Prairie Fire (6 page)

“Or it's because the girls have already spent ten weeks living on top of each other,” Sadie had said. “If they didn't isolate the boys the way they do, they'd probably be doing better.”

I liked that the strict regimen we'd been living under hadn't dulled the trumpet of her spirit.

They still weren't entirely sure what to do with me. I was attached to whatever group Owen was assigned and performed signal duties in addition to my other tasks, but I did that with flags or with shouting. There was a band on the base, but it was for officers, so I didn't play in it. Aside from singing, I hadn't done any music since I had arrived, though I continued to do my hand exercises after lights-out to make sure that I didn't lose ground. Basic had done wonders for my toughness, but I feared I was losing some of my already-limited dexterity.

The worst part of Basic Training was sitting through dragon attacks in the base shelters. There were several shelters scattered around the base wherever there was space to put them, and every time a dragon attacked, all the recruits were herded into them. I was used to hiding if a dragon attacked near my house, or if I was at Owen's and Hannah was feeling particularly protective. And I always went into the shelter at school, because the teachers relied on me for help with crowd control. But this was different. This was being underground with forty-odd dragon slayers who were very, very anxious at being out of a fight when there was one to be had.

Logistically, it made sense. If all the dragon slayers stayed above ground, they would undoubtedly be stepping on each other's feet, and some amount of chaos would result. But watching Owen and Sadie sit out attack after attack without even being able to watch put my teeth on edge, and that was before you factored in all the others. Generally speaking, we made the dragon slayers sit together by the door, where they could fret at one another and leave the rest of us in peace until the all-clear sounded.

“How do you stand having a pair of them?” one of the firefighters from Nova Scotia asked me one afternoon, when we were all packed into the shelter like sardines.

“Well, usually they're outside, working through their issues,” I pointed out. There was a wave of nervous laughter. “It makes them nervous when they can't see what's coming.”

“I don't know how you faced down dragons without a weapon,” said an engineer. I think he was from Hamilton. “I mean, I know a gun won't do much, but it makes me feel better.”

“City boys,” said the firefighter. “You can't run around in farm country shooting dragons.”

“We don't do it in the city, either,” he pointed out. “We've still got sewers.”

“We do well enough with swords,” I said, hoping to calm everyone down. It was way too stuffy in here for an argument.

“What's it like?” asked one of the Haligonian smiths.

“What's what like?” I said.

“Slaying a dragon,” she said. “There are a couple of dragon slayers here who have slayed fewer of them than you have.”

Competition was inevitable, really. No one could touch Owen in terms of real life experience, and even though Sadie was miles behind him, she still had more slayings than half the others combined. There were, as the smith pointed out, a few dragon slayers with no tallies at all. And I had one whole corn dragon to my name.

“Honestly, I don't remember much of it,” I told them. They looked disappointed. I have something of a reputation as a story teller, of course, but I'm never telling my stories when I do it. “Oh, fine,” I said. It was very tedious down here, after all. “I'll tell you what I can.”

They all leaned forward. At the other end of the room, the dragon slayers realized something was up and left off their pointless worrying to listen. I spoke louder so they could hear me.

“You've seen the clips on the news,” I told them. “The burned-out beaches and the blackened trees. But all of that happened later, when the smoke cleared. When I slayed that dragon, the air was full of fire and poison.”

Owen was watching me with the oddest expression on his face. We hadn't ever really talked about that day, once I'd forgiven him for putting me in a position that had cost me the full use of my hands. That had been a stupid conversation, because I had volunteered and it wasn't his fault anyway. Since then, the topic had just never come up. There was always something more immediate to take care of. Always more dragons on the horizon, more fire in the sky.

“We stood on that beach together, but I wasn't there to slay dragons,” I continued, falling into the style I used when I talked to reporters or elementary school students. “I was there to witness, to make sure that Owen's story would be told.”

Also a lie. I had a flamethrower strapped to my back just like Owen. We weren't supposed to slay dragons at all. But no one needed to hear that.

“But dragons are fierce and hard to predict. We'd laid a good trap, but one of them hadn't fallen for it, and it was that corn dragon that found us and separated Owen from his sword.”

Owen was, obviously, fine, but everyone looked at me with such concern on their faces that I felt rather proud. Basic Training had sucked for me. I was made up of nothing but shortcomings. Every time I was assigned to a squad, they drooped. We never won any of the challenges. But they were looking at me now like I was worth something, like I was someone they admired. I filed the feeling away for the next time I got stymied by the fitted sheet I had to corner perfectly every morning. This was why I was here. Everything else was just a hoop we all had to jump through.

“It was a corn dragon,” I repeated. “When you're up against a corn dragon, you run. You run and you hide. But you only do those things if you're not a dragon slayer.”

It was so quiet. There must have been a hundred people in the dragon shelter, and I had made every one of them hold their breath.

“My backpack was on fire,” I said. “But I didn't think about that. All I thought about was that the dragon had turned on Owen, and Owen couldn't get to his sword.”

They all knew what happened after that. It had been national news for weeks. But they wanted to hear me say it. They wanted to be part of the story too. And I was going to let them.

“I grabbed the hilt, even though it was heated by the flames,” I said. “It was Lottie Thorskard's sword, made by Hannah MacRae. And it was mine too. It went into that dragon's chest like butter: both hearts in one go.

“You know what happened after that, of course,” I said, and they all leaned back. I held up my hands, to remind them. “I screamed, because it really hurt, and then I lost consciousness. By the time I woke up, my whole world was different. I was different.”

The dragon slayer from Chilliwack had pushed through until she was next to me. She took one of my hands in hers, gently, as most people did, because they thought they might hurt me. I squeezed her hand as hard as I could, which, thanks to the exercise ball, was decently hard, and she responded instinctively, pressing back. She started to laugh.

“I'm not a dragon slayer,” I said, smiling with her. “And I don't want to be.”

I looked around at all these faces I couldn't put names to. They fought fires and logistical problems and injuries, leaving the dragon slayer free to fight dragons. And I would do my best to remember all of them.

“But I am good at this,” I said. “We will learn to be good at this together.”

There was a long moment of silence after that. Sadie was grinning fit to split her face, and Owen was shaking his head. I could lie to almost anyone now, and he knew it. But I never lied to him, and the best lies were always the ones where I told the truth. I winked, and he smiled.

The all-clear siren split the thick air inside the dragon shelter, and we all spilled out into the sunlight with some measure of relief. The sergeants were barking orders, cleanup related, mostly, because heaven forbid we miss the fun part of dragon slaying, but everyone was looking at me. The cornet-sergeant was watching me too, but his face was difficult to read. Finally, the recruits called to cleanup duty mustered themselves away from the main group, and the rest of us headed for the mess.

There hadn't been any structural damage, but the south woods were on fire, and it was a while before the flames were quenched. The firefighters used a lot of chemical suppressants, which made me nervous because water seems much more natural for that sort of thing. Of course, on patrol, chemicals are much easier to carry, and if there is no water source nearby chemical suppressants might be the only option you have. Since most of the trainers were out on fire duty, we were able to take more time than usual to eat. I celebrated by cutting up my Salisbury steak instead of just eating it off the fork, like I did when I was rushed. Sadie sat with us, which only happened these days when we were assigned to the same drill, because otherwise we arrived at the mess separately. It seemed like more people than usual were sitting with us, or maybe it was just that there were more people paying attention to us. This feeling, I remembered, was why I had wanted to spend the last year of high school eating lunch in the music room, even though Sadie never let me eat anywhere but the seat she'd saved for me in the cafeteria.

I was going to have to get used to it. I'd thought I could be in the background here, like I had done when we were in school, but the Oil Watch required more of me.

For the first time, I decided that it didn't bother me.

UNIT COHESION

It got easier after that afternoon in the dragon shelter. Not everything, of course, because there were a lot of things I had to do for myself, and they were still hard, but some things, small things, were taken care of while I was busy fumbling with something else. And most people stopped looking so openly disappointed when I was assigned to their drill. All that was left to survive was two weeks of training with the group that would make up the members of Owen's support crew. I'd done this in high school, on unicorn stationery, no less. I was pretty sure I could handle it again.

Every support squad had eight firefighters; a pair of engineers—one sapper and one smith—two medics, one of whom could double as a cook if you were on patrol; and in Owen's case alone, one bard. All of them were older than Owen and I were. The Combat Engineer, Courtney Speed, was twenty-four and had a master's in engineering from the Royal Military College. This was unusual, as most people in the Oil Watch, including our smith, Aarons, had at most only an undergraduate degree. The firefighters had all completed a two year college program, and the medics had bachelor degrees in addition to their year-long medic training course. Davis, the medic who was also the cook, planned to go to medical school when his tour was up. In those first days I despaired of ever learning their names, let alone coming up with ways to write them into Owen's songs. I was more than a little bit intimidated, and I didn't even have to be in charge. Owen was supposed to be in command and would eventually be given the highest rank. It was really important that everyone got along.

“Unit cohesion,” as it was called, was accomplished by a bizarrely fake week-long camping trip, wherein each squad was assigned a portion of the forest to patrol. It was choreographed so that no two patrols overlapped, and every day you had to break down your camp and move into the zone, still without contacting the other patrol. We carried everything with us, along with GPS monitors that kept us on track and let the commanders know we'd done the right amount of walking. If executed correctly, the whole exercise was entirely benign and unadventurous.

It was, to put it bluntly, the most tedious thing I'd ever done. The fire crew, who had already spent a fair amount of time training with one another, kept mostly to themselves except during meals. Davis and Ilko, the other medic, were bored because no one even got blisters, and I learned very quickly that leaving the engineers to their own devices ended badly in a hurry, even if neither of them had access to explosives.

We did get on well enough, though. Owen and I never walked beside each other during the day, though we did spar with each other because no one else was good enough to go as fast as we did. It was the sparring that finally won over the fire crew, because while I wasn't as good as Owen, I was better at instructing, and by the third or fourth time I'd called him on a mistake, the others started asking for my help in their own drills. They trained with swords for the same reason I did: in case of emergency. Also, it was good for stamina and upper body strength, and that came in handy for the fire crews and the engineers. I have no idea what the medics thought of it. In return, the fire crew helped me come up with ways to speed through my firearm practice, which I still struggled with. By the fifth day, when we reached the farthest part of the base from the main barracks, we were a team, even though I was still going to cheat and refer to the bulk of them by musical shorthand when it came time to memorialize them in music, if not make up their names outright.