The words were warm, dripping liquid.
Our heads turned as one. In the dark, something shifted. Uncoiled. Shards of emerald flickered with movement.
Red pointed her phone down the hall. Shaky light spilled across a pointed tail. A strong, scaled chest. A glimpse of folded wings.
The dragon stretched its neck. Its head reared to the ceiling, and it looked down on us with faint amusement.
“It’s me you’re meant to find.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Rainbow Hazel dashed to the back of her cell. Red scrambled aside. Her flashlight swept away from the dragon, illuminating the ceiling and a nearby cell for a kaleidoscopic second before she trained it back on its target.
On the dragon.
I stood nailed to the floor. Unlike with the kelpie, my brain hadn’t spent a second wondering what I was looking at.
The dragon barely fit in the hallway. Its front legs were thick as tree trunks, ending in flat paws tipped with claws the size of my middle finger. The paws were clumsy on the linoleum, like they couldn’t get a grip, the toes splayed and mashed sideways and one paw bent almost double. Its body was low to the ground. The hall left little room for its wings, which were folded up against the walls and ceiling. I’d thought its skin emerald, with a paler belly, but as I looked at it longer, the scales appeared brown and gray. The skin was shapeless and wrinkled like a Komodo dragon’s, loosely dangling from the side of the paws and its neck, all the way up to the creature’s smooth, hornless head. And the way it smelled—I couldn’t put my finger on it, something cool and musky . . .
“Yes?” the dragon asked. “Are you done?”
We only stared.
A dragon. An actual dragon. And the kelpie, and the other Hazels . . . The rift hadn’t even spat out anything this bizarre the week I’d been born, when I’d gone a much farther distance and been away much longer than today. This couldn’t totally be my fault. Yet all this happening on my birthday couldn’t be a coincidence, either. The odds were literally 1 in 365.
This was connected to me. Everything about the rift was. But somehow, I had the fewest answers.
The dragon ruffled its wings. “At least there’s no screaming.”
“We were supposed to find you?” I asked, recovering my words.
“Yes. I was in a cell across the building.” It moved closer, its elbows pointed outward and its paws inelegantly dragging along the floor until it stood in front of Rainbow Hazel’s cell. Red and I edged back. “Recent events allowed me to break out. Forgive me for not awaiting your rescue. I was very uncomfortable.”
I’d never heard an apology so accusatory.
“The note said you’re supposed to have answers?”
“Oh, yes. Those.” It glanced at me sideways. Its scaly, alien mouth twitched into something resembling a smile. “That’s my favorite part. I suppose all of you should be here to listen to it, though. I hate repeating myself.” It looked back at Rainbow in the cell. She’d been plastered to the back wall, but now slowly approached, her eyes round and flitting up and down and side to side to take in every part of the dragon. It studied her right back, murmuring, “It’ll be interesting dealing with this many of you.”
Rainbow said something inaudible. The dragon lifted a paw, tapped the window, and dragged one claw along the surface of the glass to draw a half circle. I clamped my ears to shut out the screeching of claw on glass.
The bottom half of the circle was made up by the metal window frame. The dragon dragged its nail parallel to it. All it took was a tap after that, and the glass half circle dropped into the cell with a crack.
Rainbow stepped slowly forward.
“If I wanted to eat someone,” the dragon told her, “I would take the two who are out here already.”
Rainbow took a blanket from the ground and placed it on the window frame, where blocky bits of glass still protruded. She stuck her arms through, then her head, her glasses hanging crooked. By the time she’d made it through to her belly button, she eyed us and said, “Help?”
Red and I didn’t get the chance. The dragon exhaled wearily—steam rising from its nose—and bent its head. Rainbow froze. Gently, it nipped the back of her shirt, then lifted her up and out into the hallway.
She stood shakily on her feet. “Thank. You?”
The dragon inclined its head. “You’re welcome.”
Rainbow met the dragon’s eyes, then ours. She adjusted her glasses. “Where am I?” She kept her voice impressively steady.
“West Asherton,” I said. “Just . . . not your West Asherton.”
She stared at the dragon again. “I was starting to suspect that.”
“Dragons actually, um, aren’t normal here, either.”
“Oh.”
The dragon sniffed. “Thankfully. I would pity whatever sibling of mine had to live in this dimension. No offense.”
“Dimension,” Rainbow repeated. “What is happening?”
“Well, we’re not dreaming.” Red’s smile trembled. She fisted a clump of her dress. “I think.”
“I got that far. I’ve been stuck in that cell nearly an hour.”
The dragon sniffed again. “We ought to leave.”
The four of us walked down the hallway, Red and I quietly filling in Rainbow on what little we knew, and vice versa. Like Red, Rainbow didn’t have a rift in her world; she’d been out to dinner for her birthday (not at Franny’s Food) and the next thing she knew, she was on a gray mat in the rift barn.
“I think I saw that rift.” Rainbow was dazed, but not as badly as Red had been. She kept swallowing visibly—sometimes audibly—and looking around with uncertain eyes, but that was the extent of it. “Everything was blurry, at first, but I saw something over me, unclear and flashing . . . and there was a voice through a speaker. I don’t remember what it said. Not long after that, two people came in and helped me up. They wore these big hazmat suits. They took me into another building. They knew my name. They asked what I’d seen. They wouldn’t answer my questions. They just kept saying I was in America, I was with the government, and I was safe. Then they put me in that cell, telling me to rest and they’d come back later to explain everything. They seemed rushed. Next thing I know, the lights go out, people are running past, and eventually you two show up.”
“Neither of you saw other Hazels?” the dragon asked.
Rainbow and Red shook their heads.
The dragon’s claws tapped on the floor as it walked.
I had lived a lifetime of being at the center of our government’s—our world’s—best-kept secret. I dreamed every night about what the rift might mean and where it might lead to. While I’d never considered this particular scenario, I had imagined ones far worse and far stranger.
So why didn’t I feel like I could handle this?
For the first time in sixteen years, the situation had changed. That had to be a good thing. That had to mean answers. It couldn’t mean what every part of me feared it meant: that the rift had been a sixteen-year warning. A sparking wall outlet. An unsteady stair. A crumbling dam. The rift might have been leading up to something all this time, and we’d failed to realize. Now that moment was here, and we were so underprepared we might as well have been blindfolded.