Prairie Fire (15 page)

“Chickens,” I said, hoping that would turn him off. Apparently it was the wrong thing to say, because he held a hand dramatically against his heart and looked at me with a most ridiculous expression on his face.

“Then I shall rely on you to protect me,” he said. I was definitely going to have to e-mail Sadie.

We were all quieter than usual on the way back to the barracks. Owen was limping by then, and that made us all think about our own mortality. Courtney's face was especially stony, and I wondered if her lessons that morning had been unpleasant.

“Are you all right?” I asked, falling in beside her while Owen lagged. I kept my voice low in case she didn't feel like sharing with the entire squad.

“I'm fine,” she said. “I just don't like surprises.”

“Did something happen this morning?” I said. Usually we filled each other in on what we were learning separately as a matter of course. I have no idea if the people on Nick and Kaori's squads did the same thing, but we had decided that it was better for us if the whole squad knew what everyone else was up to.

“No, it happened at dinner,” Courtney said shortly.

Oh God, if this was about boys I was toast. My abject terror must have shown on my face, because Courtney took pity on me.

“The general?” she said. “The one who argued with Porter at dinner?”

“Oh, you know him?” I said, more relieved than I have ever been in my entire life.

Courtney snorted. I retracted some of my relief.

“You could say that,” she said. “That is General Henry Octavian Speed.”

I choked. There couldn't possibly be that many Speeds in the world. Courtney looked at me grimly and confirmed, “My father.”

“Your father is a dragon slayer?” I said, hoping my voice was more “politely interested” and not “freaked the heck out.”

“Yes, indeed,” she said. “And his father, and his father's father, and all the freaking way back to the goddamn Magna Carta.”

“Oh,” I said. Because there wasn't much else I could contribute.

“Yeah, it's awesome,” Courtney said. “Who could have possibly dreamed that so many boys would be born in a row? And then me with two younger sisters?”

“Your dad doesn't think girls can be dragon slayers?” I asked, aghast. That was practically sacrilege.

“Oh, no,” she said. “He wanted nothing more than for me to grow up and follow him right off the cliff. Provided that we don't get married, of course. Or at least don't change our name when we have kids so that the Speed line will continue.”

We reached the barracks, and Courtney pulled me past the beds and into the bathroom for some privacy. No one followed us.

“I won't tell anyone,” I told her.

“Oh, please,” she said. “They'll all know as soon as he introduces himself tomorrow. Hell, Porter's known the whole time we've been—” she hesitated, but I finished the thought without her. “Here,” she concluded.

I did some quick math, counting days, and realized I'd just won a little over two hundred dollars from the betting pool.

“So he's a hard-ass?” I asked, trying to keep my voice light.

“You could say that,” she replied. “He's merciless on the dragon slayers, and he really, really doesn't like the idea of so much friendliness between the dragon slayers and their squads. He says it cuts in on their professionalism.”

“Well, that's just stupid,” I said without thinking.

“Choir,” said Courtney, pointing to herself, then to me, “preaching to it.”

“So what do we do?” I asked.

“What all good little soldiers do,” Courtney said. It was easy to forget, sometimes, that that was what I was now. A soldier. If I was anywhere else in the world, I might be a killer by now too. “We follow orders.”

There was a quiet knock on the door.

“I'm sorry, Courtney,” said Annie. “I really need to pee.”

“We've got until breakfast,” I said as we opened the door. “I know it's not much, but at least it's something.”

But we didn't have that long at all, it turned out, because three hours before dawn a new siren sounded. The Dragon Call that usually played over the intercom was a tinny, somewhat flat rendition of the call I'd played for Nick. This one was more like a foghorn, a single dark note, blasted against other ships as a warning to get out of the way and stay there.

Laura was on her feet before I was even awake.

“Everyone up,
now
,” she shouted. This was the strength of the Oil Watch, I thought, as I hastened to obey. We were a team. We could take orders from anyone, because we knew what everyone else was good at. If it was Laura, then it was local. And probably fire.

“Annie, help Siobhan. This is no time for pride.” That's when I knew it was really bad. Usually they were much better about letting me keep my dignity. “Kaori, you're going to have to translate fast, so stay close to me.”

I struggled into what clothes I could while Annie dressed next to me, and then she turned and began to help me. Kaori was speaking in rapid Japanese to her crew, and Laura was helping Courtney gather her sapper kit, which she'd left spread out on the extra cot in a small show of defiance the night before.

“Sorry,” Annie whispered as she tucked my shirt into my trousers and fastened the button and belt buckle. “I'm sorry, I'm sorry.”

“It's fine, Annie,” I said, my teeth clenched. “Just—finish.”

Kaori came over to help me into my sweater while Annie got hers. There was hammering on the door just as Kaori was doing the last button, and Porter burst in without waiting for us to confirm that we were all decent.

“Move,” he said, and we did, Courtney struggling into her backpack as we ran down the hall.

The guys joined us, all of Nick's and Kaori's teams too, as we followed the yellow line towards our dragon shelter. Because it had to be a dragon. That was the only reason for such a loud awakening. We'd had a couple of early morning attacks already, but they'd received the normal alarm. That difference, and Laura's fear, made me realize what we were about to endure.

We assembled in the shelter, Porter counting us in to make sure we were all in attendance. It was crowded. Usually Kaori and Nick took their squads to shelters of their own, but this time was different. It wasn't just us who needed sheltering. We had, by the longest calculation, four hours. Four hours to bring in all the roaming dragon slayers, all the passengers off any trains, and any local oil workers and farmers from the satellite communities. All of them would hide with us, beneath the shelter of our steel totem poles, but more importantly, beneath the solid concrete. There would be no one left above ground.

Before Porter closed the steel shutters, I saw it. Or rather, I saw the oncoming storm.

Owen was beside me, and he took my hand. I barely heard him whisper.

“Chinook.”

THE STORY OF THE DRAGON CHINOOK

There were only two things that ever stood in the way of Canada becoming its own country.

The first was our own political disinterest. The Victorian era was good to us, and we were happy subjects of the Crown. The Americans had rebelled and had paid a high price for it. We were mostly untroubled by Napoleon. We did not seek sovereignty, not until it became absolutely necessary.

The second was the dragon called Chinook. Unique in its size, and in it inexorability, the Chinook had more than enough power to drive politicians to horrible compromise and dragon slayers to terrible choices.

When John A. Macdonald fathered confederation, he dreamed of a country united from coast to coast. Aware that he would have to woo the West, he promised them a secure rail link from Halifax to Vancouver. And everything went well until the builders reached Fort Calgary.

From that open plain, the railway men looked up and saw mountains. They knew what lurked there. Settlers to British Columbia went south, always south, to the Wyoming passes, where the wagons were easier to defend. But America was creeping westward too, and Macdonald was determined to cede no territory—or any more tolls—to them.

The death toll was obscene. Even with the early warnings provided by the clouds of smoke that preceded a Chinook's appearance, the railway men had nowhere to hide, and the newly created North-West Mounted Dragon Slayers could not protect them. They retreated to the safety of Manitoba, where rebellion was already on the horizon, and Macdonald resigned in disgrace over the tragedy he had caused. Canada, it seemed, would be split after all, and might even lose the territories it had won from America during the War of 1812.

But the westward dream persisted. And the empty rails called for trains.

Mackenzie followed as Prime Minister and came down hard on the Red River Rebels in Manitoba. He encouraged the recruitment of Chinese workers, bringing them to Canada in ships and paying them just enough that they might forget about the dragons in the sky. It was those Chinese workers, and the dragon slayers who came with them, who made the railway possible, though it took Macdonald's reelection for anyone to listen to what they had to say.

From Fort Calgary stretched a short and nervous railway spur, until Hinton, when the mountains loomed too large on the horizon and the warning hours were too few. There, the rails went underground. Thousands of men moved acre upon acre of solid stone, excavating the very roots of the Rocky Mountains. It was called the John A–Zuò Tunnel, for the man who paid in coin and the workers who paid in blood.

Because the Chinooks did not stop coming. They sat upon their mountaintops and waited. When they grew hungry, the spread their wings, breaking rock and tree and all else that might get in their way. They did not use stealth in their approach, because they did not need to. Great clouds heralded their approach, giving precious hours of warning to those below. And they didn't care who had a chance to hide. They simply descended, and everything with any sense at all ran away.

Fort Calgary tunneled too, building in concrete and steel. While the towns and cities outside the Chinook hunting grounds grew, cautiously turning prairie grass to house and school and business, Calgary closed in around itself, providing shelter to all who might need it when the dragons came.

There were small mercies. Their range was quite short, not stretching as far north as Edmonton, nor as far east as the Saskatchewan border. Chinooks were also the only dragons to hibernate, which meant that the deepest parts of winter would be untroubled. But the mountaintops on which they lived caught sunlight well, and sometimes even in the dead cold of the frozen months, a Chinook would wake and turn its fire towards the east.

But progress, or whatever name you might call it, does not stop.

More tunnels were dug, connecting British Columbia and Cascadon to the rest of Canada at multiple points through the mountains. More tunnels meant more trains and, in the north where Chinooks were less worrisome, trucks and cars. More carbon, more people. More food.

Their small number and limited range had once kept the Chinook at bay, allowing Canada to carve out a country instead of settling for a wall to forever split it in twain. But as a result, the limitations were gone, and the Chinooks spread east and south, leaving ash and devastation behind them as they flew.

It was in Kansas that disaster truly struck.

No one knew what drove the dragon from the mountains so far across the plains. Kansas was completely unprepared for such an onslaught, even with the warning a Chinook provides. There was a small Oil Watch outpost there, to protect the coal beds and the trucks and trains that serviced them. There was one dragon slayer and one support squad. Usually they only dealt with local variations of the corn dragon, or the occasional blue-grey Motherlode that had flown up from Texas.

As the sun dawned that fateful morning, though, the dragon slayer looked up, saw the clouds. He knew his dragon lore well, and despite how far he was from the mountains, he knew that his doom was upon him. It wasn't his death—because he wasn't going to die that day—but his fate, his fate would be changed forever.