A Dragon of a Different Color

by Rachel Aaron

  Back in the DFZ, Myron’s task was nearly complete.

  He’d spent the entire morning taking Emily Jackson apart piece by piece. Under any other circumstances, the disassembly of a system as complex as Raven’s Construct would have been the work of weeks, but Sir Myron had been the governing architect of the Phoenix’s spellwork matrix for the last five years running. He’d taken her apart countless times before, and today, with no quality control office watching over his shoulder or deconstruction paperwork to fill out, he’d done it in record time.

  The longest part had been physically pulling out the almost quarter mile of spellworked metal ribbon that controlled the regulation of her magic and arranging it back into a proper casting circle, the result of which was now sitting on the bed of a military transport truck under the watchful eyes of Algonquin’s corporate mages.

  Myron himself was seated in the truck’s cab, squeezed uncomfortably between two armed soldiers dressed in the navy-blue body armor of Algonquin Corp’s Anti-Dragon Taskforce. It wasn’t the guards who made him uncomfortable, though. As the de facto head of magic for the UN, Myron was used to riding in armed convoys, and no mage worth the name was afraid of guns. But it was quite upsetting to sit between two fellow humans who didn’t bat an eye over the fact that he had a woman’s head cradled in his lap.

  This was his least favorite part of working on Emily. He wasn’t sure if it was security concerns or the spirit’s macabre flare for the dramatic that had inspired Raven to hardwire his construct’s buffer matrix to the inside of her reinforced skull, but its presence meant that no matter what they did to the rest of her, Emily’s head always remained disturbingly intact. Even worse, her eyes stayed open, glaring at him accusingly. Normally, Myron liked to tie something over them to prevent this exact scenario, but there’d been no time. The moment he’d finished hauling out her spellwork and getting the metal into the right shape, Algonquin had ordered everyone into the trucks. They’d been driving ever since, pushing farther into the bowels of the DFZ Underground than he’d ever been until they reached a place so dark and deep, it didn’t even show up on the GPS.

  “Where are we?” Myron asked as the truck rolled to a stop.

  The guard beside him grabbed the door handle with a grim look. “Old Grosse Point.”

  Old Grosse Point was what the maps called it, but like anyone else familiar with the thousands of films, TV shows, games, and books set in the DFZ sprawl, Myron knew the buried suburb where Algonquin’s wave had first crashed down by its colloquial name: the Pit.

  It looked just as it did in the movies, too. The Skyways above them held up some of the most expensive real estate in the DFZ, but down here, it was all just black. Black above, where not even a crack of daylight broke through the grime-stained underbelly of the Skyways. Black below, where the streets and houses were still covered in a foot-thick layer of silt from the flood. Even the horizon was black thanks to the cement wall Algonquin had built between this section of the Underground and her lake, cutting it off from the air and sun like the stone seal on a tomb.

  The oppressive darkness was more than enough to justify calling this place a pit, but it wasn’t until the guards opened the doors, breaking the truck’s protective ward, that Myron realized just how fitting the name truly was. One breath of the deathly, oily, oppressive magic that filled the air here was all it took to make him feel as if he really had fallen into one of the colder, dirtier hells.

  “A warning would have been appreciated,” he said angrily, activating the labyrinth of spellwork woven into the lining of his coat to bring up his personal ward. “This is a class-five magical pollutant zone.”

  The soldier shrugged as though exposing the world’s premier mage to potentially toxic ambient magic was no big deal and put on his helmet, activating his own ward with a button before offering Myron his hand. “This way, sir. Lady Algonquin is waiting for you.”

  Tucking Emily’s head under his arm, Myron allowed the soldier to help him down the three-foot drop to the ground. The oily reek of polluted magic only got worse when he landed, his leather shoes sinking up to their laces into the slimy layer of old lake mud covering what had once been a road. Myron pried his feet free with a muttered curse, cinching his ward tight as he made his way through the muck toward his hostess.

  The Lady of the Lakes was harder to spot than she should have been. This was partially because of the Pit’s magic. Even with the truck’s headlights at his back, Myron couldn’t see more than a few feet down the ruined street before the shadows took it back, the thick magic diffusing the light like murky water. Mostly, though, it was because of the Leviathan.

  Just like when he’d loomed over them in Reclamation Land, the giant monster was semitransparent, his shadowy body blending into the Pit’s black miasma. The only reason Myron knew he was, in fact, looking at the Leviathan and not some trick of the dark was because the monster was holding Algonquin suspended ten feet up in the air on a pillar of black tentacles.

  As always when she was forced to be around her human troops, the Lady of the Lakes was in her public form: an old Native American woman with a wise, wrinkled face and a thick braid of silver hair that went all the way down to the belt of her navy pants suit. From the way bits of her clothes kept rippling and changing, though, it was clearly a minimum effort. One that collapsed completely when she spotted Myron.

  “Right on time,” she said, her human face dissolving as the Leviathan lowered her to the ground. “Is it ready?”

  Rather than state the obvious, Myron just pointed at the truck, where a team of Algonquin’s corporate mages was levitating the silver casting circle that had once been Emily Jackson off the flatbed.

  Algonquin’s water rippled in happiness, and then she whipped her water down at the street between them. “Place it here.”

  With an irritated breath, Myron nodded, turning to walk back through the mud toward the mages to oversee the relocation.

  Even with his help and the hover spell, moving the circle was hair-raising work. Since Algonquin had refused to tell him where they were going, Myron had been forced to fill the circle ahead of time, loading it up with the spirits’ magic before they’d left Reclamation Land. Moving a full circle was never a good idea, but he’d thought he could get away with it thanks to Emily’s enormous capacity. But while the ride over had been uneventful, now that they were at the final stage, Myron was starting to realize just how grossly he’d underestimated the amount of magic Algonquin had squeezed out of the spirits who’d sacrificed themselves to her cause. Even rearranged into a circle—a much more efficient shape than a human body—Emily’s spellwork was barely able to hold all the magic Algonquin had forced it to absorb, leaving it packed like a spring-loaded snake-in-a-can. One wrong move, and the whole thing would blow up in their faces. But while that was par for the course for most of Myron’s projects, it didn’t make him any less anxious as he helped the corp mages float the loaded circle off the truck and down the silted road.

  Finally, after what felt like years, everything was in place. Myron was on his knees, making the final adjustments, when he felt water drip onto his neck. When he looked up, Algonquin was looming over him with his own face.

  “This had better work, mage,” she whispered, glaring down at him with his own exacting scowl. “I’ll spill dragon blood all day for the joy of it, but the sacrifices of my brothers and sisters must be honored.”

  “They will be,” he promised, covertly wiping the water from his neck. “There’s enough magic here to raise you three times over.” It was more power than Myron had ever worked with before, perhaps the most magic any human had ever gathered in a single circle. If any of his former colleagues had been present, it would have been a circle for the history books. His history, specifically. The core spellwork might have been Raven’s, but Myron was the one who’d arranged it into a masterpiece of magical engineering. The repurposed circle in front of them was some of the finest work he’d ever done, and the knowled
ge that no one but Algonquin’s troops was ever likely to see it was physically painful. Though not as painful as what he had to do next.

  He stood with a bracing breath, turning to glare at the lake, who was still wearing his face. “I’ve done my part. The control circle is complete and filled to the brim, precisely as promised. Now it’s your turn, Algonquin. Tell me what Mortal Spirit we are raising to make me Merlin.”

  This was the question that had been plaguing him from the moment he switched sides. Algonquin had always spoken of gathering magic to raise her own Mortal Spirit, but she’d never actually said which spirit she was working to fill. Myron had caught a glimpse of its shape in the dragon blood when he’d been on his belly under the Leviathan during the disaster with Novalli, but not enough to determine its nature or domain or even how big it would ultimately be. He’d asked Algonquin for specifics countless times after joining her, but she’d always put his questions off, promising to tell him when, and only when, the time came.

  Given how he’d come to his position, Myron had assumed she was just being cautious. He had no illusions about her opinion of his trustworthiness, and he did not take offense. Keeping mission-critical information hidden from a questionable ally was only logical. Now that he’d seen the location she’d chosen for the summoning, though, Myron was beginning to worry that Algonquin’s reasons for keeping her spirit secret had nothing to do with security.

  “Why are we doing this here?” he demanded, looking nervously around at the unnatural darkness of the Pit. “I told you when I joined, I’m not summoning any more death spirits.” It had been his only stipulation. He’d seen where Novalli’s deal with that devil had led, and he wanted no part of it. Not even to fulfill his dream of being Merlin. Fortunately, Algonquin was shaking her head.

  “I’m well aware of the qualities of this place,” she said, looking at the blackness as though she expected something to come charging out of it. “But as much as I’d prefer to do this somewhere that didn’t reek of mortal fear and death, it must be here, because here is where it began.”

  She waved her water at the surrounding land, which Myron only now noticed wasn’t flat like the rest of the city. It was sloping, the grid roads and destroyed yards of the crushed houses around them all tilting down at the same angle to form the bowl of a shallow, city-block-sized crater, which they were currently standing at the bottom of.

  “This is where it started,” Algonquin said, staring at the sloping land. “Six decades ago, this was the exact spot where the wave of my anger first crashed down. The echo of that rage mixed with the terror of those it killed to form the magic you feel now. The combination was so virulent and tenacious, I was forced to seal it off to prevent it from seeping back into my water. But sad as the loss of any land is, it’s not all bad. The magic of the Pit may be vile, but it’s thicker than anywhere else in the city, because this is where she was born.”

  A chill went through Myron’s body. “She who?”

  “My city,” Algonquin said, tilting her head to stare up at the black underbelly of the Skyways above them. “Did you never wonder why I would conquer the very city that had abused me most? Why I chose to rebuild Detroit instead of washing it clean off the map?”

  “Of course I wondered,” Myron said, fighting to keep the excitement out of his voice. “Everyone’s wondered. They’ve even got a name for it in the Spirit Affairs Office: ‘the Paradox of the DFZ.’ It’s quite famous.”

  That was criminal understatement. The question of why Algonquin, who famously cared more for fish than people, would pour herself into rebuilding a human city from a flooded wasteland into one of the biggest, densest, richest cities in the world was the most hotly contested mystery of the post-magical era.

  The leading theory was that she needed the DFZ to get a foot in the door for spirits on the international stage, but other than a handful of sweeping statements like the announcement she’d made after killing the Three Sisters, Algonquin had never bothered with politics. All she seemed to care about was growing the DFZ itself, reinvesting all the earnings from her multiple patents, technology companies, financial institutions, security contracts, and entertainment studios back into the city itself. The result was the fastest-growing metropolis in human history, and still, no one understood…

  “Why?” he asked, looking her straight in his own reflected eyes. “Why the DFZ? Did you just want your own piece on the political board, or—”

  Algonquin scoffed. “What you call politics is nothing but apes dancing in front of fires, marveling at the shadows they cast. But foolish and shortsighted as all human power structures are, your magic is real. The damage you do, the harm you cause, the monsters you create from your fear: these are humanity’s powers, and they are what I built this city to stop.”

  “That makes no sense,” Myron argued. “If humanity’s evils are what you hate, then creating the Detroit Free Zone was the absolute worst thing you could have done. You made a place where vice runs rampant. Where drugs and guns are sold in vending machines, and murder is punished with a fine. The only reason this city isn’t the most crime ridden in the world is because you also made nothing illegal. The only laws you’ve ever passed are anti-water pollution, fishing ordinances, and the ban on dragons. If you think we’re all just ignorant dancing apes, why would you create a city that does nothing to restrain us?”

  “Because you cannot be restrained,” she said angrily, her watery voice sharp as cracked ice. “I’ve lived with your kind since you began. I’ve seen human nature in all its guises, and I can say without doubt that you are selfish, brutish creatures. You consume everything, including each other, in your relentless drive to rise to the top of your own sweaty heap.”

  “But we’re not all like that,” Myron argued.

  “Aren’t you?” she said coldly. “My city says otherwise.”

  “Because you made no laws!”

  “If you were really good, you wouldn’t need laws,” she shot back. “That’s my point. I’ve seen how you behave over generations. It would be easier to stop the sun from rising than to make humanity act in a responsible fashion, so I didn’t try. Instead, I built you a place where you could be as awful, selfish, and self-destructive as you liked. No rules or restrictions, just desires and the freedom to pursue them. I gave you a blank slate, a Detroit Free Zone. You were the ones who turned it into this.”

  She lifted her hands up to the Skyways overhead. “The DFZ was your making, not mine. I built the elevated ramps because I needed conduits to channel magic into the proper forms for my Reclamation Land projects, but you were the ones who turned them into a division where the rich live literally on top of the poor. You’re absolutely right when you say the DFZ is a terrible city, but I’m not to blame. I merely gave you the shovel and let you dig, and now that the hole is wide and deep, all I have to do is step back and let it bury you.”

  His reflection shot him a cruel smile as she finished, but Myron barely noticed. He’d thrown his lot in with Algonquin because that was the price of becoming the first Merlin, but whatever Emily thought, he wasn’t a traitor. Sometimes you had to do the wrong thing to get the right end, up to and including working with a walking, talking natural disaster. It wasn’t until this moment, though, that Myron realized the true depth of the contempt the Lady of the Lakes held for their kind, and the more she insulted him, the clearer her purpose in bringing him here became.

  “That’s it,” he whispered at last, voice shaking. “The DFZ is ours, not yours. Humanity made it.” He looked down at the silted ground in horrified wonder. “The city is the spirit.”

  Algonquin chuckled. “You are a clever human.”

  It wasn’t a compliment, but Myron had no time to waste being insulted. Now that she’d put the pieces together for him, he felt like a fool for not realizing the truth sooner. The DFZ was Algonquin’s Mortal Spirit. Not just the physical city, but the idea of it, the addictive promise of a city of absolute freedom that had been hammered down
through countless movies, shows, novels, and video games over the past sixty years. The concept of the DFZ as a place where anything could happen and anyone could go to start a new life was so common, it was its own family of clichés, and that was the entire point. Algonquin hadn’t built a city. She’d created a hook for people to hang their dreams on, a place to pin their hopes and ambitions and greed. The DFZ wasn’t just a dot on the map. It was a concept, a collection of discrete ideas and hopes, fears and feelings. A Mortal Spirit, and he was standing right on top of it.

  “Now you understand,” Algonquin said, reaching out to pat Myron’s graying hair with a watery tendril. “You were right, Myron. I had no need for a human city. What I needed was a vessel. A concept for you to cling to and fill with your own ideas, because that’s how human magic works. You take something innocent, like a city, and you give it power by projecting your fears and desires on top of it. On a person-by-person level, it doesn’t add up to much. But sell a dream to the world—combine the ambition of thousands, millions, billions of humans—and you end up with monsters no one can control, including yourselves.” She tilted the reflection of his head. “Now do you understand why we were willing to die to stop the rising magic from bringing them to life?”

  Myron had understood from the moment he’d first seen Marci Novalli’s death spirit. All Algonquin’s explanation had done, besides satisfy his curiosity, was add even more weight to his resolve and a new, broader target for his end game. “I understand you perfectly, madame,” he said, stepping away from her touch. “These spirits are terrifying, and it is in all of our best interests to stop them.” He moved to the edge of the circle. “Ready to begin when you are.”

  “Oh,” Algonquin said, clearly surprised by his sudden and unequivocal agreement. “Well, glad to know there are humans who can grasp the larger picture.”

  “I have always had a clear vision of what must be done,” Myron replied, flashing her his famous smile, the one he normally saved for photo shoots. But while his outside was perfectly collected, his mind was boiling with a terrified anger that could no longer be contained.