CHAPTER 126

"Abella?" He turned to see the gargoyle standing there. "Everything okay?"

"I will watch the gate," she explained. "In case someone other than you tries to come out."

"Good idea." He handed her the key. "If we're not back by tonight—"

"Then I will worry." She smiled and winked. "Call if you have need of me."

"Hopefully, I won't need to." He opened the gate, and the creak it made pierced him to the core. Even Abella winced at the sound, and once it was open far enough, he grabbed Yuki by the hand, just in case stepping through it might separate them.

"Let's see what the other side looks like," she said, then followed him through.

Dana scrutinized the controls in her hand, then looked over at Quetzalli. They were in the greenhouse, standing on the cliffs just inside its doors. Down below, the jungle stretched out for miles, and except for the centaur settlement in the distance, there was no other sign of life.

The dragon sat on the cliff's edge, her feet dangling over the thirty-foot drop. Heights didn't seem to bother her, and she was busy pointing at clouds and chatting animatedly to Dana about cloud formations.

Dana had learned to tune her out, but sometimes, in the middle of the night, she could think back on Quetzalli's explanation about how stratus clouds were a sign that the thermals were perfect for some long, lazy flights in the sky. She often wondered if the long lectures on weather were more due to Quetzalli's instinctual interest in sky maintenance (as she called it) or if she missed the sky itself.

"Oh!" Quetzalli looked over her shoulder, her hair sliding across her shoulders as she turned. "Do it now."

Dana nodded and sent the drone up. She had been unable to figure out what was causing all the interference and confusion for her drones, but Quetzalli had told her it was related to shifting electromagnetic fields, which she could sense. Apparently there were times during the day where Dana could fly safely for a few minutes, and she was at the point where she wanted to deliver something to the centaurs rather than more excuses.

Six drones lifted off of the ground and shot out across the jungle floor, each one on a pre-programmed path. Dana nervously watched Quetzalli, who was looking at the horizon with squinted eyes. The dragon would warn her if another shift in fields was coming, and all she could do was order the drones to land or return and hope they didn't get broken. There were at least five drones lost in the jungle below, and she figured at some point, Mike would notice the cost of them.

On her laptop, the data came in chunks, and she smiled in satisfaction as the first images of the valley floor appeared on her screen. Toward the bottom was the centaur tribe's settlement, and she smiled at the cluster of centaur children who had obviously heard the drone and stopped to wave at the sky.

"See? I told you." Quetzalli had come over, but was standing a respectable five feet away. Dana had instituted a five-foot rule for all electronics after her last laptop had been shorted by a curious finger. "To catch many fish, you must cast a wide net."

"Yeah, well I want a much wider net." Most of what she was seeing had already been mapped by the centaurs, and she felt like she really needed a win here. She had made zero progress with the locked door on the third floor, and had just found out yesterday that Mike was planning to go through the back gate with some magic key that Ratu was fixing. She had mixed feelings on not contributing to any of these endeavors directly, and hoped that some success with the centaurs would help her feel better.

The data was coming in, but now that the drones were further away, the live data feed was degrading. Dana now wondered if she should just set the drones to record and then have the centaurs track them when they inevitably fell from the sky.

A distant thunderclap washed over the cliffs, and Dana scrambled to send out a return message to all of the drones.

"They don't like to share their skies, you know?" Quetzalli was staring at a crop of clouds that had just appeared on the horizon. "They can be very territorial."

"C'mon, c'mon, c'mon," Dana mumbled under her breath as she monitored the feeds from the drones. Two of them were coming straight back, and a third was trying to turn around. She wired into it directly and helped fly it back a short distance before doing the same with a fourth drone.

The fifth drone would no longer connect with her computer, and the sixth one vanished from her screen, the connection lost. The drones on their way back circled about like drunken birds.

"Damn, damn, damn!" She picked up the net that Tink had built for her. It was almost ten feet long, but had a wide mouth, and she stood on the edge of the cliff and used it to rescue the closest drone. Another one flipped upside down and crashed into the ground, and Quetzalli was able to grab one by the edges, hopefully sparing its internal components.

Dana rescued the fourth one with her net and watched helplessly as the fifth one out took a nosedive straight into the jungle below.

"Well, shit." She looked at where it fell and pulled a paper map out of her back pocket. She had printed it last week, and drew an X where she thought it had crashed. "Are those storm clouds?" she asked.

Quetzalli pointed toward the horizon. "Well, if you account for the rounded edges up top—"

"Please. Yes or no."

Quetzalli pouted. "Yes, but they have no rain in them. It isn't time yet."

Dana sighed and took the drones out of the greenhouse and placed them in a storage container by the front door. When she walked back inside, Quetzalli was crouched down on the ground, drawing figures in the dirt with a sharp stick she had found.