Fragment 49

"I would like to fly," Amaru announced.

Even Mac turned to look at the dragon who currently appeared to be a large man sitting awkwardly on the couch.

"I think there are still some domestic flights," Mac offered.

Chris cleared his throat, but Amaru responded politely, "I wish to visit a place on the other side of the planet, and would like to ride there in an airplane."

Mac looked at Amaru oddly, but Anne asked, "Which country? A few of them have allowed a few flights recently I think?"

Amaru lifted his tablet and checked a map. "China."

"I'm pretty sure that you have to be a doctor or have some kind of political pull to get on one of those flights," Chris informed the older dragon.

"Or be visiting immediate family," Anne suggested.

Chris held out his hand and wobbled it, to indicate the uncertainty of using that reason. "Maybe. I don't know if you can still get a visa for that right now. Why do you suddenly want to take a flight anyway?"

"I wish to visit my son," Amaru announced.

Chris and Anne both stared blankly, but Mac responded immediately, "Oughta keep waiting. I'd like to visit my kids too, but I don't wanna put 'em at any more risk than they already are. Tis easy to feel impatient, but it's gonna take time. Folks these days expect everything to be fast, but when I was a youngster and the adults still talked about how fast that influenza swept across the world, it actually took it over a year. Feels long, but it's better to just wait it out."

Mac glanced over at Chris. Amaru blinked at the small man, and then glanced at Chris too.

"Um…" Chris stalled. "Yeah. A bit over a year and I think afterward they decided that about a third of the population caught that one. Also, even if we can't catch it, it might still be possible for us to spread it." He knew that risk of infection probably wasn't a convincing reason for the older dragon.

Mac gazed at Chris for a moment, and then glanced at Amaru. "It's easy to forget that you're not…"

The words hovered unfinished in the air for a moment. Mac had known that Chris wasn't exactly human for most of his life, but it was one of those things that they didn't really talk about.

"Do you have a passport?" Anne asked suddenly.

Lack of ID was a real problem if the older dragon really wanted to ride inside an airplane, Chris realized. Even if Amaru had somehow had a legal identity here, there was almost no way that it could be tied to his son's. "Even if you had one and they were doing family visas right now, you'd need your son's contact information so that they could verify your relationship," he told Amaru.

Amaru glanced at the tablet he carried all of the time now. "I do not know if he has acquired one of these devices," he acknowledged.

"Do you know his address?" Anne asked curiously.

Chris shot her a look. She had to know how unlikely that was.

"I know where he is likely to be," Amaru replied without hesitation. "He will be in this region."

Chris examined the map that Amaru held out with a dubious expression, and then objected, "That's hundreds of miles of one of the most populated areas on the planet." He shook his head as he added, "I don't think it's possible. You'd need legal identification, proof of immediate need, or an employer or occupation that they are currently accepting travelers for."

"I could simply take the place of one of those who are already headed to that region," Amaru suggested.

Anne shook her head this time. "Even if you could make yourself look like them, you'd still get caught as soon as they reported that they hadn't gotten on their flight."

"It would be simplest to kill them," Amaru agreed calmly.

Chris froze, as Anne's eyes widened.

"Can't just go around killing people," Mac chided. "Besides, might get yourself worse than caught for that. Bodies are hard to get rid of."

"It wouldn't be a problem," Amaru assured Mac.

Chris swallowed his own protest against killing humans. The elder dragon still regarded humanity as an interesting, but transitory species, and had very little interest in most of them as individuals. Logically considering the range of things that he'd seen Amaru do, there was probably nothing to prevent him from killing someone and simply scattering their atoms or something.

"Oh yeah?" Mac drawled.

"If needed I could drag the body all the way down to where the stone begins to melt," Amaru explained patiently.

"You can't…" Anne protested weakly.

"Probably shouldn't kill someone for no reason. Even if they are very short lived compared to us, they are still people," Chris tried to explain. He didn't have much room to argue, since it wasn't like he'd never killed a human himself.

Amaru tilted his head and turned his tablet toward Anne. "But many of your kind apparently wish to kill this one, and this says that he will be going to the correct area soon."

Anne hesitated, and Chris leaned over to see who Amaru was talking about. A moment later he covered his face with both hands.

"Well, I guess if you actually managed it, a lot of people might be pretty happy about it," Mac said soberly. "But I'm thinking that if you failed you'd prob'ly get dissected by the government folk."

"No, just no," Chris said wearily.

Anne nodded reluctantly.