Joshua McCune - Talker 25

“Proceed.” He puts me back in transmit mode.

Painted on the wall behind her are three columns of questions. I recite the words printed above the red column. “Vestia, answer our questions truthfully and we will limit your suffering. Do not, and you will beg us to die.”

“It hurts?”

Her question catches me off guard. “Yes. They will hurt you very much if you do not cooperate.”

“No, that is not what I mean, human. It is strange. I cannot sense your thoughts, but I can . . . smell them. Do not hurt for me, Melissa Callahan. I am tired of this world. The next tomorrow awaits. I go to it with joy.”

I try to think of something happy, something to somehow alter my scent, but every memory that pops up—Mom teaching me the piano, Dad pulling me out of school early to go see a movie, Sam hiding with me in the attic during a thunderstorm—is fleeting and bittersweet.

“Hurry it up, Twenty-Five,” Patch says.

I look down the wall, focus on the questions. “Vestia, how old are you?”

“I do not know.” The same answer Ryla gave. And Blaklik before her.

“Where do you come from?”

Sadness creeps into her voice. “I do not know.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Two hundred three cycles of your moon.” Two moons longer than Ryla and Blaklik.

“How did you get to our world?”

“I do not know.”

“Where did you arrive?”

“I woke here.” She sends me an image of a forest. Ryla and Blaklik came from the mountains.

“What was your role in your clan?”

“Warrior.” The sadness deepens. “Paladin.”

“What is the status of your clan?”

“I do not know.”

“How many dragon holes are there?”

“There were five. They are gone.”

We continue like this. I ask, she answers. Not once does she ask me anything. Nothing about James, nothing about Baby. At first I figure she’s trying to spare her own emotions, but at some point I realize she’s probably trying to spare mine. This gives me no joy, but it does give me courage, which I desperately need as I ask the final question on the list.

“What are the names of your friends?” Out of the corner of my eye, I see Lester grab a hatchet from the wall. The opening salvo. Didn’t work on Ryla or Blaklik, but that’s not the point.

Vestia does not hesitate in her answer. “I have none.”

I brace for her pain, but Patch waggles a finger at the soldier. “Tell your dragon friend that if it wishes to fly into the next tomorrow with the glory of flame, we need to go no further.”

“I do not understand,” she says after I tell her.

“Fight for us, and you will get to die in battle,” Patch says.

As I relay his message, Lester runs the edge of his hatchet along Vestia’s snout.

Her lips peel back in what I believe to be a smile. “Tell the invisible men that they are not worthy of death in battle. They are not even worthy of a funeral by worms. How many of their brethren have passed through my belly?”

An instant after the robotic voice speaks the words from Patch’s tablet, the hatchet is embedded halfway into her snout. I flinch, but she does not. Tim rushes her with his knife.

“Halt, you fools,” Patch orders. “It’s baiting you.” He looks to me. “It’s sure?”

“She’s sure,” I say.

My CENSIR shocks me. “I didn’t ask for your interpretation, Twenty-Five.”

I repeat the offer.

“Tell the invisible men that they reek of cowardice. In the next tomorrow, I will pray that their god grants them courage.”

“Ground it,” Patch says to the A-Bs.

“Gladly.”

They use the serrated portion of their knives and start sawing into her wings. I try to shut my eyes, but Patch shocks me. When I take a step back from my mark on the slab, he shocks me harder.

He doesn’t have me interrogate her any further. We just watch.

It’s slow going. The membrane slices apart with relative ease, but the bone’s tough. Vestia flares here and there, sometimes I hear the slightest grunt, but her smile remains as they treat her like poultry.

They switch out their knives halfway through for fresh ones. Vestia’s wings flicker on and off. By the time they’ve winked out, the various experiments have shut down. The chain saws have gone quiet.

The other teams meander over.

“I got a Benjamin on Tim!” somebody shouts.

“Double on Lester!”

The pace picks up, a race with eager spectators cheering them on. Tim wins. The other A-Bs swarm the slab. They grab hold of Vestia’s attached wing. Twisting, tugging, wrenching, they tear it free, along with a good length of bone.

Lester wipes the blood from his gloves, pulls a camera from his pocket, pushes it at me.

“Rot in hell.”

Evelyn bounds up beside me. “I’ll do it.”

After removing their goggles and masks, the soldiers gather beneath Vestia’s wings, some with hands beneath chins and mile-wide grins, others making peace signs and goofy faces. In the middle, blood pumping down her scales onto the slab, glow fading fast, Vestia continues to smile.

And if she can smile through all this . . .

I pull back my filtration mask, suck in a lungful of frigid air, and loose the loudest roar I’ve got.

A sharp jolt from my CENSIR drops me to my knees, a brilliant explosion of light blinds me, a wave of heat washes over me. At first I think it’s the CENSIR’s doing—maybe a malfunction—but then somebody cries, “I can’t see!” One of the soldiers posing beneath Vestia’s wing, I think.

The light fades. The cold returns.

“A death nova,” Fourteen says, excited.

Soldiers curse at me. Patch delivers a few more shocks.

As I blink back the black spots in my vision, I hear Vestia’s voice in my head. She sounds a universe away. “Just because the wind fights you, it does not mean you are flying the wrong direction. Thank you, Melissa Callahan.”

Her voice plays from the tablet speakers, monotonous, before turning to static. I smile. Vestia has moved on to the next tomorrow.

AfterPatch announces that both the girls’ and boys’ barracks will be on heat reduction through the night, he sends me to the “principal’s” office.

“You’ve had an interesting few weeks here, Twenty-Five,” the colonel says from behind his desk. “You have proven inadequate in the call center and troublesome in the battle room. Your willfulness has cost me the life of one of my pilots and the skills of one of my finest talkers. And now I understand that you’ve caused a disruption in the ER on your very first day.”

“What do you want from me, Colonel?”

“Tell me, if you were in my position, what would you do?”

I don’t answer.

Colonel Hanks cups his chin, rubs his lower lip with his finger. “Major Alderson is convinced that our family would be better off if we rectified your behavior. Maybe he’s right. Families need to get along, otherwise families get hurt.”

“I’m doing the best I can. If that’s not good enough, recondition me. But leave my family out of this.”

“We’re not the ones who put them in this situation. Who knows where their allegiances lie these days? We must be vigilant, Twenty-Five. Surely you understand that?”

“What do you want?”

His eyes narrow. “You’re asking the wrong question, Twenty-Five.”

I stare at him.

“You should be asking, ‘How do I make myself a valuable member of this community?’”

I roll my eyes.

“I have been lenient with you, but do not make the mistake of thinking yourself irreplaceable.”

He turns on a thinscreen, taps at his tablet. I expect another terror video, maybe a doctor holding a syringe at my father’s throat or something. What pops up isn’t much better.