The cyborg hounds were released. They sped, baying, at the dragon. The first of them bounced against its side with a loud
clang
and sank diamond teeth into its side. Submerged as she was in 7332's sensorium, Jane felt the fangs meet in her own flesh. She cried out loud with pain.
Desperation finally entered 7332's voice. "If we don't leave now, they'll have us!" It kicked at the hound, sending it flying. But more were arriving, hot on its heels.
"That they will."
The hounds were leaping into the air to seize the dragon. 7332 twisted around to face them, almost throwing Jane out of her chair. Its turbines were screaming, and still it could not configure for flight. Shouts of anger and fierce commands came from the trollish warriors. 7332 damped down the circuits carrying sensation from its skin; Jane felt herself go numb all over in sympathetic identification. Still, the hounds were starting to do real damage.
"The keys!"
Jane waited. Half-submerged into the dragon as she was, and uncertain of her identity around the edges, of where she ended and it began, she was sure it must know that she was not bluffing. That without a name, without the control it would give her, they were going nowhere.
"Melanchthon, of the line of Melchesiach, of the line of Moloch!" the dragon cried. Its anguish rose about Jane like phantom flame. She felt her eyelashes singeing in his wrath, and knew down to her very core that it spoke the truth.
She flipped open the grimoire, riffled through the pages to the command codes and began to read: "Recurvor. Recusadora. Recusamor." The engines roared and shuddered. "Recussus. Redaccendo. Redactamos." Jane slapped the crystal into place. "Redadim. Redambules. Redamnavit." The dragon trembled with repressed power. She fitted the brass nugget into its receptor niche, and rotated the right-hand grip a quarter-turn forward. Now the needles were deep within both her wrists. "Now fly!"
"You'll burn in Hell for this humiliation!" 7332 promised. Remembered war atrocities flashed at the back of Jane's skull. "I'll feed you to the Teind with my own claws."
"Shut up and fly!"
They were moving. The tarmac grumbled under their weight as they picked up speed. The dragon's wings raised, deployed, caught at the air. Hounds fell away. Jane was laughing hysterically and so, to her surprise, was 7332.
He lifted.
Shuddering, they took flight. The factory walls moved toward them slowly, then quickly, and then flashed by underneath, alarmingly close. They were free of the plant altogether. Slowly, they gained height.
The last of the hellhounds lost its grip, and fell yapping to its death. A calm, unaccented elven voice spoke over the radio, from some faraway control tower:
You are violating industrial airspace. Surrender all autonomous functions immediately
.
Now Melanchthon screamed his battle cry over all frequencies, scrambling communications, jamming radar, scratching an ionized line high up into the stratosphere. Far below them, civil defense forces scrambled, flights of war-hardened creatures eager for another taste of combat clawing at the air, but too late.
Jane was laughing so hard now she was crying. She couldn't stop thinking of Rooster, couldn't drive the sight of his small, still body from her mind. Her emotions were so extreme, so chaotic, she could not tell which were hers and which the dragon's. It did not matter. What 7332 felt could be no more intense than what was happening inside her now. She was burning with joy.
They
soared
.
— 6 —
JANE LIVED AS A WOOD-MAY IN A PATCH OF SCRUB trees just beyond the landfill. She made her home within the cabin of what seemed to the rest of the world the rusting hulk of an ancient and wrecked dragon, half-buried in the loamy earth, with steel plates welded over the windows and pusher rods motionless.
She was a quiet creature, just coming of age, and a pretty one too, though she did not know that. The stench of cold iron hung about her from her choice of dwelling place, and she might normally have been expected to raise a fair amount of local comment. But she did not. The locals thought of her, when they thought of her at all, as a dull neighborhood institution, a nondescript fey who had lived in the area for as long as any of them could remember.
Such was the dragon's pervasive influence that only she and 7332 knew she was actually human and had lived there only a few short months.
Every weekday morning the school bell cast its glamour over the surrounding hills, calling the young to classes. They came running down the slopes and leaping over the streams, out from caves and the hollows of trees and suburban tract homes, impelled by powers greater than their own to gain an education.
Flinging open the door one morning, Jane discovered that spring had come to the land. The frozen ground had thawed and softened to mud, and a glorious earthy smell filled the air. The trees were still naked, black and budless, but the brown grasses looked hopeful, with tincts of fresh green glowing from the depths of each clump. A meryon struggled to haul a corroded zinc washer back to its nest.
A crocus had sprouted by the dragon's haunch. She hopped to the ground and squatted beside it, admiring, not touching. The petals were a delicate, almost translucent white. They had no scent, and trembled in the wind from her nostrils.
To her, this was freedom. So small a thing as being able to take a moment to admire a flower, the very uselessness of the act, was both token and reward for her, meat and drink for the spirit.
The bell sounded again, and the muscles in her calves jumped.
Convulsively, Jane stood. She slapped her wide-brimmed Morgan Calabrese hat onto her head and shoved both hands deep into the pockets of her loose trousers. Her windbreaker she left unzipped.
It was too fine a day to hurry. Forcibly resisting the tug of the bell at her heels, she ambled down the hill.
After a minute she began to whistle. She couldn't help it.
* * *
Even when she arrived at the schoolyard and found it empty, doors shut and a solitary carrion-dog skulking across the soccer field, that warm sense of well-being stayed with Jane. She was going to the mall today—Ratsnickle had promised to show her how to jigger the change box on the shuttle bus. It wasn't until she actually stepped into the redbrick school building that her mood darkened. The hollowing echoes of those gray halls were a mumbling surf of misery. The fluorescent light fixtures hummed a jittery song.
In the depths of the building, the hideous creature that the Principal kept in his office screamed. Her stomach flipped over, as if somebody had scraped fingernails down her spine.
Hunching her shoulders slightly, Jane hurried to her homeroom.
Fat old Grunt puffed out his cheeks like a toad in display when she walked through the door. "Well! Miss—" A quick, almost imperceptible sidelong glance at the attendance roster he kept taped to his desktop. "—Alderberry, have you deigned to grace us with your presence? And only six minutes late? How charming! Perhaps you would care to share the source of your oh-so-fashionable tardiness with the rest of the class?"
Jane flushed and stared down at the floor. "I was looking at a flower," she mumbled.
Grunt put a hand to his ear and bent his knees out to either side, bobbing his round body lower. "What's that?"
"A flower!"
"Ohhhh, I see." His expression was so exaggeratedly solemn that scattered giggles arose here and there in the room. "Lost in the rhapsodic contemplation of our precious little floral friends, were you?" Now the entire class was laughing outright at her.
She could sense Grunt slipping around behind her, up on his toes, with that slithery, exaggerated bounce of a walk he employed when he was playing to the back rows. Grunt was proud of his histrionics, and often boasted to his pupils that they made him the most clearly memorable—and therefore best—teacher in all the district. "But my dear, sweet Miss Alderberry, don't you know that flowers are never fully enjoyed until they are—"
He was in back of her now, his breath sour over one shoulder, and she knew from having seen this same ritual enacted upon others, that he was dipping that sharp little chin of his down, down, until chin, smirk and all, disappeared entirely in fatty folds of neck and cheek, and his mouthless face was dominated by the vicious gray light glinting from the dusty twin disks of his spectacles. She knew what was coming, and knew too that if she didn't put up with it, she would be kept after school in retaliation and miss out entirely on going to the mall. Or, worse, she could be sent to the Principal's office, to learn firsthand what it was like to look a basilisk in the face. Jane squeezed her eyes tight with humiliation.
"—
plucked
!" He thrust his hand between her legs and snatched up at her crotch. With an involuntary chickenlike squawk, she clumsily leaped and twisted away. The class convulsed with mirth, all of them braying, snorting, snickering, laughing as if they had never seen him pull this joke before.
"Take your seat, Jane!" Grunt said sternly. "We have work to do, and no time to waste on your foolishness."
It was a long walk to the slow learners' row in the back of the room, where she and Ratsnickle both sat.
Jane had no friends in the class and thus to her they were largely indistinguishable, an anonymous field of feys and weirds. But even had she known them all, Ratsnickle would still have stood out among their malicious faces and wicked expressions. Two red little eyes peered madly from an uncombed thatch of hay, and a wise-guy grin cocked up one side of his mouth. His arms were too skinny and too long, at odds with his lumpish body; but once you accepted that, he had beautiful hands, fingers wondrously long and so fluidly jointed they could wrap twice around a Coke bottle.
He turned away when she sat down.
Jane felt an icy coldness tighten her face. Her hands gripped the sides of her desk so tightly the nails turned white. An alien resolve took hold within her. She waited until Grunt turned and bent to pick up the chalk. Then she straightened her back and flipped him the finger.
Only those kids nearest her saw. At their laughter, Grunt whirled. But Jane was prepared. Her hands were out of sight, and her expression was neither guilty nor innocent, but sullen and defensive in exactly the right proportions. Grunt turned back to the blackboard, baffled.
Ratsnickle swallowed back a guffaw. A lilac maid caught Jane's eye and smiled. Jane nodded back, ever so slightly, and opened her textbook.
She was learning.
* * *
At lunchtime, she hovered at the edge of the cafeteria, tray in hand, looking for an empty place. There was no point in sitting with dwarves, thumblings, or grigs, even if she could have fit into one of their chairs; they were all too clannish, each in their own way. Nor would it be wise to sit too close to a lamie, gwarchell, or kirk-grim. A corner seat would be good, preferably with another empty chair to serve as buffer from that table's cliques. She didn't want to seem presumptuous. Or a chair between two disparate groups; she could stare straight ahead of her then, and be ignored.
Finally, because there were no good alternatives, she took a place alongside Ratsnickle.
Ratsnickle was deep in conversation with a lanky fey named Peter of the Hillside. Jane shared a couple of classes with him. Peter was wearing acid-wash jeans and a denim jacket with the Wild Hunt's "Horns of Elfland Tour" logo painted on the back. He had a bad complexion and a good haircut. He looked up, not at her, when she sat, and addressed the air: "Who's the git?"
Jane stiffened.
"She's with me," Ratsnickle said. "Okay?"
Peter shrugged. "All the same to me."
Jane ate in silence, afraid to join in the conversation. It was all about machines—Peter was apparently a shop major—the psychology of wyverns, the aberrant behavior of a drill press that had been with the school for as long as anyone could remember and might have to be put to sleep. Jane listened in fascination. Her classes, where they touched on machinery at all, were purely theoretical; she envied the boys their hands-on experience.
When she gathered up her tray to leave, Ratsnickle offhandedly said, "Still on for this afternoon?" She nodded yes, and fled.
* * *
Because she lagged so far behind the rest of her class, Jane had to go to the pale man for two hours' tutoring every afternoon. The pale man was a tall, thin creature who wore beige chinos, a white shirt, and canvas deck shoes. His skin was as lifeless as his clothing, and his eyes deader yet.
As always, he did not look up when she entered. He sat motionless on a wooden chair, hands on knees, back to the chalkboard, staring straight ahead of him into nothingness.
"Hello? I was sent here for remedial?"
The pale man looked up. He nodded wanly. Unhastily, without emphasis, he picked up a book, opened it, paged forward a leaf, and then back one. "There are three stars in the heavens," he said, "moving about Jupiter, erratic sidereal bodies which establish a lesser zodiacal process for that wanderer in its mighty twelve-year progression about the sun."
Jane had to concentrate hard to catch the meaning of his words, so flatly were they delivered. If she didn't watch it, she'd find herself zoning out, thoughts drifting off into the empyrean as he droned on and on. The pale man would let her. He didn't care in the least. He was a forest creature, and exiled from his proper environment he had grown so enervated, thin, and attenuated that he seemed hardly to be there at all. There was a natural strength and vigor all other living things possessed that was lacking in him.
Without pausing in his lecture, he teased a limp cigarette from a softpack in his shirt pocket, straightened it between two fingers, stuck it in the corner of his mouth, and began patting down his pockets in search of a match.
She sighed to herself. Through the window the horizon was ragged with a wintery fringe of trees. She thought of Ratsnickle and the mall with yearning.