Metal Dragon (Warriors of Galatea Book 2)

by Lauren Esker

  "It is you," Tamir said, staring at him. "Lyr told me, but actually seeing you—"

  "I know, I'm quite a sight to behold."

  "You are an idiot," Tamir said. His voice cracked in the middle.

  Meri went off and left them alone.

  ***

  She didn't really want to bother Lyr if he was busy, and she could tell by casual brushes at his mind that he was still working on the engines, so she wandered up to the ship's bridge. She was sitting on one of the padded seats with her feet tucked under her, looking out at the ocean, when footsteps came in and Lyr's arms went around her neck from behind. Meri sighed and leaned into his embrace.

  "Are you fixing the ship?" she asked as he crouched down beside her seat.

  "It's more that I'm getting a feel for all the modifications Skara's made to it. This is quite a ship, even if it is ..." He glanced around at the brightly painted walls of the bridge. "... also quite the aesthetic eyesore."

  Meri laughed. "I like it." She played with his hair and petted the base of his horns, feeling him relax against her. "So where do we go from here?"

  "It depends on what you want to do, but our first stop should be the refugee village. We need to take the collars off the escaped prisoners and pick up any who need transport back to their homes, including those from your world."

  "Oh," Meri said blankly. It had already occurred to her that having a spaceship meant she could go home to Earth, but it hadn't really hit her that it might be soon. That it might be today.

  "It's up to you," Lyr added, his voice gentle, "whether you want to go back or not."

  I could, she thought, dazed. I could go back and ...

  And what? Live in Cora and Dave's spare bedroom? Introduce her seven-foot-tall dragon boyfriend around at the neighborhood block party?

  Get an ordinary job and live an ordinary life, after she'd flown on spaceships and been chased by dinosaurs and fallen in love with an alien?

  The hell with an ordinary life.

  "C'mon," she told Lyr, tugging at his hand. "Show me how the kitchen works on this ship. I'd rather not be dependent on other people to feed myself, if I'm going to be here awhile."

  Lyr's silver eyes brightened, and he smiled.

  22

  ___

  T HEY LIFTED OFF FROM THE SHORE in a brilliant afternoon with the planet's rings arching overhead. As the ship circled above the beach, Meri—strapped into a seat on the bridge—saw that thunderheads were building up over the ocean. It would rain again later today.

  She tried to think if there was any reason to go back to their crashed ship, but she couldn't think of any. She had her purse with her and everything she wanted to bring was in it. Still, she found herself feeling oddly nostalgic for that place, as uncomfortable as it had been. The rock pool where she and Lyr had made love for the first time (and then almost died), the hill they'd climbed, the campsite where they'd talked and gotten to know each other and fallen in love.

  Maybe we could go back someday, she thought, as the beach fell away beneath them and the mountains loomed large in the ship's forward screen. There was a whole crashed spaceship, after all, even if it didn't fly. They might be able to salvage some things that would be useful.

  Useful for whom, though? We're not staying on this world for long.

  She tried not to feel regret for that.

  Rather than skimming high above the mountains, Skara flew slowly through the pass. Meri didn't understand why at first, until she noticed Lyr examining the slope and Skara paying close attention to the ship's instruments, and she realized they were probably checking for survivors. She didn't want to look too closely at the debris of the avalanche for fear of what she might see, and she was relieved when they soared on through the pass and down the other side.

  "No survivors," Lyr told her quietly, and she nodded.

  She felt strange about her part in it, but couldn't quite find it in her to feel too sorry for them. They'd deserved everything they'd gotten.

  And now she got her first good look at the lake-dotted plateau that she'd seen through Lyr's eyes, spreading to the horizon and lightly furred with colorful green and violet forests. Meri leaned forward, fascinated, and then was startled by a light touch on her hand. Looking down, she found that Lyr had reached between their seats to hold her hand.

  "So where's this village you mentioned?" Skara asked. He was flying the ship as Lyr had the other one, with his arms buried up to the elbows in a projecting console in front of his seat. Meri had yet to see anything like what she considered normal controls—a steering wheel, a joystick. She wondered if it would even be possible for her to learn to operate it. If she was going to be living among these people, though—and increasingly she knew she wanted to—she hoped Lyr would be willing to show her. If it meant she had to get the implants Lyr had talked about, she didn't really mind. She'd spent her adult life working with medical technology, after all. To her it didn't seem that different from getting an IUD or a pacemaker, and she'd worked with plenty of patients who had those things.

  "It's on the shore of that lake," Lyr said, pointing.

  Their ship circled wide above the lake, and Meri glimpsed a circle of crude huts and people running for their shelter. "Skara, they're going to think you're a pirate," she said.

  "I am a pirate. Technically."

  "You know what I mean. The bad, prisoner-taking kind of pirate."

  "They'll figure it out as soon as they see you," Skara said, but he set down the ship a little ways back in the woods.

  Lyr led the way to the village; Meri and Skara followed behind. By the time Meri broke out of the woods, Lyr was already in the center of the circle of huts, surrounded by eager villagers as he took their collars off, one by one.

  Meri and Skara were ignored for a few minutes in the excitement. Then someone broke away from the cluster of people around Lyr. "Meri!" cried a voice she recognized.

  "Preet!" Meri hugged her. "You're all right!"

  "And so are you!" the green woman said, and Meri realized with a shock that she could understand her. But of course she could; the translator had long since kicked in.

  "We're going to call this world Haven," Preet said in excitement. "We've already named this place Lake City."

  "You're staying here?"

  "Most of us are. We have nowhere else to go."

  This wasn't true of all of them, of course. There were the humans from Earth, and other prisoners who'd come from other far-flung worlds. But that was business that could be attended to later, sorting out those who wanted to leave from those who wanted to stay. The first priority was seeing to the injured and handing out food and medical supplies from the ship's stores. (Skara grumbled about this, but didn't seem particularly bothered by it.)

  After the excitement died down, Meri and Lyr found time to walk on the lakeshore. It seemed strange to have leisure time on this planet with no one trying to kill them and no need to struggle for survival.

  "An entire habitable planet," Lyr mused, "technically within the Empire but unknown to the Galateans. There must be many such. Space is enormous, and worlds are many, and the Empire is large. Who knows what else is out there?"

  "Preet—that's the green lady—told me they plan to call this world Haven."

  "A haven for escaped slaves," Lyr murmured. "It could be that." He looked down at her. "Your people will want to go home."

  "Yes. And we'll take them there, if Skara will help us."

  "At this point, I think you'd have to pay him to stop him from going to your planet, and even that might not work."

  Meri laughed, but then she sobered. She didn't want to break the warm mood, but she knew it was time for the other thing she'd been putting off. "Lyr ... can we talk about something?"

  "Of course. Anything."

  "You asked me awhile back about this." She took Aaron's ring out of her pocket and held it out, a simple gold band resting in her palm. Such a tiny thing to contain all her hopes and dreams, once upon
a time.

  Now she had other hopes, other dreams, and it was a golden link in a chain holding her to the past. It was time to let it go.

  "I remember it," Lyr said quietly. "What is it?"

  "My people have a custom. When a couple commits to each other for life, they exchange rings to symbolize their bond. Not everyone does it, but a lot of people do." She turned the gold circlet over, flashing the inscription: the date of their wedding. "This was the ring Aaron gave me."

  "It must be very special to you."

  "It was ... once. A long time ago."

  She held the ring for a moment longer, pressed it to her lips and kissed it. "Goodbye," she whispered, and then she dropped it into the water. It sank out of sight into the depths of the lake.

  "Are you sure ...?"

  "I'm sure. His ashes are scattered on Earth. I think it's appropriate that I bury the last of him here, where my new life began. He always liked to travel. He would have loved knowing that a little part of him went to another planet."

  She'd been afraid that she would burst into tears, but the heart-rending grief didn't come. Instead there was a gentle, wistful sorrow, and the warm, supportive pressure of Lyr's arm around her.

  After a little while, they began to walk again. She looked back, trying to find a distinctive landmark to pick out that patch of lakeshore, and then she made herself stop. It all looked the same anyway, with water grasses and overhanging trees, and that was how she wanted it.

  It was time to move on.

  "Are you all right?" Lyr asked.

  "Yes," she said, and realized that it was true. She was all right, for the first time in a long time. With her heart full, she leaned against him. "You know, this really is a nice planet, aside from the lethal wildlife. What this place needs is a lakeside resort, maybe a nice restaurant or two, with a dinosaur-proof electrified chain-link fence ..."

  "That's what you and Lyr can do with your blissfully happy future together," Skara declared, dropping down the bank out of nowhere to join them. "You can run your very own lakeside resort."

  Lyr rolled his eyes, and Meri said, "I think taking care of a village of escaped prisoners is going to keep us busy enough for a while, don't you think?"

  Skara grinned and plucked a flower from the lakeshore that he tried to tuck into her hair and, when she resisted, tucked into Lyr's instead, which got him a glare. "No desire at all to go back to your homeworld, lovely unmodified human lady?"

  "Well, eventually, sure. I want to pick up some clean clothes, for one thing, and a few, um, other things." She hadn't yet had to figure out what the Galatean Empire had in lieu of tampons, and wasn't sure she wanted to know; plus, she planned to buy a lifetime supply of coffee. "But in the long term? No. There's nothing for me back there. Not anymore." She put her arm around Lyr's waist and enjoyed his warmth against her, and the gentle touch of his mind at the back of her own. "Everything I want, everything I could want, is here."

  Epilogue: Kansas City, Missouri

  C ORA CAME DOWNSTAIRS QUIETLY to make herself a cup of tea. Toni was down for her nap, Renee wouldn't be home from school for a couple of hours yet, and today was a day off in the part-time work schedule that she'd kept since Toni was born. Time to have a cup of tea, sort the bills, get a load of laundry in the washing machine, and have a leisurely afternoon to herself for a change.

  But she found herself at the table, tea cooling by her elbow and paperwork spread out on the table, drifting away into thoughts of that night in Illinois that had occupied her mind ever since Meri went missing.

  The official story was that a gas leak had caused an explosion and produced mass hallucinations that had sent people running into the cornfields, convinced aliens were chasing them. Cora kept telling herself that hallucinations were all she'd seen, too. But it had seemed so real, all those smells and sights and sounds. It horrified her to think that she might have been under the influence of some sort of hallucinogenic gas with a small child to care for.

  Of course, the alternative was to believe that her best friend had been abducted by aliens—that she herself had been attacked by aliens who looked like cats and horse/human hybrids. It was insane!

  In the months since Meri vanished, she had poked around on the internet, trying to understand what had happened to her, and had unearthed an entire secret world of message boards talking about alien abductions and other weirdness. Most of it was too bizarre to believe—hidden civilizations inside a hollow Earth, the government manipulating people's minds by putting things in the water, and that kind of thing.

  But then there was stuff like photos of UFOs over the Midwest cornfields that looked so real it was hard to believe they were CGI (though she knew they could do amazing things with computers these days). There were people talking about a meteor strike in Wisconsin last fall that had actually been a spaceship, and eyewitness accounts of alien sightings in downtown Eau Claire that sounded an awful lot like those cat-aliens from the freeway rest stop.

  She found others looking for missing people, too. There was a man who had posted on all the boards looking for his missing wife. There was a woman who claimed her sister had talked about aliens right before going missing in Boston.

  And sometimes Cora would go out in the backyard and look up at the stars at night, washed out though they were by light pollution from the Kansas City urban center, and wonder what she really had seen that night, and where Meri was ...

  She shook her head and picked up a utility bill. This was ridiculous. Dave kept telling her what happened to Meri wasn't her fault, that she had to stop dwelling on the past. But it wasn't guilt, not really; it was a desperate need to know, to understand.

  I just want to know what happened to me, and where my friend is.

  A sudden knock at the kitchen door made her jump and almost spill her tea.

  It must be a neighbor; a salesman would be at the front door. Cora blew out a breath, and tried not to look like a bundle of nerves when she went to answer it.

  "You'll need to keep your voice down, because my daughter's asleep—" she started to say as she opened it, and then all she could do was stand in shock.

  Meri was standing there, hand upraised to knock again.

  Cora stared at her. Meri looked whole and healthy and not at all alien-abducted. Actually, she looked ... good. She'd lost the grayish, worn-down look she'd had ever since Aaron's death. Her hair was growing out of that red dye job, but she'd done something different to it—now she had little sparkly threads woven through it, glittering in the sunshine in the same colorful way as fiber optic cables. She was wearing a loose white blouse very different from her usual style, and wide gold bracelets gleamed at both wrists. The absurd clownfish purse was hanging over her shoulder, although it looked considerably the worse for wear since Cora had last seen it, like it had been dragged through the dirt and beaten with a hammer.

  "Cora?" Meri said with a cautious smile, and Cora let out a laugh and threw her arms around her friend and hugged her.

  "Meri! What are you doing here? Where have you been? No, really," Cora said, holding her out at arm's length to stare at her some more. "Where have you been?"

  "I'm sorry. I guess I've been ... finding myself."

  Cora was caught between collapsing in relieved laughter and shaking Meri until her teeth rattled. So it really had been hallucinations, not aliens. And Meri had let them spend all this time thinking she was dead or worse ...! "I want to slap you silly and hug you at the same time, girl. Okay, no, I'll hug you." And she did. "What's wrong with you? Why didn't you call? Where have you been?"

  "It's a long story. Such a long story. It's just been hard getting in touch with people. I've been ..." Meri cleared her throat. "Out of the country."

  "Out of the—where? Have you spent all this time in Canada?" She hadn't even known Meri had a passport. And what had she done, hitchhiked to the border without so much as a toothbrush?

  "Something like that. Are you okay?" Now Meri was looking at her with
concern. "And Toni?"

  "Toni's fine, she's napping upstairs. Renee's at school and Dave's at work. But really, Meri—Canada?"

  Meri choked on a laugh. "I always wanted to see Canada," she said, her eyes bright with humor, and as much as Cora wanted to yell at her for worrying her like that, oh, it was so good to see her looking like she used to, with the bright eagerness of spirit that Cora remembered from when they were college students together. "Anyway, I'm sorry for not calling ahead, but I wanted to let you know I was all right and also pick up some of my stuff, if you still have it. I understand if you don't—"

  "Of course we do. It's in the garage. Come on in, let me make you some tea, or would you rather coffee?"

  "Coffee," Meri said eagerly, "please."

  They took their cups of coffee to the garage—Meri already having gulped down half of hers; she drank it like she hadn't had coffee in months—where the boxes of Meri's things from Columbus were stacked by the water heater and labeled neatly in black laundry marker. Meri sorted through the boxes and Cora helped her carry them out to her little rental car at the curb. They had to put most of them in the backseat, because the trunk was full of cases of coffee.

  "What in the world are you doing with that much coffee?" Cora wanted to know.

  "Stocking up," Meri said vaguely. "It's hard to get coffee in ... Canada."

  "Canada doesn't have coffee?"

  "Not the kind I like," Meri said, and hastily changed the subject. "So how are the girls? How's Renee liking school? What grade is she in now?"

  So they chatted about that until they finished loading the car. "Where are you staying, anyway?" Cora asked her. "Do you have a hotel? We can clean out a bedroom for you."

  "Oh, no, I have a place," Meri said, although the direction she looked was not towards the city; it was out in the direction of what Cora knew was nothing but suburban sprawl and then cornfields.