A shadow came over the grayness of her vision. Something brushed her snout, warm and familiar-smelling.
Child. Distressed—she could hear it in his breathing, in the way he smelled salty-wet, that fluid that would run from his eyes when he was particularly upset. Like the day she’d found him, small and alone.
Where was the new human? Had it hurt her Child? Was that why he was here, weeping, unhappiness in his voice and his scent?
Collector roused herself enough to blink away some of the gray, to taste the air more carefully. Child knelt beside her, one forepaw on her snout, as he’d done when he’d been small and she’d held him close in her arms for warmth and comfort. The new human sat—or crouched? Collector couldn’t quite tell—behind him.
It was not the source of Child’s distress.
Collector was the source of Child’s distress. Oh, poor Child. “Damn dragons,” she tried to say, but nothing came out, only a weakly huffing breath.
Her sisters were dead. Her queen was dead. Child must be the only being in the world now who cared about Collector.
All his life, at least since she had found him on the hillside, she had been the only being who had cared about him. And now she was leaving him.
She summoned all her remaining strength and raised her head. Just a bit. Just enough to brush his wet cheeks with her spines, to let him rub his forepaws under her chin. He made more sad noises, and the new human crept closer. Child seemed to speak to it, and it reached out with its own forepaw.
Lacking the breath to chitter, Collector tried to rumble in her own language, through the rock. It was so terribly hard, but she managed to thrum weakly. Continue. She knew Child couldn’t understand, but she rumbled as clearly as she could anyway. Continue.
Child picked up her nerveless forehand with both his forepaws. His grasp was tight, as if, with that strange canniness, he’d sensed what she meant. Beside him, the new human reached out and gently stroked one of Collector’s spines. Good.
Good.
Collector’s vision darkened again, all gray and darker yet.
Jacq stared at Auntie’s body, unable to move. Weeks of illness and starvation had tattered her body, but at least she’d still been intact when she died. They were going to rip her up now. There was nothing he could do.
“Dragons live for centuries,” Stel said in quiet awe. “She could have been five hundred years old. As old as Landing. She could have seen the first people who ever lived here.”
Jacq slipped Auntie’s claws out of his hand, and laid her forepaw on the ground.
The new, red Cleaner dragons turned their attentions to the body. Thankfully, they dragged it into the corridor before beginning their grim work. Jacq tried not to listen, but the noises were wet and organic and he could hear them through his hands. Stel put her arms around him and tried to comfort him while he cried.
The Cleaner dragons finished outside. There were the sounds of movement, and then there weren’t.
Jacq pulled away.
Stel said, “You don’t have to stop crying.”
He shrugged.
A new Gatherer dragon ignored them as she entered the chamber, seeming much more puzzled by the piles of cargo against the walls. She went to inspect them one by one, tail tapping behind her. Collector was being replaced, already, just like that.
“I don’t want to make you rush,” Stel said gingerly, “but we don’t know how long my scent will last. We should go soon.”
Jacq dried his face with his hands. “We can go now.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“And can I ask you something?”
Jacq shrugged. “Yeah. Sure.”
Stel tapped her fingers anxiously on the edge of the cart. “Don’t get mad.”
“Okay.”
“No, seriously, don’t get mad. Okay?”
Jacq took a moment to meet her eyes. “Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”
“Please,” she said. “Leave with me. I don’t want you to die.”
Five hundred years ago, in the city they’d built out of their ship at the landing site, an old woman looked up and saw a dragon in the sky. Its iridescent scales caught the sun, and shimmered with lavender, indigo, and violet.
Behind her, other colonists scrambled and shouted. “What’s that?” “Give me that scanner.” “Shit! Shit!” “Get to the shelters!” “How can those things fly?” “We should go home!” “How? We can’t even get back to the orbiter anymore.” “They’ll eat the goddamn sheep!”
Her son shook his head in awe. “Damn . . . dragons!”
The old woman stared at how the dragon’s wings glowed in the morning, shot through with sun as if they were leaves. “I think they’re pretty.”
Seven years ago, an eight-year-old boy shivered through the night, hunger distending his stomach, and fever licking like fire at his joints. Disconnected memories cut through his consciousness like shards of glass, bleeding sensory scraps: the simultaneous screams of his brother and father as they took him, the kicks in the stomach from someone who thought it was okay because he was going to die anyway, the burst of light disappearing when they shut off their lantern and left him alone.
Through the dawn, through the dreams, a hazy form came nearer and nearer, murmuring gentle phrases that seemed more delusion than reality. “What’s that? What’s that? Shit. How can those things fly?”
Now there was the girl with the docked nose and comical ears, whose family had a free mat, and who knew what it was like to lose a brother.
Jacq said, “I’ll go with you.”
As they made their way out, the hive rock thrummed beneath them: Everything dies. We continue.