Page 39 of The Heart and the Hawthorn

She was already heading for the tunnel. Now was not the time for caution.

‘Just give me a second, Lucky!’

He bobbed his head. She anxiously scanned the dimly lit tarmac, imagining someone from Management bursting out of the woodwork to seize her sacred zookeepers cap. But nothing happened as she started typing the numbers into the keypad by the gates, no Management lackeys with handcuffs and clipboards appeared. Her fingers were sweaty, and with each number she punched in, another brick in the foundations of the ground on which she stood crumbled. She didn’t stop though. If this was the way to save the zoo – if this was the way to save her friends – she’d do it. The last twenty-digit code was in a locked folder on her phone, something they all had to keep on them at all times, in case of some dire emergency. Well, this was it. The dire emergency was here. There was just enough juice left in her phone for her to access it, before it went dead.

‘Get ready,’ she whispered, casting the phone aside. Whether she was talking to herself or Lucky, she didn’t know. Lucky can’t have heard, but his whole gigantic body was shaking anyway. Around her, the wood seemed to hold its breath as she pressed the final numbers into the keypad. With the last digit, her hand dropped.

The wards went dead.

Lucky’s howl was so loud that even though she’d braced herself, she ducked out of sheer instinct. The glass shattered with the force of his cry, entire galaxies exploding in her cerebral cortex. Clarity and flame. Wonder and triumph. Delight, delight, delight! Lucky spread his wings, slamming into whatever glass remained – now free of electricity, free of anything but bog-standard glass. It reminded her, in that moment, of the shattered Coffin.

‘Come on, little stink!’

She raised her arms, spreading her own wings. ‘I’m coming,’ she called, already running back towards him, her soul soaring. The pain in her head that had plagued her was gone. She didn’t have time to think about why this was. She just took a flying leap over the jagged wreckage, as if there was a wind lifting her up. As she landed on the other side, Lucky let out another deafening roar. No wards, and without them, it was like a wet blanket had been lifted. Lucky’s emotions slammed into her as if he could see clearly, feel clearly, think clearly for the first time since being captured, shot through with sedatives and shoved onto a plane, flown halfway across the world, and sealed behind glass.

She wanted to laugh and weep and scream all at once.

He was up on his hind legs, making the ground tremble.

‘What do I do?’ she cried.

‘Climb up!’

Frida took a running leap for his forepaw. She grappled with the edges of his scales, cold and hard like polished stone: the size of dinner plates. Unable to find purchase, the edges of them too smooth and slick, Lucky chirped with impatience, and then with a great puff of purple smoke, he pressed his whole bulk down into the mud. Flat, like a pancake crocodile. Just enough for Frida to crawl up, letting out a gigantic, ‘Whoop!’

When she’d reached the crux of his forepaw, things got easier. His scales started to have thicker ridges, and she was able to haul herself over them, panting and shivering, because he was cold, so cold. It was like bouldering on a sheet of sub-zero ice. Which moved.

‘Sorry,’ she called, wincing as her boot dug in when he lifted himself back up, almost toppling her. However, he just giggled and puffed out a few more smoke rings. His body warmed, and her muscles relaxed, a soft heat filling her. She let out a moan of gratitude.

Lucky huffed a fond sigh. ‘Little-special-stinky-Frida-Rose. Are you ready?’

She was almost at the base of his massive, scaly neck now. She could feel his muscles trembling around her legs, see the way the thousand and one purples danced under her muddy hands, a galaxy of violet. Murmuring about pink flamingos and magic and miracles with more than a few curses and prayers thrown in for luck, she swung one leg over the crest of his spine and slipped into the dip between his shoulder blades: she’d made it! The spot was gently rounded like a bowl, soft and leathery. There wasn’t much to hold onto, just a few spikes that were a bit less ferocious than the others, and she wrapped herself around one of them, gripping the ridged muscle with her thighs and thought about what her mum would say.

You’ve been ready for this your whole life, Friduska.

She tried to imagine her mum sitting behind her, helping her to hold on.

‘I’m ready!’ she called down.

Lucky gave a howl of acknowledgment and spread his wings. His wings! She would bet that one day, when she explained it to them, Hamish would write poetry about this. She watched Lucky’s unbalanced leathery sails start to lift and it seemed the whole jungle howled in answer. Her hand brushed the edges of one of Lucky’s scales, smooth as glass. She was going to fly with a dragon. Laughing wildly, she gazed towards the open roof of the enclosure, the far distant canopy, and waited for lift off. She expected them to shoot off at any moment and burst into the dazzling skies, doing loop-the-loops as Lucky blazed a hole through the fairy’s forest, just as Fireheart had blazed a hole through the fence.

And what lay on the other side was anyone’s guess.

But after a few seconds, when nothing happened, she squinted down at him. Lucky’s forepaws were moving, fast and frenzied, the noise of the thud and rip of earth deafening. It was all she could do not to go flying headfirst off his back. But he wasn’t flying. In the confusion, she couldn’t make sense of what was happening. Why was Lucky digging? He was already a foot deep, and his wings had shifted; he’d tucked the big one back in, but the one that was divided into three, he was tilting it, using those three parts to dig like spades.

All the breath left Frida’s lungs. Everyone had thought it was a redundancy of evolution. But that strange wing was for digging?

Why was Lucky digging?

They were going down, the feeling of the cold, damp earth starting to press in from all sides. Five, ten feet deep, descending into a wet dirt grave. Lucky roared, knocking her senseless with the foul stench of mould and dirt and fungus and something ancient. For a second, everything dimmed to a haze of dark smoke, and she gave a shriek as her cap flew off. The tang of metal was in her throat as Lucky’s body heaved, branches and ferns cascading. She tried to find her cap, but then she was just trying to hold on, gripping whatever she could because that smooth feel of his scales was like water flowing downstream.

He was going to drag her into the earth. Maybe he didn’t know she couldn’t breathe dirt. Did he know that? Oh, Lucky, just a quick heads up, I can’t breathe dirt, you know. Could he breathe dirt? What was he planning to do, tunnel to the place where the Jewel was? Travel to the very beginning of time?!

Suddenly, Jellybean’s words came back to her, forgotten amongst the other reams of unintelligible monkey poetry. Ree go into the dirt, down and down. Oh god.

‘I want to get off,’ she screamed. ‘Let me off!’

But Lucky didn’t hear. He was singing, the high-pitched glee of a titanic canary. She tried to take gulping gasps of oxygen, but the ground was folding in above her head, plunging her down, down, down, and all she could hear was Lucky’s singing. They were falling into the bowels where dead things were. Worms would eat her eyes, beetles would crawl in her brain, mushrooms would grow in her flesh. All her terrible decisions that day, had they all just led to this? She’d trusted Fireheart, she’d turned off the wards, she’d released a dragon! She’d let herself be gaslit by a pierced green-haired fairy.