“Well, how am I supposed to cook anything for him?” Winter demanded angrily. IceWings had frostbreath instead of fire — Moon knew all he could do was freeze the scavenger’s food.
“Someone will help you,” Sunny said. “That’s one of the many great things about making friends from other tribes.”
Ha, Winter thought bitterly.
I would help you, Moon thought, if you’d let me.
“You could give him fruit instead,” Kinkajou suggested. “Here.” She scampered over to the fruit pile and came back with a talonful of berries and a banana.
“Fruit?” Winter said, wrinkling his snout. “Disgusting.”
Kinkajou took a blueberry, which was about the size of one of the scavenger’s paws, and poked Bandit’s nose with it. “Here you go,” she said. “Mmmm, blueberry. Eat that.”
Bandit blinked and rubbed away the blue juice on his face. He glanced up at Winter, then over at Kinkajou, then reached out and took the blueberry in both his paws. He stared at it for a moment, then bit into it.
He’s relieved, Moon realized. And wary, but too hungry to care.
“Ha,” Kinkajou said, giving the scavenger another blueberry. “See? Moon was right. He’s hungry.”
Moon shivered as both Winter and Qibli turned to stare at her. Winter’s eyes were even more suspicious than before.
“How did you know that?” he demanded.
Oh, Mother, Moon thought anxiously. It’s only my first day, and I’m already making mistakes all over the place. How am I supposed to hide what I can do, with this many dragons watching me and so many ways to mess up?
“Just a guess,” she said softly.
“Lucky guess,” said Qibli, and although his tone was friendly, she could hear the chords of wariness echoing in his mind, too. She’s smarter than she wants us to know. Watch out for NightWings, that’s what Thorn said. Never trust them. She looks too pretty to be evil … but what is she hiding?
Moon took a step back, and then another. “I — I have to go.” She whirled and hurried out of the prey center cave, feeling everyone watching as though their eyes were crawling right inside her scales. Unspoken whispers swirled through her head: What’s wrong with her? Weirdest dragon I’ve ever seen. Don’t understand why she didn’t just eat it. Hope she’s not in my group.
And threading through all of it, the pure, icy chill of Winter’s last thought:
I thought they said the NightWings couldn’t read minds after all.
So why does it seem like she read mine?
Moon hid in her cave for the rest of the day. She pretended to be asleep when her clawmates came back, even though Kinkajou hopefully rustled around and dropped several scrolls in an effort to wake her up. The RainWing’s mind was buzzing with how much she wanted to talk about Winter and Qibli and the scavenger, which was exactly what Moon wanted to avoid.
Eventually Kinkajou went off to find someone named Tamarin, Carnelian curled up on her ledge, and Moon fell asleep for real.
The nightmare came immediately this time. Ever since the comet six months ago, she’d had the same awful recurring dream, although the details sometimes changed.
A roaring avalanche crushed dragonets in its path. Lightning split the sky as thunder rolled through the jagged peaks. Dragons screamed in terror and died all around her, their death spasms shuddering through her mind.
That’s Jade Mountain, she realized for the first time, watching the earth shake and crack open, the fang-shaped peaks crumbling into a slide of deadly boulders. Jade Mountain is falling.
She couldn’t move. She couldn’t speak, couldn’t call for help, couldn’t warn the dying dragons. She could only stand and watch as pain pounded through her head and the world was destroyed right under her claws.
This can’t be real.
It’s just a nightmare. It’s just everything I worry about and everything Mother worries about and now probably everything all the dragons around me worry about, all rolled into my head and exploding.
Not a vision.
Not a prophecy.
Not the future.
Please, it can’t be the future.
A SandWing on fire, screaming. Cracks appearing all along Jade Mountain, opening right under the talons of dragons and swallowing them into the ground. A dragon who looked like Kinkajou, but white with fear, shrieking as falling rocks crushed her tail.
Wake up! Moon screamed at herself.
“Talons and teeth, you poor little dragonet.” A huge shape suddenly loomed beside her, as if another mountain had materialized out of the ground. She had a lightning-fast impression of silver and black, and then vast talons closed around her claws and she was suddenly yanked out of the nightmare into darkness.
Cool, still, peaceful darkness. Darkness with no voices in her head, nothing burning or collapsing, no noise or catastrophe or panicking. It was, in fact, the first silence she’d found since arriving at Jade Mountain. She wanted to rest in it forever.
Moon took a deep breath, and then another, and gradually her heart slowed down.
This was still a dream, she knew. Someone — the other telepath — had lifted her out of the nightmare, but she was still asleep. He’d brought her mind somewhere quiet, and she guessed he was waiting nearby.
After a long, long while, there was a voice in the dark, softly. “You are a mess.”
Moon hunched her wings forward and wrapped them around herself. She whispered, “I know.”
“Someone should be punished for letting you get this way,” the voice growled.
“No one knows I’m like this,” she said, shaking her head. She hesitated. “Thank you. For … that, what you …”
“You should be able to do that yourself,” he said. She thought it was a “he”; it was hard to tell sometimes from a dragon’s internal voice. She could sense nothing else about the speaker; when he was silent, it was as though there was nothing there.
It was sort of creepy, a voice with nothing behind it. She couldn’t sense any emotions or thoughts. There was just emptiness, as blank as the dark walls around her. Was this how ordinary dragons felt every day? That everyone else was just a face and noise on a completely opaque backdrop? And all you could know about someone was what they chose to show and tell you?
“Why can’t you do anything?” he asked. “Shield your thoughts? Silence the voices? By all the moons, why has nobody trained you to step outside your visions?”
“That wasn’t a vision,” she said quickly. “It was just a nightmare.”
“Really,” he said, sounding amused. “That’s your opinion?”
She didn’t want to talk about the possible future destruction of Jade Mountain. “Who trained you?” she asked.
“My father,” he said.
“Oh,” said Moon. She’d never met her father, and Secretkeeper didn’t want to talk about him. All she would ever say was that he’d died when the volcano erupted. Moon had only learned his name by reading it in her mother’s mind: Morrowseer. “That sounds nice.”
Now he was definitely amused. “You wouldn’t say so if you’d ever known my father. What volcano?”
“I — I didn’t —” Moon fumbled for an answer. He’d just plucked that information out of her passing thought. “Please don’t do that.”
“Do what? Ah, invade your privacy? Rummage through your memories? That would be intrusive of me, wouldn’t it? But isn’t it what you do to other dragons every moment of the day?”
“Not on purpose!” Moon cried, horrified. “I don’t want to! I wish I could stop myself. I know it’s a curse and it’s terrible hearing what everyone is thinking all the time. And I don’t want to know the future, especially if — especially if it’s — like that.” She turned, spreading one wing into the darkness, and hit solid rock. She spread her claws and reached out, realizing she was surrounded by rock on all sides.
“Don’t wish to be ordinary, Moonwatcher,” said the voice in the dark. “Why would you ever wish for that? Your power
s are a gift, don’t you know that?”
She brushed her talons along the rough crevices of the wall beside her. A gift? “Not according to my mother.”
“How strange,” he mused. “I’ve never met anyone who would call our powers a curse. Other powers, yes, but not ours.”
“She says everyone will hate me if they find out what I can do,” Moon said. “Not that they like me very much to start with.”
“Why does it matter if they hate you?” he asked. “You’re better than they are. You can do amazing things. Although you could do more amazing things if you’d had any training. Right now you’re a little pathetic.”
“Thanks very much,” Moon said, flicking her wings back.
“See?” he said. “Just then you felt angry at me; perhaps you could even hate me a little bit. But you still want to talk to me. Because of my power, you’re drawn to me. The same will be true for you. Once they know what you can do, dragons will need you. You’ll be able to do anything you want.”
What if I want to have friends? Dragons who aren’t scared of me?
“I’ll be your friend,” he said, answering her thought as if she’d spoken aloud. “I’m not even remotely scared of you.” She suspected he was joking, but it was hard to tell. “Besides, dragons who are scared of you can be very useful. Tell me, would you really give up your powers if you could?”
Moon thought about everything her mother had always told her. And then she thought about being able to see inside everyone, and she thought about the time her visions had saved her from a falling tree, and she thought about what it would be like for her mind to really be empty and quiet all the time, the way it was now.
“No,” she admitted finally. “I don’t want to be … like other dragons. I just want them to not mind that I’m different, if that makes sense. I want to stop being scared — of being found out, of what my visions mean, of other dragons, of everything.”
“I think I can help you with that,” he said.
“Who are you?” she asked again.
There was a long pause. “You really don’t know,” he said, as if he finally believed it.
“How would I?” She tried pushing back with her mind, trying to get beyond the blank wall of nothing that went with the voice. But she didn’t know how, and she couldn’t find anything there at all. “Are you another student? Or a teacher? Why haven’t I heard you before?” She touched the rock with one of her talons. “Can we meet in real life? I have so many questions.”
“How can you not know about me?” he asked. “I can’t find any mention of me in your mind anywhere.”
There was a very long, thoughtful silence.
“You must be another NightWing, right?” Moon guessed. “But then why wouldn’t you have spoken to me before, when we were all back in the village? Or are you Stonemover, the dragon Starflight told us about?”
There were only five NightWing students at the school, including her. She tried to think about who else had been sent here. Mindreader? That would be funny, if her name were actually true, but Moon had seen into her mind and didn’t think so. Mightyclaws? Fearless? Or there was one other NightWing dragonet, a couple of years older, who she hadn’t met before because his parents hated Secretkeeper and avoided her. It could be him.
Or Fatespeaker … but Fatespeaker hadn’t had anything like this in her wide-open mind either.
“The NightWings are in the rainforest now,” the voice mused instead of answering her question. “Interesting. I can’t reach that far. But I don’t know any of those dragons, so more time has passed than I realized.”
Moon touched her head, puzzled. Was he not from the tribe? Was he not a NightWing at all? “More time has passed since what?” she asked.
“What year is it, Moonwatcher?”
She breathed a plume of fire into the dark. Nothing but rock around her. No other dragons in sight.
“How long since the Scorching?” he asked. “Surely this is something you’ve learned from one of your beloved scrolls.”
Moon knew he’d just get the answer from her brain anyway. “Five thousand and twelve years,” she answered.
A pause.
“What?” he roared.
And then suddenly, with a wrenching twist in her stomach, Moonwatcher woke up.
She lay there on the moss for a moment, feeling as if she’d been dropped from a great height. And plunged into a vat of noise, because even in the middle of the night, minds were buzzing all around her. Carnelian’s dreams were belligerent and blood-soaked. Kinkajou’s were sunny and colorful, but with a hint of anxiety around the edges that her waking mind normally wouldn’t allow in.
What just happened? Are you still there? She tried reaching out to the mystery voice, but there was no answer.
Along the passage, she could sense four dragonets still awake, each in a different cave, their brains circling nervously. Was one of them the voice who’d been talking to her? It didn’t seem like it; they were all preoccupied with their own troubles, and none of them were thinking about her at all.
Moon recognized one of them as Sora. The MudWing was doing some kind of breathing ritual where she imagined mud pouring over all her fears, burying them, so all Moon could see was ripples. Another dragonet was reading, but couldn’t concentrate on the words; he kept thinking, Everyone will know I don’t belong here.
Of the sleepers, several of their dreams echoed with images from the war, a few of them nearly as bad as Moon’s nightmare.
She stretched her mind until she found Winter and Qibli’s cave by the little spark the scavenger gave off, even in his sleep. The IceWing was deep in a sleep without dreams, but Qibli’s dreams were worried in an odd way and seemed to involve other SandWings throwing snakes at him.
All right, so if it wasn’t one of the students in the sleeping caves, it had to be one of the older dragons. Maybe it was time to try to find Stonemover. If she could track down his cave on her own, she could ask if he was the voice in her head.
She stepped over to the doorway as quietly as she could, but her tail bumped one of the scroll racks and it rattled across the floor. Kinkajou made a sleepy noise of protest. In her dream, Carnelian growled and whirled around to face a new attacker.
Moon held her breath until they were still, and then she picked up her map of the academy, whisked into the hallway, and turned to head deeper into the mountain. Her guess was that Stonemover lived on the far side, probably as far from the school as he could get so he wouldn’t be disturbed. She chose the quietest, darkest paths, breathing out small plumes of flame to study the map as she went. Stonemover’s cave wasn’t marked, but there were notes on the map about areas to avoid: “passage too narrow for dragons down this way” or “swarms of bats here.”
As the voices from the school grew quieter, she listened intently for anything else — a different mind, or the sound of dragon claws. She knew the other mind reader could shield his thoughts from her, but perhaps if he was distracted, or she caught him unguarded, or if she managed to get closer to him … well, maybe something would filter through.
And then, in a dark tunnel with a low roof, to her surprise, she did hear someone.
Lost another scale today, I think. And she didn’t come. But then, why would she?
That was followed by a long sound, like a mental sigh — and then she heard the echo of a real sigh reverberate off the walls around her. It came from a branch of the tunnel off to her right. She ducked her head and climbed up the passageway.
This mind’s thoughts were very, very slow, as if they were boulders being pushed up a hill. Hungry again. Nothing I can do about that.
Moon hesitated. He didn’t sound like the dragon she’d been talking to, but she’d come this far.
She heard scales scraping against stone. Cautiously she crept around the next corner … and there he was.
A huge dragon lay stretched out against the cave wall with his eyes half closed. A torch flickered from a post near his head. His scale
s were shades of gray and black, and he looked weighted down, almost more like a statue than a real dragon.
But real black eyes opened to stare at her as she came in.
“Hello,” she whispered.
“Hrmmm,” he said. There was no flash of recognition in his eyes. Surely if this were the dragon in her head, he’d know who she was.
“Are you — are you Stonemover?” she asked.
He exhaled slowly. Without lifting his head, he answered, “Unfortunately, yes.”
“I’m Moonwatcher,” she said.
“My first visitor from the academy,” he rasped. “Apart from Sunny, of course. She said I might have other dragons to talk to from time to time. But there has been no one so far. Not even Sunny today.”
“It’s only the first day,” Moon explained. “I’m sure someone else will be along soon. And it was probably a really busy day for Sunny.”
“Hrmmmmm,” he said again.
There was a long pause, and Moon couldn’t help thinking that for a dragon who supposedly longed for company, he certainly had very little to say. He didn’t even have very much to think. His mind was slowly revolving back around to how hungry he was.
She couldn’t ask him if he’d been talking to her in her head. If it wasn’t him — and she was fairly sure now that it wasn’t — then she’d be giving herself away. But maybe she could try a more roundabout approach.
“You must know a lot about NightWings,” she said.
“Because I’m so old?” he creaked. “I suppose. Compared to you, I certainly am.”
“Oh — no, I just — I mean, I was wondering if there were any mind readers in your generation,” Moon said.
He let out a kind of grunt that might have been a chuckle. “Ah, no. No, the mind readers are all gone, for many, many moons now. There are always young dragons who hope the legendary gifts will reappear. But we are far better off without them. That kind of power … will ruin your life.”
Moon shivered. That was the same thing her mother had always said. But this dragon was different. He knew what he was talking about, because now she could see his own curse in his mind.