Maximus shook his fist and said in a creaky voice, “Get off my lawn, ye young whippersnapper, and leave the Choco Tacos!”
Gabriela joined us. “That’s more pirate than old man.”
“Ye scurvy scallywags,” Maximus said, “stop stealing me chips.” He wrapped his arms around the bag of chips. Ryan offered me the Cheetos instead. Maximus made a grab for that bag too, but Ryan tossed it over his head. I caught it, and Maximus lunged for me, so I tossed it to Gabriela, who tossed it back to Ryan.
At last Maximus snagged the Cheetos out of the air by unleashing a lasso of fire at the bag—and I took the chips. Munching on them, I said, “Seriously, Maximus, where are you with the fire beast spell? And Ryan, how’s the code? Can we pick a date for the heist?”
“Can you breathe fire on demand yet?” Maximus countered. “You’ll need to be the one to do that, in order to open the panel for the combination lock. I won’t be able to join you at the vault until the lasers and the pressure plates are shut off.”
I thought of the chopstick and how difficult it had been to produce enough flame under stress to set off the smoke detector in our foyer. Fire breathing wasn’t my best skill. If Tuck were with us…But my brothers wouldn’t help.It has to be me.“Not exactly. But I will.”
“My parents’ anniversary is Saturday,” Ryan said. “My father has announced he’s taking my mother to La Belle for dinner.” La Belle was a fancy French restaurant in a lodge outside Aspen. You needed reservations months in advance, and I’d heard their béchamel sauce was delicious enough to make a restaurant critic weep in joy. Tuck used to talk about wanting to work there someday, back before he began his ever-changing stream of hobbies. Dinner there could take a solid three or four hours, depending on how many courses they ordered. If we struck then, we’d have plenty of time to be in and out before they’d finished their dessert.
“Saturday it is,” I said. Five more days. My calendar was open. Might as well fill it.
From then on, I switched off between practicing with the safe and breathing fire. Or more accurately, spitting out sparks. Three days before the scheduled heist, I still hadn’t mastered it.
Flopping back on the floor of the warehouse, I sighed loudly and said, “Can’t I just bring a blowtorch?”
“It’s not the same,” Ryan said. “The plate is specifically spelled for dragon fire.” He looked worried. His art, I’d noticed, had gotten steadily darker and more intricate, as if he was taking out his stress in brush strokes.
I wanted to comfort him. And I wanted him to comfort me. I wished we could go instantly back to the way we’d been, when we trusted each other completely.
“I know.” Kneeling, I focused on the block of wood in front of me. My goal was to generate enough heat to char it. If I could manage that much heat, then I’d be able to access the lock.
I kept trying.
Gabriela came by to watch me. She’d graduated from a blaze in the coffee can to stepping into a campfire. “You know, no offense, but it makes me feel a lot better about myself to see you not good at something,” she said.
I glared at her and tried again.
There! A little more than a spark!
“Ooh, insult me again!” I said.
“Um, you’re hard to insult,” Gabriela said. “You’re pretty much perfect.”
“I know,” I said. “Make something up.” Concentrating, I tried to feel that warmth in the base of my stomach. There it was, maybe, sort of.Come on, Sky, think heat!
“You’re not modest, that’s for sure,” she said. “Some people might call you a stuck-up princess who thinks she’s better than anyone else.”
My next flame was a tiny bit tighter. “Good. Keep going.”
“Some might say you’re selfish. Self-centered. Or maybe the word is self-absorbed. But I think they’re mostly jealous and kind of afraid of you, because you don’t care what they think.”
I glanced at her. “Idocare. You’re the one who doesn’t.”
“I care whatyouthink,” Gabriela said, and then she fidgeted as if she wished she hadn’t said that. “I remember when I first met you, my first day in second grade. We’d moved here in the middle of the year, and I was this weird kid who was overexcited about being everyone’s friend. I brought these Pokémon cards to school—I thought I’d make friends with them. But this boy in our class, he took them, and when I told the teacher, he lied and said they were his. And she believed him. But you didn’t. You didn’t confront the boy or anything. You didn’t say a word to the teacher. Or even to me. When I went to lunch, though, the cards were in my lunch box. And that boy had a toad in his.”
I grinned. I’d forgotten all about that. The boy seemed to hate toads as much as I did. He’d screamed so loudly that everyone stopped and stared. “Can’t believe you remember that.”
“I decided right then and there that I didn’t care what the rest of the class thought, so long as someday I’d become friends with you. Took you a long time to notice I was there.” She smiled shyly. She was blushing, I saw, and the pink spread across her cheekbones all the way to her ears.
“I’m pretty good at being self-absorbed,” I said. “It’s like a superpower. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry for not noticing sooner. I always had my family and Ryan and, well, all thewyverns.”
“Do you miss them? Your wyvern friends?”
“When we lost my mom, we lost the respect of the entire wyvern community, and that was very nearly unbearable.” I thought about the shunning nearly every day. It fueled me. That day…every wyvern had turned their back to me and my family. My own friends, who’d sat in the cafeteria with me and shared notes in chemistry class. And family friends. Friends we’d had barbecues with, like the Longobardis, who liked to play volleyball with a fireball. Friends we’d gone skiing with, like the Ortizes, who only skied on black-diamond trails, and Mrs. Harmon, who used to heat homemade hot chocolate with her breath on the chairlift for me. Friends we’d danced with at weddings and cried with at funerals and laughed with at picnics….All of them had declared us unworthy. And Ryan had led them. He’d turned first. He’d spoken the wordsI shun youformally in front of every wyvern at the Reckoning. He’d spread the word at school that we were over, that he didn’t want to be near me ever again, that I wasn’t worthy of him—
