The Story of Owen (20 page)

“Little lakes have lots of bays, sheltered areas on shore where dragon eggs aren't overly exposed to the elements,” I said. “That's why there are no eggs on the Great Lakes or along the St. Lawrence. That's why there isn't a hatching ground closer to Trondheim. There isn't enough protection. The Great Lakes spawn bigger storms, and the bays don't give enough shelter.”

“Okay,” said Emily. She was speaking slowly, and I could tell she was still putting pieces together. “That fits with what my dad thinks. But it still doesn't explain why the dragons are moving to a new hatching ground, or where that hatching ground is.”

“Oh!” Owen said. He got up and came over to look at the map.

“What?” I said. Apparently it was my turn now.

“Michigan wasn't always a hatching ground,” he said. “There used to be cities there, places like Ann Arbor and Lansing. The dragons only came when the factories starting producing enough carbon to attract them. Before that, they were just like us.”

“But Michigan has little lakes,” Emily said.

“Exactly,” said Owen. “Right now, the fact that we don't is the only thing that's saving us. The dragons want to come here to lay their eggs, but they can't, so they made a hatching ground as close to the mine as they could, and they come here for snacks.”

“You say that like they do it deliberately,” I said, supressing a shudder. “Dragons can't think.”

“Instincts are a good reason for doing something too,” Owen said. It sounded like the voice of experience.

I looked back down at the map, and my eyes widened. I saw the pattern, red notes across the map, composing a song in fire and warning bells. It was so clear, now that I knew what I was looking for.

“Manitoulin,” I said. “The northern side. Gore Bay and all the inlets there.”

Owen drew a red circle around the island. “It's the closest they can get.”

“They've come for the mine,” Emily said. She sat down heavily in the chair Owen had just vacated. “They've come for Saltrock, and they're going to keep attacking it until it burns to the ground.”

“We'll stop them,” Owen said. “It's why we came here.”

“How?” Emily said. “Your father runs all over two counties trying to hold everything together, and as soon as you graduate, you have to join the Oil Watch. Lottie can't do it on her own.”

“No,” came a voice from the door to the upstairs, and we all jumped. “I can't.”

We spun around, all looking guilty. It was still the middle of the afternoon, and we were clearly supposed to be elsewhere.

“I'll spare you the obvious questions until later,” Archie said, appearing behind Lottie and Hannah. “Why don't you all sit down, and we'll talk about what you've just figured out?”

We filed toward the chesterfield and took our seats while Archie pulled the papers back into what order he had arranged them. Hannah was smiling indulgently as she took her seat.

“When did you get back?” Owen asked.

“Don't change the subject,” Hannah said. “But we got here just before you did. I'm sorry we missed the concert. I'm sure it was lovely.”

“Now who's changing the subject?” I muttered.

“Manitoulin Island, eh?” Lottie said, slumping into an armchair next her wife and bringing us back on track. She propped her leg up on the coffee table. Car rides always left her stiff.

“It makes sense,” I said. “Well, it makes enough sense to investigate further, don't you think?”

“I do,” Hannah said.

“Um, I'm Emily Carmichael, by the way,” Emily said, a bit awkwardly. “It's nice to meet you.”

“Likewise,” Lottie said. I knew she must have recognized the name. She winced as she shifted in her chair.

“Manitoulin does explain a lot,” Hannah said. She took Lottie's hand and leaned over to kiss her lightly on the forehead, and Lottie stopped shifting.

“Emily's right about the problems, though,” Lottie said. “There's no way to get Owen out of his Oil Watch tour without undoing all the work we've put into making rural dragon slaying attractive, and Aodhan is already stretched thin enough.”

“You could recruit,” Archie said.

“Who?” Lottie said.

In this moment I got another brief glimpse of how much of Lottie's plan was dependent on force of personality and intuition—the same personality that allowed her to rise to the top of a bridge in Hamilton and the same intuition that let her jump off it without a moment's hesitation. At the time, I resolved to follow a different course.

“Half the senior class thinks that Owen has a good thing going,” I said. “I know dragon slaying is hereditary, but where is that written? There's got to be someone who thinks your life is glamorous enough to give it a try.”

“Those kids would still have to join the Oil Watch,” Owen pointed out. “But it might be worth considering long-term.”

“As a resident of Saltrock, I'd prefer a more immediate solution,” Emily said.

“Well, there's no point in closing the mine,” Archie said. “The damage is done. There haven't been emissions in
Michigan in more than half a century, and the dragon foothold there is still strong.”

“What about the hatching ground itself?” I asked. “What if we destroyed it?”

Lottie and Hannah looked at me like I was insane, and both Emily and her father looked startled, but Owen looked thoughtful.

“Siobhan,” Hannah started, but then words failed her.

“It's never been done,” Lottie said.

“That we know of,” Emily said. “My father has all sorts of contacts with bizarre claims.”

“They're not bizarre,” Archie said defensively, looking quite betrayed. “They're unorthodox.”

“We'll look into it,” Lottie promised. The she reached across the table and grabbed Owen's hand, squeezing hard. “No field trips.”

“I don't think this was his idea,” Hannah said, looking at me with a knowing expression.

“Then that goes for you too, Siobhan,” Lottie said.

“Okay,” I said. They didn't make us promise. In hindsight, that was probably a good thing.

Draconic reconnaissance is a necessarily covert activity. It is important not to cause civil panic. It would never do for unsubstantiated rumors of a new dragon hatching ground to leak to the public before there was a good defensive plan in place. In the end, though, we needn't have worried.

For the whole month after Christmas Break, which I had taken off from tutoring and from thinking about dragons in general, we came up with nothing incredibly productive—never mind panic-inducing. My first idea had been to move Owen's tutoring to the Trondheim public library, so we could research without supervision, but Hannah was no slouch, and she quickly figured out that my motivations were not related to a sudden fear of being attacked by a dragon while driving. I had not expected her to play dirty, but she called my parents.

“Hannah called me this afternoon,” Mum said at dinner the night before my first exam. “She's worried that all the driving might be getting to you, and she suggested that you could
tutor Owen here, and they could pick him up after you're done.”

“I—I hadn't thought of that,” I stammered. It was a terrible idea. At least if we were at Owen's house, one of the grown-ups might let something slip. All my parents ever talked about was work, the price of various household commodities and the fact that I had yet to begin seriously working on any of my applications for university. “I think it's just the exam pressure getting to me. I'm seeing dragons in every bush. Once things calm down again, I'll be fine to drive to Owen's house.”

That was the end of that, and Owen and I continued to do our homework under Lottie and Hannah's watchful gaze. Soon enough, the end of the month rolled around, and after we recovered from our exams, it was February and we were no further along than we'd been in December.

A new semester meant new classes. Owen celebrated passing algebra by starting finite and rounded out his schedule with French, world issues, and a study period. I had French, drama, and the afternoons off to work on composition. I couldn't help him in finite, but it turned out that Owen's fluency in Spanish was just enough to mess up his French vocabulary, so I still had a job.

We discovered on the first day of the new semester that Emily was linguistically precocious: She had signed up for grade eleven French immediately after finishing the grade ten course, and when we arrived in the classroom, she waved us over to where she was already sitting with a smile.

“I need to apologize to you both,” she said, as soon as we were seated. Everyone else was still milling around, so she probably didn't have to whisper, but she did anyway and we both leaned in a bit to hear her.

“You're sorry you saved us seats by the window?” Owen guessed.

“No, I meant something occurred to me yesterday and I'm sorry I didn't think about it earlier,” she said.

“Well, it's not like we're doing so well either,” I pointed out. “What did you think of?”

“Remember how my dad is a member of all those fringe Internet theory chat pages?” she asked. Owen snorted.

“Like I could forget,” he said. “My aunts complain about that all the time.”

“Hey, it's not like he goes out hunting dragons with an iPhone,” Emily said defensively. Owen looked immediately contrite.

“Yes,” I said, “We know he's one of the good ones.”

“Thanks,” she said. Her sarcasm was a thing of beauty. “Anyway, everyone on the boards uses pseudonyms, but sometimes it's really obvious who they are in real life.”

“And you want to blackmail one of them?” I said, having no idea where this was going.

“No, that would be silly,” she said. “One of them is Mr. Huffman, and I think I can manoeuver him into assigning Owen homework for world issues that will require him to research hatching grounds. In the Saltrock archives.”

“Man, your small-town ‘have the same teacher for multiple classes' thing is paying off!” Owen said.

“It's your town too,” I pointed out.

“Fair enough,” he said. “But seriously, I like this idea. It will seem so reasonable.”

“We just need to decide what the homework should be,” Emily said, just as the bell rang.

I spent most of drama lying on the carpet pretending to meditate, which my drama teacher insisted would help me get in touch with my inner stage persona. Since I was taking the class in case I ever ended up directing music for a stage production, I was less than concerned about my persona, but I did take advantage of the time to think.

We needed something that Owen could research that would be useful, but subtle enough not to pique the interest of any of our parents. This included Lottie and Hannah, as Owen generally liked to refer to all the adults in his house collectively as such. (I don't know if he ever noticed, but every time he said something like “I'll have to ask my parents” and gestured in her general direction, Hannah smiled at him like the sun was coming up.) So it had to be under the radar, but it also had to lead us to the answers we were looking for.

The ceiling of the drama room is not the most inspiring of views, and even that was technically cheating, as I was supposed to be meditating with my eyes closed. Still, I risked a glance at the walls and saw the old posters for plays Trondheim Secondary had done in years gone by. The words “The Scottish Play” caught my attention.

“Miss McQuaid,” said the drama teacher, having caught sight of my raised head. “You are not appreciating the exercise properly.”

The senior beside me was snoring, which I thought was worse than looking around, but I obediently lay back and shut my eyes. I wasn't meditating, though, and I continued to not
meditate until the bell rang, startling the snorer awake with a rather ungentlemanly grunt, and I finally got to leave the room.

I met Owen by my locker, and we waited for Emily to join us before heading to the music room. Even though I was no longer taking a class, my arrangement with the music teacher still stood. This was important because it guaranteed us the privacy to talk, and because I really did need to work on pieces for those applications my parents kept bothering me about, just in case I decided on university after all.

“I thought of something,” I said. I sat down on the piano bench while Owen slumped to the floor and Emily took the chair. She leaned forward with her elbows on the music stand. “It has to involve a hatching ground,” I went on, “and preferably someone moving a hatching ground.”

“You can't move a hatching ground,” Owen said. “All you can do is shift it around a little bit.”

“Semantics,” I said. “Or possibly lack of something we haven't figured out yet.”

“And you think we can figure it out?” Emily said. “People have been trying to do this for centuries.”