Avi pressed his palm against his skull and felt the dragon wake beneath his dreadlocks. It stirred like a heavy snake, slow and warm, coiled in the ropes of his hair. He had carried it since birth. In three nights the eclipse would seal it there forever, and he would spend his life as a cage that never opened. To free it, he had to hear its voice. He had never heard a sound. He knelt inside the crystal cave and tried again. Blue and pink stones glowed along the rough walls. Their light pulsed with his heartbeat, then faded when the dragon settled. Avi held his breath. He waited for a word, a hiss, anything. Nothing came. The spirit moved and slept, deaf to him, and he to it. He had climbed to the cave because an old woman swore its stones amplified hidden things. She was wrong, or he was broken. He struck the ground with his fist. "Speak," he said. His own voice bounced back mocking him. Then a bird screamed at the cave mouth. A falcon landed on the stone lip, feathers burning red like coals under skin. It fixed one gold eye on Avi and did not blink. It carried no message he could read. But when it shrieked, the crystals flared white, and the dragon in his hair lunged toward the sound. Avi understood. The dragon answered heat and cry, not human words. He needed a voice loud enough and strange enough to reach it. The falcon dropped from the ledge and dove into a black crack at the cave's rear. Avi grabbed a glowing shard and followed. The crack fell into a flooded pit. Cold water swallowed his knees, then his waist. Something huge turned below the surface. A pale shape rose, long and ancient, its body ghost-white, its eyes lit from within like the crystals. A leviathan, far from any sea, breathing in the dark. Avi froze. The falcon perched on a rock above the water and screamed once more. The leviathan answered. It sang a low note that shook the water and the stone and Avi's teeth. The crystals blazed. And the dragon in his dreadlocks answered back. A voice unspooled inside his skull, dry and old and vast. *You kept me waiting,* it said. Avi gasped and gripped the shard until it cut his hand. The contact he had hunted for years poured through him now, warm and terrible. He could finally begin. But the leviathan's song had roused more than his dragon. Deep in the pit, other shapes were moving toward the sound, and the water was rising fast around his chest.