Broken Dragon (The Chronicles of Mara Lantern, Book 3) (26 page)

“And, with all the advanced technology your people have developed over the last two hundred years, you have never found a cure for this disease?”

“What would be the point?” Cam asked.

“What would be the point? You would be able to stay in your own bodies for heaven’s sakes.”

“Why would we do that? Our synthetic bodies are far superior and less prone to accident and disease, and when accidents do occur, we have the means to replace our bodies. No one with a synthetic body has ever died.”

“Considering you are a bodiless head hanging at the end of a scarf, I’m not so sure how superior you should be feeling.”

“If I had been living with a biological body when that taxi hit me, I don’t think I would be alive in any form.”

“Yeah, about your accident—you have all this technological wiz-bang stuff going on, like wireless communications and invincible hardware, and you get nailed by a taxi? What’s that all about?”

“That’s an interesting story I’m not sure I completely understand. One of the technological wiz-bang things my body has is an automatic threat response program that can subsume my conscious mind and take over the operation of my body. I guess you could call it a fight-or-flight response to a threat that I cannot immediately assess and address with a reasonable course of action.”

“A panic switch.”

“Not very elegant, but I suppose that description is apt.”

“So what made you panic?”

“I’m not sure. I was closing up the art gallery, where my paintings were on display, and this opening appeared. It was like someone had ripped a black hole in the air in the middle of the room. Then there was this sphere that filled the room.”

“Sphere? What kind of sphere?” Mara set down her coffee cup.

“It was a translucent blue, some kind of electricity or electromagnetic field that filled the room.”

Mara leaned forward. “Did you see something or someone inside the bubble?”

“Bubble? I didn’t call it a bubble, but that would be an apt description. Have you seen this blue bubble before?” he asked.

“Answer me. Did you see someone inside it?”

“No. There was just this voice that said it was time to come home. It was a deep voice. And then my fingers started to dissolve into—”

“Into a fluorescent mist.”

“Yeah. How did you know? What was it?”

Mara ignored his question. “What happened after that?”

“My panic switch, as you call it, kicked in, and I apparently ran from the gallery and into the path of that taxi. The next thing I remember is you holding my faceplate in your hands at the hospital. I suppose the threat response program didn’t respond appropriately in the circumstance.”

“Oh, I think it probably responded very appropriately in those circumstances,” Mara said. She wiped her lips with a napkin, stood up and placed her dishes in the sink. “Why don’t you hang out here—pardon the pun. I’m going to run upstairs to take a shower and then to the hospital and check on Ping, assuming Mom will let me use her car.”

“So that’s it? What about the sphere and the voice?”

“Detective Bohannon and I have been looking into some disappearances of passengers from Flight 559—other people who crossed over like you—but we don’t really know enough yet to do anything. It might be nothing, so I wouldn’t get too worked up yet.”

“Easy for you to say. If that thing shows up again, I don’t have any legs to run away with this time.”

* * *

As Mara walked into her room and approached the dresser, something on her desk caught her eye. The Chronicle of Continuity sat on the center of the desk, open as if someone had been reading it. As far as she could remember, she had left it in her book bag, which was now hanging on the hook on the back of the door. She walked across the room and lightly pushed the door toward its frame. Dangling there was the book bag.

She stepped over to the desk and stood over it. There, in her own handwriting, was a haiku she had not read before:

Quit being a twit.

Prepare like a pastor with

this realm’s Chronicle.

She frowned as she read the passage. At least
quit being a twit
sounded like something she would write. Of course, if her future self was writing this to her present self, that would make her the twit being referenced. The pastor line reminded her of Bohannon’s comments about his Baptist preacher father and his tent meetings. And “this realm’s Chronicle,” if she was reading this correctly, was in the hands of Abby the Aphotis, who was who-knows-where at the moment.

She slapped the book closed and stared at its back cover. Tilting her head toward the door, she called out, “Hey, Mom. Were you or Sam in my room looking at the little book Hannah brought back from the future?”

“No one’s been in your room. I’ve been the only one upstairs all morning, and I haven’t been in your room,” she said. “Why do you ask?”

“It’s nothing. I probably just moved something around last night, while I was delirious,” Mara said. “Would it be all right for me to borrow your car to run over to the hospital and check on Ping?”

“You mean my car that is still parked in Portland?” she responded. “There’s an abandoned police car a few blocks down the road, if you want to take that.”

“Sheesh, and my car is still in Portland too. What are we going to do?”

Diana walked up to the door and leaned on the frame, drying her hands with a towel. “Detective Bohannon said he would drive your car down here and take the patrol car back up to Portland this afternoon. Don’t you remember giving him the keys last night?”

“No, I don’t remember that at all.”

“You were a little out of it when you got home. Anyway he should be here in an hour or so. Then you will be mobile again.”

Mara made a point of keeping the brim of her ratty Mariners ball cap pulled down over her eyes as she made her way through the halls of the hospital. When Bohannon stopped by to drop off her car, he said that, earlier in the day, Channel 12 had been showing a close-up freeze-frame of Mara’s face from the dragon-fight video, but that the picture was not as identifiable as they had feared. The blurred features might remind someone of Mara, but it could also be one of thousands of other people as well. If, by chance, someone identified her, she could credibly deny it. The detective said he thought it was a fluke that the little girl at the hospital saw her and the news report at the same moment, and then connected the two. Mara was, after all, wearing the same clothes in the hospital as the girl on TV, and they did look alike.

She walked past the nurse’s station without stopping and headed directly to Room 217, Ping’s room. No one questioned her, so she leaned into the heavy wood door and pushed slowly, not wanting to make a noise that might wake him. That wasn’t a problem, as she saw when she stepped inside.

“Hello, Mara,” Ping said, smiling and sitting up in bed. He pointed a remote at a television screen mounted on the opposite wall. It went blank. “Come in, come in.” He seemed quite perky.

Mara walked to the side of his bed. “You look great. You’ve got color in your face, and you don’t even look tired.”

He pointed to the chair on the other side of the bed. “I understand that I have Detective Bohannon to thank for that. Sam called a few minutes ago and filled in a few blank spots for me.”

She walked around the end of the bed. “Yes, Bo is a little freaked-out about the healing stuff. I think he’s afraid he’s going to have to hit the road and start doing three shows a night or something.” Mara dropped her book bag on the floor next to the chair and sat down. “How much did Sam tell you? Do you remember any of it?”

“He said the dragon stalked your mother across town and that you had to intervene to help her and to stop me, or it, from attacking a helicopter. I think I remember most of it, but it was more like watching a movie through a tunnel. More like being an observer than a participant. It didn’t feel like I was doing these things. I was watching them from outside my own body. The dragon had complete control, and I just had the vaguest sense of its presence.”

“Vaguest sense of its presence? What’s that mean?” she asked.

“Normally, on the few occasions when the dragon has awakened, I could hear its thoughts, anticipate how it might act or respond to a given situation. Last night I think it figured out a way to distance itself from me or somehow isolate me.”

“What’s it up to right now?”

“It’s asleep, completely unconscious. I think last night’s episode traumatized it severely.”

“How so?”

“Stripping a dragon of its wings is as severe as you can get, short of killing it,” Ping said.

Mara’s face reddened and reached up to grab his hand. “I’m sorry about that, but I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t just stand by and let him kill those people in the helicopter.”

Ping smiled and patted her hand. “That was not an admonishment, far from it. It was the perfect tactical move, given the situation. You couldn’t have played it better if you had planned it out.”

“That wasn’t playing, Ping.”

“Just a turn of phrase. I know more than anyone that last night wasn’t a game.” He held up his arms and smiled at them. “Hard to believe they were gone, and the detective restored them.”

Mara looked exasperated.

Ping put them down and looked at her. “What’s the matter?”

“You seem to be taking this whole thing in stride. You almost died. I almost killed you.”

“I am not trying to diminish the seriousness of what happened last night. I am just taking a moment to appreciate how incredibly well it worked out, all things considered.”

“I’m relieved you are okay, but you understand that nothing has been resolved, that the dragon is still a threat to us and to the whole damn city? You get that, don’t you?” Her face reddened, and her eyes welled up.

Ping held out his arms to her. She stood and leaned down to him. “I’m so sorry to put you through all this,” he said. He held her for a moment and then pulled back to look into her eyes. “You have got to stop carrying the world on your shoulders. I had my arms erased, fell from the sky, and almost bled to death, and you look to be in worse shape.”

She laughed and wiped her eyes as she took her seat.

“I know we have to do something about the situation. The dragon has to be dealt with. But I’m not convinced that it has to be dealt with immediately,” he said, then added, “That’s me talking, not the dragon making excuses.”

“How can you say that, when that crazy flying lizard is hunting my mother and terrorizing the city?”

“I’m not so sure it is hunting your mother, at least not exclusively, and certainly not with the intent to harm her. While it seems to be able to block its thoughts from me, I still can feel its emotions, like the trauma it felt last night.”

“You mentioned before that it felt threatened—its radar was going off.”

“Correct, and that makes me wonder why that would motivate it to attack your mother. After all, your mother’s counterpart was its mistress in the other realm. I picked up on other feelings last night, intense feelings that were somewhat incomprehensible to me.”

“What kind of feelings?”

“Jealousy. Fear and jealousy.”

“Fear of whom? Jealous of whom? My mother?”

“I don’t know, but the emotions were unmistakable.”

“Strange,” she said, almost under her breath. She picked at a cuticle, tried to make sense of what Ping said and couldn’t. After a moment she looked up at Ping and said, “That doesn’t answer the question of why not deal with the dragon immediately.”

“Two reasons. One, your future self has advised you to ignore the dragon’s folly, and I think, unless we have evidence that would contradict that advice, it might be wise to follow it. And two, if we wanted to do something about the dragon at this point, what would it be? You haven’t recovered the Chronicle of Creation, have you?”

“No. I’ve sort of been tied up for the last day or so.”

“Not ignoring the dragon’s folly.”

“Ping, I’m not going to sit by and watch a monster eat my mother, just because some book with my handwriting in it tells me to. If that really is me in the future sending out all these stupid haikus, you would think I would know that.”

“Okay, let’s ignore the book, and do something immediately. What do you suggest we do about the dragon?”

“I don’t know. Didn’t you say that the Chronicle is really just a talisman and that it doesn’t really have any power? That its power comes from me?”

“Yes, that is true.”

“Then shouldn’t I be able to send the dragon back to its realm?”

“Yes, if you have the requisite knowledge, awareness and belief to do it. You’re talking about pulling the consciousness of a dragon from this body and sending it across eons to another realm without the help of a talisman. Do you think you are ready to do that?”

Mara looked down, deflated. “No.”

“Then you might want to reconsider the advice you’ve been getting from the Chronicle of Continuity.”

She looked back up again. “Well, Bo and I have checked out a couple passengers. The book said to seek out passengers, so we’ve done some of that.”

“Did you get anything revealing from them?”

“There’s man who’s hibernating under a pile of laundry and a woman who’s disappeared into thin air in the middle of a locked greenhouse.”

“Did she come in contact with her own DNA somehow and get blown back to her own realm?”

“No, I think something else is going on. Cam was telling me about this opening that appeared in the middle of the—”

Ping held up a hand. “I’m sorry. Cam? Is that a person, a passenger from the flight?”

“Oh, wow, yeah. He’s a robot—well, a synthetic person, I think is what he likes to be called.” Mara looked up, as if making a mental note. “I’ve got to get out of here soon enough to take his head over to the hospital and reattach it to his body.”

“You’ve got a robot’s head from another realm?”

“Yeah, it’s a long story. Yesterday was just absolutely nuts, wasn’t it?”

“You’ve lost me,” Ping said, shaking his head.