by Jim C. Hines
The smell of burning dust rose from my shoulder. Smudge was watching the door, and waves of orange rippled over his thorax, dangerously close to my hair.
Nidhi saw it too. “Feng, is there any way you could have been followed?”
Comprehension and fear widened Guan Feng’s eyes, and she jumped to her feet. “I was careful. I didn’t tell anyone where I was going. I swear on my father’s grave.”
“He probably forced Bi Wei to tell him where you were.” I shoved the gun into my pocket, pulled on my jacket, and grabbed the rest of my books. “It’s all right. He would have found us anyway. I’m a little surprised the destruction of Nymphs of Neptune didn’t attract his swarm, but it sounds like he was busy practicing horticulture.”
Lena untwisted her cane into two sharpened swords and strode toward the door.
“How many?”
“Only one. But you might want to make sure you’ve got a change of underwear before you see this thing.”
Alex came around the desk to intercept me. “Isaac, tell your girlfriend she can’t bring weapons into holy-shit-your-spider’s-on-fire!”
I clapped him on the shoulder. “Alex, this would be a very good time for you to go on break. Somewhere else.”
Jeff had joined Lena by the door. Neither one of them moved. Not a good sign.
The scream of tearing metal filled the street, followed by silence. I shoved past Alex toward the back and hurried to see what we were up against.
“All right,” I whispered. “I admit it. I’m impressed.”
I had been expecting to see Harrison, Bi Wei, and the dryad at a minimum, along with his insects. Possibly wendigos as well, depending on whether or not he was ready to announce his presence to the world.
I hadn’t expected a six-legged dragon made of old mining and construction equipment.
The thing was roughly the size of a bus. The yellow legs looked like they had come from mismatched backhoes. The mouth was a pair of toothed bulldozer blades. Heavy steel wings folded over the body to form an additional layer of armor.
The tail was perhaps the most terrifying. Imagine Paul Bunyan’s chainsaw. Disengage the chain and make it prehensile, then start whipping it through the streets of Copper River. As I watched, it peeled the roof from a parked car and gouged brick from the building beyond.
“Go on break,” whispered Alex. “Right.”
“I promise I’ll explain later.” Not that it would matter. If this thing didn’t kill us all, the Porters would be by to erase Alex’s memories, along with everyone else in town. So far, people were keeping off the street, but I saw faces pressed against windows, and at least two phones filming the carnage.
A gun went off from across the road, but the dragon didn’t appear to notice. Standing in the doorway of the barbershop, Lizzie Pascoe raised her hunting rifle to her shoulder and squeezed off another shot.
The dragon was more interested in the library. Thick steel cables flexed and tightened within its body as it charged.
The entire building shook, and a good chunk of the front wall crumbled away. I yanked out my shock-gun, switched it to maximum, and sent lightning crackling into the dragon’s mouth. The attack left a glowing orange patch of metal the size of a dinner plate, but the dragon didn’t even slow down. The tail swiped through the wall, destroying windows, books, and the Back-to-School book display I had spent two hours putting together. Books and debris battered us all, and the shock-gun fell from my hand.
Lena hauled me toward the back of the library. Once there, I snatched The Complete Short Stories of H. G. Wells from my jacket and turned to “The New Accelerator.” I had been meaning to try this story for a while.
I struggled to focus on the words as enormous jaws ripped away part of the roof like it was made of cardboard. I kept remembering the ruins of the MSU library, reduced to a heap of crumbled brick and twisted metal. I was not going to let Harrison’s latest pet do that to my library. I reached into the story and pulled out a small, green phial of thick liquid.
“If Bi Wei and the others are here, they’ll be able to counter any magic you use,” Guan Feng warned.
“Sure,” I said. “If they’re fast enough.”
I transferred Smudge to the drinking fountain where he’d be less likely to set anything alight, then downed the potion and closed my eyes while I waited for the magic to take effect.
The sounds of battle slowed, then died completely. I opened my eyes again and strode carefully past my seemingly-motionless companions, releasing the phial over the trash can on my way out. It hovered in the air, its downward motion invisible to my hyperaccelerated eye.
Beneath the anger and, if I were honest, the overwhelming terror, a part of me was looking forward to this. It was the same part that cheered for every David-and-Goliath tale of underdogs triumphing over impossible odds and unbeatable foes.
It was time to slay a dragon.
Plato once said that human beings were created with two heads, four arms, and four legs, until Zeus split them in half. Ever since, humans have spent their lives searching for their other half, the one person who could complete them.
What a narrow-minded, messed-up, asinine system.
Do the math. There are more than seven billion people on this planet. Say you do a lot of traveling, and manage to meet a million of those people in your lifetime. That gives you a mere 1 in 7000 chance of finding “the one.”
Maybe that’s why they created me. To be their other half, the answer to the myth. Easier than scouring the planet for an impossible dream. Easier, too, than learning to set aside the dream and embrace a human being who is as flawed and imperfect as you.
Humans are so obsessed with true love, the perfect relationship. They imagine that one elusive person who fits their quirks and foibles and desires like a puzzle piece. And of course, when a potential mate falls short of that perfection, they reject them. They were too old, too young, too silly, too serious, too fat, too thin. They liked the wrong TV shows. They hated chocolate. They voted for the other guy. They didn’t put the toilet seat down.
They invent a million excuses for rejection, a million ways to find others unattractive. Their skill at seeing ugliness in others is matched only by their ability to see it in the mirror, to punish themselves for every imagined flaw. No matter who I’ve become, I never understood that facet of humanity.
I remember when Isaac introduced me to Doctor Who. In one episode, the Doctor met a man who said he wasn’t important. The Doctor replied, “I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t important before.”
I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t beautiful. People have simply forgotten how to see.
Frank Dearing was a selfish, petty, controlling bastard, but when he was working in the field, the hard muscles of his body shining with sweat as he coaxed life from the dirt…the man was an asshole, but he was a hot asshole.
Nidhi Shah was softer. She dressed to minimize the physical. Age and stress had mapped faint lines onto her face. And she was gorgeous. Even before you stripped off her clothes and kissed your way down her neck…
Then there was Isaac Vainio, a skinny geek of a man who lugged his pet spider around everywhere he went. But he had such passion, such raw joy and excitement. That passion transformed him into something sexier than any rock star.
The more we narrow the definition of beauty, the more beauty we shut out of our lives.
IT WAS AS IF I had put the entire universe on pause. Time hadn’t stopped; I had simply sped myself up by a factor of a hundred thousand or so. If all went well, I’d have taken care of the dragon before the phial had fallen more than an inch.
I wanted to run, but even my cautious, steady pace warmed my skin and clothes, courtesy of friction and compression of the air. Relatively speaking, I was a meteorite streaking through the atmosphere, and it would be all too easy to burn myself to a crisp.
“Why doesn’t the Flash ever have to worry about this?” I sank slowly to the floor to retrieve my shock-gun.
Weapon in hand, I began climbing over the crumbled remains of our front wall.
Something stung the side of my face. I thought at first that Harrison’s insects had found a way to get at me, but when I looked, I saw a triangle of broken glass hovering in the air. Other shards sparkled like ice, frozen in time and sharp enough to do all kinds of damage if I wasn’t more careful.
I grabbed a broken section of shelving and moved it to and fro like a broom, pushing the glass shards out of the way. Even a relatively slow impact shattered the shards into smaller fragments. I was tempted to try to calculate the amount of kinetic energy in each swing, but Wells’ magic formula had a limited duration. I could play with the math later.
Once I had cleared a path, I ducked outside and made my way down the steps onto the sidewalk. An overturned Chevy Cavalier had smashed into the front wall. I couldn’t see whether there was anyone inside. The dragon’s tail was curved back like a bullwhip, ready to rip through the library a second time.
“My name is Isaac Vainio,” I said. “You smashed my library. Prepare to die.”
Everything went better with Princess Bride references. I aimed at the base of the tail and squeezed the trigger.
There was an interminable wait while the ionized pellet crawled toward the dragon. It took what felt like five seconds just to travel the six feet between me and my target. I watched, fascinated, as the pellet deformed and broke apart.
I braced the gun with both hands, waiting for the lightning and rethinking my plan. In real time, the lightning followed within a fraction of a second, meaning the barrel of the gun was still aligned with the path laid out by the tracer pellet.
What happened if the gun moved? Would the lightning make a new path? My arms were starting to tire.
Five seconds to travel six feet. The gun was supposed to have an effective range of almost a mile. Call it six thousand feet for easy math, and assume the speed of light to be more or less instantaneous, which meant the lightning couldn’t start until the pellet had time to travel the full mile. In real time, it all happened too quickly for human senses to follow. At my relative speed, I’d be waiting more than an hour.
Screw it. I let go, and the gun began to accelerate downward at 9.8 meters per second squared. It should fire long before it had descended the first inch.
I returned to the library and removed a hardcover of John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War from the shelves. Reading without utterly destroying the book was harder than I had expected. After accidentally tearing the binding and four separate pages, I was ready to toss the book aside and attack the dragon bare-handed.
Instead, I released the book and used both hands to slowly and carefully search for the chapter I needed.
The all-in-one superweapons from Scalzi’s novel were much too large to fit through the book. Even if I could create them, I wouldn’t be able to fire the CDF standard-issue MP-35 Infantry Rifle without some extra hardware in my brain.
The projectiles, on the other hand, I could create. Specifically, projectiles that had just left the gun.
The MP-35 had six modes. The only question was whether to use the rockets or the grenades…
I was dragging Lizzie Pascoe back into the barbershop when the shock-gun discharged a bolt of lightning into the dragon’s tail. I set Lizzie down behind the counter, away from the windows. I did the same with her husband and their single customer. I checked the post office across the street next. One by one, I dragged everyone into the back, laying them out like firewood. The antiques store was a lost cause, full of ceramics and glass. I ended up hauling the occupants over to the barbershop instead.
The shock-gun shouldn’t have gone off yet. Either my math was off, or the time-dilating effect of Wells’ story was beginning to wear off. By the time I finished getting everyone behind cover, I was confident my math was correct. I couldn’t hear the thunder from my gun, but I could feel it, like a subsonic massage to my skeletal system.
I grabbed my gun out of the air and double-checked to make sure the street was empty. As I hurried back to the library, I could see the three small projectiles inching their way into the beast’s open maw.
My exposed skin felt like I was rubbing it with sandpaper. When I got inside, I brought Lena, Nidhi, Jeff, and Feng to the break room. After one last trip to grab Smudge, I hunkered down with them to wait.
By the time the explosion went off, the spell had pretty much ended. I heard glass shatter, and the shock wave shook the entire building.
“How did we get—Isaac, what did you do?” Nidhi shouted. I could barely hear her over the echoes of the explosion, and her voice was far deeper than normal, presumably due to a kind of temporal Doppler effect.
I crept out of the break room. The explosion had taken out every remaining window in the library. Books and papers were everywhere, and shrapnel had torn through the walls.
Outside, the dragon’s head lay in three pieces on the ground. The tail had snapped free, and spasmed like the death throes of a decapitated snake. The rest of the body simply stood there. “Maybe I only needed two grenades.”
We knew the destruction of Harrison’s insects pained him. I hoped that pain scaled with mass, and that I had just handed him the mother of all migraines.
I retrieved Smudge, who scrambled up to my shoulder and clung there, but he wasn’t—quite—hot enough to burn me, which I took as a good sign. Lena was already checking on Alex out back.
I sagged against the wall. The worst part was knowing every building on the block had been hit by the same shock wave. I had wrecked buildings and businesses that had stood here for more than a hundred years.
I couldn’t possibly come up with a story to bury this. Copper River was a small, tightly knit town. If gossip was a competitive sport, we’d have been sending teams to the Olympics and bringing back gold. There must have been at least fifty witnesses to what just happened, not to mention the dead metal dragon blocking the road. “I am so screwed.”
“You’d be surprised how much humanity will ignore when it falls outside of their beliefs.”
The calm words were an electrical shock through my spine. I straightened like a cadet coming to attention before an officer. Johannes Gutenberg stood by the crumpled book return bin, an oversized red book tucked beneath his arm.
“You couldn’t have gotten here five minutes sooner?” I asked.
For all his power, Gutenberg was a physically unimposing man. Short and slender, he looked to be in his mid-thirties. A thick black beard and mustache couldn’t conceal the narrowness of his face, especially the nose. A fringe of hair poked out from beneath a black small-brim fedora. He wore a brown vest and scarf over a white shirt, with matching white pants.
“We arrived ten minutes ago, in fact. Time enough to take care of the dragon’s keeper before he could counter your magic.” He bent over to pick up the H. G. Wells collection. “Temporal acceleration. That would explain your windburned complexion.”
“We?” asked Jeff.
“I have eleven field agents setting up a perimeter around the library. Two others will be going door-to-door. Jeneta Aboderin is safe, by the way. Myron Worster is keeping an eye on her.” Outside, the lightning-flash of automatons announced the arrival of more reinforcements.
Reinforcements who would be working their magic on my neighbors, editing the memories of people I called friends. Lizzie Pascoe had tried to help against an enemy she couldn’t have understood. She had stepped forward despite her fear. In return, I had blown out every window in her shop, and now her very thoughts would be violated and rewritten.
“You certainly seem to have gotten Mister Harrison’s attention.” Gutenberg rapped a knuckle against the book he carried. “Fascinating spellcraft. Far more stable than I would have guessed, to last for so many years with so little corruption. The fellow imprisoned in these pages was able to contain our magic long enough for his master to escape. Fortunately, I believe I can eliminate that threat.”
He plucked a gold fountain p
en from his breast pocket and opened the book.
“What are you doing?” Guan Feng shoved past me. “Stop!”
Gutenberg tilted his head, the nib of the pen hovering over the rice paper. “You must be one of the Bì de dú .” His expression didn’t change, but the air inside the library seemed to drop twenty degrees. “You neglected to mention a prisoner in your phone call to Nicola, Isaac.”
“She came to ask for our help,” I said. “Harrison was able to create his own dryad. He’s going to use her to restore the rest of Bi Sheng’s students from their books, and to enslave them.”
“His friends have done an excellent job of hiding him. But all magic has limits.” He touched pen to paper and began to write.
Guan Feng lunged for the book, but Lena caught her in a bear hug and held her back. I stepped closer, trying to see what Gutenberg was doing. The pen left no visible mark on the paper, but I could feel the book reacting to the words.
I shouldn’t have been able to feel it at all. I was too raw and exposed from the past few days. “You’re hurting him.”
“Indeed,” he said without looking up. “It will be over soon enough.”
Smudge crawled around to the back of my head, tickling my neck. I half expected him to set my hair alight, but he was unnaturally cool to the touch. Whoever was bound to that book, he was lashing out, trying to counter Gutenberg’s magic. Invisible fingers curled through my body, searching for purchase. Gutenberg merely clucked his tongue and continued to write.
“Please.” Guan Feng’s face was wet. She had stopped struggling against Lena. “He’ll die.”
“He died five hundred years ago,” Gutenberg said. “This was a collection of memories, nothing more.”
“You’re locking the book.” More than anything, I felt disoriented. Off balance, as if I was falling in every direction. Desperation built like steam—desperation that belonged not to me, but to the man bound to that book. I heard a whisper in my head, but I didn’t understand the words. And then the struggle simply stopped, replaced by resignation and a sense of acceptance.
