Adamant Blood

It wasn’t a real dragon alert.

It might have actually been worse than that. And yet...

The alert lasted an hour.

Nothing happened in that hour. No buildings exploded under archmage magics. No nuclear bombs lit up any horizons at all. That is what everyone expected. None of that happened.

In that entire hour, Mark rapidly went from confused, to furious, and then to helpful. He found himself in a way he had thought he had lost, when he lost his own faculties, when he lost his hope for a future.

He helped people.

“Hello, ma’am,” Mark said to an old woman who was flop sweating, as he handed her a water bottle. “They’re handing them out over there and I saw you could use one.”

Mark had a few bottles in his hands. He was one of the people ‘handing them out over there’.

The old woman was frazzled, but at the appearance of a water bottle in front of her face she came back to herself. “Oh yes. I could… Ah.” She took the bottle and was about to open the cap, but her hands weren’t working right. Her fingers were locked in weird positions. She asked, “Can you be a dear and open it up for me. My hands aren’t… Arthritis, you know.”

Mark was sweating a little as he walked around, helping to hand out water bottles and talk to people who were losing it, so he was glad to spend another minute with the older woman. But he wasn’t sure if he could actually open the bottle. He took the bottle and tried anyway, saying, “Here goes! I’m not sure if I can— Oh! I did it.”

The old woman chuckled a little bit, wondering why Mark was having trouble, and then her eyes went wide. “Oh! You’re a patient, too! What brought you to the PTC?”

“A coma.” Mark handed the bottle back. “It’s been something like 75 days since a 4 month coma, and I can finally open water bottles again.”

The woman breathed out. “That’s a tough one. You take care of yourself now— Have you heard about the phones yet?” She looked around the room, and then back to her phone. “It’s not working yet.”

Mark had wanted to call his parents and they had probably wanted to call him, but the phone lines were all telling everyone the same thing, every time they tried to access exterior services. ‘Dragon Alert is in place. Think about your own life right now.’ Anytime anyone opened up their phone, that is what they saw when they tried to access the calling system. Texts didn’t even work.

The City AI was overloaded, for sure. All of its efforts were probably focused on whatever was going on out there.

Mark said, “I don’t know about any of that, ma’am. I guess the City AI is busy. But I heard people talking about it, and if it isn’t letting us call out or do anything like that, then we’re as safe as can be. It’s devoting a lot of resources to helping others right now. Whoever needs the help is getting the help, and right now we don’t need the help.”

The old woman sighed. “I… I suppose so.” She began drinking the water and staring off into space.

Mark nodded a little, but he was pretty sure the woman didn’t register that. She was still drinking her water and looking better by the moment, though, even with all of the emotional trauma happening to her right now.

Mark went to help someone else.

He handed out blankets.

He helped an old man get to the bathroom when all the other nurses and therapists were busy, and the man simply had to go.

Mark almost faltered, head dizzy from exertion, as he carried around a basket of candy bars from the vending machines to hand out to people who wanted one, and a lot of people wanted one.

The physical therapy center had been packed for mid-afternoon classes and therapy, so there were lots of people. 197 people, according to some number Mark heard touted somewhere along the way. Only 50 of the people there were in actually-good shape, and only a few of those people had actual powers at all. Aside from a healer of Hearthswell, the only large powers present in the building were in the form of four brawnies and one technomage. Everyone else was baseline, or baseline-adjacent. This was a Curtain Protocol therapy center, so that made sense.

Mark passed the office where the technomage was getting yelled at by some older man who wanted to know why the phones weren’t working. Mark couldn’t help the old man. The old man was furious and possibly suffering from dementia, and his handler was trying to get him to leave the technomage alone.

Mark might be able to help the others in the room, though.

Mark stuck his head in the room and held up his basket of candy bars, trying to defuse the situation. “Candy bar, anyone?”

The angry man stopped yelling, confused for a moment—

The man’s nurse rapidly hooked into the distraction, saying, “Perfect timing, young man! Gerald. You need to keep your blood sugar controlled until Marty can come pick you back up, Gerald. So how about you take a candy bar—” The nurse spied into Mark’s basket, saying, “Ah! That’s a dark venus. You love those bars, right, Gerald?”

Mark grabbed the bar out and held it forward.

Gerald scowled heavily, but he looked around, saw what was happening, and he pulled himself back. He snatched the candy bar from Mark’s hand and then stormed out of the room, complaining, “Godsdamned AIs got jumped up powers we never should have voted in that shit in the 90s nothing good ever comes from…”

The man’s complaint vanished into all the other voices in the hallway outside the technomage’s office.

The technomage said, “Thanks. That was…” The technomage shook his head, asking, “Got something with granola?”

Mark fished out one of those and set it on the man’s desk, asking, “We’re not in any danger, right?”

“It’s a fucking dragon attack!” the man said, as he threw up his arms. The rows of servers at the back of the room all glittered with lights at that emotional motion. “They’re smart kaiju! But at the same time…” He frowned. “It’s a fucking archmage, ain’t it. Not a dragon at all… But we don’t… We don’t have an archmage alert. I don’t fucking know…” All the fight went out of him. “Sorry, kid.”

Mark did not react to the outburst, merely nodding, saying, “Thanks for keeping the phones active at all. A lot of people are reading books they have saved and playing games. Solitaire is remarkably popular. That is you, right?”

The man sighed. “Yeah. That’s me. I got a few processes going on, allowing that much. The City AI ain’t fighting me on that.”

“Is there any way I can help?”

“… If you want…” The man returned to his computer, tapping at his keyboard, text in black boxes flashing across the screen. A few things flashed. The ‘!!Dragon Attack!!’ box appeared, the red and white striped alarm still happening. But a new box appeared, and what looked like a simple messaging system flickered to life… And then the messaging system died, overtaken by the warning box yet again, along with another message to shelter in place. The man flickered through text boxes again, trying to get something to work as he told Mark, “If you want to help… I’ve been trying to get texting back up for the last hour. If anything comes back, that will come back first. For now, I think I can set up a queue system for all the people in the building. They can send out texts and those texts will be captured by the queue and be sent out when we’re not locked out of the system. Just tell people to be patient.”

Mark smiled a little. “That’s gonna be hard to explain to people and seems like it would cause more confusion than not, and so I will not tell them that. I will instead tell them that you’re working on it, and making some progress with the texting messages, and to not bother you. Want me to put a note on the door?”

The man frowned at the beginning of Mark’s words, but then his eyes went wide. “Yes! And lock the door again. I think one of the patients has a Knack for opening doors and making them stay open; I’ll just put a server in the way this time.”

Mark grabbed a piece of paper from the guy’s desk and wrote ‘working on it! texting will come up first’ on the paper, and then he taped it to the front of the door. “Good luck!” he told the guy, as he locked the door and closed the door on his way out—

He was one step from the door when the door clicked and then swung back open.

“Fucking hell!” said the technomage, who was named Jim according to the nametag on the door. Jim got up and shut the door and shoved a chair in the way. The door still unlocked of its own accord, but the chair blocked it from opening. Jim stared at the door, which was trying and failing to open. He declared, “Whatever!”

Jim let it be.

Mark continued down the way.

An hour of waiting for something to happen turned into two hours of waiting.

And then, 3 hours after the death of Mistress Storm and Red Thunder, all at once, every phone in every hand and pocket flickered. ‘Dragon Alert’ changed to ‘Dragon Warning’. Phone calls started happening, and everyone was talking at once on any phone they could reach.

A panic that Mark had been ignoring, was suddenly there. Right in his face. Demanding to be noticed. Mark’s heart beat hard as he grabbed his phone from his pocket right as a phone call came through from Mom. He answered, “Mom! You’re okay?”

“Oh thank the gods!” Mom exclaimed. “You okay, Mark?”

“I am! We’re here at the center. Stuck, sheltering in place. You?”

“I’m at a client’s house, was cleaning. Stuck here, too. I have to call your dad, now. Love you!”

Mark was about to say he could patch them into a multicall, but as he looked at his phone, he saw a popup; a call from Dad. “I have a call coming in from him right now.” He answered it, patching them all together. “Dad! You okay?!”

“Markus?!” Mom asked—

Right as Dad said, “I’m here! Donna, too? You’re all good? You two together right now?”

And just like that, the panic that Mark hadn’t allowed himself to experience, was both there, and then drifting away. Mom and Dad probably experienced the same sort of thing, their voices going from worried to accepting, right alongside his own. Mark wasn’t sure exactly what was said, but he had to sit down to finish the rest of the call—

“It was Addashield, wasn’t it?” Mom asked, bringing Mark back to the moment.

Mark’s heart beat hard. “It was. I recognized him. I think other people are already talking about it but… It wasn’t a sure thing, right? It could have been an illusion?”

Mom said nothing.

Dad said, “When they let us leave the dock to come back home, I expect to see enforcers there.”

Mark made sure no one could directly overhear him as he asked, “What happened to him?”

Mom hissed, “I don’t know and I am SO MAD I—” She cut herself off.

“I don’t know,” Dad said, “We’ll find out more than the public, I’m sure. Don’t talk to anyone yet about this. Ignore it until we’re back home.”

“I was already ignoring it, so that’s fine by me,” Mark said.