Aaron stood and moved to a seat on the left side of the plane, as Tia had suggested. He’d been so in his head about everything — the Tribulations, altered memories, vorpal swords, and not ogling Alice — he’d momentarily forgotten they were flying into New York.
As he settled into a new seat by a window, he felt excitement beginning to build in his chest. Tia wouldn’t have drawn his attention to the window if they were flying into Albany or Buffalo, right? Their destination pretty much had to be New York City, otherwise what was there to even see? Behold! A portion of the Great Lakes! Bits of Canada! Not exactly exciting vistas someone wouldn’t want to miss out on.
And if Tia isn’t a New Yorker, nobody is, he thought.
Then again, maybe Aaron was being unfair to both Canada and upstate New York. The Great Lakes were among the largest lakes in the world and it might be interesting to see them in the light of the morning sun. Plus, Toronto or Montreal were somewhere in that vicinity and they might have interesting skylines.
Still… would Tia have got his attention just for that? It seemed unlikely and that left him cautiously hopeful they were flying into one of the most famous cities in the world.
It was a city Aaron had always wanted to live in. As he got older that dream grew faded and distant. Never quite dead, but tempered with pragmatism. He’d started to wonder lately if it was even possible for him to find a career that would allow him to afford to live even a modest life in New York.
He was lacking all the bells and whistles of genetic and academic pedigree, which meant he only had talent and drive to go on. His talent had never seemed to manifest in a way that was particularly profitable which had shaken his confidence and led to his drive fading. Eventually, he’d settled into his little rut and basically given up on himself.
Maybe if he’d been born decades earlier, he could have gotten by in the squalid pit that was New York of the 70s and 80s — the place where you couldn’t have an episode of Friends because they’d have been killed in a mugging by the cast of Death Wish or The Warriors. Hard pass.
Of course, it was just as possible the gritty open sore of criminality portrayed in all that old media was the inverse of the stuff that came out in the 90s and naughties. Instead of the murder and rape highlighted in the television and film of earlier decades, Sex and the City and the like presented an equally improbable world of weirdly clean streets where no one ever vomited from the ever-present stench of urine.
Aaron had seen dozens — maybe hundreds — of videos about New York that disabused him of the notion that the place was a carbon copy of the whimsical fairy tale land of You’ve Got Mail. Learning to face and accept reality as it was rather than as you wanted it to be was supposed to be a part of growing up, becoming an adult; it also required you to stifle some of your dreams, leaving people stuck in places they hated, slowly filling with bitterness and regret if they couldn’t come to terms with their limits.
This whole dragon thing could be my lottery ticket, he thought. A way to get the leg up I didn’t luck into at birth. But… what the hell would I even do with that leg up at this point?
Assuming he survived and passed the Tribulations, Aaron had no idea what kind of things he’d have to do as the Primus Draconis. He understood it was a leadership role in the Drakon, but had no idea what that would entail. Would he be as busy as the owner of some small business struggling to keep their head above water? Or was it more of a do-nothing job like being a corporate executive or politician in Congress?
If he had a fair amount of time to himself, Aaron would want to do something with it. Maybe. He didn’t think he’d get much satisfaction out of life if he just sat around reading, watching videos, and playing games. Then again, that also sounded kind of awesome. So, probably. Or perhaps he’d find a healthy balance between loafing and pursuing his dreams.
The jet had flown so far into the sunrise it was now mid morning, having crossed two time zones. Judging by how close they were to the urban sprawl below, it had also begun its descent quite a while before Tia had grabbed Aaron’s attention and he simply hadn’t noticed.
The city passing beneath them didn’t look like New York — it was neither dense nor tall enough — so, maybe New Jersey? Or they could be coming in over one of the outer boroughs, which would mean Aaron had been oblivious to the plane banking over the ocean, as well. Then they angled left, the wing outside Aaron’s window dipping lower, and he was looking down at the southern end of the island of Manhattan.
The morning sun glittered on the glass and steel of the city and sparkled on the rivers flowing on either side of the island. The cluster of skyscrapers was unmistakable, especially to someone who’d been drawn to New York their entire life. Anyone who had access to photos, films, or television in the modern era would probably recognize that particular skyline, as well.
The immense buildings were so densely packed it was like looking at an old cemetery made of glass and steel, filled with dreams of the future instead of memorials to the past. The buildings looked so close Aaron felt like he could have reached out and touched them if the window weren’t in the way. The jet couldn’t have been more than a couple thousand feet away, maybe quite a bit less.
Beyond the sleek, modern monoliths of Downtown, miles away by Aaron’s estimate, two bridges crossed the East River. Aaron wasn’t sure which bridges they were specifically, but the closest one had tall, thin stone towers with high arches. He thought that one was the Brooklyn Bridge, but wasn’t confident he was right. The one further on was too indistinct and Aaron didn’t know the layout of the city well enough to even guess.
An idea entered Aaron’s mind, one so absurd he had to stop himself from smiling like a goon.
I wonder if the Drakon owns the Brooklyn Bridge, he thought.
He remembered there was a very old joke about selling the bridge — even Bugs Bunny had gotten in on the gag at least once — and for a moment he considered the possibility that the ultra-wealthy secret society might actually own the thing.
Of course, that was preposterous. The Brooklyn Bridge wasn’t just an iconic landmark, it was a friggin’ bridge! That meant it was almost certainly owned by the city or state government. It seemed prudent to keep that little flight of fancy to his damned self; he didn’t want to seem like a rube in a cabin full of New Yorkers.
Still, for a moment Aaron’s lack of familiarity caused a pang of regret. He chastised himself for not spending more time learning about the landmarks and neighborhoods of New York. He’d considered doing exactly that from time to time — particularly when he was feeling wistful — because it could have made him feel like he was closer to the city, more a part of it, and thus closer to his dream. But that had struck him as a level of obsession that seemed unhealthy, even parasocial (if you could be parasocial for something that wasn’t a person). Indulging his fantasy by wandering around an online map in Street View would have been a fixation bordering on delusion.
Only now Aaron’s fantasy was very real and very close. The plane continued to bank into a turn and the entirety of Manhattan crawled away to the north below him. From the air, the borough looked like it was two separate cities whose suburbs had grown into each other. A dense assembly of smaller buildings stretched between the cluster of skyscrapers Downtown and another line of monoliths that spread from one side of the island to the other further north.
Small, in this case, was likely only due to perspective and the forced comparison with the massive towers. Many of those seemingly tiny buildings were almost certainly larger than anything Aaron had seen in Sacramento. The northern row of glittering towers was most likely Midtown, Aaron thought, because even at that distance he could spot certain iconic structures, like the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings. He even thought he could see Central Park beyond that second line of towers — a broad, flat expense stretching farther into the distance.
The plane coasted around the southern tip of Manhattan and crossed the East River. If Aaron’s guess about the bridge was right, they had started flying over Brooklyn, still heading mostly east with the turn starting to take them north. Their path ran roughly parallel to the East River and presented a panoramic view of Manhattan from its southern tip to the tapered finger in the north where a river split Harlem from the Bronx.
The jet’s pass along the island only lasted a few minutes, then the terrain turned more industrial and less interesting. Shortly after this change, they were landing, taxiing into a hangar filled with private jets, and disembarking from the plane. Aaron’s few pieces of luggage were already loaded onto a rolling cart as he walked down the steps of the plane.
He turned to Barrett. “Are we taking helicopters, again?”
The older man shook his head. “Too easy to spot, too easy to track, too vulnerable to attack, and too much risk of collateral damage. We generally try to stay low profile when we’re in town.”
The entire group — Aaron, Alice, Barrett, Mallory, Tia, and the cadre of security personnel accompanying them — exited the hangar through a small pedestrian door, where a line of nondescript sedans were parked and waiting for them.
Seven people were waiting at the line of cars for them, all in dark business attire. This new group was apparently replacing the security detail, because they got into the vehicles as they split off into separate cars and the group from the plane stayed behind. Barrett and Alice rode in one with a pair of guards, Mallory and Tia another, and Aaron rode with three people he’d never met before.
A vague sense of familiarity tingled in the back of his thoughts. which meant at least one of the three had been a drakus in a previous life and he might have met them in the past.
A short woman with dark red hair was in the backseat with Aaron.
“I’m Kiara Levigné, spelled like Avril but with a cool E on the end; that’s why it’s pronounced properly. We’re your primary security detail,” she said. Her voice had a mild rasp that Aaron thought might be described as smoky. “The big fella driving is Griffin Smythe and the rat-looking shit-bastard riding shotgun is Albert Lang. Our job is to keep you alive, at least until you finish the ascension or whatever.”
She had said all this before the car had even gotten moving. It wasn’t that she spoke fast, it was more that she didn’t waste time on impracticalities like breathing. It was like she had prepared a speech in advance and worked hard to remove all the natural pauses people put in when they were talking.
Kiara pulled out a balisong and began adroitly twirling it, the handle and blade clicking and clacking as it swung around her hand. “We aren’t your servants or assistants, so we won’t be fetching dry cleaning or scheduling appointments with your therapist, and we don’t do sex stuff, so get any ideas like that outta your head.”
“Not for free, anyways,” Griffin, the burly blond at the driver’s wheel, said. He didn’t have a mullet, but with his thick sideburns and horseshoe mustache he sure looked like he ought to.
Albert, almost as short as Kiara and the scruffiest looking of the bunch with his five o’clock shadow and sunken eyes, emitted a wheezy laugh from the front seat.
Kiara shot a glare at her two companions, then continued her explanation to Aaron. “We’ll be with you or close-at-hand pretty much all the time, but there are two other details assigned to you so we can have something resembling a life. We use a rotating schedule to make it harder to notice patterns of who you’re with and when. First things first, though; take this.”
She produced a dark rectangle that was slightly smaller than a credit card, but much thicker. It was made of either dark plastic or glass but hardly reflected light at all. One corner had a tab cut away to about half the depth of the entire block with a concave edge.
“Grab the notched corner with your thumb and index finger and shake it once, like a packet of Ramen seasoning, only gentler,” she said.
Aaron gripped the thinner corner of the thing between his two fingers, the edge of his thumb fitting comfortably in the cut-out. When he flicked his wrist, the rectangle unfolded smoothly and snapped into place, doubling its length and halving its thickness. Kiara gestured to indicate he should do it again and this time the width doubled instead. A third time and the length increased again, leaving him with a smooth, black piece of plastic or glass about the size of a smartphone. Fully unfolded, it was thinner than a pocket lighter.
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“That’s your new phone. Every surface is a touchscreen. It orients itself to your face when you take it out of standby, but you can turn it to face any direction after, like if you wanted to show other people your stupid memes, cat videos, and what-have-you.”
Aaron felt along the edges of the phone, finding small sections that felt more like rubber than plastic along one edge. The display lit up when he touched them and he quickly marveled at how sleek this phone’s power and volume controls were.
“This thing is incredible,” he said.
“They’re really just a few years ahead of the curve, but we incorporate magic to get over some practical hurdles in the engineering,” Albert explained from the front. He had a rich, resonant voice that belied his wheezy laugh and rodent-like features.
“But don’t drop it in the toilet,” Griffin said. “The phone’ll be fine, but your hand won’t!”
“You need to keep it on you or very close by at all times; it’s waterproof so you can even take it in the shower and set it on a shelf or something,” Kiara continued, gritting her teeth at the others’ antics. “We’ll have more security procedures to go over after you finish this next Tribulation.”
“If you survive,” Griffin added with a melodramatic warble to his tone. “Mwuhaha! And then thunder crashes.”
“And assuming you don’t turn into some kind of Blade-style ravenous blood god. We’re not really sure how likely that is, but we probably won’t be your security if you go all Deacon Frost on us,” Albert said.
Albert and Griffin both laughed in the front seat as Kiara shouted at them to shut the hell up; Aaron couldn’t help but smile.
He usually enjoyed a bit of flippancy and irreverence as long as it wasn’t cruel and, apparently, a joke about the very real possibility of his imminent death didn’t strike Aaron as particularly cruel. For a moment, he wondered if it should and what it said about him that it didn’t, but he brushed that aside. He was who he was and he was allowed to find comfort about the dangers he faced wherever he could.
They settled into silence after that and Aaron turned his attention to the world outside their sedan. He could have played with the crazy new half-magic phone, but he wanted to try to be in the moment for his first trip to New York. As he looked out the tinted window, he found there was nothing particularly interesting just yet.
They were driving through a narrow, two-lane tunnel. The walls were white tile, but thick bands of blue tile ran along the top and bottom and three thinner lines of yellow tile were spaced along the wall between those. The car slowed as they ran into a bit of traffic congestion near the end of the tunnel and they had practically slowed to walking speed when they finally emerged into the sunlight.
A high wall made of large, mismatched stone bricks rose on either side of the road. As they came out of the mouth of the tunnel, Aaron got a close-up look at a huge metal plate standing beside it. The plate looked like a massive plaque, made of a rich burnished bronze and framed in a darker, matte black metal. The New York State Steal was embossed on the center of the plaque, as were several words both above and below the Seal. The top read Excelsior and the bottom Ever Upward.
A little corny, Aaron thought, but not a bad sentiment.
He was sitting there, looking at the great metal plate, for a couple minutes, traffic resolutely refusing to budge. He noticed that there were boxes placed around and behind the plaque, and each looked like it housed some kind of mechanism. It begged the question of what the plate was even there for, but the sheer size of the thing was what gave it away for Aaron.
It’s a gate, or a cap, he realized. It can swing shut and seal the tunnel. Probably great for when it floods.
Once traffic finally let up a bit and they were able to move out of the tunnel, they emerged on a street that was somewhere in the heart of the city itself.
Should that be capitalized? Aaron wondered. I always hated when people from the Bay Area called San Francisco ‘The City,’ but maybe that was a ‘me’ thing.
The roads in Manhattan were much narrower than Aaron was used to back in Sacramento. The buildings were also larger and, obviously, quite a bit taller, stacked right up against each other with little to no space between. The prevalence of awnings was almost as interesting as the density of the structures, the cloth and metal covers reaching out of buildings and extending all the way to the edge of the sidewalk. Less than a quarter of the buildings had one, but they were still so common it was noticeable.
Aaron gazed at the city as they passed through it, his eyes roving over the buildings, the people, the sidewalks, even the traditional stoops that fronted some of the smaller buildings. Then, as quickly as they had gone from the tunnel to the streets, they left the residential buildings behind and began to travel through businesses — much taller, wider buildings that were no less impressive despite being more modern (and somewhat bland) in design.
While they were at a stop at one intersection, Aaron saw a street sign telling him they were on Madison Avenue. That street was famous for some reason or other, but the only thing Aaron could think of was that it was a pretty nice property in Monopoly. They turned down a smaller street and passed Berkeley College, which was not to be confused with UC Berkeley in California, where Aaron’s most cantankerous ex-girlfriend had gone to school.
What a magnificent turd of a thought to pop into my head when I’m literally experiencing one of my life’s ambitions, Aaron thought, then forced his attention firmly back to the scenery.
The most incongruous thing about the journey, in Aaron’s perspective, was all the signs for parking garages. It really shouldn’t have been if he’d put any thought into it, but he was still a bit out of sorts so it caught him off guard.
New York City was famous for public transit and, even more than that, for people walking. But it enjoyed that fame, at least in part, because the traffic in the city was infamously atrocious. Obviously, for there to be traffic there had to be a lot of cars and, just as obviously, they had to go somewhere when they weren’t on the road.
Despite living in metropolitan areas his entire life, that simple aspect of city living had never seemed like a thing you’d find in New York — or at least in Manhattan — to Aaron. He felt a little embarrassed about that, because it was so obvious in hindsight and he liked to think of himself as both fairly attentive and a realist.
Aaron was still looking out the window when he heard a brief snort of laughter beside him. From the front seat, Albert turned around to grin at Kiara.
“Cut him some slack,” Griffin said. “It’s his first time in The City and there’s no place like it on Earth.”
Aaron shuddered to hear the capitalization there and turned his attention back to the car for a moment. He decided not to comment, though, because he wasn’t really sure what he would even say and he certainly didn’t have the New York cred to do anything other than talk out of his ass.
“Don’t worry, we’ll be there soon,” Kiara said, smirking. “You’ll love the place, by the way. Coolest place in town.”
“Where’s that?”
“Times Square,” Albert said, grinning widely.
Aaron gave the rat bastard a look he hoped conveyed all the biting sarcasm he was bottling up. He might have never been to New York, but he knew enough to know that New Yorkers avoided Times Square like the plague. It was, essentially, a fully-commodified tourist trap. Albert didn’t seem to be picking up on the withering sarcasm being silently directed his way or, more likely, didn’t care. If he did, he’d be recoiling in pain, no doubt. Instead, he gave Aaron two thumbs up and turned back to face the front.
Barely a minute later, their nondescript sedan was crawling through one of the most famous, most visited, and most annoying places on the planet — a billboard-infested plaza that saw more than a quarter of a million people pass through it on any given day. It was one thing to pass nearby if you were going to a theatre for a show — something Aaron hadn’t allowed himself to think about for more than a few seconds at a time to avoid getting overexcited — and another thing entirely to be going to the place itself.
What kind of magic shit can we do in Times Square, the most banal place in the world? Aaron wondered. Is the green M&M secretly a dragon and the M&M Store is her lair? Is getting a handjob from a knockoff cartoon mascot part of an ancient ritual? Maybe we have to break bread at the fucking Olive Garden to honor Fast Food Jesus or something.
Aaron settled back in his seat, swallowing his frustration and pointedly not paying attention to the outside world. He didn’t know if this was some kind of hazing since his protectors seemed to be prone to jokes, but he was determined not to gawk at Times fucking Square.
It was something of a challenge when they passed by a strange, squat glass building with a flat blue roof and some kind of art deco sign atop it that read New York Police Department. Aaron hadn’t even known there was a weird little police station in Times Square.
It’s just so… visible, he thought. It’s like the TARDIS in reverse.
It made sense when he took a second to think about it — why wouldn’t you want a highly visible police station or substation in a place jam-packed with tourists? — but having it just jump out at him like that had rung the bell on some kind of cognitive dissonance.
After several more minutes crawling through mid-morning traffic — covering an entire block and a half! — they pulled into one of those parking garages Aaron had never realized existed. As soon as they were off the road, the demeanor of the three protectors changed completely, growing intensely watchful.
Griffin circled them around the subterranean structure several times and finally parked next to an unobtrusive security door. While he and Albert stepped out of the car to check their surroundings, Kiara held Aaron in the backseat.
After a scan of their surroundings, Albert punched a code into an easily-overlooked keypad next to the door, opened it, and held it ajar. Only then did Kiara usher Aaron out of the vehicle, quickly guiding him to, then through, the metal door.
They traveled on foot for five minutes, passing through two long hallways and three more security doors, until they finally emerged into a small office waiting room. The sudden change from concrete tunnels to a musty reception area left Aaron blinking. One of the walls was entirely made of tall windows, revealing they were on the ground floor looking out at Times Square. The building had to be right in the plaza, but Aaron had no idea which building it was. None of the flocks of people passing by outside gave so much as a glance at the windows.
“Welcome to the Crossroads of the World,” Griffin said with a smile.
Everything in the small reception area was as bland as it could possibly be, including the man sitting behind the small reception desk. He was reading a magazine and looking tremendously bored but Aaron didn’t fail to notice that the humdrum receptionist had one hand hidden under the desk, where it could be doing anything — like pointing a gun at them.
Or maybe it’s not a gun, but a wand of disintegration or something awesome like that, he realized.
They were only in the excruciatingly dull room long enough for Albert, Griffin, and Kiara to take turns prodding some kind of decorative metal tchotchke on the reception desk with their index fingers. The little metal object must have been more than it appeared; the receptionist’s humdrum demeanor didn’t change, but Aaron saw his eyes focus intently on the decoration each time it was touched.
It was possible the ornament carried some kind of enchantment for identification or detection. It was equally possible his three security guards made a habit of poking the receptionist’s bric-à-brac and this was the latest maneuver in some kind of cold war between them.
Beyond the waiting room were yet more doors and hallways, though not nearly as long as the tunnels that had brought them from the garage and not made of unadorned concrete. After a short walk, they came to an unassuming door that opened onto a set of wooden stairs. The staircase had a look of great age to it, the kind of sturdiness you saw in old growth lumber but very well worn.
After walking down about a flight’s worth of steps, the walls and stairs turned from wood to cut stone. As they delved deeper, the light sources grew more and more archaic. At first, they were modern overhead lamps then were replaced by old yellow bulbs with hazy covers in steel cages, then thick iron lamps, and finally to something that resembled gas lanterns from the turn of the previous century. These last lanterns produced a light with a faint blue tinge and had no visible flame. All told, they climbed down the stairs for what Aaron guessed was three or four storeys worth of steps.
Two solid wood doors stood at the bottom, opening on their own at their approach and revealing a wide room cut from the natural stone. Across the room was another pair of doors, broader than the last, and made from great, carved slabs of stone banded with bronze. They remained closed.
A dragon was carved in relief on each of the doors, done in a heraldic style, as if they should adorn a banner or be holding a coat of arms between them. The dragons were standing upright and facing each other.
Are they dragons rampant? Or is that only for lions? Aaron wondered.
Albert, Griffin, and Kiara all settled into the room — milling about or leaning against the walls — so it seemed like they would be waiting for everyone else to arrive.
Aaron kept his attention on the carved doors. He had no way to learn or discover anything about them and knew next to nothing about heraldry, but it beat stewing in his juices about the life-or-death mystery task he was about to face. Fixating on that was a good way to start catastrophizing, so he decided a little low-grade anxiety in the background was far more preferable to letting it ramp up until he felt like he had to do something.
Whatever might come, he wouldn’t have to wait very long.