They greeted each other with caresses of their spines and low, humming songs. But Collector they ignored, as though she were invisible, inaudible, unaromatic. She might as well have been already dead.
Well, in any way that mattered, she already was.
She had done her best for her sisters, and even for the new dragons. There was little else for her to do now, little other reason to live.
She had done her best for Child, too. The new Warriors were zealous, even vicious in their protection of the hive, of their own newly hatched sister queen, but after so long in the hive, Child would smell familiar to them. At worst, they would ignore him. The new Egg Tenders might or might not feed him, but Collector had left plenty of food, enough to last him until the new hatch was established, and Child had become, she hoped, just an accepted feature of the hive.
She thought of when Child had been smaller, and she’d carried him in her wings like an Egg Tender might carry a dragon larva. Oh, he had been irresistible as a larva; so strange and soft and sometimes almost dragonlike! Had she done wrong to bring him here, away from others of his kind? He likely would have died if she’d left him, tiny and alone and crying out as he was, and maybe long enough gone from his own hive that even if he found his own way back, he might be rejected.
Which was worse, to be dead, or to be alone? Collector was beginning to think that being alone was worse than death.
But Child wasn’t a dragon, no matter how intelligent he seemed sometimes, and besides, Collector had brought him another lost one. She’d worried the new one might injure Child, or even kill him, but so far it seemed only wary and skittish, not aggressive. That was good. That was promising.
She’d done what she could. She hoped it was enough, that he would not be alone, wouldn’t feel this yawning emptiness, as though the hive, the forest, the world—the universe—was suddenly dead and empty. His own existence bare, painful, and pointless. Tedious. Exhausting.
A brace of new Warriors prowled around and past her, giving her no attention at all, the blood of her own queen slick and black on their jaws.
So tired. She was so tired.
Jacq pushed the cart through the deserted corridors, Stel complaining as it stumbled over ridges and ruts on the floor. There were things lying by the walls; Jacq struggled to fix his gaze straight ahead, but he could still see the shapes from the corners of his eyes, wings and limbs and sometimes whole dragons slumped on the ground.
They broke through into the light of one of the grand, outer chambers. Columns of sun pierced through small, round windows in the ceilings. Stel exclaimed with surprise, and stretched her hand toward the nearest one as they passed. Jacq laughed and pushed her closer to it.
The clap of unfolding wings made them both jump. Jacq came up short, unintentionally jolting Stel as the cart bumped to a stop.
A dragon scraped her claws against the ground by the chamber exit as she came farther into the room. She was a Warrior—a healthy one—with red eyes and red lacquered scales that were shinier than any Jacq had seen before. There were no nicks in them, no variations in color—none of the imperfections that were so common among the dragons he’d grown up with that Jacq had never even noticed them until now, in their absence.
Her immature head crest flopped to one side, only partially grown in. Her dual pairs of eyelids, not yet fully separated, stayed slightly closed even when her eyes were open.
Stel yanked back her hand, and shrank toward Jacq. “Shit. I didn’t know they grew up so fast.”
Jacq snapped, “It’s fine.”
“Is it?”
The Warrior lowered her head to squint at them. Her tail curled into the air, spines rigid. She rolled her weight onto her back legs, and tensed the claws on her forehands, not yet attacking, but prepared.
Once, when Jacq had been little, an unfamiliar Warrior dragon had managed to enter the hive. For weeks afterward, he’d heard the angry shrieks of his own hive’s Warriors in his dreams. Eventually—days later? Months?—he had finally managed to banish the insistent memory of the invading dragon being literally shredded like cloth. And the more unsettling memory that followed, of the Cleaner dragons carefully, patiently gathering those shreds, grumbling angrily all the while, and carrying them to the food stores.
“Yes,” Jacq said. “It’s fine.”
He pushed the cart forward. It rattled across the ground, echoing between wide, empty walls. The dragon moved to block their path, stretching her wings to extend her reach to at least twice Jacq’s height. She stared intently, her unseparated eyelids shuttering in a rhythm he associated with puzzlement.
Jacq moved in front of the cart. “You know me.”
The dragon whuffed in a breath. She looked puzzled, but withdrew slightly, seeming mollified.
Jacq gave Stel a satisfied look, and moved back behind the cart. The dragon’s head swung back downward as she slitted her eyes at the new human. The dragon’s nostrils flared. A deep, warning rumble began in the rock.
“Fuck. Fuck, fuck,” said Stel.
Jacq moved in front of the cart again. He didn’t take the time to see how the Warrior responded, just started shoving the cart back where they’d come from, hoping the dragon would leave them alone if they weren’t trying to get out of the hive. The Warrior was young. She might get confused.
“Is she following?” Jacq asked.
Stel craned her neck, searching. “. . . No.”
“Good.”
Spotting a niche in the wall, Jacq pushed the cart inside for long enough to turn it around the right way.
“That dragon was smelling us to see if we belonged,” Stel said.
“See,” Jacq answered, huffing. “I’m safe.”
Stel’s attempt to whisper back came out as a shout. “Maybe! For now!”
Jacq glared at her.
“You think this means you can stay here, doesn’t it?” she asked. “What if it wears off? What if you only smell like that because you live with your Auntie?”
“I don’t know! Stop asking!”
Stel kept talking over him. “And what about me? Am I basically just fucked? The first time a dragon smells me, they’re going to rip me apart? I mean, I guess it’s fan-freaking-tastic they know who you are, but what the fuck am I supposed to do?”
Breathing heavily, Jacq pushed the cart back into the corridor. “I think that’s why Auntie put you in the fermentation pit.”
“Shit! So we should go back there?”
“Probably, but I don’t know the way from here.” Jacq turned the cart down the right of a forked path. “I just hope Auntie is home . . .”
Collector had lain down somewhere—she wasn’t sure exactly where. She hadn’t had enough strength to choose her spot, to make sure she’d be out of the way, or at least somewhere that would make less work for the Cleaners. The new Cleaners.
She didn’t care. Everything was gray light—she could no longer close her eyes all the way—and faint, murmuring noise. Besides the pain in her muscles and joints, the only distinct sensation was the cool smoothness of the floor under her jaws, the stone and smooth-packed dirt she’d stepped on, thoughtless, all her life. Now it was the center of the world, the whole world, the only thing keeping what remained of her life from being nothing more than exhausted pain.
She was ready to go. She’d thought there would be nothing more to do than acknowledge this, and let go somehow. But it seemed she was bound fast to life in some way she didn’t know how to break. She didn’t, pitifully, have the strength to die.