Page 15 of Crash Landed with My Weredragon

"I'll be careful."

"And if he hurts you, I'm going to punch an alien prince in the face, and the interspecies diplomatic consequences will be your problem."

Marina smiled, it was hard not to. Peter was good. Genuinely, uncomplainingly good, in a way that made her feel guilty for not wanting him the way he wanted her. She couldn't make herself feel something that wasn't there. But she could respect what was.

"Noted," she said. "For the record, you're a good man, Peter."

"I know. It's my curse." He raised his coffee cup in a mock toast. "To terrible decisions made on alien planets."

"To terrible decisions," she agreed, and they drank their bad coffee, and they watched the last sun set, and neither of them mentioned that the conversation had changed something between them that couldn't be unchanged.

The morning of the departure, Marina briefed the crew.

"I'm taking a team of four to Dobromia," she announced in the cargo bay. The entire crew had gathered. Forty-seven faces were looking up at her with expressions ranging from excitement to terror. "Myself, Athena, Dr. Patel, and Peter. We'll be traveling with the three Weredragons. The purpose is diplomatic and scientific. We're establishing formal contact with their government and surveying their resources for materials we need to repair the Vulcana."

"How long will you be gone?" asked Rowan.

"Three days. Maybe four. If we're not back in five, Dr. Vasquez is in command, and you follow the emergency protocols we established on day one."

"And if the aliens aren't friendly?" someone called from the back.

"Then we leave," Marina said firmly. "This is a diplomatic mission, not an invasion. If at any point we feel unsafe, we abort and come back. Nobody's dying for a handshake."

Athena stepped forward. She'd strapped on every weapon she owned, which was considerable. "For those of you who are worried, I'll be there. And I've been told by our Weredragon hosts that the worst thing on Dobromia is the food."

"That's not reassuring," Rowan muttered.

"I wasn't trying to be reassuring. I was trying to manage expectations." Athena smiled, and the crew laughed, and the tension in the cargo bay eased by a few degrees.

Marina looked out through the cargo bay doors. Toren was waiting on the rock plain, already in his partial-shift form. His wings were extended, his tail out and his scales were gleaming in the early morning light. Auren stood beside him, bouncing on his heels with the barely contained energy of someone who'd been looking forward to this moment for days. Khrelan stood apart, arms crossed, expression neutral. He'd agreed to come, but he hadn't agreed to be happy about it.

Marina shouldered her pack. Data tablets, medical supplies, water and protein bars; the terrible kind that Toren had described as "functional." She'd also packed a small container of instant coffee, because if she was going to visit an alien civilization, she was doing it caffeinated.

"Let's go," she told her team.

She walked out of the Vulcana and into the red morning light, toward the prince who was waiting for her, and she didn't look back but she did look sideways. because Toren was doing something she hadn't seen before. He was kneeling beside a flat rock near the landing site, arranging objects on its surface with the careful attention of someone setting up a display. Marina slowed her approach and watched.

There were six items on the rock. A scratched DVD case which she could just make out the title, something with a whale on the cover. A photograph, curled at the edges, of a city skyline she didn't recognize. A paperback book so worn the cover was barely legible. A small glass bottle, a folded piece of fabric that might have been a flag, though the colors had faded beyond identification. And a pair of earbuds, the wired kind that hadn't been manufactured on Earth in decades.

"What is all this?" she asked.

Toren looked up. For the first time since she'd met him, he looked embarrassed. "My collection. I mentioned it once. Artifacts from your world that drifted through the system. I've been gathering them since I was young."

Marina crouched beside the rock. She picked up the DVD case carefully. The plastic was warped from exposure, but she could read the title now. "Free Willy," she said. "This is the movie about the whale."

"The movie about the man who taught a whale to jump over a wall," Toren corrected. "It was the first human artifact I ever found. I was twelve. I didn't have a way to play it. I had to build a device from salvaged components. It took me three months. And when I finally watched it, I didn't understand most of what was happening. The language was unfamiliar, and the visual conventions were confusing. But I understood the ending. The boy loved the whale, and he set it free, and the whale chose to come back."

He said it with a simplicity that made Marina's throat tight. This wasn't small talk. This was someone showing her the origin point of his entire worldview. It was the moment a teenage alien had watched a cheesy human movie about a whale and had drawn from it the radical conclusion that love didn't require sameness. That you could care about something utterly different from yourself and have it mean something.

"Why are you showing me these?" she asked.

"Because I want you to understand what you represent to me. Not as a diplomat or a scientist. As a species." He picked up the worn paperback. "I learned your language from this book. It took four years. I don't know what half the words mean in context, because I had no one to ask. But I read it over and over until the sounds made patterns, and the patterns made meaning, and the meaning made me want to know more."

Marina took the book gently. The title was too faded to read, but when she opened it, she recognized the text. It was a children's novel; something about a rabbit and a garden. A book you'd give a seven-year-old.

"You taught yourself English from a children's book," she said.

"It was the only book I had."