best job in the game—guarding the girls!”
Clay laughed and shook his head. “You’re a Neanderthal.
“So where’s our flag, anyway?” he asked.
“Here—” Kwan pulled a long white tube sock off his foot and held it up. The bottom was dirty and moist, and the surrounding air suddenly swirled with eau de toe.
Clay recoiled. “Ugh! Dude, that’s gross.”
“Exactly,” said Kwan, laughing. “It’s like a protection spell—nobody will want to touch it!” He wagged the sock in front of Clay’s face, and Clay dove away.
They all did.
In a matter of minutes, the game had begun and Clay was manning his post. Next to him, Kwan’s sock hung limply from a stick, an uninspiring—and very stinky—flag, but Clay dutifully guarded it nonetheless.
It was eerily silent. Not having Jonah’s extraordinary talent for seeing in the dark—or in this case, the vog—Clay couldn’t see what the others were doing, but as far as he could tell, events were proceeding according to plan. Maybe the Worms would win without his coming into contact with another player.
Or did silence mean bad news rather than good?
Whenever Clay felt antsy, his knee jiggled up and down. His knee was already jiggling uncontrollably when he heard muffled screams and saw a strange, hairy silhouette moving jerkily in the vog. It looked like a scarecrow that was losing its stuffing, and it lurched in one direction and then another, as if it were hunting for wayward crows or maybe for a human brain to steal as its own.
Clay tensed as the creature staggered toward him.
What was it?
Just as Clay was considering running for his life, one of the thing’s arms fell off. It took another step forward, then collapsed in a heap.
Oh! So that’s what it was.
Clay exhaled, relieved and impressed. Pablo was a true wizard when it came to automatons. If his sticks-and-seaweed robo-man could spook Clay, who was expecting it, it must have been terrifying to the unsuspecting Frogs—a successful diversion. With any luck, Jonah would soon be crossing back to their side with the Frogs’ flag in hand.
“Clay! Over here!” a familiar voice called in singsong, from somewhere to his right. “Catch me if you can!”
Leira.
It figured that the Frogs would send her for the boys’ flag. If anybody was a better thief than Kwan, it was Leira, master pickpocket and perennial prankster. She was the person Clay liked best at camp, but also the person who irritated him the most. He couldn’t count how many times she had stolen his wallet just for a laugh.
Clay hesitated. It would be very satisfying to take her out of the game and throw her into jail. Should he look for her? Or should he be cautious and keep guarding the flag?
He leaped into the vog, toward where he had heard Leira’s voice come from. “Got you!”
&n
bsp; As soon as he grabbed her sleeve, he knew he’d fallen into a trap; it had been far too easy to catch her.
In the end, it wasn’t even Leira whom he’d caught. It was her sister, Mira, laughing gleefully.
“No, I got you!” she said in her natural voice, which was a little higher-pitched and a lot snottier than her sister’s. “Hope you’re not too disappointed.”
Mira was an actress and was well known at camp for her uncannily accurate impersonations of the other campers. She could fool you into thinking she was almost anyone. Normally, Leira hated it when Mira imitated her; she must have made an exception for the sake of the game.
“Don’t tell me,” said Clay, the horrible truth sinking in. “If you’re here, that means Leira is—”
“Crossing back onto our side with your flag just about now?” Mira gloated. “Uh-huh.”
Sure enough, they heard her sister hooting in victory. “And—BOOM!—she takes it over the line!” Leira shouted. “Watch and learn, boys!”
A second later, she cried out, laughing, “Oh, man, this sock stinks!”
The girls had won.
“Frogs rule! Worms stink!” they chanted. “We get dessert! The Worms eat dirt!”
“C’mon, time to face your humiliation,” said Mira.
“Go ahead,” said Clay. “I’ll be there in a second.”
Clay sat down on the rock that had been designated the Worms’ jail, unable to believe he’d fallen for such a simple trick. Not only could he not build an automaton or see in the dark or start a fire with a snap or do any of the other extraordinary things that the other kids at camp could do, he couldn’t even keep his eye on a smelly sock.
His cabinmates would never let him live this down.
Not for the first time, Clay wondered why his older brother, Max-Ernest, had gone to so much trouble to get him into this camp.* His brother seemed to have faith that Clay would make a good magician, just because they used to do magic shows together when Clay was little. But at Earth Ranch, whatever being a magician was, it wasn’t about coin tricks or pulling bunnies out of hats.
Unfortunately, Clay had no way to ask Max-Ernest about magicians or bunnies or anything else. Clay didn’t know where his brother was—only that he was off somewhere fighting to protect some magical “Other Side” that Clay couldn’t see and barely understood. According to Max-Ernest, Clay would soon very likely become caught up in this mysterious battle himself.
Clay only hoped he could be more useful in a battle for the fate of the magical universe than in a game of Capture the Flag.
When Clay stood up, he felt a little dizzy, but he ignored it. The vog had gotten thicker, that was all.
He started walking in the direction Mira had gone (or the direction he thought she had gone), only to realize he was walking into the ocean. Feet wet, he backtracked, but he became confused again after taking a few soggy steps onto dry sand.
The vog was now so dense that he was having trouble breathing, and he could barely see his own hands. He dropped to the sand and crawled for a moment because the air was a little better below knee level.
Soon he found himself at the base of Mount Forge, maneuvering between boulders. There wasn’t a trail exactly, but he discovered that if he walked very slowly, he was able to avoid falling. He would worry about the others later, he decided; he just wanted to get out of the vog.
After hiking for almost thirty minutes—and traveling a distance that would have normally taken five minutes—Clay hoisted himself up a final boulder and stood on level ground. Wisps of steam rose from a hole in the rocks a few feet away, but Clay took little notice; there were volcanic steam vents all over the island. Otherwise, the air was significantly clearer up here than it had been below.
It was as good a place as any to wait out the vog.
In his backpack, alongside the notebook in which he practiced his graffiti art, he had a water bottle, trail mix, and a flashlight. He could easily survive here for a few hours, or even a day or two if need be. The counselors drilled it into the campers to keep emergency supplies with them at all times. You never knew what was going to happen on Price Island; it was best to be prepared.*
Clay was debating his next move when he saw somebody walk out of a narrow crevice in the mountainside.
Instinctively, Clay ducked behind a boulder and hid, his body tense. As far as he knew, there were no inhabitants on the island outside of Earth Ranch, and yet it seemed unlikely that any of the other campers would have made it up the mountain in the vog.
After catching his breath, Clay peeked out:
It was Flint!
What was he doing here?
The older boy looked around, as if to make sure he wasn’t being observed, and then headed in Clay’s direction.
Clay hugged his side of the boulder, waiting until he was sure Flint had passed. He was suddenly very curious to see what was behind that crevice.
Not quite as narrow as it had looked from a distance, the crevice was actually the entrance to a large cave—large enough to hold at least four or five cars.
The light was dim inside, and at first Clay couldn’t see anything but rock, but when he turned on his flashlight, he realized that the cave walls were covered with paintings. They were obviously very old—ancient, even—and resembled primitive cave paintings he’d seen in books.
A few of the paintings showed men hunting with spears or bows and arrows, and one showed a dozen men rowing a long boat of some kind. But the most striking paintings depicted—both singly and in groups—dark winged creatures with long red tongues. Some of these creatures carried deer or other animals in their claws. Others circled a smoking volcano that bore a more-than-passing resemblance to Mount Forge.
It was difficult to tell what, specifically, the flying beasts were meant to represent, but there was a distinct reptilian quality to their sharp claws and curling tails. Could they be dinosaurs? Clay wondered. What were those flying dinosaurs called? When he was ten years old, he would have known the answer.
Nowadays, his interests ran to other things, like skateboards and graffiti art. Looking at the cave paintings, he had an impulse to draw something on the cave walls himself, though of course he resisted. (I hope it goes without saying that he would never deface the natural environment!) He remembered his mother once comparing the cave paintings at Lascaux to graffiti.* At the time, he had dismissed the idea as silly—just his mother’s way of trying to make Clay’s enthusiasms fit into her own. Now he wasn’t so sure. Maybe there was a real basis for the comparison.
Telling stories on a wall. That’s what cave painting was. That’s what graffiti was.
Clay pointed his flashlight beam on one painting after another, with the idea that he might copy one or two in his notebook. But as he delved deeper into the cave, he noticed that he’d become—suddenly—very, very sleepy.
Trying to fight this unexpected drowsiness, he took a few steps toward the cave entrance—then collapsed onto the stone floor as if he’d been shot with a tranquilizer gun. His flashlight beam landed on the biggest of the mysterious winged creatures, which appeared to be swooping down on one of the hunters. Struggling to keep his eyes open, Clay noticed that the creature’s tongue was not only long and red but also oddly shaped; instead of coming to a point at the end, or even forking like a snake’s, the tongue spread wider as it got farther from the creature’s mouth—and closer to the hunter’s head.
Wait, that’s not a tongue at all, Clay thought, falling asleep.
That’s fire.
Another cave, deeper underground. It is dark, but the rock walls are encrusted with crystals. They reflect the fiery glow of lava.
Clay is leaning over the edge of a lava pit. It is like a furnace. The heat sears his face.
As he watches, patches of lava harden into black crust, only to be swallowed by ripples of red-hot molten rock. Sulfurous gases bubble up like farts in some monstrous bathtub, filling the cave with their stench. And a stray leaf floats up and
down in the heat. It catches fire just before touching the lava’s surface.
Suddenly, Clay is aware of a new feeling in his stomach. It bubbles inside him like the sulfur—a deep, powerful urge to dive in.
To swim in the lava.
With horror, he realizes that he has leaned in too far. He struggles to stay upright. Too late!
Terrified, he tumbles into the pit, and…
It is as if he is plunging into a spring. Hot, yes—but wonderfully hot. He sinks deeper and deeper, luxuriating in the thick, gurgling, life-giving lava. He has never felt so good. Nothing burns him. It couldn’t. It is inside him, as if he has somehow become the fire itself.
He wants to stay under forever.
Then, just as he thinks he must be nearing the center of the earth, he flips himself around. With strength he didn’t know he possessed, he pushes himself upward. Faster and faster he rises until he erupts from the crater of the volcano, riding a geyser of molten rock.
Still he does not stop.
Smoke mushrooming behind him, he rockets into the starry night sky.
Soon the volcano is just a dot on that spinning blue-and-green egg called Planet Earth.
With a fiery roar, he spreads his wings and flies.
CHAPTER
THREE
BEACHED
The first thing Clay noticed when he awoke was the smell. It was worse than Kwan’s socks. Worse even than his school bus on the way home from burrito day in the cafeteria.
It was a rotten-egg sort of smell, and it was coming from somewhere deep in the bowels of the mountain. Where had he smelled it before? In his dream. That was it. It all came back in a flash. Such an intense dream. Almost unconsciously, he rolled his shoulders as if they were wings. If only he could really fly like that.
Holding his nose, he stood up and took a last look around at the cave paintings.
Dragons.
Of course, they were dragons. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen it right away.