BRAZZA FLEW SMOOTHLY, KEEPING TO the edges of the city traffic. She moved up and down between the flying-drone lane markers and flapped with a steady beat that made riding a pleasure. Abel enjoyed the peace and calm as he let her stretch her wings.

The sun was dipping in the sky, lighting the clouds brilliant orange against crisp blue. The silhouettes of high-flying long-wings sliced this way and that as the medium- and short-wing traffic bustled around them. Other dragons roared and screeched in traffic, but Brazza flew steady and silent toward the outskirts of the city. She was, Abel thought, not the least bit stubborn or difficult to fly.

Until he tried to make her speed up.

The traffic had thinned as they turned onto a long stretch of open lane, not another dragon around for hundreds of feet above or below. There were nothing but warehouses and vertical farms, all the lane-marking drones hovering in bright green. This was the perfect place to see what kind of racer Brazza could be.

He gave a quick jiggle of her reins, just to warn her something was coming; then he leaned forward so his face was almost against her neck. He squeezed his legs tight and let the reins fall loose.

A well-trained racing dragon knew that loose reins meant it was time for speed. A well-trained racing dragon stretched its neck and plunged forward at the first opportunity. A well-trained racing dragon was a ballistic missile that the best riders simply clung to, doing their best to steer and trust the dragon to do the flying.

Brazza was not well trained.

The moment Abel let the reins loosen, the dragon twisted her head sideways, giving him a look down the length of her neck that reminded him of his mom when he hadn’t cleaned his room after he’d promised that he would. It wasn’t angry or mean, just “disappointed.” He didn’t even have time to apologize or explain, like he would to his mom. In this case, the eight-ton dragon wasn’t interested in words.

Brazza let her flying do the talking.

She rolled her entire body to the right and snapped her wings in sudden fury, flying sideways with her back toward the buildings along the avenue. She was going to scrape Abel out of his saddle like gum from the bottom of a shoe.

“No, Brazza!” Abel shouted, tugging on the reins, trying to straighten her out. He had to slow her down, to regain control.

She ignored him. Abel learned quickly that a ninety-pound boy could not force an eight-ton dragon to do anything it didn’t want to do.

“Please!” he begged.

The buildings beside him rushed past in a blur of glass and stone and steel. He clung as close as he could to Brazza’s neck. If he could have crawled into her mouth at that point, he might’ve found it safer than on her back. He just missed being brained by a flagpole. They zipped so close to a landing platform, he felt his jacket brush against concrete.

“I’m sorry!” he yelled. “Please stop!”

A two-hundred-story soybean farm loomed ahead, the lush green plants stacked atop each other, bursting from vertical irrigation pipes. Abel was a heartbeat from being impaled on them.

Please don’t let me die on a soybean, he prayed. Not on soy.

He’d never been a fan of tofu, even though his parents loved it. He shut his eyes, pictured his mom and dad and Percy. His friends. Lina and Silas too. He thought about how much he’d miss them all. There was so much more living he wanted to do, but this was it. He’d made the wrong dragon angry, and it was over for Abel.

Just before a fatal impact with the farm, Brazza looped straight up, sparing him … sort of.

Abel’s feet pointed at the sky, and he felt like his stomach had fallen into his nose. He was suddenly looking down at the building that had nearly killed him. Time froze. He hovered upside down for a breath; then Brazza dropped like a stone into a sewer, straight for the solar panels on the farm’s roof. She skimmed over them upside down, so close that Abel’s hair streaked their hot surface, even as he clung to the dragon’s neck. He shut his eyes again, feeling the g-forces pulling him from the saddle, pulling his soul from his body.

“I’m sorry!” he repeated. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”

His world lurched, and he was upright again. The wind was no longer pulling his lips from his teeth, and his stomach settled back to its usual spot. Brazza was in the center of the empty avenue once more, gliding along between the green-lit drones with languid flaps. She was smooth as a noodle sliding through broth.

Abel loosened his cramped hands on the reins and unclenched his legs from the sides of her neck. He slumped in the saddle and exhaled, staring up at the orange-and-pink sky, where the first stars were just popping out. He breathed in through his nose and out through his mouth, trying to calm down, slow his heartbeat, and keep from throwing up.

His hands shook, but he had survived. And he’d learned a valuable lesson: Brazza was in charge.

One glance back over his shoulder taught him a second lesson, and this one actually made him smile.

They were very far from where he’d first loosened her reins for speed.

Brazza was fast. Like, really, really fast.

If he could figure out how to train her without getting himself killed, she might just be an unbeatable racer.

That was, at this point, a big if.

He had no idea how to train a racing dragon, but he started to think that might be an advantage. Brazza had no desire to be a racing dragon.

“What took you so long?” Roa asked the moment he’d landed on a crumbling platform halfway up the ruined skyscraper. The sun had set; the city’s neon lights gleamed and blinked like humanity’s own starlight. Roa and Topher were impatient after a long, long wait.

“Brazza has her own pace,” Abel explained. After her deadly burst of speed, she’d decided to fly extra slowly, daring him to try speeding her up. Unlike the dragon pepper sundae, this was a dare he did not take.

“Well, I hope she’s faster in a race, because that took forever,” Topher groaned.

“My parents called, like, four hundred times,” Roa said.

“What’d you tell them?” Abel asked.

“As little as possible. Just that I’d be home late and they needed to trust me. How about yours?”

Abel pulled his phone out to check. He had thirty-seven missed calls. “I just didn’t answer,” he said meekly.

“Brave,” Roa grunted. “You better call them back.”

“Your parents are chill, though,” Abel said. “My parents will want to, like, get involved.”

“They were helpful the last time we had a dangerous dragon and a kin battle to fight,” Roa reminded him. “And your mom does work at a feed plant. I’m not sure how else we’re gonna find food for Brazza.”

They all looked around the empty space, windows broken and open to the autumn air. The paint had peeled from the walls, and whole sections of the floor and ceiling had collapsed. At some point, squatters had lived here and built fires that left round scorch marks on the floor. Someone had spray-painted the laughing dragon symbol of the Wind Breakers kin on a few support pillars. Someone else had painted a large mural of a fancy ball, but instead of people all dressed up in expensive clothes, it was dragons.

Other than vandalism, artwork, and time’s decay, the building was empty.

They all looked at the colorful dragon, who had shimmied out of her advertisement disguise and proceeded to shred it with her long gray claws. She sat on her haunches now, head rising above the broken ceiling and resting her chin on an exposed steel beam. Her back legs were splayed open at odd angles, and her belly was thrust forward. Abel had never seen a dragon sit that way. It was not a flattering look.

“You hungry?” Abel asked.

The dragon rested her front claws on the steel beam on either side of her face and licked her lips. She’d looked small next to the larger and better-fed dragons on the sales floor of the Burning Market, but on the eighty-seventh floor of a ruined skyscraper, she looked huge and she looked hungry.

“What do you think she eats?” Abel asked.

Roa studied the dragon, poking their tongue from the side of their mouth as they thought. That was Roa’s thinking face, ever since they were little kids. Their eyes darted up and down and side to side over Brazza’s scales and wings and claws. They studied her tail and her horns, her snout and her eyes.

Brazza twitched, then leaned her neck way down to meet Roa’s gaze and did the same inspection to them. Roa didn’t flinch. They just nodded and let themself be inspected.

“Fair’s fair,” Roa said, opening their arms so the dragon could get a better look. Brazza seemed to like that. She spread her wings for Roa to see.

The two spent a long time studying one another.

“So … any ideas?” Topher’s patience for the long silence ran out. He was not a boy who did quiet waiting very well.

“A lot of ideas,” Roa said.

The dragon snorted and rested her head back on the beam. “She’s got the snout shape and the horns of Steelwing, but her wings are shaped like a Reaper’s. They’re too long for her body, and they aren’t even with each other. Her shoulder muscles look more like a wyvern’s, but she has four legs, not two, and she’s smaller than a wyvern, so all that extra muscle must give her more power. Her scales are octagonal, which makes me think of a Drake, but her coloring is like a cross between a Widow Maker, a Moss dragon, and a Goatmouth. Maybe with a touch of Steelwing and Blue Foot in there somewhere.”

“Okay, so she’s a mutt,” Topher said. “We knew that.”

“The problem is, some of the breeds I just mentioned are charivores, only eating food they’ve burned; some only eat live prey; and one of them is a vegetarian.”

“So we test it out,” Topher suggested. “Call your mom and tell her to bring a little of everything.”

Abel had pulled out his phone, but his thumb hovered over his mom’s number. Could he really ask her to endanger her job?

“If we offer the wrong food, she might get offended,” Roa said.

“So we apologize.” Topher shrugged. “I offend people all the time.”

“We know,” Abel and Roa said simultaneously.

“If she gets offended, we say sorry and do better next time,” Topher explained. “That’s my approach. If we’re sincere and actually do better, can she really stay mad?”

“She doesn’t need to stay mad,” Abel said. “She could kill us all even if she’s only mad for a second.” He shuddered at the memories of the soy farm looming up at him and the solar panels streaking by. “Also, I really don’t want to get my parents involved. Silas and Lina might not care when they put our family in danger, but I do. Someone’s got to look out of for my mom and dad.”

“But they’re the adults!” Topher threw his hands up in the air.

“Exactly,” Abel said. “They have their own problems. They don’t even know that Lina’s in jail. They still think she’s on the run. I won’t add to their problems.” He put his phone away. “I saw a noodle shop a few blocks away. Roa, why don’t you use some of the money you won at DrakoTek and order … everything. Get it delivered, then tip really well so they keep quiet.” He turned back to Brazza. “We’re gonna get you a ton of noodles and stuff,” he said. “Maybe you’ll like some of it? Spicy miso ramen?”

The dragon cocked her head at him.

“And if you don’t like it, we’ll do better tomorrow,” he added.

She rested her head on her paws, blinked at him. Her expression was inscrutable.

“What is she saying?” Topher asked.

“I don’t know,” Abel said. “Her expression is—”

“Inscrutable,” Roa said.

“Yeah,” Abel agreed. He looked back up at Brazza. “I know you understand me,” he told her. “The thing is, it’s late and we have to get home. So … um … we’re gonna get this food and then leave you to rest. But we’ll be back. You’re not our prisoner, okay? If you fly off and leave tonight, we won’t stop you. But if you’re still here tomorrow afternoon, we’d be pretty happy.” He looked at his friends, then back to the dragon. “And please don’t try to kill any of us?”

The dragon dropped onto all four of her legs, coming down so hard that the floor shook and dust rained down all over Abel. She sneezed. The sudden burst of wind and dragon snot knocked Abel off his feet and slid him back in a streak across the dusty floor. He was gonna have a bruise on his backside. Another one.

When he looked up, Brazza’s head loomed over him, lips curled to show her jagged teeth. Some were longer than Abel’s entire body. He did his best not to flinch. He really hoped he hadn’t just made a wild miscalculation about what the dragon understood.

After a single heartbeat that felt like a year, Brazza’s pink tongue shot out and licked him from the tips of his shoes to the top of his head. She cleaned the dust off like he was a hatchling freshly popped from the egg. It was a sopping, sticky sign of affection, but it was a sign of affection.

“Noodles it is, then,” he said, dripping dragon drool.

After the food arrived and they tipped the delivery rider double the cost of the huge meal (which was already a lot), they left Brazza to claw through the bags and cartons.

Abel and his friends said their goodbyes, then made their long and winding ways on the public buses, bound for home.

Abel didn’t know he was being followed, but he’d find out soon.