Free Dragon Virus by Laura Anne Gilman

of the line.
    And in the background, when you really read what was going
on, you saw wars brewing, a Science race to find the cure, eating up everything
else the money might have been doing. Other countries, without the money,
without the media, not treating their Changed even half so well. Telepreachers
everywhere, spewing bile the Normals fed on, even as the number of Changed
grew.
    “China...” he started to say, when his mother interrupted
him, her voice sharp and low. “Don’t talk about China. Don’t even think about
it.”
    Denial. His parents were heavy into denial. Don’t talk about
it and you can pretend it’s not staring you in the face. All the stuff going
on, all the stuff coming down.
    His social history teacher had been the only one who would
talk to him about it. She was sixty if she was anything, and she looked like a
turtle with her narrow neck, sharp nose, dry-looking skin. But she was honest.
Painfully so.
    “The first generation was extreme, but almost all of them
died. The virus was a dead end, so they could afford to be kind to the children
who lived. And then when the second and third were minor and survivable — It’s
almost like it learned. Slow down, let people get used to it, then wham!”
    “Us.”
    “Yes, you.” Her turtle eyes were sad.
    “Sucks to be us.” It would hurt, he thought, if it wasn’t so
funny. We’re the freaks, but the Normals are the ones who’re protected.
    “It won’t always. Suck to be you, I mean.”
    That sounded like the usual teacher spew. “You really think
there’s a future? Honestly?”
    “Honestly?” She paused to consider it. “Humanity has always
adapted. That’s what you are, an adaptation. The fact that there are clarified
Changes, that a doctor can identify a specific strain on a birth certificate,
can treat and diagnose and predict treatment for specific Changes...
    “There’s always a future, Steven. We just never know what it’s
going to look like.”
    He left his parents to their argument and went up into his
room. He couldn’t stand it anymore, the silence and the fighting and the knowing
what’s coming and not admitting it, not acknowledging it, like there was some
way to turn it all away.
    There’s always a future.
    Nobody ever said it wasn’t going to suck.
    o0o
    A Thumper telepreacher — not the one on TV, a smaller,
meaner one — came to town that weekend. He had a permit, a tour bus, and a
platform they built quickly out of prefab wood, stringing lights and a speaker
to it with practiced ease. Stirring up trouble was what he was there for, him
with his bus-load of followers, waving signs, thumping their Bibles and getting
into peoples’ faces, hogging the camcrews that showed up to cover the scene.
    But things didn’t go the way the telepreacher wanted. Maybe
the camspeaker didn’t ask the right questions, show preacherman the right
deference. Or maybe he just got into the wrong face at the wrong time. Steven
wasn’t there, he was in school, he didn’t know. The newsfeed that night just
showed the aftermath: bodies flat on the pavement, blood pooled and signs
broken. A riot, they said. A brawl. An unfortunate incident, but even the
crazies have their right to speak in public.
    Seven dead: preacherman and four of his followers, two
locals who joined in. A cop and one of the camcrew were being treated for
non-life-threatening injuries.
    The dead were all Normals.
    The general feeling in school the next day was that they got
what was coming to them.
    Anyone who felt different stayed low and quiet.
    A quiet that you could feel burn the air.
    Steven sat at his desk in homeroom and let the gossip wash
over him. His left hand played with a gel-pen, tapping it against the desk
until the teacher, disturbed by the noise, made him stop.
    o0o
    Sunlight came in through the window, touching the
mint-green paint and turning it the color of spring grass. Tiny mica sparks glinted
in the roses, and made the dragon’s eye seem to