CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER FIVE
The Judgment
I spent the rest of the week absolutely buried in dense military documents. The queue of custom orders remained frustratingly empty no matter how much I willed it to fill. I didn’t shy away from a design challenge, but the scope of work was intimidating. In reading the documents, I wondered if they’d simply copied an existing SOW and replaced every instance of “drone” with “dragon.” Because they sure as hell were asking a lot of living reptiles.
I’d never had my own office before. The privacy was nice—or would have been, if there were many people around—but it felt too quiet. The tiniest sounds intruded, whether it was the muted noise of traffic or the strange irregular clicking of the HVAC system. I ended up moving back to my old workstation near the God Machine. I wasn’t sure why, but the server fans provided an ideal sort of white noise that let me concentrate.
When Connor sent the list of VUSes from his patient friends, it was a welcome respite. There were dozens, just like he’d promised. He’d done a pretty good job of collecting the clinical data to go with them, too. I picked one at random and started reading.
Jacob, nine-year-old male. Unable to walk until age three. Parents first noticed he had trouble climbing stairs at age six. No upper-body weakness, but his gait is getting worse.
The boy’s mutation caused a single amino acid change in BICD2 near the second mutation hotspot. It had never been reported in any other patients, nor had it been observed in healthy populations. His mother didn’t have it, either. The father was “not involved” and thus wasn’t tested. I shook my head, muttering to myself. All of this brought it close to pathogenic status, but not quite there. Yet the boy almost certainly had spinal muscular atrophy due to his BICD2 mutation. I remember when Connor was his age, how stairs used to give him trouble. God, it’s like living our childhood over again. With a little functional evidence behind it, this variant could be classified correctly, too. No wonder they were reaching out to Connor.
It wasn’t like I could slip the mutation into a prototype. The God Machine hung still and silent, except for the steady hum of the servers. All that computing power, still going to waste. I never expected that I’d return to this job looking forward to the weekend, but that’s what came to pass. In my defense, I had a good reason to be excited. And it had absolutely nothing to do with dragons.
Summer and I had breakfast before our Saturday geocache. I made damn sure I was on time. This was her busy season and I’d just taken over design, so we’d been hard-pressed to see each other for the past couple of weeks. Honestly, it was driving me crazy. We kissed in the parking lot when she arrived. It was all I could think about while we walked inside and waited for a table. So much so that I tried again when we sat down.
“We’re in public,” she hissed, and gently but firmly pushed me back to my side of the booth.
“I missed you,” I said.
“Really? I’d never have guessed.” She smiled, though, and that was her way of saying that she felt the same.
“How’s work going?” I asked.
“Brutal. Our client keeps pushing back on the things we need to do to meet our specs.”
“What do they want?”
“The usual energy wasters—open floor plans, wide atriums, decorative water fountains.”
“I like those things. What’s wrong with them?”
“Nothing at all, if you hate the planet,” she said.
Summer worked for the second-largest green engineering firm in Arizona. Her company had designed, among other things, the high-efficiency condo building where I lived. I probably should have waited a year or two because she’d bought in one of their new series of buildings and her place was way, way better. I had serious condo envy. I liked to think my car was better, but the Tesla Model S somehow failed to impress her as much as I felt it should.
“Did you set the client straight?”
“My boss did, but it was ugly. Now we have to design a bunch of other features to keep them happy.”
“Ooh, that sucks. Can you at least bill by the hour?”
“I wish.”
“Bummer.” I stirred my coffee with my free hand, as my other one remained entwined with hers on the table. I didn’t mind being one-handed for the moment. Or making a statement that we were here, and we were a thing. I was in a good mood. It was Saturday, we were together, and there was nothing that could stop us from defeating the forthcoming geocache.
“How was going back?” she asked.
“Pretty good,” I said. “A little weird, maybe.”
She gave me a look of mock sympathy. “Does everyone hate you now?”
“No one that didn’t already.”
“Ha! You’re funny.”
Now that she’d brought it up, I was starting to worry about the whole not-liking-me thing. “I got Evelyn’s office. Her old one, I mean.”
“Is it nice?”
“I guess.” I shrugged. “I’ve never really had an office.” Or a real job, for that matter.
“What about the Venus flytraps?”
“No, she took those when she moved upstairs.” I sipped my coffee, savoring the rich flavor that breakfast diners have somehow perfected. “It’s too quiet in there. I’ve been spending most of my time at my old workstation by the God Machine.”
“You have to stop calling it that.”
“Why?”
“It’s blasphemy, for one thing. And your company doesn’t need another PR disaster after killing all those dogs.”
“Hey, we didn’t kill the dogs. There was an epidemic, and our former CEO sort of . . . delayed the cure.”
“On company property, using company resources.”
I sighed. “Yeah, I know.” It still bothered me, just as the idea of sending dragons to the desert facility bothered me. I’d been actively avoiding the various media stories about Build-A-Dragon, at least until the next corporate scandal took some of the heat off us. “Well, the good news is we have nowhere to go but up.”
The server chose that moment to bring us our bill. “And here’s your carryout.” She plunked it down on the table between us. “Sixteen breakfast burritos.” She eyed us both and walked away.
“Did she seem just a little bit judgey to you?” I whispered.
“So judgey,” Summer said.
I paid the bill and we went outside to climb in Summer’s Jeep, where the ravenous menagerie awaited us: a half dozen small dragonets and one large, questionably-domesticated pig. They tore into the breakfast burritos like a school of piranhas. The food was gone in a matter of seconds. The bag, too, and nearly my hand. Then the animals sprawled in a heap on the backseat for the ride out to the desert.
We’d begun taking these trips almost every Saturday, a different geocache each time. Summer and I were trying very hard to keep our positions on the local leaderboard for geocaches. We were currently tied for third place behind Jojo and Prickly Pete, two geocachers who almost always scored together. Another couple, probably. They’d come out of nowhere while Summer and I were busy dealing with the aftermath of the showdown at the desert facility. To say it fanned the flames of our competitive sides was a major understatement. We’d met while geocaching, and we were damn sure not going to let some other couple dethrone us without answer.
Besides, the animals needed the exercise. Spending five days cooped up in a tiny condo made them all a little stir-crazy. Even Riker, Summer’s porcine companion, seemed to enjoy getting outdoors. Pigs had proven surprisingly decent replacements for dogs after the canine epidemic hit. They were loyal, low maintenance, and had a phenomenal sense of smell. Of course, they didn’t stand up to dragons, but not many things did.
Summer got us to South Mountain Park five minutes faster than traffic levels should have made possible, at least according to my phone. It was a large reserve of mostly hilly desert country just west of Highway 10. The cache itself was only middling difficulty; you parked in the spacious paved parking lot at Pima County Trailhead and hiked up into the hills. Various trails and paths spiderwebbed off in different directions, so it was easy to get a bit of solitude. Which we very much needed while trying to keep some sense of control over the pig and dragonets. The sky was clear, and the weather no hotter than usual. It had all the makings of a good day.
Octavius took the lead, sweeping low across the hilltops. Because of his coloring, it was hard to pick him out from the browns and yellows of the desert terrain. I could only track him by watching for Benjy, the dragon I’d inherited from Build-A-Dragon’s former chief of security. He followed Octavius everywhere, and his lighter coloring made him easier to spot. Emerald-green Titus and bright orange Hadrian also made useful dragon-markers. Nero and Otho were the smallest and their earth tones helped them blend with any landscape. I could never keep tabs on them, but they usually stuck close to their more visible kin.
That only left Marcus Aurelius, who was currently trying to ride on Riker’s furry back. With mixed results at best. As I watched, he lost his grip and fell off for the third or fourth time, only to flap back into position. The pig was snuffling around some rocks and didn’t seem to notice.
I laughed. “How long do you think Riker will put up with this?”
“Normally, not even this long,” Summer said. “He must be in a good mood.”
“For a pig,” I muttered. Riker would never let me mess with him like that.
“What was that?”
“Nothing,” I said quickly. I shouldn’t be jealous of a dragonet.
She gave me a sharp look, but let it slide. “So, it was weird going back, huh?”
“In so many ways.”
“What does everyone think about Evelyn taking over?”
“I don’t really have anyone to ask. Wong’s in China and Korrapati’s still out on leave.”
“So it’s just you?”
“For the moment.”
“How are you not, like, completely overwhelmed with design work?”
I shrugged. “Honestly, it’s a little slow. Orders have kind of dropped off.” I didn’t tell her by how much. Saying it out loud would make it real.
“So, what have you been doing all week?”
“A lot of reading.”
“You’ve been reading,” she said flatly, in a tone that somehow reminded me she’d probably put in sixty hours at her architecture firm.
“We got a statement of work from a possible new client. It’s . . . dense.”
“Who’s the new client?”
“I can’t say yet. It’s supposed to be confidential.”
“Do I need to remind you how well it went the last time you thought you could keep a bunch of secrets?”
“You do not.” I remembered all too well, especially what had almost happened to us in the desert. And what had happened. Still, my instincts screamed at me not to tell her. Not now, at least, when we didn’t know if this DOD thing was for real.
“Well?” she prompted.
A commotion among the animals rescued me from answering. The dragons had converged to a single location and circled overhead, crooning. Riker had his snout jammed under a large flat rock, digging furiously. Three or four dragons circled overhead and chirped their excitement.
“I think that’s a find,” I said.
“Riker’s find.”
“We’ll see.” I marched ahead, taking care to avoid the cacti flanking the narrow path. Like most geocachers, the creator of this cache didn’t want anyone stumbling on it by accident. Usually that required two elements: a good concealment container and an out-of-the-way spot. Preferably an actively uncomfortable place where only half-insane geocachers would go. Such as me. I pushed my way forward through a cloud of dragonets and found Riker proudly holding the geocache container in his mouth. It was a round metal tin about the size of my fist. No rust, so it was probably aluminum.
“Told you,” Summer called.
“Yeah, yeah.” Riker had an uncanny ability to sniff out metal. I took hold of the case and tried to tug it free, but the stupid pig refused to let go. He shook his head and growled. “Oh, come on!”
“He only answers to one master,” Summer said.
I glanced back at her. “Would you mind—?” Riker gave the cache a sharp tug and nearly yanked my arm out of the socket. “Seriously!”
“Riker, give,” Summer said.
The pig gave me one last shake and then unclamped from the cache container. If it hadn’t been aircraft-grade aluminum, the thing would’ve been crushed.
I needed a moment to catch my breath. “You know, maybe it’s time you got a dog.”
She snorted. “You first.”
We logged the find, swapped out some of the trinkets inside for pewter dragon figurines, and hid it again. Then it was a matter of rounding up the animals for the trek back out.
“So, are you going to tell me who the client is?” Summer asked.
I laughed, but it sounded nervous even to me. “I was kind of hoping you forgot about that.”
“I didn’t,” she said.
“Well, it’s not a sure thing,” I said, buying time. I trusted, I just didn’t want to tell her.
“Noah.”
Oh, what the hell. I opened my mouth to tell her, then hesitated. This was a public space. There was no one nearby, but Summer had her phone in her armband and mine was in my pocket. In other words, there were plenty of ways I could be under some kind of surveillance. So I lowered my voice to a whisper. “The government.”
“Whose?”
“Um, ours, of course.”
“What do they want with you?” she asked.
“Guess.”
“They’re going to take you to Guantánamo Bay until your war crimes trial.”
“No. They want dragons.”
“I’m guessing they don’t want them as pets,” she said flatly.
Here it comes. I should have known how poorly this would go over. Summer had had reservations about my work from the start. “It could be a big contract for us.”
She stopped in her tracks and stared at me. “You’re kidding, right?”
“No. It’s been in the works a while, apparently.”
She shook her head and stalked past me to the parking lot. “I knew this was a bad idea.”