Page 59 of Backpacking through Bedlam

“Damn, you found a Caladrius?” They’re almost extinct. Have been for centuries. Something about the combination of being something that can be slaughtered for useful resources, and looking almost human while being obviously not human annoyed the Covenant. The fact that the almost-human thing they look like happened to align pretty well with the modern church’s depiction of angels probably didn’t help.

Probably.

“Two, actually,” she said. “They’re at St. Giles, and they’ll be thrilled to meet you.”

“Great. You get all that, Sally?”

“Nope,” said Sally. “There’s so much, I’m not really getting much of anything beyond ‘If I promise to look both ways before crossing the street, I can have pizza.’”

“That works for me,” I said, and leaned over to give Verity a quick hug before I started back toward the door we’d arrived through.

As before, it was unguarded, and the door wasn’t locked, easily letting us back out into the little courtyard. The dragon kids weren’t bouncing their ball anymore, having traded it in for piling themselves into a heap of golden heads, almost like a hoard, with the long, reptilian form of the young male curled proudly on top. They were giggling sleepily, obviously pleased with themselves. I paused long enough to look at them before heading on, Sally close behind me.

“The thing to remember about dragons,” I said, once we were in the short, private hallway to the convenience store, “is they look human, but they’re not. They’re people, and they deserve respect and dignity, but they’re not human people.”

“Meaning . . . ?”

“Meaning those kids were probably following some deep-seated instinctual pattern. I’ve seen adult dragons form piles like that my whole life. Not normally with the big scaly one on top, but still, often enough that I figure it’s not something they choose to do so much as something they’ll just find themselves doing from time to time. And it’s perfectly normal.”

“What . . . How does that . . . If that’s a boy, and those are girls, how does that even work?”

“Humans have an incredibly low degree of sexual dimorphism,” I said, and opened the door to the convenience store. “It’s why we can share sweaters and shoes and knives and such. Dragons have a very high degree of sexual dimorphism. Enough so that for a long time, we thought they were two separate species.”

The convenience store was empty save for Pris, who was now engrossed in a romance novel, barely seeming to pay attention to the shop she was supposed to be watching. She looked up when the door swung closed behind Sally and me, and got up with an exaggerated sound of irritation to cross over and lock the door.

“We’ll hopefully be back soon,” I informed her.

She scoffed but otherwise didn’t acknowledge that I’d said anything at all. She walked back to her stool and sat heavily, retrieving her book from where she’d placed it face-down on the counter.

“Great customer service,” said Sally.

I shrugged. “Cut her a break. She’s dealing with some pretty heavy bullshit from the dominant species right now, and that means we’re as likely to be enemies as allies, even after we’ve been vetted.”

One corner of the dragon’s mouth tugged upward in what might have been a quickly smothered smile. She still didn’t look at us. I waved anyway as I left the store, Sally on my heels, and stepped into the balmy New York afternoon.

“Pizza?”

Sally’s request was plaintive, and made my stomach grumble.

“We’re in New York,” I said. “No matter which way we go, there’s going to be pizza within a block or two. So pick a direction, and we’ll go that way.”

Sally turned a slow circle before pointing in the direction that seemed to have the most people heading in it. “There,” she said.

“Cool.” I started walking.

Letting her pick the direction served two purposes. First, this way she was less likely to get mad at me if we had to walk more than a block for pizza. Second, living with weird-ass luck like mine has meant learning how to manage weird-ass luck like mine. If I’d picked the direction, we would probably have walked straight into a Covenant patrol, and I wasn’t in the mood to deal with that just now. We’d have to face them eventually, but we could do it on the other side of pepperoni.

Sally huffed when we hit the end of the first block with no pizza in sight, only to light up like a Christmas tree when we saw the dollar-slice storefront halfway down the next block. I put a hand on her arm.

“Buddy system while we’re outside,” I said. “We stay together, got me?”

Sally sighed. “Yes, Mom.”

“If you’re going to call me that, we should probably be consistent about it, just so we don’t confuse people more than we’re already going to.”

She turned and blinked at me, then snorted and kept walking. The smell of pizza was starting to drift down the sidewalk, washing everything else away. Hard to smell the city when you have a nose full of basil and melted cheese.

Inside, it was the sort of narrow, boxy space that New York specializes in, with a tiny waiting area and a counter running from one side of the room to the other. The guy behind the register looked like he’d been half-asleep before we arrived, probably due to the afternoon lull: there were only a couple of other patrons standing at the counter, eating slices off of paper plates. Sally ignored them. All her attention was on the glass case of pizza options.