Chapter 1 #2
The guide had talked in a rough, no-nonsense sort of way, designed to shock the tour group.
It had stayed with Kate and it had informed her courses of study.
There was an inescapable chain of cause and effect from that moment to this one.
Some might have called it destiny, but Kate was not inclined to think or speak that way.
Her world view had no room for fate. She and she alone would decide her future.
Then eighteen-year-old Kate had left the invasion site with two missions for that future.
One: she was going to enter the dragon realm.
Two: she was going to survive it. Of course, she’d had to work on mission two before mission one, and throughout her undergrad she’d not been able to even get close to a solution.
The breakthrough hadn’t happened until the first few months of postgrad study, when her supervisor had let her in on a well-guarded little secret: the college had dragon tissue samples recovered from dragon bodies that had fallen in the final battle.
They weren’t supposed to. Technically it was illegal.
Only the government was alleged to have access to dragon tissue, but there was a fair bit of overlap between high-level academics and government research and so a few hundred grams of deceased dragon had made its way into the laboratory freezer, where it sat looking entirely unassuming in an old ice cream container.
Kate had managed to take a little of the material and after several months of research, isolate a compound she believed capable of catching and binding radiation, rendering it harmless.
Initial testing had indicated that it worked, to some degree at least. The radiation of the dragon realm was not quite like Earth radiation, so it would be a trial by fire when she did step beyond the barrier of her realm.
It was surprising to her that nobody else had done it as yet, but perhaps they had and were keeping it quiet.
Or maybe they just hadn’t stumbled onto the secret as yet.
Science was a strange thing; as much as hard work and advanced mathematics made it possible, there was the spark of almost divine revelation that accompanied so many major discoveries.
Kate had felt it when she developed her formula, and she was feeling it again now.
She could hardly stop herself from giggling with excitement as she stashed the equipment in her bag and left the lab.
In the next few hours, everything was going to change.
She could feel it in the air, a sense of destiny that had kept her going through all the hard times when it would have been easier to give up and just let the world crush her.
Even as a small girl, Kate had known that she was capable of great things.
It was an attitude a lot of foster siblings had picked on her for, so it had hidden itself deep inside her, but she’d never lost sight of it and now it seemed to surround her, like a force field, or an invisible cloak, keeping her safe no matter what.
She scuttled back to her apartment, several blocks away from the college. It was a tiny little one-room place, but that wasn’t anything out of the ordinary for New York. She paid quite a premium to have the place to herself, but it was worth it for what she was about to do.
There was almost nothing nice about the place, but Kate had gotten used to ignoring her immediate surroundings in favor of concentrating on her work anyway.
She could have lived somewhere nicer if she’d had roommates, but that never seemed to go well.
She kept odd hours and did odd things and she absolutely couldn’t risk having her plans discovered by someone else.
Living with other people always seemed to arouse suspicion, if not outright hostility.
The apartment had a little galley kitchen next to the bathroom, and it was there that Kate set up her equipment, hastily wiping down the counters where her precious creation was going to sit.
The kitchen was perfect for it, thanks to the counters on either side, which provided two stationary points for the mass of wires and the heavy electromagnets and field generators to sit.
It took several more hours to get everything situated. The sun was shining through the grime of her windows as Kate rubbed her hands together, her eyes searching the wiring to make sure everything was perfect.
“Okay,” she breathed to herself. “This is it.”
Her finger hovered over the first switch, then flipped it. There was a low hum, but nothing happened yet. That was to be expected. The portal needed at least two points of contact to open—it was both the genius and the drawback of her design.
She turned to her right and hesitated, her breath catching in her throat.
There were three options as to what would happen once she threw that switch.
A portal to the dragon realm could open.
Her calculations indicated that was possible.
She could blow her apartment to smithereens.
That was much less likely. Probably. And finally, there was the possibility that nothing would happen at all.
She was afraid of that outcome most of all.
“Just do it,” she lectured herself. “Do it!”
Her finger hit the switch, the current flowed…
…
…and nothing.
It was a dud. It didn’t work. She wasn’t a pioneering scientist. She wasn’t the next Marie Curie. She was just a silly woman standing in the middle of a gross old kitchen with tears in her eyes and mold growing on a half-eaten Thai takeout.
“Dammit!” She slammed her palm down on the counter, making the yet-to-be-washed cutlery dance.
And then it happened. A small spark in the air between the electromagnetic devices.
A little pinprick that lit a spark of hope in her.
She scuttled back, keeping out of its way just in case it did turn out to be volatile.
Her protection was an armchair she had salvaged from the side of the street.
She didn’t know what material it was made of, but she knew it was old and resilient.
Over about thirty seconds to a minute, the portal blossomed before her astounded eyes. There, in her poky little kitchen, was a gateway to another world. She could see bright green grass extending from the base of the portal out into a meadow, and beyond that… she couldn’t quite make it out.
“Oh. My. God.” She murmured the words softly to herself. “This is it. I’ve done it.”
Unlike the initial portals that had ripped the sky apart, this portal was stable and small. It stood like an open doorway, inviting her through.
“I really didn’t think that would work,” she said to herself. She’d worked the math out a million ways, but the odds of the real world conforming to mathematical expectations were always much lower than, well, the odds would imply.
What now?
Should she go rushing through the portal to dance in the beckoning fields of green? It was tempting, but Kate knew the dangers of the dragon realm—well, some of them anyway—and she was definitely not a fool. Transiting through the portal could have dangers of its own.
“I need a test subject,” she murmured to herself, looking around the remainder of her kitchen. Something gleaming caught her eye.
She grabbed the spatula and tossed it through the portal, just in case it burst into flames or exploded or something. It plonked down on the grass and sat there with the warm sun of another world making it gleam.
In an instant, Kate was jealous of the spatula.
It had taken the one small step before she did.
Still, it was best to be cautious about these things.
There were dragons on the other side of that glowing portal.
None were in immediate sight though. She wondered if there were any nearby.
It would be just her luck to have opened her portal to a completely uninhabited part of the dragon realm and end up not meeting any dragons at all.
Of course, there was the possibility that there were more than dragons through that doorway. A certainty, really. A world that supported dragons as an apex species had to have other creatures to support them. Some of them were likely to be aggressive.
There was literally no information regarding the flora and fauna of the dragon realm, let alone its basic geography. The view she had in the middle of her kitchen was the most in-depth look anyone had ever had into the dragon realm.
“The first human in the dragon world,” she intoned. “Well, the first one to survive the irradiated environment. Hopefully.”
She turned to the little carry case of vials all strapped in nice and neatly.
They contained the formula she had been working on for years, a potentially revolutionary treatment that, when ingested, provided prophylaxis against radiation exposure for about a month.
She uncorked one of the vials, put the opening to her lips, and slurped it down.
It tasted vile, like battery acid mixed with mud, but she choked it down regardless.
She’d taken a dose a day earlier too, figuring it would be good to give the formula a chance to saturate her tissues.
This was just a top up, a good luck shot for the road.
She felt a little heady charge from it, a buzz that emboldened her as she looked toward the gleaming door between worlds.
With no reason to wait anymore, Kate grabbed a few supplies and shoved them in a backpack.
Her notebook was first, of course, followed swiftly by a bottle of water, more vials of her personal radiation treatment in case she needed it, and some snacks.
Not much really, but she didn’t need much.
Unlike most intrepid explorers, Kate was able to push the boundaries of human experience from inside her apartment.