‘Seeing someone die can do crazy things to a person. What just happened … it’s a reality check for everyone. And Sophie and Katherine can’t afford for you to crack the code.’
I stare at him. Sophie wouldn’t try to kill me.Would she?
‘You be careful, too,’ I whisper. ‘Karim …’
‘Isn’t a threat,’ Marquis says firmly.
‘You barely know him!’ I retort. ‘And Wyvernmire has his parents. She said so.’
‘He won’t hurt me,’ Marquis repeats.
‘But what if he does?’ I say. ‘What if he feels he has no other choice?’
‘Then I’ll—’
He stops and we both look away. What was he about to say? That he’d kill his boyfriend if it came to it?
I let out a shaky breath. ‘Who even are we, Marquis?’
He shakes his head. ‘Two kids with a family to save, that’s who. Have you still got that knife Atlas gave you?’
I nod. ‘It’s under my pillow.’
‘Good,’ Marquis says. ‘Signal if you need me.’
‘Be careful,’ I whisper.
In the dormitory, we undress in silence. I glance at Sophie, but she shakes her head at me, her eyes swollen from crying. I climb into bed and prop my pillows up, to give me a better view of the room. When I slip the knife out from under my pillow, I find the handkerchief Dodie made me with it. I hold them both tightly in my hand. I always saw Dodie as shy. Gentle. Soft. When really she was brave. She refused to be here any more, refused to compete with Atlas, refused to work with those kidnapped dragonlings.
Yeah, and look where her bravery got her.
The room doesn’t fill with the sound of sleeping breaths like it usually does and I lie awake for hours, wondering how many of the girls around me believe I might try to sneak up on them in the night. There are Guardian voices outside, still full of urgency and adrenaline, their boots crunching across the gravel. What will they do with Dodie’s body? My eyes are heavy and I squeeze the handle of the knife in an attempt to stay awake, staring at the still shapes of the others in their beds.
No one’s coming to kill you, Viv.
But how do you know?I argue with myself.What if someone else here has a reason for cracking the code even bigger than mine? What if they, too, have a family and a sister to lose?
In the early hours of the morning, as my eyes give way to sleep, I hear two sounds. The whirring of a helicopter and the loud roars of several dragons. They’re not calling, or warning or announcing, I decide as my mind drifts. They’re commemorating. The roaring is for Dodie, the most dragon-hearted of us all.
*
We work the morning shift in silence, except for Dr Seymour’s sniffling and the wailing of the wind outside. I ask her where Dodie’s body is and where Atlas has been taken, but she shakes her head and presses a finger to her lips. Are we being listened to? All she’ll say is that Wyvernmire is back, that she arrived by helicopter last night.
I stare at the loquisonus machine for hours. Gideon is currently looking for similarities between echolocation and French while Katherine works on her theory that the calls within echolocation structures are strategically placed according to which species of dragon is being addressed. It’s so pointless I almost feel sorry for them. Now I know about the dialects, I know that each one will have to be studied and compared in order to determine which calls are unique to them, and which are used universally by all dragons. It’s no longer a case of cracking one code, of learning one language.
We have to learn hundreds.
It will be months, perhaps years, before Wyvernmire hasa team of fluent translators. She might never even get the opportunity to use the dragons’ Koinamens against them. I feel a sense of relief – maybe what I’m doing isn’t as terrible as Chumana and Dr Seymour think.
I take a large gulp of coffee. The siren rang this morning just after I fell asleep, and my eyes feel like they’re full of sand. I think of Dodie and of how desperate she must have felt to scale that fence. The memory of her body falling from the top makes me shiver.
I write down the basics of what I know.
Echolocation is a universal language used by all dragons.
Different dragon groups speak different familial dialects of echolocation.
Possible familial dialects present for study at Bletchley Park:
