Voices of Dragons

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 cha

But the cha

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.

Now the talking-head commentators on TV were saying it could never have lasted more than that.

Newsreel footage and a few recordings of the Silver River negotiations made up most of what modern agencies knew about dragon diplomacy. Only a few of the people who had been at those negotiations were still alive. While people like Kay’s mother had been trained to deal with dragons, none of them had any experience. No one knew how to negotiate with the dragons further, because, after the Silver River Treaty, the monsters retreated and never spoke to anyone again.

Still licking its wounds from World War II, humanity had been unprepared. The creatures were supposed to be myths, legends, something invented by the unenlightened to explain the odd dinosaur fossil. Even after the horrors of the war, of the Holocaust, of atomic weapons, no one had been prepared for the dragons that rose from a long sleep in the earth.

It had been clear that the two sides could a

People asked: Dragons lived long lives, so were any of the ones involved in the original treaty negotiation still alive? Why didn’t they try to talk as they had before? Didn’t they remember? Or did they not care? Did they want to fight as well?

The pundits kept saying that no one knew how to talk to the dragons; most of the people who’d been alive then were now dead. If the dragons didn’t want to talk, they said, the humans had no choice but to defend themselves. But Kay knew they were wrong.

She knew how to talk to at least one of them, if only she dared tell anyone. And if only she could be sure she and Artegal would see each other again.

It was early when the jet, the F-22, flew out again. Kay was in the parking lot at school locking up her Jeep when a roar boomed over the town. She couldn’t see the border or the dragon sentinels from where she was, but she followed the jet’s sound to that direction. She spotted a contrail, but the jet was already gone, headed toward the border.

Everyone outside the school had stopped to stare at the northern sky, knowing what was happening.

Kay heard the first-period warning bell ring, but she didn’t care. She ran to the cafeteria, hoping the librarian still had the TV out and still had it turned to the news. She wanted to yell, What’s happening? Is anything happening? There was already a crowd of teachers and students gathered around the TV at the front of the big room.

Kay peered over a dozen heads to see the screen. The sound was turned up loud enough that she could hear easily. A reporter was talking over video footage of the three dragons across the border, the same scene they’d been watching for days now. The man sounded excited and spoke too quickly.

“…ten minutes ago. It’s presumed to be the F-22 jet fighter described at yesterday’s press conference. It was traveling very fast, and it passed, I don’t know, it must have passed within a mile of the dragons that have been stationed within view of Silver River for several days now. It continued on and is now out of sight. We’re still waiting for some reaction from them. And—what’s happening? I’m trying to talk to someone at the location….”