A Crown of Dragons

by Chris D'Lacey

  Really? A science lesson? Now? “There’s … a nucleus and electrons spinning around it.”

  “And between the nucleus and the electrons?”

  I shrugged.

  “Space, Michael. Most of the universe is invisible to us. If you removed the space from the atoms of the six billion people on this planet, the human race could be compressed into something no bigger than a sugar cube.”

  “So?”

  “Dragons knew how to use that space. They knew how to tap into the dark energy of the universe. They used it to move through time. You have that power, but we need to be able to control it if you want to return from this Mexico experiment.”

  “We?”

  He ignored that and said, “What was in your mind that morning on the cliff? What were you experiencing just before you rescued the dog?”

  “I was frightened. I thought it was going to jump.”

  “Frightened. Good.”

  “Good?”

  “In a heightened emotional state, the human mind is freed from its usual constraints. Suddenly, you can jump higher, run faster, think quicker. You and I can take that one stage further. In our case the impossible becomes attainable; we can alter reality. What was happening here?” He tapped the point between his eyes.

  “I … imagined myself holding her.”

  “Her?”

  “The dog. It was a female husky called Trace.”

  “And then it happened, the shift?”

  “Yes.” One moment I’d been by the car, the next I’d traveled over two hundred yards and was squirming at the cliff edge with Trace in my arms.

  Harvey nodded and stepped out of my way. “Okay. Look at the stand.”

  It was an open terrace with a few crowd barriers, so poorly tended that weeds were growing in the cracks on the steps.

  “Picture yourself on it,” he said.

  That wasn’t hard. I’d been here once before when the lower grades’ soccer team had made it to the regional final of the Inter-Schools cup. Our principal, Mr. Solomon, had practically ordered every kid in seventh grade to support them. They lost, 4–0.

  I closed my eyes and thought about the game, about standing on that very terrace.

  “Now concentrate,” said Harvey. “Fix your image, then think yourself into the space between the atoms. Imagine your body is nothing but dust, blown from here to there in an instant.”

  I tried, but my mind kept drifting. All I could think about was Ryan making up stupid chants and stealing Lauren Shenton’s knit hat, which he’d tried to feed to a passing seagull.

  I shook my head. “I can’t do it.”

  “You can.”

  “I … I can’t,” I said, and opened my eyes.

  I hadn’t moved. The terrace, the goalposts, the field were all in front of me. My toes were still touching the arc of the center circle.

  Harvey pushed his spectacles higher up his nose. “Then we need to remove your constraints,” he said.

  I heard a commotion among the crows and saw a dozen of them take to the sky at once. Harvey had opened the gym bag. In his hands was a small, square birdcage.

  Inside the cage was a crow.

  “Freya?” I gasped. “Freya? Freya!”

  She had keeled to one side, with her legs drawn up and her eyes half-lidded. A band of elastic had been put around her beak to stop her from calling out.

  “Don’t — move,” Harvey said, placing a deliberate space between the words. “Step over the line and she dies in an instant.” He meant the line that halved the center circle. He was in one segment; I was in the other. “She is ‘the one,’ I take it?”

  “What have you done to her?” I tightened my fists. Two crows strafed us and spat out a warning. I ducked, but Harvey didn’t even flinch. He knew they were far too wary to attack, afraid, like me, that he might kill their queen.

  “She is … remarkable,” he said, staring into the cage. It was a regular pen with thin metal bars, too cramped for a bird of Freya’s size. “I took her yesterday, because they were becoming such a darned nuisance.”

  “What have you done to her, you freak?!”

  “Patience, Michael. I’m getting to that. It was meant to be nothing but a warning at first. It was clear the other birds rallied to this one. So I pulled her from the sky intending to … well, throttle her, frankly. But then I had a better idea. I realized you might need a potent stimulus in order to achieve the reality shifts, so I brought her along as a mild incentive. It’s only now, of course, that I’ve discovered just how … potent Freya is.” His gaze hardened into mine. “She’s dying. Poisoned. I’d say she has less than two minutes left. The antidote is on the tenth step of one of the four terraces. You can run to the nearest and you might get lucky, but if you really want to save her, you know what you have to do.”

  “Which is it?” I begged, frantically looking at all sides of the ground. “Freya’s done nothing to you. Please, Harvey, tell me which one!”

  “Dark energy. Space. Phase,” he whispered. He blew a breath across the top of the cage.

  I squeezed my eyes shut. North terrace. Tenth step. In my mind, I counted them up from field level, pictured number ten as hard as I could. My heart pounded. My breathing quickened. My head felt as light as a bubble. And bang! In a flash, I was there. I’d phased through time. I’d shifted reality. I hit the steps and immediately lost balance, chafing my shins on the concrete as I slid.

  “Careful,” he called, his voice dry with cynicism.

  “What am I looking for?” I shouted back.

  “A vial, of course.”

  I ran along the step. No vial. But on the wall at the end of the terrace, I saw Raik.

  Aaarrk! What are you looking for?

  “Glass. Small. Liquid.” I spoke quietly in crow, because I didn’t want Harvey to hear. I tapped the step. “Ten.” I didn’t know if crows could count or if any of what I’d said would make sense to Raik, but he was gone before I could shift again.

  I was in the chicken coop stand when I saw Raik next. He was flying across the field with something in his claws. The vial. He’d found it! Smart, smart bird. I cupped my hands so he could land and drop his cargo all in one. At the same time, Harvey performed a shift of his own and put himself two steps down, in front of me. He flashed a hand, and Raik went spinning out of control. The chicken coop stand was the only one with seats. Raik hit a seat back and dropped to the floor. The vial clattered away into the darkness.

  “What are you doing?!” I cried.

  “Cheating is not an option, Michael. Now she dies. Now you’ll never find the vial.”

  “I can! Please! I just —”

  I stopped speaking suddenly — and so did Harvey.

  “Move and I’ll snap you like a twig,” said a voice.

  A strong arm had locked around Harvey’s neck.

  The arm of an ex-Marine.

  Dennis.

  What happened next happened so fast I almost lost all sense of time.

  Harvey dropped the cage.

  The floodlights came on.

  The crows screeched.

  Dennis said, “Wha —?”

  Red dots danced on Harvey’s chest.

  Voices all around me shouted, “Armed agents! Stay where you are!”

  Dennis cried out as though he’d been punched.

  He was catapulted backward away from Harvey.

  My chest heaved with a sudden unexplained breathlessness.

  Harvey looked at me with strangely dead eyes.

  He veered forward like a zombie.

  The agents shouted, “STAY WHERE YOU ARE!”

  Harvey kept coming.

  A flash of light hit him in the chest, dead center.

  Another flash hit him in the head as he fell.

  Someone cursed.

  People came running.

  Then they were on us: six men in black and one woman, Chantelle.

  Four of them ran to Harvey. They turned him over. He wasn’t moving. One s
poke urgently into a headset. Another said, “No. No. No!”

  A man I didn’t know laid a hand on my shoulder. He spoke with a quiet Boston accent. “Michael, my name is Will Reynard. We need to get you out of here. Are you okay?”

  I pushed him away and ran to the cage. “Freya?” I gasped. “Freya? Freya?” I fumbled with the cage, turning it, looking for any kind of latch. “HELP HER!” I screamed to anyone who would listen. “I need to get her out of this cage! She’s dying!”

  Agent Reynard came to me again. “Let me,” he said, and put a palm against the bars. Within moments, they’d begun to soften and bend as he somehow applied heat using just his bare hand. He pulled the bars apart and dragged Freya out.

  I immediately took her from him and yanked off the band that was binding her beak. It was almost covering her tiny nostrils, but somehow she’d managed to sip enough air to keep herself alive. “Freya, don’t die,” I whispered. My hands were shaking so fast that her head was lolling like an empty glove puppet.

  A wild thought flashed through my mind: You could put her out of her misery now.

  What?

  I shook the thought away. As I did, Freya gurgled. Her eyes rolled shut.

  “The vial!” I shouted at Reynard. “She’s been poisoned. We have to find the —”

  Before I could finish, Freya wriggled, kicked a leg, and thrust out a wing.

  “Hhh! Yes! Come on!” I gasped.

  And she righted herself and fluttered away. She crashed onto a seat, skittered around on the plastic for a moment, hopped to another seat, skittered again, then took off into the night.

  “Freya, wait! We have to —!”

  But she was gone, leaving me staring at the sky, openmouthed, wondering about poisons and their antidotes.

  “I’m afraid this one’s had it,” said Agent Reynard. Raik was laid out across his hands.

  I immediately turned and looked for Harvey. If he wasn’t dead, I was surely going to kill him. They had lain his body in the aisle between the seats. One of the agents was pressing Harvey’s chest in rocking movements.

  “Michael!”

  Farther down the aisle, field side, was Dennis. He was on his knees, hands locked together at the back of his head. Chantelle was pointing a laser weapon at him, the same kind they’d used on Harvey.

  She said, “Be quiet. Unless you want to go the same way as he did.”

  She meant Harvey, of course.

  I hurried down the steps.

  “Enjoying the game?” said Dennis, through tightly gritted teeth.

  Chantelle gave him a warning kick.

  “Let him go,” I said. “He was trying to help me.”

  “Stay away, Michael, this is my business.”

  “No, let him go!” Stupidly, I tried to take the weapon from her, forgetting she was a trained fighter. She grabbed my wrist and twisted me down, until I was on my knees beside Dennis.

  “Nice friends you’ve got,” he said.

  “All right, Chantelle, enough.”

  Reynard came down the steps, gesturing for calm. Chantelle released my wrist. I stayed on my knees, nursing the burn. Reynard sat on the first row of seats, dusting his knees, just like Klimt might have done. This was my first real look at him. He was young, midthirties, with a head of black hair too strong to be parted. He had what Mom would call a dreamy expression. There was a kindness in his dark brown eyes that could win a girl over with a single glance. Like Klimt, he was dressed in a suit and tie but was altogether more stylish than the android. I didn’t know what his connection to UNICORNE was, but I felt I could trust him more than some of the others. If nothing else, I liked his easy manner. “Who are you?” he said to Dennis.

  “A concerned citizen,” Dennis said tautly.

  “He’s a builder. He’s fixing our roof,” I said.

  “A builder with combat training. We don’t meet too many of those. What are you doing here — citizen?”

  “Making a citizen’s arrest,” snapped Dennis. “How about you? Traveled a long way for a game of soccer, haven’t you? You should have called. I could have told you Holton Rovers aren’t worth the price of the ticket.”

  “Hands,” said Chantelle, giving Dennis another kick.

  Reynard said, “It’s okay, Chantelle, go easy.”

  He let Dennis lower his hands to his sides. “Why did you follow Michael here?”

  Dennis squeezed an arm to pump some blood through the muscles. “He told me he was going to a soccer match. There are no other stadiums for sixty miles, so he had to be coming to Churston Vale. I knew there was no match here tonight, so I guessed he might be in some kind of trouble. Seems I was right.” He looked sideways at me. “I want to change my earlier statement: Weird friends you’ve got.”

  I heard footsteps. “It’s about to get weirder.” Amadeus Klimt was walking toward us. He paused to take a message from one of the agents. I followed Klimt’s gaze. Someone had put a sheet over Harvey’s body.

  Klimt ranged up, dressed, as always, as if he’d been called away from a dinner party. “Hello, Michael. What unusual surroundings you bring me to. This is not what I meant when I said ‘low-key.’ I have just been told that Hartland is dead. Your … friend here has caused us many complications.”

  “Where’s Adam Mulrooney?” Dennis spat.

  Chantelle touched the laser weapon to his head.

  I got up off my knees and sat down beside Reynard. My head felt strangely buzzy, as if my mind was fast becoming bored with this and wanted to move on. I got myself together and said to Klimt, “You were the ones who made it complicated; you’re the ones pointing the lasers.”

  Klimt looked at Reynard for an explanation. Reynard said, “Hartland appeared to be attacking the boy. I had no choice but to order them to fire. All weapons were set to stun. A beam passed through Hartland’s eye as he fell. It appears to be fatal.”

  “Careless,” said Klimt. “Your superiors will not be pleased. I believe that means your work here is done.”

  Reynard steepled his fingers. “There’s the small matter of the scale, I think.”

  Klimt wafted a hand. “You came here for Hartland. And now you have him. Our collaboration is at an end.”

  “Collaboration? Who are you?” I said.

  Reynard tapped his thumbs together. “I’ve been tracking Jacob Hartland ever since he escaped from our facility. Mr. Klimt has been aiding my investigation, though he hasn’t always been as cooperative as my ‘superiors’ would have liked.”

  “Your facility? You mean … Zone 16?”

  He wouldn’t confirm that either way. “I saved the boy’s life, Klimt. That has to be worth something?”

  “He helped Freya, too,” I said, thinking back to what he’d done with the cage. Another reason to like him. I glanced at his hands. They looked ordinary enough, but he was clearly a Talen.

  “Ah, yes, the troublesome crow,” Klimt said.

  “You need to help me trace her. She —”

  “Sir, we found this.” One of the men handed Agent Reynard the vial.

  “That’s the antidote to Freya’s poison,” I said.

  “Poison?” said Klimt.

  Reynard pushed the stopper out of the tube. He ran it cautiously under his nose. “Nil odor.”

  “Please, allow me.” Klimt took the vial and shook the contents. A purple line from his left eye scanned the fluid.

  “What the heck?!” exclaimed Dennis.

  Welcome to the world of artificial intelligence, Dennis.

  “It is water,” said Klimt, tipping it away.

  “Water?”

  “Purified. From a bottle.”

  I glanced at Harvey’s body again. More men had arrived with a stretcher. “You mean there was no antidote?”

  “Quite possibly no poison,” Klimt replied. “But even if there were, I believe I once took the trouble to explain to you how difficult it is to terminate the undead.”

  “Undead?” said Dennis.

  So it was
just a test, a trick to make me alter my reality. All the same, Harvey had made her suffer. If I hadn’t flipped that rubber band off in time … She couldn’t help you; she was worthless, a corner of my mind suggested. Uh? That was twice now with the ugly thoughts. Why was I bringing up stuff like that? I shook my head as though to rattle a pea out of my ear.

  “You okay, kid?” said Reynard.

  “Yeah, just … an itch.”

  The stretcher went past with Harvey on it.

  “I don’t get this,” I said.

  “Get what?” said Klimt.

  “Harvey being dead. Why didn’t he escape?”

  “A laser through the eye is pretty final,” said Reynard.

  “But he was cut with the scale; he had dragon powers.”

  “What?” said Dennis. This was all too much for him.

  “And you just shot him like he was … normal.”

  “Kid has a point.” Reynard looked up at Klimt.

  Klimt twisted the empty vial between his fingers. “Go with the medics. I will … extend our association for now. Continue your investigation with Preeve. Tell him I want a complete and immediate medical report. Mauve priority. Chantelle, you may also leave.”

  “What about him?” She gestured at Dennis.

  Klimt thought for a moment. “He is going to help us,” he said. And before anyone could utter another word, he added, “Someone needs to take Michael home.”

  “How?” I spread my hands. “I came with Harvey. No way will you glamour Mom into believing that Dennis picked me up.”

  Klimt gestured at Chantelle again. She put away her weapon. She and Agent Reynard left together.

  “Stand up,” said Klimt.

  Dennis got to his feet.

  Klimt said, “This is what is going to happen. You will drive Michael home and convince his mother that Harvey was called to a sudden emergency. A domestic situation, perhaps. Fortunately, you were in the relatively small crowd, had seen Michael earlier and said hello to him. Harvey approached you during the interval and you offered to help. You, Michael, will tell your mother that Harvey will be in touch when he can.”

  I looked at the disappearing stretcher — and smiled.

  “Something amuses you?” said Klimt.

  “What? No.” I hadn’t meant to smile. What was wrong with me? “Harvey’s dead. How are you going to —?”