The Mark of the Dragonfly (2 page)

“Oh, I forgot! I have a book to sell too,” Micah said. He rummaged in the sack and pulled out a red leather-bound book with spidery cracks on the spine. The smell of aged paper tickled Piper’s nose. Embossed on the front cover was a picture of a girl and a small dog. Next to her stood a grinning scarecrow, a lion, and a man who looked like he was made entirely of metal. “I can’t read any of the words. What do you think?”

Piper examined the book. “If it’s a language they’ve never seen before, the archivists will go nuts. Can’t be
a very good story, though—that picture doesn’t make much sense.”

Micah shrugged. “I don’t care, as long as it’s worth something.”

“Don’t worry. Archivists always pay good,” Piper said. She didn’t know much about them, only that their life’s work was collecting meteor-storm artifacts in order to learn as much as they could about the other worlds. Piper had heard stories about their museums, vast vaults built in mountain strongholds to the southwest. They didn’t much care for outsiders either. As far as Piper was concerned, they could be as mysterious as they wanted, as long as their prices were fair. And they would love the condition of Micah’s book.

“Where did you find these?” Piper asked, comparing Micah’s two items. “The book’s got most of its pages, and I’ve never seen a music box this pretty. There’s hardly a scratch on it.”

“Got it at the last harvest,” Micah said proudly. “I beat everybody else to it—found it in a crater, just under the ice dragon’s tail.” He gestured vaguely to the north, where the Hiterian Mountains rose up sharply to snow-covered peaks and marked the northern border of the Merrow Kingdom. On clear days when clouds didn’t obscure the view, if you closed one eye and put your thumb over the top of the jagged peaks and valleys, the spaces between flesh and rock formed the rough shape of a
dragon with one wing dipping, as if the mythical beast had frozen in midflight.

Below the dragon lay the harvesting fields, a crescent-shaped stretch of land that covered roughly fifty miles of cratered plains and foothills. For as long as anyone could remember, the meteor storms had happened there on each full moon.

Over the years, the scrap towns had grown up on the outskirts. People had become scavengers, scrappers digging out whatever the storms brought from other worlds, hoping to find some machine, artifact, or trinket, like Micah’s, that was worth selling at the trade markets. Becoming a scrapper was a way for people to make a living, though not a very good one. Most things that fell from the sky were hopelessly broken. The storms were so violent it was a mystery how any objects remained intact after they hit the earth.

“How did you get out there so fast?” Piper asked suspiciously. Micah was nimble, but neither he nor his brother ever ate really well, so they didn’t have as much energy as some of the other scrappers in town. At thirteen, Piper was stronger and faster, and she made extra coin from fixing machines people brought her from the fields.

“Well, I might’ve gone up the mountain before the storm was over,” Micah said guiltily.

Piper almost dropped the music box. “You’re telling
me you went out to the fields before the meteors were done falling?”

Micah waved his hands as if trying to hold off a different kind of storm. “Just once, and I promise I was careful! Mom and Dad were away fishing at the lake, so it was just me and Jory at home. We went to the shelter together, but I told Jory I was going to be with you so I could sneak off. I was scared of the storm at first, but once I squeezed under some rock ledges, I didn’t have to worry about the meteors.”

Micah and Jory’s parents would have had a fit if they knew what Micah was up to, Piper thought. But they were fishermen who went south to the Meljoy lakes every other week for the trout and pike while Jory, the eldest, looked after Micah. Fishing was what really kept Micah’s family fed, not scavenging in the scrap fields, but Micah always thought he’d find some priceless trinket, something valuable enough to sell and bring his parents home for good.

“Oh, well, that’s fine,” Piper said, though it wasn’t. “For a minute there, I was worried, but now that I know you had some pebbles to protect you from the
deadly meteors raining from the heavens
, I won’t think any more about it. So how about let’s go back to the part where you snuck off and used
me
to lie to your brother?” Piper caught Micah by his shirt collar and shook him. “You know going out in a storm is illegal, not to mention a hundred and fifty kinds of dangerous. Do you want to
get your skull smashed? It’d probably smarten you up, a couple good knocks to the head.”

“Let go, Piper!” Micah wriggled in her grasp and bared his teeth as if he might bite her. Piper let him go, but she scowled fiercely at him until he turned red from his hollow cheeks to the tips of his ears. “I told you I kept under the rocks. I was safe,” he insisted.

“It’s not just the meteors you have to worry about,” Piper said, exasperated. “Meteors bring the dust too, or did you not see the green clouds hanging in the air like pretty little death curtains?”

“I wore gloves,” he protested, and wilted under her black glare.

“I don’t care if you picked that box up with your brain like the sarnuns do!” Piper poked his temple until he slapped her hand away. “There’s a reason the Consortium crams everybody down into the shelter during a storm, Micah. You have to wait for the wind to blow the meteor dust away, or you’re just breathing poison. The thickest gloves in the world won’t protect your lungs from that stuff.”

“No
human
ever died from that,” Micah said stubbornly.

“It’ll kill you slower than a meteor to the head, sure, but it’s just as nasty as the black smoke that belches out of the factories in Noveen,” she said. Her voice wavered. “You knew people from this town who died of
that
.”

“I’m sorry, Piper,” the boy said, subdued. “But I’m
not as fast as the others. If I don’t get out there first, there’s nothing good left.”

“Sure there is. There’s plenty of good stuff if you know where to look.”

Micah didn’t answer, just stared at the music box with a defiant, hungry look. Piper sighed. Boys were so stubborn. Her father used to say he thanked the goddess every day that he’d had a girl. Boys were too much trouble. “Look, I’ll prove it to you,” she said. “When the storm’s over, we’ll go out together—you and me. I’ll get you a trinket that’ll make this music box look like a cheap windup toy.”

Micah’s face brightened. “You’d do that?”

Piper smiled. “Absolutely, if only so I don’t have to step over your smashed skull in the field. Now hush up a minute. I think I found your problem.” Piper rested her fingers on the music box’s cylinder. The tinny vibration of the strangled music beat a little rhythm against her fingertips. She felt the steel teeth, which were supposed to pluck the pins on the cylinder and create the melody. One of the teeth had a clot of dirt stuck on the end, which had crusted on the cylinder and kept it from turning. Piper reached into the box with her smallest finger, but she couldn’t scrape the dirt off without risking damage to the fragile tooth. “Go get my tool belt, will you?” she said to Micah. “It’s under the bed.”

The boy crawled over, pushed aside a stack of dog-eared, greasy-fingerprinted repair manuals, and reached
underneath the bed to grab the small tool belt. It was little more than a thick leather strap with pockets sewn all over it. Her father had made it for her a long time ago when she’d first started fiddling with machines. Back then, all their nuts, bolts, and gear wheels had seemed like fun mysteries that needed solving. She’d had no idea her talent would one day become what fed her.

Piper took out a small horsehair brush. As gently as she could, she rubbed the bristles over the comb, dislodging the dirt from them and the cylinder. “What I’m doing here will probably bend or break off part of the tooth—these pieces look pretty old—so it might miss a note or two, but just tell the buyer it’s all part of the song. Here, I’m done,” she said, handing the box back to Micah.

Micah lifted the box lid and looked at the cylinder. “Which tooth?” Piper pointed to the place, but the boy shook his head. “It looks the same as the others, doesn’t even look bent. How’d you do that without leaving a mark?”

“Look, you said to fix it, so I fixed it,” Piper said crossly. “Stop bothering me and try it out.”

He took hold of the windup key and turned it until it wouldn’t move anymore. When he let go, a tinkling melody drifted out of the box, soft and—Piper had to admit it—sweet, with no missing notes at all. The boy’s eyes widened. “How do you do it, Piper?”

“I told you how.”

“Yeah, but …” He hesitated, and Piper’s stomach clenched. She knew what was coming. “People in town say you’re weird with the machines. You’re like a healer with them. Only, when the healer treats a bad cut, it always leaves a scar. When you fix the machines, it doesn’t leave a mark.”

“Machines are easier to fix than people,” Piper said, trying to shrug it off. “A lot louder and dirtier too—well, sometimes, at least.”

“But you even fixed that watch,” Micah persisted. He lifted the trinket from around Piper’s neck and held it in the palm of his hand. “When I gave that to you, I was sure you’d never get it going again. Now it looks almost new.”

Piper didn’t have an argument for that one. Micah was right. The watch had been in pieces when he brought it to her. Micah’s brother had taken it from a small crater at the edge of the harvesting fields. He’d gathered up as many of the broken pieces as he could, but it looked like some scrapper had trampled the watch in his rush to get on to bigger treasures. Piper spent weeks working on it, painstakingly reinserting its brass gears, escapement, and mainspring into the case. Her patience paid off the day she heard the distinctive ticking sound coming from the thing. Micah ended up giving the watch to her as a gift.

What she never told Micah or anyone else was that in the months after her father died, when she desperately
needed coin that he was no longer able to provide, she’d tried to sell the watch to a stiff hip from Ardra. The trader brought the watch back a week later, claiming Piper had cheated him, that the thing didn’t work. Piper gave him his money back, though it had almost killed her to do it. A few days later, the watch inexplicably started ticking again. Twice more Piper tried to sell it, but both times the traders brought it back, angrily waving the broken thing in her face. Apparently, the watch had decided not to work for anyone but Piper. She’d never figured out why.

Piper knew she should be proud of her talent, and she was, but it made her nervous the way people whispered about her when they thought she couldn’t hear. They claimed that there were many machines only Piper could fix, and that made some people angry, as if she were taking something away from them by being so good at her work. How could the best machinist in the scrap town be so young, with no training beyond her father’s guidance and her own tinkering? That was what they whispered. Even Micah looked at her strangely sometimes, as he was doing now, and Piper hated it.

“It’s getting late—or early, I guess,” she said. “You’d better head home.” The storm was coming, and she had to be ready. She didn’t have time to worry about stupid rumors. Piper held open the sack for Micah to put the music box in it. “Look, promise me you won’t take less than twelve for that thing, and make sure you tell anyone
who looks at it that it plays a pretty song. They’ll want to hear all about it.”

The melody had dwindled to a few meek notes. Micah pressed his ear against the box. “But I don’t know anything about the song. It’s from another world.”

Piper threw up her hands, but she was smiling. A little bit of the tension went out of her. “Of course you don’t know it, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make something up, you dumb puppy. Tell them it’s probably an old song from a world of poets, a lover’s lament.”

“Lover’s lemon?” Micah said dubiously.

“Lament,”
Piper said. “Didn’t you learn anything in the Consortium school? It means regret or something. Trust me, they’ll eat it up.” She shooed him toward the door. “Go on.”

Micah ran when Piper pretended to kick him out with her oversized boot. “Thanks, Piper,” he said, grinning. “Mom and Dad are coming back tomorrow night. I’ll bring you some fish from their catch!”

As soon as he disappeared around the corner, Piper shut the door, shed her nightdress, and put on trousers and a thick cotton shirt, adding another layer of socks to the ones she already wore so her father’s boots would fit tighter. Luckily—or unluckily, depending on how you looked at it—she’d always had big feet. She’d outgrown her own boots months ago. Her father’s coat, however, didn’t fit her at all. The tail dragged on the ground, and the sleeves bunched at her elbows. It hung loose on her
and she was always catching it on things, tearing holes and leaving threads hanging out. The garment looked more like a dog’s shaggy coat than a jacket. She adored it.

After she dressed, Piper checked the stove again and hauled water in from the well. She filled the teakettle and set it on the stove to boil. From a cupboard, she took a box of tea and measured out a small amount to add when the water was done. For the rest of her breakfast, she got out the loaf of bread she’d made the day before and tore off two large chunks.

Every now and then, she threw an uneasy glance out the window. The green light in the sky grew brighter with each passing hour, and the smell of brimstone thickened in the air, mingling with the scent of woodsmoke from the stove. By her guess, the meteor storm would break just before dawn, which gave her a couple more hours to get ready and get to the shelter.

She packed a satchel with cloths, heavy leather gloves, a pair of goggles to keep any lingering dust out of her eyes, and a couple of rice balls she’d bought from the market. She went over every item twice to make sure she hadn’t forgotten anything that she’d have to come back for later. As soon as the storm was over, she needed to be among the first out to the fields for the harvesting—Micah would slow her down—she had to be ready to run as soon as the green light faded from the sky.