My Mother Teaches Me Where The Money Comes From

The amusement park closes at ten. I had arrived at nine fifty-five, in handcuffs (eventual), with a rabbit, after surviving a dragon. This is the kind of record that follows you.

I felt the fear the moment I walked through the empty front gate — the attendant was on his phone, the Serpent's Spine roller coaster behind a *closed for renovations* fence was, even from the parking lot, unmistakably the wrong shape in the dark. The fear was specific: I was thirteen years old, I had forty dollars and a rabbit, and nobody except Megan knew where I was, and Megan's knowledge was going to expire at midnight.

I felt it again when I saw the green eyes.

A man on a bench in front of the Tilt-A-Whirl. Wearing a traditional Chinese silk court robe over a charcoal-gray business suit. Like someone had mashed two centuries together at a costume party. He looked at me. I looked away. He stood up. He followed.

I went around the chain-link fence (a strip of it had been peeled back, like someone had been here before) and into the construction zone. The Serpent's Spine loomed over me. The first hill, the apartment-building one, blocked out half the sky.

I turned around.

The man was right behind me.

"Hello," he said.

The voice of a maître d'. British accent. Eyes the color of swimming-pool tiles.

A different green from Charles's blue.

A different brother. Half-brother, he would correct.

"You're Shen's," I said.

"Half-brother. My name is Ao." He bowed slightly. "I am the unmemorable one."

"What do you want with my sister."

"Your sister is no concern of mine, lotus prince. Your sister is concern of the king. I am only here for you."

"The king."

"You will meet him. In time."

Behind him, on top of the Serpent's Spine, a single roller-coaster car began rolling backward. The wheels chuckled along the rails. A support beam at the base cracked in half.

"On second thought," I squeaked, "let's talk later."

The man laughed. His human disguise melted away like ice cream in a microwave on high.

What stood before me was another dragon. Smaller than Shen, more crocodile than classical Chinese, all rough scales the color of canal water, too many teeth, eyes the size of dinner plates.

"You may have defeated my brother," he hissed. "But I am far more *formidable.*"

"You're shorter than him."

"I am more *compact.*"

His tail whipped around and sent me flying into a popcorn stand.

Stale kernels exploded everywhere.

Rufus, who had jumped clear of the backpack right before impact, landed on top of me and bit me on the cheek.

"OW."

"Wake up, *idiot,*" said a voice that sounded like Rufus but came from a much bigger throat.

Rufus had grown. To the size of a large house cat. His fur was static-y, like someone had just rubbed him with a balloon.

"Did you just talk?"

"RUN, JACKIE."

That was definitely a talking rabbit.

The dragon advanced slowly. His tail dragged through the dirt.

"Your rabbit looks delicious. Appetizer before main course."

He breathed green fire at Rufus, who suddenly grew to the size of a golden retriever and absorbed the flames like a fuzzy shield. I could see it hurting him. His ears went down. His teeth clenched.

Something snapped inside me.

Nobody. Hurts. My. Rabbit.

Heat surged through my body like someone had replaced my blood with carbonated lava. My vision went triple. Each image surrounded by writhing auras of color. The dragon's aura was a sick swimming-pool green. Rufus's was warm and silver. Mine was red. Bright red. Alive red. The same color as my scarf.

The scarf wrapped around my neck without me having put it there.

I jumped, and I jumped, fifteen feet straight up, which should have been impossible. Blue lightning crackled around my fists. The lightning had, weirdly, a sound. It sounded like a tuning fork being struck inside a tin can. Tasted like pennies. Smelled like a thunderstorm trying to apologize.

"Impossible! You're not ready! You haven't awakened!"

I punched him in the snout.

The world exploded. Blue energy erupted from my fists, spreading across the dragon's scales like electric ivy. He screamed, a sound like nails on chalkboards mixed with dying cats. The roller coaster behind him groaned and collapsed, two years of "construction" turning into kindling.

For one full second, I was floating.

Then the heat left my body all at once, like someone had pulled a plug, and gravity remembered me.

I hit the ground. My knees buckled. Vision shrank back to taped-glasses normal. Rufus shrank back to small-mammal normal and skittered behind me.

The dragon got up.

Hurt. Snout smoking. One wing punctured. Scales charred.

But up.

"Oh," he said, delighted. "Much better than my brother. The lotus prince is real."

He stalked toward me.

I tried to summon the heat back. I willed it. I closed my eyes. The red in my hands was gone.

I tried again. Nothing. I tried a third time and got a small spark that went out immediately and singed my thumb. The dragon watched this with something I can only describe as professional disappointment.

"Please," I said. "Please, that's all I—"

The dragon raised one clawed foot to crush me.

The last thing I saw was a familiar pair of slippers approaching through the debris.

---

"Hey, ugly," said a voice I knew.

The dragon turned.

My grandfather was standing in the construction zone, holding a wooden staff that was a few inches longer than he was. Same dark wool slacks. Same buttoned cardigan. Same brown leather house slippers.

He was alive.

He was walking toward a thirty-foot dragon with the same expression he wore when he was about to ask the waiter to turn down the AC. He was standing in front of a thirty-foot dragon with the posture of a man who was about to ask the waiter for a side of rice, and he was not afraid, and that was the part I could not look at directly.

"GRANDPA."

"Stay down, Jackie."

"You're—"

"I said stay down."

The dragon laughed. The charred snout crackled.

"You. Guardian. Old man with stick."

"Old man with stick and several thousand years of context. Your masters in Beijing have been busy. They forgot to ask the kitchen what the kitchen knows."

The dragon roared. The roar was a no.

"I thought not," Grandpa said. "Bureau memo, then."

The dragon launched.

Grandpa moved like water. That is the closest I can get. The dragon's first strike, claws the size of kitchen knives, passed through where Grandpa had been a quarter-second before. Grandpa's staff came down on the dragon's wrist with a sound like a sledgehammer hitting a frozen turkey, and the sound, when it landed, smelled like ozone and wet asphalt.

There were flourishes I could not see. Half his strikes were faster than my eye. The dragon recoiled from points on its body where Grandpa wasn't anymore. Grandpa hit the dragon in the throat, the eye, the eye, the spine.

The dragon screamed and turned to water.

Just like Chef Shen.

Grandpa stood in the middle of it all. He shook his slippers.

"Two down," he said quietly. "Many to go. Most of them clerks."

He turned to me. He put his palm on my cheek. His hand was warm. The same dry papery skin from his Christmas hugs. The warmth in his hand was not a reflex. It was a thing he had been keeping.

"Jackie. Listen carefully."

"Grandpa, you're bleeding—"

"Listen."

I shut up.

"They are coming. More of them. Tonight. The Serpent's Spine is a portal. They are coming through."

"Through to what."

"To here. To this park. To this city. They cannot find us, but they can find you. So you must go where they cannot follow."

He bent and picked something out of the pool-water, a small silver token, about the size of a quarter, that the dragon had been wearing on a thin chain around what had been his neck. He pressed it into my palm and closed my hand around it.

"Show this to the next person who asks. Don't show it to anyone before that. You'll know."

"Grandpa—"

"Take a cab. Tell the driver Chinatown. Get out at the dim sum restaurant on Stockton with the green awning and the cracked window. Knock on the basement door three times and then once. The door will be very small. They will think you are lost. Show them the token."

"Come with me."

He smiled. The smile of a man saying goodbye to a kid he had been preparing to say goodbye to for thirteen years. Not performing the smile. Spending it.

"I cannot."

"Why."

"Because they are coming, and one of us must stay so that the rest can leave."

The hill behind the Serpent's Spine creaked. The collapsed roller-coaster track shifted. From beneath the metal, in the dust, something moved.

Not the dead dragon.

Something else.

Grandpa straightened.

He took the staff in both hands. Whatever pool of strength he had been pulling from, he pulled deeper. He was not afraid. He was standing there with the face of someone who had already made the most expensive decision in the room, and it had been made a long time ago, and it was not negotiable, and he was not afraid.

"Jackie. Run."

"No."

"RUN."

Rufus, who had crawled onto my shoulder, dug his back claws into my collarbone and yanked. Hard.

I ran.

---

I ran through the food court, past the Tilt-A-Whirl, out the front gate.

Behind me, the construction zone roared. It was bigger than a dragon. Then I heard another roar, and it was Grandpa shouting in a language that wasn't English or Mandarin, older, with consonants I think humans aren't supposed to make.

Then there was an explosion.

The Serpent's Spine collapsed.

The dust cloud rose into the night sky in the shape of, briefly and absurdly, a lotus.

Then it was just dust.

"GRANDPA!"

Two pairs of shiny boots blocked my view. Flashlights blazed in my eyes.

"Are you the kid who destroyed the roller coaster."

"My grandfather is in there."

"Yeah, kid. Sure."

The handcuffs clicked around my wrists.

A police cruiser pulled up. The taller officer pulled out his phone, looked at the screen, looked at me.

"Son. What is your name."

"Jackie Lee."

He sighed. Deeply.

"Jackie. You wouldn't happen to be the same Jackie Lee who was at the Chinatown restaurant explosion four days ago. Would you."

"Yes, sir."

He sighed again, more deeply.

The other officer was already calling it in.

"Yeah, dispatch. We got an active arson and B-and-E juvenile at Castle Gardens. The Lee kid. Yeah. Need a wagon."

I looked back at the entrance.

The dust cloud was still settling.

In my front pocket, the silver token was warm against my leg. Not the warmth of a thing that had been in a warm place. The warmth of a thing that was, itself, doing something. I noticed this the way you notice something you cannot explain and file it in the part of your brain labeled *later.*

In the corner of my eye, where the dust cloud had been, something pitch-black and shaped vaguely like a tall thin person stood in the construction-zone wreckage. Faceless. Still. Watching me with attention that had no face to put it on. I didn't know what it was. I knew it was watching me specifically, and I knew from the way Rufus pressed himself into my collarbone that whatever it was, it was not something that had come through the Serpent's Spine with the dragons.

I blinked.

It was gone.

Rufus, against my collarbone, shook.

The cruiser door slammed.

I had three thoughts in a row.

The first was: *Anna was still missing.*

The second was: *I had failed.*

The third, and this was the one I would not articulate until much later, on the cot in the kitchen storage closet, was: *Megan said I had to be back by midnight.*

That third thought carried more than its words. Megan had given me forty dollars from her own piggy bank. She had said *go save our sister,* which was not the sentence of a person running a backup plan. It was the sentence of a person who had no backup plan. The midnight deadline was not a curfew. It was a signal. And I had missed it, and somewhere in a house in Palo Alto, Megan was at her desk, looking at a clock whose face had a crack in it, doing the math.

She was not going to wait.

The cruiser, in the next two hours, took me to a precinct, to a juvenile-holding cell, to a folding chair beside an officer who was Apologizing About Late-Night Procedures.

Then, somewhere around 1:30 AM, the lights in the precinct flickered.

The officer beside me looked up.

The clock on the wall reset itself.

The fluorescent panel above us went dim.

The walls of the precinct un-rendered. For one second, I saw the gray wallpaper of a different room behind them.

I was no longer in the precinct.

I was in a small classroom with fifty identical desk-chairs.

In front of me was a Scantron sheet that went all the way to letter H.

In my hand was a number-2 pencil.

The fortune-cookie slip in my pocket was the temperature of a cup of tea.

I looked at the Scantron.

*Which of the following ways is the best way to become immortal?*

This was not the worst night of my life anymore.

This was the morning of the next thing.

Above me, in Palo Alto, Megan looked at the kitchen clock. 11:59 PM. She set down her pen, took a deep breath, and walked upstairs to wake my parents up. She had her notebook. She had the Trinity College printout. She had a plan. She also had something she had not put in the plan, which was the part of her that was my sister first and an investigator second, and that part was doing what it always did when I was in trouble, which was hold very still and not let it show.

She did not yet know that her brother had been removed from the precinct by an underground school of Chinese magic before the warrant could get filed.

She would find out Tuesday.

She would, when she did, write this in her notebook: *Younger brother removed from juvenile holding by extra-jurisdictional cosmic body. Note for case file. Will require diplomatic handling.*

She would underline *diplomatic handling* twice.

I picked up the pencil.

I had no idea what I was about to do.

I uncapped my emergency chapstick.

I had a bad feeling I was about to cheat death with cherry-flavored lip balm.

I was, as it turned out, completely correct.