Carrie Vaughn - Voices of Dragons

The pilot gave her a thin smile, but spoke to her mother. “Ma’am, I’m Captain Will Conner, the pilot who went down a few weeks ago.” He pointed a thumb over his shoulder to the forest. “I met your husband. Sheriff Wyatt’s the one who found me after I hauled ass across the border. I just wanted to say I’m sorry. I’d have liked to have known him better. But I’m mostly here to talk to your daughter, if that’s all right.”

Why had he come? Why didn’t he have the whole military there demanding that she tell everything she knew? He was being too nice; she didn’t trust him.

Mom glanced at Kay, clearly confused. “Why?”

Captain Conner looked apologetic. “May I come in?”

Kay’s mother opened the door a little wider. “I think I can make some coffee—I’m sorry, it’s been a rough few days.”

“I understand. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t important.” He took off his hat as he stepped inside.

While Mom was in the kitchen, Captain Conner and Kay looked at each other.

“It really is you,” he said wonderingly. “I thought I recognized you in the picture from the funeral yesterday. But I wasn’t sure.”

She tried to ask him, pleading with her gaze, Why are you here, what are you doing, why are you finally blowing my cover? In reply, he seemed to be saying, We can do this the easy way or the hard way . Who was he kidding? There was no easy way. There was nothing easy about this. According to him—the way everyone would see it—she was friends with an enemy, an enemy that had killed her father, and she’d kept it secret all this time.

“Why didn’t you say anything earlier? Why didn’t you tell anyone about me?” she asked.

He shrugged and gave a wry look over his shoulder, out the window to the sheriff’s deputies and news vans. “I’m not sure. I almost didn’t believe it when I saw you. Thought I must have been going crazy, and why report a delusion? Then again, maybe I admired your guts. That’s test pilot guts, flying with that thing. Maybe I didn’t want to get you in trouble, one pilot to another.”

“His name is Artegal,” she said. She’d never been able to tell anyone before. He nodded, conceding the point.

He’d kept her secret. Not that it mattered now, when there was probably going to be a war. Dragons burned towns, and then people went after them with swords. Or vice versa. That was the way it had always been.

“The thing is, Miss Wyatt, the situation has changed.”

“So you’re going to tell them now. Now that you know who I am,” she said. She sounded angry, on the verge of tears. She focused on keeping control of herself.

“Right now, you’re the only person who has any real contact with them. I wanted to make sure you understood that, if you hadn’t already figured it out.”

“Why does it even matter? It’s not going to change anything.”

“Don’t be so sure, unless you want this to blow up into an all-out war.”

“No, but—”

“I was under the impression the military wants an all-out war,” Mom said, standing by the kitchen with two mugs of coffee in her hand. “That you crashed your plane across the border on purpose to see what the dragons would do. That people like Branigan wanted to go to war this whole time. ‘Like poking a wasp nest’ is what Jack said. And now you want to talk? And what does Kay have to do with this?”

When he didn’t answer, when he didn’t deny it, Kay grew frightened. Her gut turned cold, which shocked her because she thought she was numb. Mom stood there, the coffee mugs trembling slightly in her hands, a lost, accusing shadow in her eyes.

Conner ducked his gaze and actually looked sheepish. “Ma’am, I know you’ll never believe me, but I wasn’t privy to all the details of that mission. My plane was rigged to malfunction, and I wasn’t told. I didn’t know. I was the plausible deniability. And I can’t say I’m at all happy about being used like that.”

Mom’s voice was quiet, but harsh, filled with bitterness.

“I have a feeling Branigan’s going to get a little more out of his war than he bargained for.”

“I think you’re right.” He turned to Kay. “Planes have nicknames. The B-17 was the Flying Fortress. The P-51 Mustang. The B-26 Marauder. This new one, the F-22. You know what the guys are calling it?”

She shook her head.

“The Dragonslayer,” he said.

If the military had been preparing for a war, what could she do to change anything? Maybe it was inevitable. The two sides had been stalemated for decades. It was just her father’s stupid luck to be the first person to get caught in the middle of it. Kay couldn’t do anything to stop it. Telling someone sooner about her and Artegal wouldn’t have stopped it. Talking to Artegal now wouldn’t bring her father back. She didn’t want to do anything .

“What’s going to happen?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I’m sorry to bother you all. I’ll go,” the pilot said. He pulled a business card from a front jacket pocket and handed it to Kay. “Let me know when you’re ready to talk. I think you can help.”

He let himself out the front door.

“What was he talking about?” Mom said, staring after him. “What does he think you’ve done?”

“Can we—can we sit down?” Kay said.

In a moment, they were both seated at the kitchen table. Mom kept one of the mugs of coffee, gripping it with both hands and breathing in the steam. Kay studied her worriedly, not knowing how to start.

“Are you angry at them?” Kay asked. “For doing it—for starting the fires?” She couldn’t say exactly what, couldn’t mention Dad. Didn’t want to make it real.

“What? The dragons?” Mom thought for a moment, her gaze distant. “I don’t know. Right now I think I’m angry at him. Why’d he have to…why’d he have to be so goddamn brave? He should have known better, he should have known—”

Her voice choked, and she looked away, her mussed hair falling in front of her face. Kay put her other hand over her mother’s, and they sat like that, clutching their hands together. Mom was crying quietly. Kay’s own eyes were stinging, and she gritted her teeth to keep from crying. They were both working so hard to keep from sobbing she wondered what would happen when they couldn’t hold it in anymore.

After some time, seconds or minutes, Mom sat back, let go of Kay, scrubbed her face, and smiled like she was okay—a fake, stiff smile.

And Kay said, “Mom, I have to tell you something.”

The Federal Bureau of Border Enforcement building had been part of the block that burned that night, almost as if the dragons had known their target. The bureau—along with the sheriff’s department, which had also burned—had set up temporary offices in the Silver River Middle School gym. Kay and her mother stood in the open doorway, looking in at chaos. A dozen workers set up temporary office partitions; another group of technicians strung miles of wires between desks and set up telephones and computers. Various people in suits scurried through it all, from one computer to another. Outside, news vans swarming with reporters and cameras were parked. Phones were ringing, people were shouting.

Kay wondered that they had anything at all to do now. People were crossing the border all the time now—at least the military was. She thought the bureau’s job would have been practically over. But people kept calling. The military wouldn’t tell anyone anything, so people called the bureau instead.

Her mother hadn’t been back to work since the fire, just like Kay hadn’t been back to school. In the doorway, Mom put her arm over Kay’s shoulders. Kay didn’t know if the gesture was meant to comfort her or her mother.