Dragon's War

by Ehsani, Vered

  We landed farther down the beach and trudged up to the road. There was no point in being secretive. I was pretty sure there were sensors scattered around the perimeter of Lavack’s fortress. I could just see the top of the building popping above the trees. It really did look like a fortress. Which kind of fits with it being the Centre for Internal Security and all.

  “You don’t have to come, you know,” I said to Blade.

  “I know,” he said and patted the cart he was pushing. “But I figure we should finish this together. And who knows, maybe I can get a pardon for my service to humanity.”

  Darren snorted and covered it with a cough. I returned Blade’s grin with my own. “Yeah, maybe.”

  “And I did promise Dragon I’d take care of you,” he continued.

  “Thanks, but I don’t need a babysitter.” Still, if things really went south, I couldn’t think of a better person to hang out with than Blade.

  “As long as we don’t have to share the cave with the Boss, I’m cool with that,” Darren said, still gripping the portable sensor unit to his chest.

  “Thing is, boy, I didn’t promise to take care of you.” Blade laughed at Darren’s face. “Just kidding. You can tag along.”

  I glanced at the unit. It seemed so lifeless without Dragon’s image. Just a ball-sized hunk of metal.

  “How much time?” I asked.

  “About two hours,” Blade replied. I could barely hear his voice above the soft sea breeze and the swish of tree branches.

  I peered over at the control panel. One hour, fifty-eight minutes. If Dragon could answer, he’d give me the seconds as well.

  Six of those precious minutes ticked off before we reached the main gate. There was no way we could squeeze the cart or Blade through the gaps in the electric fence. And no point. We needed Lavack to give us access to the virus. Sneaking around wasn’t going to make him any happier. Plus he must’ve picked our presence up already.

  It sounds like the beginning of a joke: A pirate, a brain, a fugitive and a gambler walk up to the gate.

  Except St. Peter’s not there, the gates aren’t pearly, there are no angels strumming harps. And it’s not a joke. Especially the part about the posse of guards waiting for us, guns up and aimed at us.

  Chapter 28: Griffin

  She had it all prepared. She didn’t have to look at her notes, but she did anyway. She wanted the wording to be perfect.

  Clearing her throat, Griffin began. “This will be the last communication you will see or hear via Internet, TV or radio.” Her voice rumbled like gravel in a mixer. She sipped some water and continued. “In a few moments, all communication avenues will be cut. If you want to talk to your neighbour, you’ll have to go outside and meet him.”

  She tried to smile. Her lips twitched before flattening out. “All transport will cease to function. Everything you depend on will abandon you in isolation. This is what it feels like to be trapped by the very technology that’s supposed to free you.” Her lips curled. “Welcome to my world.”

  She coughed. Not bad as a first draft. “Kraken, replay that back to me.”

  Silence.

  “Kraken, replay now.”

  Nothing.

  Griffin eased herself out of the chair and gazed around the spacious, well ordered office. Everything was in place, just as the Boss had left it.

  It’s mine now.

  She nodded. Yes, and the rest of the mansion and the dozen brains scattered around the globe, their mental fingers dug into all the vital systems of human civilisation.

  But where was Kraken?

  Closing her eyes, she reached out into the network of communication lines connecting the mansion on its small island to Sana Island. She found him easily enough, floating in the virtual control room, a mirror image of the physical one.

  “Kraken, I gave you an order,” she said, her gravelly voice tight. “Is there a problem? I’m beginning to wonder if I made the right choice by picking you.”

  Kraken’s limbs twitched but he kept quiet. She called up a screen and peered into the central control room. It all looked as it should, except for one small detail.

  “Where’s Dragon’s tank?” she growled. Her griffin avatar formed, beak snapping, claws flexing. “Alert the security guards.”

  Her words rang loudly in the silence. She turned to face Kraken, but he wasn’t there.

  “Hello, Griffin,” the Games Boss said and smiled.

  With a shriek, she launched at him, but he disappeared.

  “I’m over here,” his voice echoed around her, mocking and taunting.

  She knew where “here” was. In a thought, she was back in the Boss’s isolated mansion. He was lounging in the chair she had recently vacated, his feet up on the desk. A gun rested in his grip, pointing at her. Not a taser. A real gun.

  “What do you want?” she said, but it came out distorted and not quite human-sounding.

  He smiled, his teeth flashing against his skin in that vote-winning way he had. Except he wasn’t going to get any of her votes, or anything else.

  “Griffin, it’s enough,” he said, calm and cool.

  She bared her teeth. “You don’t give me orders anymore.”

  “I’m stopping this,” he said.

  “What do you care?” she demanded. “What have you ever cared about except yourself?”

  He nodded his head elegantly. “That’s a point, Griffin. Thing is, this whole plan of yours is bad for business and therefore bad for me.”

  She snorted and sat in a crouching way on a small sofa facing the desk. She flexed her fingers, wishing they were claws. “It’s too late. You can’t stop what’s going to happen.”

  He sighed. “No, but I can stop you from stopping Dragon.”

  Her lips peeled back from her teeth. “He’ll fail. Even if he has enough energy left, he’ll fail. Besides, what can you do? Shoot me?”

  “I could.”

  Pressing her elbows onto her knees, she leaned towards him, red eyes wide and glaring. “Really? Would you really stoop that low and shoot your own daughter?”

  She was sure he stopped breathing for a moment. His body, as if chiselled from stone, did not stir. The only sound in the room was the regular slosh of waves against the man-made beach nearby.

  When he moved, it was to lower one foot and the next slowly to the floor. He stood up, straining at muscles that were unusually tense.

  “Don’t tempt me.” His entire being was in poker-playing mode, unreadable, unemotional except what he wanted to leak out.

  “You’d really do that, Daddy?” Her lips twisted around the last word, spitting it out. “After all you let them do to me, you owe me at least my life.”

  The gun didn’t tremble from its focus on her heart. “I’m sorry for…”

  She scoffed. “Spare me. You, sorry? I don’t think so.” She shook her head, white hair whipping against her face. “You didn’t even have the courage to tell me yourself. I had to poke around and find the facts on my own, and face the truth alone. Nice one, Dad.”

  She stood up and moved towards the communication screen. “I’m going to alert the security guards about the fugitives. And then I’m going to release my message to the world.” She stretched out a hand to the control panel. “And you’re not going to shoot because, despite all things, I am your daughter.”

  “No, Griffin,” he whispered. “You’re not anymore.”

  The Boss’s jaw tensed and his eyes squinted slightly, and in that moment, she knew what he’d do right before he squeezed the trigger. She closed her eyes. As the quiet disintegrated from the first shot, she collapsed to the floor and hugged her knees to her chest, listening to the barrage of bullets, watching as bits of screen and control panel rain down around the room.

  When the Boss stopped shooting, he lowered the gun and stared at her. She shrank back against the wall, but he didn’t do anything else. Only when a ray of sun sparkled against something on his cheek did she realise he was quietly crying.
r />   Chapter 29: Myth

  “This is welcoming,” Blade murmured, raising his hands.

  The guards were ordering us around. I wasn’t listening. Minutes were bleeding away, along with Dragon’s energy. Darren shuffled closer to me, hands up. Not sure how he thought I was going to help him.

  Wait. Hands up?

  I opened my mouth. He stepped on my foot. Hard. Before I could curse, scream or punch him back, Lavack sauntered up behind the guards. His mouth imitated a smile but his eyes sure didn’t.

  Red-haired demon, I thought, directing my mental curses, screams and punches at him.

  We were herded into the back of a van and locked in with a couple of guards. I closed my eyes, visualising the route through the landscaped grounds up to the building. Only yesterday early morning, I’d been running away. Thinking about the escape made me think about that hillbilly banjo-loving guy. Mr. Burnes. I’d borrowed his key pass. I checked my pocket. Yup. Still had the pass.

  Guess I should return it.

  If Lavack didn’t eat us for dinner. Talking about dinner, I was hungry. Across from me, Darren slumped against the side of the van.

  “No windows,” he said.

  “If there were,” I said, remembering the last time I’d been locked in a van with Darren, “would you jump out?”

  “Oh yeah,” he said, nodding his head so hard his long black bangs flopped straight up before gravity could work. “You bet I’d jump.”

  “Sounds like you kids do this often,” Blade said, stretching his legs out, leaning back and closing his eyes, ignoring the gun aimed at his head. “I’ll have to hang out with you a lot more.”

  A few minutes later, the back of the van opened onto a loading bay.

  “Not good,” Daren whispered. “They’re bringing us in a back door, so no one see us.”

  I shrugged my shoulders as I shuffled out the van. “So?”

  “So no one knows we’re here,” he said. “We can disappear into a soundproof room and no one will ever know.”

  “You watch too many movies,” I said and bit at a thumb nail.

  Lavack spoke to one of the guards, who led us down a long hall lined with doors. A couple guards tailed us, guns nudging us along. What’d they think? We were going to haul out weapons from our little cart and go nuts?

  “Soundproof torture rooms,” Darren squeaked. “We’re doomed.”

  A lady popped out of one of the torture rooms, an open laptop in her arms. Behind her were a couple of desks and a coffee machine.

  “Yeah, real doomed,” I said. “They might force us to drink their coffee.”

  Blade snickered behind me. I was glad he was with us. Not if he got in serious trouble because of us, which looked likely. But I felt safer. Which was stupid, because none of us were safe.

  We followed Lavack into an elevator. “It’s alright,” he said. “I can take it from here. They’re not going anywhere.”

  The lead guard started to protest. The elevator doors closed before he could say much.

  “Good to see you,” Blade said to Lavack.

  I gaped at him. “So what, you’re best buddies with the Boss and the Director of Internal Security?” My hands twitched with the urge to slap his grinning face.

  “Not exactly,” Lavack said, smiling as his face melted into Dragon’s.

  “Hey, how’d you know it was him?” Darren asked.

  Blade laughed. “Oh, not enough arrogance when he walks, that’s how. And the way he gestured when he spoke to the guards.”

  My mouth was still unhinged. I snapped my jaw closed. “Was I the only one clued out on this?”

  Dragon leaned towards me until all I could see were his golden brown eyes. “It seems so. Sadly, you don’t seem to recognise me in any other form.”

  Maybe I was imagining it, but there was a fatal ring of prophecy in his words and I shivered. I debated for a second if I should be angry and irritated, or give in to relief. His smile softened. I let relief win.

  “I can live with that,” I said.

  “Where to now?” Darren asked.

  I slipped the key card out of my pocket. My mom was in the building. Maybe she could help us. But as soon as I thought it, I knew she couldn’t. She’d told me so, and as much as I wanted to see her again, it would have to wait.

  “We’re going to visit Mr. Burnes,” I said, tapping the card on my palm.

  Although it was still mid-afternoon, the building was quiet. I think it was that time of day between coffee break and home time, when everyone really buckles down and gets a day’s worth of work finished in a couple hours. Something like that. Point is, we didn’t see anyone as we exited the elevator and dashed over to our target office.

  “What is that?” Darren asked, his hands hovering around his ears.

  “Mr. Burnes has unique tastes in music,” I whispered. “Lavack, we might need you here.”

  As I watched Dragon morph into Lavack, I shuddered. “That’s creepy.”

  Dragon, or Lavack, led the way into the small office with the loud music. “Mr. Burnes?”

  The man glanced up and jumped. “Ah… Sir, what an honour. I, um, what, I mean, can I help you with anything? Sir?”

  The rest of us marched in, Blade closing the door and leaning against it, his arms crossed ominously over his wide chest. Mr. Burnes’s eyes bulged slightly, until he saw me.

  “Oh, man, you’re that… that kid,” he spluttered. “You stole my key card. Oh, you, you… You are in so much trouble.”

  I forced a smile. I would’ve preferred stuffing the card into the guy’s big mouth. I restrained myself. “Yes, and I’m so sorry about that. Here’s your card back.”

  The fake Lavack also smiled. It didn’t look as fake as mine felt. “Of course. But it’s all in the past now. We have more pressing matters to attend to.”

  Wow. He even talked like Lavack. Yuck.

  “Well, that’s very magnanimous of you,” Mr. Burnes said. He didn’t sound convinced.

  Darren looked at me, his eyebrows two squiggly lines. Magnanimous? he mouthed.

  For a dressed-up hillbilly, Mr. Burnes was displaying an admirable vocabulary. Just wished he would move along and go to his banjo practice or wherever he went when he wasn’t working.

  “Yes, it is, isn’t it?” Lavack said, still smiling like we had all the time in the world.

  The time left on his cart showed just over an hour and a half. How long would it take for him to crack the codes leading to the virus? And then stop the virus? Assuming it was even possible. Assuming no one interrupted us. Assuming Mr. Burnes would shut up and leave us alone. I glanced at Blade. Yup. Good thing he was with us. I had no qualms asking the pirate to stuff the hillbilly into a broom closet.

  “The thing is, I need to borrow your office,” Lavack continued.

  “Ah… Why?”

  A bold question from someone at the bottom of the food chain.

  Lavack’s smile hardened. “My office is occupied. Maintenance issues. You understand.”

  The guy shook his head. Gotta admire his tenacity, even if it did border on stupidity. Even without an impending global calamity, didn’t he have enough sense of self-preservation to get the hint? “No, not really. Why don’t…”

  “Hey, are you deaf?” Blade asked. “The Director needs your office. You get the rest of the day off. Enjoy.”

  Mr. Burnes rubbed his chin and licked his lips, his gaze flickering between the dangerous-looking black dude and the far more dangerous Director. “And who are you?” he squeaked out.

  Blade leaned forward, his shadow engulfing the smaller man. “His bodyguard.”

  He left. Not without a few mumbled comments about inconvenience and deadlines. And he turned the music off with a triumphant look, like we were really hoping to have the music on. But he left.

  “Finally,” Darren said, cracking his knuckles.

  Dragon, who now looked like Dragon, said, “I’m going to connect to the system and search for the virus.” />
  “Can we help?” I asked.

  “Just don’t let anyone unplug me until I’m finished.” He began to fade as the mobile sensor unit floated onto the desk.

  Blade, Darren and I looked at each other. A soft hum of the building’s equipment filled in the background. The ping of the elevator bell was lost in the vastness of the silence.

  Blade locked the door and pushed a door under the handle. We settled down to wait.

  “How long should it take?” Darren asked after ten minutes.

  “Longer than ten minutes,” I said, my eyes fixed on the cart’s timer.

  Another few minutes trickled by.

  “I’m hungry,” Darren said.

  “Bah,” Blade said as he rummaged through the desk drawers. “Here.” He pulled out a bag of sweet potato chips. “And it’s even sort of healthy for you.”

  We split the bag, which didn’t give each person very much. Just enough to remind our stomachs how empty they really were. I ate slowly, savouring every bite. At least it was something to do. I was tempted to check emails, possibly for the last time, but I didn’t want to disturb Dragon. So we sat around, staring at the floor, walls, ceiling… waiting.

  The elevator bell pinged again. Several pairs of feet thumped down the hall.

  Keep going, keep going, keep going, I said like a mantra.

  The feet all stopped outside our door. Typical.

  Blade stepped back until he was against the desk, facing the door. Darren and I joined him.

  A fist pounded on the door. Seriously, bad news always starts with a loud banging on a door. At least for me it does.

  “Myth, open up.” It was Lavack. The real Lavack. The Lavack who didn’t like me, who probably hated Blade, who wanted to destroy all the MindOpS brains. That one.

  “I can’t,” I said, raising my voice over the background hum and Darren’s incessant knuckle cracking. “Griffin corrupted the virus. We have to turn it off or start collecting firewood.”

  Silence.

  I figured I should probably add to that rather bizarre statement. “The virus has been re-programmed. It will cause the MindOpS to destroy all computer-based systems. Which at this point means basically everything.”