Solnhofen, Bavaria, 2022
I. Finding Rocco
Past the strange, wind-carved cliffs of dolomite and limestone, past the wild juniper scrub scattered across the hillside, the little dog reached the deep valley of the Bavarian countryside.
There, set into the slope, was the mouth of an underground cave — small, but easy enough to find. The plants around it had withered in a scorched, blackened ring, as if something had burned through them. On the flat ground just outside the entrance, the topsoil had vanished entirely, leaving nothing but bare, hardened limestone.
She had heard countless people talk about this cave on her travels. She had never seen it herself, not until now — but she'd learned, from the way people described it, how to tell the ones who were lying about having been here from the ones who actually had. The difference was simple enough: the ones who had really been here never wanted to talk about it much.
Now that she was actually here, she found the cave mouth far less remarkable than she'd imagined. It sat quietly on an ordinary stretch of riverbank, like nothing at all.
She walked straight in, following a scent that reached her from somewhere deep inside. It didn't take long — she moved quickly through the cave's branching passages and uneven drops, a maze carved at giant's scale — until she came, at last, face to face with the beast.
The dragon studied the creature in front of him, smaller than half the width of his own palm, and blew two columns of dark grey smoke from his nostrils as he lowered his head to look her over.
"What is your name, contender?"
"Jodie," the little dog said, practically vibrating with excitement. "Jodie, from Peru."
"I don't want to fight you, creature. Go away," the dragon grumbled.
But before he could lift his head back up, the little dog had already swatted him across the nose with one paw.
The dragon froze. He drew in a breath and studied the canine in front of him. There was none of the usual cowering in her eyes — none of the arrogance he'd seen a thousand times before, either. Instead, something in that gaze held a joy he couldn't quite name.
He caught, then, a particular floral scent on her paws — underneath it, the smell of damp earth and fern spores, pulled up from somewhere deep in memory.
"Pretty good, right?" the little dog murmured. "It rained on my way here. I played in the woods for a while."
"Just like old times."
The little dog gazed thoughtfully up at the enormous creature in front of her. Her whole body began to glow.
The dragon lowered his head, as if confirming something he could hardly bring himself to believe. Thunder surged wildly through him, and the spell that had bound him for years began, at last, to thaw.
The little dog sat quietly on the ground, watching the legendary dragon shake out both wings, swinging his neck — thicker than a redwood trunk — side to side, a low groan rising from his throat like something rumbling up from the earth itself.
The dragon knew exactly who had come looking for him.
Here was the same felon who had caused so much disaster, so many years ago — letting the light pouring off the little dog reflect in his eyes, turning the valve on his own fate, breaking free in one final, overwhelming escape.
"Let's go, Rocco. We'll search together."
The great dragon threw his head back and breathed out one long, endless column of fire, burning the underground palace that had held him prisoner for so long down to nothing. Then he and the little dog, still glowing, dissolved together into the distant, setting sun.
II. The Puppy from Aguas Calientes
In Aguas Calientes, the night always begins to fade from the church steeple first.
At five in the morning, the small, familiar shape appeared right on schedule on the stone steps outside Diana's Hostel. For the residents and tourists of Aguas Calientes, this was the town's daily signal that a new day had begun — Jodie, patiently leading the hostel's guests, one after another, to catch the first bus of the morning up the valley toward Machu Picchu.
Nothing in town escaped Jodie's nose.
She knew the thermophilic bacteria in the hot springs had gone through a small bloom overnight, because the smell of soil in the streets had thickened. She knew an Andean fox had slipped into Ernesto's shop the night before, and had brushed past the cacao tree planted by his door on the way out. She'd already sniffed out a peddler selling flour paste disguised as some kind of herbal insect repellent. She knew a swarm of fireflies had drifted in from somewhere far away, because Aguas Calientes had none of the lily-of-the-valley-scented muña grass that fireflies like that usually came from.
In the distance, the bus rolled slowly into view.
Jodie moved deftly between the tourists' hiking boots and the backpacks dropped on the ground, inspecting each item like a seasoned paleontologist: cheap sunscreen with its sickly-sweet smell, a hotel-issued water bottle that somehow smelled like an injured falcon, half a chocolate bar melting in a Korean girl's pocket—
Then Jodie stopped.
Somewhere in that tangle of smells from every corner of the world, she caught the faint outline of something long lost, something she hadn't smelled in years.
It couldn't be.
She stared, unmoving, at the German woman climbing onto the bus.
No — it wasn't the woman herself. It was the sweater she wore. Layered underneath its scent was the memory of an old, dust-covered cloak, thick and woven like a carpet, and beneath that, the particular smell that clung to the engine of an old aircraft, running hot.
She remembered a silhouette disappearing, once, under a sky full of stars over the Inca mountains — so similar. Too similar.
By the time the first light of dawn climbed up the bus station sign, people noticed something strange: the little dog who always led the way each morning was carrying a strand of wool, pulled loose from the woman's sweater, and burying it beneath the old tree by the bridge — where three pieces of obsidian, strung together on a cord, and a bus ticket from Cusco, dated 1992, were already hidden.
In the dawn light over the mountains of Machu Picchu, a little dog ran with everything she had toward the departing bus, and leapt.
