Chapter 17
“Idon’t know anything about the portal,” Kate said for the fiftieth time. “I was off work for a few weeks because I had a really horrible cold, and then obviously there was a state of national emergency with that massive dragon. I mean, wow. That thing was huge!”
The dark-suited men sitting on the couch in her new apartment looked very out of place with the otherwise bohemian low budget décor.
They were not the first to visit her and she knew they would likely not be the last. The government investigation was in full swing, desperate to uncover the source of the portal.
It was a tense time, but Kate was used to keeping her actions out of the light of discovery.
“If you could stick to the facts of your own accounting, ma’am, we have reports of you activating a device attached to a high-flying kite which sent a surge through the grid and shut down the portal.”
“If that was true,” she said, “then I’d be a hero, wouldn’t I? Stopping that giant dragon from eating people?”
“You knocked out power to tens of thousands of homes.”
“Something did,” Kate agreed. “But it wasn’t me.”
She was telling the lie so well she was almost starting to think that it was true.
Maybe she never had been in the dragon realm.
Maybe she never had met the man named Vilka.
If it wasn’t for the fact that the news still couldn’t help showing the same footage of Avastias circling Manhattan over and over again she would have really wondered sometimes.
“We know you were there,” the bespectacled man said. “Your fascination with dragons is long recorded and many of your colleagues pointed toward your disappearance taking place shortly before the appearance of the portal.”
“Everyone is fascinated with dragons! There’s a whole television channel devoted to them and about a million websites. If you’re going to blame someone interested in dragons, you’re going to have to blame a whole lot of people.”
“There are a lot of people who like dragons,” the interrogator agreed. “But there are very few of them with any kind of ability to access the materials necessary to potentially enter the dragon realm.”
“Ah, I see,” she said, her tone thick with sarcasm.
“So I entered the dragon world, found the most massive dragon of all time, made it come through a giant portal in the sky—which I guess I also must have made, huh—and then I flew back on a different dragon and then the big dragon went away and I closed the portal with a giant nuclear electrified kite. Wow. I would have been so busy, no wonder I have a cold.”
“There’s no need to give us any kind of attitude, ma’am,” the agent said. “We’re just doing our jobs.”
“Looks like you’re looking for a scapegoat,” Kate said.
“It makes way more sense that the dragons opened the portal and maybe closed it behind them with some weird thing, or I don’t know, maybe the really big dragon was running out of space, like a goldfish in a goldfish bowl, you know?
They actually need like a full tank to be happy, several hundred gallons and a really good filter… ”
“Ms. Ferrier!” the agent snapped, interrupting her. “We did not come here to talk goldfish.”
“No, you came to accuse me of conjuring a giant dragon,” she said. “I know more about goldfish than I know about dragons, that’s for sure.”
“We have eyewitness accounts of a woman with red hair riding a red dragon,” the agent persisted gamely.
“Yeah, and if I went online I could have eyewitness accounts of flying saucers and little green men, but nobody is being interrogated over that,” Kate snapped. “Look, this is getting really tiresome, okay? And I’m still not feeling well. Are we done here?”
She had not been feeling well since her return from the dragon realm.
Every day her stomach seemed to churn more than the last. She could barely eat, and she was exhausted all the time.
She put it down to stress and perhaps some lingering effects from switching time streams. Her body must be confused by the different laws governing the relative realms.
“I’ll let you know when we’re done here,” the man snapped.
He seemed to find her reluctance to incriminate herself on serious charges particularly galling.
Almost as galling as the complete lack of evidence against her.
Her book was still back in the dragon realm.
There was no proof that she knew how to open a portal—and even the idea that she could was regarded as particularly farfetched.
And that was before they took the radiation situation into account.
Nobody knew how to survive in the dragon realm as far as the authorities were concerned.
“Fine,” she said. “But I’m telling you now, I can’t control this tummy bug.”
“Do your best,” he smirked.
“Okay, well… blleeuuuurrrgggggggggggghh!”
The interview came to a particularly ignominious end as Kate lost the battle of the bug and emptied the contents of her stomach onto the man’s shoes. Nothing she’d said seemed to convince them as much as a few dozen ccs of bile and chicken soup seemed to.
She apologized frantically and tried to help clean up, but the investigators weren’t having it. They left in an annoyed rush, their faces contorted with disgust.
“I hope it’s not too contagious,” she called as she waved them down the hall.
When she was sure they were gone, she shut the door and leaned against it, lifting her eyes heavenward. “You better damn well be there when I get back to you,” she muttered to the air. “I am going through some serious shit here.”