I lower my head, and the poor man with a weird patch of fur—a beard, I remember they call it—sprouting just on the bottom of his chin stumbles back.He has small red blotches all over his face, and he smells strange, but he has eager eyes.
The others glow or do not glow.He...I blink.He glows a little bit.
Agrippa and Phileas must have been listening, because they come closer.
It’s strange,Agrippa says.If I wasn’t looking for it, I might not have noticed.What do you think it means?
“Can I come with you and see whether a dragon can bond me?”
“Blessed,” Liz says.“They prefer to be called blessed.”
“You called them dragons,” Norm says.“It threw us off.”
Liz is not respectful.She sets a bad example for humans and blessed alike.
The man with the face blotches laughs.
“Can you hear him?”Liz asks.
He nods.“He said you set a bad example.”
Liz shrugs.“That’s true.”She turns toward me.“I think they should be able to come.Maybe they can’t be bonded, but it’s worth a shot.Can you return them here, if they can’t be bonded?”
“Or we could stay with you,” the man says.“I live in my parents’ basement, and I hate almost everything about my life.I’d rather come with you and try and help somehow than stay here and keep feeling like a loser all the time.”
His light increases—just a hair, but enough that I can see it.I wonder whether the human light varies based on their choices.He can come.
A small cheer erupts.
As I go down the line of the one hundred and eleven humans Liz brought, inexplicably, twenty-nine of them are bright.Another twenty-six are partially bright.
But every single one of them, bright or not, wants to come with us.
“I need some of you to stay,” Liz says.“Because we need more than ten thousand humans who can be bonded—fast.”
She’s right,Agrippa says.
“I only have three days to convince the dragons not to attack to find the brights they need by forcing the bond.”
The humans are mostly frowning.
“It’s life or death to them,” she says.“And every single human we contact is a risk.”
“I have people I can contact,” Norm says.“And there are quite a few people I reached out to who weren’t close enough to come today.”
“You’ll probably want to say goodbyes, too,” Liz says.“Why don’t you all go home and call whoever you need to call.Gather personal belongings you treasure—one carry-on bag size each—and then you can return tomorrow.We’ll take you all back then.”
“I already have a backpack,” one man says.
“Yeah, I brought a bag already,” a woman with tall boots says.
We should take some with us now,I say.We need to show Hyperion this is a viable option.
And it would be nice to take a few of the semi-bright,Agrippa says.We should find out whether they can actually be bonded.
I’d like to figure out why so many of the humans you found are bright,I say.I thought it was much rarer.
“I have a theory,” Liz says.“I think a lot of the people who are bright—who have a strong sense of justice, social and otherwise, the people who fight things, who don’t accept what’s wrong about the world, we don’t feel like we really belong.We look for other ways to understand things, and a lot of them find it through fantasy, LARPing, D&D, and gaming.”
