Except he wasn’t repelled by me, didn’t rebound to Zoe or the guys. He smiled for me. Me alone.
“You rail against collaborators way more than the dragons themselves,” he commented after introductions. “You never rage against the damn dragons. Always their human agents. You one of those nonsentience wonks?” A flutter in his voice as he said it, as if he feared challenging me, but couldn’t stop himself.
From the corner of my eye I saw Liam perk up from the merch table. When his head swiveled over to us, the raised lights of the club glinted off the metal of his piercings like a flesh-and-silver disco ball. He must have been dying to jump in on this. He believed that dragons have personhood and their own motives. I wasn’t so sure. There’s those who theorize that the dragons are just dumb optimizers. No self-awareness, simply responding to the stimuli of human desires. We’d stayed up countless nights arguing this.
“I’m with Greenwald,” I replied. “We’ll probably never know, and it doesn’t matter anyway. They don’t have human values. The longer they stay off-leash, the worse the world gets.”
My pretty fanboy nodded. “I hear they’re expecting another wave of refugees from Louisiana this month. How do you explain the repatriation collapse, if not intentional malice?” He stepped forward and motioned to the audio cables as I coiled them. “And can I help you with that?”
We continued our political griping. Neither of us screwed up too badly in the conversation, and it’d been a while since I’d gotten any. He came home with me that night.
I woke up smiling, with that warm glow that comes from being well-laid. Restraints and toys lay scattered around the bed. I rolled over awkwardly to admire his sleeping face. I rested an arm on him, one breast pressing against his bare chest, and I realized I couldn’t recall his name. I’m sure he gave it, but who knew he was going to stick around? I hadn’t paid that much attention. Crap.
A fist banging against my door startled me. My bandmate Tyrell yelled through the flimsy wood.
“Jo! Wake up! You gotta see this!”
The boy beneath me stirred awake, gazed at me with bleary eyes. “Good morning,” he said, and gave me a grin.
I kissed his collarbone, then his neck, and then Tyrell banged on the damn door again.
“Seriously Jo, come check this out! This is big!”
“Fine, I’m up!” I yelled back. “Give me a damn minute!”
I let my gaze wander over the boy’s body and back up to his face. “Hey, look,” I said, “I feel really lame about this, but I don’t remember your name. I’m Josephine. And you’re …?”
He laughed, and the rising sun caught his eyes, clear as the sky.
“Hi, Josephine. I’m Aiden.”
I grinned. “More later,” I promised. I rolled off him, and we pulled on our clothes to go eat and see Tyrell’s big deal. Tyrell sat by his laptop in the kitchen, a video queued up for us.
On screen, a business-suited man left a government building. The news banner identified him as an emissary for Hirath’bur, an elder oil-and-gas extraction dragon. A gathered crowd of the unshaven and emaciated exploded in jeers as he stepped out. Hirath’bur destroyed the land where it operated—poisoned the groundwater, blighted the soil. It had been corrupting the government for years with bribes and threats, turning our protectors into its accomplices. Whole counties had been despoiled when rich deposits were discovered. The emissary didn’t spare a glance at the angry rabble. Cops corralled the protesters behind thin barriers, their hands at the pepper-spray canisters on their belts.
An unusual movement in the air drew my eye. One of those miniature quadcopters that make up any city’s backdrop—routing packages or surveilling traffic or whatever they did. It had been passing overhead, and now tipped into a sharp dive, directly at the emissary. Four bursts of gray smoke erupted from its front. Simultaneously, four bursts of red liquid burst from the emissary’s chest, and the man staggered. The drone shot up, high into the air, fleeing the scene. The man dropped, blood soaking his suit and spilling onto the cement. The crowd screamed, scattered, and the video cut off. I stared over at Tyrell.
“The hell just happened?” I asked.
“An assassination,” Tyrell replied. “One of three, all within a few minutes, all carried out by modified delivery-drones. They targeted emissaries of major dragons.”
“Holy crap. Is this what I think it is?”
“Uh huh. Looks like the resistance just got serious.”
My eyes flickered to the boy I’d just met, listening to us intently.
“Um … Aiden, maybe you should go. I mean, leave me your number, last night was good, but you probably don’t want to get mixed up in this.”
Aiden gave me a disbelieving look.
“Are you kidding me?” He gestured to his T-shirt, which sported an image of V as Guy Fawkes, holding crossed daggers before him. Aiden grinned wildly, almost floating. “I’ve been waiting years for this!”
And so our relationship was born the same day as the resistance. I should have known it was a bad sign.
They hadn’t always been called dragons. Centuries ago, when those incorporeal inhuman minds were first discovered, they were called some variation of “messenger” or “muse.” Those less kindly inclined called them “whisperers.” In an effort to remove the mysticism from the language, Adam Smith referred to them as “the Invisible Handlers.”
Quickly their nature became apparent. Under their influence, countrysides were stripped to their bones. Cities choked on toxic smoke. Summoners grew gross with wealth, while the commoners withered into skeletons. Karl Marx coined the term “dragons” in reference to the destructive, rapacious creatures of legend.
The first resistance started same as our current one. Small groups taking local action. Individual acts of sabotage and vandalism. Growing riots. I hadn’t been in a riot yet, but that was about to change. We’d entered midsummer. The city park bustled with activity as I helped erect the stage for a protest concert. We’d received permits and cleared everything with the authorities, because we were still playing by the rules. We hadn’t yet relearned the lessons of 1917. Not until buildings are burning do governments take you seriously. It takes a revolution to force them into restricting dragons. “From this day forward, you may not dump your poisonous waste into our water. From this day forward, you may not work our children.” Not because our rulers care, but because they fear. Not discernment from above, but demands from below.
Hunched over and irritable, I struggled to lock another folding joint of the stage scaffolding. The midday sun beat down on me with spite. Every single stand and brace needed to be pummeled into submission. I was an inch from flinging the whole thing overhead and stomping off when Aiden’s arms descended over me from behind.
He wrapped me in an embrace and nuzzled my hair. “Hey, sexy girl.”
I exhaled gratefully, and relaxed back into him. He was lean, gentle affection. With maybe a hint of firmness around the crotch right now. I smiled.
“Here to help us?” I asked.
“Anything to get the show going. I still get goose bumps when you scream. But …” He gestured at the cops patrolling the perimeter. “It looks like we’re gonna get shut down.”
“Nah, don’t worry about it. Everything’s clear. We got a Free Speech Zone designation for the day.”
It still makes me sick to think back on how compliant we were. Free Speech Zones? The dragons had learned to fear the power of government over the last century. Now every dragon had phalanxes of well-funded emissaries. “What is good for Genimette is good for the country,” they said. They were patient. Slowly they wormed their way into the machinery of politics. Which is how you get BS like “Free Speech Zones.” Maybe there’d been a time when cops served and protected the public. Now they’re thugs who serve the dragons and protect their profits.
Our band, Against Drag
ons, wouldn’t go onstage until 9:00 p.m., but other locals were playing nonstop from midafternoon. The music burned violent and spectacular. The cops hated it. Which meant they had to piss on anyone they could. Shouting matches erupted. Twice pepper spray hissed and they hauled off some kid in cuffs. People drifted away, not wanting to deal with the pigs. Those who stayed were on edge. Belligerent, pierced, tattooed punks, sticking it out explicitly because it did bother the police, and damn proud of it. We were in good company.
When we took the stage, the setting sun igniting the horizon, the air held a buzzing tension. Like the charge that builds inside you when a storm is rolling in, or the last pregnant note before a DJ drops the bass. I fingered my rosary as I scanned the crowd, matching my tempo to their pulse. We could use this. I pocketed the beads at salva nos ab igne inferiori, nodded to Liam. Zoe started us off with a bass riff.
The stage lights picked us out in a giant, harsh halo. As the sky grew darker and the heavens tightened around us, that tension worked itself into our instruments. It seeped into Liam’s voice. It became a part of the music. The crowd fed it back to us, boiling, pushing us to a frantic thrashing. My hand clutched at the guitar as I choked it with my fingertips. My heart raced, and we were diving straight from one song into the next without pause. Because screw pauses, we have this burning in our throats, and we don’t know any way to get it out other than to roar it at an audience and hear them scream with us.
We smashed into our breakout song and all the riotgrrrlz and punk boys below us roared in approval. We moved as one.
There’s four words all piggies hate. They glare from spray-painted buildings and overpasses. They bleed from the shadows of hushed conversations. They’re the chorus to this song. “Death to All Collaborators.”
The chorus approached, and I stepped to the mic. Instead of looking into the crowd, I looked to the cops looming at the perimeter, and showed some teeth. I picked out one huffing like a pent-up bull. I stared him down. I screamed out my line just for him.
Death to all collaborators!
You could call that a mistake, maybe. But it had to start somewhere.
Halfway through my solo, a meaty hand clamped onto my shoulder and spun me around. The amps squealed as the notes died on my strings, and I stood eye-to-chest with a man in a dark-blue uniform, snorting fire.
“This show’s over,” he rumbled. “You’re coming with us.”
“Piss off, pig,” I spat. I shrugged him off, turned back with derision. My stomach clenched in terror, but I wasn’t doing this for myself anymore. This was for everyone who’d put up with their sneering abuse tonight. Put up with it for generations.
His hand shoved me from behind, hitting right at the apex of my hump. I yelped and started staggering forward, but I hadn’t gone one step before he wrenched my left arm behind me and screaming pain forced me to my knees.
I twisted, shrieking, as he yanked and pinned my other arm. My spine torqued, wedged vertebrae biting into calcified disks. A zip-cuff cinched one wrist, and I knew I’d be trapped like this for hours, blind with agony. Somewhere I heard Tyrell yelling, the sounds of movement, but they were dim outlines under a flood of pain.
Sudden sharp relief. I collapsed to the floor, gasping for breath. The stage rocked beneath me. I rolled over and saw Aiden grappling with the cop. My boy was no match for the hulking man, but as he pretzeled Aiden into submission, more angry punks leaped over me, piled on. The cop was big, but not a-dozen-angry-teens big, and he tipped over under the onslaught. His hands grasped for something at his belt and heavy boots came down to crunch his fingers before he got there.
Lights flashed, strobing blue and red. Whooping sirens drowned out the music of struggle, replaced it with the music of authority. Liam yelled into the microphone, something hot and angry, and the crowd erupted. Two nearby cops jumped onto the stage to free their trapped brother and Zoe, little Zoe, strode up behind them. She held her bass like a two-handed cudgel, back and to the side. She lunged forward, swung her guitar overhead, and brought it down on the bigger pig’s head. The violent jangle of the strings breaking sounded through the park, and it was the sweetest music I’d ever heard. Bottles flew. I could barely hear the sirens over the blood-lust roar of the crowd.
Zoe picked up the mic and yelled into it. “Time to fry some pigs. Let’s start some fires!”
The crowd surged like an incoming tide, bursting around the stage at the edges, breaking over the top in fury. I knew after this we were going underground. I staggered to my feet, pushed into the nearest knot of bodies, grasped for Aiden’s arm. I dug him from the group stripping the pig’s weapons, pulled him into the lee of one of the man-height amps. I still shook with aftershocks of pain, and I needed his attention on me. He took one look at my contorted face and wrapped his arms around me, bent his head down to mine. I clutched at him and raged against a stupid urge to cry.
“Thank you,” I said. Plastic zip cuffs dangled from my left wrist. And deep inside a longing swelled, a longing I’d been beating back for weeks. It broke over my inner walls before I even knew it was happening.
“I love you,” spilled out of my mouth. My heart sank. I hadn’t meant to say it. Damn.
His eyes shone. “I love you, too,” he replied, his voice soaring.
Six months later found us hunkered down in the blacked-out basement of Liam’s squat, having settled into the fugitive life. I sat on the floor, bent over my phone, resting my back against the wall. Aiden knelt beside me, kneading my shoulders and massaging along the top of my hump. He, Zoe, and Liam observed an informal remembrance of Tyrell in low tones as we waited. Tyrell had disappeared three weeks back, his door kicked in and his place ransacked. The dragons had him now.
Liam’s brother Marcus arrived last, a half-hour late. Over an inch shorter than Liam, with more hair and less piercings. Chemical burns ringed his eyes in flaming red. He limped in, favoring his right leg, but grinned when he saw us.
“Christ,” Zoe said. “What happened to you?”
“I was at yesterday’s protest at Union Station. Brought a megaphone and said some true things.”
“And what’d that get you?” Liam asked, raising an eyebrow.
Marcus’s grin faltered. “Someone tossed a Molly, before the pigs started cracking heads.”
Liam snorted. “We should be past flinging cocktails. If this was LA, the whole district would be in flames, and the pigs would be hiding behind barricades.”
“Next time will be bigger. Next time we rush City Hall.”
“It’s been ‘next time’ for weeks. We’re dying out there. For nothing.”
“Hey, back off. You just call us here to bitch us out?”
“No.” Liam straightened. “I have something to show you. We can still get our shit in order before they eat us alive.”
He led us to the next room, also blacked out. He flicked on a single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, and something glinted on the floor. A thick line of metal lay on the cement. My eyes followed it, bending smoothly, arcing around the whole room. The line of metal grazed each wall, encompassed where we were standing, and returned to touch itself. A very large circle. It looked faintly yellow. Like gold.
We were in the center of a summoning circle.
“Liam, what the hell is this?” I asked.
Zoe gaped. “Where did you get this much gold?”
Aiden inhaled sharply and jabbed an accusing finger at Liam.
“You’re going to summon a dragon? Are you insane?”
Liam looked Aiden in the eyes and spoke calmly, as if he’d rehearsed this. “Dragons are a tool. They are a goddamned amazing tool which we’re leaving lying around out of ideological purity, and it’s costing us lives. If you’re willing to kill a man to save your species, you should be willing to use the dragons against each other.”
“No.” Aiden stated flatly. “Too dangerous
. They get out of control. Always.”
I spoke up now. “We haven’t had a single politician who isn’t owned by a dragon for … hell, longer than I’ve been alive. You can vote blue or you can vote red, but you can’t vote against the interests of Auramagos. You want to add us to that equation, too? Remove even us as an option?”
“In a gunfight, the side without a gun loses,” Liam replied. “You can rage about how unfair that is, but if you don’t pick up a gun, you just guarantee that the other side wins.”
“Bull,” Aiden spat.
“Cells on the West Coast have already summoned some,” Liam stated.
That shut us all up. He gave it a second to sink in.
“You haven’t wondered how they’ve been doing so well?” he continued. “They’ve been using these things for a while. They call them Dragon-Eaters. They’re advancing the struggle, and we’re dragging them down. We’re killing the resistance.”
His words hung in the room. The circle of gold held us in its grip like a tourniquet. A bronze bowl rested against one wall, the athame inside it lay in wait. Overshadowing them, a tall wooden crucifix held a beautifully carved corpus of Christ, twisted in agony up toward the heavens. His eyes gazed at me from under the barbed crown, asking me how much I was willing to give to make the future better. How much of myself would I sacrifice for the good of others?
Liam’s brother spoke up first. “I’m willing to die for the resistance. I don’t want that to be for nothing. If this is what it takes … I’ll do it.”
Zoe nodded. “If this is a mistake, it’s not permanent. We’re the summoners, we can always banish it.”
Aiden looked back and forth among us in dawning disbelief. “Oh no … you guys aren’t buying this. You can’t be buying this.”