Dactyl Hill Squad: Chapters 19–28

Around them, the city seemed to yawn and stretch, waking gradually as the sun rose over sauropods and swooping dacytls, brownstones and church steeples and municipal domes.

The buildings, gaudy superstructures and run-down tenements alike, all frowned out from their foundations; each presided over its lot of land like the old angry white man Magdalys had seen once, brandishing a shotgun in front of his little shack in the Claw to make sure no one stole the withered apples off a sad little tree in his front yard.

The buildings, gaudy superstructures and run-down tenements alike, all frowned out from their foundations; each presided over its lot of land like the old angry white man Magdalys had seen once, brandishing a shotgun in front of his little shack in the Claw to make sure no one stole the withered apples off a sad little tree in his front yard.

The ferry sauropod navigated between huge armored warships and around a steamboat before docking alongside an ancient wooden frigate with cannons poking out of either side.

All around them, Manhattan stretched out in rowhouses, great majestic cupolas, church steeples, and glowering government domes.

All around them, Manhattan stretched out in rowhouses, great majestic cupolas, church steeples, and glowering government domes.

“Right,” Magdalys conceded.

She kept digging, frustration gnawing away inside her, until a single word on a folded-up parchment caught her eye.

It was the same insignia that Riker had on the medallion he wore!

Magdalys read: My brother knight—I trust all is well with your endeavors and I write you with the utmost urgency.

Have everything ready on the Ocarrion.
If the captain gets antsy again, handle him.
With great haste,
R

The dactyl screeched and took a few steps back from the noxious fumes now rising from the carpet.

He was probably frowning, deep in character as Richard III, the conniving, hunchbacked king of England, but inside, Halsey was chuckling away.

Raucous laughter broke out followed by wild applause.

Magdalys poked Mapper, who stood completely enthralled by the play even though he couldn’t see either.

“That’s what I’m getting to. They say that’s how Dactyl Hill got its name—all that carrion attracted the pteros, and here we are. Badhoffer was upset because whoever was there got his pteranodon all riled up.”

A pteranodon was like a pterodactyl but way, waaay bigger and with no teeth and not much of a tail. Dr. Barlow Sloan’s Dinoguide said they were the most intelligent and graceful of the pteros, and fiercely protective of their brood.

Two Step boggled. “That thing was a pteranodon? Whoa!”

“You guys don’t have legal guardians right now,” David said. “And we figured, quite frankly, between myself, Louis, the Crunks—well, Cymbeline, at least—Bernice, and everyone else here, we’d do a better job of keeping you guys safe than the broken ol' charity bureaucracy. But now...if you won’t even follow simple orders, I’m not so sure.”

“It corroborates what Marietta and I found out earlier,” Louis said.

The dactyls swooped and spiraled above the bone factory en masse, just like before, and she and Two Step had to do some fancy flying to avoid collisions as they came in for rocky landings on the edge of the wall.

But the sorrow was still so palpable; she could almost taste it.

Majestic as she was, the poor creature’s skin looked too pale and sickly. Old scars and some festering blisters stretched along her hide.

So we dactylride rooftop to rooftop down to the water, then we each hide out in one of the docked boats, and when the Ocarrion heads out to sea, we swoop in after ’em and take it over, kick all the slavers over the side and commandeer it back to the bay and turn the orphans back over to the Anti-Slavery Society and boom! Mission accomplished.

“Exactly,” David said. “And why Miss Cymbeline here knows so much about handling firearms and conducting covert ops will apparently remain a secret.”

“Will remain a secret for now,” David added sharply. “In the meantime, you can help us shred the youngens’ plan, as Two Step so aptly put it.”

“It’s all well and good that we inconvenienced that maniac,” David said, “but the real haul from Magdalys and Mapper’s little Manhattan sojourn is the paperwork.”

“...Now it looks like we—or should I say, you all—have uncovered one of the key linchpins in that connection. Harrison Weed, who we now know is a member of a secret society called the Knights of the Golden Circle—”
“K of the G C!”

General congratulating and hooting ensued.

Magdalys was rendered speechless.

David had finally relented, begrudgingly, and that meant that the rest of the squad was going as well.

“So we better get moving. Everyone’s to travel in pairs and take up your positions as instructed. Magdalys, you and Amaya are linking with an operative named Redd at Pier 54. You can trust him and his cutlass entirely—he’s one of our best.”

Magdalys and Amaya went through three dactyls on the journey; once they’d crossed over from Brooklyn they still had to trek to the other end of Manhattan, and the whole time the harried city streets seemed ready to swallow them whole at any moment.

He finally looked down at Magdalys’s hand signs. “Oh yeah, VC, VC, I know! I’m Redd. You all are Magdalys and Amaya. I got the description. And sorry to rush you and cut through the formalities ’n’ whatnot, but we gotta roll!”

Ride out with M and A and rendezvous at the Spine Islands.

“Toss it when you done,” Redd said, guiding them through a labyrinth of shipping crates and ironworks.

“There she is,” Redd said, finally stopping at the edge of the pier, arms akimbo like a proud father.

The mosasaurus was wide in the middle, where a worn leather saddle breached the water.

Her long, black-and-yellow striated body narrowed some toward the head and even more at the tail, which swished slowly back and forth in what seemed like murderous anticipation.

“Yeah, I’m only contracting with the Vigilance Committee now and then. Got my own crew, really. We buccaneers.”