“Me neither. But my dad said he was going to give your father a piece of his mind after what the dragon did.”
The dragon had not killed them. Of course. Dragons never did anymore. No one quite knew how long dragons lived—the rumors of immortality were surely just that—but a dragon valued its life enough not to break treaties hundreds of years old with a species that had proven especially adept at weapons of mass destruction. The periodic and costly dragon/human wars across the millennia had finally ended in the 1700s. Dragons had moved to their various Wastes around the world at more or less their own request, and a peace had endured long enough for humans to turn their aggression against themselves. World Wars I and II—from which the dragons had completely abstained—were the two most obvious examples, among countless smaller ones. Even just this week, the Soviet Union had captured an American pilot spying on them. Eisenhower had threatened retaliation if the spy wasn’t returned, but retaliation these days meant bombs big enough to vaporize entire cities. Sarah knew kids at school who prayed every night that they’d wake up in the morning. Truly, despite their ability to squash, swallow, or melt any human with barely an effort, dragons were quite far down the list of human worries these days.
This hadn’t made Sarah and her father’s flight home in their truck any less harrowing.
“If you ever pull a stunt like that again!” he had shouted, after the dragon had safely dropped them in their drive.
“You will do what?” the dragon rumbled. “Pay me even less?” It sounded amused and certainly didn’t look at all troubled by Gareth Dewhurst’s ranting.
“I mean it, claw,” her father said. “The authorities around here don’t take kindly to dragons.”
“The authorities cannot fly,” the dragon said, taking off, leaving her father mid-sentence and circling to the first field where it already knew it would work. Sarah watched it curl up at the edge of the trees. She had no way of knowing for sure, but some part of her felt certain that it had fallen promptly to sleep.
“I’m going to give Hisao Inagawa a piece of my mind,” her father had said, stomping into the house.
“People are always giving my father a piece of their mind,” Jason Inagawa said now. “You ever notice that?”
“They did to my mom, too,” Sarah said, feeling the usual quickening in her chest at speaking about her mother. “Especially when she caught Mr. Hainault cheating her at Frome Grocery.”
Jason left a respectful silence after this, as he had since she became motherless like him, a rarity in a time when it had mostly been fathers lost to war. It had brought them closer, but they’d been friends (and sometimes more than friends) since they were little kids who noticed they looked different from everybody else. They were only three weeks apart in age, both had even been born on their farms, though Jason’s first memories were all from “Camp Harmony,” the name given to the internment camp over at the Fairgrounds in Puyallup where all the Japanese families from Washington and Alaska had been forced to move. Even that had only been temporary: not-even-yet-walking Jason Inagawa and his mother and father—both born in Tacoma, both U.S. citizens, both viewed as potential “enemy collaborators” by the government for no other reason than their heritage—had been sent on to a permanent camp in Minidoka, Idaho, where, two years into their three-year forced stay, Jason’s mother had died of pneumonia.
People talking about the Inagawas used the phrase “at least” a lot. At least Hisao had managed to get his own farm back; not everyone had been so lucky. At least no one bothered them too much anymore in this part of the country where there were at least a few other Japanese families around.
Sarah was careful to never say at least around Jason if she could help it. They also never went to the Puyallup Fair, which ran every September, no matter how many times people at school said it was great.
“Did the dragon tell you his name?” Jason asked now.
“I’m not even supposed to tell him mine. I’m not even supposed to call him him.”
Jason kicked a rock across the road as they walked. “The red we hired when I was a kid we called Grumpy. She didn’t seem to mind.”
“Like from Snow White? Ours would definitely mind.”
“You could call him Doc. Or Sneezy. That’s a good name for a dragon.”
“Or Lippy,” Sarah said. “He sure does know how to talk back.”
“They’re supposed to be scholars, blues. Super-smart, but tricky.”
Sarah scanned the horizon. “We should be able to see him now.”
They were coming around the last small hill that blocked the view of Sarah’s family farm—Jason’s was down the road another half-mile. The two fields that needed clearing were farthest off the road, edging onto the base of another hill with a radio tower on top that began the vast forest that reached all the way to Mount Rainier.
“There,” Sarah said.
The dragon rose from the field amid faint columns of white smoke, carefully controlling a stream of flame. He had to, lest he start a forest fire, but dragons could control their greatest weapon with terrifying ease.
“It’s small,” Jason said.
“Blues are smaller,” Sarah said, feeling oddly defensive about her dragon. Though, she supposed, it was in no way her dragon. “He’s still plenty big.”
“And agile . . .” The dragon spun, perhaps a little ostentatiously, before aiming quick white-hot blasts at three of the thicker trees in the field. They were more or less vaporized in equally quick puffs of white smoke.
“He’s showing off,” Sarah said.
“He’s going to attract attention,” Jason said, and the words were almost prophecy, for who should come driving down the road behind them but Deputy Kelby himself.
“Nuts,” Jason muttered under his breath as the police car pulled to a stop next to them.
“Shouldn’t you two be at your chores?” the deputy said through his window, kept open despite the cold so he had a place to spit his chewing tobacco.
“We’re on our way home from school,” Sarah said.
He smiled at her, his teeth smeared with black dregs of tobacco slime. He spat it “accidentally” too close to their feet. “You’re on your way home from school what now?”
“We’re on our way home from school, sir,” Sarah said.
“Heard your daddy hired a claw. A Russki, no less.”
Sarah and Jason turned to see the dragon now tearing up burnt stumps with its back legs and tossing them almost jauntily into a pile. “That’s some good detective work, Deputy,” Jason said.
Kelby’s face hardened fast as a snakebite. “You giving me lip, boy?”
Sarah stepped in, trying to head off trouble. “Nothing against the law in hiring a dragon, and they aren’t involved in governments—”
“Nothing against the law,” said Deputy Kelby, “about marrying outside your own kind.” He spit again. “Don’t mean people gotta like it.” He looked back out to the dragon. “Don’t mean people gotta put up with it.”
“Well, yeah, actually,” Jason said, “it kind of does.”
“Jason,” Sarah hissed.