by Lauren Esker
"Thank you," he whispered, and kissed her gently, kissing her tears away.
"For what?" she asked shakily, wiping at her face.
"I don't know," he said, and gave a laugh that sounded close to a sob. But the smile that followed was genuine, if tired. "For ... giving me a reason to get out of my head, I guess. For telling me the truth. For giving me something to live for."
Meri felt her own smile breaking through her tears. "If I hadn't met you, I'd still be back on Earth, living in my former best friend's spare bedroom and stuck in an endless loop of reliving Aaron's death." Grief caught in her throat, saying it aloud, but it wasn't the consuming, smothering grief that she'd been living with for the last ten years. It still hurt, would probably always hurt, but it was less like a raw and gaping wound, and more like the itch and ache of something that was beginning to heal.
Lyr brushed at her tears, and his voice, when he spoke again, was almost shy. "Would you like to meet my brothers and sisters, Meri?"
"I'd love to."
She was expecting pictures from his cuffs, but instead, slowly and gently, an image began to unfold in her head.
"The first of them I met," Lyr murmured, "were the twins, Rook and Kite. They were Tyborians, from a mountainous world of cliffs and spires and trees that reach as high as outer space itself."
The shadowy shapes in her head resolved into two children. They looked much more human than she was expecting, a little boy and girl with reddish-purple skin and hair that was barred brown and white, like the feathers of a hawk. At first their coloring was the oddest thing she noticed about them—until they spread their wings, fledgling wings with tufts of fluff, still growing their flight feathers.
She saw them pounce on a bronze-skinned teenager, who she recognized with a start as a young Lyr. He was so ... open, so happy-looking; he laughed when the children jumped on him and began wrestling with him.
"Then Rei came to us," Lyr said, his voice bringing her back to reality. "He was a wolf shifter from the planet Polara. I remember him as a shy child, fond of art and quiet things."
Rei was a little boy with dark blue skin and bright, startling golden eyes. In the images playing out in her head, she saw Rei curled up crying in a corner. The little winged boy and girl went to him and hugged him, wrapping their wings around him.
"And then there was Haiva, who was of Galatean parentage. She was taken as a child to pay off a clan debt."
Haiva was slightly older than the others, an active girl with the ears of a cat and tawny, spotted leopard fur. She seemed to be a perky, cheerful child, eagerly reaching out to the others to make friends.
"Thorn was the most unusual among us. He was a chimera, created in a lab, part of a Galatean experiment to create a new kind of warrior."
This child had skin of a patchwork silver and blue, and eyes that flashed red in the dark. He didn't want to look at anyone, hiding, keeping to himself. But when Haiva crouched and took his hands, he looked up at her and smiled shyly, and then he hugged her. It was plain that they were especially close.
"Selinn was our teleporter. She was of a people called the Rhuadhi, and her people are unique among all the peoples of the galaxy because they are bonded to symbiotes that enable them to teleport from place to place. As you might expect, Rhuadhi are hard to imprison, though very sought after by those who wish to exploit their unique talents."
The new girl had skin as smooth and brown as Meri's, and green hair hanging to her waist. She reached a hand above her head and drew it down like she was unzipping an invisible coat hanging in the air in front of her. And the air did unzip, parting in a shimmer of eye-searing blue and purple to expose a view of an orange sky and distant mountains.
"A symbiote?" Meri asked. "What's that?"
"It's a lab-engineered creature that lives inside their bodies. I don't know how it works, but I know what she could do. The Galateans wanted to use her power to send her to conduct secret assassinations."
In Lyr's memory, Selinn drew a deep breath and squared her shoulders. She looked scared but determined as she stepped through the hole in the air. It closed up behind her.
"And then there was Skara, the Iustran. Skara was our troublemaker, and our finder. He worked as a team with Selinn."
The new child had purple skin and vivid red hair. In Lyr's memories, he was a whirlwind of constant motion: climbing on top of things, picking locks, stealing small items and hiding them, playing pranks on the other children and on their keepers.
"What do you mean, your finder?" Meri asked.
"It's something his people can do. They can imprint on people and find them again. It's how they recognize each other, since their people can change shape."
His memories shifted. Now the children were playing a game that seemed to be a cross between hide-and-seek and paintball. They didn't carry toy guns; instead they shot beams of colored light from their cuffs. It was clear that they were having fun, but it was also serious. If these were child soldiers in training, this was how they were trained.
And it was clear that Skara had no trouble finding the other children. The purple-skinned boy, now a lean and muscular teenager, had an unerring ability to locate any of the others. Meri watched a dizzying montage of memories (different games, different years). Skara scuttled up a sheer brick wall using an extra set of limbs that he grew for the occasion and then jumped down onto a well-hidden Rei; he extended a set of wings and leaped onto Lyr's back, throwing his arms around Lyr's neck for playful roughhousing and nearly scaring Lyr out of his skin.
"He was your favorite," she realized, feeling the emotions underlying that memory.
"I didn't have favorites," Lyr answered quickly, but she gave him a look, and he broke into a tentative smile. "Okay, maybe I had a slight favorite. I don't know why. He was just such a problem all the time. But it was sort of like ... he could be so charming that you couldn't hate him for it, even when his pranks got us all punishment detail. The thing about Skara ..."
He trailed off, and she thought he might not have intended to show her the next memory—his own hands, helping a shaken and trembling Skara out of some kind of dark box. It was a punishment; Skara had been shut up in there.
"They couldn't break him," Lyr said, his voice low and fierce. "All the rest of us gave in, sooner or later. We might be only pretending to go along with them, but we did go along with them. Skara, though ... they could beat him, starve him, threaten him with any kind of punishment. He just didn't care. Nothing they did to him made him less defiant, and I think through him, we all managed to hold onto a little bit of freedom."
"He sounds like someone I wish I could have met."
She regretted the words almost immediately, but Lyr's smile was wistful instead of sad. "I wish you could have, too. I'm not sure if you would've liked each other; he drove most people crazy—"
He broke off at the sound of footsteps outside, crunching on the foliage. But it was Tamir's tall, broad-shouldered shape that appeared in the half-open doorway. Meri grabbed for a blanket and pulled it over her chest.
"Fresh fish for supper tonight," Tamir declared. He paused to shake rainwater off his fur before holding up a string of fat silvery fish. "I went back to see if I could salvage something from the carcass down by the spring, but it'd already been scavenged pretty thoroughly; there's not much left—" He stopped mid-sentence, taking in what he was seeing. "Er ... I could go back outside again."
"Maybe long enough for us to get dressed?" Meri asked.
"Right." His fur hid his ability to blush, but she recognized his embarrassment by the hunch of his shoulders as he ducked quickly out the door. Meri looked at Lyr, who met her gaze with humor chasing the shadows of grief from his eyes.
"I guess we're one of those couples now," she said, laughing, as she reached for her blouse.
"Those couples?"
"The kind who embarrass everyone around them with PDAs." Lyr looked politely blank. "Public displays of affection."
"Hmm.
Well." He caught her hand and nipped lightly at her fingers before letting it go and groping around for his pants. "I can live with that."
***
Meri hadn't expected that fish without seasonings or butter or even salt, seared over a campfire, could taste so good. It was probably the relief of eating something other than those awful ration packs. She decided to celebrate by breaking out the rest of her chocolate stash. Lyr couldn't eat it and Tamir declined, so she ate a slightly stale, more than slightly squashed, fun-sized Mars bar by herself. It tasted amazing.
A renewed rain squall drummed on the plastic sheeting overhead as darkness settled slowly around them. Lyr stirred up the fire. Meri would have thought she'd feel a lot more nervous sitting out here, but with Lyr beside her and the fire sparking golden, and the possibility of retreat into the ship at her back, she was starting to enjoy the campout feeling again.
Tamir turned in early, still healing and exhausted from the day's activities, leaving the two of them alone. Lyr sat with his arms around her, occasionally leaning forward to add a stick to the fire. Rain ran off the plastic in a steady cascade.
Meri relaxed in his arms. The things he'd told her and showed her ran around and around in her head. Her life seemed so sheltered, compared to his.
But who would ever have thought that she'd end up having adventures like this? Stranded on an alien planet, fighting dinosaurs, making love to a dragon prince ...
Cora would never believe this, she thought. That life seemed so far behind her now. She sent another hopeful thought toward Cora and Toni, hoping her friend had made it out okay—and then let it go.
"You told me once that you didn't like the rain," Lyr said quietly. "Is this hard for you? We can go inside if you wish."
"No. I'm okay." It surprised her to realize that it was true. "On Earth, yes. But here ... it's like a fresh start. All those bad memories are a million miles away." She looked up to see that Lyr was smiling. "What?"
"The image you just shared with me. I saw you dancing in the rain."
"Oh," she said, embarrassed. She'd accidentally flashed back to a memory from college, when she and some of the girls from her dorm had run outside in a rainstorm to dance on the campus quad. She hadn't realized he had seen it.
But when had she forgotten how much she used to love the rain? As a small child, she liked to play out in it. During thunderstorms, she used to stand on the porch and watch the lightning. And then there were those wild nights on campus: taking off her shoes to walk barefoot on the wet grass, spinning around in the rain with her arms spread wide to the sky.
"Lyr ... do you want—"
Her mind shared the image before she could ask the question: Meri with rain coursing down her face and shoulders, dancing barefoot on an alien hillside with Lyr's hands in hers.
She sensed his anxiety, not fear so much as wary tension. "Are you sure? You know what's out there."
"You'll protect me."
"Are you two going somewhere?" came Tamir's sleepy voice from inside the cargo hold as they got up.
"We're going for a walk in the rain," Meri told him.
"Hmm. Don't let anything eat you." But he sounded more amused than worried.
Lyr took her hand as they left the shelter. Rain soaked her immediately. As her blouse dampened and clung, she realized there might be a flaw in her plan.
"I forgot we don't have anything to change into."
"Clothes will dry. We have blankets."
Well, her clothes needed to be washed anyway, she reasoned. Tilting her head back, she closed her eyes and let the rain run down her face. The wet grass was soft under her bare feet.
Opening her eyes, she saw the flash of Lyr's teeth as he grinned at her. He was staying very close, almost clinging—not that she minded, with the possibility of large predators around.
It seemed unlikely that anything would be out in this kind of weather. Still ... now that she'd thought of it, nervousness stripped some of the joy out of the experience.
"Aren't you enjoying yourself?" Lyr asked.
"I'm thinking that dancing in the rain was more fun when I was twenty-two."
"Perhaps your dance needs more ... dancing."
And to her surprise, he took her hands and twirled her on the hillside.
After the first breathless instant, when she came very near to being literally swept off her feet, she caught herself and began to skip along with him. It was not a formal dance so much as the kind of thing she used to do when she was younger, an improvised skip-jump, like kids playing.
Lyr's hands were strong on hers. Rain ran down her hair and her feet were splattered with mud. It was stupid and ridiculous and completely, in all ways, not how you were supposed to act when you were stranded in a wilderness filled with man-eating dinosaurs. (Not that there was an instruction booklet for that, exactly.) But it was also the most fun she could remember having in years. It was reckless and crazy. She found herself laughing, her mouth open with rainwater running in. She heard Lyr laugh, and tried to remember if she'd ever heard his laughter before.
They spun to a stop, breathless, on top of the hill. Meri leaned into Lyr and he caught her as she giggled helplessly.
"That was amazing," she gasped as she got her breath back. "That's one of those things I'm going to remember all my life."
"I'm glad you liked—" Lyr broke off suddenly, and surprise rippled through their link.
For an instant Meri thought they were being attacked, but he wasn't angry or afraid, just curious. He was looking up at the sky, so she looked too, just in time to see a bright flash of light streak through the clouds. It didn't flicker and branch like lightning; instead it was a straight line that suddenly changed direction at near right angles to its first trajectory and vanished behind darker clouds, leaving only an afterimage blazoned across her retinas.
"What was that?" she asked, startled. "Does this planet have weird lightning, or what? How did it move like that?"
"That was a ship."
"Wait, what? Really? Does that mean we're saved?"
"Unlikely." He stared into the rainy darkness, shielding his eyes with his hand. The wind lashed the trees, and Meri moved closer to him. "Think about the possibilities. The only other people anywhere near here, as far as we know, are pirates. They may well have found another functional escape vessel in the wreckage, like the one we took. And if it's not them, then the Galateans have found us."
She couldn't understand, at first, why he didn't sound happier about it, but then the penny dropped. "And you're an escaped hostage."
He looked down at her, rain running down his face and dripping off the ends of his hair. "I will not let anyone hurt you."
"I know." She moved into his arms; he wrapped them around her. "Just don't let them hurt you, either. What are we going to do?"
"If it is the Galateans, they will not pose a threat to either you or Tamir. Tamir is a respected soldier, and as for you, they will simply return you to your world."
"Not without you!"
"Just listen. If I disappear into the forest and leave you and Tamir to contact them, you'll both be safe. You can go home—"
"Lyr. Listen to me." She gripped his arms and tried to project her thoughts at him so he would recognize her sincerity. "There is no home for me without you, don't you understand? What's waiting for me back on Earth, anyway? A spare bedroom in the house of an old friend I don't even really feel close to anymore, and a new job in a new city that I don't really want to live in. What am I supposed to do, go on Tinder looking for a date when I could have you?"
In the darkness, she wished she could see his face better.
"Let me make this clear to you," she said, squeezing his forearms. She felt the hard lines of the blades under his skin, but she wasn't afraid of being cut; she knew he'd never hurt her. "If you're going to vanish into the wilderness, I'm coming with you—do you understand? I'd rather be stuck on this planet with you forever than go back to Earth alone, knowing all of this wa
s out here, that you were out here, and never able to do anything about it. Got it?"
"Yes," he whispered, staring at her.
"Good." She realized she was shivering, in her wet clothes and her bare feet. "Let's go back to the fire."
Tamir was awake and up when they got back to the ship, feeding the fire underneath the plastic shelter. He looked up and grinned at their bedraggled appearance. "I expect you two are going to be regretting this when you have to put on your wet clothes in the—" He stopped as their solemnity registered on him, the smile dropping off his face. "What's wrong?"
"We saw a ship," Meri said.
"Most likely a ship," Lyr corrected. "Although I can't think what else it could have been. It was no meteor, not moving like that."
Tamir rose to his feet. "Pirates? Did it land?"
"If it came down anywhere, it's not close to us." Lyr wrung out the dripping tails of his hair and crouched by the fire. "I don't think we've been found, not yet. It's possible that it's your people."
"Hmm." Tamir studied the two of them, then disappeared into the cargo bay. Meri was trying uselessly to wring out the sleeves of her blouse when he came back with two blankets. "Here. Get out of your wet clothes."
"We need to make a decision," Lyr said. "Should we seek to contact them, or hide and prepare to fight?"
"Why does it have to be one or the other?" Tamir countered, shoving a blanket at him. "Perhaps we could play it both ways. We don't want them to stumble upon us unawares, but let's face it, we're not getting off this planet without a working ship. This one's beyond repair."
"So ... what are you suggesting?"
"Hide the campsite," Tamir said immediately. "Have an escape plan if we need it. But go ahead and contact them. We don't really have a choice."
"I can reconnoiter as a dragon," Lyr argued. "We need to know more before we go charging into anything. You're the one who's always telling me I jump into things."
"I'm not suggesting jumping into anything blind, I'm just saying if there's a working ship on this planet, we need to talk to the people in control of it."
