“GARUK!” THE ALPHA NERD BARKED.

The herd rushed forward. Roa stood their ground and tossed their loop of fabric around its neck. They looked up desperately to the catwalk, where Instructor Ally pushed the stun button. The battery fired, and the alpha screeched, grinding to a halt. The whole herd stopped with it.

Then the alpha roared and flung itself forward, the herd rumbling behind.

“Pheromones!” Roa shouted, as if that word would mean anything to Abel. He closed his eyes and braced himself for the impact of a dozen one-ton bodies covered in steel-hard scales slamming into his ninety-pound frame of fragile flesh. He’d be really bummed out if the last word he ever heard before dying was a word he didn’t even know.

But there was no impact.

Instead, when he opened his eyes, Instructor Ally was on the back of the alpha dragon, both arms wrapped around its neck. She’d used Roa’s fabric loop like reins to steer it away from the students. The other dragons followed. Even though they were only Educational Resource Dragons, not many people could leap from a catwalk onto the back of one and steer it off course mid-charge. Abel wondered if their instructor had been a dragon rider back in her kin days. Had she fought battles through the streets, dodging fire and ice, fleeing the Dragon’s Eye and murderous kinners alike?

Had his teacher been … awesome?

“Climb!” Instructor Ally yelled back at the class.

The students began to scramble up the bars, to get as high off the ground as they could. Tall Andi’s foot slipped, but Short Andi caught her. Abel’s sweating hands had trouble gripping the bars. He dared a glance over his shoulder to where an out-of-control NERD growled, snapping its jaws at him.

He felt himself shoved out of the way, and the NERD bit the bar where he’d just been.

“Careful, dingus,” Topher growled, and pulled him back to his feet. It was weird feeling to have your life saved and to get insulted by the same person simultaneously.

Just then, one of the side doors opened and a tactical squad of Dragon Safety Officers burst in. They had powerful stun sticks and body armor, and some kind of green spray that calmed the NERDs down.

As the spray misted the air, the big lizards sniffed, then purred, then leaned on each other, swaying half-asleep where they stood.

The siege was over.

The kids were sent back to their classroom in their sweaty gym clothes to wait for instructions. They had to walk single file, in silence, under the watchful eyes of the DSOs. The guards stood along the hall every ten feet with their weapons out, glaring at all the kids as they walked past. Down a corridor that one of the officers was blocking off, Abel saw a custodian scrubbing at a huge graffiti tag that covered the face of three lockers: a black-and-white stencil of a laughing dragon.

Abel stepped on Roa’s heel in front of him, so that they glanced back. When they did, Abel bugged his eyes and nodded sideways to the tag.

“Wind Breakers,” they said.

“Quiet!” one of the Dragon Safety Officers barked. The students marched the rest of the way back to their classroom in silence.

When Instructor Ally finally bustled in, she had a bandage on her forehead. “Principal Clayton has sent an alert to all your families. The school is closing early today so that cleanup and disinfection of the air ducts can begin.” She paused. “The school will also be closed for the rest of the school term while a full investigation is conducted. You will be given remote learning assignments.”

Some of the students cheered; some groaned. Roa looked downright stricken.

Instructor Ally shook her head and rolled her eyes, mouthing a silent word she probably thought her students didn’t know. Pheromones.

They were seventh graders, though; they knew all the bad words. That made Abel wonder if “pheromones” was one of them.

“Psst,” he whispered to Roa. “What’s pheromones?”

They looked at him sideways, then back at their teacher. “Instructor Ally?” Roa asked. “What happened? Someone was pumping a purple gas through the vents. Was it pheromones? Was it the Wind Breakers kin?”

Their instructor nodded. “You’re bound to hear about it on the news, so you might as well hear it from me. The authorities believe members of the Wind Breakers kin infiltrated the school and planted them in the air ducts.”

“But what are pheromones?” Bo asked. Abel was relieved that he didn’t have to.

“They’re a chemical substance released into the environment by an animal, affecting the behavior or physiology of others of its species.” Roa recited the definition. “Basically, they’re animal mind-control smells.”

“You mean the Wind Breakers wanted the NERDs to go crazy?” Topher wondered.

“That is the theory,” Instructor Ally said without looking at him.

“And they got school canceled!” Topher cheered. “Go, Wind Breakers!”

“SHUT YOUR MOUTH, BOY!” Instructor Ally yelled, and Topher turned from mildly pinkish pale to practically white as printer paper. He pressed so far back into his seat he looked like he was on the back of a diving dragon. Their teacher calmed down, took a breath, and spoke quietly. “The Wind Breakers kin is a terrorist organization. As you know, it is against the law to express any positive sentiment about them. I am going to ignore your comment, Topher, as the ramblings of a scared little boy, and I will not report them to the authorities. But I don’t want to hear another word out of you for the rest of the day, got it?”

“Got it,” said Topher meekly.

“WHAT DID I JUST SAY?!” Instructor Ally thundered. Topher looked like he was about to throw up. He nodded and tried desperately to keep his mouth shut. “While we’re closed, you’ll be serving detention with me,” Instructor Ally added, and Topher nodded more.

Abel almost felt bad for the kid. Topher was the obvious kind of bully; he acted like a jerk because he was miserable. Everyone knew his brothers and sisters and cousins shared an apartment that was too small for all of them. He was the youngest, so he always got the last of everything and was always picked on at home. Everyone also knew that his mom had called the Dragon’s Eye on a group of Thunder Wings who were robbing a pharmacy in their building. She lost her job because the Thunder Wings made her boss fire her. You didn’t snitch to the Dragon’s Eye on the kin in your neighborhood. There were always consequences.

So Topher got bullied by his siblings for being the youngest, by his neighborhood kin for what his mom did, and even by the Dragon’s Eye themselves. Once they knew you had a snitch in the family, they made you keep snitching or they stopped protecting you from everyone else. The moment you talked to the Dragon’s Eye, it became a lose-lose situation. It looked like Topher was the biggest loser of all.

Basically, he got bullied by everyone, so it was no surprise he acted like a bully too. It didn’t excuse his behavior, but it did explain it. It was also no surprise that he liked the Wind Breakers. The Dragon’s Eye hated them, as did the other kins, just like they all hated Topher.

Still, cheering for the Wind Breakers was dangerous, even though their pranks were usually harmless. They once filled a City Councilor’s office from floor to ceiling with dragon dung. No one was ever caught, but the Wind Breakers took credit.

Abel’s downstairs neighbor’s cousin once dated a boy who clicked like on a video of that poo prank, and she got brought in for questioning by the Dragon’s Eye. She was never quite the same afterward, and she never went on a date with that boy again. No one did. He was sentenced to exile in the Farm Towers on the edge of the city just for clicking like on the wrong thing.

Topher was probably imagining the same terrible fate for himself if their teacher reported him. It was pretty cool of Instructor Ally not to. Though Topher was a jerk, he was still just barely thirteen. Thirteen-year-old jerks deserved mercy sometimes. Sometimes.

Abel had gotten lost in his thoughts again and hadn’t heard anything that Instructor Ally explained about the pheromones and the NERDs, or how she and the Dragon Safety Officers had gotten them under control. He was annoyed with his brain for zoning out and missing such a cool story. It seemed like he was always getting distracted at the worst times. He’d have to ask Roa to tell him the story during their bus ride across town.

“I’ll meet you at the bus stop,” they said. “I want to talk to Instructor Ally about getting extra-credit work while we’re out of school.”

“Extra work?” Abel’s best friend was incomprehensible to him sometimes.

They shrugged. “You should ask too. Only way to improve your grades is by actually doing schoolwork!”

“No thanks,” Abel said, scuttling out of the classroom as fast as he could. “See you at the bus stop!”

---

“I was worried you’d bailed on me or gotten eaten or something,” Abel told Roa, when they finally showed up after most of the other kids had gone.

“Nope,” they said cheerfully, like they’d just come from getting ice cream, not from getting extra homework. “You know,” they added, “one lucky thing about the attack closing school early is that we can go to that address your sister gave you, and still be home in time for dinner without anyone knowing where we’ve gone. It kinda worked out!”

“Yeah,” Abel agreed. “But then also no one will know where we are if we disappear.”

“Why are you worried about disappearing?” Roa was casual about the whole thing, more casual than Abel could imagine being about anything.

“Because kinners and the Dragon’s Eye are after Lina over this address?” he said. “And no one else knows about it? And it’s in a bad neighborhood?”

“Okay, one, we don’t know that it’s because of this address that they’re after Lina.” Roa counted off on their fingers all the reasons Abel didn’t need to worry. “Two, if the Dragon’s Eye is after her, then other people do know about it. And three, there is no such thing as a ‘bad’ neighborhood, just a neighborhood you don’t live in. To the people who live there, it’s just home.”

“Yeah, home in Thunder Wings territory,” Abel replied.

“The Thunder Wings aren’t so bad,” Roa told him.

They walked across the bridge from the platform, onto the back of the number 17 bus, which was carried by a mint-green long-wing with piercing yellow eyes. Abel realized he was about to go the farthest from home he had ever been without an adult, and he was pretty sure he’d seen stories on the news about the area they were headed to. Maybe there was no such thing as a bad neighborhood, but there were neighborhoods where bad things happened, and this was definitely one of them. The bus took off with mighty wingbeats, and Abel’s stomach lurched, though not from the dragon’s flight.

“Relax,” Roa tried to reassure him, yanking on their school tie to loosen it. Abel did the same. “You’re about to have an adventure, like in the comics.”

He looked sideways at his friend. “In Dr. Drago, innocent bystanders get devoured by dragons, like, on the regular.”

Roa shrugged. “So it’s better not be an innocent bystander.”

“Kids are always innocent bystanders,” Abel replied.

“Not me.” Roa crossed their arms and rested their head on the glass, looking at the skyscrapers racing by outside. “I don’t stand by … and I’m hardly innocent.”

Abel laughed. It sounded like a line from a comic book, but Roa was dead serious. Abel, on the other hand, just didn’t want to be dead.