RWD: 5.08

5.08

"They can only survive if they continue to increase the dependency of those who support them. It's an addict's dead-end street."

—HERETICS OF DUNE

Paul had arrived by bus, a grey man in a grey world, his presence as unremarkable as a scuff mark on concrete. The driver didn’t spare the alighting blonde teen a glance. That was the point—no glances collected, no lines hung on him that someone else could tug.

He paused beneath the stale awning of a discount flooring warehouse that had never sold a square inch of flooring. Rain had left the asphalt mottled, each black ellipse a cooled echo of motion. His posture eased a fractional degree, the tell that wasn’t a tell, shoulders slouched into the civilian slur of someone with nowhere particular to be.

He had kept himself blind for two more days, prana-bindu clamps locking down the micro-muscles of the eyes until sight was a choice. It denied the intruder the sense she desired more. Now, in the cold drizzle outside the blacksite, he loosed that control with the same precision—light rushing back into pupils that drank without flinch. The hook in his thoughts stirred at once. He fed it a measured shard of the Spice Agony. The presence recoiled.  The hook remained, sullen, present, but the hand on it had fled the stove. That would buy him the silence he needed. At least for a time.

He turned his attention outward to the other calm and felt the world resolve the way it did when you traced it with everything but eyes: a shallow sump in the floor where rain had pooled and left a mineral ring, a light hum in the walls that wasn’t fluorescent ballast but a shielded line carrying more current than any storefront needed, three heartbeats in the building that were not his own. 

Inside, the front room had been dressed in a way that spat up a defensive mess at casual inspection: stacked laminate samples, a USB fan with dust spun into its grill, a Lean Cuisine box used as a pen tray. Beyond, a door with cheap hardware turned with expensive resistance. He palmed the latch that didn’t look like a latch and walked down a hallway dressed as storage: metal racks, boxes with labels that were true in their particulars and wrong in their sum. The air cooled, and the hum changed pitch as steel took over from studs and drywall. 

“Sir,” said a voice that worked hard to be neutral and landed somewhere north of wary. A man, one of his, stationed on a stool beside a caged breaker panel. The NATO sling’s nylon creaked softly against a forearm when he stood. Shear sound, fifty centimeters of fabric rubbing itself raw. The mercenary had dislocated the arm on a retrieval operation in Maine a week ago, and Paul had him pulled from frontline duty. 

“Stand easy,” came Paul’s flat reply.

At the hall’s end, a door gave him a different chill. Refrigerated. Chemical cold, the air carrying the faint metallic tang of frigid oil.

The vat containing said oil stood in the center, industrial titanium shrouded under insulation and armor, lid sealed with bolts that required power tools to open. Lines in and lines out: nutrition, oxygen, sedation, waste. Containment foam nozzles hooded the corners, primed to displace the fluid in the event of an emergency. The refrigerant pump piped its quiet stately rill through the chassis. Paul listened to its rhythm briefly enough to know it was healthy. Across from the vat, an operating table with a warming pad idling, a steel cart arrayed with instruments whose chiming, when the nurse adjusted them, made a constellation of clean sound.

“Vitals?” Paul said.

The nurse straightened. She was square-shouldered, her hair in a practical knot, face bare of anything more than a medic’s impatience with nonsense. She didn’t waste apology on his arrival. “Stable,” she said. “Temp at target. Sedation steady. No signs of spontaneous scale emergence. EEG suggest he’s proving responsive to the audiogenic stim as per schedule.” A pause. “He doesn’t like the soprano”

“Canary worked on lot it,” Paul said. “Keep it. He’ll have to learn to enjoy it. Any change in the dermal condition?”

“Baseline.” A rustle of paper. “He heals under sedation but slow; edges creep in. I’ve been suppressing with topical cold and low-dose antagonists as specified.”

“Good,” Paul nodded. “We’re proceeding. Begin tapering to the procedure window. Keep him below flinch but above drift. I need the tissue active.”

The mercenary that had been observing silently—Miller—retrieved some power tools and the lid bolts came away with a vacuum sigh. Cold breathed out. The oil’s surface was a dull, opalescent dark. Beneath it, the dragon himself: Kenta—AKA Lung—stripped to skin, tattoos faded by cold and pallor to slate. 

“On my count,” Paul said. “Two breaths. Lift on three.”

They lifted on three. Flesh slid greasy with the oil’s viscosity. Weight found their backs and traveled into the floor through the controlled bend of knees. They laid Lung on the warmed table. The man’s skin took the heat with an animal avidity that had nothing to do with grace. The nurse caught an IV line before it kinked. The bone-conductance pads of the headphones that had been playing Paige’s songs and Paul’s subliminal instructions in his ears non-stop clung; the wire trailed and was gathered. The room adjusted its own balance around the body’s new center.

Paul’s hands were quick without rushing. He aligned, draped, secured, not in the rote of a field medic but in the stripped-down exactness of someone who had learned to make the body obey in a hundred idioms. He washed his hands before gloving them.

“Checklist,” he said.

They ran it. When he picked up the first instrument, he felt the hook bite in his skull again, the intrusive attention angling for an angle in the act. He gave it a thumbnail of pain and shut it out. Then he made the first cut, a shallow incision along Kenta’s chest. The wound began to heal immediately, but slowed significantly when he injected the area with a a refrigerated saline solution.

Into the incision went the first implant.

The first device had been retrieved from Paul’s bag and laid out on the table. Upon returning from Old Saybrook, Hibana had delivered them in foam that looked like it cushioned jewelry; and in a lacking show of trust, Paul had examined each with a heart full of suspicion. The explosive implants were designed to survival through Lung’s transformation; possessing casings that turned rubbery under heat and then re-solidified once coold, detonation logic that would ignore stray currents and the theater of fever. 

He cupped the first in gloved fingers and set it in the space he had made, seating it beside the cape’s heart. The nurse breathed once through her nose, small and uncertain. He ignored it. Sutures whispered as the injected saline warmed, before the incision resumed its quiet effort to close. The line he laid would be overwritten by Kenta’s gift in minutes. The wound’s lips drew together, closing over the miniature bomb without leaving a scar

The second cut went faster, in a gap behind the neck at the base of the skull. The third even so, on top of the liver. Finally, they lifted him back into the vat. The flame-retardant oil received him like an old habit. Lines reconnected. Bolts torqued down. Pumps resumed their work.

Paul stood with his hands held away from his body as the nurse stripped the gloves, before beginning  the process of cleaning and sterilizing the space.

Three implants. Three points of failure. Three ways to kill a dragon. Under these circumstances, Paul was satisfied. He would get to keep the dragon in play. And when the time came—when Paul needed a weapon against the Endbringers or some particularly troublesome opponent, he would have a weapon at his disposal. Should the weapon prove more liability than asset—he retained the option to permanently dispose of it.

He turned away from the containment vessel, already calculating the timeline for Kenta's eventual deployment. The dragon would sleep until called. And when that call came, it would answer with the voice Paul had given it, serving purposes it would believe were its own.

The greater purpose. The only purpose that mattered.

Miller waited by the exit, patient as stone. "Anything else required, sir?"

Paul shook his head. "Maintain current protocols. No changes until I say otherwise."

Outside, rain had started again, a new set of ellipses stippling the asphalt. He walked to the bus stop and became a boy named Greg who had just missed his bus by a dozen minutes and had the patience to wait for the next one.

Behind him, in the cold room, a dragon dreamed of fire to the tunes of a songbird as his new master promised him grand visions glorious battle, whilst softly, reminding him to be good and obedient.