“That was different.”
“It wasn’t,” he said firmly. “We’ve always treated Algonquin as our enemy because that’s how she treated us, but we aren’t the root of her problem. Whatever convinced her to surrender to the Leviathan, it was bad enough that she was willing to abandon her fish and give up immortal life. That’s not anger. That’s desperation, and desperate people want to be helped. If we can figure out how to do that, give her a path out of this corner that doesn’t involve the Leviathan, I’ll bet you anything she’ll take it. But we’re never going to find out what that is if we don’t talk to her. Maybe she’ll listen, maybe she’ll kill us all, but if it’s over anyway, we might as well try.” He leaned down, resting the flat of his feathered forehead against hers. “We haven’t lost yet. I trusted you. Trust me.”
Marci sighed. She still thought it was lunacy, but she couldn’t say no to anything when he asked like that. “Okay,” she grumbled. “I’m with you. How do we do this?”
“I have no idea,” Julius said cheerfully. “But I’m pretty sure our first step is ‘get to Algonquin.’”
“Right,” Marci said. “Just get to the spirit who’s inside the monster we can’t even hurt and whose magic will eat us if we do somehow get inside.”
“Maybe not immediately,” Amelia said, tapping her little claws thoughtfully against her chin. “I’ve never actually seen a Nameless End eat a plane. Maybe it takes a while?”
“Great, we can be digested slowly.” Marci glared up at the Leviathan. “I don’t even see how we’d get in to be eaten. That thing’s nothing but shell and eyes, no mouth or ears, no openings of any sort unless you want to crawl up a tentacle with the water.”
“Could we portal inside?” Julius asked, glancing at Amelia. “Your magic is low, but Svena’s should still be fine. Could she get us in?”
The little dragon thought about that for a moment, and then she shook her head. “No. Don’t get me wrong. Princess Snowflake is the best teleportation expert alive. She can get you anywhere in the physical world if she knows where she’s going, but that thing is ninety-nine point nine repeating percent magic. Metaphysically speaking, that makes teleporting into it the same as trying to teleport into another person’s soul, and there’s not a power in the world—dragon or otherwise—who can do that.”
The group fell silent. Marci was wracking her brain for a solution that didn’t leave them all doomed when she heard the crunch of shoes on gravel. Her first thought was Myron, because the step was far too light for Emily’s metal body, but it wasn’t Myron or Emily, or even a human.
It was Bob.
“Please tell me you’re coming over because you’ve just spotted a brilliant way out of this mess,” Amelia said, flapping up to her brother.
“Alas, we’re not there yet,” Bob said, holding out his arm so the little dragon could land on it. “But I might have a solution to your impenetrable Leviathan problem. First, though, you need to talk to General Jackson.”
“Why?” Amelia asked.
“Because she’s about to authorize a nuclear strike.”
Julius’s eyes went wide, and then he was gone, darting across the cavern faster than Marci had known he could go to tackle the general, who was still standing hunched over her makeshift war table.
“Get off me!” Emily Jackson snarled, shoving at Julius. The temporary body Raven had cobbled together for her must not have been a patch on her old one, though, because she couldn’t even budge him. “I have to do this!”
Julius’s answer to that was to grab her com unit and crush it with his claws. He crushed his own as well, shaking the sleek black headpiece off the crown of his transformed Fang and smashing it into plastic shards.
“Are you insane?” the general yelled. “It’s over, Heartstriker! We tried, and we failed. Now we have to use whatever we have left to blow that thing out of the sky!”
“No!” Julius yelled back. “If you call in those missiles, everything in North America will die!”
“Better than losing the whole world!” Emily cried, her dark eyes wild. “I don’t like it any more than you do, but this is the only weapon we’ve got left. We have no choice!”
“Incorrect,” Bob said, crouching down beside her. “I’m the local expert on choices, and I can tell you that there are at least twenty left. More importantly, though, it won’t work. The Leviathan is magic, not flesh. His tentacles were vulnerable to physical attack because they were disposable, but nuclear warheads won’t bother his main body any more than your other attacks did. I’ve already seen how that future ends. If you authorize a launch, all you’ll achieve is killing off the rest of us.”
Marci wasn’t actually sure if Emily believed that dragon seers saw the future, but she must have believed Bob now, because she slumped beneath Julius’s hold. “Fine, fortuneteller,” she said bitterly, relaxing into the dirt. “If you see so much, what do you suggest?”
“What I always suggest,” Bob replied, placing a hand on Julius’s head. “Listen to my brother.” He glanced at the smaller dragon. “You want to talk to Algonquin, right?”
Julius nodded rapidly. “We don’t know how to get to her, though,” he said. “She’s inside the Leviathan, and nothing we’ve tried can get through his shell. Even Amelia couldn’t burn him.”
“Hey, I burned him a little!” Amelia said defensively, scampering up Bob’s arm to perch on his shoulder opposite his pigeon. “I could have burned him a lot more if I’d had my old fire, but now that our magic’s hooked into the Sea of Magic, we’re trapped in the same sinking boat as everyone else.”
“Why?” Marci asked, genuinely curious. “I used to use Julius’s magic all the time in my spells. It worked great. Why won’t it work now?”
“Because we’re not casting spells,” Amelia explained. “Humans aren’t picky, so I’m sure you’ve never noticed, but dragon fire is fundamentally different from any other type of magic on this plane. We came from an entirely different system! Our magic was basically alien, which was why we never really integrated into our new home. I fixed that when I became a spirit, but in order to fit our magic into the rules of this realm, I basically had to turn fire into water. That’s great for us in the long term considering we have to exist in a Sea of Magic, but it’s hard to burn a hole in something like the Leviathan when you’ve traded your flame thrower for a fire hose, you know?”
Marci wasn’t quite sure that she did, but Bob was shaking his head. “Don’t bemoan our fate yet,” he said. “You might have changed our fundamental nature, but there’s still one dragon whose fire isn’t connected to yours.”
Amelia blinked at him. “How is that possible? I’m the Spirit of Dragons. If it’s a dragon, it’s mine.”