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  ANCIENT,

  STRANGE,

  AND LOVELY

  ALSO BY

  SUSAN FLETCHER

  THE DRAGON CHRONICLES:

  Dragon’s Milk

  Flight of the Dragon Kyn

  Sign of the Dove

  Alphabet of Dreams

  Shadow Spinner

  Walk Across the Sea

  ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales

  are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products

  of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons,

  living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2010 by Susan Fletcher

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction

  in whole or in part in any form.

  ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

  is a registered trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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  The text for this book is set in Garamond 3 LT.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  0810 MTN

  First Edition

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Fletcher, Susan, 1951–

  Ancient, strange, and lovely / Susan Fletcher. — 1st ed.

  p. cm. — [The dragon chronicles]

  Summary: Fourteen-year-old Bryn must try to find a way to save a baby dragon from a

  dangerous modern world that seems to have no place for something so ancient.

  ISBN 978-1-4169-5786-7 [hardcover : alk. paper]

  [1. Dragons—Fiction. 2. Poaching—Fiction. 3. Fantasy.] I. Title.

  PZ7.F6356An 2010

  [Fic]—dc22

  2009053797

  ISBN 978-1-4424-2002-1 [eBook]

  for Kelly

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  BIRD DAY

  PART I. EGG

  1. THINGS THAT GO THUMP

  2. PLEATHER

  3. THE ALASKA DIRT

  4. DROPPED OFF THE FACE OF THE PLANET

  5. TRIPLE SHOT

  6. KISS OF DEATH

  7. THANK YOU, MR. FRANZEN

  8. MR. LIZARD

  9. SKULL AND CLAW

  PART II. LIZARD

  10. WAY FUSED OUT

  11. CRYPTID, DORMANT

  12. SOMEPLACE REALLY REMOTE

  13. JUST WRONG

  14. RATTLED

  15. A FRIEND WITH A CAR

  16. A SECURE, UNDISCLOSED LOCATION

  17. FLY AWAY HOME

  18. RAGING GEOTOX

  19. AS IN DRAGON DRAGON

  20. PULSE WORK

  21. STEP AWAY FROM THE LIZARD

  PART III: JOURNEY

  22. FUGITIVE, ON THE LAM

  23. MOTHER SHIP

  24. SPIFFY

  25. JUST RUDE

  26. STRANGE TIME

  27. MACROECONOMICS

  28. A DARKER DARKNESS

  29. THINGS THAT HAD TOUCHED FISH

  30. COCKATIEL GIRL

  31. FULL-Out SEISMIC NUTCASE

  32. SECRETS

  33. CRYPTOMAN

  34. WRECKING ALASKA

  35. DOOMED

  PART IV: DRAGON

  36. CELEBRITY LIZARD

  37. VIRAL

  38. MAGIC MAN

  39. A FALL

  40. PET SMUGGLERS

  41. SUBWOOFER VIBE

  42. NOT THE BORG

  43. DRAGON’s MILK

  44. UGLY ORANGE COAT

  45. FREE FALL

  EPILOGUE

  FLYING LESSONS

  ANCIENT,

  STRANGE,

  AND LOVELY

  The language of birds is ancient, strange, and lovely, bearing equal parts heartbreak and joy.

  —from Lost Secrets of the Animal World by Mungo Jones

  BIRD DAY

  One rainy day, I climb up to the attic, unlock the trunk, lift out the falling-apart boxes of family pictures, and hunt for the kids with the birds. I sit cross-legged in the puddle of light on the floor and riff through all those retro analog prints—the colored ones, the black-and-white ones with the crinkly edges, the paleo-old ones with the brownish tints. I pick through the weddings and the picnics and the graduations and the vacations until I have a pile of them—just those birthday portraits, just those five-year-old kids with their birds.

  Bird day, we call it. In our family, kids get birds when they turn five. One bird per kid, that’s the deal. Nobody knows when it started, but it was back there a ways. I know that now. It had to be way, way back.

  These kids with the birds, they’re not smiling. They all look, like, dead serious, which you might think would be funny, actually, considering they’re tricked out in their Sunday best with all seismic random kinds of birds—one each—on a shoulder or a wrist or a finger or even pecking at an ear or a strand of hair. These green-eyed five-year-old kids with their birds. There’s this one girl with a screech owl perched on her little straw hat, glassy-eyed and staring, like it’s taxidermy or something.

  You’d think you’d want to laugh. But you don’t.

  Someday I’m going to scan them. I’ll amp up the encryption so no one can get in. Maybe I’ll even scrapbook, pretty it up. Put in little quotes and emoticons and stuff.

  You’ve got to wonder why they kept doing it. Setting up their little kids with birds. Encouraging it. It had to be rough when people outside the family found out what was going on, which they sometimes did. Some of them suspected witchcraft, and once I heard Mom say they maybe even burned one or two of our guys, a long time ago, at the stake.

  You wonder what they thought it was all for, this weird little thing we can do. (Some of us. Not all of us. But enough to keep it going.) It must have seemed pretty pointless until now. Like being able to wiggle your ears, or curl your tongue lengthwise, or dislocate your shoulder on purpose and put it back again. Yeah, it’s actually better than that. It’s like satisfying. I want to say the word “delight.”

  But how was it worth the risk? How was it worth all those generations of being different, being strange? How was it worth the loneliness?

  How did they know it would be so important?

  How did they phaging know?

  Something old,

  Something new,

  Something broken,

  Someone blue.

  What was whole

  Has come undone.

  Something’s broken,

  Someone’s blue.

  —from “Broken & Blue,” by White Raven

  Mercury and PCBs,

  Nitrogen dioxide,

  Arsenic and desert dust

  Blotting out the sun.

  Breathe in.

  Breathe it all in:

  Now you and the celumbra are one.

  —from “Sky Shadow,” by Mutant Tide

  1

  THINGS THAT GO THUMP

  APRIL

  EUGENE, OREGON

  I woke in the midd
le of the night, came straight up out of sleep. Then sat there, heart pounding, in that numb, blind space where you can’t quite kludge together exactly what’s just happened or where or when you are.

  It was that dream again. That dream of running, searching. Of stepping off the edge of something, of falling. The sickening lurch in the gut. The dropping down and down through black nothing and not quite landing. The full-body spasm when I would have landed, jolting me out of it, out of the dream, out of sleep.

  From a dim corner, Stella stirred: a floofing of feathers, a dry click, click of talons across the perch. I kenned her, felt her in my head: edgy now, but not alarmed. Nearby, on the shelves, I could make out the shadowy outlines of other birds—ceramic and glass and stone.

  Safe in bed, in Aunt Pen’s guest room. No one searching. No one falling.

  A wind gust shook the house. Against the far wall, the shadows of rhododendrons waved in the streetlight glow. They looked huge, out-of-scale, like from a monster vid: Jurassic rhododendron. Something thumped down there—a stray cat, maybe, or an unlatched gate, or somebody’s tipped-over plastic trash can. Some ordinary, safe thing, probably jolted by the wind.

  A chill shuddered at the edges of the air, seeped through my PJs, raised gooseflesh on my back. I slid down in bed and cocooned myself in blankets as the other nightmare came to squat in the heartspace of my chest. The nightmare that lived with me now, a Fender bass static hum that never went away, not even when I woke.

  Mom.

  Thump. Thump-thump.

  I sat up. That sound again.

  When I was little, I was one of those scaredy-cat kids; I heard weird noises all the time. In the closet. Under the bed. Down the hall. When I got panicky, Mom would tell me, “It’s an adventure, Bryn. Just breathe.” Dad would wrap my little-kid hand in his massive one. He’d talk me out of bed, take me on a tour. Night patrol, he called it. “Think it through, Bryn,” he’d say. “Where’s it coming from? What does it sound like? What do you see?”

  Usually, the sounds hadn’t come from where I’d thought. Nothing under the bed—not even once. Mostly, they were outside. Ordinary things, in the days before the swarms. A tree bough scritching against the house. Wind knocking a gate against a jamb. Later, it was the swarms. Voles or mice. Possums bumping around in the recycling bin. They would stare at us, mirror-eyed in the flashlight beam, then scuttle off into the night.

  On night patrol, even though I could still feel my heart thumping in my throat, I could also feel this other thing happening—a leaning away from fear toward a puzzle to solve, a mystery to unspool. I would strain all of my senses against the night, hoping I would find the answer.

  Thump-thump.

  I felt that scaredy-cat kid inside me now, whining like she always used to: I don’t wanna. You’d think, by the time you got to be fourteen, that kid would have disappeared with all the other ghosts of childhood past: the thumb sucker, the training-pants wetter, the sippy-cup drooler.

  But, no. And I still couldn’t sleep unless I knew.

  I sighed. Kicked off my blankets. Pulled on my fleece. Opened Stella’s cage and kenned her to my shoulder.

  She sidestepped nearer, ducked under a clump of my hair. I stroked the soft feathers on her belly. She stretched up, softly nibbled at my ear.

  I padded through the dark cave of the hall, past Aunt Pen’s room. She would be mortified to know she snored. Snorted, actually. So uncouth. Outside the den, I hesitated. I cracked open the door, peered inside, found Piper’s skinny little curled-up shape in the tangle of blankets on the air bed.

  Softly, I shut the door. I crept downstairs into the dim moonlit glow of the kitchen and kenned Stella to the top of the cabinets. She pushed off my shoulder and lit there, rocking forward, her topknot flat against her head. I could sense her puzzlement, her unease. I synched with her a moment, tweaked her some comfort vibes. She settled down, fluffed her feathers, flicked her topknot back up to the “systems normal” position.

  I opened the hall closet, slipped into my coat and boots, took Aunt Pen’s flashlight from the shelf.

  Don’t wanna.

  Too bad.

  Outside, I breathed in the faint, burnt-rotten smell of the celumbra, the cloud of dust and crud that regularly blew across the planet from places where the droughts were bad. Wind churned high up in the branches of the fir trees and stirred in the rhododendrons as I scanned Aunt Pen’s small front yard with the flashlight.

  Nothing swarming, that I could see.

  I moved along the side of the house and tugged at the wooden gate.

  Latched.

  It could be the other gate that had thumped—the one closer to where I’d been sleeping. Or maybe the wind had knocked over one of the empty plastic planters back there. Maybe smacked it against the fence.

  I reached over the gate to unlatch it, groping with my fingers along the splintery wood. Then I set out along the stone path through the garden, where long, twitchy shadows shivered across the face of the moon. Bright copper tonight—seismic stunning in the haze of the celumbra.

  Piper would need her inhaler tomorrow.

  I moved past the back door to the garage—closed—past the plaster statues of cranes and sparrows, past the little pond, across the deck. The wind picked up, lifted bits of old leaves and dirt and flung them in my face. Rounding the far corner of the house, I swept the light across the row of empty pots and planters. I could still hear the wind, but I didn’t feel it now, sheltered in the narrow space between the fence and the house.

  Nothing moved. Not in the planters. Not by the gate.

  I stood, waited, strained my ears to hear.

  Nothing. Only the whoosh of wind.

  It could have been anything. Some squirrels on the fence. A raccoon out hunting. A cat on its nightly prowl.

  I shone the light up into the high, dark branches of the fir trees, first the ones that loomed above me now, and then the ones in my own backyard, directly behind Aunt Pen’s. The trees seemed alive—restless and sad. My hand moved, all on its own, to train the flashlight on Mom and Dad’s bedroom window.

  Empty.

  Dark.

  I stood staring at it, breathing in the smell of distant deserts, trying to hold it all together.

  Sometimes you never do find out what’s happened.

  Sometimes, you just never know.

  2

  PLEATHER

  EUGENE, OREGON

  Back in the house, I put everything away—coat, boots, flashlight. I kenned Stella down to my shoulder and was heading upstairs when I jerked to a stop. Stella lurched forward on my shoulder, flapped her wings for balance, and about poked out my eye with a feather.

  There was Piper on the landing—rumpled nightie, ducky slippers, round glasses too big for her five-year-old face. Sitting there. Watching.

  “What are you doing up?” I kept my voice quiet. Aunt Pen was a sound sleeper. Once the hearing aid came out, she was gone; out for the night. Still, better not push it. Aunt Pen would seriously rupture if she saw Stella uncaged.

  “Looking for you,” Piper said.

  “Well, I’m here now. Get back to bed. We’ll both go back to bed.”

  “Will you catch Luna?”

  “Luna! Did you let her out?”

  Piper shrugged.

  I groaned. Inside, though—not out loud. I’d look pretty dim getting on her about Luna, with Stella sitting right there on my shoulder.

  “Where is she?” I asked.

  “In the basement.”

  “The basement!” I remembered Aunt Pen and took it down a notch. “How did that happen?”

  “I was looking for you. And I opened the basement door and she flew down.”

  “Did you try to ken her back?”

  “She wouldn’t come!”

  “Shh!” I put my arm around her. She leaned against me, buried her face in my shirt. “Hey. It’s okay.” It actually takes years to get kenning worked out with your bird—no matter how talented you ar
e. It’s more complicated than you might think, and Piper’d had Luna for less than a year. Luna: as in Stellaluna, our favorite picture-book bat.

  I might have been able to summon Luna myself, but it’s not the thing to ken another person’s bird. It’s just not polite.

  A thought struck me. The basement.

  I held Piper’s shoulders and pushed her away so I could see her face. “Why did you open the basement door? Did you hear something down there?”

  “No.”

  “Sort of a thumping sound?”

  “No! I was just looking.”

  Okay. I breathed. Okay. “Did you see where she went?”

  “It was dark. And I couldn’t reach the switch.”

  Don’t wanna.

  I so wished I could leave this till morning. But no way would Piper go to sleep without Luna.

  “You wait here,” I said.

  I fumbled for the light switch just inside the basement door. Way down below, the ancient fixture clicked on—buzzing, flickery, and dim. I peered into the shadows. No sign of Luna. Ditzy bird. I started down the steps, breathing in eau de basement—metallic-smelling, sort of, mixed with chemicals and dust. Halfway to the bottom, Stella pushed off my shoulder and glided past the sputtery light, into the shadows.

  “Hey,” I said.

  I tried summoning her, but she slipped away. I could feel her, faintly, farther back, but she was dissing me.

  Bad bird. Bad, bad bird.

  I heard a scratching sound as Stella lit down someplace I couldn’t see, then a little greeting peep from Luna.

  I hesitated on the bottom step and scanned the room. Hadn’t been down here in years. There was the furnace. The lawn furniture, stacked and covered, waiting for spring. The banks of floor-to-ceiling shelves with their plastic bins, all neatly labeled and color-coded, Aunt Pen–style. HOLIDAY DECORATIONS. PAPER PRODUCTS. CLEANING SUPPLIES. LIGHTBULBS. STYROFOAM PACKING PEANUTS.

  No Stella. No Luna. At least, not that I could see.

  I moved past the first bank of shelves, then deeper back, past the next. PAINT. CARPET REMNANTS. EBAY. GOODWILL. There were a couple of plastic bins labeled DAMAGED FIGURINES—a tidy little graveyard for those bloodless birds of hers. Birds that didn’t shed feathers or strew seeds. Birds that didn’t poop.