ATLAS’S TRIUMPH TURNS TO SHOCK as he sees the blood on my face.
‘What did he do to you?’ he stutters, tracing the cut that runs from the corner of my mouth to my cheek.
I ignore the question. ‘She didn’t push you off the roof?’
‘Oh, she did,’ Chumana says calmly. ‘I had to catch him like a dog catches a stick.’
Marquis smothers a laugh and Chumana looks pleased.
‘Where’s Karim?’ he asks.
‘I was flying him to safety when I heard Vivien’s calls,’ Chumana growls. ‘I left him on a nearby farm.’
‘We need to get Ursa and Dr Seymour,’ I say. ‘Are they in the—’
‘Basement,’ Atlas says with a nod, his eyes on the glasshouse. ‘Where’s Ralph?’
‘I knocked him out,’ says Marquis unapologetically. Then he turns to me. ‘Did you say … Ursa?’
But, before I can explain, Chumana breathes flames fromher mouth and nostrils. I feel the heat scorch my hair and pull Marquis back as we watch the glasshouse burn. Orange flames lick up the edges of the building and windowpanes shatter. Through the empty frames, I see the fire spreading, finding its way across the worn rugs and up the wooden tables, eating through the cushions and the plants and the magazine collection. Soon it will devour the last of my notes and the remnants of the first loquisonus machine.
‘Ralph,’ I say. ‘He’s still alive in there.’
Atlas and Marquis look at each other.
‘See, after what he did to you, Viv—’ Marquis begins.
‘Atlas,’ I say sharply. ‘Surely you’re not going to—’
‘No,’ Atlas says with a frustrated sigh. ‘No, I suppose I’m not.’
He runs round to the secret window in the glasshouse and steps inside.
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ Marquis says, going after him.
Chumana turns to me. ‘There is something you must know, something I failed to explain to you last time.’
I wait.
‘The Koinamens calls you hear through your machine, the ones that make us dragons sound like birds. They do not sound that way to dragons. The conversion to a frequency humans can hear distorts them and strips them of the crucial thing they carry.’
There’s a screech as the structure of the glasshouse begins to weaken.
I take a step closer to Chumana. ‘What thing?’
‘Emotion,’ Chumana says. ‘Each call carries a complexemotion. A warning call will give the receiver a sudden sensation of fear, like an electric shock. And if the communicating dragons are closely bonded, are from the same family, one may even be able to see, momentarily, through the other’s eyes.’
I shake my head, struggling to grasp what she means. Marquis and Atlas reappear, coughing and pulling Ralph between them. But my focus is on Chumana’s voice alone.
‘The stronger the bond between dragons, the better they can understand each other. That is why dragons who don’t know each other can only communicate using basic calls, calls that, without that emotional link running through their bones, they sometimes fail to understand.’
I think of the way Muirgen and Rhydderch communicated so instinctively, yet could barely echolocate with Borislav.
‘So that’s what a familial dialect is?’ I say. ‘A strong emotional bond?’
Glass shatters behind us again and Marquis puts a hand on my arm.
‘Viv, we have to go.’
