The Ohio River appeared beneath them like a brown ribbon stitched between green banks, wide and slow and indifferent to dragons. Malik banked north over it, checking formation. Lena steady on his left, Zoe drowsing against her mother's neck. Darius on the right, trailing smoke.

  The tremors had moved inward. That was the wrong direction.

  In the first hours after the cave, the shaking had been visible...wings stuttering, claws clenching, tail lashing in short involuntary snaps. Now Darius flew almost still. Too still. The rage had gone somewhere Malik couldn't see, and that was worse than watching it leak out the edges.

  "Indiana state line in twenty minutes," Malik called back. "We follow I-65 north. Stay above the cloud deck."

  Darius said nothing.

  Lena said, "Copy that."

  Zoe lifted her head. "Are we almost home?"

  "Getting there," Malik said.

  She subsided. Her sapphire wings had stopped trembling somewhere over Kentucky, exhaustion finally winning over anxiety. She was ten years old and she had transformed into a dragon and watched her father destroy a liquor store and she was still asking are we almost home with the absolute faith that home was still a thing that existed.

  Malik loved her so much it hurt behind his sternum.

  They climbed above the cloud deck. The sun hit them full and warm, the clouds spreading white and clean in every direction below like the world had pulled a sheet over its own mess. Up here the air tasted of nothing but cold and altitude. Malik exhaled and let his wings find the rhythm.

  Then Zoe said: "Ooh."

  Malik looked.

  Two F-16s, climbing hard out of the east, afterburners lit, closing fast.

  "Formation tight," Malik said. "Nobody breathe fire."

  "Malik," Lena said.

  "I see them."

  The jets came in on a parallel course, close enough that Malik could see the pilots' helmets through the canopies. One of them banked slightly, pulling alongside him at maybe two hundred yards. Malik kept his eyes forward. Gold wings steady. Non-threatening. Just a very large dragon minding his own business above Indiana.

  The pilot held position for a long moment.

  Then the jet waggled its wings once...the universal aviation greeting. They waited a moment, and Malik made a similar gesture. The pilots saluted and pulled away, climbing back into the blue.

  Zoe watched them go. "They waved."

  "They did," Lena said softly.

  "Does that mean we're okay?"

  Malik thought about the sirens in Kentucky. The clerk dropping his phone. The way the woman with the six-pack had run for the back of the store. "It means they're figuring it out same as us," he said.

  Darius said nothing.

  They flew on.

  The other dragon found them over the cornfields of central Indiana.

  He came in from the west, low and fast, scales the color of old iron, wingspan wider than Darius's. He wasn't attacking...his approach was too direct for that, wings angled wrong for a strike. He was just moving, alone, and he saw them and altered course.

  Malik slowed. The iron dragon slowed with him.

  They flew parallel for a moment, two strangers sizing each other up across a hundred feet of midwestern air.

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  The iron dragon was older. The scales had a weathered quality, like river rock. His eyes were human still: brown, tired, carrying the same weight Malik had been watching accumulate in his father's face since the cave.

  He dipped his head once.

  Malik dipped his back.

  The iron dragon banked west and was gone, dropping back below the cloud deck, disappearing into Indiana's flat green geometry.

  "Who was that?" Zoe asked.

  "Someone going home," Malik said.

  Lena watched the place where the iron dragon had vanished. "How many of us are there?"

  Nobody answered because nobody knew.

  They lost Darius over Lake Michigan.

  Not permanently. But the moment was bad enough.

  They had dropped below the clouds to get their bearings, the lake spreading gray-blue to the horizon, the Michigan shoreline visible as a dark line to the north. Home was maybe forty minutes. Malik could feel it in his chest like a compass needle finding north.

  Then Darius folded his wings.

  Not a controlled dive. A collapse. He dropped two hundred feet before the wings snapped back open, catching air hard enough that the crack of membrane against wind was audible. He pulled out low over the water, close enough that his wingtips left paired furrows in the surface.

  Malik dove after him. "Dad!"

  Darius was shaking again. The internal stillness had broken and what came out was worse. His whole body trembled in long rolling waves, scales rattling faintly against each other, smoke pouring from his nostrils in thick continuous plumes. He was flying on instinct, nothing else.

  Malik came alongside. "I've got you. Easy."

  "Don't." The word came out wrong...too thin, too high, like something behind it was tearing loose.

  "Dad—"

  "Don't touch me." Darius's eyes were bloodshot crimson at the edges. "Don't you dare touch me with that sound."

  Malik pulled back half a wingspan. "Okay. Okay, I won't."

  Lena came down on the other side, Zoe pressed tight against her. Her ruby eyes were steady but her jaw was set in the way Malik had learned meant she was working very hard to stay calm.

  Darius flew. The tremors gradually slowed, not because they stopped but because he was burning everything he had to hold himself together. His wingbeats were mechanical. His tail hung limp.

  "I need—" he started.

  "I know," Lena said.

  "You don't."

  "I do." Her voice was quiet. Not angry. Something sadder than angry. "I've known for three years, Darius. I just didn't know how to say it."

  The silence that followed was larger than the lake below them.

  Darius flew. Smoke curled. The Michigan shoreline grew closer.

  Finally: "How long?"

  "Since Zoe's birthday. The second flask. You thought I didn't see you refill it in the truck."

  Malik kept his eyes on the horizon. Gave them what privacy three dragons flying in formation over Lake Michigan could have.

  "I'm sorry," Darius said. His voice had gone hollow. "Lena, I'm—"

  "I know." She reached out, ruby wing briefly touching emerald. "We're going to get through this. But you have to let us help."

  Darius didn't answer.

  But he didn't pull away from her wing.