I stared at the ball the dragon had just thrown up.
“No way,” Adri breathed.
Luna shrieked, sprinting forward.
There, inside the life-sized, slime-covered bubble ball was a slim, studious boy with dreadlocks and cracked, blue-rimmed glasses.
“Bogle!” Luna ran toward him.
Joy ran through me, then concern. How long had he been in this hamster ball in the dragon’s stomach? Thankfully, through the clear plastic, he seemed okay.
Luna grabbed a knife from her belt and started cutting him loose.
As if on cue, the dragon coughed again, spitting up a second ball. In it, was a tall muscular boy with 248perfectly coiffed hair.
“Shui Li!” Luna cried, using her knife to free them both.
Adri held back. I figured he wasn’t sure how they would respond, since he’d betrayed them back at the Ostrich Labs.
I ran over to help them, just in time to hear the whir of tiny wings.
Suddenly, Martí was standing next to me, as her own girl self, helping Luna to break open the thick plastic, ventilated with small holes, wrapped around Bogle and Shui Li.
The dragon seemed out of it, at least for the moment. It had thrown up a lot for one day.
To my surprise, Luna grabbed Bogle, Shui Li, Martí and me in a huge, all-encompassing hug.
Adri kept one eye on the dragon and one eye on Bogle, who gave him a ‘Don’t-think-I-forget-you’ frown.
“Martí!” I stuttered, “we thought you were gone!”
“No,” she answered with a mischievous grin. “Just looking for weaknesses inside that thing! Then I found these guys and had to get them out.”
Shui Li bent over trying to catch his breath, but 249Bogle was scanning the stadium, field, columns, and crowd – all scattered with trash and the remains of different machines.
“I have an idea,” he offered.
Already? He’d just been half-digested. What could he possibly have in mind?
Before I could find out, Luna grabbed the front of my shirt. “Esme and Kendi, remember?” She pointed over to the other side of the field, at their not-so-great hiding place.
“Right!” I grabbed up the small discs I’d collected from the backpacks and rushed back over to where they were.
“Mm, still here! Thanks for asking,” Esme growled accusingly, but Kendi focused on what I had in my hands.
“Give me,” he said and began clicking the discs open into shields.
They could expand to different sizes, but fully opened, each shield was wide and tall enough to cover most of us from the knees up.
With Esme’s help, we attached them one to the other, in a honeycomb shape, by their magnetic undersides: the part that would normally attach to 250our wristbands.
Soon, Esme and Kendi were behind a wall made of shields, blocking the way into the trash pile. There was just one loose end: I was still outside.
“Okay,” Esme grudgingly approved, “now get in!”
“Stay still,” I shushed her from the other side of the wall, camouflaging it with more trash.
Just as I was finishing, Esme gurgled something I couldn’t make out, but I heard Kendi yell, “Duck!”
I did and felt something ‘Whoosh!’ over me, barely missing my head. I scrambled back against the outside of the shield wall, to see a metal dragon the size of a pigeon rise up in the air.
Across the field, in front of my eyes, the dragon was falling apart. Or was it? No. It was splitting itself up into smaller flying and crawling creatures, each with its own head, legs, and in some cases, arms, tails, and wings. Each of the creatures was unique in its shape and parts. Some seemed quite beautiful as they curled out toward us – a miniature work of trash art – but they all had threatening teeth and claws.
Their sudden appearance sent the machine-crowd wild. The air filled with sounds: clacking, clamouring, baying, banging, wheezing, tapping, 251crunching, clicking, popping, booming, hissing, whistling and more.
Shui Li, Luna, Martí and Adri danced back-to-back in whirling and shifting pairs, using their powers of water, light, metamorphosis, and martial arts, to fight the swarm of mini creatures all around them.
But wait. Where was Bogle?
I didn’t have time to worry about him for long. The pigeon-sized dragon and a couple of its friends flew toward me, ready to strike.
“Zo!” Esme warned.
“Yup! I see!” I grabbed a metal stick from the nearby trash, but I was no match for all of the mini dragons.
As they closed in, I heard a scream like a war cry.
It was Kendi, of all people, bursting out from the fortress we’d built, with a shield in his hands. Esme ran beside him and they both roared at the top of their lungs.
What was Kendi screaming?
“Shields! Shields!”
Right. I grabbed up one next to me and braced for the creatures’ attack.
Weirdly, Kendi and Esme’s shields were the wrong 252way around, with the inner sides facing out. I didn’t have time to figure out why.
Snap! Bang! The small metal dragon slammed into Kendi’s shield, but once there, it seemed strangely stuck, talons clawing the air.
The same thing happened to a three-tailed, sharp-toothed metal manicou stuck onto Esme’s shield.
Then I saw what Kendi had figured out without the rest of us.
“Magnets!” he shouted, giving a gap-toothed grin I had never seen before.
The back of each shield was magnetic. These creatures were made of metal. It was an irresistible combination.
“Guys! Trap them on the other side of the shields!” Kendi called out in a ringing voice I didn’t even know he had.
“Heads up!”
Esme and I grabbed as many shields as we could from the wall we’d built and tossed them to the other kids. They grabbed the rest from their backpacks.
Bang! Ping! Splat! All around the arena, the small but dangerous creatures came sliding and sticking onto the magnetic side of the shields. 253
The trash-machines in the crowd were too far from us and too large to be sucked in by magnets, but they registered their protests with boos and horns.
I ignored them, as more of the mini dragons and other creatures from the former dragon’s parts, slithered, skittered, and flew toward us.
There were so many of them. Soon, our shields were covered. We couldn’t trap them all.
Esme, Kendi and I ran to join the others. The seven of us formed a circle facing outward, with broken pieces of metal, sticks, ropes, trash, backpacks, and anything we could grab, in our hands. The remaining metal-mites, as I was calling them now in my head, closed in on us with rattling tails and snapping jaws.
This was it. Our last stand.
Then, out of nowhere, Bogle jumped between them and us, spraying fire from his mouth and hands. Wait. What? I squeezed my eyes closed and opened them again. Bogle, with his gift of seeing the world in a different way and making inventions from the things around him, had found the parts and fuel in this trash-field to make two massive fire blowers.
He used them now to great effect, blasting the incoming metal creatures with red-hot flames. 254
“Down!” he shouted as we cheered.
We hit the ground as he threw one of the fire-blowers to Luna and they went to town, warding off the creatures. Soon, the stadium erupted in chaos. Some of the metal-mites weren’t made only of metal, but pieces of plastic, unrecycled glass and paper as well. These parts lit on fire and, as the mites flew wildly into the stands, they spread fire through the trash-machine crowd.
Fire-alarms blared, and lights flashed as trash-machines and metal-mites rushed madly for the exits, ignoring Cap’n Peg’s disembodied voice on the loudspeaker repeating, “This is an emergency. Kindly proceed in an orderly fashion to the nearest exit.”
When none of the machines seemed to listen, but instead were crawling, flying, climbing, and scrambling across the seats and up the aisles, the tone of Cap’n Peg’s announcement quickly shifted.
“Kindly proceed … Okay, fine. I done eh! I tell you to proceed in ah orderly fashion to the nearest exit. But if you want to run like mad ants, run!”
“Yay!” we cheered as trash-machines rushed for the exits. Esme and Martí high-fived each other and I gave Adri a huge hug. He hugged me back, shaking 255with exhaustion. Only Kendi and Shui Li were quiet.
Luna and Bogle sprayed fire, laughing. The dragon was gone; the metal-mites toast. The trash-machines were fleeing the stadium. Finally, after all these losses, we’d won.
With a ‘shhhhh’, sprinklers went off in the stands and on the field, but the fire still raged out of control.
“Guys,” Shui Li interrupted, “They’re getting hurt.”
Bogle and Luna stopped blasting the fire-throwers, as we looked up into the stands. The cheers died in my throat.
All around us and in the stands, machines were limping, falling, and bursting into flames.
“It’s not stopping,” Kendi whispered as the fire spread.
We needed to get out quickly, before there was no way out.
“The tunnel!” I shouted, but nobody moved.
I took in what they were seeing.
The trash-machines were in a panic in the stands. I could see their terror as they tried to escape the blazing heat and thick, belching smoke. Their cries sounded like animals caught in a trap.
The look on our faces changed from triumph to 256shame. Bogle and Luna dropped the fire-throwers from their hands under Kendi’s clear-eyed gaze.
“We have to do something,” Esme whispered.
“Claro,” Martí agreed, looking to Luna for answers.
“But what?” Kendi asked.
Adri nodded. Luna looked lost.
I didn’t know what to do. Things had gotten way out of control.
“Already on it,” a confident voice broke in.
We turned to see Shui Li standing quietly in the middle of the arena, not caring about the sprinklers messing up his hair. He closed his eyes and slowly raised his hands on either side of his chest, palms up, fingers open, as if about to give a gift, or receive one.
For a second, nothing happened. Then there was a rumbling under the stadium. The ground shook. And the sprinklers burst open into geysers. Water rushed up from underground pipes and even, it seemed, from aquifers deep below the surface.
We looked around, amazed. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
Shui Li kept his eyes closed and his hands open, calling the water to him. Water shot up into the air from the field and raced down the stands. Water upon 257water, running on every side, putting the fires out.
“Shui!” After a while, Luna’s voice snapped us to high alert.
Shui Li’s eyes flew open. With the fire gone, the remaining machines had quickly exited the stadium. Those who couldn’t move were airlifted out by the helicopter-like drones that had brought Adri and I here.
But no one came for us …
Standing there, surrounded by the high smooth walls around the field and the towering rows of stands, it hit us that the arena was shaped like a fishbowl, and we were at the bottom of it.
I looked around with fear fluttering in my throat. This fishbowl was filling water.
“Make it stop!” Adri shouted as water rushed past our legs and started rising.
Shui Li looked around helplessly. “I can’t!”
As if a dam outside of the stadium had broken in answer to Shui Li’s gift, water rushed over the sides of the arena, down the stands and onto the field. Water blasted through the tunnel with a vengeance. There was nowhere left to go.
“Hold on to something!” Esme called out, as the 258water reached my waist, then my chest.
We each tried to grab something around us that could help keep us afloat, but there weren’t that many options. Adri swam over to help Kendi, as we all began to tread water.
Was the Council really going to leave us here? It seemed so. There was no Yara, or Cap’n Peg to be seen. The entire arena was deserted.
I looked down as the water kept rising. We could no longer touch the bottom.
“We have to get out of here,” Adri warned, “now!”
He was right, but how?
Esme looked gently at Luna and a shadow fell over her face.
My thoughts sank. We were going to drown. It was only a matter of time.
I thought about my parents, like I had over the last few days, wondering if they even realized I was gone. Or was Ms. K keeping that under wraps as well while they were away, just like she’d hidden the Council’s spyglass for me to find? Maybe she’d told them that I was in one of my moods and didn’t want to talk with them, every time they called to see if I was okay.
Sadly, from the way I’d been behaving, I could see 259why they would believe her.
So many secrets. I felt sick to my stomach. If I never came back, they wouldn’t even know what had really happened to me. What lie would she tell them then? That I’d gone swimming in the Bocas and drowned? I thought of Tayo growing up without his big sister, of Jake never realizing that I thought he was cool, of Mum and Da not knowing who I really was.
I bit back the tears. Why add to the water all around me?
“You’re bigger than this Zo,” my Mum would say years ago when she, Da and I were still together, and it was just us … On mornings, I would wait, fidgeting, for her to come back from an extra-long, overnight painting session in her studio. I’d barely eat the breakfast Da had made before leaving for work in the wee hours of the morning. And when Mum appeared, rushing in with her drawn face and dark circles under her eyes, I would pretend that I was angry she was late, when I was really just relieved that she had come back.
I’d be there, tossing my schoolbag on my back when she came through the door. And I would want to say, “I know you and Da are arguing all the time 260now and I’m scared.”
But instead, I’d screw up my face. “Great. Late again!”
Mum would be in her overalls stained with paint. She’d smile sadly and say, “I’m sorry Z,” and pretend to dab a bit of blue on my nose.
“You know love,” she’d whisper, her eyes trying to find mine, “we’re bigger than this.”
But were we? Was I? In the end, they’d gotten a divorce. Da was working and living far away. Then Mum and Jake met and I had a new brother, Tayo.
Endings and beginnings … I tried to snap myself out of my thoughts.
Smoke wafted through the stadium. The wall that separated the field from the stands was still too high and steep to climb, while water kept rising around us in the sunken arena. We were trapped.
Shui Li was still trying to use his power to make the water stop flowing, but I could see from his face that he was spent. No one, not even Esme, was talking. Everyone used their energy to tread water. Adri was helping Kendi as best he could. It didn’t look like we were going to make it.
“Just because something’s over, doesn’t mean it’s 261the end,” I could hear Da say. “Come on, Zo, don’t give up.”
But I was tired of swimming; tired of trying to stay afloat.
I could see that the others were tired too. None of us could last much longer.
Unexpectedly, we were arrested by the most beautiful sound, like songbirds calling each other home at dusk.
I spun around in shock. It was coming from Kendi. As Adri helped him stay above the water, he was singing.
We all stared at Kendi with our mouths half-open: this skinny, blue-black, beautiful boy, singing past his fear and ours.
Esme was the one who saw them first.
“Look!” she cried.
I blinked at her, confused. Then I looked up and saw them coming: a phalanx of birds flying our way.
“Kendi, you called them!” Luna and Bogle shouted.
“¡Eso, pano!” Martí swam over to pound Kendi’s back, nearly choking him.
Adri held him up, tiredness slipping from his face.
I waved my arms like an air traffic controller, 262calling “Here! Over here!”
Kendi scanned the sky: his eyes gleaming like stars. “I kept calling, but I didn’t know if there were any birds around here. I didn’t know if they could hear me.”
“But what are they carrying?” Luna murmured.
Beneath the birds was a golden light.
As they drew closer, we could see the cloud of birds of all shapes and sizes, holding ropes in their beaks and feet. The ropes were tied to a thin golden shape – the outline of a dragon in flight: another Dragon Door.
Our joy and relief mixed with fear.
The birds stopped overhead; their wings beating the air like fans. Still holding on to the ropes, they lowered the door gently toward us. It was taller and wider than all of us.
Inside the glowing dragon outline was a shimmering, shifting mist. It was this or stay in the water.
Together, we swam toward the door and clambered in.