Wings of Renewal: A Solarpunk Dragon Anthology Page 22

  Eventually, just as the sun was rising, Baachan asked what she had wanted to since the second she met him.

  “Why did you run away?”

  He hadn't run away. He'd been chased away by the phoenix they'd seen earlier, who'd somehow found her way there. Phoenixes now live on a faraway island, having been exiled by the dragons, which were larger in number. This one was young, according to the Dragon of Kou, had perhaps gotten lost and just now found a place to live and, driven by instinct that was deep buried in their blood, had attacked the Dragon of Kou before he'd had a chance to retaliate.

  She'd claimed the mountain as her own and, whenever the Dragon of Kou tried to get past her to fly through his skies, she attacked, setting everything on a fire so bright not even the dragon's strongest storm could quench it. He was too far to control the weather from there, so it had been an endless melting summer for the past weeks.

  “He could have asked for help from other High Dragons,” Baachan says with a smile, “but he's a bit of a stubborn mule, I must say.”

  High Dragons was a name Baachan learned from him, given to the bigger dragons who are able to control the weather. There is one in each area of the planet, siblings from long passed parents, but Baachan says the one in Africa isn't as big, and the one in North America isn't as beautiful.

  “My fellow dragons are suffering from this drought,” the Dragon of Kou told Baachan sadly, “and I remain of no help.”

  As soon as the sun had come out, the phoenix reappeared on the horizon, flying high above in a way very similar to that of someone who was blessed with too much of an ego.

  The Dragon of Kou had to stay in his human form, which he'd never spent so much time in, so the phoenix wouldn't recognise him. Phoenixes were vengeful and impatient creatures, so he was hoping she'd eventually leave in search of another dragon to taunt.

  “How long will it take, though?” Baachan asked.

  He did not have an answer.

  Baachan would not have that. She asked question after question, made plans on sand just to have them washed away by the sea and had to rewrite them. Aka grew them tomatoes, which neither of them ate, and the Dragon of Kou fished, which the three of them dined on.

  Still, even though they had a plan to defeat the phoenix, the Dragon of Kou was hesitant. He was not a fighter, because dragons are peaceful creatures who, unlike us, do not go looking for trouble.

  “But I was not looking for trouble,” Baachan says. “I was looking for a solution.”

  So she spoke. She spoke of the fragility of humanity, about how we'd almost made our own planet uninhabitable before someone stood up and said, “Let's fix this.” She spoke of how we'd somehow found balance in the middle of chaos, a solution to the impossible, life where there should only be devastation.

  She spoke the truth, because she couldn't not.

  That's just the sort of person she is.

  The Dragon of Kou was breathing smoke from his nostrils by the end. His eyes, green and not blind, were brighter than stars, almost artificial in their colour, and he stepped away from Baachan without talking, without looking away, breathing once before turning, in front of her eyes, into a serpent-like creature the size of a streetcar and with scales the soft blue of a hydrangea. He floated above the ground, not needing wings to fly, and looked at Baachan with the sort of understanding that didn't belong in a dragon, but didn't belong in any human either.

  “He caught my breath,” Baachan says, “and I don't think he ever returned it.”

  The Dragon of Kou defeated the phoenix. She flew away mid-rebirth, with ashes falling from the sky alongside the rain that blessed the city and the Dragon Cove for days to come, long enough to help everyone find their feet again but not too long that it caused more damage than good.

  “Balance,” Baachan repeats, smiling.

  She never told us what happened after this. To me and my cousins, this is supposed to be the end of the story. She and Aka returned and carried on with their lives, with nobody ever finding out what happened to the Dragon of Kou, the ruler of the skies, in those fifty days he went missing.

  I know that is a lie.

  He returned to her. He returned to her, and Baachan only made it back home days after the rainfall, with a lighter jump in her step. At some point my mother and aunt were born, twins but for the colour of their hair. And, I daresay, it wasn't the last Baachan saw of the Dragon of Kou.

  He keeps returning to her.

  Why wouldn't he?

  After Baachan finishes the story and tells us to scatter because she's going to cook, I head outside to my own pet dragon, Ichigo, who's flying around in happiness with the bright days of sun we have been getting lately. I play with her for a while, then we both head inside and have dinner. Baachan soon retires to her room, absentmindedly brushing her hair, no longer plain brown like most everyone else's but light grey as smoke. My cousins and I will spend the night on the floor of Baachan's one-bedroom flat, having been left here until the morning while our parents enjoy a childless double date.

  While Aiko and Rin arrange themselves in sleeping bags, their matching orange hair—the same colour as their mother's—looking like sunset on the wooden floor, I head to the bathroom for a quick shower. When I return, I pass Baachan's door and, listening very quietly, I can hear the soft sound of two pairs of footsteps walking around the room.

  Across the hallway, I catch my reflection in the open windows that every floor in Baachan's building has, large and opening up like a bay, filled to the brim with ferns and flowers. There is a rose growing almost at the top, right beside my head, and the faint pink colour of its petals matches the colour of my natural, never dyed hair, the same as my mother's.

  About Caroline Bigaiski

  My career as an author started at the tender age of five, when I wrote a fantastically embarrassing tale about GOOD VS BAD featuring hair clips and twin sisters. Since then, my interests have broadened to include fantastical literature, diversity, romance, and epic tales of friendship. When I'm not writing, I can be found trying to complete a Bachelor of Letters, working part-time in a publishing house, reading more books and fanfiction that I probably should, and binge-watching shows on Netflix. The short story “Dragon of Kou” is my first published work.

  Deep Within the Corners of My Mind

  by Cj Lehi

  “It's definitely a dragon,” Imre said, looking at the satellite image on the wall. He waved his hands in front of him, held them still, and pulled them apart, like stretching a thread. The image grew larger exponentially, as if we were diving toward the ground. Outlined on a bare patch of mountain was a long, thin line in emerald green, like a scar on the hillside. It started narrow, bulged slightly, and tapered off again, like a snake that had swallowed a large rat. I checked the scale guide on the bottom right. According to that, the snake would be about thirty meters long. A youth. Immature. That was a blessing, anyway.

  “I don't see any wings,” I said, getting to my feet. My right hip twinged, and I rubbed it with my free hand. Grimacing, I slurped in a sip of coffee, cooling it as I drank. Imre shot me an annoyed glance. I ignored him, advancing on the wall for a better look. I was not losing my eyesight. Not. The wall was out of focus.

  “Sometimes they take those,” Imre said. “You know how people love trophies.”

  “Those are some big trophies,” I said, but he was right, and besides, generally speaking the only thing you could readily detach from a dragon was the wings. Everything else resisted you like titanium and decayed like warm jello. “How did they kill it?”

  “That's what you get to find out,” he said, spinning around in his chair and picking up a chit, which he tossed to me. I let it bounce off me and onto the floor, without any attempt to catch it, keeping my gaze on the wall. He scowled and bent to retrieve it where it had rolled under the desk. I set the coffee down on his flat back, pinning him in place for the moment, ignoring his surprised cry. I raised my hands, then pushed them together, and we ro
cketed upward in the picture until I could see a town. Some distance away, and not a very large one. I did it again, Imre spluttering and hallooing from under the table. I smiled, but only because he couldn't see me with his head under there.

  Timisoara. Finally a town big enough to give me bearings.

  “Csilla,” Imre said, his voice now containing some real exasperation, “will you kindly remove the coffee from my back?”

  I did so, and he crawled back out from under the desk, took the chit and tucked it into the breast pocket of my shirt. Maybe I was imagining it, but he might have kept his hand there a little longer than was strictly necessary.

  I looked him in the eye, saw a little glint there, and said, “Are you that desperate for satisfaction these days?”

  “Csilla, come on,” he said. “Why do you have to torture me like this?”

  “You earned the torture,” I said. “Six times over. And now all you get are these pathetic grope jobs, and I hope it makes you happy.” I plucked his hand from my shirt and bent his pinky back. He gave a little yelp and sat heavily in his chair, nursing his finger.

  “Next year you can try again, and maybe I'll be more in the mood,” I said. “But right now I've locked Single Uninterested. Do you want to try persuading the Fönök that the registration is a mistake?”

  He turned sullen for a moment, and mumbled to himself, turning back to the board on his desk and swiping his finger from one edge to the upper center.

  “That the flight plan?” I said, reaching into my pocket and pulling out the chit. I pressed my thumb to it, and it lit up a pale blue. Satisfied, I put it back.

  “Yes,” he said, suddenly all business again. That was Imre. That was also why I was the only Dragonfly who had lasted more than six months with him. He was sweet. When he was thinking about you, that is. When he wasn't, he was sweet on someone else, and ordinarily that went down poorly. I was too old to take much offense, so we alternately Coupled and, when he went after a younger piece of skirt, deCoupled. It was that, as much as anything, that kept him interested. “Your flight plan sends you to Temesvar first, then into the woods from there. You'll have a guide.” He fired me an impish grin, knowing how that would go over.

  “I don't want a guide.” I set my mug on the desk with an audible bang.

  “Hey, you could break that,” he said, his hands making little circles toward the mug.

  “I don't want a guide,” I said, staccato.

  “Well, you'll have one. You know the locals down there. They never let anyone from Euro go into the hills without a Roma guide. I picked someone brand new who you won't have had a fight with yet.” His tone told me we were done discussing it. “And you leave immediately. That carcass will be nothing but bones inside a week.”

  “See you in a week, then,” I said. I made sure my boots clacked annoyingly on the rough wood of the station's tower, and mounted the ladder leading down from it. Rigging my boots to either side of the rails, I let go.

  Gravity sucked me down and I lit on the floor like a dancer, or so I fancied, though I was sure it didn't look like that to anyone else—not after almost twenty years of falling down that same chute. Along the bright narrow hallway in which all pretense of ancient ranger station gave way to modernity. The hall gleamed white, framed in steel and open windows, natural fall sunshine laying all about. The arch of heaven overhead was mirrored by silver metal archways, designed, I supposed, to mimic Roman design from centuries, millennia ago.

  At the end of the hallway was a small enclosure, a vestibule with twelve plasteel lockers and walls that opaqued for dressing, in case one wished privacy for that sort of thing. I didn't care, but I was dressed for flight anyway, except for my true leather flying helmet, perhaps the most precious thing I owned. I donned it, along with my Dragonfly goggles, shouldered my travel pack, and strode through the sliding doors onto the Aerie deck.

  The full panorama of the Kopász Forest spread before me, trees beginning to show signs of autumn color. Over the next hill to the west lay the modest town of Nagykovácsi; to the east, behind me and downhill most of the way, was Buda, with its conjoined twin Pest across the river. I could hear none of the bustle, but if I squinted into the rising sun, I could sometimes make out the tall tubes of the solar elevators, rising from the Pesti plain like giant sunflowers. Fifty years ago, just before I was born, the old-timers tell me you could never see that far for the smoke and haze that always collected in the Budapest basin. But now, the smog was gone, like dew before the rising sun, which was actually a pretty good metaphor since it was the sun's power that had done it. Trees had reclaimed much of the sprawl, and I could see no signs of humanity other than the elevators off in the distance.

  Except right here, at the Kopász Aerie, where the control tower stuck above the trees fifty meters, and the Aerie deck lay slightly above the tree line, for takeoff purposes.

  Six gleaming Dragons lay quiet on the matte green of the deck, soaking up the sunshine like basking lizards.

  I strolled to the end of the deck and stood in front of Kodály, the most versatile and cantankerous of all our Dragons. I laid my hands on either side of her pointed snout and leaned forward to let my forehead rest on her cloud-colored nose.

  “Vess engem az Érdelybe, te isteni églovás, és ésszegyüljük meg a sárkányos testvéreiddel,” I said. Take me to Erdely, godlike rider of the sky, and unite us with your dragon sisters and brothers. Everyone knows Dragons speak Hungarian, no matter what kind they are.

  Kodály, Madeleine, and all the others in the Eyrie were the mechanical kind of Dragon, the kind humans could ride. The others, like the one downed in the forest, were the animal kind, the storied lizards of myth and legend. Undomesticable. Untameable. Unrideable. Still the undisputed masters of sky and mountain, but now in only a few places in the world. The job of the Dragon Corps, Dragonflies and their ground-based partners Dragoneyes, was to make those places larger and more numerous.

  Except now one of them was dead. The satellite photo was definitive. What had killed it was a question I needed to answer. Dragons did die of old age, though they were extraordinarily long-lived, but when they did their wings stayed attached.

  Kodály rumbled a bit under my hand as I trailed it down her flank to the saddle. She was warm, basking in the sun, soaking up the solar and storing it. Even if we ran into cloud, with the bright morning she'd probably stored enough power to make it all the way there.

  I climbed into the saddle, what in cruder times might have been called a cockpit, and laid my satchel in the seat behind mine, closing the low-slung glass over the top. My boots fit into the stirrups, but they were long for my legs; probably Zsolt had ridden last. I pressed my knees to Kodály's sides, put my hands on her flanks, and concentrated.

  She is metal and glass, they tell me. She is wire and photovoltaic cells, mesh and gossamer, they say. She cannot hear you. She does not know you. She is a machine, not a living thing.

  But I do not believe them. She has not spoken to me, but she would. I knew in my head we humans had designed and built these lovelies, but my heart knew they were more than what we had built. They had souls. They were alive. And one day they would come alive for me.

  I concentrated, listening not with my ears but with my skin, my breath, my mind. Speak to me, I said. A tremor ran through the twenty-meter body—was it just the tremor from my own desire?—but nothing more. I sighed and fished out the key, the chit Imre had given me.

  I plugged it into the slot in the panel between my legs and the entire machine came to obvious life, emitting a hum that made my grey-dark hair rise off my shoulders and pool around my neck. In front of me figures and maps and data appeared in the air, and a short cowling of glass slid into place at the appropriate level, the stirrups shortening as well, and the skin of the beast folded up to enclose my legs. The wings, already spread wide, buzzed and fizzed, and she rose off the ground, waiting for the signal to gather speed across the deck and vault into the air.

 
“Hjah!” I leaned forward, and Kodály leapt beneath me, twisting her sinuous tail to turn us into the west wind, blowing lightly, ruffling the leaves, and without much more sound than a breath we were off the Aerie and climbing smoothly into the sky.

  But I did not want to climb smoothly. I wanted to soar and weave, for it was in those times the Dragons became closest to flesh and bone, so I gripped handfuls of the pommel and reared back, pointing her snout straight upward. She was no supersonic craft, she could not climb like this forever, but changing the angle of the Dragon bought us more power from the sun, and for a moment she streaked upward, a flashing missile. I rode her as far as her strength allowed, and just at the moment when she began to flag, I pulled her into a barrel roll and let the glowing sun bake her underside while we fell. The trees rushed at us, the wind whistling past my head, and as we brushed the treetops we straightened and I listened closer than ever, straining for any response from Kodály other than the blind and senseless joy of flight itself.

  I wished for it more than anything in my life. But there was nothing. Even I could not convince myself of a reaction that did not exist.

  So. On to the mission. The whole skin of the Dragon collected and processed power and carried us steadily to the southeast, following the encoded flight plan. The morning was warming, but the autumn chill remained and I reached back for my scarf, stuffed in my pack. With that wrapped around my neck, flapping green and bronze behind me in the wind, I worked my way through the information encoded on the chit.

  The dragon had been discovered early this morning, about first light. It was not one of the tracked and chipped dragons of the preserve in Ukraine, just over the border from Erdely—Transylvania, the HUD said, using the global Amerish vernacular—but a wild one from west of the border, from the Carpathian Mountains.