My Dinner Goes Up In Dragon Smoke

I had been at the Society of Ancient Traditions for thirty-six hours. I had survived two dragons. I had cheated on a Scantron with cherry chapstick. I had been claimed, provisionally, by an entire Council of immortal beings.

I was, that evening, eating dinner alone at a table for one in the corner of an enormous candle-lit dining hall.

The food was the best I had ever had.

The company was me.

I had become, in thirty-six hours, simultaneously the most important child in the cosmic order and the most-alone kid in the room.

This is, I am told, fairly standard for the chosen-one experience.

---

The third dragon hit the altar at 8:14 PM. I know this because Wei's wristwatch (Wei wore an actual wristwatch like a man who did not trust the twenty-first century) was the last thing I saw before the lanterns went out, and it had said 8:13.

The bowl of plum wine exploded outward in a cone of purple. The paper crane was crushed. The salt sprayed in every direction. Three hundred kids screamed. Tables overturned. The Council was on its feet, and I noticed, with a cold pang, that it was not attacking. The Council, the Eight Immortals, was backing toward the wall.

This was not because the Council was afraid.

It was because the Council was watching.

This dragon was younger than Shen. Younger than Ao. Scales green-going-gold, the color of an oil slick on a wet road. Eyes too large. Teeth the wrong shape for laughing, which did not stop him from laughing.

"The third!" he hissed. "I am the third! I am the youngest! And I will be the one who eats the lotus prince!"

Mei grabbed my arm. "Move."

"WAIT," boomed Ms. Bai, in a voice I had not previously known she had. "HE STAYS."

The dragon turned.

He saw me.

His pupils contracted to slits.

"Yes, little prince," he said. "You stay."

The room went dead silent.

Lucy, across the hall at the He Xiangu table, stood up. Her hand was on her dao. Her shoulders were at the height Wei had told me to run from. She was not running.

She stayed.

She mouthed, across thirty feet of dining hall: *use the brush.*

I had not used the brush in combat.

The only thing I had ever done with that brush was sit in the dark on my first night in the dorm and write the character for *home* in the air over my pillow, half-hoping something would happen and half-hoping nothing would. It had made a small gold glow and dissolved. I had held it for another hour, not sleeping, deciding whether the glow counted as a yes or a maybe. I had no idea whether it worked in direct combat with a thirty-foot dragon who had just destroyed the central altar of a dining hall serving three hundred people.

I was about to find out.

I uncapped it.

The dragon lunged.

I dove sideways. He overshot. He hit a table and turned it into matchsticks.

"USE THE BRUSH, JACKIE," Lucy shouted.

The dragon turned for me again.

I drew, in the air over the floor between us, the largest single character I had ever attempted.

*Stop.*

The character glowed gold and held.

The dragon, mid-lunge, claws extended, mouth open, all of him in motion, stopped.

Frozen.

Just for one second.

Just long enough.

I yanked the scarf off my neck, threw it the way I had seen Lucy throw a dao, and the scarf, of its own accord and glowing, whipped across the dining hall and wrapped around all four of the dragon's legs.

The dragon hit the ground hard enough to crack the tile.

I stood in three inches of spilled plum wine with a brush in my hand, looking at a bound dragon. My first thought, the actual first thought and not the heroic one, was that my socks were ruined.

"WEAPON," Ms. Bai shouted.

"WHAT WEAPON?"

"ANY WEAPON. PICK ONE."

I looked around wildly. The closest thing to a weapon was a dish-pit spatula leaning against the wall behind the altar, the long industrial kind, the size of a small canoe paddle, made of metal.

I grabbed it.

The moment my hand closed around the handle, the spatula changed.

It got longer. Heavier. The flat metal head re-folded into a long blade with a curved leaf-shaped tip. The handle re-formed into something gripped, weighted, balanced. A red glow ran up its length.

I was holding a spear.

I was holding a spear that was on fire.

"OH," said Mei, very quietly.

I walked forward.

The dragon thrashed. The scarf was holding. He was bigger than the scarf and the scarf was holding anyway. (Later, I would think about this. The scarf was holding a thirty-foot dragon with a personal vendetta and several thousand years of motivational fuel. The scarf was, apparently, not interested in losing. I had gotten the scarf for my birthday. My grandfather had not, evidently, considered this a casual gift.)

"Lotus prince," the dragon hissed. "The king will eat you for breakfast. The king will eat your sister for lunch. The king will eat —"

I drove the spear into his eye.

He screamed once. Went still.

He turned to water, just like both of his brothers. Gallons of pool-green water flooded across the dining hall.

I capped the Truthsayer.

I lowered the spatula-spear, which dimmed and reverted to a spatula.

I stood in approximately four inches of dragon-water with socks that were already ruined and now had company. The spatula was still faintly warm, like it had opinions about its temporary identity and was not entirely done having them.

I put it down.

The spatula, very slowly, hopped off the floor and made its own way back to the dish pit.

Three hundred kids watched the spatula walk away.

Three hundred kids looked at me.

"…hi," I croaked.

---

The Council, which had been backed against the wall, came forward as one.

Floating Person drifted to the front. The small black opening that did the talking opened.

"Show me your right hand."

I held up my right hand.

It was glowing. Not metaphorically. Actually glowing. A faint red light, the same color as the scarf, the same color as the spear-tip, the same color as the aura around my own body when I had punched Ao at Castle Gardens.

Across the hall, Lucy had her hand over her mouth.

She had held the dao through everything, the lanterns going out, the ceiling breaking, the dragon and the scarf and the spatula-that-wasn't, and the hand had stayed on the weapon, correct and disciplined, right up until the moment it moved on its own to cover her mouth instead.

She never decided to do that.

Her body decided.

Mei stepped forward, gently held my wrist, turned my hand over. The red light pulsed.

The Council was murmuring. *Confirmed. Lotus signature. No house, no doubt. Council vote tonight.*

Floating Person turned to face the hall.

"Hail Nezha," Floating Person said, in a voice exactly as deep underwater as it had been in air. "The Lotus Prince has returned."

The hall did not respond. The hall was still in shock.

"Hail Nezha," Floating Person repeated.

Lucy was the first to say it.

"Hail Nezha," she said quietly, from across the hall.

Cao Bin said it next, through gritted teeth. Mei said it. Wei said it. The He Xiangu table said it. Then Lan Caihe. Then Cao Guojiu. Then the rest, until the entire dining hall was saying it. Three hundred kids in a low tired awed murmur, the sound of a class that had not expected a quiz and was now grading it on a curve in real time.

"Hail Nezha. Hail Nezha. Hail Nezha."

Then Floating Person raised one wisp-hand and the murmur stopped.

"One additional thing for the record," Floating Person said. "This dragon was sent by an entity who has a real grievance and a wrong vehicle. The grievance is real. The vehicle is unacceptable. Do not, in the coming days, confuse the two."

The hall said, "Yes, Floating Person."

Floating Person nodded.

"Good. Eat your dinner."

I looked around for somewhere to put my hand that was no longer glowing.

I settled for my pocket.

I felt the old fortune-cookie slip.

*You will soon become the man you always were.*

The glow in my hand faded.

The lanterns flickered back on.

The Council was looking at me.

Mei walked over and took my elbow with the same grip she had been using all day.

"Welcome to the apocalypse, Jackie Lee," she said. "Tomorrow, Field Day. Get some sleep."

"That was tonight."

"That was the appetizer. Field Day is the entree."

She walked me out.

In the corridor, Lucy ran past us, going the other way. As she passed, she grabbed my sleeve and said, very quickly, "Don't sleep. Train. Salle in ten."

She was gone before I could answer.

Mei, at the door of my dorm, paused.

"Jackie."

"Yes."

"Your grandfather did not die. Not yet. I would know."

"How would you know."

She did not answer.

She turned and walked away.

I went into my dorm. Wei was already asleep. Rufus was waiting on my pillow with two carrots in his paws, stolen from somewhere. Offering me one.

"Eat the carrot," he said. "Lucy is correct. Field Day is going to be much worse."

I ate the carrot.

I went to the salle.

We trained until midnight.

When we finally stopped, I lay on the salle floor and stared up at the lantern-lit ceiling.

"You know what's weird," I said.

"Many things are weird."

"I keep being told I have a destiny, and I keep almost dying, and I have not had time to be scared."

Lucy lay down on the floor next to me. Her hair was sweaty against the wood. She smelled, faintly, like jasmine and chalk.

"You'll be scared eventually," she said. "The first time a Council member tells you he has been waiting eight thousand years for you to walk in and you happen to be the kid who, the night before, threw up from the wrong soda. That's when it lands."

"Did it land for you."

"Yeah."

"What did you do."

She was quiet for a while.

"I cried in the kitchen storage closet," she said. "Mei made me tea. I have not told anyone that until now."

"I won't tell anyone."

"You better not."

She sat up.

"Get some sleep, doofus. Field Day is in seven hours."

"Lucy."

"Mm."

"Thanks for showing up."

She paused at the door of the salle. The lantern-light caught her face.

"Don't make me regret it," she said.

She started to leave.

She stopped at the threshold.

She turned back. She looked at me with an expression I would, over the next nine days, learn to recognize: the look she gave when she had just decided something and was, briefly, willing to admit it.

"Jackie."

"Yeah."

"For the record. Yesterday I thought you were a fraud. This morning I thought you were either a fraud or a very lucky kid. Tonight, in the dining hall, when the dragon came through the ceiling and you took eight tenths of a second to *decide* before you uncapped the brush. That was the part that wasn't luck. That was the part that wasn't a fraud. I am telling you so I do not have to tell you again. Don't make me say it twice."

"…okay."

"Goodnight, doofus."

She left.

---

I lay on the floor for a while longer.

The dragon had said: *the king will eat your sister.* He had said it singular. He had not known there were two.

In my dorm bunk, the note from Grandpa was warm.

In my belt, the Truthsayer brush was warm.

Megan, in Palo Alto, had already received a bird. Nine words, past-tense, telling her I had fought and was standing. She had chosen not to call. Not because she didn't want to hear my voice. Because the discipline said the bird was enough, and she believed the discipline. She had a truncated name in a Cayman document she had closed, not tonight's document, holding it until she was sure.

And Anna.

Nine floors below Mountain View, in the pink pajamas, Anna had the lotus in her pocket, a folded drawing the system had already taken once and that she had made again, smaller, hidden. She did not know I was three hundred miles away in a flooded dining hall. She was in her low bed thinking about me the way I push the fortune-cookie words into the air, hoping they go somewhere.

They did not arrive. Not that night.

But I felt something warm in the direction of Mountain View, and I had learned, by then, not to dismiss things I could not account for.

The man I always was had two sisters fighting in rooms he couldn't see, with the only tools each of them had.

I went back to my dorm.

I slept like the dead until the bell at six.

In Beijing, at the same hour, Chairman Long set down his teacup, opened a slim manila folder marked LOTUS PRINCE / JUVENILE / INITIAL ENGAGEMENT, and read the page-and-a-half summary his analytics team had just emailed him. He read it twice. He read it a third time. Then he picked up the phone and dialed a number that rang in the inside pocket of a charcoal silk court robe somewhere under the South China Sea.

He said, in Mandarin, three words.

He hung up.

In his Mountain View hotel room, Charles, the unmemorable middle dragon brother, sat up in bed at 3 AM Pacific time, opened his eyes, and smiled.

Field Day was, as advertised, going to be much worse.