Broken Dragon (The Chronicles of Mara Lantern, Book 3)

by D. W. Moneypenny

  “Little people get to ride for free, sweetie.”

  They joined a line of passengers waiting next to the open bay to their right. Two tram cabs alternated up and down the hill, and the one on the left had departed a moment earlier. Hannah pointed to the working machinery suspended above the berth into which their tram would glide. A large orange wheel slowly turned, appearing to reel in the silver tramcar that descended sharply from the 197-foot tower they could see in the distance through the open side of the building.

  “How high up will it take us?” Hannah asked.

  “I think I read somewhere that it is about five hundred feet up to the station at the top of the hill,” Diana said.

  Hannah had already turned her attention to the little dark-haired boy in the line ahead of them. He appeared to be about Hannah’s age and was engrossed in a comic book—so much so that he failed to step forward with his mother when the line ahead consolidated. His mother turned back toward him, waved a hand and hissed, “Oye, vente aquí.” Hey, come here.

  Hannah tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Tú madre te llamas.” Your mother is calling you. She pointed a finger ahead.

  The boy looked up, startled, then skipped ahead. Hannah quickly followed, without looking back to see if Diana kept up. “What are you reading?” Hannah asked the boy.

  “It’s a new comic my uncle made about a superhero who can shoot light from his eyes. Look.” The boy held up the color comic for Hannah to see. Sure enough, one of panels showed light coming from his eyes, striking a dark-coated villain in the chest.

  Diana caught up and took Hannah’s hand. “Honey, who’s your new friend?” She smiled and nodded to the boy’s mother, who returned the gesture but did not speak.

  The boy said, “I’m Tomas,” and did a quick wave by lifting the comic book and then held it out so Hannah could read next to him.

  Diana bent down and whispered into Hannah’s ear, “I didn’t know you spoke Spanish.”

  Hannah nodded, now too engrossed in the comic to reply. She pointed at the page and said to Tomas, “What happens when he makes light come out of his eyes?”

  “That’s how he battles creatures trying to hurt his friends. It’s like he can punch the monsters without touching them. See?” Tomas said, flipping to the next page and holding it up. In the panel, the villain flew into a brick wall, as the light from the hero’s eyes struck his chest and blossomed into a radiant burst.

  “Oh, cool! I’ve seen light come from my aunt Mar-ree’s hands before, but not her eyes. I would really like to see that!” Hannah said.

  Tomas gave her a doubtful look. “It’s just make-believe.”

  Diana’s eyes widened, and her body tensed up. On the verge of leaning forward to change the subject, she stopped, as Hannah said, “In the comic, it is.”

  The boy nodded and turned back to the drawings in the book. Diana relaxed and decided not to get involved.

  Light shifted and darkened slightly, as the tramcar filled the open space ahead and slid down the cable next to them on the other side of the waist-high glass partition. After a moment the door of the cab opened, and passengers disembarked. Hannah remained at Tomas’s side, transfixed on the comic book. When the line ahead flowed into the tram, Diana tapped the back of Hannah’s head, prompting her to step forward. Once inside, Tomas’s mother led him toward the back of the car and grabbed the horizontal railing that ran beneath the bank of windows comprising the top half of the silver pill-shaped compartment. Hannah, still engrossed in the comic book, absently followed along, trailed by her grandmother.

  Diana turned to look back into the station through the cab’s windows, while two dozen other passengers boarded. Two minutes later she felt a slight tremble in the floor as the compartment door slid closed, and the tram climbed the wire. She looked down and watched Hannah wobble slightly, still clinging to the edge of the comic book.

  “Hannah, give me your hand,” Diana said. After they cleared the tram station and climbed toward the T-shaped tower, the Multnomah River came into view behind them. “Look, sweetie. You’re missing the view.”

  Hannah glanced up and said, “All I can see is sky.” She released the edge of the comic book and stretched up on her tiptoes to peek out the window. Diana bent over and grabbed Hannah below the arms to give her a boost, but the little girl’s body stiffened, then wriggled away. She stared up into the sky, beyond the roof of the cab, past the cable from which they were suspended.

  “What it is, Hannah?” Diana asked.

  “Look!”

  Diana had to squat down next to her granddaughter to see where she was pointing. The tip of something large flew out of sight, just as Diana turned to look. “What did you see, sweetie?”

  Wide-eyed, Hannah turned to her and whispered, “Dragon.”

  Diana’s head snapped around to look at Hannah, making sure it wasn’t a joke of some kind, and then quickly back up to the gray clouds billowing above. They did seem to be roiled, as if something had just kicked them up. “That’s not funny. Maybe you saw a kite or a piece of paper fly by. There seems to be a bit of a breeze blowing out there.”

  An ear-splitting scream reverberated off the windows of the compartment, followed by a murmur of concern from the other passengers. “Oh, my God! What is that?” a woman standing at the front asked. She pointed ahead, toward the narrow silver tower that marked the midpoint of the cable from which they were suspended.

  Diana spun around but could not see past the twenty-some-odd people blocking her view of the front windows. Everyone pressed forward, craning their heads upward, looking out the front of the cab.

  A shadow slid over them, darkening the interior of the cab. A moment later it passed, and light returned, but a wall of wind slammed into the side of the tram, sending it swinging from its wire like a giant silver pendulum. Passengers were tossed to the left side of the cab, stumbling over each other and rolling along the floor. A man who had maintained a grip on a pole pointed out the window to the right. Diana pulled herself up along the wall and turned to see. A tail swishing in the air, trailing massive haunches, undulated between wings on the downstroke. The dragon’s head dipped downward, below its right wing and glared back toward the tram. Its body arched, beginning to dive and turn simultaneously. It was coming around for another pass at them.

  Diana’s breath caught in her throat. Not taking her gaze from the creature, she reached for the space next to her, reaching for her granddaughter’s hand and finding nothing but empty space. The dragon bore down on the tram.

  “Hannah?”

  Diana willed herself to avert her eyes, glancing down into the pile of people on the floor. Hannah pushed herself up from the floor and held up a page she had inadvertently torn from Tomas’s comic book. She held it up, saying something that was drowned out by more screams from the front of the compartment. Diana grabbed her wrist and pulled Hannah toward her, crouching down and wrapping an arm around her waist.

  Darkness slid over them again, followed by a burst of blinding light and heat. Flames licked at the windows, blotting out the view. Another wall of wind slammed into the tram, sending it swinging on its cable again. Wrapping her arms around Hannah, Diana rolled out of her crouch through a tangle of other passengers, slamming into the far wall.

  Acrid smoke filled the air.

  “Nana, let me up,” Hannah complained, pulling on Diana’s coat lapel.

  Diana rolled onto her side, setting Hannah on the floor. “I want you to stay down here on the floor. Don’t stand up. Let me take a look at what’s going on.”

  Grabbing the handrail just below the windows, she pulled herself up far enough to look outside through the charred, smoldering glass. The car swung wildly on its cable, alternately giving Diana glimpses of roofs below and clouds above. A wave of nausea rose up from her stomach. Smoke billowed from somewhere below the window, leaving streams in the air as the tram rocked back and forth.

  Movement in the distance caught her eye. With the ben
d of the river below, the dragon circled from the south just as the tram reached the top of the tower with a subtle shudder. Diana’s heart leaped at the vibrations.

  “That monster is coming back again! Get down!” a man yelled, his face pressed to the glass near the entrance doors.

  A wave of panic swept through the cabin.

  Hannah shoved the torn comic page into Diana’s field of view, just as she turned to see the commotion. Diana pulled her arm down. “Sweetie, I can’t look at the cartoon right now. Please get it out of my face.”

  Hannah continued to wave the colorful pulp paper before Diana’s eyes. “Nana, you need to look.”

  Murmurs and whimpers turned into loud groans, and groans broke into screams. Diana snatched the paper from her granddaughter’s hand and turned to look through the window. The dragon barreled at them, wings swept back, flames streaking from its nostrils, forming a burning contrail along its scaly cheeks, flickering out into a river of smoke that ran along its torso. It looked like a giant missile plunging toward them. Diana hugged Hannah to her. Oh, God, it’s going to ram us!

  Hannah held up the torn comic page before Diana’s eyes. “Look,” Hannah said. The little girl then placed a hand on each of Diana’s cheeks and said, “You have to pretend!”

  Diana felt static run through her face and said, “What?” She blinked and shook her head. “Pretend what? What are you talking about?”

  Hannah pushed the comic page back in front of Diana and said, “Be the hero. You have to stop the dragon.”

  Diana’s eyes glanced over the page and saw the drawing of a man with beams of light shooting from his eyes, striking the villain in the chest. Movement beyond the page, over Hannah’s shoulder and out the windows, drew Diana’s gaze. The horizon was gone, blotted out by a vista of fire, scales and teeth just a few yards away.

  Diana’s eyes widened. And light flew from them, melted away the window and struck the oncoming dragon in the face. Diana’s head snapped back, the recoil flinging her across the cabin, slamming her into the opposite wall.

  The dragon fell from view, and wind blew in the fractured tram, whipping Hannah’s hair up into a wild halo, as she stood up and crawled toward Diana. “Nana? Are you okay?”

  Diana’s face pressed into the coarse industrial carpet on the floor. From somewhere she heard her granddaughter calling to her. She opened her eyes and could not focus. She heard screams and wind and what sounded like traffic, but she could see nothing but a gray blur. Widening her eyes, straining to clear them, Diana willed the haze to lift, and things came into focus. Inches from her nose were the spilled contents of her purse. Lifting her head, she recognized her phone and grabbed it.

  CHAPTER 21

  Cameron’s head still rested on the shelf above the gurney that held his body. For the past twenty minutes his eyes were closed, but they appeared to be rolling around under his lids, as if he were dreaming or concentrating on something. Tired of just standing around in the concrete bunker built into the side of the parking garage below the hospital, Mara took a seat on the floor next to the door. Bohannon shuffled around the room, looking restless.

  Mara looked up at him and said, “If you want to take off, I can stay with Cam until he gets things figured out. I’ll set up a time when we can sit down and talk to him. He seems harmless enough, so I think we’ll be able to cross him off our list of potential problems.”

  “It probably would be a good idea for me to stop by the office and touch base with my lieutenant. I wonder how I’m going to explain this to him,” Bohannon said, pointing to the gurney. “A robot, of all things.”

  Mara raised a finger to him. “You know, it might be a good idea if you stopped by on your way out and let Jazz know that I’m going to be down here working on him. Tell her that I’ll be here for a while, and I’ll be taking Cam back to my shop.”

  The detective reached for the door and nodded. “I’ll say that we are trying to find who owns him.”

  Cameron’s eye snapped open. “Owns me? What do you mean by that?”

  Bohannon continued out the door, saying over his shoulder, “You explain it to him. Oh, and prop the door open, if you have to leave the room. I don’t know the code to get back in.” The door closed behind him.

  Mara stood up and dusted off her backside. “He was talking about the nurse who brought us down here to see you. As far as she knows, you’re a robot or a mechanical device of some kind. Someone must have built you and, therefore, owns you.”

  “I can’t say I have felt comfortable since the plane crash, but I felt better when people didn’t realize how different I am,” Cam said.

  “Don’t sweat it, assuming you sweat,” she said.

  “My epidermis is self-lubricating, but I don’t need to ooze water and salt to lower my body temperature, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Whatever. What’s the prognosis?” Mara pointed to the half-covered body on the gurney.

  Cam’s eyes rolled downward toward his warped legs. “It appears one of my skeletal structures just below the left knee has pinched a neural fiber, interrupting the pathway to the central core. It’s causing a cascading failure of my internal signal processing.”

  Mara frowned. “That means absolutely nothing to me.”

  “All my thoughts and bodily functions are being shunted off into my knee, which makes thinking and controlling my body impossible when my head is connected.”

  “Your knee is shorting out your nervous system?”

  “Something like that. We’ll need to unbend my left leg and unpinch the neural fiber before reattaching my head.”

  “Just so I’m clear, you want me to grab your left leg and bend it.” Mara stepped up to the gurney and pulled back the sheet to expose the leg. It was bent at an unnatural angle, with the calf sticking out about fifteen degrees to the left of the knee cap.

  “Correct. Grab the kneecap itself for leverage and pull the ankle toward you. You want to try and straighten the leg.”

  Mara leaned her waist against the edge of the gurney, so it did not roll, and leaned over the body. She followed Cam’s directions and pulled the ankle toward her. While the skin and outer texture of Cam’s leg felt normal—fleshy—Mara sensed the underlying skeleton was much less pliable.

  She gritted her teeth and said, “There doesn’t feel like there’s any give in this leg, like it’s made of steel or something.” She continued pulling and grunting.

  “My skeleton is made of an alloy similar to titanium. It’s stronger than bone, but it has some flexibility. You just need to bend it enough to unpinch that fiber.”

  Mara pushed and pulled against the leg, straining for enough leverage to bend it.

  “Don’t do that. Push continuously against the knee and pull on the ankle. Slowly increase the pressure.”

  Mara glared up at the face on the shelf. Her face was turning red.

  Cam’s eyes widened suddenly, and he smiled. “There! You got it!”

  Mara released the leg, staggering back from the gurney and sweeping her hair from her face. “Whew. It didn’t feel like it bent.”

  “The test signal is getting through. Now all we need to do is reconnect my head, and I can begin the repair programs.”

  Mara wiped her brow. “How long will it take for you to repair yourself?”

  “A little over fifteen hours for all the structural repairs.”

  “Then you will be as good as new, able to walk and talk like a real person?” she asked.

  “Not like a real person, as a real person,” Cam said.

  “That’s what I—”

  “You’re getting a text message on your phone.” Cam’s eyes moved toward Mara’s right pocket.

  Mara smiled and patted her hip. “That is so cool how you can do that. Can you tell me who it is from?”

  “It is from Mom,” he said.

  “Mom sending me a text message? Are you sure? She hates sending text messages, says talking on the phone is faster and easier. Can you rea
d people’s messages as well?”

  “Yes, it’s all part of the same network package, the same signal.”

  Mara reached up, grabbed Cam’s head and lowered it from the shelf. She walked to the top of the gurney and said, “Why don’t you read me the message while I reattach your head?”

  “It’s fairly short. One word, repeated three times.”

  Mara smiled down into Cam’s face as she lowered it to the stump of his neck. It was an odd sensation talking to something while she worked on it. She could feel the vibration of his words run through her palms.

  “Well, hurry up and tell me. I need to stick my thumbs up your nostrils to reconnect your head, and I don’t want my message to get garbled. What’s the text from Mom say?”

  Cam frowned up at her. “It says, ‘Dragon! Dragon! Dragon!’”

  CHAPTER 22

  Mara froze and stared into Cam’s eyes without saying a word. She had stopped lowering his head over the gurney and held it between her palms.

  “Mara? Why did you stop? Does the word dragon mean something to you? You look a little pale,” Cam said.

  Mara snapped from her daze, shook her head to clear her eyes. “I have to go.” She set Cam’s head down sideways on the gurney, so it lay on his right cheek facing her. She stepped back from the gurney. “I’ll come back and reconnect your head in a little while. I’ve got to go help my mother.”

  She pulled her phone from her jean pocket and tapped her mother’s listing in her address book. A message popped up on the screen saying the device would run out of power in two minutes. She tapped the option to complete the call, hoping she could get through and find out where her mother was. Mara seemed to recall something about her mother going to visit someone at a hospital, but the adrenaline pumping through her veins seemed to have wiped out the memory. Her mother’s line rang, but there was no answer. Then the phone’s screen went black.

  Mara looked up at the gray water-stained ceiling and let out a load groan. “Mom! Where are you?”