Satis mortem
his movements Dragon didn’t agree with my request.
His flying, even when maneuvering evasively with dives and swoops and loops, was always so thrillingly effortless, like I was traveling on the back of a fine satin ribbon no matter how hazardous our path became. Now he flew in rapid, clipped movements. He dove erratically and cut around corners unsteadily like a driver too angry or distracted to shift smoothly.
“He has a family!” I shouted, trying to quell Dragon’s frustration. “We can’t just leave him there!”
“He had a family,” Dragon shouted back. “Who knows how long the real Jonah has been dead and inhabited by the chief lackey of Obrenox.”
That hit me like a snowball in the face. All I could think of was his nainai visiting from Beijing and making him that soup that was always stinking up the lunchroom. I pictured the old woman, so proud of her one grandson, not knowing that she labored over some twisted clone of her dead Jonah. Angry, indignant tears stung my eyes.
“We’re taking him back,” I said as I scanned piles of smoldering dronettes and dismembered clones that dotted the pastel ground below us. “There! I see him – the original one. He’s just there, by that … that head ….”
My stomach somersaulted as I finished that sentence. Dragon shot straight down, hovered briefly over the blood-soaked body to which I had pointed, and, looking back to see me nod, grabbed ahold of it. He tossed the body upon his back with all of the care of someone throwing a sleeping bag back on top of a shelf. I grimaced as I adjusted where I sat. I twisted to the side so I could keep one arm around Dragon’s neck and the other holding onto Jonah’s shirt. I didn’t dare touch his body.
You are secure? Dragon’s voice came tired, depleted, to my mind.
Tears pooled at my dingey shirt collar, already moist from blood and sweat.
I nodded.
He didn’t see me. He didn’t have to.
Dragon launched upward, and somehow, as he darted through the still-unrelenting waves of dronettes, we blasted out of the Seventh.
The night sky of my own familiar atmosphere blasted a welcome chill across my face. I breathed in, slowly and gratefully, the air’s clean chill. Dragon’s wings flapped slowly in descent. We skimmed rooftops and chimney tops of unassuming houses in unknowing rows on unwitting streets. No one down there, not that lady jogging or that man walking his dog or that family on bikes, knows anything of the wonderful veil that keeps them oblivious and ignorant. Lamps flickered along empty sidewalks and asphalt rolled nonchalantly beside them. It all looked so quiet, vapid, inconsequential.
“There, that one,” I said and pointed to a small yellow two-story with red shutters and a neatly groomed lawn.
Dragon noiselessly landed in the freshly mowed grass. He cast a terrifying shadow onto the garage door in the lamplight. I slid off and, keeping a hand on Jonah’s still-warm body, walked with Dragon up to the front porch.
The door was red. A small buddha figurine sat, fat and smiling, on the wooden planks near a welcome mat. The windows were dark, but I could see the rosy glow of light creeping through the sides of the drawn shades from inside.
“I … I can’t do it,” I whispered suddenly to Dragon. “Can we just leave him? I mean, that’s better than nothing, right?”
Dragon said nothing. He just lowered down, bending forward, so the body started to slip off toward me. I grabbed onto it – it, I thought, is a person, a boy, a friend? No, but a classmate … no, an enemy? – and I laid him as best I could atop the welcome mat. I folded his arms over his chest. That hid some of the blood, anyway. I straightened out his legs. And, as I leaned down to the close the glassy, empty eyes, and smooth the matted black hair, I heard stirring from inside.
Panicked, I leapt onto Dragon and we launched straight up.
“Wait,” I whispered. We hovered in the starlight, out of sight in the night’s cover.
I heard the door open.
I heard a woman scream.
I heard a man cry out, something in Mandarin.
I heard sobbing.
I couldn’t tell which was theirs, fading in the distance, and what was my own as we flew away.