Whatever April had considered would happen since the sadistic Bastard that had turned her into an alien had declared its intentions to solicit volunteers to sell their bodies, it had never been this.

And her mind could consider an awful lot in this form. Even she had to grudgingly admit that there was far more hardware in her head than she’d ever had as a human. If she hadn’t killed her fiancée as they both slept, that was how fast her transformation had been; it might have even been worth it for the potential she felt capable of.

Instead, April was atop one of the warehouses fronting the aquatic rescue center. She tried not to think of what foul urban dirt she might have the underside of her body pressed against. Instead, April was left sneering at the humans who'd gotten word of the offer extended by the Bastard to change species through the chastised but unrepentant Lacy. The cold rain pattered against the contours of the middle-aged dragon-woman’s gaping jaws as she made no secret of her contempt for the fools dressed up as animals who’d come. Only matched by the revulsion, she felt with every movement, every incomprehensible tic, of the strange body she had been forced into. 

What these people, who called themselves fuzzies, scabies, or some nonsense, claimed to desire through their strident calls to the alien woman and the other Children watching them warily was nothing short of mystifying. 

Her skin crawled, making the scales twitch more elongated and feather-like than any other scales she’d seen, at the feeling of the tail that’d crushed her partner batting restlessly against her perch with hollow metallic bangs. She ducked her head, bowing her neck until her chin touched her chest, in embarrassment when Sam, the violet-eyed dragon widower, echoed the racket she was making within the building below back to her ears. April wrapped her thick heavy taloned fingers over the bridge of the nose bisecting her vision in dismay. Sorting her thoughts, she broadcasted a wave of apology and assuagement to dozens of convalescent Children who were now being forced to reside in the warehouse.

One of five enormous structures, crowding the pier alongside the aquatic rescue, that Agent Starling and her FBI contingent had seized to consolidate as many of the Children of the Egg as would obey the authority wielded by her and the city of Seattle. Usually packed full of some manner of aquatically sourced supply, she knew by the overpowering smell, they had now been hurriedly emptied by a fleet of trucks. Nothing new entered, telling the ex-woman volumes how scarce some kinds of food were about to become after the shock of what had happened to the world spread.

Realization seeped into her conscious thoughts about the inhuman actions she’d just allowed herself to so easily slip into. Groaning with dismay, April let her head droop until her neck draped over the roof's edge with the tip of her elongated face resting against an overhang a few meters below. Her eyes looked dazedly at the newly fortified entrance to the pier where heavily armed stormtroopers wearing jackboots patrolled, ignoring the desperate pleading of the lunatics begging to be transformed out of their human bodies. 

The sight arrayed before her was so pathetic it made her want to kill herself once again, convinced that she'd died and been reborn already. She detested what she became, what it had cost her, and the shameful behavior of her former species did not induce much desire to return to their numbers either. 

The city burned, and the victims of this whole abomination had been herded like cattle into damp, mildewy warehouses under the threat of their human loved ones being thrown into jail as co-conspirators on vague anti-terrorism charges. Nothing more than a witch hunt, looking for someone to blame when those responsible were beyond any ability to be held accountable.  

A fistfight broke out between three men and escalated in seconds when one pointed a handgun in the air. April flinched, the rain reaching beneath her scales to the heated skin beneath as they lifted their extended feathery points with a rattle in a surprised wave as two shots were fired. The gunfire was painfully loud in her sensitive hearing and made her ears flick backwards with distaste. 

The Gestapo facing them on the other side of the barricade snapped their weapons up and unleashed a salvo of fire at the man waving his handgun. Sparks shot upwards from the ground as ricocheting bullets tore through the crowd, and a wave of pain slammed into April. Nearly making her vomit as an all too human acid tang churned up her throat. Human screams from the dock intermingled with howls of terror from the shell-shocked transformed humans huddling in the warehouses. The violent transmission of aggression coursing through April’s newfound abilities as a Matriarch infected all under her shadow with the pain of the small ones.  

April the human, the dwindling presence within her skull that felt less and less familiar by the day, recoiled as April the dragon threw her head back and roared her anguish at the pain she felt. An invisible torrent of her emotions raged outwards to sweep over all those, human and Child, upon the pier. Silence fell over the area, only broken by the Child’s ragged heaving pants that sent fog rolling in coils from her flaring nostrils. Standing on her hands and feet, she felt her weight shift as her wings extended upwards and flapped to lift her onto her hind legs. Surveying all those who shied away from her piercing gaze as her head bobbed and wove with agitation. 

The pain of those struck by the bullets burned from within parts of an enormous body that April still struggled to accept was hers. A dimming sight as the vision of the man she did not know failed along with his life. Bystanders worked furiously to staunch his wounds even as the FBI guards radioed for medical assistance that was no longer available.

She knew it was inevitable, and the tech CEO felt a little piece of the human left of herself die along with the man she felt was too far away to learn the name of. Bleeding out on the ground, lost and unknown. One more tragedy to heap at the paws of The Bastard.   

Towering above them all, April dared them to continue their violent madness in her presence. She dared them, knowing it was her place to protect her family. Instincts to gather all she had adopted on her escape to the aquatic center screamed at the frantic human in her mind. April’s mental homunculus raced back and forth in a frenzy to make sense of what the dragon within demanded.    

Spatters of blown rain dragged April’s miserable contemplation away from the horde throttling the entrance to the pier and the columns of acrid smoke from the city beyond towards flapping wings just before her snout as a blanket of inviting warmth settled over her. Stop Stop bobbing in a hover before the elder Child’s nose with sharply truncated sweeps of her wings that pelted April with cleansing raindrops. Moving closer, the child craned her head, and April hesitantly gave in to the instinct to nuzzle the other Matriarchs comfortingly. 

Matriarch… 

A title that still felt wrong on her pointed tongue and foreign to her mind. The Bastard had told them it was a concept that meant everything to her new species. That this maddening desire to include strangers under her protection as if they were her own children was normal.

Calm.

The child’s message into April’s mind was one of emotion and feeling but unmistakable to her new senses. Darting beneath the woman-dragon’s head, the baby’s wings smoothly folded as she curled up within the crook of the elder’s arms. Stop Stop looked up at her adoptive mother reverently before butting her head against the former woman’s thickly muscled neck and cooing a gentle reminder.  

“I apologize little one. These dark thoughts of mine are not for others.” April responded in the language that made her throat resound with the beautifully melodious but bestial notes of the dragon-like creature she’d become. The chief operating executive shook her head in frustration and felt the fin on her neck slap back and forth against her scales. “I do not know how to control myself.”

Protect. Lead. Learn.

And she was. But why did doing what was so right feel so wrong? Who, or what, was she? 

April sighed, blowing heated air through the nose that would horrify the surgeon who fixed the kink in her bridge from a childhood injury. A reminder of her human life brought back to the forefront of her myriad thoughts with the memory of a broken nose. She had so, so wanted a child. Even froze her eggs, hoping desperately that she would find a partner who shared her desire someday. When she had, what did she do? Kill him with the same abominable limb she felt draping over the roof's edge.

Every sensation and experience made her doubt if she was April anymore. Laying on this roof, with her legs folded alongside her body and arms stretched out like a sphinx to press her chest, groin, and tail against the grime covering it. The wings, massive and ungainly on the ground, twitched. Rising and lowering through no commands of her own in time with the agitation she felt. In the harbor, she could see other dragons flying and plummeting into the water with keening wails of fear. Only to laugh with sibilant huffs when their heads resurfaced. Trying to learn to fly, just as she would again in a few hours. Swimming back to shore, their movements were just like hers. Undulating side to side with flicks of their long tails, wings furled tightly, and limbs angled backwards like lizards… serpents… aliens.  

Stop Stop gently hissed upwards at April. Snapping her elder to the present and drawing a despairing whine from the woman-dragon. The extraneous limbs of her back unfurled to sweep forward and cover her head and Stop Stop both. One in shame and the other in a protective umbra. The drumming of the rain against the fleshy membranes accompanied the rasp of their mingling breaths in the space their caressing muzzles dwelled. 

We had no choice in this, April thought, casting her mind to the agonized souls below her perch on the warehouse. Sheltered from the rain that cascaded from the wet scales of her body. We want to help them make their choices, to keep our agony from repeating. But some of us who remember what it was like not to have a tail or wings knew that they did not desire our new instincts for…contact. It was wrong, so very wrong, to touch the minds of others. Yet, it took nearly all of April’s concentration to keep from doing exactly that. She had to fight against what she suspected was the nature of her new species.

If April Mayer had had a choice like the humans she sensed debating their futures, would she have given up her life for what she was told was a noble cause? Was it worth the death of their attachment to the human world, as had happened to her?

*****

The guard stared disinterestedly as Rebecca recoiled and bounced off the wall alongside them at the sound of gunfire outside her prison cell that reeked of the chemicals it contained. When the inhuman rumbling cries that made the young, talented polymath’s ears feel strange resounded even louder than the preceding whipcracks, her jailors staggered to the other wall. They reflexively pointed their weapons at the defenseless Rebecca like she had something to do with the uproar outside.

The woman, Rebecca presumed underneath all that armor and facemask it was a woman anyway from the curvature of the eyebrows under the goggles, stood in the open doorway with some ugly black rifle held tightly across her chest. An even uglier second weapon nestled below its barrel appeared to be an enormous shotgun loaded with solid gold rounds. Like that would be enough to stop the woman lying upon her military cot and jauntily kicking one leg in the air after she’d decided to accept the extended offer from the Golden-Eyed alien that some of the others called The Bastard.

Rebecca enthused as another groan of discomfort left her fleshless lips when she felt her body surge to a new and greater length. The tail resting between her altered thighs and hips where her wetsuit had been cut to reveal the lines of her joined haunches creaked as she felt it slide against the rough canvas with a surge that left it wriggling. Straining ever outwards as it pushed the woman into a life where she did not have to worry about people judging her by the volume of her breast tissue.

Now, the transitioning woman crowed in her roughening voice, would be her chance to shock the world into letting go of the presumptions of appearance and the failings of biological determination. Now, she would not be overlooked because her body was desirable and needed protection. Soon, Rebecca Huxley’s wings would spring forth to make things right for her friends by enfolding them into her embrace. She could feel the future where her strength and those with her would lead them all to undreamt of heights.  

She knew it the moment the words left her lips that turned her away from womanhood. She knew it when she saw George’s eyes and his reaction to finding his family hiding on the roof of an apartment building. Huddling together, only to explode into joyful squeaking when he had crashed uncontrolled and collapsed half the floor. Even during her transformation, the deafening wail he’d unleashed when the truth had settled still resounded in her memory.

Between never enjoying the body she’d been given and the pain inflicted upon her friend, it had been an easy choice. But not one without consequences. 

Standing, she filled the room from floor to ceiling in a crouch caused by the weight of her body extending backwards. In an instant, Rebecca’s three guards snapped their rifles up to point those yawning circular shotgun things at her head. Quickly thinking, she knew that if the weapons were enough to bring her down, they would kill them as well. 

They were willing to die to keep her in the storage closet. Irately, muscles grouped around her buttocks fired to swing her tail with a crash into a shelf. The distant sensation that she should feel an unregistered shock to her back as the metal frame crumpled at the impact of an extension of her wonderful new body. On the guards, the fingers hooked over the triggers of the weapons Rebecca saw before her twitch alarmingly. 

The Granter of Wishes had declared that the rescue's staff would not be allowed to leave for one month of interaction with it. But the federal government had stacked the deck against those bound to the physics of this universe. Limiting the meetings with the alien to once a day and for only a half hour at a time. Limits the Granter had accepted by making it clear that less was a step too far when every government thug on the pier had collapsed into unconsciousness for precisely one minute.     

Rebecca knew because a clock was in view in the conference room. After the scales had grown across the front of her darkening forehead and her skull had begun to swell, she had found that forgetting anything she had seen, smelled, heard, or felt was impossible. Very unfortunate, the metamorphizing woman felt, because she’d much rather forget the pain she was undergoing in the rebirth she had asked for.

Staring at the guards in thought and trying to process how to proceed, she tried not to show her surprise when her narrowly pointed tongue flickered outwards to wet one of her nostrils behind the bulging of her jaw. Wettened, her shrinking nose became more sensitive, and the smell coming from her guard grew sharp in her sense, even if she didn’t know how to understand what it told her.    

“When can Iiii call myyyy familyyyy?” Rebecca drawled, struggling with the vowels. A pop from her hip resounded within the concrete room. Causing the woman to squeal as her stance twisted beneath her. She dropped onto one knee as the other leg suddenly jerked upward with a bend that hadn’t been there before. Lashing in pain, her thick tail slammed into the shelving. Spilling bottles of water treatment chemicals across the floor.

Not answering her demands, the guards trained the muzzles of their rifles on the gasping woman instead. Providing no relief or pity for Rebecca. Instead, two streams of consciousness nudged against hers from far beyond her cage. Stealing the pain of her change to replace it with the uncertain but powerfully comforting presence of April and the cooling balm of eager assurance conveyed by Stop Stop.  

Lost child, we protect. We find family. April’s mind whispered into Rebecca’s. 

A distorted, unfocused image of a warehouse full of dragons and an invitation to disappear into their numbers to complete her change accompanied the woman-dragon’s message. Away from the fearful and hostile FBI agents who had dragged Rebecca kicking and screaming into her prison cell the moment the first of her fingertips had hardened into darkening claw points. It would be a place for her to reach out to her family and give them a well-deserved explanation for why their youngest daughter had volunteered to become a living myth.  

 We come for you. 

A much more irritated thought from Stop Stop conveyed the frustration that Rebecca had been growing steadily more aware of with every change to her body. An impatience for speech that Rebecca had seen bits and pieces of through the baby Matriarch alongside a distinct lack of action. 

Each train of thought was marked by the girl or woman who’d sent it. A tangible that Rebecca experienced as if it was a singularly unique taste or a smell. Something to identify an individual. The patterns that had started as a nonsensible buzz while she was human had grown more comprehensible with every hour. Once Rebecca’s skull had begun to grow, pushing out in all directions in a disorientating experience that had her repeatedly vomiting into a mop bucket, she had even been finding herself able to convey emotional thoughts of her own. Blasting her desire outwards to speak with her human family before it became too late for them to recognize her. The young woman did not understand what was developing in her mind. That not all Children of the Egg were like her.

But Stop Stop and April knew the woman-dragon needed to be taken to safety before the authorities attempting to control them understood the truth. Why that was, Rebecca didn’t clearly comprehend through the abstract concepts tickling at her consciousness.

Calm. Listen. 

Was the only warning Rebecca got that, just like the unexpected suddenness of her change, things were about to proceed far faster than she expected or was ready for.

A tiny burst of staticky voices came in the earpiece of the woman facing the towering woman hybrid as her captors touched her radio and responded with an affirmative. The first words she’d heard her speak, despite all her other attempts to evoke some response. 

“Five of the smaller creatures are coming this way,” the unidentifiable woman told her fellow guards. Standing again with a painful tilt to her stance with mismatched legs, Rebecca thought she heard a rhythmic clicking behind the government agents of something hard against the concrete floor. “Get ready to kill the prisoner if it looks like….”

And then, the lights went out as Rebecca threw herself down and to her right when painfully loud gunfire snapped past her swiveling ears.     

They tried to kill me! She screamed in her head as a very real shrill of panic ripped from her throat. They really tried to kill me! The young woman felt her hardened fingers scrape at the thinning hair of her scalp and the warmth of her tail pressing against her hip as she curled into a ball. Her cries mixed with the guards and the alien chirping from the pitch-black hall. 

The high-pitched whining of tinnitus dispelled far more quickly than it should have in time for Rebecca to hear the three thuds of bodies falling to the ground. Completing the chaos of whatever had just happened before she felt the strong, scaly embrace of a tail tip wrap around the arm shielding her face. A gentle tug and an even gentler projection of what the Child gripping her saw in the stygian light. The transforming woman could hear the even breaths of three humans along with the rasping of four Children, but it was not her sight that saw the gray-scale imagery of the unconscious guards prostrated with their weapons flung meters away.

A caress of a mind against hers told her it was Stop Stop leading this reckless, incredibly well-coordinated jailbreak. The furious ground-shaking roars and snarls of others outside shouting nonsense she only vaguely understood, such as “It is raining.”, “Why is this dolphin speaking to me?” and “I hate my tail!” was enough to disorient the humans trying to shoot the group in the blackened service tunnel through a foggy morning rain. Stumbling and careening from wall to wall, Rebecca cursed at her inability to maintain a steady pace as she was tugged along by the sure-footed and four-legged gait of her rescuers. With an inhuman howl, her unchanged hip popped to send her crashing to her hands with her tail swishing above her raised rump through the constraining wetsuit drawn tight against the woman’s skin. 

Urgent! Blared in her mind, she warbled back indignantly before switching to her native tongue. Her body wouldn’t answer her anymore with the stress of her rescue and its strange half-between state. 

“I cannot! Help me!”

She wasn’t the largest of the dragons bounding alongside her, but when Stop Stop nudged up between her legs, Rebecca couldn’t help her startled squeal at feeling the smooth scaly body moving along the underside of her tail and between her legs. Lifting her into the air with a combination of shock and strength. The hybrid woman was embarrassed beyond her ability to form words at the sensation of Stop Stop’s snout and spinal fin rubbing across whatever her vulva had become where it had migrated out of sight under the thick swell of the tail between her legs.

“Smell funny between legs!” Stop Stop declared, turning her head back and up to fix one mischievously glittering blue eye on her passenger. She yowled as their companions bobbed their heads with chuffing laughter when Rebecca thwacked the back of the young dragon’s head with the palm of her hand. 

“I dooooo fucking not, youuuuu little deviant! Get usssss out of here!”

However, the baby Matriarch had stopped just before the edge of where sullen day's dim light intruded into the corridor to wait with her co-delinquents. A feeling accompanied by the vague smell they were anticipating something heavy around where they crouched with heads weaving as they looked outside with ears bristling and nostrils flared. With her twitching limbs and long tail dragging lifelessly beside Stop Stop’s hind legs, the woman astride her could do nothing. 

Rebecca felt a buzzing, like the high energy discharge from a Van de Graaf generator that had the gunmen outside shaking their heads. Stop Stop counted down with a quiet hiss while the federal agents trying to stop the jailbreak outside stumbled back and forth under a barrage of sound and the strange sensation fogging Rebecca’s thoughts.

“11...7...5...3...2!” 

Chittering torpedo-shaped mammals launched themselves from the tanks among the ranks of the federal agents facing them. When they landed, torrential cascades of water swept men and women off their feet just as the enormous forms of Children plummeted from above. Hurling one human after another into the water with swings of their bodies. 

Gunfire erupted, ineffective as it shot into the air, but instilling high alarm into the dragons who cried out deafening cacophonies of snarls and howls. An explosion from a misfired bomb blinded Rebecca, and before her vision and hearing were overwhelmed, she saw a black armor-clad body and a rifle cartwheeling into the air along with shrieking roars. Digging the few claws she had into Stop Stop’s scales, Rebecca screamed in fear.  

A blast of pain from Benny set the nerves of her shoulder on fire as she felt his burning throes. Not knowing where this came from or why she felt Benny’s pain at all, the half-alien woman could do nothing but clamp her eyes shut and flex her fingers against the scales of the Matriarch’s back once more. The only sensory input left to her was the flickering of her tongue, bringing the taste and smell of sulfurous fumes.

Stop Stop, and her entourage, surged into motion with the scales of Rebecca’s tail scraping along the dampened concrete with each leaping bound. They plunged into a maelstrom of chaos as more gunfire came from ahead of them. Dimly perceived directions filtered into her thoughts that Stop Stop acted on. Projected from above, the young Children knew exactly the route they were taking as it was relayed to them. A sideways leap, the flick of Rebecca’s tail to lay out a looming gunman, as they fled between towering figures and bullets skipping off into the air.

Up they ran along one of the stairs of the visitor stands surrounding the water tanks dominating the end of the pier. The smell of others danced and intermingled in a whirlwind, muddling the scent of what she was becoming. Rebecca dimly saw from above their movement towards the topmost railing across the compound, a thrust of coiled legs, and then her tail trailing out behind her with the wind tickling against the fin emerging from its tip. Stop Stop’s wings snapped out with a flexion of the powerful back muscles her passenger lay upon to coast towards the top of a maintenance shed.

The tiny powerhouse’s claws clacked on the sheet metal roof upon landing. Rebecca’s overhead guardian split his vision as one eye trailed away to the humans at the base of the pier beginning to riot at the instigation of this violent outbreak. New gunfire erupted, this time quieter and less directed, and the sounds of screams came from dozens of ears to the human-hybrid. 

A trumpeting cry silenced those beneath it as Rebecca felt a light equal to the one she found herself upon pass overhead. An anguished roar beat the bedlam below into submission and gave Stop Stop’s group, immune under the baby’s protection, a chance to escape to their destination with a wrenching plummet from the roof to asphalt. Passing into a darkened warehouse that echoed with the rustle of scale, wing, and cloth. Her hearing recovered enough to hear these welcoming sounds. When her tongue flashed outward between parted jaws, she only knew a sense of belonging. Human and Child voices calling out to her in greeting.

But, as the enormous voices thundered outside to calm those attacking one another, Rebecca did not want to release herself into the wings and arms she felt reaching out for her. She could not let go of her humanity until she could right a wrong that had begun with her impetuousness. The woman groaned, sliding off Stop Stop onto her side and panting. Surging emotion fueled the changes within her frame and brought her to gasp breathlessly while she scratched at the millimeters of neoprene covering her twitching body. New growths at all points beneath the black suit bulged outwards to press painfully against the stretchy material. 

“I can’t…I can’t stop it. Mom, Dad. I jumped too soon. I jumped too soon. Just like you always said I would. Please…” a dry snap of bone made those watching the transforming woman thrum with sympathy as she screamed when the shape of her hand changed. A narrow tapering nose extended outwards to nuzzle Rebecca’s ribs, a gentle vibration coursing through her to assuage the disunion all those around her had already undergone.

“Please,” Rebecca begged, her boiling tears burning the human skin of her face as they fell. Pooling in eyes she now knew were amethyst against a backdrop of iridescent blue around ovoid pupils that held a vision that was not her own. “They deserve to know. My family deserves to know what their daughter has done to herself.”

A man wearing the dark blue uniform of an EMS and with a fluorescent orange bag rushed towards her along with a Child about three meters tall who thrust his snout under her chin as she gasped and tried to reach for her back. The pair dodged around her tail as it whipped with the pained contortions of muscles anchored to the growing mass of her pelvis. Shears scissored through the wetsuit, where it bulged around a wave of points, to reveal a proud fin that swelled to a rounded peak between her shoulder blades. Fear nearly swept Rebecca away as the process of tearing her from her human life notched another milestone. She was running out of time.

“Doesn’t anyone…” she started again. But everyone’s attention was drawn away when someone, a human wielding a short battering ram, sent the door behind Rebecca and her escort to the ground. A warning from Sebastian preceded the armored agents boiling into the warehouse with weapons raised.

Stop Stop whirled with her disproportionate wings flaring upwards to hiss defiance at them. A sense of rage came from her that April and Rebecca felt driven to add their own emotional force to. All around the pain-wracked woman, scales and fins bristled as heads and tails began to weave with agitation. A wall of black bodies coalesced around the armed agents fanning out and away from the door that backlighted them. Responding with chirruping cries to an urge that Rebecca felt scratching at her own mind. 

“Protect the little ones, protect the Revered ones.” 

“Nobody move, or we will open fire!” yelled the lead man of the assault team. The black armor-clad wearing agents progress in where is that bitch finding Rebecca was halted by the wall of Children bundling the little ones and her deeper into the warehouse. The woman gasped as a hand wrapped around her. Effortlessly pressing her against the inviting warmth of chest scales while the young ones and some humans ran beneath her in the direction her guardian thumped on three legs. Passing down a living corridor of sheltering wings and scales towards what looked like a break room seen through a large window.

Two women grunted with the effort of supporting Rebecca’s arms over their shoulders when they took her to pass through the door as she let her head loll to stare at her dragging feet. Only then noticing that one was visibly longer than the other and left faint parallel scratches in the concrete from the claws that had replaced the tips of her right toes. 

Uncertain of what, if anything, she should be doing, her tongue flickered outward to wet her nose once more as she was laid gently on the sofa cushions brought to the floor. Left to watch as the room was quickly made ready. The moisture coating her expanding nostrils brought the stench of the terror from the others into sharp focus and provided Rebecca some direction. 

Three of the smallest Children dove to nuzzle into her and twine their bodies with hers as they shook with an awful fear that felt like icy spears poking at her mind. Pushing back against the ice creeping over her thoughts, she felt a sensation of warmth spread out from her into the tiny trembling babies to banish their fears. Lifting her head, Rebecca saw a giant in the warehouse lay before the window and door just as tables were upended and stacked against them.

Men and women, armed with all manner of weapons, huddled behind the couch pushed before Rebecca with their guard upon the door. Whispering to each other in fear with doubtful glances at the dragon-woman behind them and all the other people encircled by a scaly redoubt with the Children small enough to fit into the room laying shoulder to tail. Rebecca could feel that those with guns pointed at the door didn’t know why they were risking their lives to protect her. They were even more afraid of the changes in their acquaintances who’d become Children and their adamantine belief that she needed rescuing. Whimpering cries and stifled moans of terror made Rebecca push her warming lullaby out further until, one by one, the sounds of dread fell silent.       

The shouting of humans outside grew even louder as the much more resonant grating timbre of Children rumbled back in anger. The lights went out with a tremendous crash and a roar of pained fury, and the shooting started.

*****

“Y’all are about as useless as one-legged hunting dogs,” Assistant Director Georgia Starling said, leaning on the fists she’d planted on Dr. Schofield’s desk in his appropriated office. Staring down three of what she had been told were the best special tactic operators on the west coast. A claim she had severe doubts about.  

“Ma’am…”

“Shut up,” the tall and rail-thin red-haired woman said while holding up one hand. Spinning to stalk with an energy that had impressed her superiors at every step of her career. Instilling in them the trust they had to give her the assignment of maintaining the integrity of the United States in a region stretching from the Canadian border to Portland, Oregon. Her stride took her to a wall with innumerable printouts papering over a mural of a killer whale leaping out of the water to point at three pictures of smiling ATF agents. Three that had been under her command until they’d died because Agent Stevens, the powerfully built man in the rightmost image, couldn’t keep his finger off a trigger two days ago.

“Three agents died, and ten more have been rendered medically unfit for duty during that woman’s escape. Do you understand that? Do you understand why we’re here? Do you?”

“We are…”

“Shut up,” Georgia snapped as she spun back to glower at her agents. The speaker, field agent Anderson with the DHS, bit back his first reflexive words and took a deep breath before continuing.

“We have identified and arrested the dragons that killed our….”

“We have identified the dragons,” Director Starling repeated mockingly. “What have you identified? Not one of those creatures will tell us their names, nor can their previous identities be confirmed, and without that, they cannot be tried in a court of law. A dragon. In a human court. 

“So, tell me, what have you arrested? You might as well arrest a bull for manslaughter after it gored the muck-booted imbecile that slapped its ball sack!” 

“No,” Starling said, whirling away to stare at the center’s immensely useful security video feeds while her underlings fidgeted with uneasy glances at each other. “No, no court would be able to try them. The courts are a human construct for human matters. We can only continue to restrict their freedom as a matter of national security. We can euthanize them like highly intelligent, talking animals if we must. But we can't because we need them.”

“The alien,” Jackson, the black woman on Anderson’s right, said uneasily.

“Yes,” Starling hissed, not looking back at them but at a separate video feed trained on that very alien in a tent that had been set up next to the center’s water tanks. It was surrounded by a team of military scientists and an array of sensors that not even Georgia understood. Something to do with gravity. The Enigma, as they’d taken to calling it once they’d learned it wouldn’t communicate with anyone beyond other dragons, the staff, and the families of the research center. 

At that moment, it was speaking to Doctor Schofield, the only person Georgia allowed to interact with it, while the man paced back and forth in an agitation that the FBI lead could sympathize with. She knew he, and the others, were still waffling on whether to accept the creature’s offer. No matter what she and all the personnel under her command told or ordered their prisoners to do, the siren song of the creature’s information kept the possibility alive that these humans, or some of them at least, would voluntarily switch sides.

Yet another reason why Starling thought it might be best for them all to just die instead of bolstering the ranks of that thing. To betray their species, to betray their country. 

It was the only reason they had not been taken to a federal penitentiary to be held indefinitely on charges of breaching national security. But the information the alien provided on its goals and intentions to the research center’s staff and their families was invaluable, even after the first day they’d arrived when that girl threw herself into the fire by loudly proclaiming that she didn’t want to be a human anymore. 

Once the first hints of the destruction of her biology appeared, Starling had ordered Rebecca Huxley separated from the others, even at the loss of what they might have gleaned from the alien for why it was turning people into dragons, dolphins, and God knows what else. Georgia had watched with revulsion as the hourly checks by an FBI biologist revealed the ravages underway in the girl’s anatomy when they had to cut more and more of the wetsuit Rebecca was wearing away. 

The slow growth of the tail gave her nightmares of such granular detail that the supervisor had jerked awake to feel her buttocks to make sure she didn’t have one herself. Later that same night, Georgia vomited into the trash can not far from her cot in the director’s office. The feeling of her spine swinging to brush the scales covering it against soothingly cool concrete had been intense. It had taken three laps of the office before her body could remember that it didn’t have to walk like her hips were twice as wide as they were to accommodate a thick bundle of muscle separating her legs. Only then had the phantom sensation faded.

After the next night, when she’d awoken herself with a choked scream lodged in her throat as she felt her body stretching upwards with towering growth and the spasms of her spine breaking apart, the rightfully suspicious agent had gone to the egg-heads to get to the bottom of it. Once it was observed the strange feelings Georgia had felt concurred with their manifestation in Rebecca, the prisoner had been moved deeper into the facility, and the dreams had ceased. All theories and observations of the phenomenon classified as the researchers tried to understand what was happening and what it could mean for humanity. 

Unfortunately, nothing more could be done for Georgia after her touch against the unknown, leaving her unsettled and paranoid. Daily interviews with the psychologists and their constant haranguing to fly to a hospital for thorough scans of her brain activity now another burden she had to bear and doing nothing for her peace of mind. Making her question whether she had been compromised and was a danger herself. In the end, she had to give the shrinks the authority to terminate her command if there was evidence of the slightest shift in her psychological baselines.  

Even as she tried to plan their next steps with her subordinates and the city’s mayor on the teleconference call. Her fingers frequently scratched at her arms, expecting to find smooth plates instead of skin, and she constantly fidgeted in her seat as if sitting on a non-existent tail. It was enough to make her want to kill Rebecca and all the others, regardless of their intelligence value.

And kill them for one more reason, she reminded herself. The one most personal of all. Her hand moved to brush her fingers across the breast pocket of her jacket that held a picture she could no longer look at without feeling her heart burn in agony. She buried her emotions, torn between anger and pity, beneath her steely belief that she worked in the country's best interests. 

Gregory, a voice whispered in her head. Making her leap half out of her seat with panic in her eyes and interrupting that idiot Jackson as she detailed the state of chaos that the Seattle government had fallen into. The spineless Mayor and his city council jumped like spooked armadillos at her own sudden start, and she got up to hide her fear of not knowing just what was wrong with herself.

“What we need…” she started before her voice cracked as she snapped up a bottle of water.

“What we need is control, and to get that, we need as much information as we can get.”

“Information?” echoed the mayor incredulously. “But what about the ah….”

Jesus, here it comes, Georgia thought. Rubbing her forehead irritably as she did whenever she had to speak to the wheedling man. Why was she dealing with this flotsam instead of the governor? At least he knew which way to piss when the wind was blowing. 

“What about the ah—the diseased patients? You had told us that the federal government would take care of them to allow our resources to be applied to the welfare of….”

“Yes…” Agent Starling drawled out icily. “I will take care of the dragons just as we told you we would as long as you give us enough room to house them and keep the idiots and the media away from our operation. Which, if a substantiative number of dragons haven’t fled your happy city yet, may require the usage of the adjacent pier’s structures just to the north of us. We need even more space and resources to treat those like the police Captain you delivered to us on a flatbed semi-truck. She is in a great deal of pain, I’m sure you’d like to know.”

What she didn’t mention was also needing that space to house all the personnel about to make their homes on the Puget Sound waterfront. An investigative staff to research the alien and those it had taken an interest in. It was something neither the mayor nor the governor would ever know if Homeland Security had anything to say about it. 

“Ah…” the mayor said evasively. Tugging his collar and looking as discomforted as he deserved to be. “Captain Ramirez is a hero, of course, and will….”

“You perfidious rat!” Georgia had reached the end of her patience and blazed up from her seat to snarl at the politician, posturing as if the media she had just mentioned were training cameras on him at that very moment. “That is one of your law enforcement officers in my care who I know from firsthand accounts was burned and then deserted by your office for saving your citizens.”

“I…”

“I! I?” 

Now he was getting angry; the federal agent could tell by the pallor increasing in his sunken, ghoulish face. Now they would be able to level with each other in this crisis, instead of Georgia watching him dancing around the problem like a majorette in a parade.

She couldn’t care less. 

“You listen to me, Agent Starling. I know why you’re here and….”

“You don’t know a damn thing beyond that I am here to save your ass. So, shut up,” Starling hissed in response, drawing several puzzled looks from her leadership team as she rubbed her forehead again. The feeling of something about her that was missing had resurfaced as the room spun around her.

“Your anarchist citizens are burning your city to the ground and attacking the law enforcement that lets them sleep peacefully at night out of a desire to rage against order. Now, with your overextended governor's blessing, you have come to the federal government to save you. And you have gotten me, only to learn that you don’t like the help you’ve received. Well, too bad because no one else is coming.

“This is what is going to happen, Mayor Westbrook. You are going to get the media away from these piers, along with those lunatics in the animal costumes and those trying to volunteer to join the alien’s side, so that I can determine what needs to be done to contain the American citizens running amok. 

“In turn, you get to say that you saved the city from chaos, using the information I provide you, and receive another term where you’re guarded by the police force. The one that keeps you from being gunned down walking from your multi-million-dollar town home to your German-made sports car with the license plate that reads 274-LOF. In the meantime, you will continue to provide food and medical supplies to me in exchange for the aerial surveillance assets I allow. Is that clear?”

“Yes,” he said, slumping back into his chair with an air of defeat. The spineless worm. “You mentioned needing more information before. What else do you need?”

“David,” Georgia motioned to her signal intelligence specialist.

“A call was placed from the warehouse on this pier two days ago that has been traced to where we believe the parents and family of the fugitive Rebecca Huxley are located. The suspect wanted in connection with a gross violation of national security and for questioning on her involvement in the deaths of three federal officers murdered during her escape from custody."

“No one has left that pier through our shared security. How could you have lost this fugitive?” Westbrook asked with a stupefied look that made Starling want to break her hand on the zombie’s face. 

I here, Georgia.

“Who’s here?” Starling snapped waspishly at whoever dared to use her given name as her headache grew worse. Lifting her head from reading the report on hospital capacities to see everyone staring blankly at her.

“Uh…” David mumbled, “what?” Never the most verbally agile on his feet, that one.

Massaging her temple, his boss flapped her other hand at him to continue answering Westbrook’s questions. Ignoring the confused looks her task force leads shot each other.

“You are correct, mayor, that no humans have left this pier. But given the fugitive’s advanced state of alteration at the time of her disappearance, we no longer have reason to believe that she would be recognizable in any meaningful way. Despite our best efforts, the... um... dragons that know how to fly continue to come and go. We have not been able to positively identify more than a few willing to speak to us.”

“Which means Westbrook,” Starling said after recovering her scattered thoughts. “That the only way of knowing which one is her is by forcing her to come forward. She may be in possession of classified information, and we need to know how much she knows regarding our current situation. Information she may have revealed to her family. We need your forces to bring her in.”

“What? Do your own Gestapo dirty work. My police force is not in the business of shoving people into unmarked SUVs.”

“No, they are in the business of abandoning one of their own and deserting their duties instead,” the federal agent seethed through clenched teeth. One specific instance embedded in her mind had her writing off nearly everyone in the police force as worthless. She didn’t care what species Captain Penelope was now; she was a fellow officer and deserved more goddamned respect than she’d gotten.  

Georgia could not get the sight and sound of that police captain out of her mind. With her cap half melted to the scales of her head, horrendous silver-gray charred skin and scale stretching away across her body, the whistling roars of pain echoing off the buildings all around, and worst of all, the intensity of the stench of scorched flesh from the enormous woman. Penelope had been unceremoniously dumped into their care on the bed of a semi-truck. It had taken all the senior agent’s willpower not to throttle the driver, who had no respect for his wounded passenger as she was jostled by every bump.

It had only been once a larger-than-average dragon and another no bigger than a dog had bound through the moaning crowd to touch their snouts to Penelope's had her screams and writhing against the cargo tie-downs hooking her to the truck quieted. 

“All my resources,” Georgia continued, pulling herself out of that nearly tangible memory that made her own skin prickle with sympathetic agony. “Are concentrated on piers along your waterfront to handle your dragon problem. I don’t have the reserves to break through the little bonfire party your citizens are throwing themselves in the ruins of the storefronts and banks throughout your city. The last time my teams went into the city, two of our trucks were set on fire.”

“They don’t trust you because you’re hiding something from them. Just like you are from my council and me. What do you have that is so interesting at that facility, Agent Starling? It can’t be that girl or that boy who became dolphins despite your attempts to deny that they exist. Have you been watching the news? Citizens of my city uncovered your attempts to hide them quickly enough. Between those two and the dragons, I do not know what you expect me to do about those unhappy with their human lives crowding the perimeter you stole by declaring….”

“By declaring that this pier and all the property in it is now a sensitive facility under the control and protection of the federal government,” Starling interrupted. “As ordered by presidential directive 345a.14,” she said, reading off a piece of paper that she then held up with the presidential seal prominently displayed in the corner. “Which I know you have a copy of because you and the governor are now filing emergency appeals to get it squashed in the courts. So, get to whatever point or request you’re trying to make. I have other matters to attend to.”

“These aliens are requesting volunteers to become…I don’t know…Shamu and Flipper. Why deny these people the right to choose what they wish with their lives? It will greatly defuse the situation confronting your new stolen facility. We have manpower and resource shortages of our own. An act like that would show remarkable restraint on your part.”

Because I don’t think they need to meet the damn thing in person to get their wishes granted to turn into sea mammals, that’s why Georgia thought in her head. Speaking something else entirely, of course. Despite the damage done by whatever miscreant had leaked to the press, that fact remained under wraps where it belonged. 

“If that’s truly what these people believe, then it’s our duty to save them from themselves. We, let alone them, don’t have enough information to understand the alien’s true goals for humanity. We don’t know what they are doing or what they are doing to people’s minds,” Georgia returned, unable to help how her throat vibrated to add resonance to her words. Producing a timbre entirely different from her customary southern drawl. “If you believe their bullshit that they’re doing this as some kind of altruistic act, then you are a fool.” 

We no harm.

What were these thoughts that felt alien in her own mind? It couldn’t still be that twice-damned girl, could it? There was way too much distance, wherever she was, to still affect Georgia like she had before. She had to wait until the room stopped spinning and an insatiable itch crawling across her skin subsided before the uneasy woman could continue.

“We must exert all the control we can to keep the situation from spiraling beyond ours. The future freedom of our country depends on it. We need control, which means not letting people do any damn thing they want that could destabilize everything.”

The meeting afterward with the governor went as well as expected. Seattle was not even the worse situation he dealt with, the poor bastard. If civil disobedience and the secrecy-clad, tangentially beneficial actions of some feds in his state were the only problems, then he had larger boars to hunt. Like rouge special operations personnel from Joint Base Lewis-McChord declaring that they no longer recognized the federal government and disappearing with an arsenal of military-grade weapons. Another reason why Agent Starling wanted no one crowding her perimeter.

Whatever conceptions Georgia had about the oddness afflicting her were utterly unprepared for what happened with her last daily conference, Executive Assistant Director of National Security Edward Amos. Her boss had what Georgia could only describe as an adamantine belief that he and the rest of the security apparatus operating out of the nation’s capital were the only things standing between the country and dissolution. 

She wanted his job and had to be sharp to get it. That meant no weaknesses. But, there had already been too many missteps with the death of three of her agents during the escape and subsequent search for the still-missing terrorist. That meant him not knowing that there might be something terribly wrong with her.

“So far, Agent, two Blackhawk helicopters, and a predator surveillance drone have been destroyed. Three agents have died, with ten more in the hospital, and you have nothing to show me about the entity you are there to study other than it distorts gravity around it?

“Starling, if I had another senior field agent available to replace you in leading this operation, I would fire you in a heartbeat. Your incompetence is staggering. Can you at least explain to me why these creatures are allowed to come and go as they please when they are supposed to be detained as the dangers that they are?”

Ripping his reading glasses off his face, the silver-haired man glared at his subordinate when she said nothing. Hanging her head until the auburn locks of her hair had come undone from its bun to drape over her face. Concealing her anguished grimace as she panted and squirmed on the edge of her chair.

“Well? I find it hard to believe that Gloria ‘The Undauntable’ Starling has nothing to say while I harangue her for her failures. What is wrong with you?”

Georgia could not say what was wrong with her. During her boss' tirade, she had lost all the color of the well-earned tan she carried from her relaxation method in busting her hump at her garden plot, probably already overgrown with weeds. Left unable to do much more than wheeze an apology and a bland excuse of having eaten something rotten.

More sensations of her hands and bare feet on damp concrete distracted Georgia as she mumbled vague agreements at random intervals while her superior gave her new orders. Something to do with a Navy ship coming to dock at the city.

An image of a gray supply ship, seen from far overhead as it sailed through the strait towards Seattle on the horizon, appeared in the woman’s sight at Amos’ words. Pushing her forward against the desk she was behind with the weight of wings and the powerful strokes of firing muscles across her chest and back. Understanding that she couldn’t possibly have.

The appearance of her director in the video feed split into two. Distantly she felt the wails of the Children and their blanketing terror at what their lives had become as they hunched in the dank warehouses that she’d ordered them to remain in. Something protruded into her vision at the inward edges. A scaly monolith showed an enormous nostril gaping before each of her eyes. Through that nose came the acrid biting stench of despair and sorrow. 

The rush of her heartbeat was deafening in her ears, as were the rasping breaths of the tens of scaly suspects. Reaching up with a hand, Georgia could no longer pretend to be paying attention to her boss telling her to get the alien to talk about petroleum. Her hand grabbed the empty air, where she knew she was seeing something that moved with her head as she looked around. Something that was both hers and not hers.

“For Christ’s sake Starling,” Amos snapped, drawing her back from the edge she felt herself teetering upon. “Go get yourself looked at for your food poisoning or whatever fatigue-driven delirium you’re suffering. I don’t have time for this, and despite your inadequacies, you’re the best I have available to manage the investigation of the subject at your location. No more incidents, do I make myself clear?”   

Not even waiting for her answer, the screen went blank, and Georgia surged up with her hands on the desk to give voice to the whistling cry of pain and confusion burning her throat. Fed by the feelings and emotions that grew more intense with each passing second from every direction. Even as her voice cracked under the strain of the ululation, she knew that all the acoustic nuance the call should have held in layers stretching beyond her ability to hear could not be reproduced by her thin, weak, human throat.

Voices whispered in her head, and sappy emotions conveying a sensation of family washed over her. Startled shouts came down the hallway while she and her chair crashed to the ground with stacks of reports flying into the air from a sweep of her arm. Georgia seized with the sad remains of her chewed fingernails, clawing at her scalp to raise thin bleeding welts when the chaos rampaging through her mind trebled in volume.

The feeling of a tail and the weight of wings. Agonizing loss and remembered agony as those limbs unfurled from stretches of Starling's body that remained unchanged beneath her rustling clothes. The gravity of tens, hundreds, of massive consciousnesses crushing Georgia until she screamed with an agony that wasn’t induced from afar but her own. Her scales rose, bristling, with warm bodies exuding scents of comfort and protection crowded around her. Crooning support mixed with the acidic taint of despair.

“Get out of my head!” the ailing woman shouted, raising herself on her paws to slam the extension of her snout into the ground. “Get. Out. Of. My. Head!”

The sounds and emotions grew louder and louder until Georgia felt shock explode within her like incandescent fireworks. She felt her neck, far too long and lithe for the human trying to push her face away from the vomit oozing out of the corner of her mouth, coil backwards. Snapping her gaze around from absentminded consideration of the Seattle skyline to stare at a blank wall of concrete that the assistant director knew she was feet behind.

You hear? No! No more! 

Georgia’s rigid posturing finally relaxed as a door slammed shut on what she was feeling. Cutting off the burning emotional sensations of a man, Liam Graves, as he begged a shadowy human-sized figure to be allowed to leave and visit his family. They were all that mattered to him. They were all he had left if they would accept him for what he was now. Even if they didn’t, he had to protect them.

Voices, much closer to the dull human ears that she should have, exclaimed in surprise just before the director felt hands grab at the wings curling in pain against the expanse of her towering sides. 

“If family is all they care for,” Georgia muttered to the first braindead lackey that responded to her beckoning hand as a stretcher and a medic were called for. “Then that is how we will tame them and get our answers.”