by Lauren Esker
Meri clutched at her seat as jagged peaks loomed in front of them. She had never even seen the Rockies in person, let alone anything like these. They were huge, rising so high above the world's floor that the air on their glittering silver peaks must have been too thin to breathe. Surely these were taller than Everest, like a whole range of Everests stacked together.
Surely they were going to flatten themselves on those vast ramparts, they couldn't possibly miss them—
The ship bucked, sudden weight slamming her into her seat. Sky, mountains, ocean danced crazily on the screens. Her heart leaped into her throat and stayed there. From the sudden plunge in the pit of her stomach, it felt like they were going down, not up.
"Lyr—"
*I need to concentrate.*
The ship shuddered, and again there was the sense of tremendous force pushing her back into her seat. She could see red lights going crazy all over her console, but it wasn't like she could do anything about it. The ship's violent shuddering rattled her teeth. There was a pop and she smelled something burning. She couldn't move; the force compressing her chest made it hard to breathe. Her mouth tasted like blood.
The world filled their screens and hit them like a hammer.
***
Lyr came out of a dazed stupor to the smell of smoke and a ringing in his ears. Everything seemed very still after that shuddering hell-ride through the atmosphere.
He had dropped the module on the other side of the mountains. He'd seen a chance and let it go, diving as close to the ground as he dared and then braking hard and cutting the grapples loose. There had been a plateau and a system of lakes, and he thought it was as good a chance at a soft landing as the module was going to get. There was no way he could clear the mountains with the module still attached.
He'd planned to skip over the mountains, circle and come back around to see if the module had come down okay, but he hadn't been able to get enough altitude. The ship had clipped the mountains and they'd had a hard landing somewhere on the other side.
But the ship was steady now, so they were on the ground and not in the ocean or sinking into a swamp. The viewscreen's auxiliary functions had gone down along with the power, so now it was simply acting like a window, letting in natural daylight through a tangle of green and purple leaves.
"Meri?" he asked thickly.
There was no answer. Lyr struggled to extricate his weak, shaking arms from the pilot's cradle. Next to him, Meri was draped limply in her seat, her head hanging down.
"Meri!"
Unable to reach her physically, he reached out with his mind, probing for both Meri and Tamir.
Two feeble, confused minds answered his anxious sending. Meri was hovering just below the threshold of consciousness after blacking out from the g-forces that had hammered them during their descent. He couldn't tell whether she was hurt from touching her mind alone, but she didn't seem to be sinking deeper; instead she appeared to be coming back. Tamir was harder to read, as deeply out as he was, but Lyr sensed something there. It wasn't the emptiness that was all he'd been able to feel when he lost the others.
They were, at least, alive.
Lyr fumbled with his restraints and staggered out of his seat. The tilt of the deck wasn't steep, but it made his uncertain balance even more unstable. He stumbled against Meri's seat and dropped to his knees beside it.
"Meri!"
She was slumped forward. He pushed her gently back in her seat and tilted her head so he could see her face in the light from the window-screen. Her mouth and nose were smeared with blood, the same deep red as Galatean blood, unlike the silver blood of his people.
"Meri," he said again, holding her face in both hands, and reached deep, deep for her mind, throwing her a line that she could use to climb her way back to consciousness.
He used to do this for his sept-brothers and sept-sisters. When they were in danger of passing out during their brutal pilot training, he had used his own mind as a lifeline they could use to hold onto consciousness and therefore avoid losing control of their battle-pods. Lyr, with his more durable dragon's body, had had much less trouble. He was truly worried about Meri right now. Their descent had made him pass out, if only for a moment. It could have damaged her lungs, her heart, her mind ...
*Meri. Come back to me.*
***
She was floating somewhere dark and peaceful. Her body wouldn't move, but it didn't seem to matter. Like sinking into still, dark water ...
*Meri!*
And into the water came a light.
It was felt more than seen, a great light and warmth that came down all around her. With the light came a deep note like a resonant song, rolling at the edge of her senses and making her think of far-off cathedral music.
She would have had to squint if she'd had eyes to be blinded, but in the place she was, she simply basked in the light and the song that went on and on in a single continuous note. She tried to reach up with the hands she didn't have, because she could sense this presence reaching down for her. It didn't frighten her. She wanted to go to it.
*That's right. Rise up. Come back.*
Come back. There was nowhere to go back to. Earth, and everything she knew there, lay far behind her.
But this was home, this light. Her heart knew it. She could almost glimpse it, a tremendous shape writhing in the darkness of her mind, sinuous curves and many-colored scales, a crown of horns that she wanted to touch.
She reached out.
Reached—
She blinked sticky eyelids and found that she was touching Lyr's face.
He looked awful and beautiful all at once. He was no longer a glorious bronze statue, but a tired man with silvery, opalescent blood glistening on his lips and crusted around his nostrils. His eyes—framed with dark lashes, she noticed for the first time—were soft and warm and full of relief. Emotion, real emotion glistened in those silver depths. He was more lovely than she could have imagined.
"Meri," he said aloud, a musical echo of the voice she'd heard in her mind.
"Hi," she said faintly, and couldn't help it when her lips curved in a smile. He was a nice sight to wake up to.
He seemed to get his breath, and like a curtain coming down on all that vast depth of emotion, his face went cool again. He pulled away, leaving her hand touching empty air. His mental presence withdrew as well. The sense of connection felt so natural that she didn't even notice it until it snipped off at its source, leaving her soul more alone than before.
But he didn't leave her entirely. He helped her undo her restraints, and she tottered to her feet with Lyr's arm around her. The memory of that light was still with her, that warmth and strength, like sunshine raining down on her and pulling her back to the world of the living.
"Can you stand?" Lyr asked her, and she nodded, reaching out a hand to grope for the back of her seat. Lyr's strong arm withdrew; she tried not to yearn embarrassingly after that support. Instead she hung onto the back of her seat until her legs would hold her, and then looked around.
The interior of the ship was dim, though not completely dark. Light filtered in through leaves pressed against the front screen. The instrument panels were dark, the ship's cargo hold cloaked in shadows.
Lyr was bent over Tamir. Meri took a cautious step away from the seat. Her legs wobbled but held.
"How is he?"
"Unchanged as far as I can tell," Lyr said. "I'll see if I can get the instruments up, at least enough to tell if the—what's wrong? Are you all right?"
Meri had been making her way over to them, touching the backs of the seats to keep her balance, but she stopped at a sudden realization. "You're talking out loud. I can understand you now!"
There was the quickest flash of that beautiful smile again, this time slightly embarrassed. "That's right, I didn't even think of it. Your translator implant must have finished syncing. Does your head still hurt?"
"Hard to tell right now with all the bruises." She managed a shaky smile and brus
hed her hand across her upper lip. It came away sticky. Nosebleed, she thought, looking at the blood on her fingers.
She didn't even realize she'd stayed like that, as if her mental gears had gone out of sync, until Lyr's fingers closed over hers. She looked up at him, struck all over again by how tall he was, how warm and strong his hands were.
"Take care of Tamir," he said gently, and it was backed up by a warm mental undercurrent of support. "I'll check the environment outside and see if I can tell where we landed."
"Okay," she said shakily. He released her hand with a quick squeeze, and it wasn't until he'd brushed past her that she realized he was doing exactly what she'd been trying to do for the others on the ship—giving her something to do, keeping her busy to avoid thinking too much.
She looked over her shoulder at him as he bent over the instrument panels. This was a man who had dealt with people in crisis before.
But he was right; she had a job to do. She knelt beside Tamir and took his vitals. His pulse and breathing weren't better, but as Lyr had said, he hadn't gotten worse, and given their rough landing that was close to a miracle, or at least a testament to his profound toughness.
"How does it look out there?" she asked Lyr, who had given up trying to get the instruments working and was standing with one hand pressed against the side of the ship.
"Adequate. At the very least, we aren't underwater or in an active volcano."
"What about the others, in the module? Are they okay?"
"They're not with us," Lyr said. "I dropped the module on the other side of the mountains. I had to. I think they made it down okay, but I can't boost the radio signal enough to reach them without power."
"Can we fix the ship and go look for them?"
"One thing at a time. First let's find out where we landed. I'm not reading anything in the atmosphere that would make it dangerous for your species or mine." To her surprise and pleasure, he gave her another smile, a little wider this time—a conspiratorial smile, an invitation. "Want to see a new world?"
"Yes," she breathed, thrilled.
They left Tamir on the bridge and went through the ship's open cargo hold. The floor just behind the bridge was tilted steeply and then buckled; the rest was mostly flat. They'd run into something, and run into it hard.
Lyr stopped at the airlock and gestured her behind him before raising a glimmering shield with his cuffs.
The airlock opened on a mass of colorful foliage, broken branches and leaves in many shades of green and violet. After looking around for danger, Lyr dropped the shield.
"Stand back. I'll cut our way out. Be careful of the sap. It might be corrosive or poisonous."
Meri obediently stepped back. Lyr's arm blades folded out; this time she was watching closely and saw that she hadn't been wrong before, they did come right out of his skin, with a faint trickle of silver blood.
"Doesn't that hurt?" she asked.
Lyr paused in the act of slashing at the foliage. "Does what hurt?"
"Never mind." Meri was fascinated by the way the razor-sharp blades cut through branches and twigs. A pungent, spicy smell rose from the cut ends.
"It's not dangerous to you," Lyr said over his shoulder. "Come on out."
"How can you tell?" She ducked as she followed him into the tunnel he'd hacked through the thicket; the sap might not be poisonous, but she still didn't want to get it in her hair. The air was warm and full of strange smells.
"I checked it with the cuffs. I'll be able to test anything we find to eat in the same way."
Okay, she definitely had to get herself a pair of those.
They came out of the thicket onto a hillside covered with scrubby light-purple grass. The ship had blazed a raw scar down the hill until its wild slide was arrested in a tangle of trees and brush in the bottom of a small valley. Overhead, the sky was pale blue with a few wisps of high clouds and a faint band of colors crossing it at a steep angle. That vast, arching stripe went from horizon to horizon, like a ribbon across the sky.
"What's that?" Meri asked, pointing up.
"This planet must have rings," Lyr replied with barely a glance, wiping his arm blades on the grass to clean them.
"Oh," she whispered. She hadn't even noticed, coming in; she'd been too distracted by the planet filling the screen.
Rings, like Saturn.
She was standing on an alien planet. She couldn't wrap her mind around it.
Lyr straightened and the blades slid into his arms, leaving only a thin slit visible in the skin. "I'm going to have a look around. Do you want to come?"
Are you kidding? "Of course."
They climbed the hill through knee-high purple grass. Lyr moved with slow, powerful grace, turning his head to look in all directions, alert but unafraid. Meri kept close to him, reminding herself that they were on an alien world full of unknown dangers. And yet she wasn't afraid, which surprised her. Maybe it was just that after dealing with pirates and a spaceship crash, the idea of something jumping out of the bushes and attacking them couldn't really do much to faze her. But there was also a feeling that nothing could touch her, no danger could harm her, with Lyr and his blades and his shields to protect her.
As they climbed out of the brush-choked valley, more of their surroundings came into view. The mountains rose above them, a rampart wall of rock and forested slopes that was no less astonishing up close than it had been from above. She couldn't even imagine how high the mountains must rise; their heads were half-hidden in clouds and frosted with snow and ice despite the warmth of the summer day.
And there was also the sea.
When they reached the top of the hill, a cool breeze ruffled her hair, startling after the stillness of the sun-warmed valley. It smelled of salt and ocean. As a child of the Midwest, Meri had never in her life seen the sea except in pictures. It was as vast and wondrous as she'd imagined, especially with the planet's rings rising from the horizon and arcing overhead.
Their hill, she could now see, was actually a dune. It was more obvious on the ocean side, where grass secured the sand only in patches, with sand-slippage between. More grass-covered dunes rolled down and down, to the ocean far below them, purling with tiny ruffled waves along the shore.
In one direction, the mountains came right down to the sea in towering cliffs with whitewater rolling along their feet, dashed itself on the rocks in miniature towers of spray, shrunk by distance to the size of something from a TV show. When she turned the other way, she saw the estuary, a vast salt marsh marbled in green and purple and gold, bisected with wide loops of river—one sprawling river, or several smaller ones; she couldn't tell, but the marshes went on and on, until they blued with distance to become indistinguishable from the sea.
Meri drew deep lungfuls of the salt wind. It felt like early fall, warm but with a hint of coolness underneath, which made her realize that she had no idea what time of year it was, nor any idea how to tell. Maybe everything turned purple in the fall on this world, or maybe this was the very beginning of spring. Maybe the world was so warm, and they were so far south, that there were no seasons at all.
In all this great emptiness, there was no sign of people, human or otherwise. No cell towers, no contrails, no roads or boats or buildings. Just the two of them.
She glanced at Lyr to see how he was taking it. He was gazing out to sea with a distant expression. She could see the colorful landscape reflected in his silver eyes.
"What is your world like?" she asked.
Lyr gave her a quick, sharp look, coming back from wherever he'd gone in his head. "What's that?"
"What kind of planet do you come from?"
His expression changed little, but something in his face hurt her. "My people are not people of worlds. We may have been, long ago, but not anymore ... or perhaps I should say, our worlds are ships. The great nest-cities of the dragons are hollow asteroids that sail between the stars in the furnace of the nebula where we, as a species, were born."
Glimpses of
this spacefaring past came to her through the link: fleeting images of twisting corridors lit with a soft, pastel light that brought out the layered colors in their walls. Nebula space, not empty and dark, but a furnace of heat and light where stars were born.
"It looks beautiful," Meri said. She stopped herself before she said the next part—that she would miss the sky, miss being outside—but the thought was close enough to the surface that he must have picked up some of it anyway.
"Some have skies, inside. They are vast, as big as moons. Each is a little world of its own, made into whatever the clan wants it to be."
His voice made her ache with the longing in it. "What was yours like?" Meri asked softly.
For just an instant, she thought he might open up enough to tell her. It was there in his eyes, a desperate yearning for connection, for companionship. Then his gaze became shuttered, the warmth of his expression cooling toward stone. "It was long ago. There's no sense in bothering with things that are gone."
Meri touched the ridge of callus where she'd worn her wedding ring for all these years. "Lyr—" she began.
He held up a hand. "Wait."
With that he began striding along the top of the dune, only a few steps before he stopped and crouched down, elbows resting on his knees. Meri caught up and looked over his shoulder. In the grass-covered sand of the dune top, there were tracks. Huge tracks. Each was as long as Meri's arm, with three toes and visible claws digging into the sand. There was a drag mark half-obscuring some of the tracks, where a long tail might have rubbed them out.
"Fresh," Lyr said quietly. "It might even have been here when we crashed. The ship must have scared it off."
"Good!" Meri tried to imagine what might have left tracks that big, and decided that she didn't want to. Not if they were sharing the planet with it.
The tracks went down the ocean side of the dune in long strides and were lost, eventually, in the folds of the hills rolling down to the sea.
"Where did it go?" The breeze seemed chillier than it had a moment ago. "Something that huge couldn't just disappear."