Dragon Dreams

by Chris A. Jackson

  "See you next Wednesday then." She took her coffee with her but left the two denuded pizza crusts on the table.

  Two texts later, Aleksi knew just how much she'd missed. She hurried to Bob's lab to get caught up to speed.

  "Hey Bob!" She left her bag and coat at the door, and reached for a surgical mask and gloves.

  "Aleksi!" He got up from his bench and looked her up and down. "Wow! You're alive!

  "Told you I'd kick it! No small thanks to you and your care packages." She snapped her gloves and ran her fingers together in a long-practiced motion to work the air out. Her knuckles ached. "Ready for a little catch up."

  "I can't believe you made your lab today. Yesterday I was about ready to take you to the hospital."

  "I can't believe I lost a whole day." She joined him at the bench. "What'd I miss?"

  "So, we've got significant coding differences in all of the samples. Definitely two species' DNA here, but every shared base pair means a potential cross-over of the sequence, right?" Bob waved a hand at the sequencing data and sighed. "That means cloning to split them up before we can get anything big enough to match to Genbank. The good news is that nothing is as fragmented as I thought it would be. I used short, conserved primers and all got hits. I'm beginning to think the reason the CT looked so weird was that there are two organisms in that cast. I've got all the bugs cooking right now, and I'm waiting on mass spec time for the ash cast sample. I've got a friend in Geology who's willing to have a look at the results and give an informal opinion…for a favor."

  "What kind of favor?" Aleksi could tell from his reticence that the favor wasn't something simple. She hoped he wasn't making promises. That was how research papers accumulated authors who hadn't really contributed.

  "Um…well…I kind of promised I'd introduce him to Lonnie." Bob blushed, and she could see his grin despite his mask. "He met her at the New Year party, but he's kind of shy."

  "Great!" She laughed, wondering how Lonnie would react. "Just don't tell her she's the payoff for a mass spec analysis."

  "Do I look like I want a splenectomy?"

  "Probably a vasectomy, if I know Lonnie."

  They both snickered, and she noticed that Bob was looking at her strangely. "What?"

  "Nothing. Just surprised to see you so perky all of the sudden. You seem…I don't know, happier or something."

  "Well, not feeling like crap probably has something to do with that." She didn't really feel any different, but she knew what he meant. She felt at ease, as if recovering from the illness had left her without any worries. She knew she had plenty to worry about, but it all seemed to make sense, as if she could easily prioritize things now. "So, we're looking at what, a week before we get anything?"

  "Maybe Monday, if I work over the weekend."

  "Well, I'll be working, too, so don't feel bad. I'm behind on the translation, and I should probably get back to work on the bear samples until we get some data on these."

  "Okay. Maybe we can commiserate over burritos or something."

  "I'll buy this time," she said, moving toward the door. "I owe you big for the care packages. They saved my life."

  "Sounds good!" He grinned. "See you later, then. We're meeting with Hutch Friday morning. He said he'd emailed you."

  "Right. Later." She stuffed all her protective gear in the trash and left the lab with one last wave. Her only worry was the strange mixture of warmth and foreboding that was churning in her stomach talking to Bob.

  A remembered dream, bodies moving together, sweat and flesh, passion so thick she could taste it.

  The door clicked closed behind her and she leaned back against it, dizzy with the vision. What the Hell? Her heart was pounding in her chest. Julie and Bob? She looked back over her shoulder through the glass panel in the door, unsure if the vision was a dream or a memory.

  Hey, Julie!" Aleksi called as she burst into the apartment, one arm cradling a bag of groceries. She heard music from the front room, which meant her roommate was exercising. She poked her head around the corner and grinned. "You must have gotten my text. You working up an appetite?"

  "Damn right." Julie was doing some kind of complicated stretch that looked more like a form of midlevel torture than exercise. "You owe me big, and I'm going to collect."

  Aleksi showed her the bag. "New York strips and all the fixin's."

  "You should get sick more often! I've got like twenty minutes of this, then I've got to shower."

  "Perfect." Aleksi went to the kitchen and began unloading supplies. "I'll nuke the potatoes and catch a quick shower, then do the rest while you're in there."

  "Don't you dare use all the hot water this time!"

  "I won't, I promise."

  Aleksi prepped the potatoes and put them in the microwave, then pulled the two huge steaks from the white paper wrapping. Her mouth watered as she trimmed the fat to a quarter inch, stabbed them with a fork and put them in a Tupperware with a little white wine, Italian dressing, and garlic salt. She flipped them a couple times, then snapped on the lid and put them in the fridge. Wadding up the butcher paper, she couldn't find the fat she'd cut away.

  Must have pitched it already. She licked her lips without thinking about the flavor of meat still in her mouth.

  Aleksi hit the shower—after five hours in the lab she needed it to get the rock dust out of her hair—and was drying off just as Julie finished her torture session.

  She poked her head in the bathroom as Aleksi was drying her hair. "Any hot water left?"

  "Plenty!"

  "There better be." Julie ducked out.

  Aleksi finished drying and looked in the steamed mirror. A swipe with her hand cleared the image, and she paused. Is that really me? She turned sideways. I must have lost some weight while I was sick. She grabbed her clothes and her towel and went to her room. In fresh clothes, she felt like a new woman. Tucking in her fleece top she found her jeans a little loose around the waist. Huh, definitely lost weight.

  She finished in the kitchen, making a salad and broiling the steaks just enough to sear the outside and leave the inside red. She poured two glasses of red wine as she heard the shower turn off.

  "Payback!" Aleksi met Julie at the bathroom door with one glass held out.

  "Ah! Sweet!" They clinked glasses and sipped. "Mmm, not bad!"

  "I splurged and went over the ten-dollar mark." Aleksi turned back to the kitchen to check on things. "You like rare, don't you?"

  "Medium rare, not bloody." Julie followed her, finger combing her wet curls. She took a deep breath of the seared meat smell. "Oh, my God, that smells good."

  "Just what the doctor ordered." Aleksi took one of the steaks out and slid the other back under the broiler. "About a minute if you want to get dressed."

  "I'm good." Julie leaned against the wall and sipped her wine, flapping the lapel of her fuzzy pink robe. "Still overheated from the torture session. I can't believe you're feeling so good so quick! This time yesterday, I was measuring you for a casket."

  "You know, I have no memory of yesterday." Aleksi doled out salad and prepped the potatoes. "Everything on your potato?"

  "Just a little sour cream, if it's low fat."

  "Buzzkill." Aleksi shoveled sour cream, bacon bits, chives, salt and pepper on hers. She loaded the other steak and lifted both plates. "Bring the wine, oh tender of the ill and incapacitated."

  "Ha! You are feeling better!"

  "Positively giddy with it." She put the plates on the coffee table and went back to get forks and knives while Julie took a seat on a throw pillow and topped off their glasses. Aleksi sat on the couch and lifted her glass. "Here's to not feeling like crap!"

  "I'll drink to that."

  They did, and then dug into their steaks. Aleksi sliced off a piece of the barely seared meat and popped it into her mouth, chewing with bliss. A visceral memory flooded her mind—warm flesh between her teeth, the coppery taste of blood on her tongue—She blinked and swallowed forcefully. What the hell? She
looked at the steak as if it were a freshly killed ungulate waiting to be devoured.

  "You okay?" Julie sipped her wine and wrinkled her brow.

  "Yeah. Yeah, fine. Why?" Aleksi tried some of her baked potato, but it didn't taste right, as if the sour cream had turned or something. Julie was eating hers with no complaint, so she sipped some wine to clear her palate.

  "You just turned kind of white all of the sudden."

  "Oh?" Aleksi tried another bite of steak and had no strange visions. The meat was delicious. "Maybe I forgot what real food tasted like."

  "Beats Ramen noodles." Julie took a bite of the salad, which reminded Aleksi that it was on her plate. She ate some, but it was kind of like eating air compared to the steak. "So, if this is my payback, how are you going to compensate your friend Bob? Something similar, or did you have something more intimate in mind?" Julie grinned and sipped her wine.

  "Burritos." Aleksi cut another bite of steak and popped it into her mouth. "And get your mind out of the gutter. We're friends, that's all. We're going to be working too close for anything else." She chewed and thought for a moment.

  Bodies moving together, sweat and flesh, passion so thick she could taste it.

  She looked at Julie and felt that tug in her stomach again. Dream or memory? "Seems to me that you had your eye on him, though."

  "Well, like I said, he's cute in a kind of nerdy fashion." Julie shrugged. "Not my type, really."

  "You've got a type?" Aleksi grinned. It must have been a fever dream. Still… "You mean other than having a Y chromosome?"

  "Oh, nice!" Julie put her wineglass down and tried to look hurt. "I rescue you from a lingering death, risking my own health in the process, and you accuse me of being a wanton woman!"

  "Would that be wanton or wonton? I really don't think Bob's into Chinese food, but if you dipped yourself in soy sauce, I'm sure he'd try a nibble."

  Julie burst out in laughter, staring wide-eyed at her. "Oh my God, where did Aleksi Rychenkna get a sense of humor?"

  "Told you I was giddy." She took another bite of steak and closed her eyes in bliss. "Seriously, though, if you're interested in Bob, I'll let him know. He'd be better for you than Vic." She made a face.

  "I'll think about it. Don't tell him anything."

  "My lips are sealed." Aleksi closed her eyes, recalling the dream again. Maybe she could make that happen. She thought of Bob and Julie together and couldn't suppress a smile. Yeah, they'd be good for each other.

  When they were finished with their impromptu feast, Aleksi cleared up the dishes—she'd only eaten a couple of bites of her potato and half her salad—and they both got back to work; Julie reading some ancient script on Mesopotamian opera, and Aleksi checking her own class schedule and pulling up the journal for more translation. She confirmed the makeup lab for her freshman biology students, and started in on the journal. Iggy rattled his cage, and she brought him out to play, as promised, feeding him bits of her leftover salad and scratching his chin. He settled down in her lap, his favorite spot, while she painstakingly translated Dr. Andriy Loktev's journal.

  16

  Friday morning, Bob and Aleksi met with Hutch in his office. Bob looked tired and frustrated, and Hutch's hair was wet. The weather had changed, a warm front turning snow to cold rain and slush. They were due for more cold tonight. She could smell the hint of soap and aftershave on Hutch and realized that he must have come straight from the gym. Both of them held huge brown paper cups, the aroma of coffee almost aphrodisiac.

  "Good morning." Hutch smiled, but she could see that he'd been working late, too. There were dark circles under his eyes.

  They both said good morning, and Bob raised an eyebrow at Aleksi. "What, no coffee? I thought you were a confirmed caffeine addict."

  "Way ahead of you; I was up early and finished the journal. Any more coffee and my head will explode." She passed a flash drive to Hutch. "You already have the original scans, so I just put the translation on there. I put all the illustrations and footnotes in the document."

  "Good reading?" Hutch asked, sipping his coffee and booting up his computer.

  "Actually, yes. More like a memoir than a log-book." She smiled at the memories of the flowery language, conjecture, and supposition in the journal; nothing like a modern lab journal.

  "So, where do we stand with the samples, Bob?"

  "I'm trying to figure out why we've got anything at all, Hutch." He rubbed his eyes and pulled a sheaf of papers from his bag. "I got some feedback from my friend in Geology on the ash cast results. The ash is pyroclastic, but not all the minerals show pyrogenous origins."

  "So it might not have been as hot as we thought."

  "It can't have been," Bob said shaking his head. "There's not nearly as much DNA fragmenting as we expected. I might not be getting clean sequences, but I'm getting long ones. I don't know why I'm getting two different copies from every primer, but I was thinking that we might have two organisms, which might explain that weird CT image. But whatever it is, it wasn't cooked."

  "I was thinking that could be due to the climate of the find." Hutch turned to Aleksi. "Did we get an exact position from the log book?"

  "If you believe it, sure. Within a few miles or so, on the slopes of Mount Nalychevo, at about forty-five hundred feet."

  "Permafrost?" Bob asked, his eyebrows arching again. Tissue could be amazingly well preserved if it never thawed.

  "It's the only explanation I can think of. Does the journal mention anything about the temperature?"

  "Sure. It was cold, and they were in a hurry to avoid the onset of winter, but they didn't mention permafrost."

  "Well, we can match with climatological data from the dates in the journal, then look backward with our isotope dating. Unless all of our data is due to contamination by the original diggers, we've got DNA, and we'll be able to sequence it eventually, which is more than we thought we'd have." Hutch finished transferring the journal and handed her back the memory stick. "What about the bone bed samples? How's that progressing?"

  Aleksi launched into her work on the bear samples. She'd isolated five individuals already and was working on a sixth. All solidly fossilized. She could give samples to Bob whenever he wanted them, but this DNA, if they got any, would be fragmented, which meant a lot of work on Bob's part for any meaningful data. After another ten minutes of discussion of how best to proceed, Hutch started looking at his watch.

  "Okay, so at least we've got a direction." He shut down his computer and pulled the laptop out of its docking station. "I'll send the translation to Quinton and catch him up on our progress this afternoon. Sorry to dash off, but I'm meeting with a legal team this morning, have a lecture at eleven, and wining and dining a congressman who's trying to help us drum up support for the pipeline intervention."

  They took the hint and packed up to go. "Oh, right! How goes the battle?"

  "It's complicated." Aleksi could see the worry in Hutch's eyes. "I get frustrated when money trumps the environment. Don't get me started."

  "More raping and pillaging in the name of the economy?" Bob asked.

  "That and more."

  "Well, I don't think you should—"

  "Oh! Hi!"

  Aleksi turned at the voice and found herself staring at Derrick Penningly.

  Oh crap! She forced a smile. "Oh. Hello, Derrick." She realized that Dr. Oliver's office was across from Hutch's and cursed herself for mentioning her old advisor to him. Thankfully, Oliver's door was closed. "You looking for Dr. Oliver?"

  "Yeah." He smiled with those perfect pearly whites and shrugged. "I emailed her and she said to come by during her office hours, so here I am during office hours, and no Dr. Oliver. Hi, Dr. Hutchinson"

  "You work for Quinton Neilson." Hutch shook his hand. "You helped us move the specimens, right?"

  "Yep. I'm in the graduate program next year."

  "Derrick's in my Comp Zoo lab class. He's looking for an advisor, and I told him that Dr. Oliver might have an op
ening." She gave Hutch a conspiratorial look and he nodded sagely. "And you remember Bob Tomlin."

  Everyone said cordial hellos, though she noticed a decidedly cool stare from Bob.

  "Well, I might as well just come back later." Derrick shrugged and flashed that salesman smile again, and Aleksi fought the urge to step back. While there was no doubt he was good looking, his manner set her teeth on edge. He reeked of privilege. "She probably got hung up somewhere."

  "Well, she's a busy woman." Hutch closed his door and stepping past them all. Aleksi's nose twitched as his scent wafted past. "I'll check with you two early next week. Bob, email me the cloning results, and Aleksi, don't overdo."

  "I'll be working on Bob's bear bones." She gave Bob a smile.

  "And I'll be in my lab, working on Aleksi's mystery monster."

  "Great." Hutch nodded politely to Derrick. "Nice seeing you, Derrick."

  "And you, Dr. Hutchinson." Derrick followed them out into the main hall.

  Aleksi took a deep breath of aftershave and clean soapy Hutch scent again, and found her eyes following the seat of his jeans as he strode away. She felt an unfamiliar surge of warmth, blinked, and wondered what the hell brought that on. She'd never had such silly musings before, and Hutch was her advisor.

  "So, mystery monsters and bear bones." Derrick followed Aleksi and Bob the other direction. "Sounds interesting. Are those the two samples I helped you move?"

  "Yeah, but it's mostly grunt work right now. Bob's doing the molecular analyses, and I'm doing the sample prep and morphology."

  Bob gave her a strange look. "I'll see you later, Aleksi."

  They were going opposite directions at the next turn, so she gave him a smile and a nod. "See you tomorrow for burritos." They waved and went their separate ways. She felt Derrick fall into step beside her and suppressed a shiver of distaste. Go the fuck away, already…

  "So, this mystery monster. Is that the mislabeled one from the MCZ?"

  "Um, yeah. We're still in the dark, pretty much." She gave a shrug, trying to sound boring in hopes that he'd lose interest. She felt bad about putting him onto Oliver's trail. He was new and just trying to get oriented, and she'd sent him to the worst advisor in the department. "Hey, about Dr. Oliver. If she blows you off, I'd say go find someone else. If she's not interested enough to keep an appointment, there's other fish in the sea."