the ceiling. I jumped about three feet, straight up, then leapt to the door and closed it. Hell and damnation. I had to learn to carry the headphones with me. I could pretend it was music or something.
I locked the door to the laundry room and spoke to the ceiling, “Yes?”
“There’s a breakthrough in sector twenty-four,” the voice said. I knew the voice. It was Bill, the oldest of the scientists who’d been there for the lizard people battle. He was now supposedly retired, which gave him free time to keep a scan on the mountain. His wife thought he only went there out of nostalgia, and to make sure no one stole anything.
I realized I’d said a swear word after I said it. “I can’t,” I said. “The kids are both home, and so is Wayne. Our neighborhood hasn’t been plowed. I can’t say I’m going to the store, and I couldn’t leave him alone with the kids anyway.”
There was a short silence. Then Bill sighed. “If he’s working from home—”
“That’s just it,” I said. “He isn’t.” Normally when Wayne worked from home, he worked from a desk in the spare bedroom and was safely deaf and mute to everything and everyone around him. “Even if he were, it would be difficult to leave him with both kids, but he’s home sick, and he’s in the family room. He’ll notice if I’m gone. I can’t tell him I’m going to the store, or working in the garden. And he’s in no state to look after the kids. Can’t you call Alicia?”
“Uh. No. She had a car accident and is stuck out on the road from Woodland Park, waiting for triple A to pick her up.”
“Lucy?”
“She has a cold. And she has her in-laws visiting.” He added in a tone that gave me the impression he was ticking people off on his fingers and counting, “Jill is in the hospital with pneumonia, Paula has her neighbor’s kids over and she can’t leave, Mary’s having an issue with her armor and we really can’t send her out there without it. The mechanics aren’t in the shop, and she couldn’t take it to the shop to repair, anyway, because the roads are a mess. I’m afraid it’s down to you.”
I swore again. Sometimes it’s a relief to be able to do it without the kids around. “But I can’t,” I said. “What am I supposed to do with the kids?”
“Your son, Tom?”
“Tim.”
“Right, Tim. He’s what, two?”
“Three! I was pregnant with him when—”
“Yes,” he said. The man was notably squeamish about the frog-things battle a few years ago. That had been a terrible one. Maybe it was the poisonous blood. Or perhaps the holes they had eaten into the floor. “Well. He’s not so small anymore. You can probably sit him and his sister in front of cartoons or something, right?”
I remembered that Bill and his wife had never had children. I started to say it was impossible, but if all the others were more incapacitated than I was . . . Oh, sure, I could tell Bill to fight whatever it was himself, but not only was he over seventy and a scientist who’d never fought anything more dangerous than a recalcitrant computer, but he also didn’t have the armor. Had never had it made. He’d already been too old for this when we’d fought the lizard people.
“What about Mike?” I asked. “Or Al?”
“Mike is in Hawaii, on his honeymoon,” Bill said, in a deeply disapproving tone. “And Al . . .”
“Yes?”
“Hospital. His wife is giving birth. Look, it really is only you. You have to stop this dragon. There’s no other way. We’re containing him for now, sort of, behind the doors of sector twenty-three, but he’s denting them pretty good, and, sooner or later, he’s going to come right through. Do you want a dragon eating his way through Colorado Springs? Or setting buildings on fire? I mean, the only good thing about the last dragon breakthrough is that it was in summer when fires—”
“Dragon,” I said. It wasn’t a swear word, but it might as well have been. I thought we’d seen the last of the things.
“Dragon,” he said.
And that was the problem. There are breakthroughs from the dungeon dimensions you can explain, and breakthroughs you can’t. Take the lizard people. Ah ah, rubber masks. Or take the time that we’d been invaded by a bunch of alien creatures who had studied our culture but not . . .