28
ORLANDO
I had no plan.
I was the kind of person who always had a plan of some sort. As a cryptocurrency trader, it was necessary: I had to be ready for any scenario the market might throw at me. The scripts I wrote for my trading bots were as elaborate as they were complex, an entire A.I. dedicated simply to just executing trades in the nanoseconds before a human trader could make a decision.
But my plan-centric personality infiltrated every aspect of my life, not just the professional. Dinner night with friends? I mapped out an agenda for pre-drinks, the meal, then after-dinner dancing. A Thursday evening spent on the couch? I couldn’t channel surf: I knew exactly what I would watch from 8:00-8:30, then 8:30-9:00, then 9:00-10:00 and beyond. Hell, I’d planned our vacation in Belize from start to finish by myself, and if not for that most of the other guys probably would have been fine lounging on the beach all day without a care in the world.
So finding myself in this situation, fleeing from an enemy who wanted to kill me and not having any plan, was the kind of scenario in which I never wanted to be.
Well, I guess I did have the bare bones of a plan: don’t die. But that wasn’t very specific.
YOU ARE WEAK.
The Onyx Gryphon was a persistent voice in my head, taunting me across the sky. Every time he spoke he sounded louder, and his words intermingled with my own thoughts and began to poison them. Wearing me down with doubt.
I passed over a square of open terrain in the Chicago sprawl: Midway International Airport, with a symmetrical X of runways. It looked surprisingly dormant. I looked above and saw dozens of planes circling in holding patterns, a scattering of freckles against the blue sky.
Yeah, this was getting nuts.
I turned to my right, directly at the Chicago skyline. We were almost there.
But then what?
YOU HAVE ALWAYS BEEN WEAK, the dragon boomed.
Flying was physically exhausting. I’d always thought jogging was hard, but it didn’t hold a candle to flying through the air with muscles I hadn’t used in a century. The ache was in my back muscles, not the wings; it was a tension in my shoulders, or at least what felt like my shoulders, growing more numb with every second. I was already running on adrenaline and fear. Soon I would be running on fumes.
And in my exhaustion, the dragon was gaining. I didn’t need to look behind me to tell that he was steadily growing closer, but I did anyways. There he was, a dark stain against an otherwise gorgeous sky. Unnatural in this world.
Something that shouldn’t be.
SURRENDER!
Nope. That I couldn’t do. Not with the totem in my talons.
We were flying over I-55 now, next to the Chicago Ship Canal. Brake lights flashed red as cars slowed and stopped to watch our flight; some people even got out of their cars and pointed. I wished I could tell them to get back in their vehicles, to drive away while they could, that this was something terrible instead of a pleasant air show. I opened my mouth and screeched in frustration, and rather than have the desired effect that only excited the crowds below.
What now? I was almost out of land over which to fly. Maybe I would be safer if I got to Lake Michigan? Water beats fire, right? In my panicked state, the logic made as much sense as anything else.
I was reaching the first small skyscrapers in South Chinatown when the dragon first breathed fire.
I felt the air rush away in the moment before, like the tide washing out before a big wave. The heat was tremendously powerful, scalding my rear and tail and back, so hot that I was certain my feathers would ignite. I twisted away and looked behind, and was surprised to see that the fire was nowhere near me: it had puffed into the air at least 100 feet away.
Jesus, if it felt so bad from that distance…
Into Chicago we flew. I could sense that the dragon was rabid with bloodlust now, exerting incredible energy to close the distance. I zigzagged north, following the canal toward downtown. At any moment I would lose focus and shift back into a human, which would be deadly from this height. That fear pushed me on almost as much as the dragon himself.
I reached the round South Wacker building, gliding around it for a moment to rest my fatigued wings. Faces pressed against the windows to stare at me, men and women pointing with excitement. The dragon roared as he followed, and his turn was less graceful: his left wings scraped against the building, a screeching sound of nails scraping against windows and metal.
I curved to the left toward the Willis Tower, the symbol of stability I’d been flying toward for the past 10 minutes. I felt the rush of wind again and then that terrible WHOOSH, a spray of flame reflected in the windows. I darted around the building and the jet of fire struck the tower around the 30th floor. It was as if a missile had struck the side: glass exploded from the sudden heat, and the flame shot into the building itself and blew more windows out from the inside. I saw all of it in high-definition: spectators watching first with wonder and then terror, screams drifting to my ears.
I dove away from the dragon and circled the building. Good God, if that flame hit me, or even came close to hitting me, I was a goner.
The totem in my grasp practically trembled with agreement.
I leveled out my flight 50 feet above the ground. The dragon was constantly belching flame at me now, forcing me to dart around randomly to avoid it. We were so low that I could see individual pedestrians on the ground, many of them now running in terror. Being so low was dangerous for them, for anyone around, but I didn’t have the strength to fly back up to safer heights.
The dragon screamed in fury.
I passed the PWC building on my left, my wings brushing against the glass as I avoided the dragon’s fire. He overcompensated as he followed and smashed into the facade with his heavy body, tearing a long gash into the beautiful blue glass. I took a hard right turn onto Monroe Street and stole a peek behind me: the dragon slid sideways across the intersection, crashing into the building in a tangle of scaled arms and legs, massive jaws open in anger. He beat his wings chaotically to regain control, and the strength of the downward wind beneath them was enough to send pedestrians flying in all directions.
We zigzagged through Chicago, the dragon close on my tail and the heat from his flames growing closer and closer with each breath. It was almost like salsa dancing. The dragon took the lead, and for every one of his motions I responded in kind, keeping a careful distance between us as we moved. But there was nothing smooth about the way this beast moved; he constantly smashed into glass and ignited long swaths of the street below in his desperation to get to me, and every burst of fire that had missed me had struck a building along our route. Either he loved creating chaos, or he was merely reckless in his pursuit. Maybe he was as exhausted as I was.
No, it wasn’t just that. I could feel his compulsion to follow me; he was driven entirely by his need to take out me and the totem at the same time. Both of his targets being in the same place at the same time was practically driving him mad. He hadn’t even taunted me since we entered downtown Chicago.
I could use that. But how?
I took my next turn too closely; my wing clipped the stone framework of a building, sending me spiraling sideways out of control. I tried to regain composure but it was too late, and I struck the ground and slid across the pavement before crashing into a parked SUV. I barely remained in my gryphon form, and flailed around with my wings, pushing off the ground to get back on my feet. I wasn’t sure if I even had the strength to take flight again.
The dragon descended in front of me, feet smashing through the pavement like two meteors landing. I waited for the fire to wash over me and end it, but he pulled back his long neck and then snapped it forward, fangs chomping down. I darted sideways away from them, ensuring that I still had the totem in my grasp, then took to the air once more, flying mere feet above the cars on the busy Chicago street.
The dragon roared, and let out a stream of fire, but it only came out in a tiny puff, which made him roar again with rage.
I was nearing the end of what I could do. It took enormous effort just to fly high enough to avoid crashing into the traffic lights at intersections. But onward I flew, because there was no other alternative. I passed restaurants I recognized: the Grillroom, across the street from the theater where I’d first seen Phantom of the Opera. The L-Train crossed the next intersection, and I didn’t have the strength to soar above it so I dove low, flying underneath and knocking people aside before zooming up on the other side. Despite the cover they provided, my gryphon form hated the restriction of the buildings: it wanted the freedom of open sky, blue and wide and endless. I could see the sky ahead of me, and I focused on that as I beat my wings, each stroke more of a muscle spasm than anything under my control.
And then the last buildings gave way at Michigan Ave, and the green parks were all that separated me from the endless lake.
The dragon grunted, snapping at my tail. He was so close, now. And I didn’t have the energy to get away.
This is it, I thought as I flew over the green trees. A yacht club was ahead, hundreds of individual boats all tied up, with one especially large cruising yacht in the middle. The helicopters were everywhere now, a curtain of them above and ahead, watching our terrible chase. Police flew up Lake Shore Drive, north and sound toward our location, closing us in.
But I barely saw them. Delirious with exhaustion, the only thing I could focus on was the blue ahead, the lake mirroring the beautiful sky above. It felt like freedom.
With a last gasp of energy I flew above the enormous Abegweit passenger yacht, filled with pointing passengers enjoying an early dinner.
DIE, the dragon boomed in my head.
His jaws snatched out and caught my hind leg. Pain surged through my body like venom. The dragon jerked his neck, halting me in the air, pulling me against his freight train of a body. We crashed into the boat together, our screams matching those of the people below.
The totem flew from my grasp.