Dragonback 02 Dragon and Soldier Read Free Page B

flicker of gold scales as the dragon dodged out of sight
behind the door, and then was gone.
    Keeping his movements smooth, Jack dropped his arm back to his
side and kept moving. No startled screams came from behind him; the
office must have been empty after all.
    He continued his apparently aimless wandering along the edge of
the crowd, trying to figure out what Draycos had in mind. Was he
planning on going out a window and jumping the door guard from behind?
Jack had seen the K'da poet-warrior in action, and knew he could pull
it off.
    But going outside and coming in again would mean showing himself
on a busy street. Surely he wouldn't do that. Not unless they were
desperate. They weren't that desperate yet, were they?
    The minutes ticked by. Jack stayed near the back of the crowd,
occasionally wandering around some more so that it wouldn't look
suspicious when he eventually returned to the office. The guard at the
door stayed put, and no golden-scaled dragon suddenly appeared from the
doorway behind him.
    Slowly, the crowd shrank as the teens were processed and
disappeared through the dagger-decorated door. Slowly; but still too
fast for Jack's comfort. Already the back of the group had pulled away
from the area around Draycos's office. That meant that when Jack went
back to retrieve his companion, he would no longer have people standing
all around to help mask his movements.
    Too bad he hadn't known any of this was coming. Aboard the Essenay he had a whole collection of time-delay firecrackers designed for use
as diversions. Too late now.
    In the old days, Uncle Virgil would have been right there beside
him, ready to jump in with an improvised change of plans. But then, in
the old days he and Uncle Virgil never had any life-and-death
situations hanging over them. They never had the fate of two entire
species depending on whether they could pull off some scam or theft.
All they'd ever had to worry about was closing a deal, or popping a
safe, and then getting out before the cops arrived.
    How had he gotten himself into this, anyway?
    Jack looked around the room at the other kids, feeling his throat
tighten. He knew the facts of how this had happened, of course. How
he'd bumped into the ambushed K'da/Shontine ship and found Draycos
dying amid the wreckage. How they'd escaped from the people who had
attacked Draycos's people, and gone on to solve the frame-up that Jack
had been hiding from in the first place.
    But in the old days, that would have been the end of it. Uncle
Virgil would have calmly and cheerfully gone back on his promise to
help Draycos find the people who had attacked him. He would have kicked
the dragon out to fend for himself, and he and Jack would have flown
off to get on with their lives. Nice, neat, and very simple.
    So what was Jack doing here? Draycos had already said he
wouldn't force himself on a host who didn't want him. Why didn't Jack
simply dump him on StarForce like Uncle Virge wanted?
    Was it because he'd made Draycos a promise? Could this K'da
warrior-ethic thing actually be starting to rub off on him?
    He hoped not. He desperately hoped not. It was all well and good
for Draycos to be strong and noble—he was an adult, and he'd been
trained for that sort of thing. But Jack was only fourteen years old,
and very much alone in the universe. There was no way he could deal
with the complications a K'da warrior ethic demanded of a person.
    More to the point, he didn't want to deal with them. Life
was hard enough without making it any harder.
    Draycos's five minutes were up. As casually as he could manage,
Jack strolled back to the office door.
    He reached it and turned to lean his back against the jamb, gazing
blankly out at the crowd. As he did so, he dropped one hand to his side
and scratched gently against the wood.
    From inside came an answering scratch. Good; Draycos was ready.
Now if only the guard over by the exit could conveniently be looking
somewhere else.
    He wasn't. He was staring