I don’t care any more as long as I can go home.
Dr Seymour shakes her head bitterly, her hand still resting on her stomach.
‘Wyvernmire is one secret short of making dragons subservient to humans,’ she says. ‘What do you think happened in Bulgaria? That the dragons massacred an entire population for no reason?’
My heart sinks. ‘The Bulgarian government discovered echolocation?’
Dr Seymour nods and looks at the loquisonus still on my shoulder. ‘What we thought we discovered during the war was already known to Dr Todorov, thanks to a machine that harnessed the piezoelectric effect of quartz crystals. It was a primitive device, far less developed than its successor – my own loquisonus machine. But it was a beginning. He called itreading the dragons’ thoughts. The Bulgarian humans forced dragons into fighting rings, kidnapped their young and used echolocation to experiment on them. They did terrible things.’
‘So … all this time you’ve been pretending to know less about dragon echolocation than you do? You knew, from the start, what it is?’
‘Yes,’ Dr Seymour says. ‘I’ve always known it’s a language, one the dragons clearly value deeply.’
I stare at the loquisonus machine. All along I thought it was the key to saving my family and finding Ursa, but I’ve been taken for a fool. ‘So we’ve just been wasting time,’ I say bitterly, ‘learning a language you already know—’
‘No, Vivien,’ Dr Seymour says. ‘You forget that I am no translator. The deciphering of echolocation, the meaning of each call, the existence of these dialects … that was all you.’
‘And the previous team?’ I say. ‘Did you recruit them just to sabotage their efforts? Where are they now, Dr Seymour?’
She has the decency to hang her head in shame.
‘The reperisonus wires weren’t accidentally broken,’ I continue. ‘You cut them. All this time, you’ve been trying to stop us from learning the very thing you’ve been teaching us.’
‘I have,’ Dr Seymour admits. ‘When you suggested that the dracovol was speaking to its eggs through echolocation, I was terrified. Terrified that I could no longer stop you from deciphering it, when you were realising things it took me years to understand. Terrified that you’d give the information to Dodie or Atlas, who might in turn give Professor Lumens the key to hatching dragon eggs. You were too fast for me to keep up with. It’s near impossible to sabotage the work of askilled translator when one barely speaks the language they’re translating.’
‘So the previous recruits … what happened to them?’
‘They were simply sent back to the places I recruited them from.’
‘Are you sure about that?’ I say softly.
Dr Seymour’s eyes fill with tears. ‘I had to keep my position as an informant here. The alternative was—’
I shake my head. I don’t want to hear any more. I just want to go home.
‘You should understand why I have to give the translated echolocation to Wyvernmire,’ I say. ‘You have something too precious to lose, too—’
‘Your mother’s entire family was murdered in Bulgaria, weren’t they?’
I nod.
‘If Wyvernmire learns to speak echolocation, the dragons of Britanniawillrise up,’ Dr Seymour says. ‘History will repeat itself.’ She gives me a hard, cold stare. ‘And then we’ll both lose what we love.’
*
At dinner, Marquis greets me with a glare.
‘Where have you been all afternoon?’ he says urgently. ‘Dr Seymour said you were getting a machine serviced? You weren’t in the workshops, so—’
‘Thought you’d spend the afternoon trying to crack the code, did you?’ Katherine says. She sits down opposite me, her face hardened with malice. ‘You weren’t getting the loquisonus serviced, you were just hoarding it for yourself,and Dr Seymour covered for you. We all know she wants you to win the category. She—’
‘I had Knott fix one of the dials on it,’ I lie. ‘And then …’
Better to take the fall for something I didn’t do rather than tell everyone I left Bletchley Park with a rebel dragon.
‘And then I used it to listen to some of the patrol dragons.’
‘So Katherine’s right,’ Sophie says coldly. ‘You wanted it for yourself, despite having had all morning to use it.’
