on the few occasions when the dragon has awakened, I could hear its thoughts, anticipate how it might act or respond to a given situation. Last night I think it figured out a way to distance itself from me or somehow isolate me.”
“What’s it up to right now?”
“It’s asleep, completely unconscious. I think last night’s episode traumatized it severely.”
“How so?”
“Stripping a dragon of its wings is as severe as you can get, short of killing it,” Ping said.
Mara’s face reddened and reached up to grab his hand. “I’m sorry about that, but I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t just stand by and let him kill those people in the helicopter.”
Ping smiled and patted her hand. “That was not an admonishment, far from it. It was the perfect tactical move, given the situation. You couldn’t have played it better if you had planned it out.”
“That wasn’t playing, Ping.”
“Just a turn of phrase. I know more than anyone that last night wasn’t a game.” He held up his arms and smiled at them. “Hard to believe they were gone, and the detective restored them.”
Mara looked exasperated.
Ping put them down and looked at her. “What’s the matter?”
“You seem to be taking this whole thing in stride. You almost died. I almost killed you.”
“I am not trying to diminish the seriousness of what happened last night. I am just taking a moment to appreciate how incredibly well it worked out, all things considered.”
“I’m relieved you are okay, but you understand that nothing has been resolved, that the dragon is still a threat to us and to the whole damn city? You get that, don’t you?” Her face reddened, and her eyes welled up.
Ping held out his arms to her. She stood and leaned down to him. “I’m so sorry to put you through all this,” he said. He held her for a moment and then pulled back to look into her eyes. “You have got to stop carrying the world on your shoulders. I had my arms erased, fell from the sky, and almost bled to death, and you look to be in worse shape.”
She laughed and wiped her eyes as she took her seat.
“I know we have to do something about the situation. The dragon has to be dealt with. But I’m not convinced that it has to be dealt with immediately,” he said, then added, “That’s me talking, not the dragon making excuses.”
“How can you say that, when that crazy flying lizard is hunting my mother and terrorizing the city?”
“I’m not so sure it is hunting your mother, at least not exclusively, and certainly not with the intent to harm her. While it seems to be able to block its thoughts from me, I still can feel its emotions, like the trauma it felt last night.”
“You mentioned before that it felt threatened—its radar was going off.”
“Correct, and that makes me wonder why that would motivate it to attack your mother. After all, your mother’s counterpart was its mistress in the other realm. I picked up on other feelings last night, intense feelings that were somewhat incomprehensible to me.”
“What kind of feelings?”
“Jealousy. Fear and jealousy.”
“Fear of whom? Jealous of whom? My mother?”
“I don’t know, but the emotions were unmistakable.”
“Strange,” she said, almost under her breath. She picked at a cuticle, tried to make sense of what Ping said and couldn’t. After a moment she looked up at Ping and said, “That doesn’t answer the question of why not deal with the dragon immediately.”
“Two reasons. One, your future self has advised you to ignore the dragon’s folly, and I think, unless we have evidence that would contradict that advice, it might be wise to follow it. And two, if we wanted to do something about the dragon at this point, what would it be? You haven’t recovered the Chronicle of Creation, have you?”
“No. I’ve sort of been tied up for the last day or so.”
“Not ignoring the dragon’s folly.”
“Ping, I’m not going to sit by and watch a monster eat my mother, just because some book with my handwriting in it tells me to. If that really is me in the future sending out all these stupid haikus, you would think I would know that.”
“Okay, let’s ignore the book, and do something immediately. What do you suggest we do about the dragon?”
“I don’t know. Didn’t you say that the Chronicle is really just a talisman and that it doesn’t really have any power? That its power comes from me?”
“Yes, that is