“We were supposed to find you?” I asked, recovering my words.
“Yes. I was in a cell across the building.” It moved closer, its elbows pointed outward and its paws inelegantly dragging along the floor until it stood in front of Rainbow Hazel’s cell. Red and I edged back. “Recent events allowed me to break out. Forgive me for not awaiting your rescue. I was very uncomfortable.”
I’d never heard an apology so accusatory.
“The note said you’re supposed to have answers?”
“Oh, yes. Those.” It glanced at me sideways. Its scaly, alien mouth twitched into something resembling a smile. “That’s my favorite part. I suppose all of you should be here to listen to it, though. I hate repeating myself.” It looked back at Rainbow in the cell. She’d been plastered to the back wall, but now slowly approached, her eyes round and flitting up and down and side to side to take in every part of the dragon. It studied her right back, murmuring, “It’ll be interesting dealing with this many of you.”
Rainbow said something inaudible. The dragon lifted a paw, tapped the window, and dragged one claw along the surface of the glass to draw a half circle. I clamped my ears to shut out the screeching of claw on glass.
The bottom half of the circle was made up by the metal window frame. The dragon dragged its nail parallel to it. All it took was a tap after that, and the glass half circle dropped into the cell with a crack.
Rainbow stepped slowly forward.
“If I wanted to eat someone,” the dragon told her, “I would take the two who are out here already.”
Rainbow took a blanket from the ground and placed it on the window frame, where blocky bits of glass still protruded. She stuck her arms through, then her head, her glasses hanging crooked. By the time she’d made it through to her belly button, she eyed us and said, “Help?”
Red and I didn’t get the chance. The dragon exhaled wearily—steam rising from its nose—and bent its head. Rainbow froze. Gently, it nipped the back of her shirt, then lifted her up and out into the hallway.
She stood shakily on her feet. “Thank. You?”
The dragon inclined its head. “You’re welcome.”
Rainbow met the dragon’s eyes, then ours. She adjusted her glasses. “Where am I?” She kept her voice impressively steady.
“West Asherton,” I said. “Just . . . not your West Asherton.”
She stared at the dragon again. “I was starting to suspect that.”
“Dragons actually, um, aren’t normal here, either.”
“Oh.”
The dragon sniffed. “Thankfully. I would pity whatever sibling of mine had to live in this dimension. No offense.”
“Dimension,” Rainbow repeated. “What is happening?”
“Well, we’re not dreaming.” Red’s smile trembled. She fisted a clump of her dress. “I think.”
“I got that far. I’ve been stuck in that cell nearly an hour.”
The dragon sniffed again. “We ought to leave.”
The four of us walked down the hallway, Red and I quietly filling in Rainbow on what little we knew, and vice versa. Like Red, Rainbow didn’t have a rift in her world; she’d been out to dinner for her birthday (not at Franny’s Food) and the next thing she knew, she was on a gray mat in the rift barn.
“I think I saw that rift.” Rainbow was dazed, but not as badly as Red had been. She kept swallowing visibly—sometimes audibly—and looking around with uncertain eyes, but that was the extent of it. “Everything was blurry, at first, but I saw something over me, unclear and flashing . . . and there was a voice through a speaker. I don’t remember what it said. Not long after that, two people came in and helped me up. They wore these big hazmat suits. They took me into another building. They knew my name. They asked what I’d seen. They wouldn’t answer my questions. They just kept saying I was in America, I was with the government, and I was safe. Then they put me in that cell, telling me to rest and they’d come back later to explain everything. They seemed rushed. Next thing I know, the lights go out, people are running past, and eventually you two show up.”
“Neither of you saw other Hazels?” the dragon asked.
Rainbow and Red shook their heads.
The dragon’s claws tapped on the floor as it walked.
I had lived a lifetime of being at the center of our government’s—our world’s—best-kept secret. I dreamed every night about what the rift might mean and where it might lead to. While I’d never considered this particular scenario, I had imagined ones far worse and far stranger.
So why didn’t I feel like I could handle this?
For the first time in sixteen years, the situation had changed. That had to be a good thing. That had to mean answers. It couldn’t mean what every part of me feared it meant: that the rift had been a sixteen-year warning. A sparking wall outlet. An unsteady stair. A crumbling dam. The rift might have been leading up to something all this time, and we’d failed to realize. Now that moment was here, and we were so underprepared we might as well have been blindfolded.
Every day, every minute, I felt like I was missing something vital that’d bring everything crashing down on us.
I never wanted to be right.
We exited the building. The other Hazels and I leaped over the closed security gate while the dragon barged right through it, bowling over the port and gate and practically stampeding out into the night. Its wings snapped open, stretching to their full length, all gnarly brown-gray spines and leathery membrane between. The dragon tossed its head back. It breathed in deeply, its mouth half open.
“That cell,” it said upon catching our stares, “was very uncomfortable.”
“How long were you . . .?” I asked.
“Every second in a cell is a second too long.”
The dragon stretched its legs and extended and flexed its neck. Its scales caught the light of the moon and the surrounding fire. Emerald shimmered across its dry skin,
