Chapter Ten:

Instead of a two week wait for Captain Harris, Lina had to wait two months. On the day he was supposed to come back, two weeks after he had last left, Lina had given her silver dime to the conductor of the trolley and ridden to the airfield just outside the city proper.
The trolley dropped her off and she waited and waited on the wooden bench in the little station just outside the fence of the airfield. She waited and waited, watching the airships come and go. But the Captain’s familiar craft never appeared. After a few hours, she realized that Harris wouldn’t be coming back today.
She began walking back along the railroad tracks, jumping on a trolley as it passed. She felt dejected as the streetcar rumbled its way back into the city where great clouds of smoke blew about to fit her mood.
When the Captain did return, after a couple of months, he came in late at night. Lina was awoken by his boots thumping on the floor as he entered the house. She snuck to the top of the staircase to listen to what he had to say.
“Rufus, I should never have stayed in this wretched country. Ever since that damn war, this nation has never been the same. It’s like we’re doomed to constant misery.”
“Now, old friend, it’s not as bad as it seems.”
“No. I have been commissioned to destroy all wild dragons. This time, there is no end to the war. I should have left for Dartrom and Zalbaria with the rest of the smart Captains.”
There was a brief silence before Rufus sighed quietly.
“If you leave, I might as well go with you, frankly. This city is dragging me down, Harris. I haven’t felt truly alive since those days.” Rufus grimly admitted. Harris nodded and then suddenly sat down.

Gunsmoke blew through the cables of the airship as the machine guns chattered their tune of death and metal. The ship billowed about in the waves of heat coming from the burning forest below. The shrieks of dragons pierced the dull roar of the flames as they were captured fleeing their settlement in great electric nets. Sketmoorean cavalry blocked their exit, preventing escape. Many seemed to understand the horror that awaited them and flew at the airship, until they fell to Earth dead from Gatling guns on the ship’s decks, leaves twirling to earth to spill their bitter blood on the hardened ground. Harris closed his eyes.

He was suddenly back in Rufus Scaleright’s austere kitchen, far from the mountains. A train rumbled by on the tracks outside the factory, blasting more soot into the already polluted air. The tea kettle shook from the vibrations, almost as much as Harris’ hands were in his lap.
“Are you all right?” Rufus asked, concerned for his friend.
“I’ll be fine, I’ll be fine.”
In the morning, the Captain was gone.

	“Do you think we shouldn’t be here?” Lina asked the mechanic’s apprentice, who was only a year older and certainly not a full year smarter.
	“I’m sure my uncle probably won’t mind…” Lina attempted to justify their presence in the dragon breeding room.
	The birthing room was off in a corner of barn 1, sealed off from every other section by a thick iron wall. It was warm and insulated, with a few nesting dragons, who lay on their eggs. One was pacing nervously as its eggs began to hatch.
	The foreman, for once, was sober and alert, watching the ground level; Lina and the apprentice perched in the catwalks and rafters. The foreman was one of the oldest factory employees and had a great deal of experience breeding and hatching dragons, which he enjoyed enough to do of his own volition. This, Lina was convinced, was the reason everybody else had tolerated him being in charge for the past twenty years.
	The baby dragon pushed and pushed on the egg wall. This was a dangerous stage. The mother dragon would help the baby for some time, but it could not directly break the egg, because the baby wouldn’t be ready or could suffer injuries. So, the mother began licking the egg, which weakened the shell.
	The baby pushed and pushed, using its tiny claws to pick the shell apart from the inside. For half an hour it struggled, until finally it emerged, sticking its snout outside to get its first breath and then clambering out to collapse at its mother’s feet.
	Mama dragon curled around it, whereby the baby began to nurse. Dragons were extremely odd as a specie, since they were neither quite reptile nor mammal. Biologists at some fancy university, Lina knew, had determined the dragons to be reptiles, since they didn’t produce milk, rather a sugary substance that was similar to it but not identical. How these lizards had gained flight and an extra pair of limbs was a subject of intense and contentious debate and plenty of people threw up their hands and declared that they were just a strange member of the Lord’s miracles from creation.
	The foreman looked about, spotting the two children in the rafters. He winked cheekily at them before going back to watching the dragons. A very rare smile cracked across his wrinkled face as he saw the baby begin to nurse.
	A passing train caused the baby to squeak in fear. It was going south, towards the massive military Fort Ox on the end of the Long Neck that Tarox maintained. It seemed more and more trains were going there nowadays.

	Prime Minister Hammington stood next to Lorraine, their arms raised in victory. The cameras flashed and illuminated the dust in the room they were in, full of costumes for military parades and relics of long past battles.
	“That ought to do it.” Said William. Winston was nowhere to be found, probably off drinking somewhere, Lorraine thought. She knew he had no patience for these propaganda exercises, although neither did she. It was itchy down here, mentally itchy.
	“Wait, no, Lorraine look heroic for me, there’s a good girl.”
	More flashes, like gunshots, and Lorraine couldn’t tell if her hand was shaking from holding her sword aloft or whether it was the strain of the past few weeks. Her muscles ached and she longed to let go and collapse, but she couldn’t and she stood as rigid as possible.
	William shook his head and grumbled to himself, which mean he was displeased.
	“Again, but with less shaking.”
She tried for several more shots, but he shook his head again. More flashes, the bulbs bursting loudly and stirring the dusty air. Her brain itched badly.
	“Why aren’t you trying harder? Come now, Lorraine, we need these pictures. You keep blinking over and over you see, it ruins the shot.”
	She looked away from the camera and suddenly with fire wielded at William. Pointing her sword at his chest she took a few steps forward.
	“If you want to do it, do it yourself then! This isn’t even necessary, you know. I’m sick of it, every few weeks getting dragged in here and having to look at those flashes over and over and over again!”
	William looked surprised, but then calmed himself, while Prime Minister Hammington quickly swooped in, explaining to William that Lorraine was getting tired of the flashes and it stressed her out too much and she’d been in a war not long ago and all the like. She knew he was doing this facetiously, he probably didn’t care about her any more or less than ever. Fake, all of them fake. Their false smiles and their false gestures and obsequiousness, fake to the core. Phony.
	“Lorraine, go back and stand like you were.”
	She did so, but couldn’t stop shaking. The flashes burst in her eyes, making her see stars and the room run shades of purpose and red and blinding white in her eyes, each puff of powder sending up smoke and a shot.
	“Again.”
	Flash.
	“Again!”
	Flash
	“Again!”
	Lorraine dropped her sword and it clattered to the floor like the chatter of teeth, biting into the wooden stage and knocking over props. Her brain and her skin were on fire, she couldn’t see or hear anything, just a blank wall of static and pain.
	Hammington shook his head. “William, I think that enough today.” William looked, for once, as though he was about to say something harsh, but instead he smiled and said nothing besides nodding approvingly at Lorraine. The two of them left the studio room and Lorraine collapsed on the stage, sitting on the dirty wood in her fake costume and a silly sword. She needed the Captain, she needed to get out of here.

Chapter Eleven: Escape

	“The problem with war is that it’s too boring, I think.” Brady said, sitting across from Lorraine. “You wait all week for something to happen, then you’re all busy again and it gives you purpose. Keeps you going.”
	Lorraine said nothing and simply stared at the table, waiting for dinner to arrive. “We lost three men today. Dragon came down from the trees and tore them up really badly.”
	“S’th’way of things. At least it’s dragons, it’s worse when it’s people.”
	“Were you in the war with Harris?”
	“I was in the war, but I wasn’t there with him, you know?” Brady took his knife and began digging into the wooden table. There was a crack in the wood and he began slowly digging out and sawing away at it until finally with a satisfying thunk the knife pushed through the dusty wood and poked out underneath.
	He said nothing but looked like he was trying to for a moment, before finding his words. “I was put directly into the air force, Harris started as a ground trooper. I’m from Bearburg originally, my father was in the King’s Guard.”
	Lorraine perked up at this. “He was? Was he on the guard when the monarchy fell?”
	Brady looked very excited to have Lorraine taking an interest in him and Harris noticed that he leaned in a little closer than normal and held Lorraine’s eyes a little longer than normal. A slight curve of worry formed at the edge of his mouth.
	“He wasn’t just on the Guard, he was there when the coup happened!” He looked at the others in the mess hall and they were paying attention now too. “King Franklin IV was asleep when parliament broadcast their message calling for him to resign and my father was able to look outside and see the crowd gathering outside the palace.
	I think that King Franklin didn’t quite understand what was happening until it was over. Officers from the military came into the palace and told the Guards to surrender, which most of them did. My father remembers seeing the King being led to his offices by his advisors where he gave up his power.”
	Lorraine knew that the fall of the monarchy had come suddenly and had heard recordings of the speeches in school. It seemed a lifetime ago, which for her it nearly was. Her own parents had been loyalists and to this day voted for Minister Hammington in Parliament because he’d been a knight.
	“Do you think it was right? The coup?”
	She looked at Brady, watching for his answer. They both knew it was a tense topic and to discuss it openly was impolite but she got some sort of thrill from asking him, seeing if she could throw him off balance. Shooting him a small smile, she waited.
	Brady took it and nearly stumbled but forged ahead with new confidence.
	“I do, really. Maybe we should have been more like Sketmoor,” and at this Brady shot a look to Harris, who said nothing but nodded slightly in acknowledgement, “but I think in the end we ended up alright. The King would never have stood up to Dartrom the way our government does now. Darts are traitors, plain and simple.”
	“I disagree, they were just doing what they thought was right.” Harris said quietly.
	“Betraying us was right? They’re kin, they speak our language, they come from us! But they chose to help Upley and Ferm and so we lost. And they did it because they wanted a slice of the pie. It was opportunism, plain and simple.”
	“You don’t believe that there was a principle behind what they did? That opposing Ralian influence could have been a higher moral good?”
	“You’re a Ralian too, Harris, Sketmere or not. It doesn’t bother you that our ‘wayward cousin’ in Dartrom bailed out our enemies? We had them on the ropes! Had Dartrom not interfered, we would have won.”
	“And won what, exactly. You think we didn’t intervene on behalf of Olcrum and the Five Cities for economic reasons, do you?”
	“I believe we intervened on behalf of our allies so that the Cooperatist revolution could be stopped, if he hadn’t we’d be living like Upley right now I think. Captain you can’t tell me you think that it would have been better if we hadn’t done anything at all. Through our intervention we might have saved the lives of millions from suffering, that’s what we were there for. You know that too.”
	“Dignity, man, dignity. What we were doing at the end when Dartrom intervened had no honor. Victory without honor is worse than no victory at all, if we could only win in the way we were going to then we should have done nothing, yes.”
	Brady looked genuinely angry now. He stood, but looked at Lorraine as though hesitant of wanting to leave, but did so nonetheless, saying as he left that Harris was just making excuses.
	Harris shook his head slightly as he left, waiting for him to be out of earshot, before smiling in exasperation. “He’s just overtired, really. He’ll get over it in a bit.”
	Lorraine asked if he was always so headstrong and Harris replied that he was, but that it was necessary for things to function, that Brady trusting his gut was good for the ship.
	The two stood for a moment, in the quiet, listening to the ship gently rock back and forth pulling on its mooring ropes.
	“He likes you, you know.” Harris said and Lorraine whipped to look at him, meeting those searchlight eyes seeing the turbulence under the surface at his words. She opened her mouth slightly as though to speak but didn’t and instead inhaled and exhaled slowly.
	“Normally you don’t try to impress a girl with arguments about politics…”
	“He’s like that, don’t take it for anything more than just how he is.

	The next day, thoughts of monarchy and politics seemed far away. She felt alone, under the steel sky as they marched uphill towards yet another dragon settlement. It was all so abstract, she thought. How did the dragons organize? They were organized, certainly, they grouped and circled them overhead until they were within range and then began swooping downwards at the ascending troops.
	The dragon’s cries lanced through her and she saw their shifting patterns, like a flock of birds; high and aloft their movements intertwined and paced each other trying to outmaneuver the humans marching uphill. It seemed to have an eerie harmony about it and as one would swoop and dive the others would howl their song.
	It was a song, she came to realize, mumbling it to Brady that night cuddled up against him under the airship while Harris was meeting with the other Captains. Her head was on his shoulder now and she could feel the heat of his body through his stiff uniform. It itched slightly, tugging and pulling at the infinite tiny hairs on her cheek and it felt like her mind was trying to be aclm but just itched.
	“Do you think they speak to each other?” She asked and Brady grumbled and dodged before saying that no, he didn’t think they exactly talked to each other. But that night asleep the image of them conversing came unbidden to her mind, turned to stimulating itself in the midst of the endless boredom that was the downtime of war, her world ablaze with the idea of dragons conversing of her and Brady talking and coming together, the possibilities of a life beyond where she was. A stable life, perhaps, or maybe just an escape. Brady knew that when the war was over he’d be away from it all and it came in flashes now again and her brain itched worse than ever.
	There the thought was, again, of getting out, a great shape lurking beheath the surface that Harris could probably see. She’d never asked for this life, really, it had been given to her as a gift but she thought now that maybe she had been demanded by people like William and the Prime Minister and all those in their dens scheming and politicking and winding around and around each other struggling for dominance and she was in it and above it and around it all, forever.
	No route out.
	She stood up from her bed and put on her boots, her real boots not the fancy ones they made her wear for the cameras, a well worn pair of hiking boots she’d bought on one of her few unsupervised outings in Greenburg. She’d been looking at the window, wishing she were like one of the other girls who could dash in with their friends and mothers and buy things, until she felt in her pocket and realized that she was probably the richest person on the street. So in she went and bought the sturdiest pair of boy’s boots possible, which left the owner perplexed but they’d fit her perfectly and she didn’t give a damn if they were meant for some boy who belonged to the Mayor’s outing club or some other such thing.
She left a note telling the Captain and Brady that she was going out on a walk.
	The night air was cold and it blew up against the mountain from the East, the prevailing winds coming in off the land and up over the slope until it coalesced far above into the thick clouds that usually wreathed the continental spine and dropped their massive sheets of wind and rain down on them leaving frozen Sketmoor dry and calm in the West.
	So with the wind to her back she ascended towards one of the small villages they had recently cleared, the bodies now hauled away and the smell of dead dragon and dead men now mostly gone from the stones.
	The village itself was little more than a collection of stone nests and a small cave, which as she went inside with a light she realized were carved out as though by dragon claws in great sweeps. Was it possible that the dragons had spent decades or perhaps even centuries hollowing out the room in the middle?
	It had been several hours now of walking and to her it felt like a dream. There in the flickering dark, she sat and thought of nothing.
	An hour passed, perhaps more, and she realized she was crying there in the dim light where once dragons had nested. Silently and without show.
	From the corner of her eye, she could see a vast shape move and she whirled, realizing the danger she was in. And it wasn’t her imagination, somehow a dragon was in the cavern with her, perhaps thirty feet away on the otherside, flattened against the wall of the chamber.
	Her breath caught in her throat and she reached to her side and drew her pistol with one hand, holding the lantern with her other. Fear now hit her in a wave, familiar and bitter and aching at her, telling her to try to run, but she stayed.
	“I’m sorry.” She said to it. “I’m so, so sorry.”
	The dragon looked straight at her, its cat-eyes narrowing and watching her move while the rest of the animal remained completely still. She didn’t move, but her muscles were tensed and she was prepared to fight.
	The dragon did nothing but watch. It was blocking the exit to the chamber and slowly it began to utter a deep song, one she had never heard before from any of the dragons. All at once it flew forward and she stood her ground and fired at its head as it keened its song at her.
	A hurricane of claws and tail blew past her, dodging her shots, but looping back around and this time even though she knew she shot it she knew that this dragon was too fast and she was in too closed off of a room. Fear choked her throat and she wondered if this is what it was like for the dragons in the arena.
	It circled while she reloaded, swooping in tight circles around the chamber with her in the middle, her tracking it as best she could. At last, she saw that it had left a hole in its pattern, she could run towards the entrance, and she did sprinting as fast as she could towards the hole, but the dragon did something she’d never seen one do before.
	In the arena, the ceiling was electrified and dragons would always launch upwards and get thrown down to earth by the power in the wires. But this ceiling wasn’t electric and this dragon wasn’t already beaten. She could taste fresh air from the tunnel but at once her feet were swept from under her and at once the dragon had tucked and rolled and was now above her, standing over her. Somehow, it had landed upside down on the ceiling and pushed itself downwards at her.
She dropped her gun and lantern and as the shadows played crazily on the animal it paused, looking at her. She stared back at it in wonder and terror and rage at being outdone.
	But her last thought, as it lunged forward, was a simple one.
	“Thank God this is it.”