It had been a warm, rainy day in Tarzar, and even after the rains stopped a layer of clouds moved slow and heavy over the city, filling the air with the salt scent of the ocean ten kilometers to the west.

It was approaching noon, as the sun peaked in the sky when Dianna approached Eleanor. Eleanor had been tending to a dragon whose foot had been caught under a rock and almost crushed completely. Struggling had only worsened the damage, until she had come along and soothed the beast.

"Eleanor, a word?"

Dianna's voice betrayed her nervousness before the helices floating around her did. They were a muted green, shades lighter than Dianna's eyes, and they shuffled around her in confused patterns.

Eleanor set down her tools and cleaned her hands against the overall she wore. "What happened? Did Lenishkov threaten you or something?"

Dianna raised an eyebrow at Eleanor referring to the General in the casual way she had. "He left. But General Kylian will be arriving in a few moments, and I want you to be there."

It was Eleanor's turn to show surprise as her eyes widened. "Me? I'm just a random dragon doctor, I'd look out of place," she protested.

"He will need a report on the dragons that are left and how many are stable enough to be prepped for new riders. You'll be the one to provide that information."

"You don't need me to–"

Dianna pulled Eleanor aside and lowered her voice. "I don't trust him."

"That still doesn't explain why you need me there," Eleanor whispered back.

"General Lenishkov, impulsive as he may be, has decades of experience in dealing with difficult situations." Dianna lowered her voice even more, glancing around to make sure none of Eleanor's helpers were listening. "He believes what happened to Tarzar was an inside job."

Eleanor looked for any sign of deception in the other woman's face and found none. Furthermore, the helices swirling around her remained steady and did not betray any hidden emotions.

"Look," Dianna continued, "General Kylian named me Consul of Kentauri. General Lenishkov thinks it was all a plan to keep me close so I can't investigate further into the Tarzar incident. That way he has me here playing politics instead of focusing on my work."

Eleanor had to agree with that logic at the very least. Dianna was an expert analyst from what she'd heard, and if Kylian truly had something to do with what happened to Tarzar, keeping the best option at finding out what really happened occupied with other business was a good idea.

"So what do you want me to do?" Eleanor finally asked.

*****

The camp was shaken by a loud boom that echoed through the nearby mountain peaks, sending waves of snow rolling down the rocky ridges. The clouds overhead lit up briefly in a bluish-white flash and half a minute later, a silver spacecraft emerged from the clouds, slowly descending on jets of fire. It hovered at two hundred meters and smoothly shifted sideways, coming to rest without a sound in a prepared landing area. Powerful water jets washed over the landing pad and lower hull, sending plumes of steam into the misty rain. When the water shut off, only the soft patter of rain and occasional creaks from the cooling vessel could be heard across the paved spaceport. A walkway extended out from the body of the spacecraft, twenty meters above the ground. Five figures emerged onto the elevated platform.

"Welcome to Tarzar, Sir," Dianna greeted General Kylian. He nodded and leaned on the railing, taking in deep breaths of the crisp, rain-kissed air. Droplets of rain beaded on his shoulders and eyebrows.

"This place looks different," remarked the General, his gaze sweeping over the transformed landscape.

"Things have changed," replied Dianna.

Thousand of shacks and lean-tos covered the hillsides and gullies along the walk to the suburbs. Fires were being lighted under wet tarps and the General watched mud-colored figures moving between mud-colored shacks. High fences had been rigged along the old highway and the road itself had been widened and regraded. Two lanes of truck and hover traffic, most of it military green, moved sluggishly in both directions.

"Four million," said Eleanor, building on the General's thoughts. 'At least four million people. The numbers grow by the day as more people stream in from Tarzar and the neighboring towns."

The General stared. "There were only two and a half million people in the city when I left."

"And every one of them wants to board a ship and escape this nightmare. Some are waiting for the promised trains to be built, but most don't believe it'll happen in time. They're afraid."

"Of the rebels?"

"Them too," said Eleanor, 'but mostly of the dragons."

The General turned his face to her. "So they've ventured south of the woods then?"

Eleanor let out a humorless laugh. "They're everywhere. Most people are convinced that there are dozens or hundreds of them now. Reports of dragon-related deaths have surfaced in at least three camps."

"How many casualties?"

Eleanor could tell from the tone of his voice that the General did not really want to know.

"At least three thousand dead or missing," said Eleanor. "There are a lot of injured people but that isn't the dragons, is it?" She let out another dry, bitter laugh. "Dragons don't just wound people, do they? People shoot each other by accident, fall down stairways or jump out windows in their panic, and trample each other in crowds. It's a mess."

The General's face contorted with a mix of horror and disbelief. "Is the military any help?" he asked. "Are they what's keeping the dragons away from the big camps?"

Dianna shook her head, taking the opportunity to reply. "They're waiting to fight the rebels. One thousand of them ventured north to try and confront the dragons. That was the last we heard from them."

"Good God," the General exclaimed.

As the group stepped out onto the scene, their eyes were met with a devastating sight. They stared into the distance, where once stood the grand northern outpost, now reduced to charred and toppled wreckage. Years ago, when the ports were deemed too perilous and closed, the outpost had transformed into Tarzar's most renowned tourist attraction. It spanned an impressive four city blocks and rose over two hundred meters in height. But now, its splendor had been obliterated. Tall piles of blackened stone were all that remained, hinting at the structure's former grandeur. Melted alloy girders jutted out from the stones, resembling the skeletal ribs of a colossal creature. Much of the debris had collapsed into the deep crevices, basements, and passages that had existed beneath the three-century-old landmark. The General walked close to the edge of the cliff and Eleanor saw the helices around him turn to a pale brown color just before he threw up.

"It looks as if they used a nuke on this place," pointed out one of the men who had come with the General.

Dianna responded grimly, "Four, to be exact. You're not safe here. Stay in Kentauri."

'I'm sorry,' said the General. 'I can't.'

The air smelled of ashes.

The fact that she saw their helices first gave Eleanor at least a split-second advantage. She reached out for the first Rebel's face as though to grab it, but it was the helices she made contact with, and she yanked, hard. Disrupting the helices that much was fatal as Eleanor had learned ages ago; a disruption of that magnitude turned a human brain into something resembling mush. The rebel carried two weapons – a sonic stunner in one hand and a smaller but much more lethal pistol in the other.

The second Rebel fired a wild burst of light past the General's left shoulder a second before Lyra fired three shots that tore through his chest plate. The third Rebel would have escaped if he had not rediscovered honor and turned to fight. Eleanor felt an inexplicable sense of déjà vu as Lyra put an energy bolt through the man's left eye from five meters away and he toppled over the edge. The air behind her rang with curses, commands, and questions and the General's guard pulled him away to safety.

Eleanor ignored the others and went towards the man she had killed. The Rebel was naked under the camouflage suit and it turned out not to be a man; she had short-cropped dark hair, small breasts, and a tattoo just above her waist. The woman's pallid complexion contrasted with droplets of blood that seeped from her nose, ears, and eyes. Eleanor made a note that the Rebels used women as warriors. All of the Rebel bodies in the remains of Tarzar had been male. The noise and chaos around her was indescribable as more soldiers swarmed the area.

It didn't matter.

She closed her eyes more tightly.

It had happened again.

*

Eleanor opened her eyes and saw the silhouette of a woman bending over her. For a second she thought it was Dianna. She looked again and realized that it was Dianna. She touched Eleanor's cheek with cool fingers.

"Am I dead?" whispered Eleanor, raising her own hand to grip Dianna's wrist.

"No. Do you feel like trying to walk?" Her voice was soft and throaty, burred with the hint of the accent Eleanor had still failed to place. She had never heard Dianna speak like that before.

Eleanor sighed and looked around. They were on some sort of couch or platform set in the middle of a dark, cavernous room. Overhead, starlight was visible through a broken roof.

Eleanor lifted her arm to cover her eyes. Even through the disorientation of her current state, she now remembered the painful therapy sessions, the long hours in the lab, and the death. Most of all the death. 'Where are we?' she asked, still shielding her eyes.

"One of the many abandoned buildings in Tarzar," Dianna replied. "I needed to get away from everything for a while. I brought you along because there were... inquiries."

"You must have questions too," Eleanor said as she sat up. She caught Dianna's scent, the fragrant hint of the ocean that Eleanor now knew so well from their other times together.

Dianna stayed silent, waiting.

"From my earliest sense of self, I knew that I would be–should be–a doctor. It wasn't a matter of choice; it felt as though the dying all around me exhaled their final breath into me, commanding that I be destined to play with life for the rest of my days."

"In my first experience with death, I was four years old, crying and searching for my mother through endless rooms, permeating with the scent of dust and old furniture. Breaking the first rule I ever learned, I flung open the doors to my mother's sewing room. There she sat, shrouded in shadows, unresponsive. One of her graceful arms rested along the back of the chaise longue, while the other lay limp on the cushion. I recoiled, stunned by her cool, lifeless form. Without rising from her lap, I pulled open the heavy velvet drapes. My mother's eyes—white, rolled back—stared into nothingness. Her lips were slightly parted, and drool glistened at the corners of her mouth and on her perfect chin. On the table near her left hand lay an empty syringe. The servants arrived and pulled me away, as I screamed and lashed out in the only way I could. Five dead, eight severely injured."

'My God,' Dianna said softly. She started to speak again and then stopped, merely tightening her grip on Eleanor's hand.

"I slowly learned. The brain retrains and adapts itself amazingly well. I discovered that the difference between finding the right helix as opposed to accepting one that's almost right was the difference between being struck by lightning and merely watching a lightning display. "

Dianna chuckled, but her voice was devoid of humor and carried a tinge of disappointment. "So what are you, some kind of god that decides who lives or dies?"

"I don't know." Eleanor looked down at her hands. "It's why I became a doctor. I thought-"

"That if you learned how to save lives you could save more than you take?"

"That I could be more than a harbinger of death," Eleanor sighed. "I try not to mess with things. But sometimes-"

"You saved The General," Dianna told Eleanor, holding her hand and squeezing it. "I'm sure he can be convinced to overlook the autopsy results."

Eleanor shot up so fast her head spun.

"Autopsy?"

"The Rebel you killed," Dianna replied. "Lyra said she wanted to do an autopsy, something about searching for trackers and bionic implants."

"She can do that?"

Dianna nodded. "She has the General's support. And considering she reacted almost as fast as you did, she must have seen what happened."

"Yes, she must have." Eleanor sat back down as she spoke. "But she won't understand what really happened. There's no way to trace anything back to me."

"Are you sure?" Dianna raised an eyebrow.

Eleanor nodded.

"Then let me make something clear," Dianna said, her voice firm. "We're here to save as many lives as possible, not take more. If you can't keep whatever this is under control, I'm sending you back on the next ship to Kentauri."

The helices around Dianna glowed a force green as she spoke.

"You are invaluable to me here," she said, and then added, "Especially with the dragons. I want you to stay. But I need to know that I can trust you to not...mess with things."

"You can trust me."

"Come on then." Diana helped her up. "I need to show you something."