Page 2 of The Dragon’s Captive

“Fine,” the guard sighed. “Get what you need, then get out of here.”

“Thank you!”

She went into the lab and pulled a couple of pieces of equipment from her nook. This was definitely not allowed, but she needed them to perform her final trial—her first real run. She didn’t need to take too many things, just a small amount of radioactive material and a couple of decent-sized electromagnets, plus a little more material to transform them—along with the bits and pieces she already had set up back home—into something extraordinary.

As she worked to gather the necessary materials, the guard’s words about a love life made her smirk to herself. “Love life? Hah.”

She’d never had anything remotely resembling a love life. There hadn’t been time. She had her sights set on more than any man could offer her. The biggest scientific breakthrough of a generation had happened when she was months from graduating high school—the discovery of a parallel world, full of sentient dragons.

It had sounded ridiculous, until you saw the footage for yourself. The Mojave was still marked with the scars of the facility where the first and thus far only portal opened by humans had once stood. She’d watched, stunned from her little home in the Midwest as the California power station that had been heralded as the answer to humanity’s energy crisis melted down the moment it was activated. In doing so, it had ripped a hole in the sky. That had been horrific enough—but then the dragons had come, pouring through the aperture that linked the human realm to the realm of humanity’s nightmares. California was still rebuilding from the damage that had been done by those sentient lizards, creatures that not only had fearsome animal forms, but which could allegedly take a human form as well.

The world was still reeling from the events of those days, and though the war was over, the dragons vanquished, the portal closed, the fear remained. There was a lot of research going on around the accident, but it was absolutely, highly, incredibly, federal prison illegal to attempt to open any kind of portal again.

And that was precisely what Kate was preparing to do tonight.

It wouldn’t be like the first portal though. That had been a giant, uncontrolled accident. She was certain that she could do it under controlled, repeatable circumstances that would not enlarge into great tears in the fabric of time and space, but would function more like doorways between the realms. Her math was solid, but even the most elegant equations could turn to chaos when translated into reality. Reality had a way of twisting at the very last second, turning and biting a scientist in the butt. That had happened in a spectacular and devastating way with the power plant, so Kate was exercising a fair bit of caution with her experiments.

She could still remember the hour and the day on which she had started down the path she now found herself at the end of.

As part of the attempt to clean up California, the government had started running tours around the remains of the power plant. Kate was the only teenage girl there on the day she went. She’d saved up money for her plane tickets, and the tour itself, working double shifts at the grocery store.

Having lost both her parents young, Kate had come up through the foster care system, bouncing between homes several times before her eighteenth birthday. Fortunately she was smart enough to be able to bury herself in her study and not pay too much attention to the emotional deficits all around her. Being quiet, studious, and determined were qualities that had saved her a thousand times over. Her hard work had paid off to the tune of a full ride to NYU. She’d been accepted to several other colleges, some of them with more cachet, but NYU was in New York and she wouldn’t have to do another shift at the grocery store as long as she was there. She’d worked in the dining hall instead all through undergrad, until finally getting a tutoring position. Really, her journey had started a hundred times in a hundred different ways, but she’d known for certain what she wanted to do when she had found herself walking where the portal had once been, on the very land across which dragons had once soared.

She had stood there in the ruins of the power station, wearing a radiation suit and listening to the guide’s voice coming through the speakers in the headset. The guide had a Texas twang and a real enthusiasm for his subject. He was a veteran of the dragon war, had flown planes against them and was full of stories, but what had caught Kate’s attention most was when he talked about the dragon realm, and the reason humans couldn’t survive there. A very particular type of radiation, native to that realm, was highly dangerous to humans.

“Radiation shreds DNA. Burns right through it. At first you don’t know you’ve been exposed. Then the sores break out. Then everything in your body breaks down bit by bit, because the cells can’t replicate anymore, you see? You can’t get near that realm unless you have some kind of protection. The dragons have a resistance to it.”

The guide had talked in a rough, no-nonsense sort of way, designed to shock the tour group. It had stayed with Kate and it had informed her courses of study. There was an inescapable chain of cause and effect from that moment to this one. Some might have called it destiny, but Kate was not inclined to think or speak that way. Her world view had no room for fate. She and she alone would decide her future.

Then eighteen-year-old Kate had left the invasion site with two missions for that future. One: she was going to enter the dragon realm. Two: she was going to survive it. Of course, she’d had to work on mission two before mission one, and throughout her undergrad she’d not been able to even get close to a solution. The breakthrough hadn’t happened until the first few months of postgrad study, when her supervisor had let her in on a well-guarded little secret: the college had dragon tissue samples recovered from dragon bodies that had fallen in the final battle. They weren’t supposed to. Technically it was illegal. Only the government was alleged to have access to dragon tissue, but there was a fair bit of overlap between high-level academics and government research and so a few hundred grams of deceased dragon had made its way into the laboratory freezer, where it sat looking entirely unassuming in an old ice cream container.

Kate had managed to take a little of the material and after several months of research, isolate a compound she believed capable of catching and binding radiation, rendering it harmless. Initial testing had indicated that it worked, to some degree at least. The radiation of the dragon realm was not quite like Earth radiation, so it would be a trial by fire when she did step beyond the barrier of her realm.

It was surprising to her that nobody else had done it as yet, but perhaps they had and were keeping it quiet. Or maybe they just hadn’t stumbled onto the secret as yet. Science was a strange thing; as much as hard work and advanced mathematics made it possible, there was the spark of almost divine revelation that accompanied so many major discoveries. Kate had felt it when she developed her formula, and she was feeling it again now.

She could hardly stop herself from giggling with excitement as she stashed the equipment in her bag and left the lab. In the next few hours, everything was going to change. She could feel it in the air, a sense of destiny that had kept her going through all the hard times when it would have been easier to give up and just let the world crush her. Even as a small girl, Kate had known that she was capable of great things. It was an attitude a lot of foster siblings had picked on her for, so it had hidden itself deep inside her, but she’d never lost sight of it and now it seemed to surround her, like a force field, or an invisible cloak, keeping her safe no matter what.

She scuttled back to her apartment, several blocks away from the college. It was a tiny little one-room place, but that wasn’t anything out of the ordinary for New York. She paid quite a premium to have the place to herself, but it was worth it for what she was about to do.

There was almost nothing nice about the place, but Kate had gotten used to ignoring her immediate surroundings in favor of concentrating on her work anyway. She could have lived somewhere nicer if she’d had roommates, but that never seemed to go well. She kept odd hours and did odd things and she absolutely couldn’t risk having her plans discovered by someone else. Living with other people always seemed to arouse suspicion, if not outright hostility.

The apartment had a little galley kitchen next to the bathroom, and it was there that Kate set up her equipment, hastily wiping down the counters where her precious creation was going to sit. The kitchen was perfect for it, thanks to the counters on either side, which provided two stationary points for the mass of wires and the heavy electromagnets and field generators to sit.

It took several more hours to get everything situated. The sun was shining through the grime of her windows as Kate rubbed her hands together, her eyes searching the wiring to make sure everything was perfect.

“Okay,” she breathed to herself. “This is it.”

Her finger hovered over the first switch, then flipped it. There was a low hum, but nothing happened yet. That was to be expected. The portal needed at least two points of contact to open—it was both the genius and the drawback of her design.

She turned to her right and hesitated, her breath catching in her throat. There were three options as to what would happen once she threw that switch. A portal to the dragon realm could open. Her calculations indicated that was possible. She could blow her apartment to smithereens. That was much less likely. Probably. And finally, there was the possibility that nothing would happen at all. She was afraid of that outcome most of all.

“Just do it,” she lectured herself. “Do it!”

Her finger hit the switch, the current flowed…

…

…and nothing.