“EXCUSE ME?” ABEL CALLED TO the old man. “Mr. Voorhees?”
He didn’t respond. A large magenta Infernal with one wing medical-taped to its body poked its head out of a stall and snorted sparks that showered the old man. Otto swatted at them without waking up, and the long-wing dragon lowered its head again, having lost interest.
“I’m not sure this guy is gonna be of much help,” Roa suggested.
“I’m not sure these dragons are either,” Topher said. In the second stall, a saggy-winged lump of gray scales with a mop of gray fur between its horns shook the floor with its snoring.
“EXCUSE ME!” Abel shouted. For added effect, he banged on the old guy’s hand-painted sign.
“Huh? What’s the noise, eh?” The old man wheezed, one eye popping open under his bushy eyebrows. The other eye followed like it was running to catch up. “Who is it? Godfrey? You back with the noodles?”
“Um, no, er, Mr. Voorhees,” Abel said. “I’m … uh … I mean, like, we’re here to—”
“Huh? No noodles? What?” It seemed like Otto Voorhees couldn’t hear very well.
“NO NOODLES!” Abel shouted. “I’M HERE TO BUY A DRAGON! SILAS SENT ME!”
“Lower your voice, boy!” The old man popped to his feet like a sprung spring, leaping the distance between them and pressing a papery palm over Abel’s mouth. His other hand wrapped around the back of Abel’s neck with alarming strength. “Not wise to shout your business around this place, got it?”
Abel nodded. The man removed his hand from Abel’s mouth, then released him and stepped back, straightening his frayed purple blazer.
Otto was much larger than he’d looked in his chair, and younger too. He had a shock of salt-and-pepper hair on his head, pointing in all directions, and his outfit was an odd mix of castoffs—a purple blazer paired with a black silk shirt and green tuxedo pants. His face had deep lines, but they looked like the kind that came from living hard, not living long.
A neck tattoo of a dragon wrapped around a stack of books suggested membership in a long-forgotten kin, and the big scar on his forehead suggested the kin was better off forgotten. He had the letters “RIDEFIRE” tattooed across his knuckles in faded blue ink. Abel had seen that tattoo on long-haul pilots who flew Goliaths across the Glass Flats.
How in the world did Silas know this man?
“So little Silas sent you?” Otto asked with a wheezing laugh. Calling Silas “little” made Abel smile. His brother would not like it. Abel couldn’t wait to tell him. “I wondered when he’d call in the debt I owe.”
“Wait, you owe Silas?” Abel found that hard to believe. What could this tattooed old dragon dealer owe Silas, of all people?
“He got me out of a jam some years back,” Otto said. “I was a riding instructor at the Academy, and I was … well … borrowing supplies to sell to, er …” He looked around the market like he was searching for a word in the high rafters where smaller dragons perched. “Neighborhood organizations.”
“You were stealing,” Roa said flatly. “And selling the stuff to the kins.”
Otto shrugged. “Teaching doesn’t pay much, kid, and I liked to bet on the races. Anyway, Silas was only twelve years old at the time, but that little scamp caught me. Rather than turn me in, he suggested I resign quietly, and that I remember to whom I owed my freedom. The boy told me that one day he was going to be an officer, and that he might need a man like me to do him an unsavory favor. What kind of a kid talks that way?”
“Silas,” Abel said, unsurprised by his brother’s devious planning. Still, Abel was kind of impressed that Silas hadn’t always been such a stickler for the rules.
The old man looked between Abel and his friends. “So who in the flames of Friday are you three supposed to be?”
“Doesn’t matter who we are. We’re here to buy a racing dragon from you,” Abel said. “The fastest you’ve got.”
The old dragon rider sucked his teeth and locked eyes with Abel. Then he cracked his R knuckle, then the I, D, and E ones. Before he made it to FIRE on the other hand, however, he burst out laughing.
“Why didn’t you say so?! I know I have a racing dragon in here somewhere! Maybe I left it in my other jacket! Ha ha ha!” He slapped the pockets of his blazer theatrically. “Oh, that’s good! I never took Silas for a joker, but this is a good one …” Otto waved his hands dismissively and went back to his little seat, putting his feet up on the rickety table, where he kept an old-fashioned ledger book and a mug of pens. The mug said: A KNIGHT SLAYED MY HOMEWORK. “Tell him he got me. This was a good one.”
“I’m serious,” Abel said just as Otto’s chair tipped too far and he toppled backward onto the big magenta dragon. The Infernal opened one eye and grunted out tiny blue flames from its nostrils but then went back to sleep.
Otto popped to his feet and brushed himself off. A few shifty-looking shoppers at other stalls glanced in his direction, then returned to their business. Though some, Abel noticed, kept looking over their way.
Abel double-checked that Roa and Topher were still standing behind him, watching his back. He didn’t want a surprise snapdragon wedgie from one of these people pretending to be a customer. Nor did he want a knife in the spine.
Calm down, Abel, he told himself. You’re catastrophizing again. There are tens of millions of people in the city. You’re not special. No one knows who you are.
“You’re Abel, aren’t you?” the old man said. “Silas’s little brother? The one who beat all the kins in a battle and let that Sunrise Reaper go free last spring?”
Okay, this guy knows who you are, Abel thought. He really didn’t like when his catastrophizing leapt out of his head and into the real world.
“Look, mister, I have money,” he said, with more confidence than he rightly should’ve given the small amount of money he actually had. “And Silas said you’d help me. But I guess I can tell him you thought it was all a joke. I’m sure he’d find that funny. You know he has a great sense of humor.”
The old rider raised a bushy eyebrow. They both knew Silas had no sense of humor.
“You’ve got money?”
“Mm-hmm,” Abel replied with as neutral a tone as he could.
Real racing dragons could cost tens of thousands of dollars. Even hundreds of thousands! With his $567, he knew one of Otto’s motley menagerie was the best he could do; he just hoped it was enough.
“Well then, kiddos, meet the finest legacy dragons your money can buy!” He gestured broadly at the row of stalls behind him.
The magenta Infernal finally opened both eyes but didn’t lift its head. The lump of gray in the next stall stayed fast asleep. Abel couldn’t see into the rest of the stalls, so he had to walk forward to check them out.
“What’s a legacy dragon?” Topher asked.
“It’s a euphemism,” Roa told him before Otto could answer.
“Oh, right, of course,” said Topher. Then, after a breath, he asked, “What’s a euphemism?”
“A euphemism is when you use a nicer word than the one you actually mean,” Roa said. “Like, saying ‘borrowing’ when you mean ‘stealing.’ ‘Legacy’ here, I think, means ‘worn out.’ ”
The old man snorted. “I pride myself on giving even the lowliest dragon a chance at rehabilitation. Surely, you, Roa, can appreciate that.”
Roa froze. Otto knew who they were too and that they loved dragons—even the lowliest, most worn-out ones. How much did this man know about them?
“I think you’ll be interested in this one,” Otto said. He led them to the last stall in his row. They passed a wingless Educational Resource Dragon, the kind that schools used, who was pacing back and forth, and a Rock Reaper who was eating mush from a trough.
“Is that dragon toothless?” Roa asked, somewhat horrified.
“Don’t judge,” Otto snapped at them. “If you lived to nine hundred eighty-four years old, you’d have no teeth either.”
Roa balked. Dragons lived a long time, but none of them had ever seen one that old before. In fact, Abel realized, he’d never seen an elderly dragon at all. He’d also never wondered what became of them when they could no longer work. He thought again about the dragon parts for sale downstairs and shuddered. Better a stall at Otto’s than getting dissected by poachers.
They reached the last stall. Unlike the others, it had a door. Otto unlocked it with a scan of his phone. It slid open with a scraping sound. Flecks of rust fluttered to the floor, but it was dark inside.
There was movement in the darkness. Abel leaned forward to see better, when a face the size of his body lunged from the shadow, a full mouth of fangs open wider than Abel’s whole height.
“Ahh!” He leapt backward into Topher and Roa.
There was a loud THUNK, as Otto tapped his phone, laughing again. The magnetic cuffs on the dragon’s ankles locked it in place on the floor. The dragon was a pink-and-blue short-wing, some kind of combination breed. Its coloring was uneven over its scales, like someone had just tossed the scales on haphazardly. It had bright yellow eyes, and a pair of curled horns that wrapped from its forehead to the underside of its jaw. Its wings were a shocking bright green, folded at its sides, and its tail was long and smooth and ended in a sharp and fearsome hook of pearly white bone. The dragon looked wild, and smart, and deeply unhappy to have visitors.
“Her name’s Brazza,” Otto said. “Don’t know how old she is, but she was a lightweight battler for a few years, judging by the scars on her flank. Until a … friend of mine won her and thought to race her. She was fast but had a bad attitude.”
The dragon snapped her jaws, daring any of them to take a step into her stall.
“I see that,” Abel said.
She opened her mouth like she was snarling and roaring, but no sound came out.
“Oh, and she doesn’t make noise,” Otto explained. “I think she worked for a ring of thieves for a while. Makes sense they’d train silence into her.”
“That’s not right,” Roa whispered. “Dragons shouldn’t be silent.”
“Maybe it’s her choice?” Otto shrugged. “Either way, with the right trainer, she could be a fine racer.” He looked Abel up and down, rubbed his chin as he thought. “And I’d be happy to part with her for, let’s say, two hundred thousand dollars.”
Abel’s heart sank. That was way more than he had or might ever have in his life.
Otto read his body language and sucked his teeth. “Well, since you’re family to Silas, and since you made such a fool of Jazinda Balk and the Red Talons last spring, I suppose I could make some modest concession on price.”
“What does that mean?” Topher cut in.
“It’s another euphemism,” said Roa. “It means he’s willing to negotiate.”
“What are you willing to pay?” Otto asked Abel.
“Three hundred,” Abel tried.
“Three hundred thousand?” Otto laughed. “Kid, you’re not supposed to negotiate yourself to a higher price!”
“No,” said Abel. “I meant three hundred dollars total.”
Otto sighed. He cleared his throat and made a great show of thinking, but he wasn’t a good actor. “How about five hundred and sixty-seven?”
Abel gasped. “You … you knew?”
Otto smiled. “It’s my job to know,” he said.
“Then why go through this whole act with the two hundred thousand?” Abel wondered.
“To see your face!” Otto laughed. “I don’t get a lot of customers. Have to make my own fun.” He pointed into the stall where Brazza still thrashed against the magnetic cuffs, enraged. “You want her or no?”
“One condition,” Abel said. “I have to see if there’s a hope of riding her. If she and I don’t understand each other, there’s no sale.”
He thought back to when he’d first met Karak in an abandoned warehouse. He’d nearly tried to incinerate Abel. It took time for them to trust each other, to become partners.
Not partners.
Friends.
He wondered if he’d be able to befriend a new dragon, if he even wanted to. He felt guilty, like he was betraying Karak’s memory, but what choice did he have? Karak was gone, and Abel needed to race.
“You want a test drive?” Otto bowed, then pointed Abel to the stable. “Be my guest.”
Abel took a deep breath. It was now or never. He had tamed a mighty Sunrise Reaper. He could tame this mixed breed. He would show no fear.
WW3D, he repeated in his head like a mantra. WW3D. What would Dr. Drago do?
He stepped forward into the dragon’s stall, leaving his friends behind. When you faced a dragon, as friend or foe, you faced the dragon alone.
Brazza thrashed against the cuffs that held her feet to the floor, and she opened her mouth wide, right in front of Abel.
He froze, realizing he hadn’t asked if the dragon had a breath weapon or not. He shut his eyes and winced, waiting to be engulfed in flame or ice or broken glass. The thing about mixed breeds of dragon was that you never knew what they could shoot from their mouths. That was part of the reason kinners bred them, and part of the reason it was illegal to breed them. The government had rules about the types of dragons that were allowed to exist; any that fell outside those rules were banned. No one talked about what happened when a banned dragon was caught. Abel feared they ended up in pieces for sale on the fourth floor of the Burning Market. The thought made his skin prickle.
That was a good sign.
His skin wasn’t being fried off by dragon fire. His eyeballs weren’t burned by poison breath, or his bones snapped by jagged shrapnel.
He opened one eye, then the other.
Brazza just stared at him. She’d closed her mouth to watch Abel with slitted eyes. He dared another step toward her, close enough that she could bite his head off if she chose to.
“What are you doing, Abel?” Roa asked.
“Showing her I trust her,” Abel said. Then he sat cross-legged on the floor directly below Brazza’s snout. “And doing something that helps me when I’m in a bad mood.”
Very slowly, he pulled his phone out of his pocket, tapped the screen, and brought up his book.
“It was the night before the great battle, and the Dragon Queen sat with her friends, wondering which would fly through storm and siege and which would fall.”
The dragon listened. Abel read.
He didn’t know if she’d be any good at racing, but he knew he had found his partner.