Prairie Fire (4 page)

“I'm worried too.” It was the first time I had said it out loud. “But we're in this together.”

“That's what I told him.” Sadie's smile didn't quite reach her eyes.

“What if they assign us to different places?” Owen said.

“They can't,” I said. “Well, they can with Sadie. But you and I come as a pair.”

“You need Sadie too,” he said softly. “I can't French braid.”

I had taken to wearing my hair down. It was simple enough to comb and mercifully stayed mostly straight. When we were patrolling, playing soccer, or on the training field, Sadie braided it for me. I couldn't even do a simple ponytail anymore.

“Then I'll shave my head,” I told him. “We'll match and everything.”

The uniform requirements for Oil Watch recruits were a bit more extreme than they were for regulars, largely because of the increased chance of burning. Lottie and Hannah had both shaved their heads while they were on their tours—I'd seen the photos—though Catalina, Owen's mother, had opted for the more complicated protective helmet.

“Siobhan,” he said, “you can't joke about this forever.”

“I'm not joking,” I told him. “I am going to do this. And it is going to suck. But that's not going to stop me.”

“Tell you what,” Sadie said. “We'll borrow my dad's clippers and do it before we leave.”

“We?” I protested. She'd been planning to wear the helmet.

“Sure,” she said. “If you can make drastic decisions, then so can I. We'll do it tomorrow, after school.”

Owen and I exchanged a glance. Our telepathy had improved dramatically since we'd met. I could tell he was thinking that there was no point in arguing with Sadie, and he knew that I was thinking it was his fault for dating her.

“Fine,” I said. “Tomorrow. Now can we please go into the backyard and hit things?”

“Yes,” Sadie said, and gestured to the floor in front of her.

I sat between her knees, and if we cried while she braided my hair for one last time, none of us were rude enough to mention it.

REAL PIE

In hindsight, we probably should have waited to shave our heads until after Owen's last interview with the local newspaper. Emily was annoyed. She liked having first dibs on releasing any news about us to the world at large. She'd had to give up most of her online aliases after what we'd engineered last spring. I didn't understand it fully—something about sock puppets, which apparently the Internet is desperately against—and having direct access to us was something she cherished. Usually we didn't mind letting her have the first go, but the haircuts had been kind of spontaneous.

Sadie brought the clippers over to the Thorskards' on Friday after school, as we'd planned, an hour before Owen's weekly sit-down with Sheila, the editor-in-chief (and also main photographer, copy editor, ad saleswoman, and espresso machine operator) of the
Trondheim Weekly
. I'm pretty sure we were all standing there wondering if this was a terrible idea.

“I think we should hack off most of it with scissors,” Sadie said, twisting her ponytail in her hand. “That way it's kind of past the point of no return.”

“Works for me,” I said. “Except you'll still have to do it. I don't think I can hold scissors.”

“Sit down, the lot of you,” said Lottie from behind us. We'd left the deck door open and I hadn't heard her get close. “On the steps.”

Lottie dragged a chair over, and sat down behind me. In a second, she had snipped off the braid Sadie had woven the night before, and handed it to me. It seemed a lot thinner than I'd expected. The clippers whirred to life and I felt the tickle as the blades ran along my skull.

“I hope your head doesn't have a funny bump to it,” Owen said, running his hand over his own scalp.

“Thanks,” I told him. “To be fair, I've been hit around the head fewer times than you have, so it's more likely that you'll have something weird.”

Sadie laughed, pitched a bit higher than usual. The last time Owen had gone up against a
lakus
, he'd got the tail across his back as it was dying. It had knocked him into the side of a barn, and he'd ended up with a concussion. The farmer was absolutely horrified that Owen had been injured on her family's property, even though my mother ended up calling every day for a week to assure her that Owen was fine. One of the local newspapers had run an op-ed about how it was time for helmets to become standard for underage dragon slayers, but I wasn't holding my breath on any legislative change. It had taken long enough to get helmets into minor hockey.

Lottie slowed down as she went around my ears. My head felt very odd, and I twisted my hands in my lap. She ran her fingers across the top of my head, searching for any hair she had missed, but found none. She rested her hands on my shoulders and squeezed.

“Good lord, Lottie!” Hannah said from the kitchen. “Can't I leave you alone at all?”

“It was my idea,” I said. Which was almost true.

“Did you tell your parents?” Hannah asked. She was the one in the Thorskard family who did most of the active parenting, after all.

“Um,” I said. Because of course I hadn't. They were expecting me home with, at worst, a set of bruised knuckles.

“Oh, for Pete's sake,” Hannah said. “Lottie, give me that.”

Lottie managed to look a bit sheepish has she handed over the clippers, and Hannah rolled her eyes before dropping a quick kiss on her upturned face.

“Your turn, Sadie,” Hannah said. “Assuming this was a group decision.”

“It was,” Owen said, as Sadie shifted to be better sat in front of Hannah.

Sadie managed not to flinch when Hannah cut off the bulk of her hair, but her smile got a bit watery when the clippers started up again.

“Well, it's practical,” Hannah said. “If a bit showy.”

“I never understood why anyone wore the helmet,” Lottie offered. “It itched. And it was hot.”

“We might not get assigned to the desert,” Sadie pointed out. “There's oil in cold places too.”

“There are pipelines in cold places,” Hannah said. “But they're not usually in conflict zones.”

There was a very good chance that both Owen and Sadie would be assigned somewhere in the middle of a war. They had more experience than most dragon slayers their age, and that usually meant a ticket to a place that was hot in more ways than one. It also meant that their support crews would go under heavy arms, which I was not looking forward to. For starters, I wasn't sure I'd be able to fire a gun. And if there was a person at the other end, I wasn't sure I wanted to.

“It will be okay, Siobhan,” Lottie said, looking at me. “You'll learn to do the things they ask, or you'll learn a way around them. And once you're in the field, you'll have a dozen people as backup. It will work out.”

Lottie's faith was touching, but she wasn't going to have to figure out a way to get in and out of a uniform that seemed to be nothing but buttons in less than a minute, with ten fingers that refused to perform under that kind of stress.

“One thing at a time,” Owen said. “We've figured out your hair. We'll figure out the rest.”

Sadie's phone rang just as Hannah was finishing, and she answered it as Owen took her place in front of his aunt.

“Hi, Emily!” I heard Sadie say, and then, “Oh, no, that's just the clippers. We're shaving our heads.”

I winced. Sadie was quiet for a while, presumably because Emily was yelling at her. Lottie was trying not to laugh.

“Stop squirming,” Hannah said to Owen, who was also holding back a giggle.

There was the sound of a car pulling into the driveway, and I realized that Sheila was early.

Sheila was a professional—well, professional for Trondheim—and managed not to send her eyebrows into low Earth orbit when she saw Sadie and me walking over to greet her.

“Ladies,” she said.

“We're around back,” Sadie said, as though this was a totally normal day. “Is that okay?”

Sometimes Sheila did a video recording for the paper's Web site, and she liked us to be in the living room for that, because it looked homey. Since Emily agreed with her, we went along with it. The local municipalities had been thrilled with the outcome of the Manitoulin disaster, but the provincial and federal governments had a somewhat more adversarial response. Owen, and I for that matter, had both been painted as wayward youths at the least, and one network in Quebec had gone so far as to wonder if we were budding ecoterrorists. Emily assured us that the bulk of public opinion was with us and did what she could to ensure it stayed that way.

“That's fine,” said Sheila. “Just a quick chat today. The Blyth spring fair is this weekend, so I have less space than usual.”

“I hope you have room for a picture,” Sadie said. “I spent forever on my hair.”

I have no idea how she managed to do things like that with a straight face. It was very frustrating.

It was a medium-length interview, where Owen talked about why we'd decided to take such drastic measures.

“There's no guarantee that we'll be assigned to the same units during Basic Training,” he said, which was true, though unlikely. “We've worked together for so long that we wanted to do one last thing as a set, before we take the next step in our journey.” Apparently Emily's PR training had stuck.

He didn't mention me once, which was how I preferred it, but I assumed Sheila could read between the lines. Hopefully, she'd be able to keep her creativity limited when it came to writing the actual article.

When Sheila left, we went inside because it was starting to get chilly. It hadn't been a humid spring, which was odd, but since that meant the dragons were staying close to the lake, no one complained. Except the cottagers, of course, but they complain about everything. There was a message on the machine from Aodhan, who tended to forget that he could call Owen's cell if the landline went unanswered. He was bringing home dinner, though he neglected to say what it was.

“I hope there's pie,” Sadie said.

“There's usually pie,” Hannah pointed out.

“Real pie, I mean,” Sadie clarified. “Not store-bought crust.”

“You're kind of a snob about that,” Owen said.

Aodhan showed up after fifteen minutes of bickering about what makes a perfect pie crust with enough food for a week of dinners. This trend had fed them all year, to the point where Hannah had stopped buying perishables at the grocery store. I went home with as much as Owen could put in my backseat, though to be fair, some of that was bound for Sadie's house.

I helped her carry it in. It was possible, if someone loaded my arms for me and got all the doors. Sadie's mother burst into tears as soon as she saw us, and it took me a moment to remember why.

“Mom,” Sadie said, depositing her stuff on the table and wrapping her arms around her mother's neck. “We have to. Siobhan can't do her hair, and I won't have time.”

“I know, darling,” Sadie's mother said. “It's just a surprise. You didn't mention it.”

“It was kind of like jumping in the lake on Victoria Day weekend,” I said. “We had to do it fast, or we'd start second-guessing the decision.”

“Well, you both have excellent bone structure,” she said, gulping and trying to laugh. “And it'll grow back when your tours are done.”

I drove home and sat in the driveway for a while before I went into the house. I ran my hands over my head. I could feel the skin with my fingers, but it felt rough because of the scarring there. If I used my wrists or the backs of my hands, it was different. Fuzzy. I looked at myself in the rearview. I was very pale, but that would change soon enough.

Lottie was right. This was one less thing to worry about now. I could practice dressing. I could practice the horn. I could make sure that I was the most over-prepared recruit ever to show up in New Brunswick. Or, at least, I could try. Lottie was so sure. And she'd done so much to make it possible. I was nervous—no, I was terrified—but I was going to do it anyway. Owen was going. And even though he'd never asked, I'd go too.

I checked the sky when I got out of the car—habit—and there were no dragons, so I went inside to show my parents what I'd done to my head.