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A shudder ran through my back and wings when I cringed at the sound of bone being ground back in Kim's arm. Knowing that our children could feel the vibrations through her body, I was holding them asleep while the prep work for surgery was done. The predawn light was barely making its way through the continuing snowstorm outside the large tent that had been erected around Kim's shoulders, neck, and front legs as she was made ready. I kept my watch through a clear vinyl window that the heated air within the tent kept clear of snow.

Construction of these new tents continued around my silent vigil by a new shift of national guardsmen. Providing security around the tents and the huddled Children was a detachment of Boyd's me in their armored trucks. Drifts of snow accumulating against the large tires of the armored trucks where they sat idling in the cold. Their turrets swept back and forth in vigilant regularity as the gunners manning them fought against the fatigue and boredom that always accompanied guard duty.

On the other side of the parking lot from where I curled around my wife's shelter another large tent had Big Bang's hindquarters hidden inside. Her more intelligent half stretched outside with her head laying on the ground and impatiently watching the claws of one paw click and clack alternatingly on the tarmac buried beneath the now compacted snow. Wincing at random while her haunches were treated for the multitude of shrapnel and bullet wounds that I took the biting edge from in combination with the booze-soaked towel sticking out of the corner of her mouth to deaden her nerve impulses. The dazed look I could see in her one eye matched the feeling of her thoughts as a forgotten memory of a college age night of indiscretion slowly and haphazardly reformed in her mind from a time twice forgotten.

"What they're doing right now is grinding down the bones of her leg so that they can reattach her connective soft tissue. The information provided by Serena and Brian at CSU has proven invaluable in this first of its kind operation." The doctor from the VA, a slim man in his 60s with bushy eyebrows and an incongruously deep voice briefed me on the operation and what I would need to do when the time came. There just wasn't time to rig up some method that they could use in a sterile manner to maneuver my wife's arm and paw that weighed more than the whole surgical team combined. "Her limb will be a few centimeters shorter than the rest of them but given your enormous size we do not believe any lasting disability will result if the operation is successful."

He showed me on the diagram, that I had assured him I could still see fine, on the piece of paper that he was waving around that looked like a cross section of a child of the egg's leg.

I didn't want to know where he gotten it, and was afraid to ask what was needed to get that kind of detail.

"I give us about a 60-70% chance of pulling this off with what was sent to us. Brian, I am being told, is already making his way here and will be able to assist along with Serena. We don't expect them until later tonight however long after we have begun. To prolong the amount of time before tissue death occurs we're using transfusion lines to...'jump' the gap and keep blood circulating until we are ready to reattach the arteries and veins.

"You're help is going to be needed, once your uh...hands have been washed and scrubbed, to make adjustments in your wife's arm position. Once the bones have been reattached with titanium plates designed for horses..."

"Will that be strong enough? We're a lot bigger than horses."

"We...we don't know. We're already going to attempt to use an experimental and entirely improvised method of casting the break afterwards using carbon fiber composite and wooden bracing bolted together. Once the bone has been reattached, we will begin to work our way outward reconnecting nerves, tendons, muscle, and vascular system vessels. The final step will be sealing the wound with skin sourced from Kim's opposite arm. Which we are attempting to harvest now. Your...hardened epidermal plates are robustly resistant to removal and it's taken a pair of maintenance workers some time to clear a patch of underlying skin of them with the two pairs of pliers we sterilized.

"Do you have any questions so far?"

"How long will her recovery take? How long must she remain here? I want, and so does she, to be at home for the birth of her children and we have no idea when that might be."

"Well...normally she should not be moved for..."

"This area is not safe for a duration any longer than absolutely necessary, doctor. There is stolen military equipment in the area that remains unaccounted for. How long before she will be stable enough to be moved by ground transport to her home in Coeur d'Alene?"

General Boyd cut in, to my annoyance as I stifled my first reaction to him undermining the medical authority in charge of my wife's care.

"The only thing that could carry some one of her size is a cargo truck... General you can't be serious! The shock and vibration of such a trip could undo everything we're about to attempt!"

Boyd's tail tip flipped through a half arc dismissively as he brushed that concern aside. "I'm sure you'll figure something out. There are issues with resources (an image of tanks appeared and the feeling of confusion at not knowing where they were) that will become worse the longer so many are being used to defend this hospital. Kim will not be the only one undergoing transport. Every human and child of the egg in the Boise area who has been targeted for assault is being evacuated to northern Idaho. The situation on the ground is shifting, and large swaths of the United States are about to (thousands of people marching in the streets of a major city with the decapitated body of a child of the egg on a flatbed trailer played in his mind) have problems that will take time to deal with.

"For better or worse, the region around Coeur d'Alene lake is now being supplied and secured to be an area of safety for a region stretching from Spokane to Boise to Idaho Falls and Helena. There are secure areas being set up all over the country until people get over their...panic of the situation of finding themselves no longer alone in the universe and in the crosshairs of an alien intelligence."

"Aren't we playing into the hands of these violent assholes with segregation like that?"

"These orders are coming from the White House. The president is not willing open war in this country, consider it a temporary and tactical retreat. There are just too many things falling apart right now as a result of the oil situation and first contact to worry about those of us who lost our humanity. The best and most effective way to protect as many as possible is to do that in secure areas, such as your home and the area surrounding Coeur d'Alene."

"Against our will, right?"

"Absolutely not!" The horror I felt from told me his outraged roar was genuine. "That would_be playing into these people's hands. No...only those that feel they can no longer live safely in their communities, those that are lost and have no remembrance of their lives to fall back on will have need of these areas. The situation looks bad (_it was) but not everyone is under violent threat of attack."

"Mr. Schwarzkopf, if I don't have your attention at the moment, and there are no more questions from you as to your wife's condition..."

"Our children, is there anything that you can tell is wrong with them?"

The mayor, sitting behind me and talking with the city council and several police officers, felt my unease and rubbed my tail with hers absently in comfort. Even Boyd gave a sympathetic whine of distress that he didn't seem to give any notice to making.

"No, not really. I'm trained and experienced on humans, not alien biology."

I sighed and bobbed my head reluctantly. Letting him go for later when I was needed once more. An idea occurred to me to help him but I had to push it to the back burner as a I felt the attention of several small ones shift towards me. Some officers wanted to get me alone to interview me on the events of yesterday, and the Mayor was pointing out to them which child of the egg was me with her tail.

It was difficult to find somewhere to do the interview in private as I refused to range further from my wife and children than I could keep contact established and the area had grown even more crowded than it was last night. The movement of people and children of the egg had melted paths through the snow to and from several treatment tents that had tangled bundles of electrical and communication cables looking like mis-colored spaghetti which made me hungry.

Another new presence was the large group marching back and forth past each other on the road under the intense narrowed gaze of a seated Jill. Most of these demonstrators were incensed about us being in their city. Some yelled at their silent watcher, questioning if she or the rest of us were ever human to begin with. If we were 'plants' to disrupt humanity's control of Earth.

Others were there to demand of the mayor, who had moved to the entrance of the parking lot and thrown her wings wide for attention, what was being done to feed themselves, their families, and guarantee that roofs would remain over their heads. Debt collectors and banks, I had learned from a nurse that morning, had become increasingly aggressive over unpaid bills and mortgages in the area after the police had ceased enforcing evictions. Several dozen murders had been attributed in the city to those actions alone.

Some of these people were truly desperate. Long past worried about their lost jobs, they were in fear for their very lives as the turmoil continued to roil beneath the surface of even the calmest days in the world.

The sound of the wolf scratching at the door was becoming hard to ignore.

I listened to Mayor Mclean try to explain the latest rounds of what was being done to guarantee the common good as I gave my accounting of yesterday's events. Although I was more than half tempted to just impart the memories on the police themselves. Which wasn't a bad idea...

"You want to what?"

"Instead of you asking me questions about yesterday, and me giving you answers you may or may not believe. I think...I think I can replay what happened for you as I saw it."

Did I know that I could do that? No. Did I think I can? It would be no more than combining several things that I had already done separately, and so was worth a try. Not that Corporal Haines needed to know he was going to be a Guinea pig if he agreed to it. Hopefully, it wouldn't lead to any kind of short- or long-term damage. In any case, I already could feel that it was a bad idea to make the offer.

"Hell no! You stay out of my fucking head you...you..."

You mind raping beast. Jesus, aren't you things dangerous enough already? Look at those fucking claws...

_ _ "...Mr. Schwarzkopf, thank you for your offer. Whatever it was. But answering my questions will suffice."

It was probably for the best that I answered him the old fashion way. I knew the he, and his partner keeping notes, were already alarmed by the force of my presence as it was and didn't need the added stress of feeling mentally violated as well.

Not that even most of my mind was on them. Much of me was still soothing the rattled nerves of all those undergoing medical treatment here. Even, since early this morning, all the small ones in the hospital. I listened to the mayor, as reliving yesterday when I literally couldn't forget any of it frankly bored me. Especially with the consideration that I could sense that the policemen themselves had already given up on solving who had attacked us. An alarming development that I wasn't sure how best to rectify while I listened to the Mayor address the angry crowd at her paws.

"I am working with the Governor to assure that no one will go hungry in these trying times. Together with the Idaho National Guard and federal resource management we will maintain enough food, medicine, and essentials for your family and selves to continue your lives unencumbered while we adapt to our situation."

"But my job!" A man screamed from the back with a rifle slung across his chest. "I don't want welfare. I want to work to feed my family! What concern do your masters have for my wellbeing when they thought it would be fine to turn oil into useless sludge? How can I use my truck when I can't get fuel for it? We have to walk everywhere!"

The towering female was appalled, but ultimately unsurprised by this anger fueled accusation of her serving anyone but the same people she had since she'd become mayor. She was already swinging her head in disagreement as more words poured from the base of her throat.

"The only masters I have are you, the citizens of this town. Whom decided through the special recall vote that I myself had initiated to keep me in charge of your city's government despite the horrible change that has been inflicted upon me. Trust in me to do absolutely everything that I must to ensure that none of you go hungry, lose your homes, or access to medical care.

"Roger..."

She said the man's name who didn't look or feel any less comforted. Instead, displaying his shock that she had recognized him individually in the crowd with his face half covered by a neck gaiter. He would be a great deal more so if he knew that she had already effortlessly memorized every person she had met since her transformation.

"...Roger, you have lost your job at the dealership after it declared bankruptcy. But if you go to the career center like I'd asked you last time, I know there are openings needed to help coordinate the delivery of..."

"You're bullshit center isn't offering any pay! I need money!"

"For what, Roger? For what? To keep your home? To be fed? Do you know how much it is costing the government to suspend debt payments in this nation for all those effected the worst by the events of a year ago? To have nationalized the food and transportation industries of this country? You are already being paid. Just not with money in your hands. I am sorry Roger, but you do not currently have a protected job and people are just not buying new and nearly useless automobiles anymore."

Rage suffused his helplessness when being confronted by the impotency that he had been reduced to. Everything in his life that added up to who he was had been upended, and now he was forced into reliance on a government that he had no love for and little trust in because they did not align with his political values. Just like millions of others in this country, and billions more around the world.

And like countless others, in his anger, he wanted to turn to violence because he didn't know what else to do. I nudged the Mayor mentally, and sent her a picture of a girl crying, Roger's daughter, because she missed her friends at school. It was what was really pissing the man off. McLean understood what I sent, poking at my tendril of thought bemusedly in her mind and unsure of where it had come from, but ran with it as if it were her own.

"Schools will reopen after Thanksgiving, as planned!"

The crowd murmured and shifted at the sudden change in topic. But Roger, and dozens of others with children, grew calm and more attentive as I'd hoped they would.

"There will be fewer school buses, but the remainder will have fuel to operate. The schedule is still being worked on to ensure no empty seats and to maximize efficiency. As soon as it is finalized local news outlets will announce the new timetables. We now have enough volunteers to assist the teachers that remain on the job if only you'd allow a few more children of the..."

"We're not trusting you heathen creatures to be around our children!" A woman with a drop holster on her leg shouted back.

"You've turned your back on your god and your country to become this! For what? Power and a place in the new world order? I don't want you in office! I don't want you alive! Get the hell out of my state, my country, and off my planet!"

Wrathful shouts echoed the woman's vitriol as the snowballing anger ran away like an avalanche. McLean shrank backwards at the heated, wrathful, cries for a return to a past that no longer existed. Dismay leaked from between her bristling and alarmed scales as she swung her head back and forth looking for something to calm the crowd.

"No! No violence, please! I'm begging you! We're killing each other, and we have to stop! Only together can we..."

"There is no us and you together on anything you fucking alien! If you ever were one of the only species, the only race, that matters, you aren't now! You're no better than this filth right here!"

The man vented at the mayor, and turning, slammed the buttstock of his rifle into the nose of the Hispanic man holding a sign demanding safe streets next to him with an audible crunch. Attention turned from the piercing whimpers of the mayor as the disparate factions of the crowd dissolved into chaos. The brazen act of Henry against his fellow protester Antonio came from his mistaken belief that he could act with impunity with so few cops present. Henry's mind also held the feverish and not entirely steady hope that the nervous Guardsmen with their military grade weapons wouldn't put the mob down with catastrophically deadly results for the numerous media cameras trained and watching to capture.

What he hadn't counted on, however, were the multi-ton peacemakers that would intercede with a precision the belied their size. It was like watching an elephant dance in Swan Lake to see the incongruously careful and exact movements of Jill as she surged to her feet and bound forward the three giant loping strides that carried her into the violent mosh pit.

McLean's wings went from a calming posture of embracing and sheltering those in front of her to straight up in alarm as she rose to her feet and roared for calm. Making many before her stop to cover their ears against the sonic assault. The few cops present interviewing me unholstered their sidearms and went to run towards the commotion, but I stopped them with one hand.

"Wait. We need less guns here, not more...give us a chance first without weapons drawn."

At the same time I halted the cops, a sense of shock flared to life at the sound of McLean and the sudden appearance of Jill's lowered hand parting the crowd to pluck the instigator of what had become a riot from the ground. A shock that I amplified until it left all the small ones frozen for an instant. It was an opening that Jill used to nudge people into small groups well apart from each other with careful movements of her paw.

Without a shot fired, or an escalating response, the situation had been defused. Or at least I thought it had. The turbulent emotions died down and I sensed a camouflaged thread of focus that had narrowed on Jill murderous intent.

Wind and snow whistled past my head as I whipped up and around to face the street, and Jill, who now stood with three people in her raised hand among the milling crowd. A tightening of a savage kind of excitement joined the focus and I knew what was about to happen. Yelling my warning alongside a jab of direction just in time.

"Jill, cover!"

Not even hesitating at my combined signal, her legs folded and she slammed to the vacated ground beneath her. Her wings and tail extending outwards to block the innocents around her from the image of a sniper that I'd sent her. She moved and a window shattered as a high caliber rifle fired.

Everything was still for a moment, and then the newswoman covered in the remains of her partner shattered the fragile calm. Her screams spurring everyone into action as his headless body and the blasted remains of his camera fell with a thump and a clatter next to her on top of their news van. In a line that would have passed right through where the head of Jill had been just seconds before to a broken window in a three-story building.

An armored vehicle at the nearest corner of the parking lot returned fire with its turret mounted weapon and so did some of the protesting mob. The Mayor's horror turned from the sight of the inconsolable newswoman covering her face and rocking on her knees, to the holes being punched into the building the sniper fire had come from.

"NO! THOSE ARE APARTMENTS! DON'T SHOOT!"

From the other side of the parking lot near the entrance, Dan's watching head shot skyward as he rose on his hind legs with wings stretched open to repeat the Mayor's command in more tactical terms that the gun crew was quicker to respond to. The scared giants around his feet jumped into the air and disappeared into the storm in alarm while his daughters bristled challengingly with their heads weaving left and right.

I let the cops go when they tried to run forward again this time, one taking off shouting and waving his arms at the armored truck firing until it stopped after a few more bursts from its weapon. The Mayor continued to roar her warning to the crowd ignoring her until her voice cut off with a choked gurgle as blood sprayed from her neck when another shot came from the unseen weapon in the apartment.

Her pain slammed into me and my control fractured. Children of the egg reacted to echoes of her pain and terror rippling through me to all the others and took to the skies in all directions. Jill whimpered, but did not move from her spot shielding a couple dozen small ones behind her lengthy body. Instead tightening further around herself with eyes wide and rolling wildly as McLean's pain battered her.

The Mayor lay partially in a shallow ditch next to the road on her side. Her long tail beating mindlessly against the side of another armored truck and crushing all the exterior cargo boxes as the vehicle rocked perilously onto two wheels again and again. Fear poured off her scales and her mind as she clutched at her whipping neck instinctively to halt the bleeding. I could see, despite how bad it looked, that she may have bled into her windpipe. But it was not arterial, and she was in more danger of choking than she was of bleeding out.

Two children of the egg circled above the apartment building trilling challenges and threats at the shattered unit where the unseen sniper lay hidden. They couldn't get to the woman behind the rifle without risking being shot point blank. They needed a distraction.

Well I had one. Banishing my hesitancy at violating a human mind that had no chance at fighting me off for the time being, the immediacy of the danger to everyone in the open drove me to do what I didn't want to. The jaw dropping amount of callous disregard for innocents the gunwoman displayed in her choice of firing position left me no choice. Out went the pain felt by McLean, and the icy abyssal terror that the news reporter continued to feel as she was pulled from the top of the van by members of the protest behind Jill's wing. In return a new scream of anguish pierced the air as the negative emotions I shot at the sniper fragmented her mind.

I signaled to the two overhead, and the teenage male (Freddy) landed on two legs with his head darting into the smashed window. Brick crumbled around him as he withdrew with a pale blond woman clad in olive drab green and frothing at the mouth in his jaws. Dumping her on the ground, his tail wound around her as he trotted back to us to deliver her to the officers that had given up any pretense of caring further about what I had to say on the matter of yesterday after this new assault on civility.

Now I was beginning to understand the shortchanged investigations and why the police didn't seem interested in solving anything. They were critically undermanned for reasons that weren't apparent to me at the time. The few that remained rushed from crime scene to crime scene at a frenetic pace, stopping just long enough to collect the most obvious evidence and imagery. A fucked series of investigations that could only lead to problems when or if trial came but was unavoidable for the overworked and understaffed law enforcement.

The crowd of onlookers temporarily forgot their beef with the mayor and our presence after the children of the egg put themselves at risk. Even if my cowardly ass stayed where I was to keep soothing my children and all those in the hospital whose alarm had flared when the gunfire had started. Those wounded, skittish, minds including my brother. Who knew, just knew, that I was knee deep in whatever was happening outside. I sent him feelings of outraged denial and felt his exasperated disbelief in turn.

Tentatively, I stood, and walked away until my tail was just barely grazing Kim's, cringingly, I broke physical contact with her and waited for our children to wail their mental distress. Sleepy white noise was what I got instead, and I heaved a titanic sigh of relief that left the snowflakes swirling in twisting eddies in front of me.

With Jill admonishing the crowd to go home to their families in a mixture of words they could understand and not. Not realizing her frequent switches in language and garbled English syntax that confused those listening to her. The crowd was badly shaken by the suddenness of the violence and how quickly the towering citizens among them had reacted to end it. That numb shock being the only reason they obediently nodded along while I fed them the maternal sternness that Jill was broadcasting. They were looking for strength and you'd be hard pressed to find much more at that moment than in Jill's dense frame.

I don't even know why I'm so angry.

_ She didn't even hesitate to cover us._

_ The mayor did help me find work at the food bank._

_ This is bullshit! That motherfucker deserved what he got!_

_ It's getting out of hand here. Maybe I should go home..._

_ Is this fucking thing really telling me that she cares for us like a mother? How fucking dare it?_

_ Look at their size! There's no way that we can live with them!_

_ _ Well... I'm not the fucking thought police. I just couldn't understand why people could feel how others did and still be so hostile. Neither did I feel like invading their privacy to find out. More things to wonder over later during the long hours of my wife's hopefully still approaching surgery.

Two nurses and a doctor had run from the hospital entrance with backpacks full of supplies over their scrubs and woefully underdressed for the weather. But could get no further than a dozen meters from McLean as she continued to gasp and shrill her pain that I kept flooding into the twitching sniper woman. Whom lay not far away with a patrolman checking her vitals and wondering what was wrong with her and why she wasn't responding to the knee planted between her shoulder blades.

There was no sympathy in me for her. In time the courts will deal with her and her actions, but for as long as others were suffering the consequences of her actions, she would pay now, and consider herself lucky that she was alive because it had been children of the egg engaging her. The police would have had no choice but to open fire on her. That rifle hadn't been the only thing she'd been armed with. An empty drop holster on her thigh and the semi-auto handgun another officer was unloading were further proof of the danger she had posed.

Was that something I should have concerned myself more about? Yes, I was no court of law to hand down judgement. Was I in the right though? Yes...I felt I was in the right to share with her the consequences of pulling a trigger. There was no doubt that she was guilty of what she had done when I had seen with my own eyes her being pulled from behind her weapon.

Bracing myself after I had finished my quick thumping trot through the untrammeled snow to McLean, I reached out and stole her pain to make it mine. The burning in my throat immediately flared to life, and I curled my neck with my head low to cough black blood onto a hapless snow-covered bush. The heated blood melting through the snow and disappearing into the depths of the plant.

The Mayor's movements calmed, even if her whimpering cries of alarm did not. I don't want to die, I don't want to die, I don't want to die. Why does my city hate me? I thought...I thought...

_ I thought they were my children..._

More of the crowd was turning their attention to her as the racket of radio chatter and raised voices died out. Flickers of sympathy started to push against anger and distrust as small ones grew quiet while watching the tears form in McLean's eyes to plop steaming to the ground.

Shushing Lauren's cries, I settled next to her. Pushing with gentle nudges those closest to her away with my opened wing. I felt the fascination of the others flit across my mind like fireflies and ignored the cameras splitting their attention between their fellow reporter being led away and me comforting the Mayor. What they didn't know, what none but Lauren, I, and Ichika, knew was how I helped them both.

Their terror faded beneath the swaddling blankets that I draped around their minds. Whispers that it was over, that they were safe carried thoughts of what had just happened from their minds. I couldn't, no...I wouldn't, erase the memories of what they'd just experienced. But what I was willing to do was create distance from the events. I could give them a chance to gradually come to terms with the shocking attack.

The nurses and doctor used an empty syringe to suction blood from the wound to get a good look at the impact site of the round. It missed her arteries the bleeding is capillary. How am I going to get this thing closed? God, her neck is thicker than I am tall!

Blood ran from between my teeth and dripped on the ground. The small ones passing me by, dispirited by the violence they were allowing themselves to be pushed away by the meager police presence, wandered at the cause of the blood.

"I...am...." I stopped and coughed up another glob of gore, licking my bottom jaw clean. "...controlling her pain by making it mine and hers..." I flicked my nose towards the semi-lucid woman that I had eased up on cramming the panic and fear of all the innocents into. Instead of being locked into a near catatonic state, her jaw was now free to work silently to find a release for the screams frozen in her throat. "She wanted violence, so I gave her violence. How many of you that thought so little of us earlier would still be willing to harm others if you knew that you'd feel that pain yourself? How many of you have considered anyone's feelings other than your own before you came up here with your guns and your unhelpful attitudes?

"All of you can do better than this, we can all do better than this. We are all in this together, this fight is for our futures. There is no longer a path where one species can rule this planet, now it is on us both to figure out how to survive. The mayor of your city has been shot because she looks different and she is a public figure that is trying to hold your city together. Do you not see the antennas and tents on her back? Do you not realize that she has not stopped patrolling her city since she was changed? Some of you must have noticed! Didn't you yourselves vote to keep her in her position despite your doubts in her after Zero day?"

Muttered comments and restless shifting were my only answers as the crowd dispersed further and further on their own. The law enforcement interviewing me earlier was grabbing those who had fired at the sniper and demanding their identifications and contact information.

A young pair of Asian looking demonstrators stopped in front of me with my attention turned away to watch the cops handcuff the woman to a stretcher after stripping the soft body armor off her. The pale flickering of their minds drawing my eyes down to them. The crowd nearby stopped to watch the interaction.

"We..." the male began before turning to his female companion and shrugging his shoulders.

"If what you said is true, we want to know that you are really on our side. That you feel our suffering at losing our jobs, at losing our sense of worth and security. We don't want to be seen as shallow and violent like that woman over there." The slight woman (Sakura) pointed at the moaning sniper being carted away. "Can we...trust you to be sincere with us?"

Rumbles of thought vibrated in my throat as I ran through all the likely results of what they were asking of me. Most of them were dangerous...for them. But there could be consequences for the large ones as well if this was seen as brain washing or mind control.

"I want you to understand that others are watching you right now. This may place you in danger with them. But if you truly want to know how I feel about being like this and want me to understand your anger on a deeper level, then touch my hand."

Sitting on my tail with my head lowered below my shoulders, I turned over one of my hands and extended it until it was a couple of meters from them. I didn't want this to be some stray impulse on their part. The distance to my paw was enough for them to have second thoughts.

The man (Ken) swallowed and walked towards my hand first with his wife following only a few heartbeats later. They looked up at me and then at the palm of my hand where it was level with their eyes. I saw cellphones and news cameras trained on us but ignored them. There were risks here, but opportunity as well. I wanted people to see this.

I looked down on them with a friendly grin and inviting scent to put them at ease (probably as welcoming a look as a salvage yard shredder before you jumped feet first into it). They closed their eyes as I felt the slight pressure of their hands pushing on a few of my scales.

I opened myself to them a miniscule hair, just enough to keep them from harm. Even that thundercunt fucking sniper woman I only let have a hundredth of what I thought the 'force' of my mind could manage. I think I could have had her brain running out of her ears as banana scented oatmeal if I'd wanted to.

Frustration and despair flowed from them to me. Angry arguments where Sakura wanted to have children, but Ken refused after losing his job at an ad agency. Stacks of bills on a kitchen counter next to packages of food marked as coming from a local food bank. Watching videos of children of the egg on television, looking scared as crowds of humans yelled at them. Long running disagreements of what this meant for the future. The image of a man who had pointed a rifle at a Ken just a few months ago and telling him to get out of the country he had been born in. Ken sliding the receipt for the low mintage gold coin from his collection across a counter next to it the following day at a pawn shop to buy a ridiculously overpriced assault rifle of his own. The one slung across his chest as we connected in fact, and that gave them a peace of mind more important than all the bills that same coin could have paid off.

Sakura, crying in a room made up as a nursery but with no baby in sight. Of long days of menial work at a medical distributor to fill frantic orders from doomsday hoarders and hospitals across the nation. Her going over their financial reserves and pinching every penny that was supplemented by Ken's unemployment. A letter in the mail stating those unemployment payments would be ending soon. Sakura trying to make ends meet by asking for rent from the friend of hers that lives in a spared bedroom after losing their own apartment.

And coloring all their thoughts was the uncertainty that had ensued when the order that the world had settled into jumped from its comfortable track like a train derailing after hitting a school bus full of children. How little faith they had that their lives had meaning any longer.

I could have hidden my uncertainty from them. Made myself appear as mentally formidable as my physical appearance was. But I knew that showing my vulnerabilities, my constant fear, as well as my own worry for the future would do better in convincing them of our continued similarities. Despite what my body looked like now. This was both of our fight against the looming Sword of Damocles swooshing back and forth over us with nerve wracking periodicity. I gave them my feelings, and more.

Analogies work best for me to describe what I showed them. The web that I had generated to ease the aches and pains of those in the hospital and the parking lot a pool that I led their consciousnesses to dip small tendrils into. Their minds recoiled at the sense of pain and confusion of all those who had been harmed and didn't even know why. Some, still reeling in a lost fog with no memory of who they were before their change, tried to latch onto Ken and Sakura's minds in hope of guidance. Forcing me to stop the powerful surge from going the other way and doing I know not what to the minds of the small ones.

Calmly, and soothingly, I forced those lashing thoughts seeking what they had lost back to their owners. Walking back the connection to myself and the others I withdrew the couple from the contact. Like pushing water back into a container that it had spilled from, I gently coaxed the man and the woman back to their own smaller minds where I could close them off entirely from the universe I had briefly introduced them to.

I saw small arcs of an electrical discharge arc from my hand to theirs and yelping they drew back. Ken rubbed his eyes, trying to remove images from his sight that were never his. While Sakura held her hands to her heaving chest with a thousand-yard stare before blinking herself back to reality. Sakura's hand shot out to her husband's blindly and finding it squeezed hard before they drew each other into the comfort of the other's arms.

"Sir! Ma'am! What did you do to them?"

"Are you okay ma'am, sir? Did the dragon attack you?"

"Can you give us your name, child of the egg? Did you show those demonstrators something? Are you controlling them? Why were they so shocked just by touching you?"

On camera, I explained what I had done. I explained how the sniper woman was feeling the pain her actions had caused, and how I had traded with the Ito family our understanding of the events the other had suffered through.

"This is what those that are resorting to violence and fighting are making worse. We must be pulling together to solve the challenge that has been laid before us. I challenge anyone, any child of the egg, any human, who hasn't considered the affects to feel as those they ostracize."

My voice rose from a low growl to that of a highly tuned American V-8 at wide open throttle. My hind legs extended until I stood tall on all four with my hips rocking in time to my tail as it swayed over everyone's heads. The small ones backed away with their cameras and eyes panning up to my head that I had to remind myself to keep lowered and still.

We must delay the operation on the woman dragon until we get this one stabilized. It's fine, it's fine. It gives me more time to study these scans that those two in Colorado sent me. Her veins are large enough to pump blood directly from her body. I've never done that before but it should buy us some time My right ear flicked twice when I heard the surgeon's thoughts. Good, at least they had found some way to extend the life of the severed limb.

"Individuals must accept that the future is in their own hands now. It is no longer just for governments and organizations to act. Now everyone must work together as well as individually to find solutions for the problems that we have created."

My tail stopped waving, and its agitatedly vibrating tip pointed towards the woman disappearing inside while strapped to a gurney. I turned from the cameras to face the crowd who had stopped their departure to listen. Faces covered and frames hunched against the blustery wind that blew down the quiet street.

"Use the resources that the federal government and your city is giving you to cope with this fundamental shift in the world that we've known. Look at all yourselves. I won't say that you've gotten off easy, many of you are like this pair here and are not concerned with the larger picture. What you want, what you seek, is purpose that has been stolen from you by something that I understand no better than yourselves."

I began pacing back and forth, my body so long that at the completion of each turn my tail tip hadn't completed the previous one. A big four-legged flying garden hose chasing itself was what I looked like. I had to fight the insanely irrational compulsion to bite down on the other end of my self and go rolling down the street cackling in mad abandon.

"Violence is not the way that we're going to make a future for ourselves. Use your energy, your skills, to find a new path in the world that has been forced on us. Please help me, help us, help others, make this world better than it was not just today, but better than it was before Zero day as well."

Attention began to shift away from me. No longer interested in what I was saying when it did not fit their goals. Their focus moved to the city council members trying to exhort them to disperse and go home before more violence was attracted. As misguided as that was, since I believed at least half the violence was directed at me and the other large ones, I held my huge and muscular tongue. The crowd grew restless and dismissive.

I knew what they wanted. I could feel it pouring from their minds in waves. They wanted a return to before. But before was no longer a possibility. These people had to find something new, some new path, or more would turn to violence and despair. Waiting for someone else to solve their problems was not going to help them or others. Many of the people in front of me weren't ready to take those steps though.

Out of the dozens that were crowding the street to give voice to their problems but offer no solutions, eight including Ken and Sakura listened to what I said. But the type of change that needed to happen was not going to do so all at once. These incremental steps were encouraging, even more so when Ken, Sakura, and Jimmy, stayed behind.

"We...we felt your emotions. There is a little girl...Susannah...she is so...her family is dead, aren't they?" Ken broke the silence as a new police SUV arrived with siren off but lights flashing.

"I believe so." I told them somberly, distress underlying my voice. "By the fact that you've remained are you three ready to work towards something better than what we have now?"

"How can we do that, when we can't even take care of ourselves?"

"Sir! This dragon says that he can make you understand things by connecting you to others. Is that true? What does that mean? Is he really talking about being psychic?"

Ken worked his jaw wordlessly in response while my fins tugged at my skin when they flared in agitation at being dismissed as 'this dragon'. These damn news crews kept acting like I was a wall or something that was merely in the way. Running around me without even a glance upwards at the living being that they scampered about.

"I can show you...Jessica...Jessica, if you would like."

The stunned blonde woman leading a crew of three floundered in the glaring light of her camera before finding her footing. Her mouth formed a paper-thin smile after a moment and she politely declined my offer, as I'd expected.

"Then just listen and stop filming my legs when you point the camera at me, my head is up here." I reminded them from a good couple of meters above where they were aiming.

"I felt your pain...your isolation...but, we have problems too! Isn't it just as bad as losing our bodies that we have lost our lives in other ways? We're broke and don't know how to make next month's rent! We could be homeless like all the others since Zero Day! Your name is Tom isn't it? We're sorry that this happened to you but how can we help when we can't even help ourselves?" Sakura asked me like I held some kind of authority. I had no agency to tell them what to do, but I had ideas, and called for some of the council to come over. Which they did if for no other reason than I could be extremely loud about asking.

"Tell them how you feel, Sakura and Ken. Tell them that you're not happy waiting for someone else to tell you how to change to thrive. Tell them that you want to act. You too Jimmy, tell the council that you're sure that threats and gunfire aren't a future you want to participate in.

"Councilmen and women tell me, how many people do you have acting as an outreach to the community to hear their concerns directly? Are your lines of communication with your constituencies still intact?"

Some of that elected assembly were able to tear their gaze away from the gory spectacle of their boss getting operated on to answer my question. No, Mayor McLean continued to attempt outreach but was not meeting with the unalloyed truth needed for her engagement to work. A team was needed together to do this. Councilmen, citizens, child of the egg, and law enforcement. Which is exactly what I told them.

"Then that is what you can do..."

"Hey! Wait a minute! Who the hell do you think you are assigning citizens to city employme..."

"...Positions that are already funded but going unfilled, am I right? If you want to make the process formal, then interview them! You're going to have to be more flexible if you're going to respond to their concerns in a way that solves them now, not next fiscal year."

My growling thrummed response shut the city's comptroller's mouth as I knew it would. The information my quake inducing voice had given back to him had come from his own mind and it's rapidly spinning clockwork.

My head swung around to look at everyone who was paying attention or recording me to make sure they realized the second order effects of my suggestion. Which is something that people also needed to start considering. A quick scan of the buzzing noise of their thoughts told me only a few were tentatively making a connection. I thumped my tail, making many jump, as children of the egg watching this exchange play out began to chirp and murmur to each other in high pitched tones that pierced through the deadening effect of the snow.

"This is how you stop the bloodshed and unrest! Not by strong arming people with police! You need outreach teams to engage and calm people's concerns! You!"

My head turned and shot out to the end of my neck as the scenery whizzed by like a bullet train and a group of sign wielding citizenry clumped into a circle at my unexpected attention. Pleased smells came from my neck scales as I saw a few rifles begin to rise to aim at me before others in the group pushed the muzzles back down.

"If you had someone just listen to your concerns at your homes how many of you would be out here armed? How many that you know would be out ransacking the city even as we speak? Most of you are just seeking some way to earn a living are you not? You despair because the careers you've carefully constructed for yourself over a lifetime have vanished is that right? How many of you have shown the flexibility to adapt those lifetimes of experience to novel opportunities?"

The thoughts of one in the group huddled below my nose caught my attention and my snout shifted a few degrees to point at a woman near the edge.

"Melinda Gomez, why haven't you spoken up to anyone about your idea to coordinate city services and reduce city wide fuel consumption by 15-20%?"

I swung my head back to the council, already knowing the reason why and that they were the cause of it. Soon the stammering Puerto Rican woman found her voice and yelled out her alibi.

"I did! I did! No one would listen to me, los idiotas sordos!"

"Don't you think this is a problem?" I asked the council, nudging them past their recalcitrance to admit that they had done anything wrong. "Ignoring the advice of a woman whose entire job was scheduling and coordinating three dozen delivery drivers that are also unemployed and could be trained to operate city equipment around the clock?"

"But...but...funding!"

"But...but...funding!" I echoed mockingly back at the comptroller, using the mimicking nature of my throat to parrot his own voice.

"Aren't the state and federal governments bending over backwards to fund what is needed at the city level? Isn't there a direct line to an almost unlimited line of federal credit sitting at the airport trying to engage with local officials? That should be all the startup capital you'll ever need to turn this dismal anarchy around in your city! Establish safety and security here, and it will spread regionally. No one that is well fed, well housed, and happy, is going to provide shelter for assholes that just want to watch the world burn. That is counterinsurgency 101."

What was left of the mob on the street fell to murmuring to each other and then clamored for attention from the council once more as news crew turned to focus on them and not me, thankfully. Sakura and Ken sent loaded glances at me but were ushered away from any chance at conversation by a reporter who wanted to get them apart from me and...if I can just find one bit of evidence that that dragon brainwashed them, it'll reveal them for what they are...

"Dragon Tom!" A soldier called out from the turret of his vehicle at me and I sighed in vexation. "Can you clear the street? You're blocking my line of sight!"

Honoring the guard's request, I padded back to the other side of the perimeter and one reporter peeled off to chase after me as we passed by McLean. Looking down at her to see that her eyes were squeezed shut in imagined pain as a man covered in blackish blood reached entirely into her neck with one arm. The feeling of the worming of his limb in my neck made me gag. A result of finally redirecting the last of the burning synapses lighting up her throat where she lay spanning the ditch and snowy berm separating the parking lot from the road. Some of the other large ones had offered to move her, but the doctors had refused until the wound was stable and fought to keep the concerned noses of some lost ones away from McLean's neck and licking her open injury.

Frustrated energy built up in me and I cast my head skyward wistfully as the weight of my wings rising and spreading restlessly travelled up my spine. I glanced down at the news reporters that continued to blare their questions at me. Trying to get me to admit to a mischaracterization of what I had told them earlier was the goal of one newspaper reporter who stood only a little taller than my ankle.

"So, let me get this straight, to prevent further gunfire you attacked her mind and did what exactly? Made her feel the pain of the dragon that she just shot? You assaulted her and broke the law yourself in an act of vigilantism?"

This was already annoying me. I knew he had been there and had seen that cameraman's head explode. He wasn't upset with the fact that I had stopped the sniper. He was disturbed by how.

"You wouldn't be asking me those questions if I had had a gun and shot her in a reaction that you could understand. Just ask me what you really want to know and stop wasting my time. I want to go for a flight before my wife's surgery to reattach her leg, my brother is in the hospital because of something that I'm still not entirely sure of how to control, and I'm fucking hungry!"

The man, wearing a ski jacket and thin but warm looking gloves, took a moment to recover and fix his hat that my huffed agitation had blown half off his head. While he set himself straight, I swung my head around over him to rub the scales covering my nose against an itch on my shoulder. Flaring a patch of scales the scent of my compounding anxiety flowed past my nostrils while I extended my tongue to probe at the nettlesome piece of thick black skin until I could find relief.

Before the reporter could get around to asking what he really wanted to know Can he really read minds and attack people like that? That can't be real. ESP is horseshit... A Navy officer (Lieutenant Commander Schmidt) told him to go away so that she and General Boyd could grill me about what I had just now done. There was a law enforcement Corporal standing next to her with an open note pad in his hand and his body camera turned towards my direction so that it could see one of my feet and little else.

The reporter didn't stray far while not so subtly eavesdropping as I replayed what I had done to neutralize the woman shooting into the crowd. Boyd seemed more interested again in how I had coordinated the actions of the other children of the egg in the immediate aftermath of the first shot and the identification of a limitation of my ability. I made no comment on it, not comfortable with the direction he was going with this and his keen interest in the tactical applications of the kind of communication nodes I and Kim could be the centers of.

No one asked me about anything else I did, so I didn't volunteer the information.

"What about these outreach programs?" I wanted to know instead, looking down at one of my claws as I scraped it back and forth in a square pattern around a parking lot curb.

"Those are exactly what we're trying to accomplish..."

"Wait." The cop objected. "I need more information on what this guy did to that woman. She hasn't stopped screaming about claws in her mind since she stopped about a non-existent gunshot wound to her throat."

"I did what I had to do to stop her attack. She should consider herself lucky that I can exercise restraint and that she can talk at all. As a concerned citizen, I intervened as a violent crime was being committed. If you're going to arrest me, tell me so and I will follow you to wherever you like. Otherwise I have nothing more to give you right now unless you want to experience the incident as I did. I can show you if you'd like."

He turned me down, just like nearly everyone else did, and left promising to have city prosecutors contact me. Eventually. Probably never.

"Boyd...is there any food going to be delivered to everyone at the hospital? Eight children of the egg here haven't eaten in four or five days and none of them are in condition to fend for themselves. I don't want to send anyone out and weaken our security."

His eye, filling the screen that Schmidt was holding, blinked as he responded. "I appreciate your concern, but with my security teams there it should not be an issue. I strongly urge you to have at least one wingman with you at all times to head into the forests nearby to find what you can. There are no other sufficient quantities of food available for you in the area as everything is being directed to local foodbanks for those more constrained in their diets than we are.

"Returning to your outreach ideas. I am glad that you are pushing these people to engage with me and my wing. There is a common misbelief that we are here to impose the security measures inherent in martial law and not many are willing to listen to conversations to convince them otherwise. We are only here to provide resources for local governments, not supplant them. We need dialog to occur to prevent the exact scenario they fear from playing out if this fails. No one wins if one of the greatest militaries the world has ever seen is used to clamp down on its own citizenry. Already we have had to make our mission in this area far more offensive in nature than I am comfortable with."

The O-4, Schmidt, agreed with her commander and followed it up with her own observations. "The protestors responded favorably to the message delivered by Mr. Schwarzkopf, that their future remains in their hands and is dependent on them taking initiative on an individual level with the help of government programs in returning to the workforce. A major point of concern of the local populace sir is that there seems to be a more aggressive campaign in the area to forcibly evict defaulting homeowners and renters."

"Commander take this conversation private. Mr. Schwarzkopf thank you for resolving the incident earlier without further bloodshed. Please keep me informed of any further developments in your 'abilities'. I want you to rest easy with the knowledge that transportation for your wife and the other injured children of the egg at your location is being finalized as we speak. As soon as the wounded there are certified capable of travel, you will be removed to the regional safe zone at your home. Do you have any questions?"

I didn't and the female officer wandered off to a more private setting in the snow filled day. Leaving me with the newsman who still hadn't fucked off like I wished he would.

"I know that look you're giving me. You might not be human anymore, but I can always tell when someone is looking at me with contempt because I'm with the media." Jonah James said to me.

"If you want your story told, you're going to have to open up to someone like me. I'd prefer me."

I didn't bother responding to the man and turned away to stride towards the pile of children of the egg who felt varying levels of stress from watching someone just get their head blown off. The small feeling of the journalist slogging through the snow after me with settled determination remained though and I wished he would give me some space. I soothed the feelings of the children of the egg and performed the same detaching of themselves from the experience I had done for the poor woman, who was just now getting the blood cleaned from herself, earlier. An effort to give them time to come to terms with what they had seen without the shock of the sudden surrealness of the murder.

Asking them if any would like to accompany me to hunt for themselves and others, Virginia's head immediately appeared as it snaked its way free of the pile followed by her titanic body. Standing, she shook herself once and gave me a friendly grin that made Jonah flinch in fear. Which, a distant part of me, felt was understandable with all those teeth on display in the amiable expression coupled with the tremendous damage done to her burned snout.

Any worry I might have had about who was coming with me was put to nest when only Pat and Dean said they'd come to help Virginia and I. Those two stretched themselves out while Virginia asked a nurse to see a radar image of the area on her phone to try to find some clearing in the clouds for us to get a little more visibility. I had been worried that Jill would try to come with me, but she had returned to her new favorite position with her head and one eye against a window that I could feel her child, husband, and my bother behind.

"You want this scoop? Put on some more clothes and come with us. You can have an exclusive interview with me unlike anything you've ever done before."

"Come with you? Aren't you...you mean go flying with you? Is that safe?"

I shrugged and watched his eyes track the very appendages that would soon carry him into the sky rise and fall on my back.

"When's the last time you talked to your airplane? Would you like to hear my inflight safety brief? Don't take off your harness, and don't fucking puke on me. Do you feel safe now? General Boyd left some harnesses in case something like this came up." I pointed a wing thumb towards a cargo truck parked next to a tent with a pair of Army National Guard privates smoking in front of it. "Tell them Tom sent you to get what you need to fly."

Overhearing that, Dean went to pick up a set of equipment for himself, before hobbling over with it to the city council in one paw. Ducking under the emergency room entrance overhang he dropped the harness at the feet of the council where they had sought shelter from the weather outside the awning.

With my head on the ground, I asked the same nurse that was going over the weather with Virginia when the surgery was expected to start. Listening at the same time I directed Jonah to fasten his safety line around the base of my neck with one eye on him to make sure he latched the nylon webbing correctly.

"In an hour. Dr. Archbold is going over some last-minute details with a Mrs. Willow and the staff that was going to attend your wife are supporting the surgery being done in the middle of a snowbank full of oily crap scraped from the parking lot."

The reminder that my friends were becoming involved in Kim's time of need made my scales rise happily. I was glad that Brian and Serena were on their way here from Colorado. Ever since their introduction into our lives and Brian's genesis as a child of the egg we had kept in steady contact with each other. Kim had bonded easily with Serena and after Brian's transformation, along with his display of misguided bravery for volunteering for it, we had warmed up to him as well. Becoming long distance friends with the two of them.

No sooner had I haggardly told them that morning what had happened to Kim, that Serena and their team of graduate students were already erecting a large rigid canvas shelter on Brian's hunkered back. Twenty minutes later, Serena was talking to me from the air with three of her assistants sitting behind her in what looked like a small communications hub. I could tell however that they were on Brian's back and that he was in flight by the cadence of the buffeting that slapped the walls of their shelter and the rolling swells of the scaly floor between his wings.

"13 hours Tom. We are on our way!" His full-throated bellow had come over the microphone from outside the shelter that the video feed came from. In the background of the image, the research assistants behind Serena turned to each other and excitedly tried to interpret what Brian had just said.

Jonah drew me back from the events that happened hours earlier when he approached my eye and held out a jumble of wire with incomprehension dancing across his thoughts. Telling him how to straighten it out, it was clipped to my ear with the long microphone boom extending to the corner of my jaw.

"Hey, what's this?" He asked at the same time I felt a slight tugging at the fin surrounding my ear canal. He squeaked in fear when I reflexively shot a small dart of irritation into him while snapping my ear, and the remembrance bracelet his gloved fingers were finger fucking, out of his reach.

"None of your fucking business, that's what that is." I snarled at him.

That bracelet, now an earing, attached to a loop of stainless-steel cable pierced through what my ear had become, was a reminder of the day that I had failed. Kim wasn't awake to kick my ass for my negative self-depreciating thoughts of 14thJune 2017. So it was a struggle to pull my thoughts out of the spiral of doubt and guilt that still haunted me even years later without her help.

I had been too late. I hadn't been good enough. I could have saved them. If only I had been better. If only I'd had...

"I think I'm ready." Jonah struggled and failed to break into my dark thoughts.

Kim, where are you? That smell...I remember the smell...

"Hey, are you okay? I'm sorry that I brought up the..." He tried again, succeeding this time as I snapped out of it.

"Forget it..." I huffed gruffly, turning away to rub the traitorous tear falling from my other eye away on the back of my hand. I should listen to my brother and wife's suggestions and call that psychiatrist again. Hopefully the VA shrink wasn't in a forest somewhere gnawing on the leg of a moose. I hadn't spoken to her since I had grown a tail. Won't she be surprised...

"Move forward so that I can look at your harness. Safety inspection, my little passenger ant."

I made him turn so that I could see all sides of his harness until I was satisfied and then craned my head to look at the base of my neck to examine the loop there as well. Happy, I knelt and extended my arm so that he could walk up it to my shoulder while performing a communication check with him.

Mentally nuzzling my wife and our children, I made sure that nothing had changed and that they remained asleep in the tranquil calm of my wife's drugged and unconscious body. Plucking another strand of my network, I reached out to my brother to project a sense of flight and a brief passage of time capped by the feeling of a return. I was shocked when I felt his mind fumble in an attempt to send me something before the distinct sensation of impatience flowed back up our connection, it was then I noticed that his aura was getting closer.

He had thrown his thick jacket on over his gown, and his untied winter boots were crammed onto his sockless feet. I was immediately worried about him being cold, feeling like my own mother, and hurriedly snatched him off the ground to wrap in the coils of my tail with scales open to vent heat on him.

"No, I'm not cleared to leave." He said to me, sighing and melting into the comfortable heat coming from my body beneath the scales. I couldn't help myself, and gently examined my brother's health. To say that I was concerned when even my minimal touch made my sibling frown and rub his forehead would be undercutting my response.

Sadness radiated from me in thought and scent alongside a plaintive whine escaping my long throat. Ignoring the curious noises coming from my earpiece and the reporter scribbling notes to himself on my shoulder, I brought my head closer to my brother. My nostrils flared into sight with each breath as I sniffed at him, trying to learn what I still didn't know. He reached out to lay his hand at the tip of my nose out of sight on the slight point that my face came to between my nostrils.

"I know you didn't mean to do what you did Tom. But the staff here doesn't know the mechanics of what happened to me or any of the other humans when you had your fit. Knowing the origin of what happened hasn't gotten them any closer to figuring it out either. Doctors have never even considered that they might have to treat psychic injuries one day. The ones here can do nothing more than keep us at rest and monitored. I went in for a PET scan first thing this morning, and there are unusual activity levels in my Insular cortex, brain stem, and hippocampus. They don't know what that means but..."

"Those may be regions of the brain affected when I connect to you." I finished for him.

He nodded as his hand dropped to run back and forth across the fin of my tail. I shivered at the feeling of his hand across the sensitive flap, briefly jostling him and bringing that uneasy pain flitting across his mind again. Reflexively, I made his pain mine and instead of his worry abating, it only grew.

"Tom, I'm asking you...I can't make you stop if you...." He sighed and looked down at his hands that had switched from caressing my fin to wringing themselves. "...Tom what you did to me and the others yesterday caused intracranial bleeding. I know that you think you're just helping...but until we...until I know more about what you can do can you please stop doing what you're doing? I...Tom...I don't know if you've left the connection open or not...but I can still feel you like you're standing right behind me all the time."

By the time he had finished his request, my misery was almost drowning me and my formerly happy posture at seeing my brother had dissolved until I lay nearly flat on the ground and curled completely around Alex. I didn't want this. Was this because I was trying to help or from when I had felt my connection to Kim cut?

"Alex...I thought I was helping! I could feel your pain leave you when I..."

"Tom, you never even asked...you invited yourself into my head. Tom, I need to ask, since I don't know how you would have used an ability like yours as a human. Do you feel like...do you still understand the concept of privacy as a human would?"

Confusion warred inside of me with my misery at possibly making my brother worse when all I had wanted...

All I had wanted...

I repeated that phrase to myself one more time, and then asked myself what I should have from the beginning. But what did everyone else want?

Was I acting differently? Was I acting like Thumper by forcing help on people despite the cost? Did I even care that in helping others I might have been trespassing on the only place that before my intrusion was absolutely inviolable?

Was I still...me?

"Alex..." I whimpered, confused and unsure. Setting him back on the ground and loosening my hold on him, now consciously scanning for the least amount of fear or the faintest desire of his to escape from me. What a monster I must seem. "Am I...am I still the Tom you remember?"

"Dr. Schwarzkopf!" An irate man yelled, striding towards my brother whose sheepish thoughts let me know all I needed about who had performed medical malpractice by actually letting him wander around. No one had, my brother was on the lam.

"Please, Alex. I need to know...look past the body I have and tell me. Am I still your brother?"

Letting go completely of him, I lifted my tail and put it down once again between the nurse Joey Willard and my brother. The nurse redirected his ire to me, demanding if I knew what the know-it-all patient was risking by hooking his vitals monitor to the woman in the next bed and coming out here to frolic with people that could accidentally crush him without a thought.

Readjusting his coat as he was exposed to the bite of the winter's day after the removal of my heated appendage, Alex looked up into my eyes and beckoned me closer with his hand.

"Are you the same brother that I know always wants to do what he can to help others? Yes. Where I worry though Tom, is that you are starting to forget that humans might not want that help. That your idea of self doesn't recognize privacy as you once did." He rubbed his head again, as the nurse ran around the obstacle of my tail to verbally accost Alex. "You need to ask, Tom. As much good as what you're doing is accomplishing, it is still an unwanted trespass."

The nurse cut off his harangue of my brother to glance at me. Once at my forelimb, and then again upwards at a more intelligent part of my body.

"You're behind what's happening?"

"It seems the road to hell is paved with good intentions. What have I done now?"

"What you have done, is cut down the number of requests for pain management since you've arrived here by 97% and lowered the average stress response scores by 45%."

Angelica had followed the nurse that she just cut off when she walked between my front legs and stood to look up at my head with her hands planted on her hips. "In a completely unorthodox method of treatment that is as effective as it is alien. Just as you are."

She turned to my brother and looked him up and down scathingly. "You're right he should have asked. But since you and everyone here agreed to submit to medical treatment, your objection is overruled. As long as he is here, I want him doing whatever it is he's doing. Now..." She pointed at her nurse, Alex, at the nearest entrance to her facility, and then snapped her fingers in a clear signal. Joey gulped at the look of the dark storm clouds brewing in her eyes and begged my older brother to follow him back inside before he gets fired from one of the only jobs in town.

My head followed him in an attempt at maintaining contact. Just like all those months ago when the change had first unsettled me. I was once more unsure of just what I was and needed...wanted...the feeling of my family.

"We'll talk more later little bro." He promised me as he was led back to the bed he belonged in. "I'm sorry that I am making you doubt what you are. I can...feel your confusion. It's so strong that I'm doubting who I am as well. I only wanted to reassure you that I was healing by coming out here, not send you into an existential tailspin."

"Well good job..." I muttered glumly, blowing snow away from the tip of my nose where it was pointed straight down along with my eyes. I traced the revealed parking lot line as everyone within range of my thoughts felt some of what I did. I had to focus to keep from connecting to everyone, and focus was something I lacked at the moment. The only sound within ten meters of me was the mournful howl of the wind.

I felt like a kicked puppy, and I knew from the sight of others that I looked like one too. My wings collapsed onto the frozen and exposed asphalt at my sides. The cold encouraging strange shifts in my body. I watched the veins in my wings contract to decrease the red tinge of my wings as I wallowed in the truths voiced by my brother.

"I love you Alex and all I want to do is protect you. To keep you safe. To use all this strength for something. I would never knowingly hurt you or anyone else."

His face softened as he relented, glad that I saw his concern. I felt his relief. I didn't know how to shut off reading his emotions, it would be like asking someone how to shut down their ears or eyes, but I could and did stop my intervention with my brother. My heart stopped, and it took everything I had not to send reinforcing thought rushing back into his mind when he felt the tension of what I had been sparing him all this time.

He groaned while leaning against Joey and one of my offered fingers, as big around as his chest, and struggled with the sensation of his intractable brain injury. "Tom, thank you for letting me feel what you have been sparing me. My head feels like it's about to split. Let me see if I can adjust...I love you too, little brother."

"Enough!" Angelica snapped, shaking my dragging mood off with some difficulty. "Get him back inside and out of this gosh dang blizzard! Tell your shift supervisor to be in my office in twenty minutes." She told the increasingly pale nurse and turned back to me.

"Look, I don't know what's going through your head right now..."

"Do you want to find out?" I grumbled listlessly, still looking at the individual cracks in the yellow paint just beneath my claw. She continued without acknowledging me.

"...but you're doing a lot of good even if it might upset some people. I've never had so many people in my facility not crying for relief from pain after such trauma. Not only that, but everyone is...well I wouldn't so happy. But everyone's blood pressure and heartrates are stable. They are healing which is what's important. More, I think, than any vague notion of privacy. Which I will reiterate again that since all those under the care of my staff have agreed to medical treatment their hysteria over their treatment is overruled. So, here..."

She fished a crumbled ten-dollar bill out of a pocket of her jacket and threw it at me. I watched it fly halfway towards my leg before the wind caught it and it vanished into the ether. My saddened gaze shifted back to her and awaited the completion of her spiel.

"Congratulations, I just made you a paid contractor according to my legal counsel. Now everything is semi-legitimate, my newest hireling. You get a discount on your wife's experimental, first of its kind, incredibly risky, and likely to fail spectacularly, surgery, and everyone else gets a possibly unethical, crystal shard eating, pyramid hat wearing, psychic therapy. Yay. Everyone say yay. Yay."

The best I could do to show my amusement was a half-hearted snort as she strode off in the footsteps of my brother. I heard the grumbled uncomfortable clearing of someone's throat just behind me and then a wing knuckle nudged my exposed flank.

"Let's go young man." Virginia said, breaking the fraught tension lingering around me. "A little air and some exercise will be good for you."

Her tail tip wrapped around my neck and tugged my head away from staring wistfully at the door my brother had disappeared through. Obediently following her like...a duckling after it's mother, I thought irately. The small group that had agreed to go find some food went into the road facing away from the area haphazardly marked by crime scene tape and into the blustery wind.

Out of uncharacteristic spite on my part on the way to our impromptu launch point, I donkey kicked (dragon kicked?) the still unconscious Prometheus in the ribs.

It didn't really make me feel as good as I'd hoped it would. It made me feel like I'd just kicked an unconscious and injured living being.

Some of the lost ones shrilled loud recriminations at me for the violent act. But I didn't have it in me at that moment to feel sorry for the source of so much that I didn't understand about my new life as an alien on my own world. He didn't wake up, of course. Probably because it wasn't convenient for the plot, or maybe the one recording my life for me just couldn't think of anything to do with him at this point in my story.

Virginia took the lead at her own insistence and ran down the road with her wings stretched past the edges of the road on both sides and angled above the streetlights and buildings in her way. The eerily deserted street had no vehicles to get in our way, and with two last bounding jumps she had enough room to extend the span of her sails and catch the wind.

She circled back around with her head pointed down and sweeping side to side before calling an all clear. Only then did the rest of us thump down the vacant road kicking up snow drifts and wild vortices behind us to join her.

The older female led us towards where she had seen a break in the storm with the hope that it wouldn't close before we got there. It was a farm about twenty minutes away by flight, which had been worked out with the woman sitting awkwardly at the base of Dean's neck. A member of the council he had approached earlier in a bid to find food for all the children of the egg affected by the outbreak of violence. She had agreed to come along to negotiate for any unsold crop or livestock which Dean had assured her we would be likely to find entirely edible no matter what condition it was in.

Remembered conversations with Bryan, that made the human still inside me want to vomit, had led me and Kim to facetiously dub ourselves garbage disposals. Apparently, we could eat almost anything. Which made me wonder, not for the first time, just what the fuck was wrong with Bryan and what could ever drive someone to do some of the things he's tried in the name of science.

Once we were all aloft, and at a safe height of a few hundred meters, we fell into an instinctive wedge formation with the massive elder at lead. Pat, between Virginia and Dean, shrieked a loud call of welcome to any that might hear her in the ongoing search for any local Children. A pattern that we continued our whole flight to seek out any new children of the egg that might need help or desire company. Once in steady flight, I turned my head to address the constant irritating sound emanating from the speaker in my ear that made it twitch in agitation.

Jonah, screaming about vertigo and how he didn't want to die, was bouncing back and forth between the wings buffeting him across the width of my back at the end of his safety tether. After telling him to lean against the end of his leash and plant his feet against my body to gain his equilibrium and stand. I felt him walk forward a little bit and sit in a spot that Lucy had told me once was a natural dead spot in the whipping wind of our flight. While he got his panicky breath under control, I told him my conditions for the interview that I had talked him into.

"While we fly there, you get to ask me questions. On the way back, I ask you questions. Will that work for you? Of course it will, because otherwise I won't say a word to you and the only thing that you'll get out of this is that you got to fly on top of another living being."

"What kind of questions are you going to ask?" He asked warily after digesting my promise to stonewall him.

I kept my head straight and angled slightly down to look over the city we passed over as I responded out of the side of my mouth. "I want to know what's going on in the world, and you're wasting time with questions like that. The flight to this farm is only going to be 20-30 minutes, your clock is running."

I was disappointed that he didn't seem to really care who I was as much as what I was, if his questions were any indication. Whenever I tried to bring up my family and how they were suffering just like I was he made non-committal noises and then asked about some other aspect of what I had done that morning and why my brother seemed so afraid to ask me to stop.

The best I could do was to tell him the truth. But I only answered the questions he asked and gave no information that he didn't ask for. I knew how dangerous the knowledge that I could interact with other people's minds would be. Being clear about what I did and did not know about what I could do, and my intentions, would be better than obfuscation and denial.

I hoped anyway. I sensed conflicting thoughts from him on how he would spin the story. I couldn't out what he was thinking. Another weakness found. Confused minds and thoughts made for unclear and confused broadcasting thoughts. I told him that to, knowing how worried he was when I described reading thoughts like listening to radio broadcasts.

"So, you're saying that it's hard for you to read my mind if I'm confused all the time? I don't know how to keep that up for very long..." He sounded, and felt, dubious about the usefulness of that information. I didn't think it was all that useful either.

Virginia made a bellowing happy cry when she led us out into a break in the storm and the sun streaked down on her vast outspread wings. Those sails thundered as she swooped and then soared upwards into a tight spiral that ended with her chasing herself through a loop and back down to our level.

"You don't...have the sudden urge to do that too, do you?" Jonah's scared voice came from the speaker in my ear canal.

I barked a short not entirely heartfelt laugh at his fear of me enjoying the warmth that comes from flight in the open sky. The feeling of Virginia's glee and her feeling like a carefree sixteen-year-old girl again lifted my spirits a little bit. Sighing wistfully, wishing for those in my life that would make me feel as she did, I let her bliss pass through me and onwards. Letting all the others feel the soaring as she did.

Dean and Pat gave joyful whoops at Virginia's infectious elation. Even it was temporary, we escaped the heaviness that lay awaiting our return. Twisting the feeling a little bit to match the small minds that rode on two of our backs, I heard a gasp in my ear and an excited shriek come from Dean's back.

"This is the beauty of what I can do Jonah James. Can you feel her happiness?" I asked my passenger as Dean and Pat circled each other, mouths open and smiling with eyes for each other as they spun wingtip to wingtip towards the ground.

In the distance, I felt six minds flare to life at the sound of our presence and the lighthouse like beacon of my mind. Soon, we would have new company. But as we made gentle landings on the snow covered and frozen fields surrounding a cluster of barns and silos, we had a deal to make first.

As soon as my four hands touched the frozen ground, my mind was already anxious and casting back to my loved ones at the hospital. Dancing disquietedly and keeping myself from enjoying the feeling of the snow blanketed field, I made sure Dean and his companion knew not to dawdle here. I sent a pulse of urgency along with my words before I could stop myself and wondered at why these instincts where so deeply ingrained and so damn hard to break.

Dean and his passenger Kathy, with a K, Stevens made their way to a nearby house that looked to be associated with the plowed and frozen fields surrounding us. I could feel the worry of those within and had a sense of what concerned them and knew that we had come to a place that would welcome a purchase of grain and potatoes that would rot otherwise.

"There is a group of six children of the egg nearby that have heard us and felt me. They are going to be here soon. Let us make them feel welcome and see how we can help them. I do not think they are hostile, but they are too far to know much else about them."

"Maybe better here than there? Not like city and death that sneaks quiet, quiet. Much like this. Maybe flowers somewhere?"

"I agree with Pat" Virginia added, seconding the much younger female who wandered off to inspect the area and keep one eye to the sky for the minds that I felt gathering themselves to come to us. "As happy as I would be to shelter more of these poor souls where I can ensure their safety with my wings, perhaps it is better that they remain far from the city. Unless of course, they would prefer to be with us. I am sure I can find more room for them in the mall. Maybe they should come with me. I am quite firmly sure that I can keep them safe."

Or at my own home, at the other end of the state. But as far as my pessimistic mind was concerned at the far end of the Universe. Where me and my family should be happily curled around each other with nothing but our own calming scents to help us forget this troubled world for a time.

The men who came to the door of the house lived there and identified themselves as caretakers. The multinational corporation that actually owned the farm had told them to let the crops rot after international trade had more or less collapsed after Zero Day. Storehouses full of potatoes and no longer capable of climate control had frozen on the farm after power had been cut and awaited the onset of spring to begin their decay into useless mush.

Which was an appalling waste of badly needed food. As I knew from my flight over the city and seeing the long lines of hunched figures queuing up at what smelled to me like foodbanks. Why wasn't this stuff being bought?

"Well...the company crunched the numbers and feels that they'd make more money off the insurance for the lost crops than they would if they sold it." The man on the porch telling us why he wasn't allowed to sell the potatoes in the warehouses said.

"You have been told to keep this food from distribution while people go hungry? As millions in this country lose their jobs and live in fear?" Virginia cried incredulously, her head tossing in disbelief. They looked up at her looming snout apprehensively with saliva dripping from her rent lip steaming to the ground and nodded.

"We're not here to make waves. We're just happy to have these jobs as caretakers. We even have somewhere to house our families." He gestured behind him at the large structure he'd emerged from. I felt about two dozen minds inside.

"Do you have a phone number for me to call? This is just nonsense. If you can't make on the ground decisions, I need to speak to someone who can." Councilwoman Stevens demanded in exasperation. I didn't know what authority she was acting under to find food like this, but whatever it was I could tell that she felt on solid ground.

Something nagged at me about the man's emotions. There was something he wasn't telling us...

"When's the last time you've heard from your employer?" I came over to ask the two men.

"Just after the harvest, five months ago."

I sat down with my tail twitching through tiny sweeps across the snow in thought. It was as I suspected. My hunch was confirmed seconds later when Stevens dialed the phone number they gave her and received an automated message saying the number had been disconnected.

"Here..." she handed one of the men two business cards. I saw a state seal on one and a Department of Defense insignia on the other as they changed possession. "If you ever hear from anyone who is financially responsible for these crops give them those numbers. Tell them we seized it from you under Executive Order 3475-C."

The man fidgeted with his hands and shifted side to side. Here it comes, I thought to myself.

"Could you...could you pay us for some of what you're taking? We haven't...we haven't actually been paid in three months."

The woman who came with us turned to Dean to ask how much exactly we would need. At the same time, I looked at Jonah standing next to me just on the limit of my shadow and trying to get warm after his flight.

"Is this a common situation?" I asked him. "These conglomerates that own these farms going bankrupt or what? Just going away?"

"Yes, fairly common. I don't know why no one has approached this one. But many of the farmers that operate the farms owned by overseas companies have been on their own. There are cases working through the courts where those working these farms are seeking the rights to the farms when no contact can be made with the businesses that have become insolvent. The feds are using the strategic oil reserves to guarantee that food continues to move within the country and that the farms run, but many overseas customers have stopped buying. There is something like three billion people across the world living off around 1000 calories per day because international shipping has come to a standstill. Famine is reaching apocalyptic proportions. There's to be a UN meeting tomorrow, the third one on this subject, to debate a bill to shift resources in an industry that can't move its product with the collapse of the oil industry. The top ten nation-state exporters of food have been working with grocery chains and suppliers on a proposal to balance domestic needs with international starvation.

"I don't know what these aliens intended by shattering the bedrock foundation that oil was in modern society. But they don't seem to be intent on helping with the calamity they have caused beyond pushing us to innovate new solutions. Satellites are taking photos of mass graves in almost every nation on earth. The scale of this disaster is Biblical..."

A grim assessment, but not one that was at odds with what I'd expected. Even so, Jonah looked at me with curiosity skittering across his thoughts when I raised my head to the sky and a low keening whistle came from my open jaws. I felt like a wolf howling at the damn moon.

"What is that one doing? You said more dragons are coming here? Can they not? They've been scaring the shit out of our wives every night when they try to talk with our children through the windows." One of the group talking to us said. "Their help is more than welcome operating the farm, it's just...well...goddammit I just don't want anything with mouths bigger than I am playing with our kids even if they are only ten-years-old!"

"It doesn't help that Rachel went flying with them last week. Now it's all any of the kids want to do." Another man said under his breath. My eye swiveled to a number of young childish faces pressed against upper floor windows just beneath my head. Spotting me looking at them, some of them waved heartily at me in a carefree greeting that told me just how familiar this group already was with children of the egg. I began to think that I knew what was going on here. Not being to help myself, cold air pooled in my open mouth as I returned the smiles of the children.

The six minds I felt earlier grew in intensity in my head and I advised Jonah and the other humans to take shelter until we knew more about the oncoming visitors. Dean swept them towards the porch of the large house with a wing at the same time Virginia and Pat stood up on their hind legs with their wings out for a welcome display that I hadn't seen before. Unfamiliar it may have been to me, the coming group seemed to recognize it for what it was.

The men protested that they didn't need herding and that the ones coming in hadn't harmed them yet. Still, just because they interacted with some children of the egg didn't mean these were the same ones. As they got closer, I felt a hardened and angry edge to the thoughts of two of them which put me on alrt.

Which, of course, were the two that came down to cast suspicious eyes at us while the other four circled above. A pair of females that I could feel having a hard time deciding who led our group. Victoria, from her size and age. Or me, whose presence felt overwhelming in their minds. I tried to make them more at ease by imagining sun light being filtered through a cloth as an analogy to take down the intensity of my mental strength. The effort solved their dilemma by drawing the entirety of their focus onto me. One after the other, they bobbed their heads at me and then Virginia.

Glancing with one eye at each other, we both bowed our heads to the two newcomers who smelled honored by the motion. They weren't lost ones like I'd thought earlier. But neither where they all that friendly. With hesitant advances, I conveyed our peaceful intentions and at last their rattling scales subsided as their bunched muscles and stiff movements relaxed.

"Have called elder ones here, Rafael and Jeremy friend?" The larger female of the two with a half-healed tear in one of her wedge-shaped ears asked the men that had been speaking to us. "Why done? Not need eyes and nose finding us safe here! More scales, more eyes! We help small humans and you help child of egg! Not need more!"

The conversation that followed revealed much to me through the thoughts of the others as it continued. Especially after the circling children of the egg overhead were signaled that they were free to land. The four teenagers (three males and one female) came from two different families and had been found by the older, twenty something, females after they themselves had come together in the vast emptiness outside of Twin Falls.

All of them had been shunned by their families and were a little untrusting of humans. So it had taken them some time to warm up to the small ones living here. A marriage of convenience had become friendship as the two groups thrived out here on this farm that no longer had an owner. Where the children of the egg had been living, and where I'd sensed them, had been a large equipment shed a few kilometers away. Making room for themselves by pushing surplus vehicles outside into the weather.

Long running angst ran deep in several of the children of the egg and small ones over what had happened on or after Zero Day. Which I soothed for them in small degrees to help them cope with the fractured lives they led since being exiled from their families and communities.

Much of their healing had already been accomplished here, however. Finding solace with each other and providing a shining example of the type of union that needed to occur all over the world. I had to nudge Jonah to take note of what he was seeing here. How ingenuity was evident in several self-developed workarounds that made novel usage of what they had. Some of it went right over my head, but the small ones in the caretaker's house seemed to be impressed with the crop yields they'd been able to take in with limited equipment, electricity supplies, and manpower.

The money they were asking for was to cover their utilities for the home that were being threatened with termination as well as for expenses such as medicines for some of the children. I didn't mention to any of the others that there were about ten more minds in the basement of the house, hiding from us. They were illegal immigrants afraid of our intentions. I soothed their thoughts as to why we were here, and three of those minds slipped into peaceful slumber while the rest relaxed their vibrating concerns. I calmed the other dozen I felt in a bunk house out of sight on the other side of a nearby warehouse as well. A teenaged child of the egg saw me looking at the beaten path of snow from house to house, mistook my intentions, and shifted to sit down on the track with his meter-thick tail trying to surreptitiously erase it behind him.

A choppy laugh came from my mouth and I winked at the boy who seemed to relax at my reaction even if it startled some small ones around me. I sent a query straight from my mind to his, asking what they needed here with images and feelings. He sent back mental images of a school classroom and a doctor listening to a young man's chest. I bobbed my head, and he twisted his head curiously at me. Waving off his lack of understanding, I silently assured him assistance would come while replaying for him the memory I held of what the Mayor had said about the schools. His bronze colored eyes were as wide as his head, and his nostrils were flaring in silent alarm, at the range of abilities that I was displaying to him with no one else in the area the wiser.

Well, I take that back. Some of the others might have felt my signals even if they didn't understand what they were feeling pass over and through them. Several of the small ones were rubbing their heads behind their ears and looking around in confusion. I could see the hair of a couple women standing on end like they were caught in an electrical storm, and the children of the egg instinctively looked to me for reasons they did not fully understand. I evenly returned each of their gazes with calming thoughts and requests to pay attention to the conversation at our feet.

Promises of payment and a line of credit for the city for the food was made and Virginia asked them to bring a few pallets of potatoes out and bundle them together with rope. A woman, watching from the porch and leaning on the encircling railing, told us that a couple herds of pronghorn typically were browsing through the crops that weren't harvested in the southwest forty.

A young female just out of her teens with tattoos on her arms, down her flanks, and around a hind foot (Dominique Simpson) bobbed her head and grinned toothily with her tongue flicking outwards to swipe at the remembered taste of hot arterial blood.

"Yes, yes!" She cheered happily. "Not take pregnant does! Very good! Keep herds strong and healthy! Yes, yes! My project! No hunters shooting for fun! You hunt my herds for fun, I hunt you for fun! Yes, yes! I think very funny when bullets go 'plink' off scale and stupid humans scream."

"Do any of you want to come with us back to the city?" I asked, mentally admonishing Dominique even if I was hypocritical for doing so since I never said anything to Kim when she'd done almost the exact same thing before.

No one here wanted to. Happily supporting their own community to an extent that they were able to get by with. Only seeking more support for the health and education of their families. I also asked them if they wanted work during the winter months, and told them of the idea I had to start preparing food here to be brought to food banks and for the children of the egg needing food in the city while recuperating. Services for the city and pay for these people. A win-win.

None of this group wanted to go, but a male laying on the peak of the roof at my eye level perked up and told us of another group they had periodic contact. He said they were nearby and chirruped to soothe my bristling scales and mind that he could have them here within a half hour. Letting us know that it was a group of a dozen that was led by two mated pairs that needed help but had been too wary to seek it.

"Tried lick lick hurt! No good not like not want! Huuu-mans not treat them nice! Not like us with friends. They no trust friends, we bring tasty and they help us pull rolling rip up ground. I try make happy, but I Friend to All does not mean others friend to all too!"

The male Friend to All assured us, and me, but I wasn't exactly in the mood to be assured. This kind of mission creep is exactly what I was worried about coming out here. Start out to get food, then next thing you know we are off retrieving the fucking red sapphire from the underground cave with a waterfall to give to the crotchety old woman who knows where the lost puppy for the crying boy was so he would eat his green beans and the whole goddamned world could be saved.

I wanted to get back to my wife who was getting her damn leg sewn back together. That was all.

I sighed and gave my assent to the teenage male who took off into the brooding sky that was churning closer to seal off the local respite from the weather. Virginia and Dean helped the humans gather the pallets of potatoes and I collared Pat to come with me to see about getting some of those pronghorns with Dominique to guide and supervise us in taking from 'her' herds. The rest remained behind to chatter with each other while Jonah wandered from small one to large one to ask them all questions generated by his rapidly turning mind.

Dominique told us to wait for her signal where we circled over a herd hundreds strong digging through the snow on the field to get at vegetation beneath. With a roar, she plummeted into the middle of the herd sending them scattering as she spun around herself to encourage them with snaps of her jaws. Calling her direction up to us after a moment of watching them flee.

"Do not attack does with child! Get the ones lagging the others! Make the herd stronger!"

I took four of them off the ground and a quick, efficient, clench of each hand carrying an antelope snuffed their lives out. Looking around, I spotted that the grinning Pat on the other side of the field had taken five. Eating one of them in two bites after flicking its head with a single claw to kill it. Nearly decapitating it in the process. Smiling at me with her blood-soaked teeth, I asked her to lick herself clean before we went back to the others. Grabbing her kill she fluttered over to me and Dominique and I unthinkingly bent my head to clean a few spots that she had missed at the corner of her jaw. Only thinking I shouldn't after I'd already finished. For her part, Pat didn't think anything of it as she was merely grateful for the quick cleanup of spattered blood that she couldn't reach.

I didn't see the young male who had taken off to parts unknown on our way back or at our return. But I could just barely sense him off to the southwest and heading towards some faint glimmers that might be other's minds. I asked the councilwoman with us to call the hospital to make sure my wife wasn't being operated on yet. Being satisfied on that end when I was told no, I turned my attention to Jonah.

"Tell me how things are going for us." I said, settling to my belly to tap my chest and then his with a claw while arching my neck to look down at him.

Searching around for a bit while he scratched absently at where I had poked him, he spied what he wanted and climbed the steps behind him to the deep covered porch. Dragging a chair over so that he could look out and up at my head. Humming, he organized what he had to tell me before replying.

"It's not just the food crisis either. From top to bottom the whole world's financial system has been shaken badly. The United States is trying to throw money at the problem, but unemployment remains at thirty percent. Thirty percent of the country is unemployed! One hundred million people in this country alone. Tax revenue is falling through the floor and the deficit is soaring to unimagined heights. Meanwhile, to add to the problems of the world's largest economy flirting with an insolvency that could bring the international markets to ruin, a growing sense of despair is taking over the thoughts and feelings of this country's citizens.

"Pie in the sky engineering projects the likes of which haven't been seen since the Apollo missions of the 60s don't hold much water for John and Jane Doe when they're cashing in their child's education fund to put food in front of that same kid. Not to mention the legions of out of work energy sector employees that are bound to oil, gas, or coal careers for livelihoods. Careers that are never going to return due to the actions of aliens that seem not to be bothered by the death they've unleashed in the ambiguous pursuit of making us better or else. All for the sake of helpless cute little..."

I raised my head and cut him off with an agitated ripple of my scales and a slash of one claw diagonally in front of him. Every time I asked what was going on in the world, I always got the same response. I didn't want to hear how sorry the world was. If that was all that I wanted, I needed look no further than my own body to see that nothing was the same as it was. Neither did I particularly want to hear him carp about why a nearly omnipotent alien species cared more about endangered animals than human beings and our infinite capacity for stupidity.

"What else? How have the courts reacted to the programs that the President here has implemented? How have governments responded to our...redefined existences? Are we due the same rights we enjoyed before? What do other small ones think about sharing their world with a new species that may be..."

"May be what? Bigger than us? Is that what you mean by calling us small ones? I mean...your head is bigger than my entire body, but I don't think that's what you intend with that phrase."

He was halfway right, but I didn't want to interrupt him. I could feel that his attention was where I wanted it and that correcting him would distract him from giving me the information that I desired. So, I encouraged him to move on from my choice in how I referred to humans.

"Not just here in this country. How are the others doing? What are individuals doing to right what has brought us to this point?"

"Well, the courts are trying to decide is whether you have any rights at all. Judicial systems across the world have ruled that there is no doubt that you are still highly intelligent and self-aware as obvious as that is but, strictly speaking, you are not human and there isn't a country on Earth that has thought to start granting the same rights you used to enjoy as human to whatever species you are now. Some jurists are arguing that you are diseased human beings. Some, that you are mere animals. Many are asking just where the line should be drawn between what intelligence deserves rights and what does not. There are some groups using you all as justification to demand more rights for animals such as dolphins and primates. Speaking of dolphins and sea creatures, did you know that there are real live titans living in the ocean now? I saw footage of a pair of creatures that shouldn't be possible towing a net between them in the...

"Can you please stay on topic?" I cut him off, tapping at a wooden step leading up to the porch not far from him absentmindedly. Accidentally splintering the board and then covering it with my two-decimeter wide finger in a vain attempt to hide my guilty crime of negligence that everyone's eyes now lay on. Like a kid kicking a broken vase under a table. I looked upwards and whistled nonchalantly from my throat.

"Other groups, however" He continued after giving me a dubious look. "argue that the rights guaranteed to citizens by their governments only apply to humans, now and forever.

"Which is the biggest problem for you. States, cities, and nations across the globe are seizing property and finances of you dragons. Circuit courts in the United States have ruled that you have no rights, while others that you do. Emergency appeals to the Supreme Court are at an impasse after one of their own members transformed. Six attempts have already been made on his life that only his new nature has kept him from succumbing to.

"Some nations have already declared campaigns of 'control' against you and your new kind. Thousands of dragons have died and hundreds of thousands of humans in direct conflict often meant to seize their assets or families."

He paused to look at me warily as a sharp growl rumbled my throat while I felt my scales rise to unconsciously vent the ozone smell of my anger.

"Tell me more about these families being separated."

"Uh..." He scanned his memory for a minute to voice the answer I had already saw swimming across his thoughts. "Parts of Russia, China, The Philippines, Cuba, Brazil, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, South Africa...Are you sure you want me to go on?"

"Any states?"

"Missouri, Arkansas, Oregon, New Jersey, New York, Kansas, Nebraska, Utah, Georgia, Alabama, New Mexico, Louisiana, Texas, Maryland, West Virginia, Florida and well...Idaho is debating doing it."

He jumped away from the edge of the porch like he was anticipating me attacking him at the unwelcome news, but I already knew he was going to say it and I wasn't the type to kill the messenger. The male that had flown away earlier was on the return leg of his errand and there were two dozen minds with 30 small ones following behind him.

Fuck.

"Sit down, and stop acting like I'm going to swallow you whole for giving me the news that I had asked you for." I said with exasperation as he settled back into his chair cagily.

"The number of people killed by the dragons after attempting to take their families is unknown, but it is fueling other's suspicions that you are nothing but wild animals that are too dangerous to have families. It's a self-propagating cycle where cooler heads, that realize that breaking up the families and support structures of people that have already undergone tremendously shocking changes might not be the best idea, are having difficulty advising against. It's a powder keg waiting to blow combined with the army of unemployed disaffected workers looking for something to blame. Not to mention all the bigots and anarchists running amok and stirring trouble anywhere they can. Like that sniper earlier, what did she have to gain from shooting into that crowd other than to scare people and incite more division? Nothing."

It was all more alarming than a five-alarm fire at an oil refinery, but none of it was a surprise. Still, something had to be done with all that reckless hate and energy.

"What about these security zones like my house? Where else are these being tried? Are they successful? What out there in the world is working?"

"There are mixed results with that experiment. Some nations have tried creating them only to have them turned into death traps for the humans and dragons that came to them as well as the government forces protecting them. Sometimes it's rogue military elements and militias attacking and government forces defending. Or sometimes it's the other way around.

"A town in Illinois was badly burned by white supremacists from Indiana when it welcomed in several dozen dragons fleeing from violence in Chicago. Which has turned into its own bloodbath after the majority of its police force quit when anarchists began targeting their homes after someone doxed the entire force. The burned town in Illinois turned into an urban gun battle after the fires were set and calm was only restored with the intervention of the National Guard along with unspecified active duty assets. I think it was another cell like the one General Boyd runs if you want my opinion. Covering up the involvement of our nation's military was done for obvious reasons because it feeds the narrative that we're becoming a military camp.

"A safe zone in Puerto Rico came under attack from locals who had been armed with weapons smuggled through Cuba from what some suspect was Russia. The dragons routed the attackers and hundreds died, now the Puerto Rican Governor has been forced to declare a state of emergency and mobilize the national guard to quell a vocal minority to get rid of the dragons altogether. I have heard it said that there will be another attempt at voting for statehood in the next election as persistent food shortages continue to plague the island.

"There are some security zones that are not only doing well for themselves, but actually prospering. Some of the ones here, ironically enough, are the zones set up on Native American land. Dragons with little else to do have been the most effective in implementing..."

Jonah's long running exposition on the state of some aspects of society ground to a halt in the whirlwind that kicked up in front of the house. The youthful male that had flown off earlier had returned with wings held up and out theatrically and with his head beckoning to the many newcomers landing behind him. Prideful scents swirled in the eddies of the arrival of the veritable horde of children of the egg and small ones with him.

A large male placed himself in front of the others and spread his wings to hide them from us. With his wings extended, I could see the disfiguring burn scars identical to Virginia's marring the enormous vein suffused and ragged sails. The smell of his pain, and an ultrasonic whine that made the teeth of the small ones ache, were a reminder that however long ago he had suffered those wounds they had never healed properly. Virginia gasped at the sight of them, and stuck her head out to nuzzle the male, that was a tad larger than me and whose name was Kenneth Bridgewater, consolingly along each side of his muzzle with a deep thrum that made him close his eyes. I quieted his troubled thoughts as well as Virginia's flashes of remembered agony while stealing the male's pain.

His pale yellow and orange eyes found mine at the same instant I noticed, and felt, the tug of burn scars stitched through his left ear fin. He bowed to me, sensing just as others had the feeling of my mind all around his in comfort.

The healer in me, the one that promised to do no harm, warred within myself against the learned behaviors of human society and the paramount importance of the sanctity of individuality. Like relearning how to move one of my legs, this ability and the urge to use it was a part of me as was respecting others. All too often I could see the signs in the others who had changed as I had. Just like physical contact, which I was watching even now as more snouts rubbed alongside Virginia's and a soothing hum inaudible to small one's ears whispered across the clearing accompanied by the smell of encouragement. Children of the egg had a much different view of intimacy, these bodies thrived in closeness, on sharing with each other. I amplified the contentment of Kenneth and the desire to help him heal from the others around him until I heard blissful sighs from everyone around me. Eyes slid closed as bodies slowly rocked to the rhythms that I made sure everyone could share. Inside and outside the home, parents drew their children close to relish their closeness. In the unseen second house, the huddled and frightened immigrants felt their fears evaporate when I sent warm thoughts and welcoming to dance around them. For seconds that felt like hours, I helped these minds find a world where trouble did not exist and all who sought comfort could find it.

My brother's words came to me as the others roused themselves from their own feelings and looked around with soft contented smiles. I couldn't share those smiles with them as the reminder of how alien what I did was drilled through my head. Moaning wordlessly to myself I closed my eyes and turned my head away towards the ground. The gratitude shining from Kenneth's eyes, and the euphoric look of the ones in front of me, overlay the confusion and deeply buried fear in my brother's. His doubt as to just who I was now.

When I did things like projecting the emotions of Virginia and the others to everyone. I didn't know who I was anymore either. Tom Schwarzkopf might be my name, but the human that was born with it didn't look so human in my mind's eye anymore. Only a year as this, and the makeup of who I thought of myself as now included a man with a thick tail where his buttocks once were and vertical pupils staring out of a human face.

Sadness struck me, and I couldn't help that the others smelled my distress even as I walled my thoughts behind armor that was as impenetrable as NORAD's front door. The well-meaning noses of several others poked and prodded my neck and face until Virginia gently but firmly separated them from me. She addressed the other children of the egg and the small ones scattering out of the way of the towering legs trampling the snow around them. Her expansive wing curling around and pinning me to her side in a motherly embrace that made me squeak in shy embarrassment

"His wife is severely wounded at the hospital. The only thing he needs right now is to get back to her. So please help him by being quick about organizing who wants or needs to return with us. Yes, Night Wind, I see your wing. You can lower it, this is not grammar school and there is no need for that formality. Before you decide, here is what you should know..."

She told the seven families (that's what they were) about the difficulties at the hospital and the city surrounding it. Many in the group looked to Kenneth's wounds making him self-consciously tighten his fins against the sides of his head and flanks with a grim expression settling on his snout.

As it was explained to them by Virginia and the councilwoman what could and could not be done for them for the first time, I listened to the thoughts that popped up left, right, and center.

It wasn't mindless boredom that had led the whole group to come here. They had all been sheltering in a small rustic inn that Poly (If I hear one more goddamned joke about 'Does Poly want a cracker?' just because I have wings...I'm going to start eating people...No one better mess with my inn while I'm gone!) owned. She had turned her lodging into a gathering point for those that wandered near her town and had nowhere else to go. In turn using the skills of her tenants to keep the power on and water flowing with the income they generated from keeping the rest of the city humming along smoothly. An amicable arrangement that made the other citizens of the town grateful. When they had been led here by promises that their questions could be answered it had been to learn more about what was going on outside their little island of sanity. Like the protesters in the city they wanted medical care, school, safety, sanitation, and jobs. What they thought a councilwoman for an entirely different city could do for them I didn't know as Boyd would be the one to talk to. A lifeline I offered to them after the mostly negative assurances the representative of Boise and something that Kenneth, Poly, and a few mated spouses glommed onto eagerly.

I was looking back in the direction of Boise with a sense of unease and a low thrumming rumble of longing while the decisions were finalized. A full half of this group from Pine_wanted to be escorted to Boise to get supplies and health care treatment. Which given the violence I had witnessed, and that they had seen on the news both that morning and the time prior to today, was understandable. The children of the egg had steadfastly refused to allow their families to enter that danger before. But now with titanic Virginia and _The Patriarch myself to lead them, they felt comfortable for reasons that danced just on the edges of awareness. Hidden in the nothingness where the knowledge of how to control a body as comfortable in the air as it was on the ground dwelt alongside strange urges and increasingly familiar habits.

Five of us had come out to the farm, but it was twenty-five of us that left with pallets of potatoes and slain antelope clutched in our paws. Two from the farm we had just left along with the Pine group containing eighteen small ones that had smells and feels that told me all were sick or injured in some way. A few of us yelled our farewells, the roars scattering snowflakes that had started to fall in the area, as the rest of us waved goodbye with our tails when we gained a little altitude. Heading back for Boise with tiny Jonah lying flat and out of the wind at the base of my neck, I picked up my line of questioning from earlier as I took over for Virginia in setting a hurried pace back to my wife and brother. The rest settled into a large wedge behind me to enjoy the turbulence and easier passage that my wings produced. Like geese. If we were a few miles up, we may have even been mistaken for a flock.

"What about the alien computers? What are they doing?"

He didn't feel as sure about that question, and I had to wait for an answer.

"I think...I think that these computers are not typically present with individuals or families. You had two of them with you as of yesterday correct? That's the first I'd heard of that happening anywhere to my knowledge."

"It's a little more complex than that..." I grunted out of the side of my mouth into the microphone. The absent Thumper never was far from our thoughts, and I had no idea where Tomoko was since she disappeared suspiciously at the exact moment my wife's eyes had rolled up into her head. Explaining them, and what exactly Prometheus was, took a few minutes before I could continue with what I wanted to know.

"How are people dealing with this? And please answer my first questions."

"About as well as you'd think. Some hoard, some think these are the end times, some isolate themselves, some work together with their heads down, some complain, some give up. Some governments like ours are trying to enable innovation. Resources are out there for those who work for them. Groups like those at that farm. Groups that unite to survive this as big government works with industry and citizen coalitions to find solutions to the immediate concerns of moving goods and services. That is the biggest priority for the near future of at least this country. Energy generation, transmission, and storage are getting trillions of dollars pumped into them.

"There are similar patterns of development and aid being created and distributed in Europe. Although there the governments are taking more of an active role as opposed to the lower key presence in the States. Africa is a whole other ball of wax that is working firstly on expelling warlords and extremists from within its own population by citizen groups consisting of dozens of dragons and hundreds of humans. Conflicts are brewing with the nations of the continent as well, as these groups don't seem to be interested in recognizing land borders. Some countries in Africa are resisting the work being done because these flights of dragons and humans cross boundaries with impunity.

"To answer your first questions, I don't know what kind of advice the other AIs are giving whoever they're advising. The computers themselves make their responses known by inserting what they say onto news outlet websites. But the answers they give often are meaningless without knowing the questions and many of the governments and organizations they advise have been less than transparent. It is breeding an environment of immense distrust with the general public. Which if you want my opinion seems to be the goal of the alien computers to make the decision-making processes more open by forcing people to confront these groups. Although why they don't just...will... things to be the way they want them is something that I don't understand."

I banked around a cloud to keep in clear skies for as long as I could with the rest following me like a navigation beacon even when they couldn't see me through the nebulous shroud. Down below, I saw the endless ribbon of the I-84 interstate extending into a veil of snow in the distance. A single lane each way had been cleared of snow for a steady parade of semi-trucks trundling cautiously across the landscape. Other than a pair of snowplows and a pawful of long-haul buses there was no other traffic on the road. Another sign of the times and one that fit in with the only gas stations that I saw which remained open were three truck stops that each had a Sheriff's patrol car parked in front of their respective shops.

Jonah confirmed my suspicions when I asked him about the sight. Fuel banditry had become an enterprise of professionals often working in armed teams with stolen fuel tankers. If that was the case, I wondered what good a single patrol car would be. Flapping onwards I bent my thoughts and questions away from mercenary thieves and back to other issues.

"It's because they're trying to force us to change on our own." I gave him why I thought the aliens acting the way they were on the transparency issue. "Tell me something else about how children of the egg are being treated..."

"What are...oh that's right, that's what you transmogrified humans call yourselves now. Look I don't know what to tell you about what you're obviously fishing for. Not everyone is afraid of what you've become. But many don't understand what has happened to you and are frightened by the thought that it could have been them or their loved ones filling your...scales. However, the majority of respondents to surveys put conducted online and by phone don't seem to blame you for what happened or think that you invited this upon yourselves. Those same questionnaires however also indicate that the majority of those asked still feel uneasy being around you with your size, strength, and how much you resemble the aliens that supposedly did this to the world. They question if you are really still on humanity's side."

"And how do you suppose we do that?" I asked with affected disinterest that he saw right through. "How do you suppose we convince these skeptics that we are still on the side of the species we spent almost our entire lives as?"

"Keep the fear of many from manifesting by not eating people..."

"Why the fuck does everyone think that!"

"...or taking over the world. Let people warm to the idea of you now. I would say to let humans get used to the concept of another equally intelligent species on this world created _from_our species before reproducing. But it seems that was out of the question from the start when a percentage of the women who became dragons were already pregnant.

"I can't give you an answer as to how long after becoming something new being accepted will take. It's not like this is a once a century event that has a historical precedent. Humans haven't had to share the world with a stronger and equally intelligent species since the stone age. Since I haven't seen any Neanderthals walking around lately, we can all see how that went. Humans do not like to be told what to do, and we do not like sharing resources. Only a year ago you were human yourself. Are those concepts something that you can still appreciate? Do you remember what it was like to be what were? The concerns and values you had? Are they the same, or have they changed as much as your physical image?"

The part of my mind that had been jumping from one thought and possibility to the other, as I had listened with another piece while a third worried about my family, reached a decision. As soon as he was finished, I already knew what would be best going forward. For both of us hopefully. He didn't feel all that comfortable that I didn't answer his questions about my values. I made up for it later, but doubt was planted in his mind over how I was acting.

"Have you ever visited one of these security zones yet? If you would like to, I am inviting you to the one my home has become in northern Idaho to learn whatever you want. You'll be a guest in my house where it is the center of this new development. You could do a report on me, my family, my home, anything you like. What do you say?"

He seemed intrigued as we came upon the city and I told him to think it over before giving me an answer. I wasn't going anywhere until my wife and brother were able to anyway. Hearing an increase in the tempo of wing beats on my right, I turned my head to watch Dean beat his way up to my side to relay a request from Stevens. She wanted us to get lower for a scan of problems in the area of her city we were about to overfly. Aerial reconnaissance, which I got the sense was one thing the Mayor McLean had been doing regularly before she had been shot in the neck and almost killed.

The streets were placid from the forced suspension of activity due to the ongoing storm. I saw plenty of tracks in the snow going to and from a small number of buildings that may have been bars, but other than a few dozen people in groups little else was stirring at the moment. A female two Children back on my right side clicked for attention and pointed down with a hind leg at a pair of bodies lying still in blood-soaked ovals of snow. Remorse and bitterness swept through the children flying with me in a circle like buzzards over the corpses that smelled of recent death. At the rate that snow was falling, the bodies on the sidewalk would be buried within an hour. I heard Dean tell Stevens on his back the street names he could see at the nearby intersection and we continued with the area as it was. It was still important not to disturb the crime scene even though it took several flashes of thought for me to convey that to the lost ones who wanted to land and mourn the dead. Denied that, they took to making shrieking keens that the rest of us took up ourselves and leaving some of our human passengers haunted by the baleful cries.

Before I could see the hospital, I knew something was wrong. Elemental cries of distress but without clear thought or form rang in my mind as I neared where part of my family was. The Children with me (you may have noticed that shortly before this I had begun to shorten our specie's name) screeched anxiously and the only one that could keep up with the frantic sweeps of my wings was the enormous Virginia with her far larger span. The males of my new species were nimbler than the females, but in a straight line over any distance longer than a sprint none of us could match them.

She whistled at me, asking what was wrong, and then turned her head away to fix determinedly in our direction of flight when I relayed my children's distress to her. Leaving the rest behind us, the tower of the medical facility loomed out of the inclement weather and I saw the disquiet of the hospital parking lot as Children were ringed around the tent my wife was in with bristling scales. Their heads, filled by agitation, wove back and forth looking for the source of their sense that something was amiss. It was clear that my children had awoken and were crying out for me even if it wasn't to anyone else. My children's unresponsive mother's mind only feeding the panic and sense of abandonment that they felt.

Daddy's coming babies. Daddy's coming...

From two kilometers away, I felt one of the females latch onto my mind like an eager lamprey. A conduit for her siblings in my mate's womb, the raw unformed emotions of all four of them shot into me. Giving their energy the form of what I think their tumbling bodies would resemble, I nudged them along until I felt their spirits nestle alongside the glowing and inviting warmth of myself. Wrapping my mental projection around them, I loosened the restraint I kept on my thoughts until my glow banished the cold thoughts of loneliness licking at their minds.

One of our daughters was going to be very special. It was at that moment that I wanted to name her Mathilda. I knew as soon as I explained the name to Kim, she'd be all about it.

_Mathilda,_I thought to my unborn daughter. Reveling in the intimacy of being able to talk to her like this in a way that no man, no parent, ever had before these changes. Just the sense of being able to communicate with my own children like this made all the alienation and wracking torture worth it. I couldn't wait to get home and connect with my other children like this as well. God, I love my kids so, so, much.

A feeling of acceptance pushed against my thought and the sense of something like a nuzzle against the scales of my belly. Did she approve? Warmth radiated through me and I glowed like the sun with affection for my...our...children. Whom I'd been told were still years from opening their eyes. I wanted to be as close to them as I could, and to do that...

"CLEAR THE AREA!" I screamed into the cold air in front of me, sending an image of the region around my wife cleared where I saw Prometheus, awake at last and sitting on his haunches next to my love, and where I expected the people and Children there to unass my landing spot. Others scattered at my impetus and I dropped my load of slain pronghorn just behind the entrance barrier before coming to a sliding stop that left shallow gouges in the frozen tarmac. Even as I rushed through the encampment, already I was reconnected to all those that I had begun to think of as my patients and, not truly being able to help myself, felt out my brother to make sure he was dealing with the pain of the migraine that was now his to suffer through. At his insistence. Which if I'd even felt a single glimmer of his desire for it to be gone once more it would have never troubled his thoughts again.

My shoulders and chest flexed to hold my wings straight up and then folded my arms to bring the curtains of skin neatly down to my back so that I could sidle up to my love's side with our flanks pressed together. Virginia landed behind me and the snow falling on my wife and I vanished when the canopy of her wing spanned over the two of us, Prometheus lying down on Kim's other side to make room, to prop its talons against the ground. I could hear her explain what the rush was as I felt the echo of my own heart through my children as they calmed once more at the sense of my presence. Stretching my head over top of Kim's back to bring it down and press it against the side of her belly. Listening to the steadying thumps of their tiny but powerful hearts. Only then was I able to relax with my scent changing from one of parental alarm to tranquility.

"Can you please let me down now? This is very touching, but I'm old and not going to jump fifteen feet down from your back." Jonah's pleading voice came my earpiece. Apparently not noticing that I'd already lowered my wing as a ramp for him to slide down on. Annoyed that I had to interrupt being with my children, I raised my wing and shook it for him to see before setting it back down again. Rippling my scales under his feet, I knocked him on his ass and shrugged to send him tobogganing down my wing with a surprised yelp.

Two small ones came from Kim's tent to have irritated words with me. One of them was Ulysses who I had been briefly surprised at his presence when I'd felt his mind upon my return. But, given his and Kim's long history with each other that predated even knowing my future wife when we had first met and fucked inside a storage container while we were both on a rotation to the Philippines, it shouldn't have I suppose.

"Where have you been?" He snapped at me angrily. "They've been ready for twenty minutes and none of the other dragons would help. So that leaves you to move her hand for the surgery, are you ready?"

I opened my mouth to defend my actions, only to be cut off by the surgeon who was standing next to my wife's long-time friend.

"Save this for later. Nurses, scrub this man's...hands...so that he can assist us. Make sure you get beneath his claws or whatever those things are as well. They are going to scrub you at the other end of the tent. When they say you're ready don't touch anything else or stand on your...your...goddammit. What do you call those things?"

Blinking slowly at her I tried not to laugh nervously at Herath's confusion. This was to be one the surgeons reattaching my wife's severed limb and she couldn't even be decisive enough to come up with a name for a part of the limb she'd be working on?

"Whatever you want lady..."

Virginia moved her wing to allow me an exit from her protection and snow began to pelt me anew. Moving around on the four paws I had, that were just as capable as human hands and which I truly did not care how others referred to them, to the other end of the tent where a pair of scrub nurses awaited me beneath an awning set up just for the occasion. Collapsing to the ground without fanfare I spanned the length of the tent so that my tail remained in contact with my wife's body and curled my hands inwards towards the nurses in their shelter. The two women looked at each other with quirked eyebrows when they saw that each hand, when on their sides, were taller than they were. They were about to begin scrubbing my scales and talons clean when Archbold came out of the tent and asked them to wait a moment. Holding up his hand, he looked at my nearest eye.

"This operation is going to require very fine adjustments to get her amputation aligned. I need to know that you are up to the task. Put the tip of one of your fingers against the palm of my hand and listen to my instructions."

With the assistance of Herath, I was given another rundown of the surgical procedure that my wife would undergo. A dozen nurses and specialists from two different hospitals and using an array of tools never designed for use in a living body, but were about to be after being hastily sterilized, were going to attempt to reattach my wife's two-hundred-kilogram paw. I moved my claw millimeters at a time to follow the directions of Herath in matching his movements as they explained what else would be needed from my wife's own body to complete the operation. A patch of skin, revealed by ripping hardened scales from her other arm, would be removed to serve as a cover for the wound as they worked to undo the damage done to her.

Jill, listening in alongside Virginia, cried in dismay as she was reminded that all this was a result of her actions and I had to soothe her as the explanation continued.

"Your...uh strength will be needed in other ways than to set your wife's paw for bone fusion. After the amputation, many of her tendons retreated into the cavity of her leg and we don't have the means to retrieve them with what we have here. We will secure anchor points to the sinew and will ask you to pull them into position so that they can be rejoined. Your tendons are made up of a material, that if I hadn't seen it myself in your own living tissue, would've thought it impossible to exist. I suppose I will just have to accept the notion that I will be repeating that same incredulous statement ad nauseam over the course of this operation on a member of an alien species.

"Brian and Serena have done the best they can to brief us on what oddities to expect from your physiology, but until they are here to provide hands on experience we won't be able to complete the reattachment of Kim's nerves and complete the operation with the skin graft implantation. Do you have any questions? By the way, your fine motor control is exemplary given the size of your hand. Why it might very well weigh more than I do!"

Raising my head to look away from him in thought, I hummed absently to myself while enjoying the feeling of the brushes scrubbing at my scales and the ridges around the bases of my claws. The scales covering my hands opened of their own volition to invite closer attention to the nerve dense skin hidden beneath and other plates across my body signaled how pleasurable this cleaning really felt. Spying Prometheus sitting on his tail and watching me with his usual unreadable expression an idea occurred to me and I snaked my head down again to ask the surgeons what was on my mind.

"Would it be helpful if I told you that I think I could help you with reconnecting her nerves together?"

"...What?"

The more I thought about, the more confident I was that I could do what I was about to propose. It might not work with anyone else. But with Kim, who was now a part of me as I was her, it just might. Concentrating, I and the others noticed the fluorescent lights behind them began to fluctuate wildly as I brought more and more focus on to my wife's body and then I shut my eyes. Here goes nothing...

"Tell someone inside to poke my wife in a location that you can see, and I will tell you exactly where she was just touched."

"We don't have ti..."

"Then don't argue with me and just do it."

He sighed, throwing up his hands in surrender. His scrubs rustled over the ambient noise as he turned and called out to someone inside the tent to do as I'd just asked. The slithering feeling of something cold probing between two of my...two of Kim's scales on her upper leg registered in my mind.

"Left upper leg just above the outside of her elbow, you just inserted something metallic and cold between two of her scales. Do it again."

Five more times this repeated until Herath waved her hand dismissively and said that was enough. A short but excited conversation with her peers followed that made me pleased enough that a low trill of satisfaction came up my throat.

Embarrassment, and the gawking of my nurse attendants, over the odd behavior was cut short when the two surgeons in charge of my wife's operation agreed with the usefulness of my ability to feel what my wife's body did. I didn't want to alarm them by telling them unnecessarily that I thought I could do the same with them if they'd allow me to touch them. Intuitive whispers told me that I could do so much more if I would only allow myself to realize how powerful my mind was now that it had been unlocked. Those same whispers told me that, if Kim were awake, together we could do things that might seem to be straight out of a dream.

Or a nightmare.

"How much longer do you need to get his hands clean Violet?" Doctor Archbold asked the woman pleasingly scrubbing my right hand. Water sluiced away in small streams away into the winter storm to freeze and become an unwelcome hazard for the multitudes of others coming and going across the lot as she dipped her long-handled scrub brush in the soapy water.

"Ten minutes doctor."

"Is there anything else you need before we begin?" He asked me after nodding.

"Can you call our children? They deserve to know that their mother is about to enter surgery."

Archbold patted his pockets and came up empty so it was Herath that saved the day by dialing the number I gave her to reach Irma's phone. On the second ring my scales rippled in happiness to hear my youngest daughter's voice once again as she answered. I heard a thumping noise and it took me a second or two to digest what I felt in my body and realize that the sound was me smacking the ground with my tail happily.

Well...fuck it. I guess when you have a tail it's going to betray your emotions sometimes.

"Aw...is the big cutesy dwagon happy?" One of the nurses scrubbing my hand cooed at me.

Even when it leads to people treating you like an eight tonne dog...You know what? I really don't know how much we weigh anymore...The truck scale fiasco happened while we were still growing to our full size. I tried not to let the scowl I was directing at the giggling nurse color my voice as I talked to my daughter.

"Lucy, it's..."

"Dad!" She squeaked adorably, cutting me off before I could name myself. The thumping shiver travelling up my spine came faster along with a surge in my happiness. Not even the sound of both nurses tittering at me now could keep the smell of my jubilation from my scales. I can't describe to you, knowing how alike I and all other Children sound, how elated the simple act of our kids being able to recognize us by our voices made me. How much that made me feel like I was still...me.

"Is Mom awake? Mommy, are you there?"

The nurses looked at my crestfallen appearance with sympathy in their eyes when I had to gently let Lucy know that her hopes weren't to be answered. Instead, I asked her to rouse her older sister (I could hear the heavy breathing of a sleeping Child and rightly guessed that it was her) and find her brother. Once I heard the snuffling arousal of my oldest daughter and Luke's voice, I told them what I could about what Kim was shortly about to undergo with the assistance of the two surgeons leading the operation.

They had many questions of course, especially once they had gotten wind that I was going to help them reconnect her nerves because I could feel what each bundle would connect to.

"What do you mean you can feel what Mom does? Since when? How? That doesn't make sense!" Irma exclaimed in vexation.

Under her noisy outburst, I could hear the twins whisper to each other. They were figuring out on their own that it was something that had happened to me in the short time I'd been away and bouncing ideas off each other to distill meaning from what I'd said. Pride in their intelligence blazed within my chest like an exploding star. I couldn't wait to show the depth of my love for them. For all of my children.

"I will explain everything when we get home kiddos. I promise. We have to go soon..." I noticed the impatience growing in Herath's body posture. "...so, wish your father and your mother's surgical team luck as we try something completely new here."

I heard some restless shifting and then Jesse's voice giving encouragement to Irma along with the sound of scales rubbing against scale. Irma's diffident voice came from the phone and I understood where her reluctance was coming from as soon as she made her request.

"Dad...I know Mom wouldn't understand because she's...well...Mom, and you have had a troubled relationship with the Lord after what you've seen..."

"Aw...not this again Irma!" an exasperated Lucy complained to the accompanying sound of a groan from Luke. "This is st..."

"Luke! Lucy!" A sharp snarl flew from my mouth to cut her off. My scales flaring in agitation at my children's behavior with each other. Kim and I had always been careful to teach our children to respect other's beliefs no matter what they were. It didn't matter if Kim had none or not, if Irma continued to believe in her faith when we did not, then I wouldn't tolerate my family antagonizing her for it.

"I am disappointed in you both, Luke and Lucy. If your mother was awake you know damn well she would say the same thing. If Irma wants to say a prayer, you don't have to join her but the both of you will respect her desire to say one. Am I clear?" I finished with a low menacing growl that I hadn't entirely...oh, who am I kidding?

Of course I had meant to make that noise this time. We refused to allow our kids to grow intolerant of others no matter what they believed. After what happened to us, this was a lesson that was even more critical for them to learn.

The smell of my disappointment was thick in the air and caused the small ones between my arms to sneeze rapidly until I closed myself off to allow the wind to carry the scent away. Children down wind of me craned their heads with nostrils flaring to look for what had caused the reproof they smelled until it dissipated. They returned to their own conversations as I waited for what I knew my children were intelligent enough to know what was required of them.

"We're sorry Irma, we were wrong to say that. We were being mean and didn't consider your feelings. Are you ewww!"

Giggled laughter erupted from the phone, making me smile at the sound of my oldest child kissing the younger two. The rasp of her tongue on their skin making them beg their big sister to stop. When they had calmed down, the surgeons and I bowed our heads as Irma began. Just before I closed my eye, I saw Prometheus draw close to peer curiously at us with his head cocked and ears flared wide. The very picture of someone that didn't fully understand what they were seeing.

Having faith in something beyond one's self might be a concept that an alien supercomputer had little ability to grasp despite the immense vastness of all their knowledge.

Dearest God, I am deeply concerned now about my loved one who is on the operating table. As the surgeon performs the procedures on her, I cannot help but be worried. There are a lot of questions in my mind that come up about how she is doing. I know, God, that this surgery is out of my hands now, which is why I'm coming to You today...

When Irma was done, my three children each gave their love to us both over the phone once more, making my mind alight with the desire to express to them the depths of mine. A mindless roar of dozens of other voices came through the speaker as the call ended wishing good luck to us both and the world shimmered behind a haze of unshed tears that I licked from my eyes before they could fall to the ground.

Dozens of warm minds grew in my sight, and I felt their muzzles or hands caressing my side and my neck comfortingly. Murmurs of encouragement and that it would all work it eased my anxiety a bit and allowed me to focus on the task ahead of me. Something that I could only guess at being capable of but might very well determine if my wife would spend the rest of her life missing part of one of her limbs.

The surgeons were gowning up for the operation now, so it was a few nurses that did the last bits of preparation. Lifting the outer skirt of the tent to allow my hands in, the claws of my right hand made contact with my wife's severed paw first and I gently felt it over to develop its position in my mind. With my tail still in contact with hers I started to weave a picture in my head of the constellation of darkened willowy strands that were her nerves that should have been radiantly glowing with the passage of her thoughts and intentions.

A monitor was shortly wheeled in front of my nose, forcing me to curl my neck to put enough distance between my snout and it to actually see the image of my wife's torn and now bloodless wound. Herath's voice came from the monitor's speakers as we both prepared ourselves.

"Tom, can you hear me?"

"I am ready."

"Good, are all the cameras rolling? Yes, okay. Audio recording? Check. Follow my lead Tom and if you perform any of that...telepathy...please state for the records what you're doing, how, and when. Alright people and dragon, let's do this right and earn our place in the annals of history while we're at it."

The snow disappeared once more when Virginia settled at my side once more with the canopy of her wing arcing far overhead. Peering across the tent, I saw that Jill had taken her spot at my wife's flank and had stretched her own wing across her back with her head beneath it. Through my wife's body I could feel the tuneful humming that Jill was sending to my delighted children. I connected her to my children and delight flooded through her like a tsunami, leaving me happy that they both would be one less thing I fretted about while I did...whatever it was I was about to do.

Virginia nuzzled her head under my chin to caress my neck with her eye filling all of the view of one of my own. As intimate a gesture as she could make short of kissing me. Which would have been weird for me, given that she was almost twice my age.

"We are here for you, young one."

Bobbing my head, I focused as the fight to save my wife's arm began.

...