The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford [79]
“Actually, I hadn’t guessed,” Sara confessed. “And telling me who you were would have ruined the Masked Avenger act.”
“I suppose it would,” he conceded. “Afterwards, when I realized that you hadn’t poisoned my shadowbats—not deliberately, anyhow...well, here I am, and I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay,” Sara said, putting on a fine show of maturity. “It’s really not important. I’m afraid my parents will be in touch with your parents by now, though. I’ve already run the gauntlet once—your turn is still to come.”
“I know,” he said. “Shady deals with the Dragon Man...my bats invading a young girl’s bedroom...then the Masked Avenger act. When they get their teeth into all of that it’ll be the most fun they’ve had since I crashed a glider into the best greenhouse. Only a little one, mind—not the kind you actually sit in. Now I can tell them that I’ve apologized to you, that might help cut the barrage short, maybe by as much as an hour.”
“Is that why you did it?” Sara asked.
“No, I really am sorry. I jumped to the wrong conclusion. It was stupid.”
“In that case,” Sara said, glad to have the opportunity to take the moral high ground, “you can tell your parents I forgive you. In your place. I’d probably have jumped to the wrong conclusion too. If something had happened to my rose....”
“It’s a nice rose,” Michael Rawlinson told her. “I couldn’t really see it last night, but I clicked on your tag just now to get the picture. It really suits you.”
If he’d phrased the compliment slightly differently, Sara might have been delighted by it—and astonished by its source—but it echoed far too closely the first words the Dragon Man had ever spoken to her. She felt tears welling up in her eyes, and felt profoundly grateful that she was wearing a hood instead of sitting in front of her desktop camera. All that the older boy and her three classmates could see was a synthesized image of her face; they knew which way she was looking, but they couldn’t see the tears. The hood was sensitive to her expression, though, and it was feeding that emotional intelligence to the program synthesizing her appearance.
“Are you all right?” asked Julian Sillings.
“Of course she’s all right,” Michael Rawlinson said, snappishly.
“Why did she call you the Masked Avenger?” Davy Bennett inquired, obviously feeling that Julian’s question had opened up the conversation to anyone who cared to join in.
“None of your business,” the older boy retorted, glaring at Davy before turning back to Sara. “Are you all right?” he asked, in a very different tone.
“Of course I’m all right,” she said, having recovered her composure. “You said so yourself, didn’t you?”
“Yes I did,” he agreed, as if that were absolute proof. “Anyway, I just wanted to say I’m sorry. I can call you if you like, to let you know how the thing with my parents works out.”
Sara almost said “Why would I want to know?” but she stopped herself just in time, partly because she caught a glimpse of the expression on Margareta’s face. She swallowed the intention, and waited until she was sure that she could form the words clearly before saying: “Yes—do that. We might have to compare notes to figure out how to get both lots off our backs.”
“Right,” Michael Rawlinson said, before floating away in an elegant, rather dreamlike fashion that real space would never have tolerated.
“It’s the rose,” Sara told Margareta, airily. “You ought to think about getting one yourself.
“What was all that about?” Davy wanted to know—but the time available for explanations was already gone, and they all had to return to the classroom for a dose of Mid-level Multiversal Navigation.
The story came out anyway, as it was bound to do, in dribs and drabs. Sara only had to tell her side of the story once, and leave the grapevine to take care of its dissemination. She was careful, though, not to make Mike Rawlinson’s actions seem unreasonable—and she hoped that he would do likewise. By the time the school day was concluded, everyone in the school must have heard about what had happened to Mike’s shadowbats, and what the