Lucinda didn’t stay to answer their questions-she was terrified that Mrs. Needle might appear. She thanked the women and headed out toward the Sick Barn. Things were getting more confused every moment. What was she supposed to do if she couldn’t find Ragnar? Wake up Gideon so he could learn there were strangers on the property? Including the Carrillo kids, one of whom had apparently fallen through a mirror and into the Fault Line?
She could feel the unhappiness of Meseret in her head while she was still fifty yards away from the Sick Barn. The dragon was making a strange, low groaning that Lucinda had never heard before. The first waves of Meseret’s powerful thoughts, just beginning to wash over Lucinda’s mind, were almost incoherent-in no recognizable form except anguish and fury.
NO NO NO NO NO NO NO…!
Lucinda hesitated at the door of the immense concrete cylinder, suddenly afraid to step inside. It was like walking into a blazing oven of unhappy emotions.
“Ragnar?” she called, but no one answered. “Ragnar? Mr. Walkwell?”
She stepped through the door. She could see the dragon’s back as the monster writhed in her pen, the restraints creaking as they stretched. A shape in a white hooded safety suit was standing at the edge of the pen, aiming a rifle at Meseret’s vast, shuddering bulk.
“Stop!” Lucinda shrieked. “What are you doing? Don’t shoot her!” She ran toward the pen. The figure turned its faceless plastic-shielded head toward her for a moment, waved violently at her to stay back, then turned to the dragon again and pulled the trigger. Lucinda couldn’t even hear the sound of the gun firing over the dragon’s groaning, and nothing seemed to happen: Meseret still struggled on, her thoughts flooding Lucinda’s head in a meaningless roar of upset.
NO NO NO…!
Haneb pulled off the hood. His black hair was lank with sweat, his scarred face full of amazement and fear. “Get back! She is dangerous! I give her medicine to sleep!”
“Medicine?” She turned to look at the dragon and saw a clump of feathers wagging on Meseret’s near haunch, so red it was almost orange under the bright fluorescent lights. “Is that… a dart?” She could feel the chaos of the dragon’s thoughts begin to calm a little.
“To make her sleep, yes! But stay back. Half hour until she sleeps, maybe an hour.”
The dragon groaned again, this one a sound that was almost human in its misery. Her thoughts, perhaps because of the sedative, were clear enough now for Lucinda to understand.
EGG THIEF RUNS! EGG GOES AWAY… GOING NOW… FLY, FLY!
Lucinda turned on Haneb. “She’s upset about her egg again. What did you do to her? Why does she think you stole it?”
Haneb’s look of dismay turned to something deeper-an expression of utter panic. “She speaks to you?”
“What did you do? Why does she hate you so much?”
He took a few steps back. If this had been a vampire movie, Lucinda felt sure, he would have been flashing his crucifix at her. Then, to her astonishment, the little man began to weep.
“I did not want!” he cried. “I did not want take the egg! Please do not tell Mr. Gideon! Mr. Colin make me take!”
Meseret groaned and thrashed. Her head snaked around on her long neck as she began to bite at her restraints. If she was about to fall unconscious, Lucinda thought, she was doing a pretty good job of not showing it. She turned back to Haneb, who had fallen to his knees. “What do you mean, Colin made you?”
“He want egg. He made me take it or he tell Gideon I sneak out to the town one day. Just to look! But Colin say Gideon send me back to where I come from if I don’t help him. Now the great she-dragon wants to kill me!” He was so upset she could hardly understand him, and the pounding of Meseret’s thoughts in her skull wasn’t making it any easier, but she was beginning to get the point.
“You mean Colin has the egg? It didn’t get stolen by the other dragon-by Alamu?”
But Haneb wasn’t talking anymore. He had buried his face in his hands and was sobbing.
Now the dragon began to fight even harder. EGG! her thoughts bellowed. TAKING AWAY NOW! STEALING! And with the ideas a sort of vision came into Lucinda’s head-of a hunched, slightly glowing shape moving through the dark, not so much seen as sensed, like the night vision option on that combat game of Tyler’s. But the object that the glowing figure carried glowed more brightly still-an egg-shaped smear of warmth.
It’s happening right now, Lucinda realized. She can sense someone taking her egg away right now!
YES! EGG! Meseret was biting ever more frantically against the restraints, not caring if her teeth dug into her own scaled skin. Blood dribbled down her side, purple-black under the fluorescents. EGG! NOW! The thoughts were still understandable, but wavery, as though they came from beneath water. The sedative might, at last, be starting to take effect, Lucinda decided with relief.
Then one of the heavy restraints, frayed by Meseret’s teeth, snapped with a gunshot noise- Pow! Another went, and then another- Pow! Pow! Pow! -like fireworks. A moment later the dragon had freed enough of herself to get her midsection up over the edge of the pen, bending back the metal fence at the top like it was no more than a cheap spoon stuck in frozen ice cream. Her head stretched over the edge, one of the restraints still flapping like a scarf around her neck. Her red-gold eyes were wide, rolling, and Lucinda gave up any thought of trying to communicate with this many-ton monstrosity. The idea that her stolen egg was somewhere close by had all but driven the dragon mad, and the sedative wasn’t helping much. Lucinda screamed to Haneb, but the little man was crouching, holding his head. He had faced the male dragon bravely, but something about this situation was too much for him. He looked like he was waiting to die.
Still wrapped in torn restraints, Meseret dragged the bulk of her body out of the pen, her long, wing-fringed front legs hunching and stretching as she struggled across the room, knocking over the tables, smashing the equipment. One of the trailing harnesses caught in a set of shelves and the whole thing was yanked off the wall and onto the concrete floor, scattering liquids and broken glass everywhere. The dragon crashed past both Lucinda and Haneb and butted the door of the Sick Barn with her huge head, smashing it off its hinges, but the rest of the door frame and the semi-circular wall was concrete and she could not get past it. She roared in desperate frustration-Lucinda could hear it echoing across the farm.
EGG! EGG! The creature’s thoughts were so furious and powerful that they burned in Lucinda’s head like fire. She bashed at the wall around the broken door like the biggest woodpecker in the universe, but the concrete would not yield even to her great strength. With another bellow of frustration, she turned and headed toward the other end of the Sick Barn.
Lucinda was right in the dragon’s way.
Everything around her seemed to ooze into a stately crawl, like a slow-motion video replay. Only her thoughts were moving quickly. The tranquilizer rifle was gone, buried under debris, and Haneb was still down on the floor-he might even be dead already, felled by flying metal.
Lucinda bent and picked up the box by her foot that said TRANQ. DARTS in large, felt-tipped letters. Underneath it had been written BIG ANIMALS-THIAM, PHENC, SCOP MIX, which she hoped meant the drugs were already in the darts.
Meseret was coming toward her, stripping metal shelves from the wall with her lashing tail, oblivious to anything except the big back door with its metal shutters at the far end of the Sick Barn.
Lucinda reached carefully into the box. There was only one dart left, a cylindrical tube the size of a roll of toilet paper, marked like a hypodermic, with a tail of feathers at one end and a thick needle about four inches long covered with a plastic cap.
Meseret was on top of her, big as a bus and seemingly blind with rage. Lucinda tried hard to keep her eyes open as the monster bore down on her. She held up her trembling hand, ready to try to punch through the ridiculously thick skin with the needle, but at the last moment the dragon swerved around her. Lucinda had only a half second of relief before the remains of Meseret’s restraints whipped over her as the dragon thundered past, knocking the needle from Lucinda’s hand and tangling her in canvas straps.