A Pet For Lord Darin

by Hollie Hutchins

  Oh, this guy is fucked, I thought, and I smiled.

  Smoke and strings of fire pressed Orin into the glass, wrapping around his ankles and wrists like chains, tightening around his throat, sinking into his skin. The more he struggled, the deeper they dug, razor flames catching on his hair, his coat, his stupid elbow patches. The smoke leaked through the bars, almost caressing the metal, clinging to it like climbing ivy. It spread out to the man’s left, but not his right. It didn’t come close enough to touch me. It poked and prodded at some invisible border, billowing up against it, but it never came closer.

  For a while, nothing happened. Orin’s eyes turned red and his hair caught fire, and as it burned he screamed and wailed and cursed. The window warped beneath him.

  Eventually, I looked at the dragon, and found him looking at me. I couldn’t imagine why, but his eyes – his red eye, gleaming in the dull orange light of his own fire – seemed to be asking a question.

  I looked from him to the man and back again, and drew my thumb across my throat. “Fucking drag him,” I said.

  The dragon gave me a single solemn nod.

  The fire lapped at Orin’s throat, his hair, wrapping around his suspended heels and his whirling silk tendrils. He said something in a thin, high voice, begging, probably, or maybe insulting the dragon because he knew he was out of time.

  The dragon snapped his fingers. The sound they made was like thunder, a furious clap that made the whole room ring like a bell. I flinched and blinked, and when I opened my eyes, the window was gone.

  And so was Orin.

  ***

  The body was carted away from the beach far below by a host of massively tall aliens in tight black suits, which I was beginning to think was the staple hard-labor look. They put him on a stretcher, drenched in blood and salt and sand, and carried him away, to burn or bury or send back to his family in little bite-sized pieces with a politely threatening note.

  I hoped, for their sakes, that whatever he’d come to talk about wasn’t important; but you don’t barge into someone’s house in the middle of the night in service of a glass of wine and a misguided effort to get some tail. You come when the moons are up because whatever it is can’t wait.

  But he was so calm, I thought. So it wasn’t urgent on his part. Which made me think he came to deliver a threat or an ultimatum, not because he had to but because it was dark and he didn’t want to be seen.

  Whatever it was, it can’t have been anything good. Nobody who dresses like that in the dark has stellar intentions, especially given the kind of people the dragon keeps for company.

  Yita came running in when the glass broke, and he saw Lenada on the floor by the bookcases, her face in her hands, sobbing. He ran and knelt in front of her, whispering quickly to her with words I’d never heard before – a specific dialect, maybe, a different language, or maybe sweet reassuring nothings the dragon had never had occasion to say in front of me.

  Yita finally got her to look up and she nodded, tears streaming down her face. He said something soft, and she said something softer, and together they stood and left. The dragon didn’t move to watch them go.

  The carpet beneath the window was scorched, a black shadowy circle that seemed to grow and wane when I wasn’t looking at it directly. The whole room smelled like melting skin, burning feathers, sweat and salt and the tang of a cold night wind. Red curtains, usually so still, flung themselves out the window, billowing like capes. The dragon stood between them, arms crossed, contemplating the small red stains in the sand.

  The breeze was nice. I hadn’t been outside since I’d gotten here. I forgot how good the ocean smells, how calming it is when the wind catches your hair, what salt tastes like in the back of your throat. I pressed myself up against the bars closest to the break – warm now, close to scalding – and inhaled as deeply as I could.

  “That was close,” I said, more to myself than him. I never really expected him to respond. At this point, I might actually take offense if he replied, as though he were intruding on a private conversation I was having with the wallpaper. “I hope he wasn’t here for…”

  I looked at the dragon, and found him standing close to my cage.

  “…anything…important,” I finished quietly.

  “Jal,” said the dragon, reaching forward and lifting the lock on the cage door. It slid open with an uncertain creak, as though the cage itself weren’t sure if he’d done it on purpose.

  “Jal,” I repeated, frowning at him. Come, this way, follow, something like that. But why?

  “Jal,” said the dragon, and this time he gestured for me to step out. I did, slowly. He was uncomfortably close to the door, and there was no way around him. So I stood there, a hand’s breadth from his face. He stared at me, red eye glistening, white eye blank and empty. There were black flecks in the red eye, now that I was close enough to really see it, black flecks like spattered paint. He exhaled, and his breath smelled like blood, like rusted iron and wet metal.

  He inhaled and stepped back slowly. I stayed where I was, staring at him. I tried to fix a question into my expression: What do you want me to do? Maybe he wanted to teach me to do a trick: roll over or play dead or something equally contrived.

  The dragon either didn’t get the message or he simply didn’t care. Or more likely, he only saw his confused new pet, not understanding what was wanted of her, the way a dog looks at you when you throw a stick and they don’t know you want them to go get it. He took another step back.

  “Jal.” He held out his hand, fingers twitching in a “come hither” gesture.

  Okay, that was straightforward enough. I walked up to him.

  He lowered his hand and stared at me. I stared back, wishing I knew his language better so I could demand to know what he was thinking.

  “Qel sur tun?” he said, searching for something in my face.

  Qel meant “what” and tun probably meant “you”. So, “What are you?”

  “Human,” I said. But he already knew that much.

  The dragon’s scowl deepened. Without looking away, he pulled a small tablet from his pocket, slid his hand across its surface – and made a call. It was slimmer and shorter than any smartphone I’d ever seen, but it seemed to serve the same purpose. He lifted it to his ear and waited a moment.

  “Sol-dam,” he said, looking at me. His tail lashed back and forth, taking pieces out of the bookcases whenever it brushed past. There were gouges like that on most of the furniture. The plush pieces probably looked new because they were new. Replacing pillows couldn’t be cheap, but I guess it’s better than having steel chairs. The rooms were austere enough as it was.

  “Ji nen ka sel dalis,” said the dragon.

  I couldn’t quite hear the person on the other end, but they sounded irritated – or at least very indignant. The dragon made a face and said, “Ji na velu sel a tun en silvam.”

  He hung up and pocketed the little tablet. “Jal.” And he started for the front door.

  I followed.

  ***

  It was a doctor. Not the one from the ship, someone younger and visibly more excited by the sight of me.

  We were in an office, the sterile white room of what I was reasonably sure was someone’s private lab. The building was small, situated on a cliff not far from the monolith. Wide windows looked over the vast grey sea, casting a cold white light across the vast array of tools and microscopes laid out on metal folding tables. I wondered if the clouds would ever go away.

  The doctor – Kai-dam, the dragon called him – pulled up a diagram to compare me to, a rendering of his species’ male and female anatomy. I leaned forward to examine them as he played a “find the difference” game between us. What I found startled me, probably more than it should have.

  Any planet similar enough to Earth would likely have yielded similar organisms, so the alien’s humanoid evolution was nothing to be surprised at, but as I looked I saw more and more similarities. The aliens had two breasts (on what I assum
ed was the female), though the ones on the diagram were smaller than the average human’s – which might mean nothing, since these had been rendered specifically for tissues and organs and veins.

  And many of those were in the same places as well. My specialization was chemistry, so I’d have a better time comparing the compositions of our blood or saliva, but I could pick out a few organs that seemed to have the same shape and purpose as mine: a stomach, a liver, two kidneys, a uterus. There were others I didn’t recognize, but I hadn’t taken anatomy in more than a year, so that didn’t mean they didn’t have human counterparts.

  The doctor said something. He crossed his arms and made a show of uncrossing them. I uncrossed mine and he smiled.

  “Let’s begin,” he said – in his own language, but his tone and his suddenly stern expression was enough to translate by.

  Dr. Kai-dam offered me a small wooden box with three holes in it – a triangle, a circle, and a square – and handed me a triangular wooden block. He made a vague gesture to the pieces and said something I didn’t catch.

  Oh, you’ve got to me fucking kidding me.

  I stared Kai-dam down as I slipped the wooden block through the triangle hole. He nodded and smiled and handed me a circle, and I repeated the trick until he stopped giving me blocks. He adjusted his spectacles – I guess every race with eyes gets around to the concept of glasses eventually – and jotted something down on his tablet in a blocky runic script. I watched over his shoulder trying to parse out some of the letters, but after he made some one or two-word notes in print, he switched to cursive, and then I was completely lost.

  Add that to the list of universal concepts we could probably do without, much to the chagrin of all the poets of the universe. Depth and illegibility were, apparently, directly correlated, according to every English major I’d ever had the misfortune to meet.

  He put down the tablet and grabbed a small pink box made of something that might as well have been cardboard. It was in poor condition, frayed and scratched, but I could make out the vague cartoonish design of a forest. He set it on the examination table in front of me and opened it to reveal a very rudimentary puzzle.

  I sighed. I’d always loved puzzles, but the milk-white kind, the ones where there’s no picture, just a jumble of impossibly tiny pieces. This one was made up of five blocky jigsaw-style pieces I could put together in less than ten seconds. Dr. Kai-dam clapped and said something in an excited voice. The dragon, standing in the doorway watching with his arms crossed, frowned. His frown was getting deeper with each passing minute. If he wasn’t careful, he’d stretch his lips right off his face.

  Dr. Kai-dam kept the puzzles coming for a while, increasing their difficulty by pathetic margins. It was starting to irritate me. I wanted a fucking Rubix cube, chemical formulas or differential calculus, or a real puzzle, but he kept presenting me with toddler toys. Every time I solved one he grew more…he wasn’t as excited as he was giddy. He was the walking embodiment of the word “squee”. It took me a stupidly long time to realize they were testing my intelligence. Which was good, I guess, maybe that meant progress.

  Eventually, he brought out the big guns: a piece of paper and a pencil.

  The doctor drew a smiley face, very slowly, looking up ever second or two to make sure I was still watching. When he was done – thirty seconds later, with nothing to show for it but two lines and an unsteady smile – he turned the paper towards me, and handed me the pencil.

  “Sur,” he said, and made a writing motion with his hand. He pointed to the smiley face, made the gesture again, and pointed at me. “Sur.”

  I felt myself go stiff. Draw a smiley face, I thought. Really? Can I draw a fucking smiley face?

  I ripped the paper off the table and took it to the floor on the other side of the room, away from them, turned halfway towards them so I could see their perplexed faces. Neither of them moved to follow me.

  Draw a smiley face, I thought, clenching my teeth hard enough to make my jaw hurt. Draw a fucking smiley face, I’ll show you a fucking smiley face. I didn’t spend two years rendering scientific drawings of flowers for nothing.

  The drawing I ended up with was artistically lacking, but it was obviously the doctor’s face. I wrote dam at the bottom, which I’m pretty sure means either doctor or scientist – not that the distinction really mattered here.

  I pushed the paper in his face, scowling. I was one hundred percent done with all of this “unintelligent human” bullshit. Let’s see if she can draw a smiley face, they said, I wonder if she can play fetch, I wonder if she can do a backflip, I wonder if she can bark on command…

  The doctor took the paper. He looked from me to the drawing and back again several times, eyes wide with wonder. He slowly moved away from me and showed the paper to his colleague, pointing to the word at the bottom. It occurred to me a little too late that they don’t know anything about the English alphabet, so to them it just looked like a bunch of random shapes.

  But that didn’t seem to matter. The doctor said something softly, and I caught a few words of it. “Think…she…not…”

  “Dalis?” I said – the word I was reasonably sure meant dumb.

  The doctor dropped the paper, and his jaw. I couldn’t help but smile.

  “Thalsi,” he said, mouth agape. Language.

  “Thalsi,” I agreed.

  He looked at the dragon, sneering openly. “Thalsi.”

  The dragon pursed his lips and didn’t reply.

  The doctor scooped up the paper from the ground and rushed over to his console, sliding his fingers across the slick glassy surface until the anatomic hologram in the middle of the room switched and displayed a tree, an Earth tree, unless their ecology was identical to ours, which I found unlikely. At the least I expected it to be a different color.

  “Bal,” he said. He pointed to the hologram and leaned forward, saying it again, slowly. “Baaaal.”

  I nodded. “Bal.”

  The tree disappeared, and four images appeared in its place: an apple, a glass of water, something that might have been a phone, and a tree.

  I walked up to it and pointed to the tree, my finger sliding through the bark and making the projection shiver. “Bal.”

  “Savei, savei!” he said, which I took to mean “yes” or “good”. He turned to the dragon and said something I didn’t catch, and the dragon inclined his head.

  “You don’t speak this language, do you?” I said. It was a vain hope, but you have to try everything. If anyone in the room was a linguist, it was the doctor. “Um. Can you understand me?” I said, drawing out my vowels.

  The doctor perked up, then frowned like he was thinking. He tapped his lips with one finger. When he spoke, his words came slowly. “Yes…bit. Small words. Much not.”

  Okay, so his grammar left something to be desired, but it was worlds better than nothing.

  The dragon pushed himself off the wall, visibly disconcerted. He spoke slowly, so I caught all of his words. “It’s a language,” he said, totally aghast.

  The doctor looked as smug as anyone ever had and nodded, and said, “Ji talas tun,” which I was pretty sure meant, “I told you so.”

  I smiled and pointed at the doctor. “Name?” I knew it already, but it felt polite to ask.

  “Name,” he said, wracking his brain for the translation. “Name. Name, name…”

  I walked up to him slowly and reached for his collar, where there was a rectangular pin with black script – what was hopefully a nametag. “Name?” I said.

  He looked down, then back up, and he smiled. “Name!” he said. He took a step back, giving him enough room to bow deeply. “Dectar Polat Kai-dam.”

  “Doctor?” I said.

  He snapped his fingers. “Doctor, yes!” He pointed at me. “Name?”

  I returned his bow. “Brittany Lu,” I said.

  He frowned. “Bir…beer—itanny?” The b-r stuck to the roof of his mouth like peanut butter and he couldn’t quite get it out. />
  “Um…how about just Tany?” I said. That part of the name he could say. “Tany,” I said, making air quotes.

  Dr. Kai-dam repeated the gesture to himself, looking confused.

  I put my hands shoulder length apart and said, “Brittany.” I moved them closer together. “Tany.” Long name, short name.

  “Ah!” he said. “Tany. Berr-it-any. Tany short.”

  “Yes,” I said, “savei!”

  Dr. Kai-dam clapped his hands together, laughing. Bar none, this was the most expressive alien I’d encountered. He gave the dragon a pointed look. “Most say, human smart no. Say we, yes! Always, say we, yes. Now, see we correct.”

  “We?” I said.

  Before he could continue, the door swung open, and someone else came striding in.

  “Sol-dam,” the young doctor said, bowing to the newcomer – the doctor from the ship, the one that had been so disturbed by me. He seemed equally disturbed now, but the disturbance seemed to be something within him rather than something in the room.

  Sol-dam smiled thinly at the younger doctor and told him something in his language, with a raised eyebrow expression that went with the kind of faces teachers make when they’re trying to convince you something was your idea. The young doctor beamed, nodded, and left the room in a hurry, probably to get more puzzles or something, or to leave us alone for a physical examination. Maybe that was the nurse and Sol-dam was the real doctor. He approached me with a grim expression and I tried to prepare myself for something uncomfortable. He looked at the door, closed now, and turned to me.

  And he spoke.

  “I’m so sorry. I trust him more than most, but his tongue is loose when he is in his cups, and I could not risk him knowing anything I am about to ask of you.”

  “You,” I said, mouth agape.

  “Speak perfect English? Yes. Yes, I do.” He walked towards me. “May I offer you a hug?”

  I felt something crack inside me. “Yes.”

  He embraced me, squeezing me tightly. How long had it been since I’d had any human contact? Okay, this was alien contact, but I was counting it full on.