A dragon egg.

They were destroyed, nearly all of them, before they could be used, before they could be properly fed. We've forgotten, most of us, rooting round in the scuffling shadow of a dozen rival empires and a hundred lesser states. They're fractious, these fey, and for all their magic and mighty works that's the reason we've survived this long, in the cracks, the spaces between. Humans. A whole race in eternal search for cover along the borderlands.

Once, we were children of the sky. Once, our ancestors made wonders of their own. Once, there was something like harmony, or, more likely, at least a kind of coexistence without utter domination. But they discovered that their magics could overcome our wonders, properly cast, and our countermeasures came too late, and the lure of power, the sweet thought of humiliation for mighty Man, that was too much, they couldn't resist.

The dragons came too late. Only a few could be fed enough to matter, and the fey used our own weapons to bring them down.

But all those weapons are long gone.

I run my fingers over the sparkling shell, felt the warm lightning-life of the substance within. Hungry. Ready to be fed.

"I will hatch you," I whisper in a long-forgotten tongue. My parents were scholars, some of the last. They and their parents before, and their parents before, always questing for what was left behind. And now, here, in this half-buried vault, all those generations of despairing search have...have...

Well. I don't know. We'll have to see. Soon.

It's damned heavy, both the egg and the weight of the dead, piled up behind me in the doorway, shoving me forward with dead sacrificial hands. I ought to feel nothing but gratitude toward them, but I find part of me resents the burden of their expectation, no matter how thoroughly the brains that bore it have rotted into the dirt.

Gonna be real hard to carry, all of it. But I don't feel I have any choice, not if I want to continue to be who I am, a woman with purpose, someone whose life may make a difference beyond just not-dying, creating new people and trying to extend the not-dying into their generation. Scratching food from the ground under the groaning weight of special taxes. Bleeding out a living in some fey criminal underworld where even the lowest detritus consider themselves above you.

I place the egg carefully into my pack, thinking hard about what I'll be dealing with when I get back above ground. This vault is deep, I'll have some time to consider. I'm going to need it. I start walking, pausing again and again to stare at some old wonder, only partially-destroyed by the collapse of the building above. A machine that once brewed and dispensed beverages, oozing ancient brown. A cracked screen that showed moving-pictures-in-depth, like some Gnome illusionist's image. A half-buried skeleton clutching at a long-barreled weapon that once spat lines of disintegrating fire.

I don't try to pick any of it up, wouldn't even if I weren't already carrying as much as I reasonably could in the form of the egg and my own few supplies. All broken, and even if it weren't, exposing it to the fey-occupied city above would destroy it in short order.

But the dragons were different. I tug the straps of my pack upward, feeling that terrible, reassuring weight resettle over my shoulders and hips. Upward, upward, scrambling over jagged metals no Dwarven smith could ever reproduce.

And speaking of Dwarves...

I pause, listen, pull myself back behind a corner. It's unlikely they'll notice the entrance to the ruin, they never had before, but who knew how it all had settled and changed over the years. Maybe the way in I'd found was newly-formed by centuries of shifting metal and earth. Maybe it's more obvious than I thought, especially to keen-eyed Dwarves.

It is.

Half-interested chatter comes down the twisting corridor, gruff stoneground voices, the clatter of heavy armor and sturdy weapons.

I'm unarmed. We all are, by law. Oh, there are small things here and there. A knife used for utility work, a stick for walking, but nothing beyond that. Even if I had a weapon, I'd be no match for a Dwarf patrol. They'll ask me what I'm doing down here, search me, and that will be the end of it. They'll know what the egg is. Legends like that don't die, not for a long, long time.

I keep very still. They're getting closer. I could run, get lucky, dodge their crossbows, if they get near enough to notice me. There are other passageways, even if I don't know where they go, even if they're most likely dead ends.

I ready myself, breathing long and slow, muscles tight and loose in sympathy with the movement of air in and out of my lungs.

Can't let them have it, if there's even the smallest chance you have to take it.

One of the Dwarves in the patrol begins to laugh. More chatter. My Dwarven is iffy, but I understand enough. She's found some small personal item on the corridor floor. "Look at this," she says. "Still holding on to it with bony little hands. Lot of good it did the vermin-child."

I grit my teeth. Laughter. The movement toward me ceases.

Then the sounds begin to move away.

I force myself to count out twenty full minutes after I'm sure the patrol has departed completely, then start making my own way out. I search the floor as I go. Sure enough, right there. A small skeleton, curled-up, finger-bones forced open. A couple paces away, a small stuffed toy has been tossed aside. It's in surprisingly good shape, or maybe not so surprising considering how durable our ancestors knew how to make some things. Or maybe it's just luck that kept it away from moisture and mold all these years.

I pick it up. It's a Pegasus, the kind of creature the Elves use to patrol the skies above me right now, part of the treaty struck after this last great human capitol was felled by joint forces of the fey.

I am burdened, but not that burdened. I pick up the toy, turn it over in my hands, brush it off, put it in a side pouch of my pack, and continue into the slow-growing daylight of early morning.

I have a long journey ahead.

~

My neck hurts. I've been watching the sky, watching for patrols of pegasus-riders, thinking all the time about the toy in my pack, the child who held it more than two thousand years ago, the bone-corpse fingers that held it until I'd stolen it for good a few hours ago. I'm watching the buildings, too; they may be mostly collapsed, but there are still plenty of vantage points for a really determined climber on the lookout for humans, especially humans with full packs and furtive manners. Contraband to be "confiscated." Legalized banditry, highway robbery where you're not allowed to fight back. I don't carry a weapon anyway, not even a walking-stick. Even the one knife on my person is a tiny folding thing as far from being a weapon as possible for any object with a sharpened edge.

Except of course that I do carry a weapon, now, the most powerful ever conceived by an inventive race at the dizzying apex of its brilliance. But it's still only an egg, still needs to be hatched and fed. Not doing anything for me now but make my back and shoulders ache from its weight.

"Hey! You, vermin! What have you got there?"

Gods damn it, the voice is coming from a side-street I hadn't noticed, too busy checking upwards. Out here, a few miles away from the city center, not even the dwarves usually bother patrolling the ground. The fey either make their demands from above, or they leave the scurrying trickle of human traffic alone.

I turn to look. It's an Elf, but she's in bad shape. Not just because of the scars on her face, or rather, that's likely one of the root causes of her troubles, but they've expanded since then. An Exile, kicked down into the dirt with the humans for falling short of Elven standards of unmarred beauty. Still not human, though, not quite vermin. Not quite able to call for the aid of her former fellows, but still Elf enough that serious repercussions could come down if she were found seriously injured or killed. Exiles are held in contempt, but that didn't mean mere humans are allowed to do them harm. She'll expect a degree of protection from all this. Still, though, there's never any lack of truly desperate humans, and she's alone, so she approaches cautiously, improvised scrap-metal spear held out in front of her. Exiles are still allowed to carry weapons so long as they aren't recognizably "Elven" in make.

"Salvage," I say, truthfully enough. "Not much I can use right now, though," I add, which is also not technically a lie.

"Give it here," she says, and reaches out a hand, walking closer.

I sigh, and nod, and slowly unbuckle the pack from around my waist, slip one strap off my shoulder. She keeps coming, hand still held out in greed, just one on her spear.

Mistake.

I parry the spear aside with the bracer hidden under the ragged cloth of my sleeve, and twist my whole body so that the weight of the pack swings heavy off the fulcrum of my shoulder, hefting upward so that the egg slams right into the side of the woman's face. I'm not worried about damaging it; if the delicate bones of an Elven cheek could do harm to a dragon egg there'd have been nothing left to salvage.

She crumples. I try not to look too closely at her face. I'm breathing hard, starting to shake. Beyond a few scuffles with other humans growing up and in my travels, I've never really fought before. Certainly I've never hurt another person this badly before.

Hurt? No. Even from the edge of my vision, I know she's dead. I don't need to see, I felt it, the sharp giving-crunch of bone, the following soft-resistance of...

...enough. I don't have time for this, to panic or have some crisis of conscience. She'd have killed me for what was in my pack without a second thought.

But now what? What kind of reprisals would fall to every human who happened to be in the area once the body was found?

Can't worry about that. Feels awful, but my mission is too important. Have to move on.

I look around. No one is watching that I can see. That doesn't mean no one saw. Just about any living human will have the kind of sharp survival instincts that say, "It's a bad idea to be a known witness here."

The side of my pack is dripping blood and gore and fragments of what are probably bone but I pretend they're not as I scrape them off against the woman's own clothes. I do it kind of sideways, so I don't really have to look. I justify it, telling myself I need to keep a lookout, which isn't wrong, I'm all alone and just got a very pointed reminder how dangerous that is. But I didn't have anyone I could trust enough for this particular scrounging expedition.

I'm not going to make it home. I'm going to have to hatch it here, in the outer city. I'm going to have to find a place to do it.

My hands are still shaking. There's blood on both of them, from putting my pack back on. It's dripping, too. I can hear it.

I need to get underground, and fast. If I'm spotted like this, by almost anyone either human or fey, I'm basically fucked. I can't answer any of the questions they'll ask.

I look around. Nothing in view, just a lot of destroyed buildings, impossible to identify what they'd once been for.

Got to move fast. Keep going down this side street. If I didn't see the Elf coming, maybe no one will see me leave. Maybe if anyone saw me, they'll keep to themselves. They did just see me basically assault

murder

a fey, after all. They might keep their distance.

Please, gods, let them keep their distance.

I have to go a distressing distance down the road before I find a sure prospect. But I'm not attacked, not stopped. I have an idea after a hundred paces or so, stop, take a ratty old cloak out of my pack, use it to cover up the stain on the side. I'll look a little strange, but not strange enough in the scrounge-and-make-do culture of humans. It's a good thing, too, because several people look my way before I see it.

An old supply depot. It will have a basement. The basement would have raw materials. Ruined, for most purposes. Unsalvageable. No point. No use. Dangerous, too.

Still dangerous for me. But not without use. This is perfect, if I can make it in.

I circle the place. Nothing. Nothing. I'm aware of eyes on me. Just kids, playing in the street-debris, playing with the street-debris. But still eyes.

Part of the above-ground building is intact. There's a gap in a semi-collapsed wall. I slip in. An outer hallway is passable, if sagging. I follow it.

There. A collapsed section of floor. A subtle glow from below.

I look behind me. This is it. This is going to have to be it. No one can follow me in. They should think it fell on me. They should think I died. Happens all the time.

I pull a small sphere from a hidden pocket in my pack. Precious little thing. Time to let it go.

I thumb the right spot, squeeze another. Precise. Hold it. Feel it pulse in confirmation. Throw it, jump down into the gap.

RUN

RUN

Throw myself to the floor, hands over my head. Hear the sharp pulse of explosion, feel it. Some of the ceiling falls on me. Small cut in my side, nothing I can't treat.

I stand up, shaking, look back the way I came.

Hole in the ceiling is still there, the collapsed hallway floor. I walk cautious, look up into it.

Rest of the hallway has collapsed. I couldn't be followed, not that way. I let out a small bit of sigh. Can't let all the tension out, have to keep it, keep me alive.

But look. Look at these riches. Great bins of what our ancestors called "Universal Component Paste." All ruined now, useless to any but the most sophisticated of their machines.

Except this one, the one I'm pulling out of my pack, caressing, smiling. This one would have food now. This one could eat.

And grow.

"Time to hatch, little one," I say softly, in that ancient, ancient tongue.

~

I have to rest. But first, it has to be fed.

He has to be fed? She has to be fed? The dragons weren't like the other ancient wonders, they thought and felt and spoke, after their fashion. Or was that really true? There are so many legends and so few solid answers.

This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

I lift the egg up into one of the bins, more gently than is probably necessary given what I used it for less than half an hour before. It shines brightly, sparks from a thousand hidden facets.

It will be a she once it hatches, I decide, because I have hopes for it to be the mother of more of its kind. The first of them came into being at great cost, but never had time to fulfill the measure of their creation.

The egg shudders in the bin, and heat comes off the degraded paste around it. I stand and watch a long time, but I still have to rest. It had already been a very long and wearying day when I first encountered the egg, and the journey since has piled on even more weariness, heavy and insistent.

I wish I had someone else with me, to stand watch, to talk things through. But it's just me and the egg, so I take the bedroll from my pack and spread it out on the most even patch of ruined floor I can find, near the bin where my newest hope and greatest burden shines and burns and slowly swells.

I sit and treat the wound in my side. I scrub the gore from my pack. There will still be a stain, maybe a stain on me as well. Don't want to think about that. Anyway, no fey will care about stains on ragged human things. Won't be able to see the stain on me. Gods. I eat a few bites of dried fruit and hardtack, drink some water, lie down.

Sleep comes harder than usual, but exhaustion wins out.

I dream of ancient times, roaring wyverns and humming machines, lances of fire from human troops hemmed in, fading away as their weapons fail, hit by spells from afar. Some simply fail to fire. Others explode in great scintillating gouts of destructive pseudo-fire.

Runestones flung from distant trebuchets hit, spread their destructive magics of ice and fire and tangleball lightning.

Death and screams and despair. Then a great roar, unnatural though not in any terrible way, just not come from anything living. A thing of silver and diamond-flare bursts out, breathing white-hot flames that linger long in the air and even longer in the eye. They burn outward and consume and I feel a long lifting burst of hope and then I wake up.

It hasn't been long. I'm still tired. The egg is still sitting in the bin, luminescent, larger but unhatched.

Slowly, I go back to sleep.

I awake to something nudging my face. Years of surviving mean that I open my eyes very slowly, reach for and find the nearest solid thing to hand, which now is one of the solid bracers I've taken off to sleep. If it's a rat, I'll kill it. If it's a thief, well, care has to be taken. If it's a fey, I'm in some sort of real trouble.

It's the dragon. Of course it is. She's hatched. She's tiny, or at least much smaller than I would have expected given the size and weight of her egg. Perhaps the size of a feral cat. Her wings fold and unfold, almost like breathing, though she does not. Her eyes are purple-and-teal, swirling with sharpened curiosity.

"Hello," I say, I breathe really, fogging some of her facets. She's almost-lizard, with those mirror-scales. She recoils, but only a little. "Hello," I say again, this time in the ancient tongue.

She nods. Actually nods. Maybe it's working, maybe this will work. Of course I have hoped, but never dared to hope too hard. Maybe she'll

Authorized Operator Acknowledged. Orders?

The words come straight into my head, making it ache. I stare. They're cold, those words. They're so, so cold.

I knew she would be something not-quite-living. But I wasn't expecting this at all.

Orders?

I can still feel her in my head, still cold, no feeling at all, just careful logic and the stark promise of engineered death. Orders? I'm not about to send her out into battle at this size, however powerful she might be. There's just one of her, and one of me, and gods knew how many fey boots stamping on human faces - forever, or so far back past living memory as makes no difference.

"Feed," I whisper, wondering why my throat was suddenly so dry. Send her out into battle? I've just been in battle myself, a small, nasty, two-person war I still don't want to think about or even remember. My dreams last night were a relief rather than a discomfort, I realize, because they were about an ancient war and not that bloody bone-jolting skirmish on the side street, the swing of weight, the crunch of bone, a scarred face now destroyed forever and

and

She's looking at me, eyes bright, filled with diamond-lights, arching her neck up toward me with fluid grace. It's not clear to me exactly what she's made out of, she has joints but they're not like machine-hinges, her created-flesh is graceful, semi-fluid, not alive but also not like any unliving thing I've ever seen.

"Feed," I say again, getting more of my voice into it again, not that I think it matters, she's not listening that way, she's still in my head, cold and sharpened all along the length of her presence. She hears, lopes away from me, dives back into the bin. I stare a moment, seeing her form as just a quick flash of motion, a lingering curve of here-then-there tracing her path through space.

I get up and walk over to the bin, crane my neck to look inside. Nothing, just the paste; she's submerged herself completely in the semi-solid stuff. Small hints of movement under the surface, when I really look closely.

Ah...how long will this take? I ask down into the bin.

Feeding will continue until conditions are reached. Possibles:

No more suitable input-substance available in immediate area

Operator-ordered cessation

Material integration period necessary

Maximum effective size reached

I ponder that for a long time before I come up with another question.

What is time until next integration period?

The answer is immediate. More than immediate, actually, distressingly so, cutting my sent-thought in half, knowing exactly what I'm planning to say and answering it before it seems to have fully left my head.

Seven standard hours, assuming feeding is uninterrupted. Integration time will total three hours, seventeen minutes when reached. Integration time is not interruptible without damage to DRAGON unit.

Okay, that raises several more questions and is gonna mean more planning on my part.

Is there enough material here to reach integration period? What is accomplished by this first integration period?

She pokes her head up through the paste, cocking her head at me, then comes up higher to swivel round and take in the buried room, only partly-illuminated by the shifting facet-spots shining off her body.

Unknown. Inventory necessary. Requested?

I grimace, wondering if she could run into any dangers down here while she's still so small.

Multiple queries given. Second query is: What does first integration accomplish. Answer is: Initial armament/defensive systems fabrication/calibration/activation.

I realize suddenly that her replies aren't in my native language, and they're not really in the ancient one I piecemeal-understand either, they're just sort of getting...translated by my own brain, and it's starting to have a hard time with some of the concepts, like that last one, I have to sit and think about it. Then I understand, and I take in a deep breath, and nod.

We'll both be vulnerable until she can eat enough and then even more so while she sort of...builds herself up? I think?

Inventory necessary. Requested?

I start at the repeated question. "Ummm...yes," I say aloud, pulled out of my own head a moment. "You're not...defenseless now, are you? Do you need all those new things from your first integration if we run into danger? Oh, and, uh, I don't know about the inventory, not until I'm sure it won't put you at risk."

Something like laughter comes into my head, the closest thing to feeling I've gotten from her so far. Even fully-grown DRAGON unit is not invulnerable, only extremely resilient/capable. However: current state has some capability. Sufficient for: armed fey ground units, minimal magic, no support creatures. Uncertain for greater threats.

Relief and apprehension, swirled together in a deep uneasy mix. "Umm, then, yes. Please take inventory."

She acknowledges, just a sort of ping in my head, and again that silver-path speed, from here to there as though she's barely a physical object at all, like a visible silvery wind.

Or a spell, thrown out to tear a small child apart.

I brush the memory aside, but suddenly she's back from wherever she's been searching, right in front of my face, looking into my eyes, shining, burning, taking in.

Tactical information taken for integration. She nods, taps me gently on the knee with one clawed...foot? Hand? Thanks are given.

Tactical information. That's what she got from that. Also, she saw that.

Gods. This is going to be...more than I thought. And I'm not even sure what I thought. I suppose I never really believed it could happen, and now...

Gods.

I send her off to continue her inventory. I've got thinking to do.

~

Thinking is terrible now, there's too much washing across my mind and leaving streaks of anxious uncertainty at belligerent angles to its trails and paths. Nothing wants to flow gentle and true from end to end. I sit on the remains of an ancient machine, fallen on its--side, I think?--and listen to the distant-echo ring of metals and composites being moved around by the dragon as she performs her inventory.

The dragon. I still can't believe it, haven't fully processed it, not the fact of her actual existence as a hatched thing now, certainly not the many many implications of the things she's told me, the quick cold imparting of naked facts.

She still doesn't have a name, and maybe she needs one, probably she does, but I didn't have anything for her in the rush and buzz of my thoughts, so I sit. And I wait.

Query?

The clean cold thought slices across every disordered layer of my own, cleaving them, stilling them, and I look up to see her diamond-shine face, long and perfectly pointed with its light-socketed gaze, cocked slightly as she waits for an answer.

"Um, sure," I say, forgetting about the no-need-for-speech. "Go ahead."

She nods, just the once, and bends her body through the air in a way that makes me unsure whether her legs are in actual contact with the ground, moving forward and around, settling in beside me.

What are desired size/capability parameters before leaving this location? What are probable targets outside?

"Ummm..." I say again, and think, hard this time, most of the chaos settling down as a layer of mental detritus I'll have to sweep up and examine later. Okay, so size. She could probably break through walls if she got too big for any of the actual ruined exits. But do I want that? How much attention would it attract? How easily could she be hidden?

I'd have to risk it, I decide. This is as good a chance to "feed" her as I'm going to get, and there aren't many patrols in this area, and maybe...

"Hey," I say, smiling at the little surge of hope that comes with my idea. "Do you have any way to camouflage yourself? Or disguise, maybe?"

She nods slowly, bobbing her whole body up and down in time with her head. Capability is possible, must configure. Query desired camouflage/disguise? Can be hard to spot, or appear to be something else, not both, incompatible dermal-layer modifications.

"Something else," I say, with a decisive finality that immediately puzzles me as to possible origin. "I'm...we're...going to be under a lot of scrutiny. A hint of something strange at my side, they'll investigate, even if it's just a shimmer. Maybe especially then. Could be magic, something stolen, they'll be all over that."

Acknowledged. She stretches out her front legs in a way that was almost catlike, then looks over her shoulder at the nearest bin. Current location is enemy territory?

That catches me off-guard. Of course she doesn't know what the situation is, she's a newborn with ancient imprints of knowledge at once far beyond and far behind her time, our time, the terrible place in history her birth has brought her to.

"Yes," I say gently, and then before I can stop myself, wanting to get it over maybe, "Listen, everywhere is enemy territory. The war was lost. Thousands of years ago. I'm...sorry to tell you that, I guess."

War is lost? She straightens up, body stiff. War is not lost. Weapon still online. Operator condition is acceptable. Imperial command chain status?

"The Butlerian Empire has been gone for more than two thousand years," I say simply. "There is no command chain, just me. A few resistance groups here and there, some of them claim a kind of Imperial legitimacy, but...I'm not part of any of them. I just...found you. Sought you out. Followed the footprints of my parents' research."

She is silent for a long moment, then gives a kind of shudder and nods again. Acknowledged. Tactical/Strategic situation unfavorable, risk must be minimized/risk must still be taken or no hope of reversal.

"Yeah," I say. "That's about the long and short of it. Okay, look, there'll be time to talk about this later, right now we need to get you fed. I need you to be about the size of a scav-donkey, so you can disguise yourself as one. An old, scrawny scav-donkey, one no one will think worth the effort of taking off me."

See scav-donkey instance pass through mental imaging sent, acknowledge but do not recognize creature. Primitive beast of burden?

I nod, suppressing a sigh. "Yep. We had to breed them after the Fall and the Great Machine-Ban. They can survive on very little food, even take some of their sustenance from sunlight, but they're not very fast and can't carry all that much, so the fey don't have a lot of interest in taking them from us. Not practically, anyway, they still do it to punish or just because they can, like a lot of other things."

Seen, she sends, which is strange. No "acknowledged," nothing formal like that. Thoughtful, maybe a sheen of something underneath the ice. I don't know what, not yet.

"Yes, and you'll see more," I say. "Take what time you need, I don't know all that much about how you work. It's been a lot of years. You're going to have to train this operator. Can you do it? Oh, and I forgot to ask. Can you have wings? All the, umm, old legends and pictures of dragons have wings."

She curls herself forward and in front of me, facing me again. This can be done, null-gravity systems expensive but size asked leaves extra resources. Can reach parameters: Requested size, hard-light disguise capability, flight capability. Some resources still available. Desired weapons systems? Current request only claw/bite/tail, close range.

"Yes," I say, and feel a little shiver down my spine, burning into my chest. What am I doing, where am I going, where will it end am I really sure I want to be there. "Fire. In the legends, in the pictures, they always had fire."

She looks at me a long long time. Acknowledged, she said, and there's that iciness back, not sure what's still underneath. She flits away, all flowing-diamond and slight luminescence in the dark, to feed.

I sit and watch and wonder.

Fire.

Gods.

~

It takes a lot less time for her to get to donkey-size than it did for her to hatch and grow to cat-size. It's also a strange thing to watch, because you can't actually see it happen, it's too slow for that. But this minute she's noticeably larger than last minute, if you pay attention to the objects behind her, and I do, because what else is there, down in this ruined basement with his unreal creature that's mine in a somehow even more unreal way?

Plenty, actually. I should exercise, my parents were always sticklers about that and I haven't always been. I'm planning to go to war, after all, even though I don't like to think about that.

Targets. She was asking about targets, and I told her to have fire, fire and claws, and I know we're going to have to fight, this situation out there, it can't continue.

I remember the way my parents died. No one killed them, except they did, they kept us pressed down in the dirt like this and the filth made them sick and there was no recourse, nowhere to go for the healing they needed because they weren't allowed, never never to rise up where help could be had. And when we set up our own help, it was smashed. No machines, no clever medicines like our ancestors, that was forbidden. No magic, because we had none, and only the favored had access to what the fey could provide, and we all cursed them because the price they paid to have that was usually taken out of us and not just them.

Fucking traitors, gods-damned willing slaves.

I remember the way my brother died. Nothing special. Just fought back against the abuse one day, and the dwarf he was talking to broke his kneecap then crushed his skull. One, two, just like that. I wasn't there to see it, but I heard, and my parents didn't let me see the body. We weren't allowed to have a funeral anyway. I was seven.

I watch her feed. Her wings are like buds, then spreading tendrils, then a fine tough film between them, silver and sparkle and graceful spread.

And then she's ready.

I stand, stretching, delaying, because I'm not, not really ready, don't think I'll ever be. But I am aware that we need to go, aware that readiness is overrated when time pulls on the place where you're standing.

"Okaaay." I draw the word out, double-checking my pack. Not ready not ready not ready. Maybe I'm not so aware after all. Maybe all that wisdom about doing what's needful only goes skin-deep, skull-deep, just the upper reaches of my brain where I know things but haven't really taken them in.

"We have to go," I say, part of me wanting to catch the words before they can leave my mouth, still letting them go. Readiness is nice but right now we have to go.

Readiness is nice, but right now we have to go, she agrees, and I start, not realizing I'd sent that thought her way.

"How much of what I think can you hear?" I ask.

She cocks her head, all scale-glint and eye-lights. Only receive what is sent. Human brain sends what it wants, doesn't always talk to itself.

I reel a bit at that. "So I don't have full conscious control of what you get?"

The wings turn her shrug into a strange and elegant thing. Theory-of-mind simulations limited. Operator will have better comprehension than DRAGON system base base data allows.

"They didn't give you all the information you needed when they made you?" Those words, I really do wish I could take back. Too late, though, maybe even before I said them.

Development of DRAGON system was accelerated. War contingencies. Adaptive routines used for post-constructor learning. Not entirely disadvantage: unique units hard to predict, plus current situation makes limited preconception almost necessity.

I sigh. "I suppose it does at that. Look, we really do have to go."

Right now. Because readiness is nice but right now has the necessity.

"Yes," I say, thinking that as good a way to put it as any. "Right now has the necessity."

~

We manage to exit the ruined building's basement without making any additional holes in the already-crumbling walls. She can't actually make herself thinner to fit through smaller openings, like I've kind of been hoping, her form is fleshlike but also has a kind of skeleton and can only squish or stretch so far. But the one crack we find is enough, and it's actually me who gets a small scrape on the back trying to wriggle through the narrowest part.

There's no one out there waiting for us. I had visions of a full patrol, just standing there patiently. Dwarves, probably, hammers and axes in hand, maybe a geomancer holding a steel runedrum. But no. It's just us. I look up. Nothing right now, though of course there would be, the flying patrols pass often.

I pat my dragon, still unnamed, and shiver a little at the strange feel of her hard-light disguise. It can't withstand more than casual pressure, and certainly wouldn't turn aside a blow or a really determined investigator, but the feel of dense coarse scav-donkey hair is fairly convincing against my hand, warmth and all. Maybe totally convincing; it's hard to forget what you know when judging a thing like this. I hoped so.

"Okay, donkey," I say with a small smile. "Let's go."

She brays. The sound of it is just a little off; she had to pull it along with her appearance out of my mind, which meant a lot of trial and error as she perfected the disguise. Or near-perfected it. Hopefully we'll pass a real scav-donkey (though not too close) and she can improve it by seeing for herself.

I realize suddenly that the bray is the first sound she's made since she hatched, really made on purpose. It makes me smile, and I don't know why.

"Come on, Ms. DRAGON," I say, the smile still lingering. "It's a long walk to the nearest settlement."

Is this advisable? Use of official designation DRAGON, enemy territory? There's almost a hint of concern there.

I laugh. It's warm and deep and genuine and cuts loose tension I wasn't fully aware of holding in. Though I do whisper what I say next. "No one will notice, they'll think it's just a silly ironic nickname. There are no dragons any more, not for two thousand years and change."

There are no dragons any more. Thoughtful. A touch sad? I may be reading too much in.

Zero dragons, plus one, now.

"Yeah," I say softly. "Zero dragons, plus one."