Book One: A Storm of Glass and Ashes

Chapter Eleven: Facts and Refraction

Em blushed, and Hawk saw it.

It started with the name Henry Dyson, a man Hawk knew Emile hated. She knew this, she supposed, the way sailors had known where the dragons lay. It was a thing you assumed, like sunrise's inevitability. And the two scientists had robbed each other of research more times than Hawk could count.

But there, to Hawk's joy: the blush. The evidence for the romantic cryptid, more precious and feral than a Tasmanian wolf. That was a thing destroyed by men like Willheim, the men who pen up and poison the wild places. They spent the eras of humanity the way they spent their wealth, splurging on tiger hunts and wide open lawns, on coliseums drenched in the blood of prisoner, slave, and heretic. The survivors are penned, not to salvage for some future generation, but for the promise of a guaranteed trophy. They wanted the world at their pleasure, stretched out and pinned to cards like butterflies. And what remained is tamed, a tourist attraction with no true teeth. Nature conquered, they moved on to the mind, stripping it of things they don't understand. The unsafe, untamed loves, the lusts they cannot fathom, the faiths they cannot achieve. Things no one should touch, for the human heart is the ultimate untamable beast. It is Chimera, it is Scylla, it is the great dragon coiled around the root of the world. It is the lions that guard sheep, devour only the enemy, and turn velvet to the beloved touch. Here came Willheim and men like him, and Chimera is caught, flayed, drowned in formaldehyde. The lion, no threat, is now footstool, bedspread. Not tamed; dissected. People like Emile were reduced to simplistic lovers on television, their homosexual taxonomy a thing of corporate compromise, and both the actors playing them are straight. Teeth pulled. Claws removed. How could there be anything new here, those compromises whisper. How could there be anything worth your eyes or time? And here was Emile, with blush, at the whisper of her supposed enemy's name.

This was undiscovered country.

Hawk was rapidly reviewing a near decade of interactions, and coming up with a thesis she rather liked. It had to do with that blush, roseate across a colorless past.

Well. This could actually be interesting, She thought, and filed it away for later.

So it was Alex who broke the silence after Kaiser left. "The truck threw me," he said, as the truck itself coughed to life and began its retreat from the Yong residence. "Somebody loves that truck. I thought it was him. He almost got me."

"Why isn't it him?" Em said. "It looks like it got polished by a diaper cloth before he drove it over."

"He dressed up for us. That flannel and the designer jeans. That's a nice, folksy lie to put us at ease. Nothing about the persona he walked out for us is genuine, anymore than the first persona we met was the real Kaiser. First time we met him," Alex jerked his chin at Hawk, "he was Willheim, Billionare magnate, Lion of Technology. This time we got Kaiser, farm boy made big and overwhelmed by a disaster that—note how he implied this—isn't of his own making." Alex spread his hands out, a kind of shadowed Mia culpa meant to mirror his words.

"I thought it was real nice he had a name ready to go," Hawk said. She looked faintly sick.

"Yep. Thought you'd broken through to the real man, didn't you?"

She'd never felt so much dismay as she did, right now. She'd been watching, goddamn it. She'd known he was crooked, had all her guards up and in order, and he still got through to her. And there was a mirror of her own expression on Emile's face. Dismay, despair. They'd been less vulnerable to Kaiser than anyone...in theory. Their anarchist philosophy, their trans-ness, both should be considered an inoculation. They recognized the great, rotted belly of the corporate whale...and they'd still fallen for the ruse.