A Progeny of Dragons

“There weren't always dragons in the Valley,” Mona said in a low voice, binoculars pressed against her eyes and trained on the cluster of black suited men entering the high rise of Golden Empire Electronics across the canal. “They used to exist only in my brother’s mind.”

“They don’t look like dragons,” Kyle whispered, trying to make out the dark figures with his own set of binoculars in the fading glow of twilight.

“Of course they don’t,” Mona said, sharply. “Not for now, anyway.” She softened her tone, trying to break from the habit of snapping at the young twelve-year old who was, for now, one of her only two recruits in the ill-fated campaign to reclaim the Valley from the fire-breathing beasts. Her other follower was Emily, also sixteen like Mona, but much quieter and possessing a spark of magic that unsettled in its manifestation. Before disappearing a year ago, Mona’s mother had warned her about seers and their ability to assimilate reality in all its gruesome detail with a look and how sometimes they could even see beyond that reality to find intricate patterns that verged on divination. She had met Emily out in the streets, after she escaped the broken machinery of foster care to become just another missing kid in the slums of Silicon Valley.

“Will they actually turn into dragons?” Kyle asked, but Mona quickly silenced him with a sibilant shush.

In the distance, three of the men, all with blond hair and very likely siblings, remained outside the building entrance while the others vanished behind the dark glass.

“Here,” Mona said, passing the binoculars to Emily. “Take a look at their faces and memorize them. Memorize their movements and the layout of the area in front of the building.”

Emily grabbed the binoculars shily, her eyes two saucers of the purest amethyst hue, and placed them in the direction of the building. “They’re triplets,” she said after a few seconds.

“Are you sure?” Mona had noticed the similarities between the men but had not realized they were that much alike. “Any differentiating marks?”

Emily did not respond and instead began whispering what sounded like a nursery rhyme, her own strange way of activating her eidetic memory.

“Why does she do that?” Kyle asked, his voice showing a mixture of fear and awe.

“Same reason you fidget with your fingers when projecting your hearing: to focus the magic.”

“It’s not fidgeting,” he said with a pout.

“Hell it’s not. Why do you think your parents gave you up in the first place Mr. ADHD?” She almost regretted her acid tone, but with the events of the last two months and a year of living in the streets of Silicon Valley, Mona had little room for patience.

Kyle lowered his head, avoiding Mona’s stare. “They didn’t; they were forced to.”

“Sure, and I have the ability to see the future!”

“No you don’t; you don’t even have magic,” Kyle retorted in an angry whisper.

“Exactly,” Mona said. She had come to terms with her magicless existence when she saw what it had done to her little brother Aiden, who had become a prisoner in their own home, his magic nullified by their mother in an attempt to keep a fiery apocalypse from descending on the Valley. Patricia Huffstein had been, after all, the most powerful neutralizer in the country, with a field of influence of about twenty feet, more than enough to keep a pre-pubescent twelve-year old with uncontrollable creative magic from turning his imagined beasts into flesh and bone.

They sat in silence for a moment, as Emily continued to sing-whisper to sustain her magic, until the young girl finally put down the binoculars and gave them back to Mona.

Mona knew better not to ask Emily to give her the details of what she had seen on an empty stomach, when her behavior could be easily described as catatonic.

“I could listen in,” Kyle said.

“No need to; they are not really big talkers from what I saw. Plus, from what my brother said many times before, dragons are impervious to magic so you might not be able to hear anything anyway.” Throwing her binoculars in her bag, Mona signaled for her two young recruits to follow her. “Let’s get out of here.”

The trio descended the small hill that had served as their stakeout without speaking. Mona kept looking back to make sure no one had followed them, even though they had been extremely careful. After what seemed like a mile of dead grass, they crawled through a hole in the fence surrounding the abandoned computer factory and made their way into the building complex, finally feeling more at ease inside, where it was cooler and safer.

“We’ll hang out here for the night. I asked two kids from the Winston block to meet us here around 7 p.m. I hope they can join us.” Mona pulled open a trap door leading to an underground bunker she had accidentally discovered months ago when running from a cop that had recognized her as the missing Huffstein girl. The ladder was steep and the rungs slippery, but they all managed to make it to the bottom without falling.

They had turned the musty and dark room into a livable enough space with several pieces of weather-beaten furniture and two old mattresses they had dragged all the way from what must have been sleeping quarters from the days when the old factory was still open. Added to that were the plastic containers with canned goods, snacks, and small treasures they had gathered from the dumpsters of the people who still had homes in the now mostly desolate Valley. Battery-operated lamps did their best to illuminate the forgotten bunker-turned-hideout but could not take away the feeling of gloom the concrete walls and the dampness gave the place.

“Kyle, could you warm up some bean soup? We must feed Emily first before she can tell us her take on what she saw.” Mona handed Kyle an empty pot and two cans of bean soup from a plastic container next to her mattress.

The boy went to it without protesting, likely as hungry as Emily after the long afternoon spying on the supposed dragons.

In the meantime, Mona looked through her brother’s sketchbook, trying to make out the meaning of the scribbles that accompanied the childish drawings from what she feared was the end of the world.

“They are not dragons,” Emily said suddenly, startling Mona.

“What? Who?”

“The triplets.” Emily was staring at the dark corner, her eyes glossy and unfocused, as if dreaming.

“How could you tell?”

“The air was not disturbed around them like it does on a hot day.”

Kyle let out a hearty laugh from the corner where he was warming up the soup on a hot plate. “Told you they weren’t dragons. You’re just making shit up as usual to get attention. And it’s always a hot day in the valley; Emily is either full of it or just delusional from starvation.”

“Get attention? This shit is real. My brother conjured them into being days after my mom went missing, just like she had feared.” The pain of the memory rose through Mona’s spine along with anger, that same anger that had made her mother leave the house that afternoon, never to return. “They just haven’t figured out how to turn, that’s all.”

“Sure. Just like your mom and brother magically figured out how to deactivate the unhackable beacons buried deep in their skull. You’re just another orphan like Emily and I.”

With that Mona shot up to her feet, intent on giving Kyle a good shove, even if it meant the bean soup would spill all over the ground. She pictured the scene as if it were happening as she took long strides toward the boy. “You little–”

Emily’s words cut Mona off, sending a chill through her body. “But the woman is definitely a dragon.”

Mona froze where she stood. No one in her small circle of destitute kids had yet acknowledged aloud the possibility of dragons hiding in plain sight for the last year as Mona claimed, especially as they had not yet transformed into the giant beasts found in Aiden’s drawings or described by him in his raving moments.

Even Kyle had stopped fussing with the soup, the rhythmic sound of the wooden spoon against the pot coming to a stop.

“What..woman?” There was never a woman, not even what could pass for a female dragon. Aiden’s dragons were always male, both in his sketches and in his tales.

“The woman,” Emily said matter-of-factly. “She came out to hand the triplets a round sphere each, different colors.”

That, at least, was in the sketchbooks. Mona slapped Kyle on the back of the head. “Close your mouth, fickle head. Told you there were dragons.” She then rushed back to her mattress where the sketchbook lay open.

She fumbled through the pages, filled with images of the men in their black suits in some or fully transformed into fire-breathing dragons in others, but no woman.

“There!” She exclaimed, finding the page with the three spheres, red, green, and blue, laid out in an equilateral triangle around a dark, human-like shape with a question mark next to it.

“Here,” she said as she showed Emily the pages with the spheres. “Did they look like this?”

Emily’s eyes focused on the sketchbook for a moment. She began whispering her unintelligible nursery rhymes and rocking back and forth slightly. Then she sang-spoke the words, “Just like that, three gems they were, translucent and perfectly round.”

“What about this shape in the middle, does it ring any bells?”

More nursery rhymes and more rocking, and then, “The woman, see the turn of her neck? There’s your woman, see where she lies,” Emily said.

“Woman, how can you–” but then Mona noticed for the first time the curve of what must be a small waist, the swell of breasts. She felt embarrassment at the realization; she of all people should have noticed a shapely woman. “Why is she wrapped in a black cloth?”

Emily focused on the page again, singing softly, and then she wove her response right into the melody. “Body shrouded in mystery, her identity a question mark.” She ran her finger along the curves of the supposed woman, making Mona blush, but then her fingers went to a cluster of three curved lines next to the blue ball. “Sound waves, sound waves from the outside, echo inside the blue sphere.”

Mona stared at what she had always thought were just random lines devoid of meaning. “What about this?” She asked, pointing at two concentric circles next to the green sphere.

Emily hummed her song for a few moments and then replied in a creepy singed murmur, “It’s an eye, an eye that sees all, that which is hidden and that which must fall.”

This was getting creepier by the second. “What about this black disk next to the red ball?”

Emily’s own finger touched the black disk. “An inert void, a–” She stopped, her body motionless for an instant, until her finger returned to the womanly shape in the center. “Oh, no,” she cried, no longer singing her magic-focusing rhymes. She crawled back, away from the sketchbook and cowered in the corner. “It’s not a black cloth, the woman is not wrapped in a black cloth.”

Mona rushed to Emily’s side, who had curled into a ball, her little body in spasms. “Chris, Chr-r-r-is,” she repeated several times, stumbling on what sounded like someone’s name.

“Chris, the woman’s name is Chris?” Mona began to suspect that Emily’s magic saw more than the many details of reality and could very well be a full-blown seer.

“Not Chris,” Emily said, her voice trembling. “A chris-a, chris-a.” Before she could say more she crumbled to the ground, the rest of what she was saying a dying whisper. Her eyes remained wide open, unblinking.

“Damn, Emily! Don’t go catatonic on us now. Kyle, get me some water to throw on her face,” but Kyle was not responding. Behind her, Mona could hear a soft rustling, like that of fabric against skin. She turned to Kyle.

He was standing listlessly, his arms hanging on either side of his body, fingers moving quickly and busily, rubbing against one another and making that rustling sound. Then he suddenly stopped, his eyes fixing on Mona’s as he spoke a single word, a word that meant it was already too late and that Aiden’s creation was much more dangerous than she had ever imagined. A word that meant the Aiden’s and her mother’s feared age of dragons was about to begin.

“Chrysalis. Emily said, Chrysalis.”

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