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CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Desert Encounters


I tried to go back to work, but the incident with the egg and hatchers kind of shook me. After my third false start on the next custom order, I decided I should just call it a day and go home. Not so long ago, heading home meant I’d play Russian roulette with the jalopy and head to my empty, crappy apartment. Now, I had Octavius to come home to. And more importantly, I’d spent most of my bonus on a much nicer form of transportation. It was my one concession to the flash and glam of the Phoenix lifestyle, a car I’d dreamed of owning since childhood.

A Tesla Model S, bright red.

I paused to unplug it—charging your battery on the company’s grid was part of the benefits package—and put my thumb on the biometric scanner. The car beeped, the security system disarmed, and the driver’s side door hissed open.

I never, ever got tired of that sound.

I slipped into the driver’s seat, put my hands on the wheel. I inhaled the scent of Nappa leather while the retinal scanner verified that it was me.

“Good afternoon, Noah” said the car. Her voice, which sounded like the computer from “Star Trek,” was another thing I never got tired of hearing.

“Hello, gorgeous,” I said. “Let’s go home.”

The seatbelt slid across. The car backed out and began the seemingly endless ascent up the exit ramp. The windows dimmed automatically when we got outside the garage. I fiddled with the console to find some 80s music.

The Tesla got me home in twenty minutes—leaving in mid-afternoon had its perks—and parked itself in the garage beneath my condominium building. This was one of the prefab “green” complexes that they’d built all over Scottsdale. I could have afforded a swankier place downtown, but I liked the fact that they generated their own power. Totally off the grid. My corner unit had a balcony and fifteen hundred square feet of bachelor pad.

Another thirty or forty years of gainful employment, and it would be all mine. Of course, that depended on remaining employed, which was by no means a guarantee.

The condo door slid open at my touch. Fluorescent lights flickered on.

“Octavius?” I called.

No answer. He was probably asleep, as usual.

I dug a diet soda from the high-efficiency mini fridge and took it out on the balcony. Nestled between two stone gargoyles I’d picked up at a yard sale lay a football-sized dragon the color of sandstone. He kept till as a statue, but the detail was far better than any carving I’d seen.

“There you are,” I said.

The dragon stirred. One bright eye flicked open to look me up and down. He stretched and hopped over to nudge me with his snout. He’d grown since hatching, and he was getting stronger. Between that, his ever-sharper teeth, and the rapidly growing claws, I figured he could hold his own against the average house cat. I rubbed the dry patch of scales behind his ears. “Missed you, buddy.”

He had the run of the condo while I was at work, whether I wanted it or not. There’s just no way to corral a dragon that can work doorknobs and pick locks.

I took a slug of the soda, savored the rough cool slide of it down my throat, and sighed.

Octavius looked up at me and made an inquisitive sound.

“Just a rough day at work,” I said. “Trust me, you don’t want to know.”

He looked back at the sunset, and a flash of wistfulness crossed his features. Just a momentary flash, but I caught it. He wanted to be out there, I could tell. But if I let him roam free, someone might find him. If word got back to Build-A-Dragon, they’d eventually figure out who had printed his egg. Then I’d be on probation if I was lucky or fired if I wasn’t. Either way, I’d win some scrutiny that I didn’t want. Not with the progress I was making on my flying dragon.

Still, I felt bad about keeping Octavius shackled here with his metabolic deficiency. I flicked him on his shoulder to get his attention. “Let’s do something fun this weekend. You and me.”

He spun around in a circle and uttered two high syllables. Frisbee?

“No, you destroyed the last one, remember?” I asked.

He shook his head, denying it.

“We lost the other one in that lake Wednesday after someone got distracted by a butterfly. I won’t say who.”

He ducked his head and looked down at the ground.

“What about a geocache?” It would take us out into the desert beyond prying eyes. I hadn’t been in a while, and it helped me clear my head. Maybe I’d figure out what sort of dragon made the most sense to host my unsanctioned genetic testing. Besides, I was still tied with SumNumberOne on the leaderboards, and if I didn’t log another cache soon I’d drop into the #2 slot. “We have to follow clues to track down a prize.”

He perked his head up, intrigued but not sold on it.

“I’m pretty sure there’s a good cache up in Tonto,” I said. “We’d go past a restaurant that makes the crispiest bacon . . .”

He jumped up and crooned happily, nearly knocking me off my chair in the process.

“All right, buddy, if you insist.”


Because of the crappy night’s sleep, we got a later start than I wanted the next morning. We were going after an ambitious geocache in Tonto National Forest, three million acres of cactus-studded desert and with the occasional evergreen ridge thrown in. The drive alone was about an hour; I got breakfast on the way. I parked the Tesla in a remote parking lot and set out on foot. As soon as I couldn’t see the parking lot, I let Octavius take wing. He flitted left and right overhead as I hiked up the trail.

Tonto might be rugged, but it was still close enough to Phoenix that I expected to run into some other people. Hikers, for the most part. Other people were taking out their non-canine pets for some desert time. I counted three ferrets, two guinea pigs, and an honest-to-god cat on a leash. Every time, I had to call Octavius back and hold him so he wouldn’t tangle with some ridiculous pet. After the third instance of this in the first half mile, I was kind of used to it. The foot traffic thinned out as we got farther from the parking lot. We had a quarter mile to cover until the first clue, so I let Octavius scout ahead.

There was a chance I’d run into another person or two. I figured I’d handle it. I expected it. What I didn’t expect was to navigate a sharp turn and come face to face with Ben Fulton. He was wearing dungarees and a faded ball cap, so I almost didn’t recognize him.

“Parker?” For a moment he seemed just a startled as I was.

“Hey.” I made a dedicated effort not to glance up to see where Octavius was. “What’s up?”

“What brings you out here?”

I tapped my watch. “Geocaching. You?”

“Just stretching my legs.” He glanced over my head and frowned.

My heart sank. He must have spotted Octavius. I had no idea what I would say to explain his presence.

“Well, I’ll leave you to it. Be safe.”

He brushed past me on the way to the parking lot. I stood frozen for a moment. What just happened? I snapped out of it and searched the skies frantically for Octavius. I spotted movement at least, near the tops of some saguaros that lined the parking lot. Yes, there he was. Darting low and fast among the tops of the cacti. He seemed to be getting stronger and took to wing more easily than usual. It was curious, really. I’d given most of the design points to intelligence, so his physical traits got only a pittance. Still, he was growing into a powerful little flier. It occurred to me that a flying dragon, one that had to pull its body through the air, was the true test of muscle performance. Maybe that would be the best reptilian model for Connor’s mutation. A model that would demonstrate that his variant caused disease after all.

A realization jarred me back from that line of thought. Octavius was not alone. Another flying shape about his size zoomed around the cacti. Similar coloring, too. How in the world? It was another little dragon. They chased one another around, but it looked more playful than aggressive. Then someone whistled, and the strange dragon broke off. It swooped down to the window of a large black pickup. Fulton’s pickup. I’d seen it in the parking garage at work enough times to know.

Fulton has a dragon, too. Maybe his was authorized, but I doubted it. The thing looked too much like Octavius for it to be a coincidence. Why would he, of all people, take the same risk? What did it mean? I pondered this as Octavius glided back to me, looking especially pleased with himself. Maybe he understood, or maybe he’d just enjoyed seeing another creature just like himself. He landed on the split boulder and stared back at the parking lot, where Fulton’s pickup disappeared behind a cloud of dust. Maybe he didn’t know what to make of it. I sure as hell didn’t.

“Ready to find the prize?” I asked. “It’s supposed to be at the base of a boulder.”

He tilted his head and chirped two questioning syllables that sounded uncannily like boulder.

“A big rock, taller than this.” I stood and lifted my arms straight up. “It’ll be along the trail, about half a mile up. Think you can find it?”

He took off and zoomed ahead, following the trail as it wound down into the desert scrub. He circled back two minutes later, trilling his excitement. That was promising. He landed on my shoulder and prodded me with a clawed foot.

“Ow! All right, buddy,” I said. “Easy with the claws.”

I picked up the pace, kicking the occasional rock with my boots to send it skittering across the hard-packed dirt. Two minutes later, we crested a ridge that looked out over a wide basin of saguaro and rocky-strewn sand. A ten-foot boulder rested a few feet off the path. That had to be the one. But I couldn’t see the cache itself, because there was a girl standing right in front of it.

There are too many people in this goddamn park.

“Hello,” I called.

She jumped and turned around, startled. I started to stammer out an apology. Then a bundle of black hair and teeth jumped up right in front of me, grunting and snapping at my knees.

“Whoa!” I took a step back out of instinct.

At first, I thought it was a boar, or a wild hog. Its mottled brown and black hair blended well with the desert terrain. The only thing that stood out was the hemp collar around its neck. It’s a goddamn pig.

Octavius hissed and lifted his wings as if he was going to swoop down to attack. No surprise there. The first of his kind had been bred to hunt animals like this.

I put a hand on his clawed feet to restrain him. “No, Octavius.”

He rewarded me with another hiss, but I held him fast and backed away.

“Riker! Come!” the girl commanded.

The pig obeyed with obvious reluctance, it retreated, never taking its eyes from us. Giving us a snarl, too. Which Octavius was happy to return.

“Sorry to startle you,” I said. “Are you here for the geocache, too?”

“Yes, we-” she began. “Noah?”

I got a better look at her face, and it clicked. Her name was Summer Bryn, and she was the tree-hugging roommate of my crazy-ass ex-girlfriend.



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Framed