The Art of Saving the World

that way, too, with blank walls and scuff marks down the center of the dull gray floor. Red-Dress Hazel shone her phone into each cell we passed. Many were empty. Others had plants—repotted trees brushing the ceiling or shrubbery lining the walls. I could swear one plant had been moving and froze only when the light hit it. Malfunctioning solar lights and cameras sat in the ceilings. On each door there was a chart with unintelligible statistics and measurements. They listed dates—recent dates—but what did that mean? Dates of arrival? Dates of testing?
I leaned into a window, studying a cell that seemed empty aside from a silver puddle in its center. Red-Dress Hazel gasped. Her wide eyes fixed on the next cell.
I walked closer, not sure I even wanted to know.
Colors.
That was the first thing I saw. Colors shone brightly in the beam of the light, red and purple and green and yellow. A second later, my brain made sense of the rest. Inside sat a girl our age, half her hair buzzed to a short fuzz and the other half dangling down past her ears in a jagged cut. She’d dyed it every shade of the rainbow.
She was sitting cross-legged at the back of the cell and stared at us, her mouth open. Her front teeth were big—in a way I recognized. Her face slotted into place: the thin lips, the too-long chin, the glasses.
That mole above her eyebrow.
Her mouth moved. The glass was soundproof; we didn’t even hear a whisper.
“Another?” I said.
“Holy crap,” Red-Dress Hazel said.
I stared for longer than I should have. Coming face-to-face with—well—my face was one thing. With Red-Dress Hazel, I could’ve pretended I was looking in the mirror. The makeup, clothes, and glasses were the only things different about her. We even wore our hair the same style and length.
But this Hazel? I’d looked with envy and awe at women on TV with hair like hers, half dreamed of one day being bold and trying something different with my own. It’d never gone past dreams that even I didn’t take seriously. Hair like that would only make me a target. When that senior girl Kasey had donated her hair to charity and showed up to school with a buzz cut, suddenly rumors were flying around about her creeping on girls in the changing room.
I didn’t want anyone to think I was gay. Having hair like that—it’d make it so final. As though, right now, there was still a chance I’d someday wake up feeling comfortably straight, and I’d never again have to wonder about who I liked or what I had to do about it.
The Hazel in this cell didn’t seem to share my uncertainty. The buzzed, dyed-black hair on one side only made the rainbow shades on the other half stand out fiercer. Her glasses were different, too. Whereas mine and Red-Dress Hazel’s were black and nondescript, this Hazel’s glasses were a dark, stylish purple, with winged tips. And she wore a necklace: two Venus symbols, intertwined.
This wasn’t me given a two-minute makeover.
This was me from another world. A me as alien as that kelpie down the hall.
A me who—if Red-Dress Hazel’s note was to be believed—held answers.
Rainbow Hazel snapped out of it faster than either of us. She scrambled toward the glass and pointed at the wall where the keypad lock was. She said something else—shouted maybe—but I couldn’t tell what.
I aimed my light at the keypad and tapped numbers at random. It didn’t respond. No beeps, no lights. The screen remained empty.
“Can we break the window?” Red suggested.
“It’ll be bulletproof.” Everything else on the grounds was. I frowned. “Whoever wrote that note must’ve known we would have no way of getting her out.”
“Actually,” a voice to our right said, “it’s not her the note refers to.”
The words were warm, dripping liquid.
Our heads turned as one. In the dark, something shifted. Uncoiled. Shards of emerald flickered with movement.
Red pointed her phone down the hall. Shaky light spilled across a pointed tail. A strong, scaled chest. A glimpse of folded wings.
The dragon stretched its neck. Its head reared to the ceiling, and it looked down on us with faint amusement.
“It’s me you’re meant to find.”

CHAPTER SEVEN
Rainbow Hazel dashed to the back of her cell. Red scrambled aside. Her flashlight swept away from the dragon, illuminating the ceiling and a nearby cell for a kaleidoscopic second before she trained it back on its target.
On the dragon.
I stood nailed to the floor. Unlike with the kelpie, my brain hadn’t spent a second wondering what I was looking at.
The dragon barely fit in the hallway. Its front legs were thick as tree trunks, ending in flat paws tipped with claws the size of my middle finger. The paws were clumsy on the linoleum, like they couldn’t get a grip, the toes splayed and mashed sideways and one paw bent almost double. Its body was low to the ground. The hall left little room for its wings, which were folded up against the walls and ceiling. I’d thought its skin emerald, with a paler belly, but as I looked at it longer, the scales appeared brown and gray. The skin was shapeless and wrinkled like a Komodo dragon’s, loosely dangling from the side of the paws and its neck, all the way up to the creature’s smooth, hornless head. And the way it smelled—I couldn’t put my finger on it, something cool and musky . . .
“Yes?” the dragon asked. “Are you done?”
We only stared.
A dragon. An actual dragon. And the kelpie, and the other Hazels . . . The rift hadn’t even spat out anything this bizarre the week I’d been born, when I’d gone a much farther distance and been away much longer than today. This couldn’t totally be my fault. Yet all this happening on my birthday couldn’t be a coincidence, either. The odds were literally 1 in 365.
This was connected to me. Everything about the rift was. But somehow, I had the fewest answers.
The dragon