Those razor-sharp wings. The metal shifters were back. She had to warn the others—but where was she?
In freezing, sour-tasting saltwater. Her body reacted before her brain formed the thought, calling instinctually on the safest shape for being in the water.
Her neck crunched.
Agitated screeches echoed in her ears as she lost the shift, falling back into her human form flat on her face.
A rope snare, tightening! A rope snare!She didn’t recognize the image that blazed into her mind, but whoever sent it to her loaded it with enough context to make their meaning clear. A hunter’s trap, meant to weaken and torment until their captive was exhausted enough to kill without danger to the hunter themselves.
This time, she rose slowly, testing her bonds. If she raised her head, her arms were yanked down; if she moved her legs, the collar dragged her face back down into the brackish water. The floor was wide-spaced metal grating, which made sense as she pieced together the rest of it. One length of chain attached to manacles and passed through the grating to keep her down.
There was more water below the grating, obviously, but it was dark, and she couldn’t see how far down it went. The floor rolled again, and the water slopped higher. She was on a ship?
She looked up at last, wary of her chains but not, despite everything, frightened by what she saw.
Maybe she’d maxed out her ability to be afraid. That would be nice.
Six Stymphalian bird shifters had attacked the plane. One was back in the basement where Lance and the others had caged her.
The other five were locked up here with her.
They shuffled feet and claws on the same grating she was lying on, and one level up, on another layer of cages. There was barely any light down here, but enough to glint on bronze feathers and the cage walls. She stared silently at them. Shifters like her, trapped gargoyle-like between bird and human. The same way she was trapped.
And all caught in the same snare.
“Hey,” she said, for lack of anything else. Her voice sounded like she’d been gargling with glass shards.
Rising sun! Warm updrafts! Plentiful food! Safe nests!
Someone hissed. The shifter in the cell on the far left hunched down as his neighbors flared their wings at him. She peered, trying to see through the shifting shadows and glint of metal, and thought he might be a he, and younger than the others. The bird-faced woman between him and Carol ran a human hand down her beak and smacked the cage above her head.
The cage above held another woman. With a human face. The same one she’d seen at the plane window? The woman knelt on knees that bent too high on her legs, threading hand-claws through the grated floor to keep her balance.
“Apologies.”
It took Carol a moment to realize that had been a word, outside of her head. The woman’s mouth worked again.
“Regret?”
It was like talking to Maggie, she decided. If Maggie was a year or two older and knew words instead of just pictures and feelings. Their images were so layered with meaning, it was like language—like looking at a single picture and reading a whole paragraph from it. Speaking English out loud must feel thin and lacking in information by comparison. Rising sun, warm updrafts… things that were welcoming. Home-like. Safe nests?
Regret?
Carol licked her lips. “Yeah, I guesssafe nestsisn’t an appropriate thing to say to someone who knows you tried to kill a dragon hatchling and a clutch of eggs.”
The woman frowned, sharp and severe. “Dragon? No fight with… dragons.” She hesitated.
“Then why did you attack Maggie?” She layered her thoughts with memories of the little spitfire dragon: her joyous ferocity. Her curiosity and endless hunger. The way Carol’s heart melted when she curled up in her lap, those bright golden eyes closing as she fell asleep with perfect trust.
“Not dragon.” The woman hissed. “These words… new. Strange.”
“I know Cantonese and Spanish. Some Arabic, if that would help.” But not enough of any of them to hold a conversation more complicated thanHi, how are you?andWhat’s the WiFi password?Let aloneWho are you and where did you come from, and why do you look like that, and if you’re trapped in these cages with me then who the hell is the bad guy here and what do they want?
It was almost a relief when the bird shifters all stared at her in puzzled bafflement when she tried a few phrases on them.
English it was, then. English, and pushing images into their minds, which probably felt to them the same way Maggie’s poorly rendered piles of gold and salmon felt to her. Clumsy and childish, but still communication.
“If you weren’t after Maggie and the other baby dragons, why did you attack us?” The plane. She didn’t want to remember it, but she did, and pushed the memories out to the other shifters.
