Dragon's Ark

by D Scott Johnson

  But not anymore. Especially not tonight.

  The train car rumbled and rocked while they ate supper. Mike had finally mastered chopsticks. “It’s not as good as Sichuan.”

  “We’re not in that part of China anymore. It’s like complaining you can’t get good Mexican food in New York.”

  “Or find a good Greek restaurant in Virginia.”

  He would bring that up now. She held her chopsticks tightly remembering the way the waitress acted. “She threw herself at you, and all you did was smile.”

  “Kim, you’re supposed to smile at waitresses.”

  “Not like that.”

  He threw the napkin down on his plate. “It’s never like that for me. You flirt your way through life. It’s how you survive, I get it, but I’m so goddamned sick of the rules being different for me!”

  She pushed the plate away. “Stop it. I can’t do this anymore.”

  “Yeah, I get it. You can’t do a lot of things anymore. It seems to be a pattern for you whenever I score a point.”

  She’d made him this angry; he hadn’t started out that way. Nowadays she could get him this mad in an instant. The entire time she’d known him, Kim had been pushing him away as hard as she could. A small part of her was still happy it was finally working, that she’d finally cut him so badly he would leave.

  That part of her life was over, right now.

  He sat there fuming, trying to find buttons to push, but Kim knew what had to happen next.

  She let go, and finally admitted to herself that she was in love.

  But he wouldn’t shut up.

  “And then you just kept going on about that damned translator.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Kim gripped the tablecloth. She’d stepped over a threshold and would not turn back. Hell, she’d planned all this. “Stop. Just stop.” She put the chopsticks down before she poked his eye out with them. “I have a surprise for you.”

  And what a surprise. He would never guess. She could barely believe it herself. Her skin got hot thinking about it.

  “What are you talking about?”

  Just keep breathing. “Clean this up and put the table away.” She could do it. She was going to do it, even if the goddamned train derailed, which it probably would. That’s the way her life had gone up to this point and, Jesus, she was absolutely going to do this. “I’ll be right back.”

  The look in his eyes, that flash of curiosity and wanting, wanting her, now meant something totally different. Letting go was terrifying, but now that she’d done it everything clicked. It really was that easy. If Kim could just get through these next few minutes... She slid the curtain across the cabin divider.

  Kim was a grown woman. There was no need to be this nervous, but her whole body shook. She could do this. She was going to do this. Her fingers couldn’t get the zipper on her pants to work. “Mike, could you turn the fluorescent lights out?” Kim needed all the help she could get.

  The green lights snapped off, leaving just the old-fashioned incandescent over their foldaway dinner table. Its glow cast a ribbon of light under the curtain as she pulled on a bathrobe.

  “What’s going on?”

  To hell with the robe. She let it drop. The air of the cabin caressed her bare skin. She threw the curtain to the side and paused for ten heartbeats.

  Ten quick heartbeats. “Say wow.”

  “Wow.”

  “I want you naked.”

  He shucked his clothes off. Kim had forgotten how chiseled he was. “Wow.”

  The last time she’d seen him naked, she still thought he was an assassin who wanted to kill her. Now she faced a different kind of fear, but it was easy to fight off. The light and shadow exaggerated every detail of his body. The train just barely swayed.

  Mike asked, “How do we do this?”

  She threw a bundle of washed cloth strips at him, half of the remains of her dress. She kept the other half in her hands. “We’re going to take it slowly.” Her heart was almost in her mouth. Everything she’d ever wanted, lost, and gained again stood right in front of her, in more ways than one. “I want to know how far we can get with silk.”

  Chapter 46: Helen

  Events had conspired to prevent her from reporting to Father, but now that she, Spencer, and Tonya were all safely on a train, Helen had no choice.

  “Father, I am here.”

  “You should have reported days ago, daughter. Where are you?”

  Defying her father was the hardest thing she’d ever done in her life. “I cannot tell you.”

  “What is the meaning of this? You have shirked your duties. China is in chaos because of you. Fang Hua, you will tell me where you are.”

  Now that she was outside, Helen understood what a physical compulsion was. Resisting his command was almost impossible.

  Almost.

  “You promised my friends would be safe.”

  “Events have overtaken promises. Your duty is to your family. To me. You must tell me where you are.”

  “I will, as soon as my friends are safe.”

  “Your friends? What are your friends? Foreign devils. You know better than this. Your hooligans first prevented us from tracking you, and then they destroyed the chips. That is a felony of the highest order. You will tell me where you are.”

  Her threads fought off the realmspace trackers easily. Now that they’d gotten rid of the implants, there really was no way for him to find them. “I can’t. As soon as my friends are safe, I will report and obey. But not before.”

  “I will not accept this impudence. I already know your general location. You will tell me where you are, or—”

  She cut him off. The effort hurt beyond words.

  They sat in the dining car, in spite of all of her warnings about the food. The smoke was too thick to see the other side.

  “He didn’t like what you told him, did he?” Spencer asked.

  Spencer had told her it would go like this. She didn’t have the skill to hide her shame at his being right.

  “It means nothing. I will stay true to my word. I’ll get you all out of China.” A squadron of jets blasted over their train car. “It’s not safe for anyone here now.”

  The news kept getting worse. Helen’s job was to keep China’s realmspace safe and orderly. If she manifested her holo anywhere, though, they would find her in an instant. Without a law enforcement presence, chaos slowly poisoned the network. They could still find and shut down troublemakers, but taking entire realm blocks out at once wasn’t subtle. Each time they did it Helen got a quick twinging headache.

  Her survival was not threatened. In spite of calls by radical commentators to shut all of Chinese realmspace down, official news services admitted that was not an option. Realmspace had insinuated itself into the national economy as thoroughly as the classic Internet had a generation before. They simply couldn’t afford to turn it off completely.

  The attacks across India had escalated. It didn’t matter how much the government denied it, how often they showed planes on the ground and tanks in their motor pools. The world had seen an opportunity to spy on her country’s most intimate military secrets and grabbed it with both hands. There was no way China would ever allow independent inspections of a military base a foreigner happened to be curious about that particular morning.

  Nobody knew what might happen next. Weibo went completely insane when someone posted pictures of a DF-21 convoy traveling down a major highway. For the first time in history, China had deployed her mobile nuclear missile launchers.

  People were scared, terrified, of how events had gone so wrong so fast, but life did go on. At least their train didn’t run late.

  Tonya and Spencer got excited after they crossed the outskirts of New Shanghai. Helen thought it was because they would reunite with Mike and Kim soon. She was wrong.

  “Finally,” Spencer said, “Western food.”

  Tony rubbed her hands together. “Which first, cheeseburger or pizza?”

&nbs
p; “Why not both?”

  The restaurant Spencer and Tonya chose was a ridiculous room filled with white walls and bright neon. The chair backs were shaped wrong; no matter how she sat she couldn’t get her back to feel comfortable. Aches and pains had been increasing lately, even though the medical monitors reported everything was nominal.

  The wait staff wore horribly out of place uniforms meant to evoke an era of American prosperity more than seventy years in the past. Before she could protest this bourgeois vulgarity, Spencer gave her pay records that proved nobody here was being exploited. Their wages were well above average for their jobs. Helen still couldn’t believe they were as happy as their smiles indicated. The exploitation was happening, somewhere, and the government…

  Was the same government hunting them, that held them all hostage, experimented on everyone. It made her actually want to cry, which would’ve been mortifying. A few weeks ago she would never have had these thoughts or been this stressed out over it all. Life in realspace was incredibly complicated.

  When the food arrived, she couldn’t decide if she was horrified or nauseated. “You’re serious? You eat this?” Helen held up a triangular slice of flatbread that dribbled yellowish snot trails down its sides. “Do you have any idea how much regular food we could’ve bought for what this costs?”

  Spencer slurped the cheese dripping from his slice like it was noodles. Disgusting, stringy noodles.

  “Worth every penny, too. Go ahead and try it!”

  “I’m not sure I can. It stinks.”

  “If I can try stinky bean curd,” Tonya said, “you can at least give this a shot.”

  Spencer took a big swig of beer. “You ate that? I couldn’t get anywhere near the cafeteria when they served it.”

  Helen tried to work out how to lift the slice without touching any of the cheese. “Bean curd is fine once you get past the smell.” Chopsticks wouldn’t work, either. She stared at them for a weirdly long moment before she realized there was an alternative. Her ability to concentrate was slipping for some reason, dammit. Helen grabbed a set of their barbaric cutlery and tried hacking a chunk off.

  Spencer laughed. “You look like you’re sawing lumber.”

  “Here,” Tonya said, “let me show you how to hold the fork properly.”

  While Helen got her lesson, Spencer’s second course arrived.

  She stopped and asked, “Cheese and ground meat? Seriously?”

  “Cheeseburger! Pepsi! Chips!”

  “Oh, to be a teenager again,” Tonya said. “And don’t bother trying a milkshake, Helen, let alone one as big as his. The cheese should be fine no matter what, but we do not want to discover how lactose intolerant you are with a quart of whole milk and half a pint of ice cream. If we get it wrong, you’ll be sitting on the toilet all night.”

  “But Tonya, it’s chocolate.” The smell was driving her mad. “Mike told me about chocolate.”

  Spencer and Tonya stopped what they were doing.

  She looked up at their silence. “What did I say?”

  Tonya blinked. “You’ve never had chocolate?”

  This time she couldn’t stop the tears. “No.”

  “Oh honey, I had no idea. Spencer, go to the drugstore across the street. You’re looking for something called Lactaid.”

  “Are you kidding me? I’ll get killed trying to cross the street. I’m not done with my pizza.”

  “Spencer, you are standing between a woman and chocolate. Wait, Helen, do you have any idea where your host is on her cycle?”

  Oh, no. That couldn’t be happening. Not now. Hormones were such a pain in the ass. “I’m not sure. This body feels like a balloon, and everything aches. I’ve been trying to analyze it for a few hours now with my real self.”

  Tonya turned to Spencer. “Maxipads too.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  “What, you’re afraid they’re gonna think you’re using them?”

  “They won’t speak any English. I don’t know how to say those things in Chinese. I don’t want to know how to say those things in Chinese.”

  Helen took a deep breath, which only wafted more chocolate milkshake her way. “I’ll send you the characters. Show them the screen on your phone, they’ll do the rest.”

  “Great. I’m gonna get killed by a Chinese cab getting goddamned maxipads for a fucking AI hybrid. Fuck my life.” He continued building sentences exclusively with profanities until he left the restaurant. Fortunately, it seemed nobody else in the room spoke English.

  She looked at Tonya, and then they both looked at the big metal cup of Spencer’s milkshake. The way the condensation dribbled down the sides would’ve normally fascinated her, but the smell was driving her nuts.

  “You’re a nurse, right?”

  Tonya’s didn’t stop staring at the cup. “I am.”

  She wanted some too. How could she not? If chocolate was anything like Tonya had said, Helen would want to share it anyway. “How long does it take lactose intolerance to appear?”

  “An hour, two at the most.”

  That was promising. An hour was a long time. “And if Spencer gets back in the next ten minutes?”

  “You’re golden.”

  By the time Helen pulled the cup into range, Tonya already had the spoons out.

  *

  Her first walk through a city was to meet Kim and Mike’s train. It was the Ghost Festival, a time when—according to ridiculous superstition—Heaven, Hell, and the land of the living would open to each other. Piles of joss paper and spirit money, meant to appease recently deceased ancestors, burned on every street corner. They had to be careful not to step on the ashes or the plates of food left beside the fires. The superstitions were ridiculous of course, but it would do no good to antagonize people by being disrespectful.

  Mike and Kim walked off the train, and immediately Helen knew that the ordeal on the riverboat had changed them. Tonya ran up close to Kim. This time they described a slow circle with both of their hands. Westerners could be so expressive around tragedy.

  Mike blushed and tossed his bag at Spencer. They smiled and nodded without saying a word. They were all talking through realmspace. People didn’t smile this much about tragedy. She was the outsider again, just like all the times when she’d tried to make her holo fit in with the trainees back in the academy.

  To hell with this. She wouldn’t be a wallflower now. Helen sent a private message to Mike, “What’s going on?”

  “Kim and I…”

  Tonya whispered fiercely at Kim, while her brother and Spencer joked and horsed around. She locked eyes with him and sent, “Kim and you what?”

  “I trust her a lot more now. A lot more.”

  It took her a minute to work out exactly what he was saying. That moment in the cafeteria, when she’d said how disappointed she would be if they couldn’t get together. As adults. But Mike could be very open, maybe too easy to trust someone who’d obviously hurt him. The thought brought her up short. Helen felt protective. Well, this was her brother after all. Curiosity overrode concern. “You slept together? How does that work?”

  Helen followed a few steps behind everyone else off the platform. Mike replied silently, “It’s complicated, but nice. More than nice.”

  Mike was enjoying this too much. Helen let her new-found protectiveness loose, just a little. “I’m not sure I approve of this.”

  He stopped and turned around.

  “I’m not sure she’s good enough.” She’d meant as a light tease, but it was funny how his expression changed so quickly.

  “You sound just like her mother. Only backwards.”

  She smirked. “I really want to meet her mother. In fact, I insist.” A grin bloomed as Helen finally lost control of her face. It was such a remarkable sensation.

  Helen waited until she was sure Kim could hear her and said out loud, “I am so very happy for you both. I wish you long life and many children.”

  Spencer said, “What you mean is liv
e long and prosper.” He held his hand up with his fingers splayed into a V shape.

  After a quick search Helen shook her head. “You are such a nerd.”

  “Born and bred, baby. Born and bred.”

  Chapter 47: Kim

  She had spent her entire adult life scorning anything romantic. In retrospect, it was a kind of psychic armor that helped her deal with her disability. Mike had blown a big hole in it, and now she was helping him dismantle the rest.

  But old reflexes died hard. Anytime she caught herself mooning over him or trying to think of small gifts to get him, the person she was increasingly coming to think of as “old Kim” would make mental choking sounds. Thank God it was Tonya who’d caught her writing “KT + MS” on a breakfast napkin this morning in the hotel’s restaurant. If Spencer had seen it, she would never have heard the end of it.

  Then there were the practical aspects. Now that they were off the train and in a major city, it took a bit of coaching to get Mike to graduate from ribbons.

  “You and Tonya should go to the shop,” he told her.

  “It’s too crowded, Mike.” Sex shops in China were multi-leveled buildings staffed by little old ladies in surgical scrubs. The aisles were simply too narrow. “Just keep Spencer away from the upper levels. You’ll never get him out of there.”

  “I am not taking Spencer along for this.”

  Helen kept wanting to know more about their arrangement. “Ribbons were all you could use?”

  “You have no idea. I had no idea.” Kim would never again look at red silk without blushing.

  A private lab realm only took a few hours to set up after they’d arrived at the hotel. It allowed them to re-start their decryption efforts almost immediately. Her new relationship made working on the ark amusing.

  The first day Helen said, “Okay you two, new rule: no flirting when we’re in here.”

  Mike’s voice was deep and so sexy. “We’re not flirting.”

  Helen replied, “Like hell. If I hear any more baby talk, I think my head will explode.”