CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Triangulation
On hatching day for the sabotaged dragon, I took my lunch to the glass-paneled observatory room. I figured I had half an hour to eat before the egg cracked. But I hadn’t accounted for the gung-ho attitude of a perpetually eager dragon.
I was halfway through my peanut butter and jelly when the purple snout broke through the egg’s surface. Most of our custom jobs take two or three minutes to fully escape the eggshell. This one squirmed free in less than thirty seconds. It scampered over to lick the gloved hands of the hatchery staff.
They nudged it toward the bowl of raw meat. Newborn dragons usually needed a quick infusion of protein; the instinct to eat meat was so powerful that we relied on it for the imprinting process. This one couldn’t settle down long enough to eat, though. It kept leaving the bowl to wander about the room. Jim and Allie were in there trying to clean up, and the thing just wouldn’t leave them alone. At one point, Allie tried pushing the dragon’s head away.
Big mistake. In my mind’s eye, I could see the neurotransmitters flooding synapses, and the neurons firing in a self-multiplying fireworks finale. Every emotion amplified a hundredfold.
The dragon reared back, put its two front paws on her shoulders and licked her full-on in the face. Big, wet, slimy licks. This wasn’t normal behavior; anyone could see that. Jim came up behind the dragon and gently slipped a catchpole over its neck. He eased it over to the food bowl and held it there to eat. Meanwhile, Allie went to the phone and made the call to Herpetology.
I went back to my desk as if things were normal. Half an hour later, I got the summons to Evelyn’s office. I’d kind of developed a reputation for not being the most prompt communicator, mostly because I lost track of time when I got deep into DragonDraft3D. So I gave it ten more minutes before I moseyed over.
“You needed me?” I asked.
Evelyn glanced up. “Yes, come in.”
I stepped inside, and she sealed the door. So that’s how it was going to be.
“There’s a problem with one of your custom dragons,” she said.
I feigned surprise. “Which one?”
“The purple birthday job.”
I knew I didn’t have much of a poker face, so I thought it best to fall back on a role I knew well: touchy, defensive artist. “What kind of problem?” I demanded.
“Behavioral. It wouldn’t leave the hatchery staff alone.”
“It’s supposed to be a child’s pet. You don’t want it friendly?”
She pursed her lips and hit a few keys on her keyboard. “Here’s the vidfeed.”
A new opaque rectangle appeared in the air, showing security footage from the hatching I’d just witnessed. I winced at the close-up view of the purple dragon’s wet tongue sliding up Allie’s face. Yech.
“I guess I see what you mean,” I said.
“Did you use a stock design for this one?”
“No. The simulator said it would be fine, but I didn’t run a comprehensive battery.” Because I’d known it might show up.
“Will you check the design again?” she asked.
“Sure. I’ll do it right now.” I made to leave, then turned back. “What’s going to happen to that one?”
“Probably just a quarantine. It’s not that the dragon is dangerous. But something didn’t quite work,” she said.
I sighed, maybe a touch too theatrically. “Yet another dragon wasted. I’ll take a look at the design.” Then I left, not trusting myself to keep a straight face. I went back into my design and readjusted the transporter gene so that it would function normally. We still had to fill the order, after all.
Sure enough, the simulator code predicted the desired result: a dragon that was friendly but not over-the-top. Then again, that’s what it had said about the first one. This time, however, the guy who wrote the simulator wasn’t trying to fool it. I sent the new design to Evelyn with a note:
Think I found the problem. One of the serotonin transporters. I fixed it and put this one through the works. Sorry about that.
It took twenty minutes for the egg printer to turn on, which told me she’d probably run my new design through the simulator herself. I wasn’t worried, though. It would be exactly what the customer wanted.
With luck, the defective one was already headed for The Farm.
I stayed at work bit later than usual, not because I was busy but because I didn’t like driving the Tesla in heavy traffic. It had collision-avoidance systems and real-time maps and such, but that didn’t stop some moron on a cell phone from sideswiping me on the freeway. My baby was pristine, and I wanted her to stay that way. Only Wong was still there by the time I left,
“Tai t’yen, Wong Xiansheng,” I told him.
“Yes, see you later,” he said.
“Don’t work too late.” Sometimes I wondered if he ever stopped working at all.
Traffic had relented a little by the time I got onto the freeway. I got home just before dusk and found the condo dark. Usually, that meant Octavius had settled somewhere for a nap.
“Octavius?”
A soft noise came from the kitchen, the unmistakable sound of dragon claws on stone tile. I walked in, thinking I’d find him on the floor amid a destroyed box of cereal. But the floor was clean and empty. Octavius dropped down from the ceiling like a ninja assassin. He put his wings over my face, too, effectively blinding me. I cursed and swatted at him until he flew off to perch on top of the micro-refrigerator.
“Missed you, too, buddy.” I rubbed the dry patch of scales on the back of your head. “You’re going to help me clean this up. Then we’ve got work to do.”
I wolfed down some Asian-Mexican fusion leftovers—that food truck had really gotten a hold on me—and then parked myself in front of the computer to get started. The GPS tags were linked to a tracking app that Octavius and I used to log our geocaches. My watch synchronized with it, as did the tracking tags I’d placed on the handlers’ trucks. I pulled up the paths and overlaid them with a map of Phoenix, centered on the company headquarters.
Over the last several hours, the tags had rolled out of the parking garage and headed in a dozen directions. I traced most of them to residential complexes on the outskirts of Phoenix. Interesting that none of the handlers lived downtown, even though it was closer to work. They seemed to prefer the fringe of the desert.
Tag number six was the only one that went far beyond the city limits. In the early afternoon, that vehicle had made a straight shot northeast of Phoenix into the desert wilderness near Gila National Forest. I tried to zoom in on the satellite imagery, but it became blurry when I did so. I zoomed out and moved around to be sure. Sometimes that happened in areas with poor satellite coverage, but I doubted that was the case here. Not this close to a major city, and neatly ensconced between national forests that the federal government liked to keep eyes on. No, this had the stink of paid exclusion to it.
For an exorbitant fee, imaging and mapping companies removed the high-quality satellite coverage of certain sensitive areas. Corporations and wealthy individuals who valued their privacy were all too happy to pay.
Say what you want about the Freedom of Information stuff, but it came in handy from time to time. Especially to those of us who were computer-savvy enough to pay attention. First, I went to the property maps website for Phoenix County. Working back-and-forth between that and my mapping program, I found the property record for the parcel of land where the truck had gone. A few more clicks and I was looking at the details on the property’s registered owner.
Hello, Reptilian Corporation.
That sealed it, for me. Build-A-Dragon had no reason to own a second swath of land out in the desert. Certainly not one that the dragon handlers would visit.
The location was going to be a problem, though. There was a single two-lane road going in and out. No real reason to be on that road unless you were headed to the facility. I couldn’t be sure that I’d tagged all the handlers’ vehicles, either. They were all dusty old trucks and jeeps. My red Tesla would stick out like a sore hallux. That’s a big toe, by the way.
I didn’t love the idea of taking my baby on an unfinished road, either. If only I still had the jalopy. That thing would have blended in just fine. The thought gave me an idea. Two ideas, really. An excuse to call Summer, and a halfway-decent cover story for if we got caught.