Shall we go?
Liz laughs.“I need to do some preparing first.”Her preparing involved poking around and tapping on a bunch of little screens, but eventually she calls me over.“Can you portal above a big building?”She holds up the screen to show me some images.
I can, yes.
She’s showing me from another angle when a video pops up.The barely legible text says ‘related to your search,’ and Liz starts to click a tiny x to make it disappear—I’m learning about this internet humans love—but then she freezes.“Oh, no.”
What?
She doesn’t respond.She taps on the video and it expands.
“After several weeks of experiments, scientists in Iceland are finally caving to the public pressure.They’ll be executing the remaining dragons who have been held in captivity on Friday, using all the newest technology they have developed for our ongoing counter-measures in the war against the invading dragons.”
The screen flashes images one by one of almost a dozen blessed that are being held captive and tortured by the humans.I’m frustrated, but not surprised.We had assumed those blessed were already dead.Liz only told us about one other water blessed who was yet alive when they escaped, but it’s hardly a surprise that they had another location.
Still, Liz looks shell-shocked.“We have to go back and save them,” she says.“I promised Plumeria.”
That sounds an awful lot like the beginning of the war you’re trying so hard to prevent.
Her hands clench into fists.“But they—it’s?—”
The tinny voice from the small square screen starts blaring again.The video she selected ended, and it rolled right into another one.“So far, there hasn’t been much consensus on what to do with the war criminal, the mother of the most famous war criminal of all, Elizabeth Chadwick.”
Another voice comes on now, and I believe it corresponds with the brown man who’s now talking.He’s holding a microphone in his hand, which Liz told me is to amplify tiny human voices.“As you’ve already heard, the members of congress are split on whether Harriet Chadwick, wife to Ronald Chadwick, has committed crimes punishable by death.She doesn’t even deny freeing her daughter, the former bonded to the strongest of all the invading dragons.She insists that her daughter’s bonded dragon has died, but she agrees that Elizabeth Chadwick’s potentially dangerous—and most of the military leadership agrees that with her departure, the humans lost their single strongest weapon against the dragons.The military recovered two swords crafted by the dragons themselves for their fiercest human warrior, Chadwick herself.Now civilians are reporting that Elizabeth Chadwick has indeed rejoined the dragons, and not only that, she’s also somehow reported to have wings, along with the swords she took upon her departure.”
The video cuts to a fuzzy clip of Liz flying beside me at the renaissance festival.
“While the military’s doing everything in their power to regain the weapons she stole, the one thing we do have control over is the execution of her criminal mother.”The man with brown skin sounds downright furious.“Elizabeth Chadwick must pay for her heavy debt to humanity, and if the only way we can punish her is by killing her mother, then so be it.”
Liz is frozen in place.She looks completely shocked.
Are you alright?
She shakes her head.“I’m fine.I think we should go to Brisbane.It’s nine in the morning there.”She swallows and stands, handing the square screen off to one of the other humans.“It’s—we have other things to worry about right now.”
It’s clear that she’s worried about her mother, though.
Even when our trip to Brisbane is a huge success, when we manage to find almost five hundred new brights, she’s still dazed.“It’s not enough,” she says.“We have to find another...”She’s poking at the screen again, frustrated and shaking.“We need at least a few hundred more or Hyperion...”She freezes.“If they learn we hit a con, the government will shut those down next.”
She stands.“We need to hit Florida Supercon today.It’shuge.”
It’s too risky, then,I say.With that many people, the military will be there.
“Not if they’re focused on renaissance festivals or tracking down people connected to the people we’ve taken already.”She shakes her head.“If we could go back with almost two thousand brights, Hyperion would have to give us more time.”She steps closer.“Come on, Axel.We can do it.”
We have to drop these humans off first,I say.I won’t risk all of them, and Hyperion will insist that we take more blessed.Thirty won’t be enough.
“Fine.”Liz truly looks like a warrior in that moment.She may be upset that her mother’s being executed, or maybe she’s angry about the blessed.Perhaps it’s that her people consider her public enemy number one, in spite of her tireless efforts to save their lives.Either way, for the first time, I truly see what I might have liked before I lost my memories.
She’s fierce.
She’s brave.
And she’s unyielding.
She’s doing it, just as the humans said, to help my people, but she’s also trying to help her own.Unlike most of them, she looks at the whole picture.It’s a slow process, taking all the humans we’ve found back to Hyperion, and he’s not keen on the plan.It’s too dangerous.It could lead to a war we’re not ready for—the war Liz doesn’t want.We might suffer heavy casualties if we go against them this way, petitioning.
It takes a while, but Liz convinces him to allow us to go—if we take a hundred strike blessed.
