Asimov's Science Fiction 02/01/11 Page 4

  The dragon had completely broken apart now. Incandescent stuff dripped and hissed into steaming water and the burning light was growing brighter.

  Like almost everyone else, Lucas turned and ran. Heat clawed at his back as he slogged to the top of the ridge. He saw Damian sitting on the sand, right hand clamped on the upper part of his left arm, and he jogged over and helped his friend up. Leaning against each other, they stumbled across the ridge. Small fires crackled here and there, where hot debris had kindled clumps of marram grass. Everything was drenched in a pulsing diamond brilliance. They went down the slope of the far side, angling toward the little blue boat, splashing into the water that had risen around it. Damian clambered unhandily over thwart and Lucas hauled up the concrete-filled bucket and boosted it over the side, then put his shoulder to the boat’s prow and shoved it into the low breakers and tumbled in.

  The boat drifted sideways on the rising tide as Lucas hauled up the sail. Dragon-light beat beyond the crest of the sand bar, brighter than the sun. Lucas heeled his little boat into the wind, ploughing through stands of sea grass into the channel beyond, chasing after the small fleet fleeing the scene. Damian sat in the bottom of the boat, hunched into himself, his back against the stem of the mast. Lucas asked him if he was okay; he opened his fingers to show a translucent spike embedded in the meat of his biceps. It was about the size of his little finger.

  “Dumb bad luck,” he said, his voice tight and wincing.

  “I’ll fix you up,” Lucas said, but Damian shook his head.

  “Just keep going. I think—”

  Everything went white for a moment. Lucas ducked down and wrapped his arms around his head and for a moment saw shadowy bones through red curtains of flesh. When he dared look around, he saw a narrow column of pure white light rising straight up, seeming to lean over as it climbed into the sky, aimed at the very apex of heaven.

  A hot wind struck the boat and filled the sail, and Lucas sat up and grabbed the tiller and the sheet as the boat crabbed sideways. By the time he had it under control again the column of light had dimmed, fading inside drifting curtains of fret, rooted in a pale fire flickering beyond the sandbar.

  Damian’s father, Jason Playne, paid Lucas and his mother a visit the next morning. A burly man in his late forties with a shaven head and a blunt and forthright manner, dressed in work boots and denim overalls, he made the caravan seem small and frail. Standing over Julia’s bed, telling her that he would like to ask Lucas about the scrape he and his Damian had gotten into.

  “Ask away,” Julia said. She was propped among her pillows, her gaze bright and amused. Her tablet lay beside her, images and blocks of text glimmering above it.

  Jason Playne looked at her from beneath the thick hedge of his eyebrows. A strong odor of saltwater and sweated booze clung to him. He said, “I was hoping for a private word.”

  “My son and I have no secrets.”

  “This is about my son,” Jason Playne said.

  “They didn’t do anything wrong, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Julia said.

  Lucas felt a knot of embarrassment and anger in his chest. He said, “I’m right here.”

  “Well, you didn’t,” his mother said.

  Jason Playne looked at Lucas. “How did Damian get hurt?”

  “He fell and cut himself,” Lucas said, as steadily as he could. That was what he and Damian had agreed to say, as they’d sailed back home with their prize. Lucas had pulled the shard of dragon stuff from Damian’s arm and staunched the bleeding with a bandage made from a strip ripped from the hem of Damian’s shirt. There hadn’t been much blood; the hot sliver had more or less cauterized the wound.

  Jason Playne said, “He fell.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Are you sure? Because I reckon that cut in my son’s arm was done by a knife. I reckon he got himself in some kind of fight.”

  Julia said, “That sounds more like an accusation than a question.”

  Lucas said, “We didn’t get into a fight with anyone.”

  Jason Playne said, “Are you certain that Damian didn’t steal something?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Which was the truth, as far as it went.

  “Because if he did steal something, if he still has it, he’s in a lot of trouble. You too.”

  “I like to think my son knows a little more about alien stuff than most,” Julia said.

  “I don’t mean fairy stories,” Jason Playne said. “I’m talking about the army ordering people to give back anything to do with that dragon thing. You stole something and you don’t give it back and they find out? They’ll arrest you. And if you try to sell it? Well, I can tell you for a fact that the people in that trade are mad and bad. I should know. I’ve met one or two of them in my time.”

  “I’m sure Lucas will take that to heart,” Julia said.

  And that was that, except after Jason Playne had gone she told Lucas that he’d been right about one thing: the people who tried to reverse-engineer alien technology were dangerous and should at all costs be avoided. “If I happened to come into possession of anything like that,” she said, “I would get rid of it at once. Before anyone found out.”

  But Lucas couldn’t get rid of the shard because he’d promised Damian that he’d keep it safe until they could figure out what to do with it. He spent the next two days in a haze of guilt and indecision, struggling with the temptation to check that the thing was safe in its hiding place, wondering what Damian’s father knew, wondering what his mother knew, wondering if he should sail out to a deep part of the Flood and throw it into the water, until at last Damian came over to the island.

  It was early in the evening, just after sunset. Lucas was watering the vegetable garden when Damian called to him from the shadows inside a clump of buddleia bushes. Smiling at Lucas, saying, “If you think I look bad, you should see him.”

  “I can’t think he could look much worse.”

  “I got in a few licks,” Damian said. His upper lip was split and both his eyes were blackened and there was a discolored knot on the hinge of his jaw.

  “He came here,” Lucas said. “Gave me and Julia a hard time.”

  “How much does she know?”

  “I told her what happened.”

  “Everything?”

  There was an edge in Damian’s voice.

  “Except about how you were hit with the shard,” Lucas said.

  “Oh. Your mother’s cool, you know? I wish . . .”

  When it was clear that his friend wasn’t going to finish his thought, Lucas said, “Is it okay? You coming here so soon.”

  “Oh, Dad’s over at Halvergate on what he calls business. Don’t worry about him. Did you keep it safe?”

  “I said I would.”

  “Why I’m here, L, I think I might have a line on someone who wants to buy our little treasure.”

  “Your father said we should keep away from people like that.”

  “He would.”

  “Julia thinks so too.”

  “If you don’t want anything to do with it, just say so. Tell me where it is, and I’ll take care of everything.”

  “Right.”

  “So is it here, or do we have to go somewhere?”

  “I’ll show you,” Lucas said, and led his friend through the buddleias and along the low ridge to the northern end of the tiny island where an apple tree stood, hunched and gnarled and mostly dead, crippled by years of salt spray and saltwater seep. Lucas knelt and pulled up a hinge of turf and took out a small bundle of oilcloth. As he unwrapped it, Damian dropped to his knees beside him and reached out and touched an edge of the shard.

  “Is it dead?”

  “It wasn’t ever alive,” Lucas said.

  “You know what I mean. What did you do to it?”

  “Nothing. It just turned itself off.”

  When Lucas had pulled the shard from Damian’s arm, its translucence had been veined with a network of shimmering threads.
Now it was a dull reddish black, like an old scab.

  “Maybe it uses sunlight, like phones,” Damian said.

  “I thought of that, but I also thought it would be best to keep it hidden.”

  “It still has to be worth something,” Damian said, and began to fold the oilcloth around the shard.

  Lucas was gripped by a sudden apprehension, as if he was falling while kneeling there in the dark. He said, “We don’t have to do this right now.”

  “Yes we do. I do.”

  “Your father—he isn’t in Halvergate, is he?”

  Damian looked straight at Lucas. “I didn’t kill him, if that’s what you’re worried about. He tried to knock me down when I went to leave, but I knocked him down instead. Pounded on him good. Put him down and put him out. Tied him up too, to give me some time to get away.”

  “He’ll come after you.”

  “Remember when we were kids? We used to lie up here, in summer. We’d look up at the stars and talk about what it would be like to go to one of the worlds the Jackaroo gave us. Well, I plan to find out. The UN lets you buy tickets off lottery winners who don’t want to go. It’s legal and everything. All you need is money. I reckon this will give us a good start.”

  “You know I can’t come with you.”

  “If you want your share, you’ll have to come to Norwich. Because there’s no way I’m coming back here,” Damian said, and stood with a smooth, swift motion.

  Lucas stood too. They were standing toe to toe under the apple tree, the island and the Flood around it quiet and dark. As if they were the last people on Earth.

  “Don’t try to stop me,” Damian said. “My father tried, and I fucked him up good and proper.”

  “Let’s talk about this.”

  “There’s nothing to talk about,” Damian said. “It is what it is.”

  He tried to step past Lucas, and Lucas grabbed at his arm and Damian swung him around and lifted him off his feet and ran him against the trunk of the tree. Lucas tried to wrench free but Damian bore down with unexpected strength, pressing him against rough bark, leaning into him. Pinpricks of light in the dark wells of his eyes. His voice soft and hoarse in Lucas’s ear, his breath hot against Lucas’s cheek.

  “You always used to be able to beat me, L. At running, swimming, you name it. Not any more. I’ve changed. Want to know why?”

  “We don’t have to fight about this.”

  “No, we don’t,” Damian said, and let Lucas go and stepped back.

  Lucas pushed away from the tree, a little unsteady on his feet. “What’s got into you?”

  Damian laughed. “That’s good, that is. Can’t you guess?”

  “You need the money because you’re running away. All right, you can have my share, if that’s what you want. But it won’t get you very far.”

  “Not by itself. But like I said, I’ve changed. Look,” Damian said, and yanked up the sleeve of his shirt, showing the place on his upper arm where the shard had punched into him.

  There was only a trace of a scar, pink and smooth. Damian pulled the skin taut, and Lucas saw the outline of a kind of ridged or fibrous sheath underneath.

  “It grew,” Damian said.

  “Jesus.”

  “I’m stronger. And faster, too. I feel, I don’t know. Better than I ever have. Like I could run all the way around the world without stopping, if I had to.”

  “What if it doesn’t stop growing? You should see a doctor, D. Seriously.”

  “I’m going to. The kind that can make money for me, from what happened. You still think that little bit of dragon isn’t worth anything? It changed me. It could change anyone. I really don’t want to fight,” Damian said, “but I will if you get in my way. Because there’s no way I’m stopping here. If I do, my dad will come after me. And if he does, I’ll have to kill him. And I know I can.”

  The two friends stared at each other in the failing light. Lucas was the first to look away.

  “You can come with me,” Damian said. “To Norwich. Then wherever we want to go. To infinity and beyond. Think about it. You still got my phone?”

  “Do you want it back? It’s in the caravan.”

  “Keep it. I’ll call you. Tell you where to meet up. Come or don’t come, it’s up to you.”

  And then he ran, crashing through the buddleia bushes that grew along the slope of the ridge. Lucas went after him, but by the time he reached the edge of the water, Damian had started the motor of the boat he’d stolen from his father’s shrimp farm, and was dwindling away into the thickening twilight.

  The next day, Lucas was out on the Flood, checking baited cages he’d set for eels, when an inflatable pulled away from the shrimp farm and drew a curving line of white across the water, hooking toward him. Jason Playne sat in the inflatable’s stern, cutting the motor and drifting neatly alongside Lucas’s boat and catching hold of the thwart. His left wrist was bandaged and he wore a baseball cap pulled low over sunglasses that darkly reflected Lucas and Lucas’s boat and the waterscape all around. He asked without greeting or preamble where Damian was, and Lucas said that he didn’t know.

  “You saw him last night. Don’t lie. What did he tell you?”

  “That he was going away. That he wanted me to go with him.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “Well, no. I’m still here.”

  “Don’t try to be clever, boy.” Jason Playne stared at Lucas for a long moment, then sighed and took off his baseball cap and ran the palm of his hand over his shaven head. “I talked to your mother. I know he isn’t with you. But he could be somewhere close by. In the woods, maybe. Camping out like you two used to do when you were smaller.”

  “All I know is that he’s gone, Mr. Payne. Far away from here.”

  Jason Playne’s smile didn’t quite work. “You’re his friend, Lucas. I know you want to do the right thing by him. As friends should. So maybe you can tell him, if you see him, that I’m not angry. That he should come home and it won’t be a problem. You could also tell him to be careful. And you should be careful, too. I think you know what I mean. It could get you both into a lot of trouble if you talk to the wrong people. Or even if you talk to the right people. You think about that,” Jason Playne said, and pushed away from Lucas’s boat and opened the throttle of his inflatable’s motor and zoomed away, bouncing over the slight swell, dwindling into the glare of the sun off the water.

  Lucas went back to hauling up the cages, telling himself that he was glad that Damian was gone, that he’d escaped. When he’d finished, he took up the oars and began to row toward the island, back to his mother, and the little circle of his life.

  Damian didn’t call that day, or the next, or the day after that. Lucas was angry at first, then heartsick, convinced that Damian was in trouble. That he’d squandered or lost the money he’d made from selling the shard, or that he’d been cheated, or worse. After a week, Lucas sailed to Norwich and spent half a day tramping around the city in a futile attempt to find his friend. Jason Playne didn’t trouble him again, but several times Lucas spotted him standing at the end of the shrimp farm’s chain of tanks, studying the island.

  September’s Indian summer broke in a squall of storms. It rained every day. Hard, cold rain blowing in swaying curtains across the face of the waters. Endless racks of low clouds driving eastward. Atlantic weather. The Flood was muddier and less salty than usual. The eel traps stayed empty and storm surges drove the mackerel shoals and other fish into deep water. Lucas harvested everything he could from the vegetable garden, and from the ancient pear tree and wild, forgotten hedgerows in the ribbon of woods behind the levee, counted and recounted the store of cans and MREs. He set rabbit snares in the woods, and spent hours tracking squirrels from tree to tree, waiting for a moment when he could take a shot with his catapult. He caught sticklebacks in the weedy tide pools that fringed the broken brickwork shore of the island and used them to bait trotlines for crabs, and if he failed to catch any squirrels or crabs he collec
ted mussels from the car reef at the foot of the levee.

  It rained through the rest of September and on into October. Julia developed a racking and persistent cough. She enabled the long-disused keyboard function of her tablet and typed her essays, opinion pieces and journal entries instead of giving them straight to camera. She was helping settlers on the Antarctic Peninsula to petition the International Court in Johannesburg to grant them statehood, so that they could prevent exploitation of oil and mineral reserves by multinationals. She was arguing with the Midway Island utopians about whether or not the sea dragons they were using to harvest plastic particulates were also sucking up precious phytoplankton, and destabilizing the oceanic ecosystem. And so on, and so forth.

  The witchwoman visited and treated her with infusions and poultices, but the cough grew worse and because they had no money for medicine, Lucas tried to find work at the algae farm at Halvergate. Every morning, he set out before dawn and stood at the gates in a crowd of men and women as one of the supervisors pointed to this or that person and told them to step forward, told the rest to come back and try their luck tomorrow. After his fifth unsuccessful cattle call, Lucas was walking along the shoulder of the road toward town and the jetty where his boat was tied up when a battered van pulled up beside him and the driver called to him. It was Ritchy, the stoop-shouldered one-eyed foreman of the shrimp farm. Saying, “Need a lift, lad?”

  “You can tell him there’s no point in following me because I don’t have any idea where Damian is,” Lucas said, and kept walking.

  “He doesn’t know I’m here.” Ritchy leaned at the window, edging the van along, matching Lucas’s pace. Its tires left wakes in the flooded road. Rain danced on its roof. “I got some news about Damian. Hop in. I know a place does a good breakfast, and you look like you could use some food.”

  They drove past patchworks of shallow lagoons behind mesh fences, past the steel tanks and piping of the cracking plant that turned algal lipids into biofuel. Ritchy talked about the goddamned weather, asked Lucas how his boat was handling, asked after his mother, said he was sorry to hear that she was ill and maybe he should pay a visit, he always liked talking to her because she made you look at things in a different way, a stream of inconsequential chatter he kept up all the way to the café.