Zachary Ying and the Dragon Emperor Read online

  To my family,

  who didn’t take this writing thing seriously at first,

  and then not even after my first book deal,

  but finally did after this one

  1 How to Get Superpowers by Reading Wikipedia

  ZACK HAD LEARNED TO STOP opening the lunches his mom packed for him in front of his friends. He didn’t eat them anymore either. He loved his mom’s cooking, but his friends always wrinkled their noses as if the pungent sauces and spices hit them like a physical wave. Of course they made a big deal out of how the one Asian kid in school had the “weirdest” food. Ugh, he hated that this was a stereotype.

  “Why care what others say?” His mom had been baffled when he’d begged her to just make him sandwiches. “My cooking is way tastier than slices of meat slapped between bread!”

  She wasn’t wrong, but she didn’t understand the problem. Zack had finally gotten a steady friend group after going to a different middle school than his few friends from elementary; he didn’t want to risk getting left out again. Yet no matter how many times he told his mom she didn’t need to cook him full-on Chinese meals, she never listened, because “where would you get your nutrition?” And whenever he’d come home with his lunch uneaten, even with the excuse that he’d been practicing fasting for Ramadan, her scientist side would activate, and she’d unleash yet another lecture about the daily amount of protein and healthy vegetables a twelve-year-old boy needed.

  It was easier to just pretend he’d eaten them.

  Ignoring the stab of guilt to his heart, Zack hurried down the empty hallway with his lunch box tucked under his arm like he was smuggling something illegal. He stopped in front of a row of color-coordinated trash bins and unzipped the lunch box. The smell of stir-fried green beans and beef slices heaped juicily over rice exploded through the air. It made his mouth water, and he couldn’t help but eat a few sauce-soaked pieces with the chopsticks packed to the side, but he stepped back as he remembered the smell might stick to his hair and clothes. Plus, he didn’t want someone to catch him eating near literal trash bins in a hallway. The last thing he needed was another reason for the other kids to call him weird.

  He popped open the compost bin.

  “Whoa, kid. Are you really letting all that food go to waste?”

  Zack startled at the voice, so close it was practically in his head. It was deep and gruff like a teacher’s, yet when Zack looked around the hallway, there was no one else around.

  He set his lunch box on the lid of the paper-waste bin and checked his phone. No sudden notifications or apps that had opened or anything. He dug out the other device in his pockets that could’ve made a sound—his augmented reality portal-lens from XY Technologies. He slid it on over his eyes. Its clear interface spanned his vision as a single long lens. Transparent neon widgets for stuff like the time, temperature, and weather popped up along the edges of his view. But he’d gotten no new notifications there, either.

  “Hey! Do you play Mythrealm on that?”

  Zack jumped. This time it was for sure a real person speaking. Though instead of a deep, gruff voice, it was another boy. Another Asian boy, coming down the hall with a shy smile. The shiny floor glistened like a path of light beneath him.

  Zack couldn’t help his shock. This part of town was so white that he’d been the only Asian kid all through sixth grade. He wondered if the boy was just here for summer school, or if he’d stay for the fall.

  “Who doesn’t play Mythrealm?” Zack composed himself and pressed his voice low, as he always did when talking to someone new, because otherwise the first impression they got was that he looked and sounded like a girl. Even short hair and baggy clothes didn’t help when he was so scrawny. Still, he smiled a little. He loved being able to make friends through Mythrealm. It’d been a long time coming. The game—and XY Technologies’ portal-lenses in general—had blown up about three years ago, but that had also been when he and his mom had to move out of New York because she could no longer afford it, so she couldn’t afford to get him a portal-lens then either. Mythrealm did have a phone app version, but the controls were much more cumbersome, so nobody wanted to play with the kid who had to use their phone exclusively. Only after Zack’s mom had surprised him with a portal-lens on his birthday last year had he finally been able to play for real, make friends through it, and even earn a little money from trades on the secondary market—which was how he could afford to buy school lunches every day instead of eating what his mom had packed. “I’m even on the school team,” Zack added. “That’s why I’m here. Get some classes outta the way in summer, and there’s more time to prep for tournaments in the fall.”

  “That’s awesome! Wanna add each other?” the boy said while opening the Mythrealm app on his phone. His accent sounded like Zack’s mom’s, which meant he was probably also from mainland China, speaking Mandarin Chinese as a first language.

  Zack’s excitement slowed into caution, as it always did when he met another kid from China. There was a chance that politics would get between them, considering that Zack’s mom had to flee with him from the Chinese government when he was just a baby. Most Westerners thought of Chinese people as all having the same background and same beliefs, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Zack was often frustrated that English labeled them all as “Chinese,” while in Mandarin there was a clear difference between Huárén, someone of Chinese descent, and Dàlùrén, someone from mainland China. Huárén had been migrating all over the world for centuries, maybe millennia. Back in New York, his mom’s Chinese friends had been mostly from Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, and other Southeast Asian countries—those who were Huárén but not Dàlùrén, and thus were more likely to be as against the mainland Chinese government as she was.

  It wasn’t that Zack had to stay away from all fellow mainlanders. After all, his mom had friends from there, too. But he first had to figure out if the boy was gung-ho about the Chinese government—the way some kids here believed the American government was all good and powerful without questioning it—before getting too close to him. It was an awkward question to ask right away, though, so Zack just flashed a hopefully natural-looking smile and opened his own Mythrealm profile on his portal-lens, which was connected to his phone app.

  “So you’re Zachary Ying, right?” The boy held up the friending QR code on his phone screen. “I’m Simon Li.”

  “How’d you know my name?” Zack frowned as he pointed a finger beneath the code, which made his portal-lens scan it. A thin neon square closed around the code and flashed, then Simon’s profile popped up in Zack’s view. He tapped the floating friend-request button.

  “A teacher told me!”

  Zack blinked fast. He didn’t know how to feel about that. He could guess what had happened—Simon must’ve dropped into summer school for some August classes, and a teacher must’ve told him to find Zack, as if they should automatically be friends just because they were both Chinese. It was another sharp reminder that when people looked at Zack, Chinese was all they saw. Ha-ha, of course the two Asian kids found each other, he could already imagine the other kids saying.

  A familiar exhaustion weighed down on Zack. He was tired of being singled out because of how he looked, which had gotten so much worse after moving to Maine. Back in New York, people were so diverse that his race was hardly a huge deal, but here, it was like he walked with a glaring sign saying FOREIGNER. He didn’t get it. He was as American as any other kid in his classes. He couldn’t even speak Mandarin besides a few basic phrases. Why couldn’t people see past his face?

  “So is your family name the same Ying as the First Emperor’s?” Simon turned his phone back toward h
imself. His thick bangs seriously needed trimming; they were so long that they basically hid his eyes.

  “The what?” Zack took off his portal-lens and smoothed out his own hair, which his mom always complained was too messy.

  “The First Emperor of China. Everyone calls him by his title, Qin Shi Huang, but his real name was Ying Zheng. Is your Ying the same as his Ying? I mean, there are a couple of different family names that are read as Ying, but his is really rare. ’Cause, you know, most of his kids were killed when his dynasty fell. But if your Ying is his Ying, you’re probably from a surviving lineage!”

  “What are you talking about?” Zack’s own last name didn’t sound like a real word anymore.

  Well, it never sounded like a real word. He had no idea if it meant anything. Besides, he hated it. He’d been teased all his life about how it made his name sound like a verb. Zacharying. Past definitions included “running out of breath faster than anyone else in gym,” “acting like a girl when you’re a boy,” and, of course, “bringing weird food to school.”

  “You don’t know who the First Emperor of China is?” Simon recoiled. “Wow, what is going on in American schools? He, like, invented China! That’s a big deal, even for world history! By 221 BCE, he had conquered the Seven Warring States and declared himself—”

  Oh God. This was too much. Ha-ha, of course the two Chinese kids are nerding out about ancient Chinese history together, Zack imagined other kids saying again.

  “Listen, uh”—he cut Simon off—“speaking of history, I actually have that class right now. And I told the teacher I’d only be at the bathroom for a little while. I’ll see you around, okay?”

  “Oh. Okay.” Simon whipped his bangs out of his eyes, which caught the gleam of his phone screen. “You should search up the First Emperor of China, though. He’s pretty cool. I’ll send you a link!”

  “All right. Thanks.” Zack snatched his lunch box off the paper-waste bin lid.

  “Wait, were you gonna throw that food out?” Simon pointed.

  “What?” Zack laughed a little too stiffly. He slapped the compost bin shut. “Of course not. I was throwing… something else out.”

  “Kid, you care way too much about what other people think.”

  Zack jolted, then looked around as cold sweat broke under his shirt and jeans. That voice definitely didn’t come from his phone or portal-lens.

  “What’s wrong?” Simon’s gaze turned weirdly piercing.

  “Um. Nothing. Just… bye.” Zack shuffled away.

  When he passed the bathroom, he briefly thought of flushing his lunch down a toilet, but he couldn’t stomach the idea of doing that to his mom’s cooking. At least compost went somewhere valuable. Or so he told himself.

  Maybe the voice was his conscience.

  But since when were consciences so loud?

  * * *

  Once Zack got back to history class, he sat down with his friends to continue their project on Alexander the Great.

  “Welcome back. Had fun?” quipped Aiden from across the small round table, twirling his tablet pen with a lazy grin. He was the captain of their Mythrealm team, and Zack’s heart had an embarrassing tendency to beat faster around him. Not only was Aiden absurdly tall, his short blond hair was always impeccably styled.

  “I got held up by this random new Chinese kid, actually,” Zack muttered, averting his gaze from Aiden’s pale blue eyes. “You guys heard anything about him?”

  “Why are you asking us? You’re the one who’s also Chinese,” said Trevor, another member of their Mythrealm team. He had shaggy brown hair and wore the same weatherworn hoodie year-round. Or maybe it was two twin hoodies that he switched around. Theories differed.

  “That doesn’t mean I know anything about him!” Zack spluttered. “That’s why I’m asking!”

  Trevor’s hands shot up in defense. “Sorry. Don’t sue me.”

  Zack tensed back a sigh, not wanting to seem so sensitive that he’d get offended at a single comment. After checking to make sure Ms. Fairweather was busy helping another group, he scrolled on his phone under the table. Simon had already sent him a message on Mythrealm and a link to an article about the First Emperor of China. “This kid’s kind of intense. He said a whole bunch of stuff about some emperor and made me add him on Myth—whoa.”

  “What?” Trevor peeked over at Zack’s phone, which was open to Simon’s Mythrealm profile. It showcased six favorite virtual myth creatures in Simon’s collection, visible to friends only. All of them were maxed rank and extremely rare.

  Trevor’s jaw dropped as well. “Is that an Exalted level ten hydra?” he exclaimed, drawing looks from a nearby table. “And an Exalted level ten Chinese dragon?”

  Zack shot a nervous glance at Ms. Fairweather, ready to pocket his phone. Luckily, she didn’t seem to have heard.

  “Are you serious?” Aiden snatched the phone from Zack. “Dude, I’ve been needing an Exalted version of that! How much is it worth now?”

  Trevor did a quick search on his own phone, then looked up with a mind-blown expression. “About two thousand dollars on Mythrealm Exchange.”

  “No way that kid could’ve caught all these on his own.” Aiden’s wide eyes reflected the glow of Zack’s phone. “His family must be rich!”

  “Well, duh, he’s an international student.” Trevor shrugged in almost a defeated way. “They’re all rich.”

  “Zack isn’t rich,” Aiden said. “His mom works at Target.”

  Heat scorched Zack’s ears, but he tried to keep his tone unbothered. “I’m not an international student. And my mom works at UMaine, too.”

  “Well, my sister says these crazy rich Asians are all over UCLA, wearing Supreme and driving BMWs and Porsches.” Trevor huffed. “More like University of Caucasians Lost among Asians.”

  Aiden choked out a laugh. “You are so not allowed to say that.”

  “We’re friends with Zack! We get a pass, right?” Trevor nudged an elbow at Zack, grinning.

  “Uh—” Zack didn’t know how to answer that. He just reached to take his phone back.

  “Dude, you need to actually become this kid’s friend.” Aiden waved the phone in a way that prevented Zack from getting it. “You gotta borrow this dragon for me.”

  Zack drew his hand back as casually as possible so he wouldn’t seem desperate for his phone. Aiden would prank him by keeping it longer if he sensed it.

  “Ugh, you weakling. These boys are no true friends.”

  Zack sucked in a sharp breath. What was that voice? How was it speaking right in his head?

  “Zack?” Aiden leaned closer. “Did you hear me?”

  “Oh, um…” Zack hesitated. Whenever Aiden said “borrow,” he never meant the part where you gave the thing back. A few months ago, when walking near a pond with Mythrealm open on his portal-lens, Zack had captured a super-rare level 5 boto, a shape-shifting dolphin from South American myth. The next day, Aiden had “borrowed” it. He still had it. “Come on,” Zack said. “He’s never gonna let me borrow a two-thousand-dollar creature.”

  “If his parents are letting a twelve-year-old—is he also twelve?—have that, that amount of money is obviously nothing to his family. Besides, it’s not like we could lose it.”

  “You already have a level ten Chinese dragon, Aiden. It does the same thing.”

  Exalted Mythrealm creatures were only different aesthetically, having a fancier design that spawns with a one-in-ten-thousand chance.

  “But it’s not Exalted. Look, I’m running my Water-type roster for the next regionals. If you don’t get this for me, my Chinese dragon will be my only creature that’s plain.”

  “No one’s gonna expect you to have an Exalted one,” Zack pleaded. Unlike Western dragons, Chinese dragons controlled water, not fire, and were by far the most powerful Water-type creature in Mythrealm—and thus rarer than rare.

  “But imagine their faces if I do show up with it! It would make our rep forever.” Aiden stared into Zack’s
soul with his striking blue eyes, making Zack’s skin grow uncomfortably warm. “Come on, dude. Be a team player.”

  Zack bit his lips together. It didn’t look like Aiden was going to back down, and he didn’t want Aiden to hold a grudge against him. He couldn’t lose his friends and go back to being the weird kid eating alone at lunch. “Fine. I’ll talk to him.”

  A dazzling smile broke across Aiden’s face. He pointed at Trevor with his chin, then bumped Zack on the shoulder. “We’ll come with you. Give you some moral support.” He placed Zack’s phone back in front of him. “Tell him to meet us after school.”

  “Um. Okay.”

  * * *

  When Aiden said “us,” Zack didn’t know he meant them, Trevor, plus three other boys on their team also taking summer classes.

  “Zack!” Simon laughed nervously in the looming shadows of Zack and his five teammates. They were at the school’s back entrance, right near the turf and running track. “Did you read that link I sent you?”

  “Not yet. Sorry.” Zack scratched the back of his head. He didn’t like how it looked, them crowding around Simon, but saying something like Don’t worry; we’re not here to beat you up! seemed like it’d make everything worse.

  “So, Simon.” Aiden slipped on his portal-lens. “Zack tells me you have an Exalted level ten Chinese dragon.” He strode toward the running track as he spoke, and everyone followed, equipping themselves with their own portal-lenses. Mythrealm players never wasted time standing around outside. They were always on the move, collecting the virtual creatures and in-game items that spawned everywhere.

  “I—I didn’t tell him that. Not deliberately.” Zack adjusted his portal-lens to hide his guilty glance at Simon. “I just showed them your profile. Because of how impressive it is.”

  “Yeah, it really is impressive.” Aiden peered sideways at Simon. “Listen, I don’t know how the tournament circuit works in China, but over here, we have a regional one in two weeks. I’m running my Water roster. I would really appreciate it if you would let me borrow your dragon.”