Lucinda lifted her hands to her cheeks and found they were wet. The force of the misery-whoever’s misery it was-had brought her to tears.
Go away, ghost, she thought desperately. Leave me alone!
But it would not go away, and she spun in helpless circles, holding her head. It was only then, as though she had turned toward the sun with eyes closed and felt its heat, that she realized she could tell where the painful, unhappy thoughts were coming from.
The Sick Barn.
Lucinda looked around but there was still no one in sight. She walked slowly to the front of the great concrete tube. The overwhelming sense of someone else’s misery was growing a little less, but it still battered her mind like a strong wind.
The door to the Sick Barn was open, propped with a stone so it wouldn’t latch shut. Lucinda poked her head in, heart beating fast and prepared for almost anything, but there was little to see. In fact, except for the huge bulk of Meseret sprawled in sleep, tethered to the floor with massive bands of canvas, and some movement in some of the smaller pens and cages, the place seemed empty. But who had left the door propped? And whose terrible, mournful thoughts had invaded her mind? Was it the ghost in the library mirror? Or something worse-some horror conjured up out of its natural time and place by Gideon’s Fault Line?
And then Meseret’s great, red-gold eye flicked open, as if a gypsy fortune-teller had lifted the cloth cover off a crystal ball. The long, narrow reptilian pupil widened a little and several ideas thundered in her brain at the same time.
NOT EGG THIEF. WHAT WANT HERE? SAD SAD SO SAD!
Lucinda didn’t hear individual words, but instead felt the meanings with the suddenness that a splash of paint would shout “Red!” As the alien ideas cascaded over her, a sudden, clear understanding came with them: the voice she had been hearing in her head, the mournful thoughts that she had mistaken for ghosts, had come from Meseret.
The dragon was in her head.
Lucinda’s first impulse was to turn and run, but the misery that she could feel as clearly as heat or cold held her. The immense reptile let out a floor-rumbling groan and tried to stand, but the heavy canvas restraining straps, each one as wide as a bedsheet, kept her belly against the floor and her winged forelegs pinned against her sides.
“Oh, you poor thing…,” Lucinda said, then trailed off in sudden fear as the dragon stopped struggling and turned her terrifying eye on Lucinda. “I’m… I’m sorry you’re tied up,” she said, her voice little more than a squeak. “I’m so sorry your egg… your baby… died.”
Now, as if her idea had leaped between them in the same way the dragon’s thoughts had jumped to Lucinda, the dragon shuddered and shook her massive head from side to side as if to shake it free of something. Lucinda guessed from the slowness of the great beast’s movements that Meseret was drugged.
NO DEAD! Drugged or not, Meseret could still make the inside of Lucinda’s head rattle like it was thunderstruck. NO DEAD! TAKEN!
It took Lucinda a moment to make sense of the thoughts.
“Taken? You mean… by Alamu?” It hadn’t occurred to her until that moment that it might not be very smart to argue with a giant winged monster forty feet long-especially one that was clearly angry and upset. But instead of the burst of anger she feared-or even a scorching belch of fire, which could reach her even where she was standing, she abruptly realized-what came to her was only a squall of misery, like cold wind and dark clouds.
NOT LITTLE WORM. NOT HIM! LOST. TAKEN. EVERYTHING GONE.
And then there were images with the ideas, pictures in her head that Lucinda could not make sense of-a setting sun, a tangle of bones, a cliff wall of sheer red stone looming above drifts of sand.
NO QUICKENING. NO BABY.
Lucinda saw an image of something that was neither a dragon baby nor a human infant-more of a shining point of light, like a welcoming door opened into darkness.
GONE.
It was too much, the power of the dragon’s thoughts, the strangeness of them. It felt like having a stranger pull on her arm and shout in her face in a foreign language, shrieking for help. Lucinda took a few stumbling steps backward. Something creaked behind her and she saw Haneb standing in the doorway, pulling his protective hood back on as he returned from somewhere outside, his scarred face wide-eyed with surprise to find Lucinda standing beside the dragon’s pen.
A moment later she was rocked off her feet by Meseret’s bellow of anger and pain, her ears popping with the pressure.
EGG THIEF! The thoughts crashed through Lucinda’s head like an avalanche, almost knocking her down again even as she struggled to rise. HIM. THIS ONE. EGG THIEF!
Haneb hurried toward her, head down as though he crossed a battlefield beneath a hail of bullets. He grabbed her arm and pulled her to her feet, then yanked her toward the door.
“What you doing?” he shouted, his voice muffled by the hood, his eyes frantic behind the faceplate. He grabbed her arm and began pulling her. “No suit! Dangerous! Come away! Come away now!”
He can’t hear what she said, Lucinda thought. He can’t hear her thoughts like I can.
“It’s you,” she said wonderingly as they reached the door. Behind her the dragon groaned. “She’s calling you a thief. She says you took it.”
“What?” Haneb still had his hood on, but his startled look was easy to see even through the protective mask. “What you saying?”
“Meseret. The dragon. She says you stole her egg.”
For a moment his eyes widened even farther, as though they might leap right out of his skull. Then Haneb turned on his heels and ran away from her across the farmyard.
Chapter 24
T yler wasn’t sure he understood everything she was saying-his sister was pretty worked up.
“So, hang on-the dragon talked to you?”
“Not talked, not exactly. But it totally communicated with me, Tyler. I’m not kidding! I could get most of what it meant. It kept saying- she kept saying-that Haneb stole her egg! And when I said it out loud Haneb got this super-guilty look and ran away!”
“But why would he steal an egg? It’s not like they don’t feed people around here.”
“Tyler! I’m serious! This is the craziest thing yet!”
“I am being serious-and it may not be the craziest thing happening around here… although talking dragons is pretty hard to beat.”
For a moment Tyler thought she was going to go into her old hurt-feelings act, but instead she finally noticed the papers spread all over his bed. “What are you doing? And why did you just take off and disappear like that?”
“Oh yeah. Well, see… ” He was about to launch into an explanation of everything he’d been thinking, but something about her face made him say instead, “You know, that’s really amazingly weird, what happened with the dragon, Luce. Do you think you can do it again?”
She seemed surprised to be asked. “I don’t know. Maybe. She was really upset and I think she’s on some kind of drugs-tranquilized.” She shook her head. “I still don’t understand why Haneb would steal an egg from her.”
“Maybe she got that wrong.”
Lucinda frowned. “She seemed pretty certain. But he wouldn’t do that, would he? He’s so nice.”
Tyler shrugged. “Who knows? We’re leaving in a couple of days and we’re not going to figure everything out by then.” He saw her expression. “Yes, even I admit it. We’re not going to solve all the riddles-not this time. These
