Triplets For The Dragon

by Jade White

  “Macy, wait!” called a familiar voice.

  Everyone looked to the left of the great marble wall, to where the familiar owner of the voice came down a side corridor. Sophia Leland was accompanied by a group of other people who Macy knew must all be weredragons, some of whom she recognized from attending functions with Aaron. Immediately behind Sophia was the one that Macy recognized best, a very intent-looking Eamon Larch.

  Please, I do not need to deal with all these people now, Macy silently protested.

  Sophia and her group reached Macy and hers, and Sophia said at once, “I knew this day was coming, Macy. I kept my distance from you and your family the way you wanted, and I advised others to do the same.” She glanced over her shoulder at Larch and those who accompanied them. “I honored your wishes because I knew it was important to do so—because I knew this day was coming, and you’d only be more set against us now if I didn’t leave you alone then. That’s why we all stayed away.”

  “Because your psychic premonition told you that you had to,” said Macy.

  “Yes,” said Sophia. “Because today is that important.” She glanced over and down at Andrew, Sam, and Kate, who were keeping close to Rudd. “The children are beautiful, Macy,” she said. “I see both you and Aaron in them.”

  Larch stepped around Sophia for a better look at the triplets. “They are beautiful,” he said. “I see our future in them. They’re the realization of things our people have dreamed of for hundreds of years.”

  Macy, her maternal instincts on high alert, moved herself between Larch and her children, making sure that they continued to stay close to Rudd. She studied Aaron’s fellow, sometimes rival CEO and the other Nathairfear with him and Sophia. They all had the same expression, a look of reverence and awe that under any other circumstances might fascinate and intrigue Macy, but now made her feel extremely wary. She was prepared to demand that the Dragon Watch get all these people out of here if they continued to scare her. “I’m not concerned with your dreams now, Eamon,” said Macy. “I’m here for my husband, that’s all.”

  “I understand your concern,” said Larch, keeping his eyes on the triplets. “But we don’t mean any harm. In fact, we have every faith that Aaron will be coming back to you. There’s nothing in the Prophecy of the Dragons Three that indicates any harm to anyone.” He addressed Andrew, Sam, and Kate directly: “You are here today because you are the fulfillment of a promise—the most sacred, cherished promise that our people have. You three are going to bring us to a moment that so many have died for and so many others are dying for. You’re going to be the answer to all our hopes, and bring our creators to us. Because of you, this will be a holy day for our people. You are our three miracles.”

  The triplets ran from Rudd to Macy and huddled nervously around her. Macy let them come as close as they could. She pulled them closer and tousled their hair reassuringly.

  Sam cried, “Mom, this man is praying to us!”

  Kate added plaintively, “Make him stop!”

  Eyeing Eamon coldly, Macy said, “Don’t worry. He’ll stop. He won’t go on scaring you; he’s going to stop. Aren’t you, Eamon? You’re going to stop upsetting my kids.”

  Larch replied, “I don’t mean to frighten them. I want them to understand there’s no reason to be afraid.”

  “If you don’t want them to be afraid, then shut up,” Macy said flatly, not caring how Larch took it.

  Sophia said, “If we could all calm down, we could explain to the children what happened to their father and why we need them to be here.”

  Continuing to pull the triplets close to her, Macy said, “If you can do it without all the mystical crap, then do it. Keep it as simple as you can, and make it fast.”

  Sophia took a breath and looked at Mark Weathers. “Mr. Weathers,” she said, “it might be better if you explained this for Kate and Andrew and Sam.”

  Macy added, “Please.”

  “All right, then,” said Weathers. Addressing the kids, he indicated the door in the marble wall. “Inside there is a place where we keep a device called a Beacon. It’s used to guide the Vonsahlans—the beings who created our people—from the other dimensions that they travel through and help them come to Earth. It’s a very powerful device. It opens a kind of hole in space, and that takes a lot of power to do. That’s why we keep it under guard, which your father helps us with. The power would be very dangerous if anyone used it for anything that it wasn’t meant for. That’s also why it takes three people with special training to operate it. The Beacon won’t respond to just one user; it needs three, and they need to know what they’re doing. That’s another way we keep the Beacon safe. Right now, the three main people who were trained to operate the Beacon have been hurt, and the others who know the technology are with your father on the other side of the hole in space that the Beacon opened. The hole in space closed up behind them, and we can’t reach them. And the machines that control the amount of power that the Beacon uses have been damaged.”

  “But why didn’t it work right?” asked Andrew perceptively.

  “Usually, it does work right,” answered Weathers. “But the hole in space opens up in places between this world and other worlds, and the energy that keeps the worlds apart—sometimes, it changes. Sometimes, it gets weaker, and sometimes it gets much stronger. And when it gets much stronger, it can slam the worlds together hard, like the way you clap your hands hard. When that happens, the power in the machines can get to be too strong to control. That’s what happened this time. We were testing the machines, and the energy between the worlds slammed our universe together with another one.”

  “And that’s why Daddy and those other people disappeared?” Kate asked.

  “That’s right,” said Weathers. “The hole between the worlds, it’s like a bubble. And when the power got out of control, the bubble got bigger…”

  “…and swallowed Daddy,” Sam finished gravely.

  “That’s why we wanted the three of you to come and help us get your father back,” Sophia continued. “We know that you three are very talented, very gifted with machines. You can understand machines, what they’re for and what they do, just by looking at them. We want you to go with Mr. Weathers and his friends into the place in there where we keep the Beacon and help them fix it and turn it back on, so they can go into the bubble and into the world on the other side of the hole and look for your father.”

  She omitted, but Macy could practically feel her thinking, …and then bring our creators to Earth and fulfill the prophecy of their return.

  The triplets looked up at Macy intently. Sam asked, “Mom, can we do that? Can we help Daddy?”

  Kate tugged at Macy’s blouse. “We want to help Daddy! Can we, please? We want Daddy to come home! Please, Mom!”

  “Hush, darling, let Mommy think,” said Macy, scratching her head. Pointedly ignoring Sophia, Eamon, and their contingent, she addressed Weathers. “These are my children, do you understand that? They're only kids. They’re not ready for this. They shouldn’t have this kind of responsibility or have to face anything like this. You should have other people who can do this.”

  “We do,” said Weathers. “That is, we have people who have studied the system; they know all the principles, but they don’t have any experience using it because we only activate it during the times when Mr. Bedford comes to supervise the testing. All the people who have experience with the technology are either injured—or gone over. I was reluctant to involve the children myself. I wanted you and them to stay away; I told you that.”

  Macy shot Sophia a look out of the corner of her eye. “Yes, you did. And I probably should have listened to you, Mr. Weathers—instead of to someone else.”

  “I know you don’t believe in prophecies,” said Sophia. “But this day was foretold. I believe—we all believe—that this is the day. The Beacon must have three dragons to call back our creators. And you need the gate between worlds open to find Aaron. Everything is happening as the Prophe
cy said it must.”

  At this, there was a murmur of agreement from Eamon and the other believers present.

  Macy shut her eyes, wishing she could just make the whole thing go away and make Aaron reappear before her by force of will alone. But that would have been just as miraculous as the claims of these dragon prophecy lovers, and perhaps all the more impossible.

  She felt little hands tugging at her blouse again. Macy opened her eyes and looked down into the pleading faces of her children. “Mom,” said Andrew, “we can do it. We want to do it!”

  “Yes, Mom!” Sam insisted. “Let us do it!”

  “Please, Mom, please!” Kate cried.

  Macy knelt down and let the three of them huddle around her. “All right,” she began, “listen. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but—all right. We’re all going to go into that place together. And you are going to listen very carefully to everything that everyone says to you, do you understand? You are not going to go anywhere that you’re not told to go, you are not going to look at anything that you’re not told to look at, and you are not going to touch anything that you’re not told to touch. And somehow…we’re going to get Daddy back.” She shut her eyes again, almost as if to give a silent prayer. Then, she opened her eyes again and looked from one child to the other, watching for their comprehension. “Are you ready?”

  As one, the triplets said, “Ready!”

  Macy stood back up. She said to Aaron’s right-hand man, “Rudd, you’re the one that Aaron trusts the most, outside of me and the kids. I want you to come in with us, to help me watch the kids.”

  Rudd replied, “Aaron gave me the authority to do whatever I think is best in an emergency, and it’s part of the company’s deal with the Dragon Watch that they have to abide by my decisions. And…you’re his wife. I’m abiding by your decision. We’re going in.”

  Macy nodded. “That’s it, then. We’re going in.” She turned to Sophia, Larch, and the other supplicants of the Beacon and the Vonsahlans. “And you’re waiting out here, and I’m not hearing anything else about it.”

  The group of believers made no protest. Macy knew that in their minds they had already decided the outcome of what she was about to do. She had no faith in dragon beings from another dimension and their arcane technology to support her. She had only her faith in her marriage, and her love for her husband, and her belief that it could not end this way. She could not have the man she loved torn from her by some strange accident caused by alien powers that he had never even confided in her. She did not believe that the universe could be that capricious and cruel.

  But then, her beliefs were being sorely tested today.

  Ushering the triplets along with her, with Rudd at their side, Macy let Weathers and the members of the Dragon Watch lead her to the glass and brass door in the marble wall.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Macy’s fear for her husband was matched only by her pride in her children.

  There were certain “magical” ideas—Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny—that made for a full and complete childhood. Macy and Aaron had taught Andrew, Sam, and Kate that these things were symbols, that they stood for things and that it was all right to believe in the things that they stood for. But today, watching her three children who were not yet even ten years old work with adult technicians on the hasty and urgent repairs to some of the most sophisticated and exotic technology in the world, Macy could not help but think that in some way she was watching actual magic at first. The kids showed wisdom and skill surpassing their very tender years.

  The interior of the Beacon chamber was like a theatre stage. There was a wide platform, and evenly spaced in front of it were three columns, each one about chest-high to an adult male human. Each column had an instrument mounted on the top of it. These devices reminded Macy somewhat of a combination of an iPad and a portable GPS, except that the symbols on them were graphics that she could not recognize, which were obviously of alien origin—neither of this world nor to the universe to which this world belonged. The technicians had to use tablets of their own to show the kids a kind of “Rosetta Stone” for what the symbols meant, and the three Bedford children seemed to learn their meanings quickly. This came as no surprise to Macy at all. It was through the three devices on the columns, each made for one operator, that the larger device at the rear of the chamber, powered by hidden generators of alien design inside the walls, would be engaged. That device, the Beacon, was another column, perhaps twelve feet high, with a crystal lens-like device mounted at the top; it would channel the power delivered into it and fire a beam of energy through the lens onto the stage. This projected beam would become the warp gate, an expanding bubble of energy through which beings from somewhere else could step forth into this world—or beings from this world could step through into somewhere else.

  While her main attention was on the triplets and on her gnawing dread of what unknown thing might be happening to Aaron in some unknown place, the meaning of where she was and what she was seeing was not lost on Macy. She was in the presence of the most ancient and arcane technology of another world and a more advanced intelligence, a technology older by far than any that man had ever created. It was the makers of these devices that had transformed common humans into her husband’s people. She knew from the beginning that she had fallen in love with a man who was also a mythical creature. Now, for the first time, she felt the full import of what Aaron was and where he had come from, ancestrally. What Macy was now seeing was something that very few, if any, human eyes had ever seen. And it was her children’s heritage. While she was in this place, she had the profound feeling that she was not of this place.

  Off to one side of the chamber was a large room with tiered auditorium seats behind a thick glass wall looking out into the “theatre.” This was the observation room, where Nathairfear faithful to the religion of the Vonsahlans and the promise of the aliens’ return would go to look out on the Beacon and contemplate the “miraculous” technology that the dimension-traveling dragon people left in the earthly weredragons’ care. Macy stood here, watching the triplets with their tablets standing on stepladders at the three control columns, studying the alien visual language of the Beacon controls, while technicians busied themselves across the room in places where panels were removed from the walls, going over connections and repaired and replaced components that the triplets had helped them to trace and identify. In carefully controlled testing, they had found that the power surge caused damage that had not been detected, which they had rooted out with the help of the Bedford children. Macy, standing with crossed arms, felt another swelling of maternal pride that almost softened the ache of worry over Aaron. He had made her pregnant during their first weekend together, and they had spent most of the few short years of their marriage caring for the triplets. He couldn’t be lost now. She could not accept that the future that awaited her was that of a single mother and a dragon’s widow. They had looked forward to a lifetime together. She still wanted that life. She had to get him back. She repeated over and over in her head, You have to come back, Aaron. You have to come back…

  Her own thoughts almost drowned out the voice of Duncan, the head technician who was standing beside her.

  The tall, tan-skinned man, toting a tablet like the ones given to the children, asked, “Did you get that, Ms. Jacobs?”

  With a start, Macy whipped her head around to face him. “I’m sorry, what…?”

  Duncan repeated, “I said we’ve got it all set up the way you said, Ms. Jacobs. There’ll be no danger to the kids when we get started. We’ve chosen three other technicians to do the procedure. They’ll stand at the three control columns while the kids sit in here with their tablets, which we’ve synced with the controls. The kids will tap in the control sequences in here, and the technicians will repeat everything they do. That way, we’ll activate the Beacon without the kids having to be hands-on with it. They should be safe in here in case there’s another surge.”

  Macy shook her h
ead, regaining her focus. She had too many things to focus on right now, but she was still keeping her eyes on the prize: recovering her husband. “I’ve got it,” she said. “Are you almost ready?”

  “Just another couple of minutes,” Duncan replied. “We’re as anxious to get this under way as you are. Once the warp gate is open, Weathers will be leading a team inside to search for Mr. Bedford.”

  “And I’ll be going in with them,” said a voice from across the room.

  The two of them looked and saw that Rudd Ainsleigh had entered, clad in a Dragon Watch uniform jumpsuit, a weapon in a holster strapped to one thigh. The suit had a breakaway back to release his wings and tail in the event that he needed to morph. Macy left Duncan and went over to Rudd, putting her hands on his shoulders. “Rudd,” she said, concerned for a man who had been important to her family from the beginning, “are you sure?”

  “Definitely,” said Rudd. “You know I’m trained as more than just Aaron’s assistant and chauffeur. If there’s trouble, I’m trained to have his tail. I’ve worked for him for too many years to just stand out here when he’s in a mess like this. The Dragon Watch knows me; they know I can handle whatever they can when they get in there. So yes, I’m going.”