Original

It was Haraan's last day in Mauhu, and the weather had never been better.

Out on the patio, an ocean breeze blew in from the north, bringing up with it the waxy scents of palm and ficus leaves from the lower forests. It danced through the thatched bungalow behind him, around the reed-woven chairs and between the lanterns, and into the town behind that, nudging the walkways which ran between the trees. The beaches at the water's edge, hundreds of feet below the suspended settlement, shined like polished teeth under the clear summer sky.

The eight-year-old had heard the weather would not be this good where his family was heading. He heard it rained hard enough in the autumn to kill anyone caught outside, and that the sun would be smaller there, colder. That was what Ren said. He had not been mean about it, nor had he rubbed it in. He had presented those facts flatly, in his normal, this-is-how-it-is way, and had advised Haraan to find a good raincoat.

Haraan hated raincoats. He was small, even for a Loeri kid, and every raincoat he had ever worn practically nibbled at his knees. Give him what he was wearing right now: a thin shirt with sleeves and a stitch-up front, and light, loose pants — he could run anywhere in those clothes, but a raincoat would only bog him down. If the weather up there was going to be as Ren said, then he might as well stay inside for the rest of his life.

A door swung open behind him. He heard his mother call him. "Kiddo? How are you — Oh, Lady. It's nice out here." She walked over and joined him at the patio rail, resting her hands on the bamboo. Like him, Lyra had a head of black hair, blue eyes, and was slight of frame. Her dress, light and undyed as dresses on Liliota Island tended to be, exuded a mix of citrus and pan-fried fish from the kitchen. She inhaled through her nose as the next breeze blew in, stretched her back, and sighed. She looked over at him. "What's wrong?"

"I don't want a stupid raincoat," Haraan grumbled, staring straight ahead.

"No one does. They all want the intelligent ones," said Lyra.

"I mean I don't want to move," he said, dragging his nails along the rail. "Why do we have to leave? Can't Dad just stay here and not be a captain?"

Fingers slipped into his hair and ruffled it, back and forth in a rhythm. "Your dad's going back to do what he loves," said his mother. "He loves being out on the ocean. That's where we first met, after all, you know. When we had you, we never planned on staying here forever. We just needed a quieter place to raise you, that's all."

There was a moment of silence between the two. The wind picked up again and shook the leaves. It sounded very much like rain.

"I like quiet," said Haraan.

"Because that's all you know, kiddo. Your Dad and I wouldn't be going back to Talery Bay if we didn't think you'd have a better life there. You know how you always race through this town with Ren? You're going to meet a bunch more people who will be as amazing as him, and they'll keep you busy. I'm sure you're going to love it there."

To this, Haraan said nothing. Someone was out there on the ocean, pulling a net into his boat hand over hand. The breeze picked up once more.

"What is Ren up to right now?"

"He's upstairs, playing with his sister." Haraan made a face. She was weird. How else could he say it? How Ren could stand being her brother—

Lyra bopped him on the crown with her knuckles. Not very hard, but firmly enough to make a point. "Kaela is a fine girl now, and she will grow up to be a fine woman one day. Just you wait. You'll be glad to have known her."

Haraan rubbed his head and frowned.

"You know what? You should ask them if they want to go outside. Kellie and I could even bring dinner down to the beach and we could have a picnic."

The idea of a picnic got Haraan to cheer up—for a moment. He was all for running around with Ren, but it would be better if his sister stayed behind. She tended to wander off and climb into bizarre places they would not have even noticed. He turned to his mother. "Are you sure you can get the food down there?"

"It's not too late to change the menu to sandwiches. But I'll be counting on you to find us a good spot down there, first. One without any other people on it for us and for Ren's family, understood?"

Haraan nodded.

"Good." Lyra started heading back to the kitchen. "I'm going back to tell Kellie about our agreement," she called over her shoulder. "Make sure you hold up your end, young man."

Once his mother was indoors, Haraan pushed himself off the rail and looked around. How was he going to keep Kaela here while he and Ren went looking for the picnic spot? He could try calling Ren away for a bit—his sister was the type to wait patiently, too patiently, for someone to come back if they had to leave for someplace.

There was that one time they were outside when it started raining, and he told her to wait a moment while he ran inside for a towel. A mug of hot cocoa and a change of clothes later, he suddenly wondered where Kaela was, only to find her outdoors, in the same place he had left her, shivering and soaked. What did she do then? She smiled and shrugged it off, saying that the rain had told her to trust her friend to come back.

That the rain told her anything was only the start of her problems.

Confident in his scheme, Haraan walked upstairs, keeping his steps light. The hallway leading to Ren's room was lit by two old lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling, casting orange light on framed photographs of Ren's family—two with just his parents, one more with him included, and the other three with Kaela. The light from downstairs pierced between the edges of the floor slats, and the patterns they cast on the ceiling shifted as Haraan went along. At Ren's door, he heard them talking on the other side.

"Who do you think is out there?" Ren asked.

"It's Haraan, of course," answered his sister.

"How can you tell?"

"Because he's the only one who comes up here so quietly, isn't he?"

Haraan stifled a groan. That was the kind of thing about her that annoyed him the most: her ability to make him feel stupid, time and time again, without any effort. She had once called to him while he was climbing a stairway when he tripped on a raised footboard and dented the wood with his head. When the pain let him see again and she arrived at his side, she told him she had wanted to warn him about the danger. He could not even hit her for it, not because she was a girl—a slight one at that, even thinner and shorter than he was, despite being the same age—but because he somehow knew she was not out to get him on purpose.

He heard footsteps on the other side of the door. It opened inward, and Ren's head peeked out from the threshold. "What is it?"

Ren, two years Haraan's senior, had inherited his mother's straw-colored hair and his father's stocky constitution, minus the beer gut. His brown eyes bore an expression that said, "you will be quick about this," or so Haraan thought. He recovered a little when he saw his friend was already wearing light clothes, much like his, meaning they would be out of the house—and away from Kaela—sooner.

"Mom just needs a little help from us," he said, pulling his thumb down the hallway. "Would you mind coming? It'll be fun and we won't be gone long." Keep it simple, he thought. He never said where the help was needed, or what it was—it certainly was not "downstairs" or "chopping vegetables," and Ren would be smart enough to catch onto his hidden meanings. He turned to leave when Ren's hand clamped onto his shoulder.

"Can it wait? I'm in the middle of a game," he said.

Haraan turned back. "It can't really wait. You'll have to leave the game alone for a bit or dinner won't happen." The thought had entered his head like the sound of a tree limb snapping in a wind, and he was happy for it—it was always energizing, but he could only stand so many before his mind collapsed. If Ren turned this into an argument, that wind would become a monsoon. "They need us," he finished, realizing his gaffe in the narowing of Ren's eyes.

"They? I thought it was just your mom."

"Well, your mom asked for help, too." Haraan forced himself to keep eye contact. A lie, no matter how small it began, never helped him win against Ren.

"What do they need us to do? Chop vegetables?"

"Nah, they've got that covered. We just need to head down and set the... table." There were no tables on the beach, but if he said blanket, that would have given it away, would it not have?

"That's not bad." Ren looked over his shoulder at his sister. "Hey, wanna come help us set the table?"

"Oh, she's fine where she is," Haraan blurted, grabbing Ren's wrist. "We can set the table and be right back up here in no time at all." He stopped, another idea whipping to mind before Ren could preempt him. "Hey, Kaela, you don't mind waiting for us, do you—waugh!"

When Haraan first spoke with Ren, Kaela had been sitting in the middle of his room—well, their room, they shared it. He had not seen her approach until she was next to her brother, and next to him. Like Ren, she had straw-colored hair, but she had green eyes, eyes that stared into him with the calm weight of seas.

"Can I help? You can play with us too, if you want."

Haraan's jaw wobbled soundlessly before he caught up with himself. He was, however, disarmed for the moment, and a question tumbled out of him before he could bite it back. "What were you two playing? I don't see any games out at all."

"Questions," Kaela replied. "We're both winning at the moment."

"Huh?"

"'Huh?'" Kaela looked up at the ceiling, smiled, and looked back at Haraan. "That's kind of an odd question. So, I'll give it an odd answer. Huh-nuh-nuh gibble barble. Eep!" She reached over and poked Haraan on the nose. "Lloo! Haha!"

"The point of the game is to ask interesting questions." There was the barest hint of restraint showing on Ren's face. "That last one put you a little behind, honestly."

Haraan snapped, "Forget about the dumb questions! Kaela stays here, you—" pointing at Ren, "—are coming with me. To set the table."

Two hands slammed palm-out into his chest, sending him into the other wall. Ren was standing over him in the next instant.

And you," he said, "are not going to order my sister around, or I'm gonna hit you. You think she makes you look like an idiot? You don't have to be smart to see the truth. You're always the one making an idiot out of yourself. Not her."

The two boys glared at each other, their chests heaving, their shoulders taut, for several breaths. Ren was the first to relax. He shook his head and held out his hand. Haraan took it without another word.

"This is your last night here." Ren pulled Haraan to his feet. "There's no point in fighting. I'm going to miss you, and so will Kaela. I hope you'll feel the same way about the both of us."

Haraan looked down the hallway, out to the ocean, where the sky's bright yellow began to deepen to orange and the scattered clouds turned purple. He realized he had a knot in his throat that refused to come unstuck, no matter how hard he swallowed. His vision became curiously blurry.

"Kaela's coming with us," Ren said. "Now—what did your mom ask us to do?"

Her voice called out

to him, soft, bent in waves through the green water.

"Are you here to save my day?"

Hawking

The hiss of the milk steamer over the droning coffee grinder wasn't unbearable, even if the tunnel threw all that noise back in his ears over and over again, but Haraan would have preferred dealing with it another time. The bench he sat on refused to warm to him while he waited for his friend to finish at the coffee bar, and a constant breeze from the tunnel's mouth robbed warmth from where his clothes didn't cover his neck, wrists, and ankles. His shoes slid over grimy tiles.

Autumn had arrived at Talery Bay, bringing with it all the clouds and rain anyone could ever want. The bar had built up a solid line of locals -- he could tell what they were by the dripping, ankle-length coats wrapped around them. Those treated leather hides weren't anyone's idea of elegance, but they gave the wearer a solid look and kept more water off than any umbrella in the city. The winds made sure of that. Everyone knew umbrellas in the city were a swindle except for tourists, and Haraan knew several kids at the Academy who made rude amounts of cash passing "bloomers" off to hapless visitors caught under "these regrettable climactic conditions".

His friends had brought him along to hawk several times in the past couple of months, but this was the first time he was pulling a morning shift. Tired wasn't the right word to describe what he felt, but he did wonder if someone had stuffed his head with a noble gas while he slept. His hand kept straying to his bag, but all he did was play with the snaps. He knew what he carried: three sketchbooks of different sizes, pens and pencils, air tip and dye, and The Corthian Pageant, Volume One, for class. Yet part of him asked him to look inside anyway. Why? He couldn't say. His head wasn't together.

Footsteps approached him from behind. "Vac-flask, now," said a girl's voice.

He handed his up without comment. Flask in hand, the girl filled it from a tube-mounted spout connected to the half-gallon bladder on the side of her backpack. She took less than five seconds to give it back.

"Thanks." He let the steam rise to just beneath his nose, and smiled for the first time that morning. "You didn't have to get hot chocolate just for me," he said.

"It's your first time." She dropped in next to him. "I'll do coffee another day. I don't need to deal with anyone who doesn't like hot chocolate before first gun."

Haraan blew into his vac-flask and took a cautious sip. The drink still singed the middle of his tongue, and tasted as if the sleep-less twenty-something wringing a living from the bar's morning shift had simply poured boiling water over a bon-bon. He was no connoisseur, of course, but his mother did have a reputation among the gourmets about town... "Amina, it's like she didn't even care," he moaned. "She didn't even care..."

Without a word, Amina stood up and walked back to the bar, ignoring the line and the sudden protests -- she was five-feet-five and the man up front ordering a triple expresso with chili stood head and shoulders above her, and she pulled him to one side like he was a saloon door. The barista was rummaging beneath the bar for something; Amina wasted no time getting her attention.

"Hey, pimple-plex."

Haraan winced, as did one or two people in the line. If only he could know what the poor woman behind the bar was thinking. When you're up against a chick packing an electric-blue hairdo and short sleeves this time of year, you pay attention or end up regretting it.

The barista took her time standing up. When she got around to that, she gave Amina the kind of look that said "This ain't your fight, sister." Haraan couldn't tell if she was cocky or just slow in the head. Maybe both. Discouraging aggressive customers didn't take much brains when your job put you near convenient supplies of boiling water.

"There's a line."

"And I'm sure as hell that line isn't interested in getting ripped off by your gimpy drinks," Amina countered. "I know you're new, I come here every now and then -- but what's the big idea, cutting my cocoa like that?"

Flat as old soda, the barista insisted, "There's a line, ma'am. Wait your turn."

"No. I've got hard-working people counting on me to make their morning and what you gave me ain't gonna do that."

"Please get in line, ma'am."

Advice columnists for children led simple lives. A degree in psychology and a gentle, affirming voice was all they thought they needed to solve every problem a child could face growing up. Haraan had read the magazines when he was younger; the columnists told bullying victims to ignore their persecutors, which would frustrate them and cause them to find another target.

This barista put her faith in that quaint advice, and that was a mistake. Amina wasn't a bully. Far from insecure, she realized early on that going after what she needed ended better than going after what she wanted, and that the two were different.

Since she needed high quality hot chocolate, she knew how to deal with being ignored. She whipped her spout out and dispensed hot chocolate straight onto the bar.

"I knew I should have made my own at home," she said, watching the woman leap back from the sputtering torrent. "But then I would've had lukewarm cocoa, and nobody wants that."

"You asked for a reduced rate, you get reduced quality." The overwhelmed woman snatched up a carafe of hot water, but held herself back from throwing it at the last second. "What did you expect? A half of DeLaurenti's for your ten gambits?"

"I expected to be in Talery Bay, where we do this 'haggling' thing a lot. I don't understand your jam, sister. Did it ever occur to you that every cup I sell is a cup sold for your company? They won't come here for cut product, so give me the real deal. They're happy, they come here, you're happy. That's business. And I'm sure your supervisor would love to hear how you refused to capitalize on such an entreprenurial opportunity. Here's a tip: Taijuro's my older brother."

If he could only take one thing away from this morning, Haraan prayed it would be a memory of the woman's face paling to the shade of an ice cube.

"Put the pot down." Amina spoke, and the barista complied. "Good. Now let's do it right this time. In fact, I'd better see you putting cream in there. Heavy cream. I want it so rich that they'll still have it oozing down their throats by lunchtime."

Murmurs sprung up from the line, energized by Amina's performance. One spoke up. "And how about a gigante latte for me while you're up there?"

"Are you sure I can't interest you in a cuppa hot cocoa first?" she answered, slinging her bag back on. "I'll let you try some, and you tell me if Bimbolina back there did a proper job of it."

"Fair enough." The taster was well into his fifties, but he pulled out his flask with the excitement of a ten-year-old. Amina poured him a shot, he tossed it back. Looked skyward, smacked his tongue, nodded, held his flask out for more while digging in his pocket for money.

Amina held up three fingers, received three gambits, topped off her client's flask, bowed theatrically. "Pleasure doing business with you, sir."

"Likewise."

Haraan shook his head as his friend came back over, unable to suppress a grin. It was time for them to catch the steamer, except they were missing someone...

.. who walked out of an adjacent restroom at that moment. He was a tall one -- his hair, shaped like a corn muffin gone horribly wrong, came within inches of the tunnel's ceiling. In addition to his bag, which normal people would have used for week-long hiking trips, he wore a heavy overcoat which looked to be more straps and buckles than leather in places.

"I thought you were never coming out of there," said Amina.

The boy shook his hands out. "Hey, if it's a waiting game, nature wins. By the way, I heard you from in there. Rough much?"

"I smoothed her over." She stood up on her toes, just tall enough for the boy to plant a kiss on her forehead. "Got everything?" she asked. "Nothing fell in?"

He stepped back and snapped one side of his coat open. Playing cards, minuteglasses, capsules with four to twenty-sided dice, memo pads, compasses, pens, and even a barometer (its needle situated on "RAIN") were lashed in place with more straps, buckles, and harnesses. "Now that you mention it, I can't be sure it's all there," he said, "buuut it'll have to do." He closed his coat and turned to Haraan. "How are you feeling?"

He sighed, wondering inside how he was going to get a word in edgewise to people with those two working in the same steamer. "A little nervous. But overall, I'm glad I'm here. Thanks for bringing me out, Jasti."

The tall one put a hand to his face and groaned. "Ho, Lady, I can't believe you made me do this, this is gonna be terrible--" He removed his hand and grinned. "Kidding, kidding! Let's get you some sales! Come on!"

Haraan followed him and Amina further into the tunnel, beyond which lay the atrium of Grand Sentinel Station. Three kids from Altina Academy, artists in their own ways, hawking for laughs, getting a feel for what they could do in this world before the world could decide that for them.

This, he needed.

Another Raw Start

The men wore nothing but boxers on deck and were caught in the misery of salt spray on their backs, necks, arms, and legs, all the color of crabs left too long to boil in the pot. Better the sunburn than the alternative, though, which was wearing clothes — a day's steam south of Kestrel Harbor brought them to ocean temperatures in the nineties and the humidity would steam them alive.

The wood lattices bolted to the deck and gunwales spared the deckhands from touching the exposed steel beneath, which was why the Provident Reaping could take her men beneath latitudes which planted nightmares in other skippers' sleeps.

Karal stilted to the water pumps for a drink — the sea gushed from one with the press of a pedal, fresh water trickled from the other. His skin begged him for a splash of the pure and received a salt rebuke. Meric wasn't the kind of skipper to charge wages for fresh water, but the man who squandered it on his burns paid a steep price. Piss in his dinner glass instead of beer, night soil rubbed into his sheets...

Karal ducked his head under the sea spigot and let the hot rush through his hair. He stepped back and shook it out — ah, there it was. A moment's cool clarity.

"Sometimes," he said, "I wonder what the others miss out on."

"Well said, shbykhand," said Haust, rumbling by.

"I never would have guessed I was cut out for this," said the novice. "It's got to be a hundred and twenty, at least."

Haust said nothing. He rubbed the ocean over his cracked skin without wincing.

"We're all boiling right now. The captain's in his little wheelhouse oven, the fish are stewing in the ocean and float to the top—"

"Bait the nets, shbykhand."

"Yes, sir!"

When Karal was done, the vile-smelling chunks of liquified fish and cheese on his hands gave him another excuse to return to the pumps. It was the only shade out there on deck, designed for two mens' simultaneous occupation.

The five veterans of the Provident Reaping glared at the shbykhand from beneath that tiny shelter.

Karal spread his arms in supplication. "Gentlemen, if you would be so kind as to budge a little, so these guts don't end up smeared on yours?"

Raucous laughter and a couple of hands whacking the sea stream at him, reaching his chest as nothing more than stinging spray.

"I suppose a wash is out of the question, then?"

"Lanmas," cried one of the five, "how far up God's ass did you crawl to find this poet?" He held his girth in both arms like it might rip from him in his fits.

"Oh, Dac, you flatter me," said Rakal, "but I was the one who crawled out, looking for you."

More laughter as the veterans shifted aside. Camaraderie was a flesh-walled path to a seawater pump. Rakal washed his hands. It would be a while until the nets filled again, until the deckhands had to go out to blister beneath the sky.

Another start

Given the choice, given the chance, Haraan would have remained asleep. There could be no escaping them, his memories, either waking or dreaming, but his mind in the latter state wouldn't object to the contradicting evidence of who he was.

His first memory, so it contended, was of sand, of flapping and pouncing along some secluded, sable shore before his mother's jaws reined him into deeper waters. His first memory, argued another: clashing a pair of forks together to music while wrapped in his mother's arms.

We may rest easy at night despite whatever turmoil life brings into our lives, whether we lose our possessions in a fire, accident or arson, or if the loss is felt on an emotional level, such as the departure of a loved one, on the basis, the simple refuge, of acknowledging ourselves as human beings -- when we can't count on anything else, at least we may count on that, irrelevant to circumstances as that fact may be. Excuse the pedant, the contrarian, the fantasist: we go to sleep human, we wake up human, such it is that we may rely on (or resign ourselves to) it as certainty.

Such is not the case for Haraan Akema Siarke, who despises sleeping in a dragon's body, for he wakes up convinced he wears the wrong shape.

***

Let us be fair. Haraan has certainties to his life as well -- what a punishment it would be to live a life without certainty, a cruel hoax devised by something beyond God, for God creates life with the guarantee that whatever has life does not merely exist as does a rock, or the sky, or fire; it lives. Juxtaposition is a beautiful instrument for deriving certainties.

If he were the optimistic type, Haraan would admit he was living, and not living dumbly as a bacillus, or a stalk of kelp, but as a creature capable of reasoning and recollection, and not only that, but of abstraction, too. His human memories inform him two times five gives him ten and he can believe that without an array of pebbles spread before him to illustrate the point.

Why two times five equals ten is useful to know as a dragon, he couldn't say. The most important knowledge his dragon-self possessed tied intimately with his senses: the stench of oil signaled the presence of what his human-self called a boat, or a ship, it really depended on how big it was, but his dragon-self only cared that it had dragged his mother into the sky with giant hooks when he had been eight grand tides from the egg. The hooks had ripped through blubber into her arteries, so the oil mixed with blood.

Every time he had come close to a boat in the ocean, so his dragon-memories told him, every time he smelled their oil in their frothy wakes, he also smelled a little of his mother's blood, too.

Haraan is certain about hating boats. And as the first bars of dawn light begin to filter through the water, he is not at all optimistic about the coming day.

***

Why these contradictions? he wondered. When the contradictions overlapped in time, such as the matter of his first memory, they left holes in other places: entire seasons, tides, other spans of human and dragon measure both obliterated, leaving behind faint, smeared hazes of intuition best viewed as through the corner of an eye, if these ex-memories could even be seen with eyes.

On a very cold, very analytical level, it would be better to dismiss his blasted, carved-up past and focus on living out the rest of his days as a dragon. But no sooner did that idea come to him that other voices cried foul, most of them his, some of them imagined, conflated, or redacted from his recollecting, the rest, from her.

Especially from her. Hers was the only voice that didn't object as an echo in his brain.

"Not now, Kaela," he moans, rolling over. He knows she floats just a foot above him; he can scent her. She smells of strawberries today, tangy and light on his tongue, slowly, inexorably drawing him back to the waking world. Stop making me think about everything.

"Something came back to you yesterday morning."

"And it's only confusing me more. Let me sleep." Something blunt digs between his back and the sand, trying to nudge him up. He hears her voice bubble up from under him.

"I think we're going to find lots of memories today."

Lady, she is insistent -- and until yesterday, religion hadn't played any part of his life. He'd woken up with visions of temples, their inward-curving columns and somber, candle-lit statues of humans garbed in fabrics ruffled by impossible winds, the name of the goddess he invoked just now. Chants of worship resonate through his head before he realized what they were doing -- making him remember -- and quashed them. He brushes his companion away. "Not today."

He feels her wake pass over him, getting a whiff of strawberries again. He hears a sigh as she drifts into the curve of his chest and settles there, her dorsal frill tickling his skin. The sigh is his; he cannot decide whether it was a sigh of frustration, or a sigh of relief. The first night she had done this to him, snuggle up with him, that is, he had been asleep, only to bolt awake in fear. Despite one part of him having lived life quite happily in nakedness, the other, blurred, fragmented part of him screamed in an awkward terror groomed by a half-remembered, air-breathing, clothes-wearing society. He realized a week later that that society was nowhere nearby to judge him, and the warmth, the deep-seated whisper of her pulse, was nicer to have close by at night than a cold boulder.

"Are you still sleepy?"

"Very sleepy," was his reply.

She shifts, thinking to herself, probably. "Am I still waking you up too early?"

"Yeah."

"I'm sorry."

"It's okay."

"I'll wait more next time."

"Until you can tell what color your flipper is in the light."

"Okay."

She would get better. At first, she woke him with several hours to go before sunrise.

1

Given the choice, he would have preferred to stay asleep. He had to deal with them regardless of his state of consciousness, the fogs, the fogs which crept over the hills and crevices in his head, the fogs he knew were keeping his own memories hostage. In his dreams, they were just as hazy as anything else -- he never had to question what lay within those memories as he passed by.

Or, rather, those memories never got to question him.

And so it happened, every morning, the daily fight to keep his eyes closed for a few minutes longer -- but the act of keeping his eyes closed roused other parts of his mind into waking, and with the waking came the questioning.

What was so strange about waking up underwater?

What did he care about being naked?

To address the first question, waking up underwater was a perfectly normal thing for a dragon. Waking up in a bed, not the kind that formed by chance in a thick swath of sea grass, but in a bed covered with cloth sheets and cloth blankets, with a pillow stuffed with feathers under his head -- wouldn't be. As for the second, he was plenty warm enough, owing to the layer of blubber wrapped under his skin. And yet, he couldn't stop looking for anything flat and wide enough to drape across his stomach, even if he only found stones -- such as the one lying on him right now.

In short, he missed having underwear. Here he was, a creature with fangs in his mouth, webbed spines running the length of his back and tail, a pair of horns long as his head -- and he was prepared to trade them all for a piece of cloth he could pull between his back flippers (and how would he do that without fingers to grab on with?).

As the days passed, hints of before trickled back to him despite the fogs' best efforts -- the first had been a smell, the second, the word belonging to that smell.

That smell, the smell of fruit, tangy, and light enough to stay off his tongue, drifted through his nostrils now. She was nearby. In the end, sleep lost out, as it always did, every day, and Haraan opened his eyes.

"Has anything else come back to you?" she asked him.

He nodded.

"What was it?"

"Chalk."

"Mmmm." The little dragon before him closed her eyes and smiled as if receiving a back rub. "I know that one. You can use it to write stuff."

Another memory struggled against its hazy prison, its fierce babble dumbed into a moan. Something thin and rigid pressed between his fingers -- from when he had fingers, if he ever _had_ fingers -- he couldn't choose how these things came back to him and what he remembered by touch was hard to ignore.

"Really? Don't pencils do that, too?"

The smaller dragon shook her head. "They're different. You use a pencil on paper, but you use chalk on a street."

"Spoken like a human."

"I am one. And you are, too."

"I still don't believe you."

"I remember bein' human. All we have to do is get you to remember, too."

Haraan groaned. She said that same thing every day for the past half-tide. "I doubt that's going to happen. The way I am right now? I'm fine with it." The lie burned on his tongue. "Really."

He rose from his resting place from last night -- nestled against a quarter-arc of stone set on top of more stone, cut in even blocks and laid in a flat, interwoven pattern. He knew the arc had belonged to something called a fountain, and that it belonged above the water so it could shoot more water into the air. Wide stairs led up and out from the area around the fountain in four directions, passing under algae-slimed arches at their apexes.

When she had first caught him

about to scrape barnacles from the columns of the Second Street bridge, she had told him she was a dragoness.

If he ignored everything below her neck, if he blocked the thought of rubbing against that clear, gelatinous bell, if he denied the trailing, circumscribed tentacles anchored beneath him and the frilly mane descending from her inner mantle like a chandelier, shbyk, if he ignored the other frills, rippling in their eerie trains along her front and dorsal — if he kept his eyes on a leash and concentrated very, very hard, then yes, she had the right to call herself a dragon. The upper half of her body remained opaque out of mercy (to who? to him? to her?) and green as the seas off of Kamania.

Her head stirred. She rubbed her cheek against his scales and only the complete evacuation of his mind kept Haraan from flinching. That was the way it was with nighttime ideas: mornings turned them into regrets.

~Hey,~ he echoed, nudging her with his flank. ~Hey. It's time to wake up.~

She blinked awake. Even through the overcast morning robbed most color from the world, her eyes maintained their greenness relentlessly, especially when she turned them on him.

~Good morning,~ she yawned. Her fangs, tiny as they were, spaced themselves along her jaws with smart precision.

Haraan ran a careful tongue along his own, unsure of why he felt a need to compare dentists. ~Yeah. Good morning to you, too. Good dreams?~

A little light show accompanied her answer: four muted rills of green and orange trickled from the apex of her bell to the rim as she nodded. ~We talked again.~

~I remember.~ He uncoiled himself from the strange human-dreaming jellyfish-dragon to stretch. The ritual was so different here — no arms to thrust into the air, but he could touch his nose to his back and twist his body a little more than two full turns, all in three dimensions. By bending into letters from the alphabet, he at least found some use for his new shape.

Start with capital A. Then go through B, and C, and so on. Concentrate. As they encouraged difficult and dynamic body angles, alphabet stretches made great striding exercises. In a sense, he was still himself — possibly even better than he had been before.

E... That middle prong demanded a hairpin his skeleton and its hundreds of ribs weren't loose enough for. F was no better. He got to H and growled.

He dropped the routine before moving onto the letter K. That sense of ~himself~, the one with legs? He was only trying to fool himself longer. The water he breathed, the agitated flare of his dorsal frill, his limblessness (dear Lady, even she got flippers, transparent and squishy as the rest of her was).