‘The wyverns must echolocate underground, no? If we take the loquisonus down to the Stepstones, I can listen and determine where the calls are loudest. We might be able to follow the sound until we find them.’
‘Brilliant,’ Atlas says. His face lights up. ‘You’rebrilliant.’
I flush with pleasure. It feels addictive, having his eyes on me.
‘There’ll be interference,’ Gideon says. ‘From the other dragons on Canna.’
I nod. ‘We can try to avoid that by going to the lowest point of the valley.’
‘Look for a river, then,’ Marquis says. ‘The bottom of a valley usually has one, or at least an active stream.’
‘There,’ says Serena, pointing to a long, blue line of water.
We venture down towards it, the sun warm on our backs.
‘Let me help you,’ Atlas says.
He doesn’t wait for my reply before reaching for the loquisonus machine, his fingers brushing mine. I count the moles on his face as he sets the machine on the ground by the river, then crouches over it to plug the headphones in.What if he does decide to be a priest?I think suddenly. He could still change his mind, and what would we be then? Strangers? Lovers? Friends who kiss against a tree from time to time? Of course not.
No. He wouldn’t allow it.
Atlas King would never agree to loving my body but not my soul.
I take the headphones from him and sit by the water to listen. My ears fill with the clicks and trills of echolocating dragons, each one as loud as the next. I shake my head and stand up with the machine, moving further along the stream. My heartbeat slows as I close my eyes. I let my mind search for the calls it recognises, then follow the ones it doesn’t. The ones I haven’t heard before.
‘What does it feel like?’ Atlas says. ‘To understand them?’
I don’t open my eyes. ‘It feels like . . . like listening to an unintelligible stream of sound, except that one day the sound becomes several distinct sounds, imbued with enough meaning that suddenly the stream is replaced with words and phrases that make sense. And you can never hear them as gibberish again, no matter how hard you try.’
But the calls of Canna’s dragons are almost impossible to differentiate. I didn’t study these in the glasshouse. They probably refer to the hunting of puffins or the rising tide rather than the comings and goings of life at Bletchley Park. It’s like learning a new language.
I step over another small stream as one of the calls gets louder, then quieter. The clear, oscillating vibration of them stops me in my tracks. This echolocation sounds strange. I step back over the stream and the volume increases again.
‘There,’ I say, nodding to the spot where I was just standing. I glance up into the sky but see no dragon. ‘Maybe there’s something below.’
‘There’s no feathers or fur or dragon dung,’ Marquis says.
Gideon shakes his head. ‘No tracks or discarded prey.’
I keep listening, the calls still loud in my ears as I walk along the stream. Something glints in the grass. I turn it over with the toe of my boot. It’s a piece of transparent, orange rock, the size of a pebble. As I kick the grass back I see more of them, tiny treasures buried in the ground. My boot meets Serena’s.
‘Someone’s turned up the earth here,’ she says.
We follow the stream for another half-mile, deeper into the valley as I try to concentrate on not losing the clearest calls I’m hearing among all the others. They vibrate in my ears, then die, then stutter to life again. They sound like a faint yet persistent music. The valley is as still and crisp as the untouched landscape of a fairy tale, yet the ultrasonic sound bursting in my ears tells me it’s full of life.
But where is that life hiding?
‘Stop,’ Serena says.
The stream snakes into a small pool of water surrounded by trees. At the far end is a tall cliff face with a waterfall crashing down from above it. We pause, hot and breathless, as Atlas walks around the pool and lays a hand on the wet wall of the cliff.
‘There’s no tunnel here,’ he says.
‘Behind the waterfall?’ I say hopefully.
Atlas edges along the cliff and sticks his head behind the curtain of water.
‘Nothing,’ he calls out.
