The flashing red lights triggered something inside him.
Finn: trapdoor. Dragon: no fire.
He checked the flat-panel display. Yes! There were several lines labeled TRAP, and a separate monitor to his left displayed a stage floor plan with TRAP-1, TRAP-2, TRAP-3, all the way through TRAP-7.
Philby wiggled the mouse, drawing the cursor across the screen, and went to work.
* * *
Charlene had to move because the guys beneath her were never going to. At this point, what did it matter if they saw her? The dragon was alive up there. He was huge, and she had to stop him.
As she climbed, the chain around her shoulders rattled again the steel ladder.
“Hey! You!” came an angry voice from below.
“You can’t go up there! Get down here!”
She thought she heard Security mentioned. No matter what, she wouldn’t have much time.
As she arrived to the top of the ladder, Charlene’s head swooned. The mountain peak rose at least forty feet above the stage and much higher than that off the ground to the back of the structure—it looked like eighty or a hundred feet. She felt dizzy and a little sick to her stomach. It took her an extra second or two to realize that the greenish-brown tree trunk in front of her was the dragon’s right leg. The size of it shocked her. She’d known her task was to lock down the dragon, but she’d never expected this. At that moment, the beast was hunched so far forward, his neck craned down toward the stage, that he seemed poised to jump. Her job was to prevent this from happening and her first reaction was that she’d failed. She’d let Finn and the team down.
But the dragon didn’t jump. He just stayed there leering toward Finn as if….
He’s going to spit fire! she thought.
Charlene’s conscious thought was replaced by instinct and action. It wasn’t so different from a soccer game or gymnastics: you stopped thinking and let your body take over. She ducked her head and caught one end of the chain as it fell off, springing up and over the disgusting, scaly skin of the dragon’s right foot, grabbing hold of a spine of leathery skin—if you could call it skin—across the bridge of his four-toed foot, all the while dragging the chain with her. She couldn’t allow the beast to slip his foot out, so as she landed back on the upper platform she climbed the foot again to put a full turn around the dragon’s ankle, but by now he’d felt her, by now his attention had been distracted from the stage, and one gooey eyeball slid to the side of its socket and caught the gnat-size girl doing something down there on his foot and…kicked her off.
Charlene flew from the dragon’s foot like a bug being brushed off a child’s arm. But she held on to the chain, so that instead of being flung to her death, she ended up being swung out and around and coming back down to the floor with a thud, but with the chain now looped around the dragon’s ankle exactly as she’d wanted it. Bruised and aching, she forced herself up on her hands and knees and crawled toward the free end of the chain, where it was hanging over the rung of the nearby safety ladder.
The dragon briefly lost his balance in his attempt to lose the bug. He stepped back to recover, driving his heel down.
Charlene saw it coming and rolled, letting go of the chain. The heel came down with a stomp. Right on top of the chain.
Charlene stood and pulled with everything she had, but the chain would not budge.
The dragon—irritated and bothered—reared back his head, ready to throw a tongue of flame at his target.
She caught something out of the corner of her eye: a small pile of props, including some bows and arrows and four or five spears. They looked like they’d been there forever. But she took hold of one of the spears, tested its strength, and thought back to the one time her track coach had let her try to throw the javelin. She looked up at the dragon, remembering her Language Arts block on Greek mythology.
Achilles.
His mother, Thetis, had dipped him in the river Styx to make him immortal. But since she had held him by one heel to dunk him, this one part of his body had remained dry, and was the only part of him vulnerable to any weapon.
Achilles’ heel.
She ran to the side of the beast’s ankle, searching for the indentation at the back of the ankle—the soft, fleshy part between ankle and tendon.
She reared back the spear, then in an instant coiled down, using every muscle in her abdomen and back to whip her body forward, her arm hesitating and waiting for the sling effect that would draw first her shoulder, then her elbow, wrist, and hand ahead, up, and over her head, so that the spear seemed now to be part of her body.
She let go.
* * *
Finn froze, locked in fear as the vulture moved toward him, pushing him farther back and away from any of the glow-tape Xs that marked the various trapdoors on the stage floor. If he couldn’t get himself atop one of those Xs, he was going to fry. Get barbecued. Roasted. Killed. The dragon had been about to flame-throw when he’d suddenly looked away and stumbled. Charlene, Finn thought. At last! But nothing was going to stop Maleficent. The vulture threw her neck forward, trying to peck Finn’s head off his shoulders. He looked over at the sword inside the glowing cage of laser light.