Kay braced herself. Tam had her hand on the door.
“We ready?” she said.
Kay nodded, and Tam opened the door. She half expected the back parking lot to be swarming with army cars and news vans. But it wasn’t. No one had found them. No one was looking for Tam’s car.
As they drove, Kay resisted an urge to crouch under the dash again.
Silver River wasn’t a huge town and definitely wasn’t that busy except during the height of tourist season. But along Main Street, there were usually cars and people around, enough to make the place look interesting, inhabited. Now, it seemed like a ghost town. Most of the storefronts had CLOSED signs in the windows. No cars were parked on the curb. The empty Alpine parking lot seemed wrong. Several blocks in the center of town were roped off with yellow caution tape. The street was still barricaded, to keep people from driving that way. Around the corner, Kay could see bands of black soot on a brick wall, the only hint that the group of buildings had burned.
Kay wanted it all to go back to the way it had been. She wanted to see her father, in his uniform and cowboy hat, walking up the street. But nothing she could do would make that happen. She could only try to make things a little better than they were right now.
Finally—Tam was driving extra slowly and carefully— they reached Kay’s neighborhood, then her street. It was like a circus had camped out there. A dozen news vans lined up, blocking driveways, and they all had huge antennae sticking out the tops and people with cameras and microphones milling out front. The neighbors must have loved it.
Kay slipped down to crouch on the floor before Tam told her to. “Park here,” Kay said, whispering, as if the people on the street could hear her. “Find Deputy Kalbach and ask him what to do.”
Tam parked, and as she left the car, she looked over both shoulders and all around, as if searching for signs of an ambush, as if they were in some kind of spy movie. Kay waited, hugging her knees to her chest, for Tam to return. Hoped no one happened to walk by and look in the window at the girl huddled on the floor.
More quickly than she would have expected, Tam returned, climbed back in the driver’s seat, and started the engine. “He said to park the next street over and sneak in the back. He’s going to go tell your mom.”
A few minutes later, she and Tam were running from the next street, past a neighbor’s house and across the back lawn to the door of the garage at Kay’s house. The door was unlocked, and they made it inside safely.
Kay was coming from the garage to the kitchen when her mother met her and engulfed her in a hug. She was almost crying, murmuring meaningless phrases, pressing Kay to her as if she’d believed they’d never see each other again. “I’m okay,” Kay kept saying, but her mother didn’t seem to hear. When Mom finally pulled away, sure enough, she was crying, quiet tears streaming from red eyes.
Maybe this was a mistake, Kay thought. Her mother would never let her leave the house again.
Mom made her and Tam sit down to dinner, and she explained the situation over more lasagna brought by well-wishers.
“Did you find out about Jon?” Kay asked.
Mom nodded. “They let him go. They wanted to charge him with some kind of aiding and abetting, but I managed to pull some strings. Nice to know I still have a few strings.” She looked at Kay with a raised brow. Kay couldn’t even remember back to this morning. “The bureau asked him to stay at home and be available for questioning.” So he was home. She could call him.
Her mother continued, “Branigan issued an order to stand down. He’s not following you anymore; he’s not sending anyone to arrest you, at least until after the press conference. You’ll get a chance to have your say, answer questions. Then I’m afraid it’ll go to the higher ups.”
“Who’s higher up than Branigan?” Kay said.
Mom gave her a look. “All the way to the top. Congress, the president. They can’t ignore this. You should see the polls, Kay. As soon as the pictures of you flying went out, the numbers in favor of negotiating went way up. Just showing people that cooperation is possible completely undermined the military’s argument.”
But guys like Branigan wouldn’t stop fighting, because they were like bullies on the playground. Neither side could back down without losing face.
Her mother and the FBBE director set up the press conference at the temporary headquarters in the morning, and Kay went along with it, unable to argue. And maybe it would work. But she didn’t think so; it wasn’t just a matter of convincing the military to stop bombing. She had to convince the dragons to stop attacking as well, and a press conference wouldn’t do it.
She and Artegal could get their attention. They’d proven that. She needed help, though: She needed someone to leave a note for Artegal.
Her mother was on the phone, still talking about the press conference. Without a word, she and Tam cleaned up after supper and went to the living room to watch news on TV. As soon as she saw the images—of cities burning, landmarks in Washington, D.C., forests in Florida, buildings in Japan, like an old postwar dragon movie come to life—she wasn’t sure she wanted to see the news after all. The footage of her and Artegal soaring over Silver River was just a footnote to the destruction.
She tugged on Tam’s sleeve. “I have to show you something.” She went to her room, and Tam followed.
All afternoon and even now, Tam had been looking at her strangely, as if something were wrong with Kay, like Tam expected her to do something weird or crazy. She looked like the best friend of the drug addict trying to tell her to get help in those public service videos.
This wasn’t going to make things any better.
In her bedroom, Kay pulled the book from her dresser. Sitting by Tam on the bed, she held it open on her lap.
“What’s this?”
Kay said, “I think it’s kind of a history book. Artegal—the dragon—gave it to me.”
“The dragon gave it to you?”
“They have books too. And libraries.”
“Nobody ever said that—why wouldn’t they teach us that in school?”
“I don’t think anyone knows.” And would it change anything if they did? If people knew dragons wrote and read, would people like Branigan still want to destroy them?
Tam turned the pages carefully, using only her fingertips, and after a few moments murmured, “It’s beautiful. But—do you think it was really like this?”
She was looking at a picture showing a dragon blowing fire into a blacksmith’s forge. The blacksmith was making something curved, unidentifiable—a tool, not a weapon, Kay thought. The weapons came later.
“I think it was. I think it must have been. Tam—I need your help.” Kay swallowed. “I want to do something kind of crazy.”
“Crazier than usual?”
Kay turned pages until she reached the one showing the sacrifice.
Tam stared at it for a long time before shaking her head. “You’re joking. This is a joke.”
“They used to do this as a pledge. We talked about it—it was supposed to show what people were willing to give up to have peace. And it’ll be okay because Artegal and I have a plan, but I need your help.”
Tam shook her head. Horror furrowed her brow. “I can’t do this. You can’t ask me to do this! How can you even think like that? How can you even look at this after what they’ve done? You saw what they did to the town!”
“That wasn’t Artegal’s fault.”
“Kay, dragons killed your father.”
“I know.” She hadn’t meant to, but her face screwed up, and the tears fell. She hadn’t meant to admit it at all. Tam was at her side, moving the book away and hugging her. Face pressed against her shoulder, Kay choked back sobs. She didn’t want any of this to be happening. But she was the only person who had any chance of talking to the dragons. She could imagine her father saying that, which meant she had to try. The sacrifice was something, a symbol that the dragons would understand.