by Lauren Esker
Meri turned to give him a deeply startled look. "You can fly?"
"Didn't I mention that?"
"No!"
"I keep forgetting you don't know of dragons."
"Dragons?" she repeated. Surely he couldn't mean—that. She got the sense sometimes that the translator was struggling to find a rough equivalent for something that had no similar word in the target language. But she also remembered the huge hot presence she'd touched with her mind, after their crash—the way it was him, and not-him at the same time—
"Dragon?" she asked, and sent him a mental image, which happened to be the CGI dragon from the Hobbit movies; it was the first thing she could think of.
A quick flash of surprise lit his eyes. "Your world knows of us?"
"Yes—but—they're not real. They're imaginary."
But aliens weren't supposed to be real either. And she was sitting beside a campfire on a planet with actual dinosaurs. Why not dragons too? In the firelight, with those iridescent ripples of color across his bronze skin whenever he moved, he did look like a dragon made flesh, a dragon in a man's skin.
"I am very real," he assured her, and brushed her hand with the side of his own.
"Do you actually change shape, or what? You don't have wings."
"I do change shape. I'll show you tomorrow, when it isn't dark. I'll also see how the hunting is. We may be able to eat those—what did you call them?" He sent her a mental picture of the swimming creature.
"Dinosaurs. I mean, obviously they aren't, since we're on another planet and all, but they kind of look like them."
"In any case, it's possible we can eat them. I'll have to catch one and scan it with the cuffs to find out."
Meri touched the silver band bisecting his wrist. He didn't seem to object. "I need to get some of these. Can you teach me how to use them?"
Lyr shook his head. "They won't work for you unless you have the mods to use them. Do you?"
"Mods?"
"I expect that's a no." Lyr touched one of his cuffs and it sprang open, leaving his wrist bare. He turned his arm to show her his naked wrist in the firelight. Hair-fine silver threads glimmered on his skin. "There are implanted contacts to connect to the cuffs, and nanites in my bloodstream to power them and allow them to receive mental commands. This is one of the ways that Galateans keep other races from stealing and using their technology."
"But the pirates had them, didn't they?"
"Most of the pirates were Galateans. And it's not impossible for other people to use them. They just need to have had the necessary surgical modifications." He touched the underside of her wrist lightly with his fingertips, a soft touch shivering across her skin. "Most people who live within the Empire have the mods. You need cuffs to do things as basic as open doors and make financial transactions. Of course, most people don't have the military-grade ones that Tamir and I do."
His fingertips still moved across her unmarked, unmodified skin, tracing the lines of tendons and veins. It was a feather-light touch, a reminder of the incredible delicacy of which he was capable. Just as the ferocity with which he'd hacked up the trees had reminded her of the other side of him, the killer and warrior.
"I am sorry if I offended you earlier," Lyr said quietly.
"When?"
He was looking not at her, but at her hand, lying open and relaxed in her lap. His gentle tracing of the lines of her wrist moved on to her palm. "On the hill. When you hugged me."
"You didn't offend me." Her voice came out on a breath, the words mostly unspoken, carried on the link between them.
"I don't want you to think that your touch was ... unwelcome."
"I didn't think that," she breathed.
The link between them was alive and thrumming with energy, with anticipation. She hadn't been aware of it strengthening until it was there, shivering at the edge of her awareness.
"Lyr ... do your people kiss?"
His fingertips paused in their sweeping motion across her skin. "Kiss?"
"Kiss. Yes." She could feel her cheeks growing warm. "You know ... touching mouths?"
"I know what kissing is." He seemed amused, and perhaps a little wistful. "But as for your question, I do not know."
"You don't know?" She'd anticipated a number of reactions, from a confident "Of course" to disgust or dismay. But this wasn't any of those.
"I was young when I left my asteroid. My people are reticent about public displays of sexual interest. I am not sure what our courting behavior is like."
"You do have sex, though?" she asked anxiously. If she was going to have to stop fantasizing about that firm, copper-colored body flexing against her own, she wanted to know right now.
"Oh, yes," he murmured. "We do."
"Do you want me to ... show you? How to kiss?"
"I ... I'm not sure."
His hand still rested in her palm. She covered it with her own, and was shocked to realize he was trembling.
"Lyr ... what are you afraid of?"
*I don't know.* Through the link, this time, and with it came an abrupt glimpse of a starfield, something exploding, a raw flood of grief and pain—
A sob caught in her throat. Meri realized there were tears in her eyes. Lyr tried to jerk his hand away, but she held onto it, wrapping her fingers tight around his. He'd cut off the rush of emotions as soon as he'd realized she was feeling them, but that raw ache lingered, tightening her throat and sinking claws of grief into her chest. She knew that pain; it was what she'd felt after Aaron died.
"Lyr ..." Her voice came out strangled, still fighting her way through a grief and loss that was not her own. "What was that?"
"Nothing." It was spoken aloud with no mental component at all; he had pulled back, putting up walls. But she didn't want him to, not now, not when she was finally starting to feel as if there was something real between them and not just the desperation of two people in danger together. She groped for him mentally, not sure what she was doing, but wanting desperately to know what emotions underlay that single flat word, reaching for another look at that star-laced ... metaphor? memory? that she'd seen earlier.
*Don't.*
It came down the link, carrying the force of a rebuke, with the weight of his anger behind it. Startled, she jerked back, and he pulled his hand free.
*Don't,* he repeated. *To seek after another's private thoughts is unforgivably rude. It is the first thing we teach our children. Don't ever do it again.*
"I'm sorry."
"You didn't know." But the link between them was closed, and she had the sense of a barrier in the way, something he'd erected to keep her out.
"I'm really sorry. I won't do it again."
"I'm not angry. You simply don't have the mental control my people do. I keep forgetting that."
"Where are you going?" she asked as he got up.
"To gather more firewood. I'll be back soon."
"I did offend you, didn't I? Lyr—"
"Hush." He touched her shoulder, a light brush of his fingertips. "I'm not angry at you. I just need a few minutes alone."
Meri put up her hand to cover his, and he let her for a few seconds before sliding his fingers out from under hers. "Okay. Just come back soon."
*I will.* The words lingered on the link between them as he vanished into the darkness outside the circle of firelight.
***
It was not as dark as it had seemed at first. There were two moons in the sky, one high and crescent-shaped, the other lower and fuller. The planet's rings had a faint luminescence as well, like a band of pale chalk drawn on the night sky.
Lyr had to work on keeping his mental barriers in place. Underneath was a roiling, seething mass of emotions, as if everything he'd been trying not to feel was boiling up, on the verge of erupting.
He thought he'd trained himself to feel nothing; instead it seemed he'd only managed to bottle it up.
He wanted to shift and fly, but he didn't dare in his current state. Everything was closer to th
e surface when he was a dragon. What he needed now wasn't catharsis, but calm.
He emptied his mind and simply let himself exist, listening to the small rustles of night creatures going about their business around him. It had been a long time since he'd been on a planet at night. When he let himself think about it, he felt overwhelmed by the knowledge that he was at the bottom of a planetary gravity well, with space immeasurably far away. It was almost as if he could feel the weight of all that atmosphere pressing him down.
He still found planets indescribably alien. Home was the darkness between stars. Home was the curving tunnels of a hollow asteroid, twisting around in organic shapes and opening into huge caverns big enough to fly in, softly lit in gentle colors that were soothing to dragon eyes.
And home, or a home of sorts, was the sterile corridors of a spaceship, ringing with the echoing sounds of voices and footsteps and clanging machinery.
But home had never been this, a place so full of life and smells and growing things that every breath he took was a brand new sensory experience. Even the crushed grass beneath his boots was fragrant.
It was serene and beautiful in its alien way. And slowly the pain and rage began to ease out of him, soothed by the calm of the night—and by Meri's presence back at the fire. He could feel her at the back of his mind, humming softly to herself as she went about her business at the campsite. Every once in a while, her thoughts turned his way, and she sent a tentative question in his direction, a little tickle of his name and a wordless, half-formed Are you okay?
As he stood there in the dark, it seemed to Lyr that he was balanced between two worlds. One was the great, dark, empty night, the whole wild planet out there. As a dragon, he could vanish into that wilderness. He could live here for the rest of his life, hunting to survive, needing nothing and no one. The Galateans would never find him; he could make sure of it. No one would ever find him.
Freedom—not the sort he wanted, but freedom nonetheless. He would never go home, but as he'd told Tamir, it wasn't as if they would take him back anyway. His people had sold him into slavery, and anyone who had ever loved him had probably forgotten him by now.
Honor held him prisoner, but he hadn't even been trying to escape when freedom had fallen into his lap anyway. And now an empty world, a world that might be completely unknown to the Galatean Empire, had been laid in front of him. Fate had handed it to him like a gift.
But ... then there was the other world, that pool of warmth and light back there. When he looked down the hill, he could see the tiny flicker of their campfire, like a candle flame holding back the darkness.
Meri and Tamir needed him to survive. One was badly injured; the other had never been off her world before and could not possibly defend herself against this world's wild creatures.
Meri was still singing softly. Her mind was wide open. He wasn't prying ... not exactly ... but he listened to the words she was singing in her own language, translated through the implant. It was a sweetly sad song about lost love. Freedom was an illusion, Meri was singing in the words of her people; it meant only that you'd lost so much you had nothing else to lose.
Aimed at him? No, he thought; all he sensed from her was the slow easing of her worry and anxiety as the song calmed her. To her, it was only a song.
But she wasn't wrong, he thought, looking out into the dark. The trade-off for escaping his responsibilities would be a lifetime of loneliness. There was a big wide world out there, where he could live forever as a dragon, with no one to care about, no one to mourn.
A great, wide, utterly empty world.
Meri's soft, husky voice sank into low, wordless humming. He looked toward the firelight again. He could see her shadow cast across the side of the ship, dancing in the flickering firelight with each graceful move she made.
He didn't have to walk away now, he told himself. He could always make sure everyone else got safely offworld and then make his own way in the wilderness.
And for tonight, perhaps he could catch them some fresh meat.
It only took a few minutes. The night was full of small, skittering creatures. He strode back toward the fire down the hill with a small blue-and-orange lizard dangling from his hand, dispatched with a quick stroke of his arm blades. It was good to know he could still hunt.
While he was gone, Meri had moved Tamir's float-hauler from the bridge down to the cargo bay and parked it on the floor just inside the airlock. She had also begun to set up a little camp inside the open airlock, spreading blankets near enough to the fire for its light and comfort, but inside the door so they could close it if anything dangerous came along. She'd even washed out their empty ration packs and filled them with water so they didn't have to keep going back to the taps in the ship's head.
Lyr sent a feather-light touch across her mind so that she knew he was there before she looked up from arranging the blankets and saw him in the firelight.
"Just doing a little housekeeping," she said with a quick smile, and then her smile turned teasing. "No firewood?"
"I ... forgot," he admitted sheepishly.
Meri's playful smile turned to a full grin. "It's a relief to know you can forget things like a normal person. What's that?"
He held up the lizard. "A better dinner than the ration packs."
Meri didn't look as pleased as he'd hoped. "Uh ... I think I'd like it better with barbecue sauce and a nice gas-powered grill."
Lyr squatted to give the lizard a quick scan with the cuffs, finding it perfectly compatible with both their metabolic processes, and spitted it on a stick. "What is that song you were singing?"
"Oh? It's called 'Me and Bobby McGee.' It's by a famous blues singer on my world." Meri smiled crookedly in the firelight. "Not that you know what blues is. But I can see you know music."
"Yes. My people have music." He looked down at his work, rather than at her. "I must apologize to you for walking off like that. I behaved dishonorably—"
"Oh, don't start. I know you weren't mad, and if you were, you had a right. I wanted to know more about you, but that's no excuse for snooping."
"And I should have taught you properly." He looked up, with effort managing to put on a smile. "It's been a very long time since I've taught someone else."
"Did you teach people before? —No, never mind." She shook her head. "That's up to you to tell me. I won't pry."
"I did." With the lizard speared on a stick and propped over the fire, there was little else to do except wait for it to cook. He rose from his crouch and came around to her side of the fire. "They were my sept."
"What's that?" Meri asked quietly. In response to a polite mental request that he sent without even thinking about it, she held out the container of water she'd brought down, tilting it so he could wash his hands under the flow. His people liked to be clean.
"They were my brothers and sisters. The Galateans took them from their homes as children and trained them to fight. Such child-slaves are divided into septs and put under the supervision of an older child. That child was me."
"Oh," she whispered. He risked a glance at her, and found that her eyes were deep and dark in the firelight. "I didn't know ... How old were you?"
"Nineteen standard." Realizing that he didn't know how Earth years compared to Galatean years, he sent her a mental image of himself at that age, lanky and gangling, still growing into his height.
"You were a teenager," she murmured, reaching out a hand as if to touch the image of his younger self. "Put in charge of children."
"Tamir was responsible for all of us." He looked over at Tamir, just visible inside the inner airlock door—a bundle of silver blankets and tufts of striped fur, sunk deep in a coma that might heal or kill him. "He was the one who taught us to fight, while I handled the day-to-day care of the sept."
For so long, he had refused to think about those days. Now it came rushing back to him. They had been so small when he had first met them, a diverse group of children from different worlds, each with his or
her own unique skills and abilities.
"Where are they now?" Meri asked.
"Dead," he whispered. "All dead."
The warmth of her hand on his own made him flinch, but when she started to pull away, he turned his hand up and she settled hers in his, and held on.
"Do you want to talk about them?"
*Someday,* he sent through the link, not trusting his voice. *Not tonight.*
He sensed wordless acknowledgment, and finally brought himself to look at her. She was beautiful in the firelight, her skin a gorgeous warm brown, with the fire's glow bringing out a thousand shades of amber and green in her dark eyes.
"But tonight," he said quietly, aloud. "... Tonight I would like you to remind me that I am still alive, even if they are not. Tonight I want you to show me how to kiss."
12
___
H IS WORDS STARTLED HER, but not as much as his face, turned toward her in the firelight with his lips parted. His eyes were molten silver in the flames' flickering light.
She leaned forward, drawn to that silver fire. His lips were as soft as they looked. Their first touch was the gentlest brush of his mouth on hers, but she was the one who surged back toward him, opening her mouth, letting him taste her.
He tasted good. His mouth was wet heat and restrained eagerness, and desire coursed through her in a sudden, shocking rush. It had been so long since she'd been touched that way, so very long, not since Aaron—
She clamped down fast on the thought of Aaron, not wanting Lyr to know that his kiss had made her think of another man. But it was too late; even if he didn't understand the reason for it, he'd already noticed that she'd gone still against him. He pulled back immediately.
"Did I hurt you?" he asked, fast and worried. "Was I doing something wrong?"
"Oh, no, no." She brushed her hand across the side of his face. His skin was so warm; how could she have ever thought it would be cold? "It wasn't you. What hurt me was ... something else. Something that happened to me years ago."
"Do you want to tell me?"