Wings of Renewal: A Solarpunk Dragon Anthology Read online

  I feel my heart in my throat as I fear I have somehow gotten trapped in the fire and look up, trying to take in my surroundings. It is not the fire creating the glow, though, but rather the rising sun. I have been here a full day and night, and my exhaustion catches up with me. Afraid I will get hurt or make a mistake, I stumble away from the line and sit on the ground, looking up at a sky tinged pink with morning sunshine and smoke. I am soon joined by Bukky and others I recognize from our group, until Taneen lands by us yet again. Even the dragon seems tired as he rests his head on the ground near us. We all look at him, waiting for word on what was going on.

  “I have just left Ade,” he says, and pauses. “We have done it.”

  A cheer goes up from our group and my tiredness vanishes instantly. Taneen does his laugh again and lifts his head, roaring with us. A couple of members of our group run off to tell the others, but I stay next to the great dragon, leaning on him. “You saved us. Again,” I say softly and feel Taneen shift under my weight.

  “No,” he says. “I helped and provided guidance, but you can never say I saved you. You tenacious beings have saved yourselves. Again.”

  “I wonder how the fire started,” I muse, less to Taneen and more to myself, but become aware of him stiffening next to me. “Taneen …?” I ask, turning to look up at his face. “You wouldn't …?”

  “Of course I didn't,” he says, preening like a large cat. I say nothing, continuing to look at him expectantly, and he sighs. “I had the hiccups. It could happen to anyone.”

  About Gemini Pond

  Gem is a 27-year-old avid book lover who currently resides in North Carolina. She lives with her three crazy cats and one crazy boyfriend. When she is not attempting to write, she is attempting to make crafts or crying over fictional characters, other peoples' and her own.

  Refuge

  by Mindi Briar

  Dragons had rules about their interactions with humanoids. That was one of the first things Prince DeSanto had learned in pilot training. They didn't portal anyone without consent; they didn't portal sick or injured people; and they didn't portal anyone in a life-endangering manner, or to an overly dangerous place.

  The latter rule was the reason people still used starships: dragons would not transport humans offplanet without the protective casing of a ship around them. There was all sorts of scientific debate about why, but it boiled down to the fact that every time someone had tried it, they died.

  That left Prince trapped inside this broken-down ship in middle-of-nowhere space, with a portal dragon that was just about to bail on him.

  Please stay, he begged the creature, watching its body shimmer in agitation. When he was able to see it, it was pastel-translucent and shaped vaguely like a snake with no discernable head. It was picking up on his negative emotions, and nothing made a dragon vanish faster than fear.

  It wound around the empty copilot seat, communicating its displeasure at the situation. As if it was his fault! Dragons portaled by taking themselves and anything they touched out of the physical world and into the parallel aetherworld. This one hadn't been paying attention and they had still been a little corporeal when it flew him through a star.

  He'd thought he was going to die. In fact, he still might, because it had fried the daylights out of his starship. All systems were overheated, and because Prince couldn't stop panicking, the idiot dragon wouldn't portal them to safety.

  The dragon shimmered again, its whole body disappearing for a moment.

  Calm. Stay calm.

  RADIATION WARNING, said the dash. ADVISE IMMEDIATE EVACUATION OF THIS VESSEL.

  47ºC. TEMPERATURE REGULATION FAILURE, said another part of the dash.

  OXYGEN LOW, said another part. RE-ENTER BREATHABLE ATMOSPHERE IMMEDIATELY.

  Prince ran a hand through his sweat-soaked maroon-tinted hair. Dragon. Friend. We have to go. We're way too close to that star.

  It communicated to him that he was injured and distressed, and that it did not like to transport anyone in that condition.

  “You're the reason I'm injured and distressed,” he snapped.

  The dragon vanished.

  “No! No, I didn't mean it. Come back. C'mon, please come back?” Prince wiped his sweaty forehead on his sweaty arm and counted the seconds in his head. When he got to twenty-four, he realized the dragon had probably left him for good.

  He indulged in a few good swear words, then began pressing buttons on the dash to see if he could contact anyone to come and rescue him.

  Everything was overheated. The dragon was gone. He was stranded.

  He frantically began to dial his friend's call code on his key bracelet, but then stopped. No, he couldn't call Joel X anymore.

  Stars, he still couldn't believe Joel was a Greenjacket. He'd dormed with the guy for three years during pilot training. Carried him home every Dayseven after he patched crazy mind-alts at some dodgy public lounge. Joel had even stood up for him when Heather Jung was going through her hey-you-know-what-sounds-like-fun, let's-beat-up-the-short-guy phase.

  And now their friendship was vortexed because Joel got the stupid idea to try to recruit him.

  Not that Prince had any love for the Saijin Empire. They were terrible. But they also didn't actively destroy cities and lives the way the Greenjackets did.

  Also, their idea of convincing him to join their rebel army had been to kidnap and threaten to kill him.

  They'd at least given him a nice dinner while they talked about glory, freedom, et cetera. He'd had the sense to wait until dessert before he turned them down.

  After that they'd thrown him in a holding cell to await execution, because he was an “Imperial loyalist” and was going to spill all their secrets to the authorities. (He wasn't, but it was pointless to try to argue.) As they were marching him to the med center, to put him down like a dog, he'd managed to swipe the stunner from his guard's belt.

  Taking out his guards had been the easy part. Stealing a starship had been harder. He'd been so full of sheer terrified adrenaline that he could barely call a dragon to portal him away.

  And his panicked state had rattled the poor dragon so much, it had flown him through a star.

  Maybe it was just as well that he was going to die out here. He couldn't go back to the dorm he shared with his fellow graduates from pilot training. Joel X had probably been ordered to arrest him if he saw him again. And it wasn't like Heather and her crew would help him. They'd laugh if they heard Prince was dead.

  A strange calm came over him, and suddenly the whole situation just seemed funny. This was only his second solo flight since graduating pilot training a fortnight ago. His first had been a disaster, too. He'd gone to the Monroe system, patched a few ecstasy mind-alts, and ended up getting a tattoo of a dragon on his left arm in fluorescent pink. Heather had mocked him for days.

  He'd been resigned to the fact that he was going to have to settle down and do some taxi work to pay off his debts. Now, instead of being just another working pilot, he was going to be the Cautionary Tale. The one instructors pointed to when they said, “See what happens when you don't stay neutral during a flight?”

  Well, there were worse ways to be remembered. Prince put his feet up on the dash and laughed.

  He was still chuckling when the physical world suddenly vanished around him. He floated in the aetherworld, his body and the ship nothing more than insubstantial mist clouds around his consciousness.

  The dragon had come back for him!

  Well, either that, or he had just died.

  They burst back into space-time. Heat slammed into him like Heather Jung's fist in his first year of pilot training. Everything was upside down and sideways. The fried sensors showed that he'd re-entered atmosphere, but in an uncontrollable spin.

  Good news: he hadn't died. Bad news: he was about to.

  “I get that you totally just saved my life,” he yelled at the dragon, which he still couldn't see, “but is it ungrateful to want to survive the rescue?”
<
br />   You will.

  He didn't know where the sudden certainty came from, but it was comforting, anyway. He tightened his safety belt, clung to the armrests of his pilot chair, and surrendered to the fall.

  * * *

  Prince woke in a healing center. At least, he was fairly sure that's what it was, because there was an open case of medical equipment on a table next to his bed. But the floor was fragrant, gray-green moss, and the walls were heavy white cloth, rippling in a light breeze.

  “Good afternoon, Pilot DeSanto,” said a pleasant female voice. “How are you feeling?”

  He turned his head toward the healer. She was in her late thirties, wearing the pale blue robe of a Devote to the Halcyonite religion.

  “Where am I?” His voice came out a croak. She helped him sit up and handed him a cup of water.

  “This is the Avalys Refuge. Your starship crashed in our orchard,” the Devote said. “This dragon seems to have saved you. It won't leave your side.”

  That was when he noticed the translucent form draped around the perimeter of his bed.

  It was not the same dragon that had abandoned him. That one had been mostly blue-green hues; this one manifested as a faded sunset of violet-blue-pink.

  Hi, he said tentatively.

  The dragon communicated that it was glad his physical form was not permanently damaged.

  “This may be a stupid question,” he said, addressing the Devote again, “but … am I on Halcyon right now?”

  “Of course. Where else?”

  Well, he had given the other dragon the coordinates of Gila Spaceport near his dormitory on Esperanza, half a galaxy away. He'd sort of expected to end up there. Apparently this new dragon hadn't bothered waiting for coordinates. It had just gone ahead and taken him to Halcyon.

  He wasn't even sure he was allowed to be here.

  The Refuge Planet was known for its strict adherence to a moral code of peace, honesty, and empathy. People underwent careful background checks before they were even permitted to set foot on Halcyon soil. Anyone who lied, stole, or hurt others faced immediate deportation.

  It was a haven for dragons, which shied away from turmoil and negativity. Perhaps that was why this dragon had decided to bring him here. Although crash-landing him into a Refuge—Halcyon's version of a religious temple—wasn't exactly avoiding turmoil.

  “I'm sorry about your orchard,” he said.

  “It's all right,” the Devote replied serenely. “You can help us replant it when you recover.”

  “You want me to stay here?”

  She smiled. “You are free to do as you wish, of course.”

  “Uh … but I haven't, you know, done a background check or gone through immigration.”

  The Devote reached out a hand to the dragon. Its colors faded shyly and her hand went right through its side. “If this creature brought you here, then you belong here,” she said.

  * * *

  The dragon wouldn't leave him alone.

  Thanks to the healer's care, he was up and about by evening, with nothing but a bad sunburn and a few fading bruises. Avalys Refuge, it turned out, was located on the outskirts of a lovely coastal town. On one side, craggy cliffs and crashing waves made an impressive view; when he turned around, fruit trees and wind towers blanketed the rolling hills as far as he could see. Except for the Refuge's white pavilions, dwellings were hidden underground, leaving the planet's surface space for farms and leisure parks.

  It was like those holo-documentaries he'd watched as a kid, during the history and geography segments of his Galactic Standard education program. It was too idyllic to be real. And the smell of the place! Damp, fresh ocean and flowering moss and citrus from the orchard. The only sounds were birds chirping and a cluster of Devotes singing as they washed a load of laundry by hand in a trough next to the well-pump.

  He felt like he'd been transported back to Old Earth. Places like this didn't exist on Esperanza. He had only ever known crowded, noisy spaceports and crowded, noisy dormitories in crowded, noisy high-rise buildings. He struggled to think of the last time he'd seen a tree, let alone an orchard.

  It would be too easy to let go of that life. Here he could start over. Be a farmer, maybe. Or a mechanic. He might be good at that.

  If only that dragon would quit following him around.

  What do you want? he asked, watching it undulate with pleasure as the sea breeze tickled its skin.

  It informed him that it was utterly content and wanted nothing more than to continue existing.

  Dragons! You could never get a straight answer out of them.

  He tried again. Why are you following me?

  Because he was interesting, it told him.

  He supposed he should be flattered. Dragons usually couldn't even tell the difference between one humanoid and the next. Then again, most humanoids couldn't tell dragons apart, either.

  This one was quite distinctive. Aside from its pastel-sunset coloring, it deviated from the basic flying-snake shape of most dragons. There was a fluttery frill behind its head-end, like a ruff or a cape. Or wings.

  “Forget dragon,” he muttered. “You look more like some kind of fairy.”

  The dragon caught the image of a fairy as it flitted through his mind and seized on it, comparing it to the ancient, mythical images of dragons. It informed him that it found the fairy image more aesthetically pleasing, and wondered how humans had ever looked at dragons' graceful forms and seen a likeness to a great scaly monster?

  I dunno. Want me to call you Fairy instead?

  It communicated pleasure at the idea.

  * * *

  The Devotes kept him busy for the next few days, loading broken bits of starship into a hovercar, then hauling them to the recycling center in the nearby town. He enjoyed working with them. They were always laughing or singing, and not a single one ever blamed him for flattening a quarter of their orange trees.

  It turned out some of them knew Fairy by sight. She (he'd ended up giving her a gendered pronoun; somehow, calling her it felt wrong) had nested in the Refuge's outgoing portal for some time, offering her transportation abilities in exchange for a share of the Halcyonites' vibrant, positive energy. Now, she had been replaced by another dragon, and the Devotes had already accepted Fairy and Prince as a firm pair.

  “That happens sometimes, you know,” said a young male Devote, helping Prince lift another chunk of starship into the back of the hovercar. “They just pick a humanoid and attach to them. You're lucky. It would be ace to have a dragon companion.”

  Prince had heard of it happening, but it wasn't very common. Especially not among the pilots he'd known back on Esperanza. They were all quarkbrains. Most of them had to patch mood-stabilizing mind-alts to even get near a dragon.

  Going into town with the scrap parts, he wasn't sure what to expect. The underground dwellings sounded cavelike and sinister, but they turned out to be the opposite: high ceilings, lots of artificial sunlight, with real potted plants growing everywhere. Fountains, waterfalls, and streams created a merry falling-water white noise behind the sounds of children playing, elderly citizens gossiping on benches, and bots doing routine maintenance.

  Floating a hoverbarrow of parts through one corridor, he ran into a social group of five teenagers, who bumped into him and knocked several of the metal pieces to the ground. They actually apologized, helped him pick them up, and told him his dragon tattoo was ace.

  Who were these people? This kind of continuous positivity wasn't possible.

  The people down at the recycling plant were just as cheery. Apparently, sorting recycled trash and melting down raw materials was the best job ever, because they were genuinely excited when he dumped load after load of scrap metal on them.

  “The only metals we ever get are busted maintenance bots!” said one guy, his fingers hovering over a piece of the starship's nose like it was a large, misshapen hunk of chocolate fudge.

  “Well, enjoy it,” said Prince, baffled. “I've g
ot more.”

  What's with these people? he asked Fairy as they headed back to the surface level. Is the whole planet like this? Doesn't anyone ever get angry? Bored? How can they stand to act that happy all the time?

  Fairy responded that of course they were not happy all the time. She sent him a complicated series of images from people's lives she had observed: a Devote sobbing when her sister living offplanet was murdered. A young man struggling to control his anger. A girl feeling lonely and isolated because she didn't enjoy the same things her social group liked.

  Yet each image had a happy ending. The Devote, praying through her tears, found comfort that her sister's soul lived on in the aetherworld. The man channeled his anger into amazing works of art. The girl found friends on the g-web that she could talk to about her interests.

  Feeling negative was not a choice, Fairy seemed to be telling him, but people could choose what they did with those feelings.

  She sent him one more image. A young man with maroon hair and a bright pink tattoo on his arm, trapped in a dying starship. Pain and fear overwhelming him. And then, despite everything, he began to laugh.

  That's why you saved me?

  She informed him that he belonged on Halcyon, whether he knew it or not. She had merely seen to it that he got there in one piece.

  * * *

  He had been at the Refuge for three days when his audio earring chimed an alert for an incoming call. It surprised him so much that he answered without thinking. “Yes?”

  “DeSanto, where the blazes are you?”

  Prince made a face. It was Jeann Elkin, the owner of the taxi company for whom he had been due to start work this week.

  “It's a long story,” he replied.

  “Oh, I bet! Can't wait to hear your excuse, I'm sure it's fascinating. Did you get locked in some Monroe courtesan's room and couldn't find your way out? OD on mind-alts? Lose a limb? Well, you're not dead, DeSanto, so you'd better pay the hooker, strap on a bionic arm, and show up tomorrow.”