learning how to shoot the easiest of possible weapons.'
'And, if you believe Alison's numbers, all of this is happening in a quarter of the time regular soldiers need for their training,' Jack finished for him. 'This is starting to feel a little creepy.'
'Yet as you yourself said, you are only being trained as garrison assistants,' Draycos reminded him. 'Perhaps this is adequate for such duty.'
'Maybe,' Jack said. 'But like Alison said, you can get just as dead in a garrison as you can out in the field.'
Still, he reminded himself as he continued through the trees, he wouldn't be staying for that part of the operation. Tomorrow night he and Draycos would pull the information they needed, and then they would be out of here. 'Anyway, I'll bet I did better than you think,' he added.
'You have a tendency to shoot high,' Draycos told him.
'I do not,' Jack insisted. 'You wait and see. You'll be eating those words for your dinner.'
'Pardon?'
Jack sighed. 'Skip it.'
Alison and Jommy, to Jack's complete lack of surprise, came out first and second in the final tally.
To his rather annoyed surprise, he found that Draycos's evaluation of his own shooting skills had been correct. He himself had finished a less than glorious eighty-seventh.
But at least he'd only collected three sniper hits. Most of the others, blissfully unaware of their true position in Grisko's shooting gallery, had up to two dozen of the little marks.
Alison, naturally, had only one.
Dinner that night was grumpier than usual. Most of the recruits seemed to think it had been a highly unfair trick to play on them, and the majority seemed to blame Sergeant Grisko personally for it. Jommy in particular was highly indignant, apparently feeling that his twenty-one hits took a lot away from his otherwise impressive second-place score.
Jack stayed out of the debate as best he could. There was no need to get them thinking about his own low sniper hit rate. It might lead to the unpleasant suspicion that he had been in on the scam from the start.
After dinner there was a twilight marching drill, using real Gompers flash rifles this time instead of the candy canes. Unloaded, fortunately. Then came more study time, bedtime preparations, and finally lights-out. Jack waited until the rest of the barracks was asleep, then gave Draycos his meager meal and sent him to his washroom window to watch.
It was somewhere in the middle of the night when he suddenly awoke.
For a minute he lay motionless in bed, trying to figure out what had awakened him. Then, suddenly, he got it.
There was a rush of cool air rippling over him from the washroom area where Draycos was supposed to be watching. Not the usual light breeze that came from having the window open a crack while the dragon peered out, but something stronger.
Silently, he climbed out of bed and padded barefoot across the cold floor to the washroom. If this was nothing but a matter of the wind having shifted direction during the night, he promised himself darkly, he was going to be very annoyed.
The wind hadn't shifted direction. The breeze was stronger because the window had been propped wide open. And Draycos was gone.
Chapter 7
AH right, Jack told himself urgently. Don't panic. Draycos wasn't lost, after all. He was just misplaced a little.
All right. First off, it was for sure that none of the roving patrols could have gotten him. Certainly not without making a lot of noise in the process. Wherever Draycos had gotten to, he'd gotten there voluntarily.
Could he have decided to tackle the HQ building on his own? Ridiculous. Draycos might be a first-class warrior, but he didn't know the first thing about human-designed locks and alarms. He wouldn't have gone there without Jack.
And then the obvious answer struck him. Of course: Draycos was hungry. After nearly a week of the starvation diet Jack had put him on, the dragon had finally given up and gone hunting.
Jack felt his face warm with shame. He should have tried better to bring Draycos more food. Tried, nothing—he should have done better. But with all those kids bustling around, and Grisko and the other drill instructors likely to drop in without warning—
He shook his head firmly. Those were cheap excuses. And as Uncle Virgil would have said, yesterday's cheap excuses were tomorrow's fish wrap. As of tomorrow, he would starting bringing a decent meal home to his partner.
Partner. He frowned at the word. Uncle Virge didn't want him to have any partners. Uncle Virge especially didn't want him having a partner with Draycos's rigid, self-sacrificing K'da warrior ethic. Uncle Virge would be very unhappy if he knew Jack was starting to think of Draycos in that way.
The open window was next to the low wall of the washroom's big shower area. Carefully, trying not to make any noise, Jack pulled himself up onto the wall. He steadied himself with a grip on the edge of the window and looked out.
The camp was actually rather pretty by starlight. To look on it now you wouldn't think there was so much grunting and sweating and agony out there during the day. He looked through the trees toward the dark windows of the headquarters building, trying to imagine what kind of security they might have there.
And then, he caught a flicker of movement from his right. Something that looked like a black shadow was moving swiftly and silently along the ground toward the barracks.
It was Draycos. It had to be. And the fact that the dragon's golden scales had turned to combat black meant there was trouble.
He slid off the wall onto the shower area's tile floor. If Draycos was moving that fast down there, he wasn't likely to slow down much coming through the window.
He didn't. Without any hint of warning, the dragon was suddenly there, leaping with bull's-eye accuracy straight through the center of the opening. His tail caught the edge of the window with a soft slap as he passed, slowing him down and deflecting his arc just enough to drop him soundlessly into the center of the shower area.
'What's the matter?' Jack hissed.
