“He thinks he is,” the girl said, “but no one is really. Police and everyone arguing among themselves. Do you have a phone, Lucas? Mine doesn’t work. This is the best thing to ever happen here and I can’t even tell my friends about it.”
“I could row you out to where your phone started working,” Damian said.
“I don’t think so,” Lisbet said, with a coy little smile, twisting the toes of her bare right foot in the wet sand.
Lucas had thought that she was around his and Damian’s age; now he realized that she was at least two years younger.
“It’ll be absolutely safe,” Damian said. “Word of honor.”
Lisbet shook her head. “I want to stick around here and see what happens next.”
“That’s a good idea too,” Damian said. “We can sit up by the fire and keep warm. I can tell you all about our adventures. How we found our way through the mist. How we were nearly run down—”
“I have to go and find my friends,” Lisbet said, and flashed a dazzling smile at Lucas and said that it was nice to meet him and turned away. Damian caught at her arm and Lucas stepped in and told him to let her go, and Lisbet smiled at Lucas again and walked off, bare feet leaving dainty prints in the wet sand.
“Thanks for that,” Damian said.
“She’s a kid. And she’s also the mayor’s daughter.”
“So? We were just talking.”
“So he could have you locked up if he wanted to. Me too.”
“You don’t have to worry about that, do you? Because you scared her off,” Damian said.
“She walked away because she wanted to,” Lucas said.
He would have said more, would have asked Damian why they were arguing, but at that moment the dragon emitted its mournful wail. A great honking blare, more or less B-Flat, so loud it was like a physical force, shocking every square centimeter of Lucas’s body. He clapped his hands over his ears, but the sound was right inside the box of his skull, shivering deep in his chest and his bones. Damian had pressed his hands over his ears, too, and all along the dragon’s length people stepped back or ducked away. Then the noise abruptly cut off, and everyone stepped forward again. The women flailed even harder, their chant sounding muffled to Lucas; the dragon’s call had been so loud it had left a buzz in his ears, and he had to lean close to hear Damian say, “Isn’t this something?”
“It’s definitely a dragon,” Lucas said, his voice sounding flat and mostly inside his head. “Are we done arguing?”
“I didn’t realize we were,” Damian said. “Did you see those guys trying to cut it open?”
“Around the other side? I was surprised the police are letting them do whatever it is they’re doing.”
“Lisbet said they’re scientists from the marine labs at Swatham. They work for the government, just like the police. She said they think this is a plastic eater. It sucks up plastic and digests it, turns it into carbon dioxide and water.”
“That’s what the UN wants people to think it does, anyhow.”
“Sometimes you sound just like your mother.”
“There you go again.”
Damian put his hand on Lucas’s shoulder. “I’m just ragging on you. Come on, why don’t we go over by the fire and get warm?”
“If you want to talk to that girl again, just say so.”
“Now who’s spoiling for an argument? I thought we could get warm, find something to eat. People are selling stuff.”
“I want to take a good close look at the dragon. That’s why we came here, isn’t it?”
“You do that, and I’ll be right back.”
“You get into trouble, you can find your own way home,” Lucas said, but Damian was already walking away, fading into the mist without once looking back.
Lucas watched him fade away, expecting him to turn around. He didn’t.
Irritated by the silly spat, Lucas drifted back around the dragon’s prow, watched the scientists attack with a jackhammer the joint between two large scales. They were putting everything they had into it, but didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. A gang of farmers from a collective arrived on two tractors that left neat tracks on the wet sand and put out the smell of frying oil, which reminded Lucas that he hadn’t eaten since breakfast. He was damned cold, too. He trudged up the sand and bought a cup of fish soup from a woman who poured it straight from the iron pot she hooked out of the edge of the big bonfire, handing him a crust of bread to go with it. Lucas sipped the scalding stuff and felt his blood warm, soaked up the last of the soup with the crust and dredged the plastic cup in the sand to clean it and handed it back to the woman. Plenty of people were standing around the fire, but there was no sign of Damian. Maybe he was chasing that girl. Maybe he’d been arrested. Most likely, he’d turn up with that stupid smile of his, shrugging off their argument, claiming he’d only been joking. The way he did.
The skirts of the fret drifted apart and revealed the dim shapes of Martham’s buildings at the far end of the sand bar; then the fret closed up and the little town vanished. The dragon sounded its distress or alarm call again. In the ringing silence afterward a man said to no one in particular, with the satisfaction of someone who has discovered the solution to one of the universe’s perennial mysteries, “Twenty-eight minutes on the dot.”
At last, there was the sound of an engine and a shadowy shape gained definition in the fret that hung offshore: a boxy, old-fashioned landing craft that drove past the police boat and beached in the shallows close to the dragon. Its bow door splashed down and soldiers trotted out and the police and several civilians and scientists went down the beach to meet them. After a brief discussion, one of the soldiers stepped forward and raised a bullhorn to his mouth and announced that for the sake of public safety a two-hundred-meter exclusion zone was going to be established.
Several soldiers began to unload plastic crates. The rest chivvied the people around the dragon, ordering them to move back, driving them up the beach past the bonfire. Lucas spotted the old man, Bill Danvers, arguing with two soldiers. One suddenly grabbed the old man’s arm and spun him around and twisted something around his wrists; the other looked at Lucas as he came toward them, telling him to stay back or he’d be arrested too.
“He’s my uncle,” Lucas said. “If you let him go I’ll make sure he doesn’t cause any more trouble.”
“Your uncle?” The soldier wasn’t much older than Lucas, with cropped ginger hair and a ruddy complexion.
“Yes, sir. He doesn’t mean any harm. He’s just upset, because no one cares that he was the first to find it.”
“Like I said,” the old man said.
The two soldiers looked at each other, and the ginger-haired one told Lucas, “You’re responsible for him. If he starts up again, you’ll both be sorry.”
“I’ll look after him.”
The soldier stared at Lucas for a moment, then flourished a small-bladed knife and cut the plasticuffs that bound the old man’s wrists and shoved him toward Lucas. “Stay out of our way, grandpa. All right?”
“Sons of bitches,” Bill Danvers said, as the soldiers walked off. He raised his voice and called out, “I found it first. Someone owes me for that.”
“I think everyone knows you saw it come ashore,” Lucas said. “But they’re in charge now.”
“They’re going to blow it open,” a man said.
He held a satchel in one hand and a folded chair in the other; when he shook the chair open and sat down Lucas recognized him: the man who’d been sitting at the head of the dragon, sketching it.
“They can’t,” Bill Danvers said.
“They’re going to try,” the man said.
Lucas looked back at the dragon. Its streamlined shape dim in the streaming fret, the activity around its head (if that was its head) a vague shifting of shadows. Soldiers and scientists conferring in a tight knot. Then the police boat and the landing craft started their motors and reversed through the wash of the incoming tide, fading into the fret, and the scientists followed the soldiers up the beach, walking past the bonfire, and there was a stir and rustle among the people strung out along the ridge.
“No damn right,” Bill Danvers said.
The soldier with the bullhorn announced that there would be a small controlled explosion. A moment later,
