We Continue

We Continue

Ann Leckie and Rachel Swirsky

Something was wrong.

Jacq could tell. It was a thrum in the rock. Even human as he was, even though he didn’t understand dragon speech, he knew.

Auntie grunted with effort as she backed into their chamber. The enormous stacks of wood under each of her forearms shouldn’t have even slowed her down, but her scales were dull with exhaustion.

Jacq stumbled out of his fabric nest. “What’s going on?”

“What’s that? What’s that?” Auntie replied in an old woman’s voice. She couldn’t really speak human, but she liked to chat like a parrot, repeating things she’d heard.

“Is everything okay?” Jacq said. “Why are you back in the hive? Did I lose track of time? Is it night?”

Auntie flapped her wings at him to be quiet. She began piling the wood by the wall.

“What are you doing?” Jacq pressed, but she pushed him away.

When she was done, Auntie turned to him. She fanned her ear webs, and the spikes along her spine and tail rose expectantly.

In various voices, she said, “Damn dragons. I think they’re pretty. How can those things fly?”

She gave him a meaningful look, but all Jacq could see was how fast the milky tissue which had appeared last week was spreading over her eyes. The inky quickness behind them was still there, but it was disappearing.

“Are you bringing stuff here from the storerooms? Are you allowed to do that?” Jacq said. “I don’t know what to do!”

Auntie gestured eagerly with her head toward the wood pile. “Shit! Shit! Get in the shelters!”

“It’s . . . for me?” Jacq asked.

He stepped toward the wall. Auntie shuffled approvingly, claws ringing against the floor.

He laid his hand on the wood. “Okay . . . thanks.”

Auntie’s wings snapped open with an excited clap. Jacq’s stomach twisted. Her wing edges were shredded as if they’d been snagged on huge rocks and ripped free.

Jacq rushed toward her. “What happened! Are you okay?”

She nudged him back with a wingtip. “What are those things? Give me the scanner! I think they’re pretty.” She patted him in place with her tail, and went back into the hive.

Over the next few hours, Auntie brought back a dozen loads of cargo: fabric, dried grass, bark, and other useful things. Whenever Jacq tried to help, she pushed him back into the chamber until he finally stopped trying.

By the time Auntie finished, her scales were tinged with gray. She folded her tattered wings and sat, breathing heavily.

“I know something’s wrong,” Jacq said.

She blinked at him, inner and outer eyelids moving in separate rhythms. In an exasperated, male voice, she said, “They’ll eat the goddamn sheep.”

Sometimes it made Jacq so angry that Auntie could talk to him in a hundred different strangers’ voices, but never communicate a word of her own. He snapped, “I wish you could just talk!”

Both sets of Auntie’s eyelids opened.

She stared at Jacq with the intensity he sometimes suspected meant she was trying to talk to him in her true language, whatever that was, something different from postures and colors and imitating human words. Sometimes, there was something that felt like a portent; sometimes, the rock beneath him trembled as if with intangible breathing.

Abruptly, Auntie rolled him up in her wings and hoisted him onto her back. She hadn’t carried him like this in years, not since he’d hit puberty. Something was so wrong.

Jacq’s stomach roiled as she carried him through the hive’s slanting corridors. Briefly, he had the urge to tear free, but after a moment, he was surprised by how comforting it felt—the smell of the fine scales under her wings, the crackle of her joints, the thump of her steps.

Filtered through the veiny, purplish membrane of Auntie’s wings, the hive looked misty and distant. A passing trio of dragons—Gatherers, like Auntie—began as a blur. Nearing, they came into dreadful focus; they looked even more haggard than Auntie, eyes sealed shut with saplike clumps, patches of hide hanging from remnant forelimbs.

Jacq squeezed his eyes shut. He thought of the Gatherer dragon he’d seen last week who’d gone into the snow with what should have been a treatable gash in her side, but which must have killed her in the cold. Something wasn’t just going wrong. It had been wrong for a long time.

Dizzily, he thought, And it’s not going to get better.

Collector dropped Child at the edge of the fermentation pit, rolling him forward over her shoulder and swallowing a grunt of pain. When she’d first found Child alone on the hillside, making loud distressed noises, his face hot and salty-wet, she had lifted him easily into the embrace of her wings. He had calmed and then slept as she’d carried him back to the hive. He’d been much smaller then, but even when he’d grown larger, she’d had no trouble lifting him. Now, with the next hatch nearing its last molt, the effort she’d just made to bring him her gift had bruised her phalanges and left her joints sore and stiffening.

Well, it didn’t matter. “Damn dragons,” she said, and nudged Child gently toward the edge of the pit. She felt her ear webs opening out in anticipation, and perhaps just a little worry.

Shivering in the sudden cold after having been wrapped warmly in her wings, Child looked down into the pit. He made a series of little puzzled noises, and looked at Collector with an expression she had learned was confusion.

“What’s that,” said Collector reassuringly. “We should go home! How? We can’t even get back to the orbiter anymore.” Behind her, faintly, she felt as much as heard the comforting hum of the hive, faltering here and there, but still her sisters, still near.

The other human in the pit stared up, silent now, though it had shouted and struggled all the way up the hillside, tightly wrapped as it had been in Collector’s weakening wings.

Child’s eyes dilated, and he waved his forepaws in the air, making distressed noises now.

“Damn dragons,” said Collector. She wished there were some way to really communicate with Child, to tell him her thoughts. To explain. But he seemed mostly deaf despite his pretty mammalian chittering. And he seemed not to be able to smell much at all.

Child made another distressed sound. He covered his eyes and snout with his forepaws for a few seconds, and then released them again, huffing. He made more noises, clearly unhappy.

What was the problem? Was he afraid of the new human? Collector had worried that might happen, or that neither of the two humans would smell right to the other. In the hive that would end in injury or death. But humans were different. Weren’t they?

She looked down into the fermentation pit. The new human sat, still staring up, one forepaw wrapped around a lower extremity—the limb was badly swollen, definitely wounded, and Collector hoped again that it was the sort of injury that would heal on its own. The new human was larger than Child had been when she’d found him, and differently shaped. Perhaps it was further along in its development, an instar Child hadn’t reached. Or perhaps it was a different caste.

It hardly mattered. Collector didn’t have time to be fastidious.

Maybe she’d failed. Brought the wrong sort of human. Failed to help Child as she’d intended. Down in the fermentation pit, the new human began making noises of its own.

“Shit,” said Collector, though so far the sounds she made seemed not to soothe this one.

And, well, maybe she couldn’t blame it. It was injured, apart from its own sisters (horrifying thought), and no doubt frightened—most humans Collector had seen had fled the moment they’d realized she was nearby. And this one was sitting atop a layer of bones and rotted viscera, feathers, and fleece, the remains of animals that no one in the hive could eat without a good, long aging. Child had never liked the smell.

As recently as a month ago, the aroma of fungus and rotting sheep would make Collector’s gizzard contract in anticipation. But Collector hadn’t been hungry in days. Never would be again.

Child laid his forepaws on Collector’s snout, and made louder, more insistent noises. Liquid welled in his eyes.

Maybe Child couldn’t really talk, but she’d heard those particular noises before, when Child didn’t want some food she’d offered him. Why . . . ? Oh.

The new human was sitting in the fermentation pit. Collector usually fed Child things unfermented—fermented food made him sick. But he must have understood somehow what the pit was for. He must be afraid Collector had brought the new human here to eat it!

Really, sometimes she was sure humans actually thought about things. They were almost like people sometimes. This was good. Her spines softened, and her ear webs quivered with relief. “Not food, not food,” she said, repeating back the sounds he’d just made. Despite the ache in her muscles, she brushed Child with her wings. And she wished, oh, she wished there was some way to just explain.

The girl in the pit was older than Jacq by a few years, maybe just turned adult. It was hard to tell. It had been a long time since he’d been close to another human.

A really long time. That docked nose. Those comical ears. The hairs pricking out of her skin.

“Fuck!” the girl shouted. “Help me out!”

Jacq broke out of his daze. “Oh. Uh, right. Just a minute.”

The words came easily, and Jacq realized it was probably a good thing he’d kept talking aloud to Auntie all these years, even though she couldn’t understand him.

The pits weren’t that deep, but the girl’s leg was injured, and she kept making things worse by trying to jump. Jacq finally located a rope in the adjacent storage cell, and threw down one end. The girl tied some impressive knots to help heave herself up until Jacq could pull her the rest of the way.

Her smell was an overwhelming wave even in the already foul cavern. Her face was sallow with pain and sweat. Bits of sheep hide and rotting meat stuck to her skin and clothes. She breathed heavily as she slumped onto the ground, propping herself against a disposal box.

Jacq pressed the back of his hand over his nose. “Did you fall into the hive?”

“What!”

Jacq removed his hand to shout, “Did you fall in?”

The girl looked disgusted. “Do you think I’m stupid?”

“I don’t understand why you’re here.”

“A dragon threw me in!”

“To the hive?”

“To the pit. First, she kidnapped me—wrapped me up like a spider with a fly! Then she carried me here, and dumped me in.”

“Wrapped you in her wings?”

“Yes!”

Jacq gestured to her leg. “Because she found you injured?”

“Look,” the girl said. “Call me Stel. You’re . . .”

“Jacq.”

“Fine. Jacq, I’m a picker, okay? My clan spends the cold season near here. We just set up camp, so I slipped off to go looking for scraps in my old scouting spots. One of them is at the old Landing site . . . Well, maybe I went farther past the radiation warning signs than I should have. By the time I realized, it had been a while. I was scrambling over stuff to get back and . . . I admit it. I tripped. I probably looked like a great catch, separated from my herd.”

“She wouldn’t have eaten you.”

“Why was I in a food pit?!”

“I don’t know. She . . . wanted me to meet you? Something is wrong. They’ve been acting weird. The whole hive. Auntie especially.”

“Auntie?” Stel asked, with a look of disbelief.

Jacq made an impatient noise. “She’s bringing me stuff. She’s getting sick . . .”

“Isn’t that normal when there’s a hive collapse?”

The silence was flat.

Jacq said, “I don’t know what you mean.”

“The hive is in shutdown. They’ve laid a new queen. You must be able to tell. Haven’t you seen the dead workers? There were at least three on the way in.”

“I haven’t seen . . . anyone dead . . .” Jacq said, but he could remember the dragon with the fatal gash who’d gone into the snow.

“You live with dragons,” the girl said. “Do you know anything about hives? How did you end up here? What clan are you?”

Jacq stared past her. “What’s going to happen to the hive?”

“It’s going to collapse! Hive. Collapse.” She clapped her hands together to illustrate. “All the old workers and warriors and whatever are going to die to make room for the new ones. It’s kind of neat, actually. It’s part of their reproductive cycle, every few centuries.”

Jacq didn’t move.

Stel made an exasperated noise. “Whatever! The point is, I’m getting out before that happens! You, too. I can’t leave you here. What are you, fifteen?” Stel clapped again. “Pay attention to me!” she said. “It’s time to leave before everything dies.”

Everything dies. The message had been passing in the base thrum of the hive since the new queen hatched. Everything dies. You will die, but other life will continue and new things will come.

Collector labored up the hillside, a bundle of mite bark clutched in her forehands, pushing her way through the pain as she would have pushed herself through a too-small corridor. Bracing, sliding, pausing, twisting, breathing. Her body was done, but she had more to finish—the duties she had postponed while she dealt with Child.

Collector had always been the odd one of her Gatherer sisters. Not that they didn’t love her—she had always been one of them, part of them, another voice in the song that lent the world order and purpose. No, she had loved her sisters, and they had loved her. And she loved to gather for the hive, loved going out into the open to find food or materials for building or digging, or whatever the hive seemed to need.

But she also loved to look at and collect things no one seemed to have any use for—the quivering, gelatinous underside of a wideleaf; flakes of corroded metal from the abandoned human hive that gleamed when scrubbed; stones shot through with sparkling crystal. Then there’d been the tweeting, feathered creature with the injured wing. Its body seemed more similar to human than dragon, and Collector had exasperated her sisters by trying to explain why she’d kept it, fed it till its wing healed, and fed it still when it kept coming back. She’d tried to explain her idea about animals and plants and how they were related and how they weren’t, how lately there seemed to be two kinds of life in the world that were, if not inimical to each other, somehow starkly different.

Her sisters all said she had too much work in her joints—she could never be still; when she was done with hive work she had to make her own.

She stopped, peered down at the pitifully small bundle of mite bark. She had found barely any—there seemed to be less and less of it in recent months, though perhaps that was just because she no longer ranged so far from the hive, or else her dimming vision. But there seemed to be less in her hands than just moments before. Slowly, she turned to find, once she’d stared fixedly enough, a trail of brownish-blue strips reaching back in the direction she’d just come from.

There was no excess work in her joints now. Still, the hive needed every bit of what she’d gathered. She would have to go back and pick up what she’d dropped.

So, first there had been that flying, feathered thing, and then there had been a trio of leaf-creepers that had delighted her with the way their segmented bodies would change color from pink to brown to green to blue, and she’d loved to watch them slide around, their cilia waving sinuously.

And there had been the water worm she’d kept in a bowl in the back of an empty egg cell—she’d bred mudhops to feed it, until her sisters had complained about the constant buzzing.

None of them had been like Child. Child seemed to return her affection. He could manipulate things with his so-dexterous paws—tying sticks together, stacking stones, weaving leaf stems. Sometimes his chittering seemed almost to be speech. Sometimes she was sure that he was actually speaking to her, like a person would. He was different.

She was glad for it. She was glad that things were different, and would continue even after she was gone.

As a picker, Stel had a sharp sense for adapting materials. She interrogated Jacq about what he could grab, and figured out how to make a cart they could use to get her out of the hive. Apparently, once she was outside, she’d be okay; her clan had a signal point nearby.

It wasn’t hard to gather what they needed. They divided the labor, Stel molding sap while Jacq worked with the wood.

“How did you end up here?” Stel asked.

Jacq cringed. Stel made him uncomfortable with her bluntness, and her volume, and her humanness.

“Auntie found me.”

“Found you where?”

“Near one of the radiation patches.”

“Why didn’t your parents stop her?”

Jacq hesitated. “They weren’t there.”

“And no one found you?”

“No one was looking.”

Stel shook her head in dismay. “How old were you?”

“I was pretty small.”

“Like, under ten?”

Jacq shrugged.

“Under five?”

Jacq looked at his hands. “I had a fever.”

“Okay, but why—” Stel cut off. Her eyes went wide. She slapped the ground with excitement. “Wait! Are you from the city?”

Jacq shrank away, but he didn’t like to lie. “Yeah.”

“You’re from Landing? Really? You really grew up in the city?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, wow,” Stel said. “Oh. Wow. We heard they were sending people out by the end, but I thought it was old people and babies.”

Jacq’s knuckles whitened as he gripped a plank. He kept his voice blank despite wanting to shout in her face. “It was a bad fever.”

“So they sent you out to die? Why? To save food?”

“There wasn’t enough,” he said tightly.

“Wow. Just wow.”

Jacq threw down the wood with more force than he intended. The smack finally got Stel’s attention, and she shot him a guilty glance.

“Oh. Uh, sorry,” she said. “I guess maybe that’s hard to talk about.”

Jacq shrugged, picking up a new plank.

“Uh,” Stel said. “I guess, maybe I should tell you. They died. The people in the city. Things got worse, with the food and the radiation. Some of them left, even toward the end, but the ones who stayed died. Um. A lot of the ones who left died, too. They were pretty sick, and they didn’t know how to find the clans. We would have helped. We tried.”

She paused, watching for Jacq’s reaction. He said, “I see.”

“I guess . . . maybe . . . it’s revenge . . . ?”

“I had a baby brother.”

“Ah. Yeah.”

Jacq said nothing, letting the conversation sink into silence like a stone into a lake. Stel fidgeted, increasing discomfort visible on her face.

Words finally burst out in a rush. “It’s so weird to think, like, there’s a ship that’s traveled so, so far, all the way from Mars. By another star! And it’s been made into a city, and it’s been there for like five hundred years—I mean, it’s really old! Then there’s a storm, and something happens to the old engines underground, and boom, no one can live there anymore, even though they keep trying, and dying. It makes you think, like: What else can get destroyed? What else can just go boom, and you lose everything?”

“It was an earthquake.”

“Huh?”

“An earthquake, not a storm.”

“Oh. You remember?”

Jacq shrugged.

“So, uh, yeah. The dragons found you and brought you here?” Stel asked.

“Just Auntie. She took care of me.”

“Before or after throwing you in a fermentation pit?”

“Will you stop?” Jacq asked. He wanted to sound cold, but his tone was plaintive. “She saved your life, didn’t she? Isn’t that important?”

Stel’s mouth shut on whatever she’d been about to say. She looked down, embarrassed. “I made a stupid mistake. I shouldn’t have needed rescuing. Everyone always tells me to be more careful.”

“Maybe you should.”

“You’re right,” she said quietly. She cleared her throat, and when she spoke again, it was with overloud confidence. “Well. It’s good I got here. At least I can get you out.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“I don’t think you have a choice. Every dragon you know is going to die. The new ones might not like you.”

“Humans would be new to me, too,” Jacq snapped. “Newer.”

“Yeah, but new dragons don’t like humans breaking into their hives. We won’t murder you just because you don’t look like you belong in our camp.”

Jacq’s lips thinned. “As long as you have enough food.”

She paused. “Okay, yes, fine, humans can be crappy. But I promise you, our clan takes in strangers. You can stay with my family if you want. There’s an empty mat. My brother—”

For the first time, Stel balked. It was more than embarrassment; she looked as though she had swallowed something living, something that was flailing its way down her throat.

She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “Well, anyway, there’s a free mat.”

Jacq thought of Auntie, and the hive, and the people before them who he could usually put out of his mind.

His throat ached. “Thank you. Truly. But I live here.”

“They’ll hurt you!”

“No. They’ll know me.”

Waving away his objections, she leaned urgently toward him. “We could look for your brother. Not everyone died—that means there’s a chance! I know you must want to find him. I know how you feel. You can’t stay!”

She was so red and vulnerable and hurting. Almost crying, because of him. The first human he’d seen in years.

“Okay,” he lied. “I’ll go.”

The queen was dead. Collector knew from the oppressive silence, and the smell that drifted from the center of the hive, the last cry of the old queen—Collector’s queen—as she struggled weakly against the newly molted Warriors. Her own daughters.

That was the way of it. That was life. The new queen would feed on the body of the old, would grow large and strong and lay the eggs that would, someday, hatch her own death.

Collector had known all her life that it would come to this: herself among the last of her sisters, her eyes clouded, her wings tattered, her queen dead. She had always expected to die in the course of her duties to the new hatch, her lifeless body disassembled by the Cleaners and piled in food storage. Still serving the hive, even in death. If she had never been eager for it, nor wished it to come sooner, still it had always seemed right and fitting.

She hadn’t realized that it would be so lonely.

She hadn’t realized that her stiff and weakening joints would hurt so much. The sudden absence of her queen had struck her like a thunderclap—or like its opposite, a shocking, painful, empty silence. The newly molted hatchlings—the Warriors, the new Egg Tenders moving about the hive, few now but increasing daily—smelled familiar, but were somehow blank and alien to her.

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.

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.