by Lauren Esker
"Into the water, maybe. Or it might have a den nearby ..." He stood abruptly. "The water," he said, pointing.
The creature was just sliding into the edge of the sea. From up here it looked small, but she could see by the trail down the dunes how high above it they were. It was colored orange and gray, with a high crest rising from its back.
"That—that's a dinosaur!"
Lyr glanced at her. "You have them on your world?"
"We used to." She stared, captivated, as it swam away with a graceful wriggling motion. She couldn't pin it down to a specific kind of dinosaur from the toys she used to play with. It would have been more surprising if she could; it probably wasn't a kind of dinosaur from Earth's past. It was whatever this world had instead.
But, while she might not be the world's biggest science fiction nerd, Meri Rowland had been a pretty big dinosaur geek when she was about eight. She wasn't sure if she could still tell an ankylosaurus from a dimetrodon, but she'd known all of them once upon a time.
That might not be a dinosaur down there, but it sure looked like one.
"There are dinosaurs on this planet," she said, and broke into a huge grin.
Lyr looked like he was trying not to smile. "If you have them back home, is it really that exciting?"
"No, you don't understand! They went extinct a long time ago. It's ... oh, I can't explain. It's just that I never dreamed I'd actually see one, and now I have. Even if it's not really a dinosaur, it's about the closest thing I can imagine. Thank you, Lyr, for getting me down safely. Thank you for giving me a chance to see this."
And before she could think, she hugged him.
He had held her once before, as he shielded her when the pirate ship was firing at them back on Earth. But that had been different, a light, precise touch. This time, she threw her arms around him and hugged the stuffing out of him.
Lyr went instantly rigid in her arms. He was big; she'd almost stopped noticing that, but being in physical contact brought it back to her full awareness again. Her head barely came up to the middle of his chest. He was basketball star tall, but thicker—and it was all muscle, a frame of pure lean muscle over bone. He was hard everywhere, as if all the softness had been burned out of him long ago.
And yet, when he brought his arms up behind her—very tentatively, as if he'd forgotten how—it was nothing but soft: the brush of his touch against her back, gentle as the touch of kitten paws.
She knew how fierce he could be. She knew his hands could deal death. But she had no fear of him, none at all, not as his arms came slowly around her and he hugged her back with breathtaking gentleness.
11
___
I T HAD BEEN LONG, so long, since he'd been touched like this.
His people were not, in general, the touching kind. Touch, for dragons, was often a prelude to psychic contact, so they were careful, reserving physical affection for only their most intimate loved ones: family, the closest of friends ... and their lovers.
But he had grown up used to the casual, friendly touches of his septmates. Since their deaths he had ruthlessly shoved away any attempts to breach the wall of personal space around him. His people were reserved, but they were not meant to be alone, forever. It was like being in a prison made of ice.
And now a ray of light shone into the prison, and some of the frost on the walls began to melt.
She was so warm. So small. So fragile in his arms.
And that was what made him snap out of the spell she seemed to have cast over him. He pushed her away with a small shove, not enough to hurt, just enough to make it clear that he needed space.
He had no right to hold something so fragile and precious. Didn't she know how strong he was, what he could do to her with a casual, careless touch? His entire life was about death, destruction, damage.
Meri looked startled and hurt. Lyr tried not to allow that to affect him, pushing his emotions ruthlessly back into their armored box. He took a step back, reestablishing their boundaries, and saw Meri cover her hurt with a smile. (And if there was a part of him that would have done anything to take her back in his arms and soothe that hurt away, hurt he had put there, it took all he had not to give in to it.)
"Sorry about that," she said. Her laugh was a little shaky, but not insincere. "I can get a little carried away sometimes. You just tell me if I get up in your personal space too much, okay?"
Lyr only nodded, unable to trust his voice, not while having her "up in his personal space" was all he wanted or could think about. She'd been so warm, so soft ... so ...
... so female.
He had not thought about females in a very long time. Everything in his life had been death and war and killing. He'd simply assumed that he would never get back to the Well of Stars, would never see another dragon again, so what was the point in thinking of mates and companionship? No one he'd seen among the Galateans or among his septmates had ever stirred romantic feelings in him. He had not even thought of them as male or female—had not even realized his feelings were capable of being stirred by those outside his own people.
This was new. Unexpected. Standing here, even having re-established physical space between them, he was all too conscious of his new awareness of her physical form and smell.
She was not like the females of his species, but that was part of what charmed him.
"Lyr?" Her voice sounded uncertain now. "If I offended you, I'm sorry."
"It's not you." He drew back when she reached to touch him. He couldn't take the intensity of it; he needed time to decide if he was going to stuff his feelings back into their box, to think of her merely as a companion, and not ...
Not as a very desirable woman.
A woman of a different species, who probably had a mate among her own people. He was being a fool.
Meri's hand lingered in the air and then dropped. "I'm sorry," she said helplessly. "We ... we should go back and check on Tamir."
***
Stupid, Meri berated herself. She hadn't meant to let emotion carry her away. Some people didn't like being touched, and it looked like Lyr was one of those people. She made a mental note to keep her hands off him, even if it was damn hard when she was this close to him, all too aware of the lightly spicy scent of his skin.
Looking down at the ship from up here, it was all the more astonishing to her that they'd survived. It was crumpled and twisted, half-hidden in trees. She wondered if the module had fared better or worse, if Preet and Edrin and the others were even still alive.
"We're going to look for the module, right?" she asked as they retraced their steps down the hill.
"Of course. But our first priority is securing a campsite here."
"Put on your own oxygen mask before helping others, right?"
"I suppose," he said, a slight smile tugging the corner of his mouth.
Approaching the ship nestled in its hollow, with the rampart of the mountains rising above it, brought home to her the true enormity of their isolation. The only sound she could hear was the soft rustling of the grass around their feet and the whisper of the wind through the trees. In this entire world, they might be the only people.
"Lyr, who lives on this planet? Does anyone?"
"I didn't pick up any radio transmissions from space," came his quiet answer. "That doesn't mean it's impossible for this planet to have natives. But they won't be advanced enough to have cities or space travel."
"How are we going to get off it, then?"
"I don't know," he said.
It was oddly comforting to get back to the ship, away from that huge, wide, people-free horizon. Mere hours ago, this ship would have seemed impossibly alien to her. Now it was the only halfway familiar thing in an alien wilderness. Meri picked her way through the pitch-dark cargo hold onto the bridge—where there was at least some light, filtered through the branches covering the cracked viewscreen—and checked on Tamir. His IV bag had deflated completely, but she held off on hooking up the only other one she had. The supplies she'd p
acked before leaving the module would need to be rationed carefully.
Once she'd gotten Tamir settled, Meri went to see what Lyr was up to. She found him clearing a wider space around the airlock.
"I was thinking we could set up a sort of camp out here," he said, wiping his blades with a handful of grass. She was able to get a better look at the blades this time, two gently curved weapons like scimitars, made of metal that gleamed in the sun.
When he noticed her looking at them, the blades shuddered and then folded neatly back into his forearms, like an airplane's landing gear folding up.
"You don't have to hide those," she said. "I was just curious."
Lyr held out his arm. There was only the faintest crease in the skin, like a very old scar running down the outside of his arm, but as Meri watched with interest, the skin rippled and parted, and the blade slid out, shiny and sharp, streaked with silvery-pink blood at the tip.
"Can all your people do that?"
"No. It's a surgical modification. The Galateans did it."
"Did you ask them to?"
"No," he said quietly. "But I didn't particularly mind. My people naturally have defensive spines. This is like a technological version of it."
As he spoke, what she had taken for small dimples or scars in his arms and shoulders suddenly bristled with backward-curving spikes. These appeared to be made of something like tooth or bone, and glistened faintly in the sun.
"Why did they do it?" she asked, to cover up the surprise which he had probably felt from her anyway.
"Why? So I could fight better, of course. At one time they intended to train me as an assassin." His smile curved like his blades. "That didn't work out as they'd planned."
"Why not?"
"Because ... I'm very good at killing things. Just not in the way they hoped." He turned back to cutting down trees with slashes of the blades.
Meri hesitantly reached out for his mind, but he'd closed it off to her.
After a minute or two of watching him, she wandered a little ways away—far enough not to have to worry about flying branches and sap, near enough to feel safe—and sat in the sun-warmed grass on the hillside. After smoothing out a patch of grass with her hands, she opened up her purse and took a careful, systematic inventory.
Her coworkers might joke about her over-stuffed handbag, but she had never been so glad of her long-standing habit of carrying anything and everything in the succession of oversized bags she'd owned over the years. She pulled out items and laid them down systematically, row after row. The medical supplies she'd brought for Tamir were followed by a veritable catalog of the last couple years of her life.
Tylenol and aspirin and allergy medication and baby wipes and a mini flashlight. Phone, of course—she picked it up to check for a signal automatically, only to find that the battery was dead. Tissues and a memo pad and no less than four pencil stubs plus two ballpoint pens with business logos on them. One glove, with no mate to be found. A hairbrush from when her hair used to be longer. A spray bottle of cheap perfume she'd gotten as a book club giveaway. A handful of coupons. Some redeemable point stickers she'd been collecting from a gas station chain. Her keychain multitool with a can opener, screwdriver, and scissors—she stowed that in a pocket where it would be easily accessible. A pair of reading glasses, which she didn't use much but had started carrying around with her in reluctant acknowledgement of the fact that she no longer had twenty-year-old eyes. A couple of fun-sized bars of last year's stale Halloween chocolate, which she put aside, mouth watering as she began to realize how hungry she was.
The inventory went on: A paperback romance novel she kept on hand for reading while standing in line. A wad of yarn, six rubber bands, three lipsticks, an old wristwatch with a plastic band and a dead battery, an Ohio library card, a pumpkin-spice-scented tealight candle, a takeout menu for a Chinese restaurant, $2.37 in loose change ...
And her wedding ring, of course.
She became aware that Lyr had stopped cutting down trees and was standing over her, looking down curiously at the items spread out in the grass. "What is all of this?" he asked.
"The consequences of not cleaning out a handbag for years." She covered the ring with her hand, suddenly embarrassed for reasons she couldn't explain.
He's an alien. He doesn't even know what a wedding ring is.
Still, she scooped it up first and put it back in its pocket, then began to restow everything else, one item at a time.
"What a very useful thing to carry around with you," Lyr remarked. "Did you pack in the expectation you might encounter an emergency?"
"Not this kind of emergency," she admitted with a soft laugh. "Being abducted by aliens and taken to outer space definitely wasn't on my to-do list for this week. But I guess I'm just this way by nature. I like to be prepared."
"A useful trait, when one is stranded on an unfamiliar planet."
"I guess I can't argue with that. But I wish I'd thought to bring a backpack filled with camping gear and a tent." She held up a mini Snickers bar. "Do you want to split this with me?"
"What is it?"
"Candy. Uh, a snack food, from my planet."
Lyr held out his hand. Meri started to put the chocolate bar into his hand, but he only brushed the cuff against it. "Hmm. I don't think I can eat that. But you should. You need energy, and there may be more supplies on the ship."
***
With her mouth full of chocolate, she helped Lyr begin a systematic search of the ship's cargo area and various compartments. It was an odd assortment of things that they found. There were several barrels containing what Lyr told her was a chemical cleaning solvent. Much more usefully, he located some blankets and a bale of flat packets, each about the size of a package of freeze-dried camp food, that he said were food packets, "with enough nutrients to sustain most human-derived life forms." Meri hoped they tasted better than Lyr made them sound.
Even with the ship's power off, the taps in the bathroom still worked, producing potable water that Meri sucked down eagerly from cupped hands.
"I can try to find a way to refill the tanks later," Lyr said. "For now, with just the two of us, the supply on the ship should last us for weeks as long as we're careful about our consumption."
There were more odds and ends scattered throughout the ship, mostly tools. Meri found a handheld device shaped like a wand that turned out to spray out a mist of plastic that hardened on contact with air; it produced thin sheets of plastic that they draped over and around the open airlock door to create an outdoor tentlike shelter where they could make a fire.
Darkness was falling by the time Lyr had a fire burning, crackling just outside the cargo door. The plastic sheeting was angled to direct smoke away from the ship, though Meri still got smoke in her eyes when the wind changed to blow just the wrong way. It made her think of camping out when she was in college.
They couldn't afford nice vacations, of course, not a bunch of cash-strapped college students. But back in the days when she was dating Aaron and Cora was dating Dave, they used to occasionally go on couples camping trips to local campgrounds or state parks. They'd build a fire and roast weenies and marshmallows, before crawling into the big old canvas Army-surplus tent that Dave had found somewhere. It was a heavy monstrosity that smelled like mold and took an hour to set up, with a lot of pinched fingers and jury-rigged rope tying up the sagging places.
She wondered whatever happened to that tent. Surely Cora and Dave hadn't dragged it all the way to Kansas City.
It was very hard not to think about Cora and Toni, last seen huddled in the car. They'd be okay, she thought. Those bastards hadn't gotten them. Cora was probably home in Kansas City right now, with an awful story to tell Dave but not otherwise the worse for wear.
I wonder if she thinks I'm dead.
But she couldn't worry about Cora; there was nothing she could do about it, any more than she could help the other passengers on the crashed module. Secure your own oxygen mask, then help ot
hers—it was good advice.
"So how do you open these?" she asked, squeezing one of the ration pouches. It was firm but slightly yielding. She couldn't see any sign of a place to tear it, but there was a button on the side that made her think of the pull-out inflation tube on an air mattress. She tried to work her fingernails under it to see if it pulled out.
"Not yet," Lyr said. He put his hands over hers. "May I?" When she nodded, he flipped the pack over and ripped off a strip of metallic silver stuff that she hadn't even noticed.
But it still didn't open the package. "What's—" she began, and then nearly dropped it as it warmed in her hands. "Sweet! It's like an MRE."
"A what?"
"Military camp food on my planet. They have a chemical heater in the package, too." In her hands, it was now almost too warm to hold comfortably. "Time to open it now?"
"Now you do what you were doing before." He popped out the tube she'd been pulling on. "And you suck on it." He demonstrated, taking a mouthful before handing it to her and reaching for one of his own.
Meri hesitated before putting her lips on it. It was intimate and strange, a kiss one degree removed.
"Blargh," was her reaction when she'd found out what the stuff in the pouch tasted like. It was a bland, slightly salty paste. "You'd have to be hungry to eat this stuff. I think even MREs are better than this."
"It's healthy," Lyr said, heating his own.
"Yeah, it tastes like it."
She sipped at the tube, trying not to gag. The night outside their plastic lean-to seemed very dark and very large, filled with strange rustling sounds.
"Do you think the others made it?" Meri asked quietly, when the vast darkness away from the fire became too much; she had to fill it with some kind of sound. "Preet and Edrin and the rest of the prisoners?"
Lyr didn't answer immediately. At last he said, "If we did, the odds are pretty good for them too. I'll scout when it gets light."
"It'll take days to get over the mountains."
"Not for me," Lyr said. "I'll just fly up and get an overview of the landscape."