The guy behind the microphone was almost a stereotype: broad shoulders, square jaw, balding, with a hawkish, hooded gaze. He wore a blue air force uniform decked out with insignia. GENERAL MORGAN H. BRANIGAN, the TV caption said. The Pentagon guy who’d arrived a few days ago to make everything better.
For the first five minutes, he read from a written statement explaining the new jet: an experimental fighter called the F-22, designed for maneuverability and speed, exceeding all expectations, and so on. What he didn’t say, but what was clear, was that this was a jet sixty years in the making, a plane specifically designed to be able to hold its own in flight against dragons. His staff presented visuals: drawings, a poster showing simple schematics, a video.
Then, with the might of the air force’s new tool displayed behind him, the general announced, “An aircraft this unique requires special consideration. We would hope to negotiate with our neighbors about the use of portions of this territory—portions they are not using—in order to fully test our new aircraft.”
So, the plane accidentally crossed the border because it needed more room to practice? Kay might have bought it if the guy didn’t look like he wanted a war.
The general stopped talking, and the reporters shouted questions that he didn’t answer. Kay spotted her mother off to the side, arms crossed, looking surly. Her pantsuit was rumpled, and Kay wondered when was the last time anyone had done laundry. The stress must have been just killing her.
Everyone made it home for dinner that night. Kay’s mother was furious. She went through the motions of making food—pasta again—but slammed the fridge door, cupboard doors, and pots on the stove. Kay made a salad—poured it out of the bag and into a bowl, really—and tried to stay out of the way.
“They’re not telling us everything,” her mother said.
“It looks to me like they’re poking a wasp nest to see what comes out,” said Dad, as he sat at the table and skimmed the newspaper.
Mom dropped the bag of pasta on the counter and put her hands on her hips. “That’s the problem. The military doesn’t think they’re going to respond. They don’t think the dragons are actually going to do anything, no matter what the coalition says about it.”
“And what do you think?” Dad said.
“I’m not paid to think, apparently,” Mom said, and slammed an empty jar of sauce into the trash.
When they were all finally sitting around the table with food on their plates, Dad asked Kay how school was, and for once she rambled on about classes and grades, eager to change the subject until her mother calmed down.
Kay knew she was getting only half the story. She knew the dragons were talking about this as well, and she was desperate to talk to Artegal about it, call him up on the cell phone, tell him what was going on here. Although, it occurred to her that someone like General Branigan would call that spying.
She and her father cleaned up while her mom went to take a shower and lie down. She hadn’t gotten much sleep over the last couple of days, and Jack quietly urged her out of the kitchen. She touched Kay’s shoulder as she passed, as if needing the contact for reassurance or for balance.
The only useful thing Kay could do was load the dishwasher, so she did.
Her father was usually laid-back. It was hard to read him. But there was a tension in the room, as if he were worried. Kay wondered what he was thinking and didn’t know how to ask. By way of observation, she said, “She’s really upset.”
He was sealing leftovers into plastic tubs. He didn’t look up but smiled his wry, thin-lipped smile. The small-town sheriff smile, as she thought of it. Like he’d give the richest guy in town—maybe the Hollywood star who owned a ranch twenty miles south—just before writing him a speeding ticket.
“She’s upset because the military is kind of telling her that her job doesn’t matter anymore,” he said. “The military’s snubbing the bureau and the coalition.”
It made sense, because her mom’s whole job was to protect the border, and this jet had crossed it as if it weren’t there, and wanted to keep crossing it.
“She’s just tired,” Dad added, and he patted Kay’s shoulder, too. Rather than comforting her, the gestures made her more worried. This wasn’t normal, and nothing was the way it should be.
The news channels got tired of showing the same footage of the dragons not doing anything, though the image still enthralled Kay. She found herself staring at it, moving closer to the TV to see it better, waiting, hoping the reptilian statues would do something. She wondered what they were thinking, what they felt about the human town they gazed over.
But the channels cut away to do what they called in-depth reporting. Instant history they used to fill time, showing mini documentaries and historical film clips, reviewing the background that had led to this moment. Kay had seen a lot of this in school, in history class. History classes at Silver River High maybe spent a little more time on the subject than schools in other places. It was history that lived within view, every day.
Kay remembered one of the old film clips from a documentary—the first footage of the dragons’ return, after they’d faded into myth hundreds of years before. Black-and-white, scratchy, shaky, the footage hardly seemed real. It showed dragons in Anchorage, Alaska, right after the war. Two of them, as large as airplanes, flew back and forth over the city, mouths open, heads up. The film didn’t have sound, but clearly, they were screaming. No one had known where they came from. Later, people speculated that they must have been hibernating in the far north for hundreds of years. Anchorage was just the first place with any kind of population they arrived at. No one believed it at first. The war had just finished, so when civil air defense spotted large figures swooping in, dark shapes against the sky, they thought of Japanese fighters. But as they came closer, it was clear the figures had long tails that curled and waved, and translucent wings that stretched behind long, slender fingers. The two of them landed on the mucky coast that lined the city, roared in what had to be anger, and spat flames from gaping, fang-filled mouths. They set fire to a section of the city. The weathered wood buildings burned quickly. No one was killed.
Then they flew away before the army could respond. The planes tried to follow them, but the dragons flew faster.
No one believed the reports until more dragons were spotted, flying down the Pacific coast to Vancouver, Seattle, San Francisco, and west to the Soviet Union, Korea, Japan. They were seen in Siberia, Norway, Iceland. Dozens of them.
All the aircraft involved in World War II were still on alert, and they confronted what was seen as a new threat. There were battles, violent skirmishes over London, Tokyo, Seattle. Then after a week, the dragons stopped attacking and fled the aircraft instead. Some so-called experts speculated that the dragons were surprised to find that people could now fly, and that the two sides were now evenly matched.
The so-called experts were often medieval scholars and mythology experts who had studied the stories and lore of dragons, most of it so old it was assumed to be fiction. People had forgotten.
The Silver River Treaty came about when three dragons landed in Washington, D.C., London, and Moscow, asking to negotiate a peace. That was another shock, learning that dragons could speak English, Russian, and even Icelandic. They asked to have their own territories, and to be left alone. They were even willing to take uninhabited regions, far to the north, if it included a portion of the mountains in North America. They loved the mountains.
The human governments appointed delegates. It took a year of negotiations and serious economic incentives to the Soviet Union, Canada, and the United States, who were being asked to cede most of the territories. The treaty was established and was named for the town where the U.S. bureau was formed to enforce the human side of the treaty in the Rockies. A Soviet version of the bureau existed on the Taymyr Peninsula in Siberia. Humans and dragons had been at peace for over sixty years.