Captain Abel inhaled deeply through their nose, held the breath in their chest, then exhaled. After four repetitions, they felt capable of response. “I suppose, if we’re already bringing up the others . . . have the transport head there next. Ship, are you preparing the med-bay?”
AFFIRMATIVE. YIPPEE!
“And we’ll need to inform Luna”—the captain tapped to get Gita’s attention—“of our unusual cargo. At least this one didn’t assume we were Martian hyper-capitalists. How’s our fuel projection with the extra weight?”
IT’S PUSHING OUR MAXIMUM CAPACITY!The words scrolled fast, betraying the ship’s excitement.BUT THAT’S THE LAST ONE, PROMISE! THE DRAGON IS ESSENTIAL!
Captain Abel forced a smile. “Well, if she’sessential, then we’ll bring aboard the dragonandthe manandthe polite and friendly sorcerer. Until then, I will be fucking asleep. Good work, crew!”
Before anyone could protest, they marched from the cabin. The door slid shut behind them, and, at last, they allowed themself a small groan of pain. This blossoming headache was a monster, and nothing that followed would lessen it, they knew that much. Reality was different, reality had changed, reality had unicorns and dragons in it.
I’LL WAKE YOU ONCE THEY BOARD,scrolled the ship across their eye-lens, and they nodded affirmation, only to wince at the jogging of their tenderized skull.
Captain Abel’s last thought, as they crawled into the darkened nook of their sleeping shelf, was to pray to whatever God might be out there that this freshly returned Earth proved a better neighbour than Mars.
CHAPTER 57
In Which a Star Is Falling from the Sky.
The round, foreign structure descended from the heavens like an instrument of God.
It landed in a wash of light and flame, turning the night briefly into day. Four legs unfolded from the pod, sinking into the sand, and straightening the ramp that unfurled like a tongue.
A construct. But no—this was metal, not wood. This was . . . actually, I didn’t know what this was.
Feeling like I walked through a dream, I lifted the limp weight of Merulo and mounted the ramp, flinching at the hollow clang of my footsteps.
Inside: a ring of seats, harnesses falling from their shoulders. Lights blinked on, blinding me. When I could bear to open my eyes, I saw illustrations lining the walls of small figures finagling themselves into the seat-straps.
“You first,” I said to Merulo—though, being unconscious, he neglected to respond.
My hands came away wet from securing him into his partitions.
I’d barely strapped myself in when the hatch snapped shut, and with it, my last view of Larnia. Before I could shout at this, acceleration struck. A terrible weight pressed on my shoulders, sinking my eye-jellies deep into my skull. Every breath took a struggle.
Then, it stopped.
I was still gasping in recovery when the hatch slid open to reveal, not peeping Martian visages, but Hydna.
“Hy—”
“Shit.” Hydna ducked into the pod, filling it with her bulk, and beelined to her brother. Her calloused hands fluttered over the crushed prosthetics that dangled like windchimes from his shoulder and hip. Clamping her jaw tight enough to spasm, she dropped into an adjacent seat, nearly tearing the harness in her haste to secure it. “GO!” she roared to the pod, and it did.
Once more, force peeled back the skin of my face. It grew, and grew until it was too much to bear—then, in an instant, it abated. Replacing it was a sense of weightlessness. Not just a sense; I floated in my seat, with only the harness keeping me in place. “AUGH!” I cried, and watched as saliva drifted from me in tiny, pretty bubbles.
It distracted me so thoroughly that I nearly missed Merulo’s last breaths.
Those last gasping intakes—like he sucked air around some hidden obstacle. I could tell, even as Hydna freed herself of the straps and pounded at his chest. I knew the finality of it.
Merulo was dead.
It barely breached my awareness when the door slid open again, and a glittering horde of metal floated in to snatchaway his corpse. Dimly, I heard my own voice, painful in its volume, overlaying a second, far calmer voice that issued nonsense words.
There was a wrench, as weight re-established and my feet slammed into metal flooring. Then I was following Hydna, without the memory of having unstrapped myself from the transport wall.
We passed into a corridor, and I sat. From that vantage, I watched Hydna seize a hovering contraption, her greed for information overcoming any sense of loss. She hooked her pointed nails into a crevice, tearing through its shiny surface. Small metal parts tinkled to the floor around us. I leaned back against a cool, smooth wall and realized that I was waiting to feel something. Really, anything at all.
Using the organs of the machine she’d taken apart, Hydna assembled something like a small, heated knife. With a cry of triumph, she brought it to sizzle against the wall of our prison.
