Drake

by D M Gilmore

  Ruth was gone for the night, at work, dropped off a few hours earlier by Asher so he could remind his younger brother of the plan. Ruth was to get Asher into the facility so that he could get into the building and start scanning the security systems, find a chink in the armour that he could exploit with the right spell.

  In the meantime, Asher was left with nothing to do except plan for the heist. He hadn’t originally planned on getting dressed, but he had thrown on shorts and a t-shirt when he took his brother to work. Now, though, the shirt lay discarded on the floor in a crumpled heap, on top of a pile of human-sized clothes that he had shredded in frustration after dropping his brother off. It wasn’t like he would need to wear them any time soon. He winced a little, imagining the fifty dollars that shirt had cost him spiralling down the drain. He was more concerned about the money than ever having to need clothes to wear while human.

  Asher snorted angrily at the idea of ever having to be a human again. It wasn’t enough that his human form was weak and small, but being infused meant he was powerless in most situations, a freak of nature and mana who was slowly turning into a…

  Infusions were mostly harmless, but when a person develops too many, they turn into a creature not wholly human. Aberrants, they were called by the media, humans whose bodies were so twisted by mana that they couldn’t be recognized as humans at all. Their body melted and congealed and reformed into something alien, monstrous, and utterly revolting. When people saw an infused, they always assumed that they were hours away from melting into a gibbering mass of flesh and bone. Special prisons had been built in order to house aberrants, because in most instances the aberrant lost all semblance of humanity. They were, for all intents and purposes, a monstrous animal that had at one point been human.

  Asher shuddered at the thought and did his best to push it out of his head. He was a drake, and though he needed draquartz to maintain his form, he still had all the benefits that came with it. Size, strength, and an immunity to the manaflux. He would never need to worry about changing into an aberrant, as long as he wore his ring.

  For a moment, he actually contemplated going to a piercing studio and getting a draquartz stud implanted somewhere on his body. It wasn’t like he ever took off his ring unless he was in a place where he was required to be a human, but then he thought of the cost. A draquartz implant was expensive, at least a thousand dollars just for the crystal, let alone the piercing or labour. He couldn’t afford to waste money like that right now.

  He sighed deeply as he thought of all the times he had cursed Lovecraft for all the time they had forced him to be human, while Ruth never had the choice in the first place. His brother had been born a fuldrake, while he was just a pardrake, a part-time drake. He had the choice to be human, and it was the one thing that really set him apart from his brother. Ruth would kill to have that option, to be human for just one day, while Asher would give anything to never need to be human again.

  “If only our situations were reversed,” he muttered, turning to the screens on his computer desk. With a quick twist of his neck, eliciting a sharp crack, he brought his focus back to the task at hand and tried to get back to work.

  There were three hologram screens hovering above his desk surface, each accompanied by a semi-floating holographic keyboard. The leftmost screen had the code for Shimmerscale, which he was desperately trying to stabilize. He could trick security cameras and wards all he wanted, but if a person saw him then the heist was a bust. He needed to be as invisible as possible. So far, after a few hours of tinkering with the code, he was able to get the lensing to a point where it looked less like a glass cup and more like a glass window, with his features less defined than it had been before. It still wasn’t perfect invisibility, somebody with a good eye will absolutely be able to see him. A few more hours of coding might be required.

  The middle screen had his lockpicking algorithm, his most complete spell to date. The spell worked by interacting with any moving mechanism in the lock, meaning it could work on analog locks as well as digital or magnetic. He kept trying to find something he could do to improve the spell, to make it more stable, but every time he looked he couldn’t find anything worth changing. He had never found any bugs in the spell, nor did he find any mana leaks. The lockpicker spell fired once, unlocked a lock within a minute of being cast, and was done. It took maybe at most 4 percent of his watch’s battery life, 8 percent if he was running some intense background spells. When he had tested the pair together, he had found that Shimmerscale had interfered with the lockpicker, making it spend more mana as it tried to process the complex safe that Asher had prepared for the exercise. The safe currently lay ajar in the back corner of the room; the photograph salvaged from Asher’s cubicle at Lovecraft was the only thing within.

  The third screen had his latest spell, and perhaps his most ambitious one to date. It wasn’t enough to trick people who saw him, he would need to make sure that any evidence left behind was virtually non-existent. Security cameras, in that case, were perhaps the largest threat to his success. It didn’t matter if people couldn’t see him, they’d still be able to scan the security footage, and if they found any evidence him, even the lensing provided by Shimmerscale, he would be screwed. This new spell would hopefully allow him to loop the last minute or so of footage for upwards of fifteen minutes. He called it Looper, and was strongly considering putting it for sale when the heist was done. The Saints would pay well for it, if not the Mountains. He had been testing the spell on a personal webcam, and although he got it to work, he had yet to get the spell to a point where it was operating at an optimal mana efficiency. “10 percent per use is not an acceptable output ratio,” he muttered, adjusting some variables in his code to try and fix the spell.

  Asher’s focus was suddenly broken by a long and much-needed yawn. Blinking blearily, he craned his neck around to glance at the clock on his nightstand. Two in the morning. He sighed and shook his head, and one by one dismissed the screens floating around him. Ruth would be home by eight, there was no point in killing himself to make his spells work a bit more efficiently. They could wait until morning. He sighed as the lights around him disappeared into a small silver plate on his desk, which doubled as both his computer and his hologram projector. The processor was already synchronized to his phone, so any program he had been working on at his desk would be available to work on when he was out of the apartment.

  Yawning again, Asher tossed the covers of his bed aside, accidentally knocking his clock off the stand. Its lights went out, most likely unplugged by the impact. Asher groaned and decided to deal with it in the morning, after Ruth had gotten home. Without even bothering to take off his shorts, he fell onto his bed and buried his snout into his pillow.

  Asher slept dreamlessly until finally he was violently awakened by a hand roughly shaking him by the shoulder. Asher bolted upright in bed, lashing out with claws and tail, only for them both to be caught by a ready and waiting drake of considerable size and bulk. Asher blinked a few times as the grains of sleep tumbled from his eyes, and he looked up in surprise to see his brother frowning down at him.

  “Rough night?” Ruth asked, finally letting go of his brother’s relaxing limbs.

  “Unproductive,” Asher corrected, rubbing his wrist where his brother had grabbed him and squeezed. “Ran into some issues with Looper. Did things go better on your end?”

  Ruth grinned and nodded as he stepped out of Asher’s bedroom. Despite knocking his clock away, the half-sleeping drake knew it must have been pretty early still, as Ruth was still wearing his janitor’s jumpsuit from work. Not that he usually wore much more than it in the first place. Groaning tiredly, Asher tugged a shirt over his shoulders and zipped it up at the front, drake shirts being designed so they didn’t have to go over their horns, and followed his brother out into the shared living area of their apartment.

  “What’s with the face,” Asher demanded, as he stepped out of his room and saw his brother sitting on the couc
h with the very same grin plastered on his face. “You look way too happy about something.”

  “Well, I’m working a double shift today, for starters,” Ruth started, not even dropping the grin for a second, “I have to head back for 9, and I’ll be off by 5, and then back in again at 11 for my usual shift.”

  “Okay, what does this have to do with you getting me in?” Asher demanded, crossing his arms and furrowing his brow.

  “Oh, I got you a job interview,” Ruth assured him, leaning back in the couch. Not for the first time, Asher noticed that his younger brother took up two cushions on the couch nearly by himself, he was just so big. “Be there by 3:30, ‘cause the interview’s at 4. Bring a resume, dress nicely, and be polite, dammit.”

  Asher blinked in surprise, doing a quick double take at his brother as he tried to process what he had just said. It had never occurred to him that he should actually try to get a job at the mana station, even though it made sense given he was currently unemployed. He had been so focused on the heist, it didn’t hit him until a moment later that Ruth had already taken steps to get Asher the job. “Oh, shit. Shit, fuck,” he swore, ducking back into his room and quickly firing up his computer.

  A holographic screen jumped to attention and Asher began to type away furiously at the screen that appeared. When Ruth ducked under the door frame to enter, he found Asher busily lost in his own head, typing code faster than he had ever seen his brother type before.

  “That doesn’t look like a resume,” Ruth commented, standing over his brother’s shoulder and frowning. He didn’t know the first thing about spellcrafting, but given the shiny golden M+ in the interface, he knew for a fact that his brother was programming something.

  “I need a scanner spell for the security system! If I can log enough data about it, I can crack it in a matter of hours,” he said, not ceasing his coding even for the conversation. One of the first things he had learned to create in university was a spell that could analyze a system to identify anything wrong with it. It was an essential part of spell network upkeep. Without knowing the exact intricacies of the network, he doubted he could scan for every available flaw, but he could at least find a way to make his life a bit easier. He thought back to how he had found cracks in the school’s own security system with a very similar spell, and had used that knowledge to pass his Ethical Hacking class. Within a matter of minutes, Asher had the basic shell of the scanning function finished, and was working to write the output function so that the spell would send all the information it gathered directly to his phone.

  “Looks complicated,” Ruth muttered, ducking low under the door to avoid scraping his horns against the frame. “I’ve gotta start heading back to work, bro, but I’ll see you after your interview is done, okay?”

  Asher grunted in acknowledgment, and Ruth just shook his head and left. There was no stopping him when he was deep in code.

  Chapter 7

  Asher adjusted his red tie, loosening its grip around his thick reptilian neck. It was one of the ties he normally wore while human, and it was barely sized properly for a drake. He owned exactly one drake-tailored dress shirt, and exactly one pair of dress pants that buttoned at the back, above his tail. As was normal for drakes, he continued to wear no shoes of any kind, his talons were too sharp and would shred any kind of fabric if he tried to pull them on, and frankly he considered it a miracle he had even managed to get the ankle-length pants on without issue.

  He was seated in his car, parked just outside the Scarborough mana station, a long, two-storey building made of drab grey concrete with a cuboid metal dome towards the rear, which Asher assumed would house the generator and all the mana orbs. It was just a little after 3:30, and he was nervously twiddling his thumbs as he went over his mental checklist. He was dressed nicely, he had actually bothered to straighten his crest and polish his horns, his teeth were brushed, and his phone was fully charged. His resume was loaded onto his phone and watch, which he once again checked nervously. The smooth glass screen flashed the time, and he took a deep breath, snatching his phone off the dashboard of his car.

  “Why am I nervous?” he muttered to himself, as he headed straight for the front entrance of the facility, “I’m just scouting the place out, I’m not actually planning to get a job here,” he finished, pushing open the door with a rusty creak. “I’m here to prep for a heist, dammit. Stop being nervous about a job interview that you don’t even care about!”

  The mana station lobby was far more barren than Asher was willing to admit he expected. Upon stepping in, he made eye contact with an ageing silver female at the front desk, who blinked a few times in surprise at the visitor before returning to the hovering holograms around her. Along the leftmost wall was a peeling mural that may have once depicted the various eras of energy, from steam and coal, to fossil fuels, electricity, and finally mana. A few plastic chairs had been set up in the lobby to give guests a place to sit, and an ancient plasma-screen monitor was erected on the wall opposite the mural, turned to a local news station where a cheerful-looking human woman and her infused co-anchor were busily discussing the latest in celebrity gossip.

  Asher quickly called up a small display around his phone and prepared to launch his scanner spell. The moment he tapped the floating icon, his battery level dipped a few percent, and he could feel the air ripple around him as his code took control of his phone’s mana, directing it outward. The metal device grew warm in his hand, and he quickly stuffed it into his pocket, out of sight. He wasn’t concerned about the security cameras catching his icons or reading his spells, as a quick examination of them was enough to prove they were not in a state of good repair, and his icons were so small that they were difficult for other people to see or distinguish, let alone do so through the broken lens of a camera. To the unobservant, Asher had simply sent a text message, and not begun scanning the security system for weaknesses. The lobby camera hung at a loose angle, the mount wobbling and shaking as the motor swivelled the lens back and forth. Even from a distance, he could clearly see the crack in the lens.

  “Excuse me,” the female drake at the desk growled, looking at him through narrow red eyes, “do you have an appointment?”

  “I, uh,” Asher started, backpedalling for a moment as he scrounged around his brain for the right words, “am Asher Itzcovitch, I’m expected?”

  The female’s brows furrowed as she quickly typed away on her keyboard. Her eyes scanned the screen in front of her before she started nodding slowly. “Have a seat,” she growled, picking up what appeared to be an old corded phone and holding it to her snout. She muttered a few things into the receiver, but Asher couldn’t hear what was being said. He resigned himself to silence rather than the awkward conversation he had fully expected.

  To his own surprise, he breathed a sigh of relief as he collapsed onto the creaking plastic chair, which visibly buckled a little beneath his weight. Even as a runt of a pardrake, he had a bulkiness to his body, a density to his musculature, that differentiated him from his human form. All drakes were heavy; they were so big that it was impossible to be anything but. Though it had been a while since he’d been weighed, he figured he must have been over three hundred pounds by now.

  Asher lost himself to his thoughts again, before finally they were broken over twenty minutes later by another female drake, this one significantly larger than the one at the desk. Judging by her height alone, maybe six inches under Ruth’s considerable stature, he figured she must be a fuldrake. She had an apple-shaped figure, and wore a black dress that was several sizes too big for her, with her tail snaking out from underneath it. She had dark green scales, almost like algae-filled pond water, and her horns were a muddy brown in colour. Her crest was short and swept off to the side, frayed at the edges like it had been torn rather than clipped, and she had an extra horn jutting out from the centre of her snout.

  “Mr Itzcovitch?” she asked, bending down a bit to shake his hand. Asher leapt up from his chair and grabbed her claw in
his own, wincing a bit as she squeezed him in a firm, powerful grip. “Thank you so much for coming on such short notice! When your brother said you were available today, we just had to take the opportunity to get you in! I am Rita Patel, the director of this station, and thank you so much for agreeing to see us today!”

  “That’s not how Ruth told the story,” Asher wanted to say, but he held his tongue and simply responded with “The pleasure is all mine!”

  Her eyes were beady and seemed to smile more than was really necessary, and Asher found himself staring at her snout with his best attempt at a positive expression on his face, so as to avoid looking directly into them.

  “We’ve been without an IM technician for so long that some of the facility just fell apart in their absence,” she continued, and Asher realized he had missed part of her speech while focusing on her snout.

  He quietly cursed himself but continued to nod pleasantly and pretended to pay attention. He got a few snippets of what she was saying, like how their last technician had disappeared without a trace a few weeks back, and how difficult it was to find an IM technician that actually wanted to work inside the manaflux, let alone the mana station responsible for it.

  “It’s just so rare to meet a drake with your credentials,” she praised, casually leading him out of the lobby and into a closet that seemed to double as her office, “although I suppose it’s a benefit of being a pardrake, since schools would have a harder time denying a human, even an infused human, of your calibre.”

  “One of the conditions for my admission to U of T was that I remained human while on campus,” Asher agreed, taking a seat on the offered metal folding chair in the tiny office space. The room was dominated almost entirely by on large metal table, on which a metal plate, a computer model that Asher recognized, sparked with mana and conjured a holoscreen.