Prairie Fire (16 page)

There were a lot of people in Kansas. Farmers. Miners. Teachers. Children. The Chinook didn't burn the ground as it flew, staying above the storm of clouds that preceded it. It held back all its fire for when it reached the refineries around Lawrence. And in the face of that storm, the dragon slayer made a choice, and he chose to save as many lives as he possibly could, no matter what the other costs might be.

You do not shoot a dragon, ever. This is engraved upon the heart of every dragon slayer while they are still in their cradles. But there was one missile, left over from an administration more likely to take unpopular risks than the current president. The dragon slayer wasn't even sure it was going to work. His squad mutinied and left him alone at his post. He didn't care. There would be no trial for them, he knew. He would bear the blame for this.

The firing mechanism was almost distressingly straightforward, even for someone who didn't have the level of training the dragon slayer did. It was meant to be braced by a truck or small munitions tower, but the dragon slayer had neither of those. Instead, he used his left shoulder, not his sword arm, and held off firing for as long as he could to be sure of his aim. It wasn't like he could miss the Chinook, but he had to kill it, and he only had one chance.

The missile caught the dragon in the air, its wings spread so wide that a man would have to turn his head to look from wing tip to wing tip. It cut into the Chinook's chest, filling the air with dragon screams, and exploded. Such fire and waste rained down on Kansas that day as has not been seen since Hiroshima. The coal beds took flame, and burn to this day.

But the people evacuated.

If you ask him why he became a dragon slayer, Declan Porter will tell you stories about slaying small ones bare-handed as a sign of strength. If you get him really drunk, which is not an inexpensive process, he will tell you the truth of what happened on the Kansas plains. And he will look you in the eye and tell you that whatever the consequences, he has no regrets.

“I pressed the button,” he said to me years later when I asked him, soldier to soldier, about that day. In the yard, his daughters fought with tiny swords, while his son hammered red-hot steel alongside their mother in the forge. “I pressed the button. And I would do it again.”

I might die of old age, in the end. And when that time comes, Kansas will still burn.

THE ONE AND ONLY

They had turned the siren off, thank goodness. My ears echoed for a moment after the sound was cut. It wasn't exactly a melodic way to be jerked out of sleep, and the longer we listened to it, the more I found it sinking into my bones. This would be a terrible song. It began too abruptly, proceeded in a discordant fashion, and then faded to nothing but low murmurs that lasted too long to be interesting. Owen stared at the shutters, and I stared at him.

“He won't open them,” Courtney said to me, leaning close to whisper. “Porter, I mean. Not unless he's ordered.”

“Why not?” I whispered back. “Shouldn't the dragon slayers at least see it?”

Now that the sirens had stopped, it was deathly quiet. I knew that soon it was going to get deathly loud.

“That coal bed near Lawrence?” Courtney's voice was so quiet now she was practically breathing the words into my ear. “The one that's still burning.”

“That bed will burn forever,” I told her. “It's not like it's going to run out of fuel.”

“True,” Courtney allowed. “But anyway, my father was the commander of that zone when the Chinook came. He ordered a full evacuation of Lawrence, but there wasn't going to be enough time. The official policy with Chinooks is only to run, but one of the dragon slayers serving under him broke orders and fired on it.”

“I've heard the story,” I said.

“Yeah, well, I've lived it,” she said. At my startled look, she continued. “Not in Kansas, no. I've never been. But Dad was livid for months. He wanted to nail the dragon slayer's hide to the wall, but since so many lives had been saved, he had to settle for giving him the crappiest assignment he could think of.”

“New Zealand?” I guessed. It was so small and transportation was so difficult that dragon slaying there was the end of the line for the Oil Watch. Plus, the only export was wool, and by then I'd been in the military long enough to know what rumors would follow any dragon slayer who ever managed to serve in New Zealand and then leave it.

“Alberta,” Courtney said, and turned her head very subtly to where Porter was sitting, his hands on his knees and a very strange expression on his face.

“Porter?” I said, only remembering halfway through the word that we were whispering, and thus ending the word in a squeak. Courtney looked around to see if we'd drawn too much attention.

“The one and only.” Courtney's tone was almost fond. “Anyway, Dad couldn't even make an example of his support crew, because Porter made them leave before he fired.”

“I thought they mutinied,” I said.

“Siobhan,” she said. “You do this professionally.”

Of course. Porter had made them leave, and then told everyone they'd mutinied to save them from court martial. Dragon slayers are always doing silly things like that. Things like jumping off bridges. Like reaching into fire. I looked at the lieutenant, trying to imagine him as something besides the brash, barely-contained soldier that he'd become. I assumeded his tendency to be a smart-ass had come from surviving his training in the SAS, but maybe it, like my hands, had been tempered with dragon fire.

“Don't stare,” Courtney said. “And for the love of God, tell Owen privately.”

I could understand the lieutenant's desire for privacy. Something occurred to me then. “Wait,” I said. “Are you just, you know,” I made a vague gesture, “with Porter, to piss off your dad?”

“No,” Courtney said sharply. Then she considered it. “Well, maybe. But to be fair, I do a lot of things to piss off my dad.”

“Like become an engineer?” I said.

“With two university degrees at that,” she said, clasping at imaginary pearls around her neck. “I am so high above my station.”

“My parents wanted me to be a doctor,” I told her. “But I think they'd have been happy with an engineer too. I'm not switching, though. I don't imagine that the general is a fan of bards. Or Thorskards.”

“You're probably right,” Courtney said. “He's never approved of Lottie, and he's only met her twice. He considers her a poor example of a dragon slayer. Says she thinks too much. And he thinks only the worst of Aodhan.”

“No opinion on Hannah?” I asked, though I was pretty sure of her answer.

“He doesn't pay attention to support crews,” she said. “Not even his own, when he has to have them.”

“Has to have what?” Owen said. I guess he had finally stopped trying to see through the shutters.

“Breakfast,” Courtney said, her eyes shining with sincerity. “It's the most important meal of the day.”

Whatever Owen might have said to that was swallowed up by the loudest sound I had ever heard. It was like a train crashing through a hundred timpani, skin after skin giving way with a tremendous boom that echoed in the kettles even after the drums had been smashed. It was wings, I realized half a breath after Owen did, huge wings that rent the air in swaths so thick, a soccer field might fit inside them. I knew that between those wings hung a monstrous body capped by a head full of teeth, the smallest of which was bigger than the car I had left in Ontario. I could only imagine the fire.

Fort Calgary did not break, though we heard the scream of metal and knew that the Chinook had tried to rip out one of the totem poles. Kaori sat in the corner by herself, her hands on her knees with her eyes closed, and breathed as steadily as she could. I could see her shoulders shake. Nick paced, twisting his fingers in delicate motions I knew must have some real purpose, but couldn't identify. Owen was beside me, and it might have looked to anyone else like he was standing still, but I could tell that he was bursting at the seams to be this close and not even get to see the beast.

I risked a look at Lieutenant Porter. He stared hard at his knees, fingers stretched out over his kneecaps and white at the knuckles. This is what he saw, I knew then. Aodhan saw the oil rigs burn, and Lottie saw a long fall onto hard cement. I saw egg shells shattered and Owen defenseless. And Porter saw this. This room full of recruits, only a month off the trains and under his protection, even though he was forbidden from doing anything to protect us. I had a great deal of respect and friendship for Courtney Speed, but right now I thought her father was kind of a douche.

“Lieutenant?” Nick said, and I realized that he probably knew exactly who Porter was, whatever Courtney thought. He might be from New York, but the American press was as attached to their dragon slayers as the Canadians were to ours. “I'm sorry, Lieutenant, but we need to see it.”

“Go ahead, then,” Porter growled. I don't think he was angry; he just couldn't talk.

Nick went to the shutter controls and took a deep breath. Owen and Kaori came to stand beside him, and the rest of us fell in. I would have stayed at the back, but Owen took my hand and pulled me forward. He wanted to see it with me.

Nick pulled the shutters open, and one of the Japanese girls screamed. I very nearly did too, except I was too busy trying not to faint. Courtney's hand closed on my shoulder, the one opposite from where Owen stood. She squeezed so hard it hurt, and snapped me back to myself. We all gaped out the window clinging to one another for strength.

In your dreams, when you're chased by monsters, you don't usually see them. They are these big things looming in the corner of your eye. If you see them, make them stand in front of you, or chase them down, you know them, and they lose their power over you.

That is not how it works with the dragon Chinook.

It wasn't in the sky when Nick opened the windows, it
was
the sky. I didn't know if it would smother us or burn us first. The totem poles kept it in the air. If it landed, it would be like when a person lies back on a bed of nails. Presumably the dragon would not be hurt, but at the same time, neither would it sink to the ground. The totem poles would bear its weight. I forced myself to think of that, just as the sky cleared. The Chinook had passed overhead and had gone to breathe fire on another part of the fort. Out of our sight line, it was even worse. Now we knew what it looked like, we'd seen its teeth and fire, but we didn't know what it was doing.

We all jumped back from the window as sheets of orange flame burned down from above. The Chinook flew back into sight, and it was too hot to stand close. It flew up into the sky, thwarted again by the solid concrete it could not break, and trailed back towards the mountains. We watched it go for a long, long time.

After the all-clear came, the only sound in the shelter was the rumbling stomachs of the hungrier members of Nick's fire crew. The all-clear was followed immediately by the call to breakfast, and we knew that we were about to start our day as if nothing had happened to put us behind schedule other than a regular dragon attack.

“Will there be a cleanup?” Kaori asked.

“The fire crews will be called out, and maybe the engineers,” Porter said, looking at Courtney. Try as I might, I could not find one iota of unprofessionalism in the way he looked at her. “Depends on the structural damage.”

We didn't say anything else as we filed into the mess hall. The older dragon slayers and their more experienced crews looked just as rattled as we did. I wondered if they had watched, or if they'd closed their shutters against the one thing they could not fight. There were no civilians present, which I guessed meant that they were being debriefed separately.

General Speed was already sitting at the table Porter usually ate at, the other dragons slayers taking seats around him, and the lieutenant left us to head towards them, squaring his shoulder like a man who is about to walk into something unpleasant. No one spoke to him, though. They let his ghosts be. We ate, and then the general stood up to make an announcement. He didn't need a microphone. His parade voice was just fine. “First of all, I would like to commend you on your expert handling of this morning's exercises,” he said. Exercises. Like we'd gone for a run. “You are a credit to the Oil Watch.”