Chapter 7 Axel #3
Do you know what the bond entails? I look carefully at the dozen humans in front of me. What did Liz tell you?
“You need us,” the tall man with big teeth says.
“We will go with you to Iceland or wherever you travel in pursuit of the heart,” a short, squatty woman with a spiky grey mohawk says.
We don’t know what will happen when we obtain the heart. My father may force us all back home—you’d have to leave your own country, and possibly, your own planet. Our people can’t defy him. He’d kill us for trying.
None of them look shocked. Liz must have been honest, at least.
“I’ve never fit in here,” the tall man with big teeth says. “I was picked on during school, I was mocked at work, but the one place I found friends was playing Dungeons and Dragons.” He looks around. “Most of my friends are here with me.”
“Take me away,” the squatty woman says. “That’s fine with me.”
The man beside her takes her hand. “But if she’s going somewhere, I hope I can come with her.”
You’re wed?
The woman nods.
The man frowns.
He can’t hear me. Because he’s not bright. You can bond. I turn toward the man. But he’s not bright—he can’t.
“How can that be?” the woman asks.
“We don’t know what makes humans bright,” Liz says.
“But could he come with us, even if he can’t be bonded?” she asks.
Liz turns toward me.
Yes. The other humans can come if they promise to obey. If they’ll join us, we’ll protect them as best we can.
“My brother and sisters have been with us this entire time,” Liz says. “They’re not bonded, but Azar protected them anyway.”
The woman nods and squeezes the man’s hand. “I’m a bright,” she says. “We can go with them.” They both look pleased, which is strange to me, but I won’t argue.
The man with the big teeth is also bright. Several others are not. But the seventh human is baffling. He’s. . .not not bright.
“What are you saying?” Liz asks.
I lower my head, and the poor man with a weird patch of fur—a beard, I remember they call it—sprouting just on the bottom of his chin stumbles back. He has small red blotches all over his face, and he smells strange, but he has eager eyes.
The others glow or do not glow. He. . . I blink. He glows a little bit.
Agrippa and Phileas must have been listening, because they come closer.
It’s strange, Agrippa says. If I wasn’t looking for it, I might not have noticed. What do you think it means?
“Can I come with you and see whether a dragon can bond me?”
“Blessed,” Liz says. “They prefer to be called blessed.”
“You called them dragons,” Norm says. “It threw us off.”
Liz is not respectful. She sets a bad example for humans and blessed alike.
The man with the face blotches laughs.
“Can you hear him?” Liz asks.
He nods. “He said you set a bad example.”
Liz shrugs. “That’s true.” She turns toward me. “I think they should be able to come. Maybe they can’t be bonded, but it’s worth a shot. Can you return them here, if they can’t be bonded?”
“Or we could stay with you,” the man says. “I live in my parents’ basement, and I hate almost everything about my life. I’d rather come with you and try and help somehow than stay here and keep feeling like a loser all the time.”
His light increases—just a hair, but enough that I can see it. I wonder whether the human light varies based on their choices. He can come.
A small cheer erupts.
As I go down the line of the one hundred and eleven humans Liz brought, inexplicably, twenty-nine of them are bright. Another twenty-six are partially bright.
But every single one of them, bright or not, wants to come with us.
“I need some of you to stay,” Liz says. “Because we need more than ten thousand humans who can be bonded—fast.”
She’s right, Agrippa says.
“I only have three days to convince the dragons not to attack to find the brights they need by forcing the bond.”
The humans are mostly frowning.
“It’s life or death to them,” she says. “And every single human we contact is a risk.”
“I have people I can contact,” Norm says. “And there are quite a few people I reached out to who weren’t close enough to come today.”
“You’ll probably want to say goodbyes, too,” Liz says. “Why don’t you all go home and call whoever you need to call. Gather personal belongings you treasure—one carry-on bag size each—and then you can return tomorrow. We’ll take you all back then.”
“I already have a backpack,” one man says.
“Yeah, I brought a bag already,” a woman with tall boots says.
We should take some with us now, I say. We need to show Hyperion this is a viable option.
And it would be nice to take a few of the semi-bright, Agrippa says. We should find out whether they can actually be bonded.
I’d like to figure out why so many of the humans you found are bright, I say. I thought it was much rarer.
“I have a theory,” Liz says. “I think a lot of the people who are bright—who have a strong sense of justice, social and otherwise, the people who fight things, who don’t accept what’s wrong about the world, we don’t feel like we really belong.
We look for other ways to understand things, and a lot of them find it through fantasy, LARPing, D&D, and gaming. ”
Norm cheers.
So do most of the others.
“Whatever the reason is,” Liz says. “We need way, way more humans. If you can all do whatever you can to locate more, that could save the dragons from causing another war by forcibly bonding people.”
“But if just one of our friends decides to call the government,” Norm says. “Then. . .”
“The entire plan would be put at risk,” Liz says.
And you would be in danger, I say. You should stay in Iceland from now on.
“Absolutely not,” Liz says. “They need to hear this from me—I’ve been bonded. I’m un-bonded now, and I’m still working to help you. They need my word to believe you.”
“That’s true,” Karen says. “She convinced me.”
“And her wings didn’t hurt,” big teeth man says.
“That’s true,” the tiny woman says. “The wings were the reason I believed her story.”
You can’t come without me, I say. So I guess that means we’ll both be traveling.
“Norm got me a satellite phone,” Liz says. “That way, at least we can communicate with them from Iceland to coordinate spots to rendezvous.”
A small flock of large white swans fly past overhead—not far overhead—and Agrippa’s head snaps up. She shoots into the sky, grabbing one and then another into her mouth.
When she lands, she’s quite pleased with herself. There’s more food here than in Iceland.
“Those are tundra swans,” Karen says. “They’re one of the few large birds that make Utah their warm, winter home.”
They’re also delicious.
Liz and Karen don’t look impressed.
Was there some reason I shouldn’t have eaten them? Agrippa’s eyes are wide.
“Generally speaking, humans don’t eat swans,” Liz says.
Why not? You eat geese and ducks, right? Agrippa frowns. Swans are bigger—and more delicious than the ducks I’ve eaten.
“I thought you couldn’t eat without being bonded,” Karen says.
“The earth blessed ate just fine until they got their power upgrade,” Liz says. “That just happened—and now they can’t eat.” She looks at Agrippa. “Unless. . .” She steps closer. “How do you feel?”
Agrippa straightens. I feel great. You never answered about the swans.
“They’re pretty,” Karen says.
“I think that’s why,” Liz says. “It’s not a great reason, but I think that’s why we don’t eat them.”
I’m as confused as Agrippa looks. How are we to know what we can and can’t eat—the birds all look about the same to me.
“It’s fine,” Liz says. “It’s not like we’ll attack you because you ate a few swans.”
At least if I bonded a human, they could explain some of these confusing human-things to me.
As if he can hear my thoughts, Norm asks, “Why haven’t you rebonded Liz? When you died, it broke the bond, right? But you could rebond her now.” He frowns. “Or can’t you? Have you already tried?”
I can’t admit it out loud, but I think I’m scared to bond her again. By all counts, I turned into a lunatic while I was bonded to her, and in spite of my best efforts to dislike her, I find myself listening to her strange human demands more and more with each passing day.
If you’re going to be opening portals and defending Liz, Phileas says, you’re going to have to bond some human or other, or you’ll run your energy down too low.
He doesn’t say that I’ll die, but he’s right. If I don’t want to bond Liz, I’m going to have to bond someone else soon.
As the humans prepare to either return home or come with us, I can’t help watching her. For a human, Liz is graceful, fierce, and strong. If I have to bond one of them, shouldn’t it be her?
But she’s also the most dangerous, for precisely that reason.
I want her.
And I don’t have the slightest idea why.