Voices of Dragons

The hospital wasn’t in town, but a few miles out on the highway. It wasn’t big, just an emergency room and a few clinics to serve the outlying areas. For anything serious, people went to Great Falls.

She tried to reassure herself that if this were serious, they’d have airlifted him to Great Falls. So he had to be okay.

With the police siren heralding them, Kalbach brought them right to the emergency room doors. Kay rushed inside before the deputy had climbed out of the car.

The place was crowded. There’d obviously been more people injured than her father. A couple of men wearing blackened firefighter’s coats lay on beds sucking oxygen through masks. Walking wounded were being led to backrooms by orderlies. A reporter with a cameraman was being herded out none too politely. Panicked, Kay looked around for a familiar figure on a bed, for her mother standing watch, and couldn’t find them.

The deputy pushed past her and tapped a white-jacketed nurse on the shoulder. “Sheriff Wyatt, where is he?”

The woman pointed to a corridor. Kay rushed past them both.

Two steps into the hallway, she stopped, froze. Her mother sat in a plastic chair, part of a row of them lining the wall. Her elbows rested on her knees; her hands covered her face.

A doctor, a woman in a white coat, closed the door of a room a few paces down. She kneeled by Kay’s mother, touched her shoulder, and said a few words. Mom didn’t respond. When the doctor stood to return to the emergency room, she spotted Kay, and her lips pressed in a line.

Kay wanted the world to stop right there, she wanted to run away, and she wanted not to have to live the next five minutes of her life. The universe could end and she wouldn’t care, as long as it prevented the next five minutes.

The doctor approached her. “Can I help you?”

“I’m Kay Wyatt. My dad—”

The doctor looked back at Mom, seemed to debate with herself. Then she lowered her head. Her smile was probably meant to be comforting, sympathetic. But it was just sad.

“I’m very sorry. We did everything we could.”

Just make everything stop, Kay begged. She was still asleep. Her brain couldn’t hear the words.

The doctor touched her arm, then walked away. Kay managed to sit next to her mother, though her limbs tingled when she moved. Like her body wasn’t hers, or she was leaving it. Still, her mother didn’t react.

Kay eyed the door that the doctor had closed. A door to a room where a body lay on a bed. She said, “Can I see him?”

Her mother looked up at that. Her face was red; her eyes were red, swollen. Her hair was mussed. A streak of black soot smudged her cheek, and she smelled like smoke. She didn’t look at all like Mom. She only stared at Kay, expressionless.

Kay started again, pointing at the door. “Can I—”

“Oh, baby, you don’t want to see him, not like that, you don’t—” She broke down, folding against Kay like her bones had disappeared, pressing her face to her shoulder. Numb, startled, Kay held her while she cried wrenching sobs.

If Kay had been about to cry herself, she was now shocked to stillness.

After a long while, her mother stilled, but Kay suspected it was exhaustion and lack of oxygen rather than spent grief that made her stop crying. She remained curled up in Kay’s arms like a child, sniffing and clinging desperately to Kay’s shirt. Don’t go, the gesture said.

At one point, she noticed Deputy Kalbach looking at them. Then he bowed his head and walked away.

Kay didn’t know how long the two of them stayed frozen in that tableau. She was aware of Kalbach blocking the end of the corridor and of a reporter shouting at him. Then the doctor, the same who had told her about Dad, sat by her and whispered close to her ear—so her mother wouldn’t hear.

“Kay, I know this is very difficult. But can you take her home? We’re going to have to move him soon.” She nodded to Mom. Translation: Get her out of here before they pull the body out of the room.

Kay almost shook her head. No, of course she couldn’t take Mom home. Mom was the grown-up, Kay was the kid—she wasn’t expected to do anything. But Mom wasn’t doing anything right now. Her eyes weren’t even seeing.

So Kay nodded, taking her mother’s arm. “Mom, we have to go. Come on.”

Mom had aged years in moments. She walked hunched and wouldn’t let go of Kay, who kept her own mind numb and focused on the task at hand.

With one arm around Mom’s shoulder, she approached Deputy Kalbach and touched his shoulder. “Can you take us home?”

The young deputy nodded quickly.

Then came the gauntlet.

More reporters had arrived. More injured had been brought in, and their families and colleagues filled the emergency room. Word spread. It couldn’t help but spread in a town like this when something terrible happened. People would have to take only one look at them, Kay with her face a rock and Mom huddled in her arms, to guess what had happened. She recognized faces, heard her mother’s name called out, but she didn’t react, didn’t respond. A flash went off, someone taking a picture. Deputy Kalbach was their shield. Kay felt his arm across her back, pulling them both into the sphere of his protection. His other arm stretched out before them, cutting across her vision. It deflected all comers. Reporters shouted at her. She didn’t hear a word of what they said. Only Kalbach’s voice saying, “Move aside. Please, get out of the way. Clear the way.”

The journey to the door outside was chaos. A blur. Kay kept her gaze forward and absorbed none of it.

She sat with her mother in the back of the patrol car. Mom still leaned on her, still seeming unable to hold herself up.

Kalbach kept looking at them in the rearview mirror. He started, “Kay, I—”

“Don’t say anything,” she said, closing her eyes. If he said anything, she’d break, and she couldn’t break. She had to take Mom home.

The air still smelled like smoke, and the sky over Silver River still glowed orange, fires still burning. She remembered the news report: The fire could have swallowed the town in seconds.

She asked the deputy, “Do they know how the fire started?”

Her mother stirred in her arms, straightening, turning her tear-and-soot-streaked face to the window.

“It was them,” Mom said, nodding in the direction of the border.

15

The dragons circled. The next morning, three of them flew just over the river, banking sharply when it looked like they might pass into human territory. The sight of them made people cringe, as if they wanted nothing more than to run and hide. Lock themselves behind castle walls. Like mice in view of soaring hawks.

Kay watched the news on TV. Several people, mostly firefighters, had been injured in the blaze that destroyed two of the four buildings in the administration complex. Only one was killed. Sheriff Jack Wyatt’s face appeared in newspapers and on TV screens all over the world, and the eulogies poured forth from people who never even knew him. It was because he was a cop. They could use words like hero without knowing anything about him.

The president went on TV to declare the attack an act of aggression. Several of the more shrill pundits called it war. These were the same ones who questioned why humanity had ever agreed to the Silver River Treaty in the first place, and argued that an international coalition should launch an assault to reclaim the vast territories so blithely handed over all those years ago. We could have wiped the dragons out then, they said, and we can do it now. The time of the dragons is over, was over mille

Kay watched the dragons from the living room window. She felt like her brain hadn’t turned back on yet. She couldn’t think of Artegal at all. She kept wondering what happened next, and her mind kept going blank.