Kur walked past them, into the shadow of the first tree. He did not look back at Elara. He did not look at the broken glass or the spilled meat cubes. He looked up. Through a hole in the canopy, he saw a single star—not the Sky-Serpent, but a cold, distant point of light.
He remembered the First Nest, a crater of molten rock where his egg had cracked. He remembered the Deep Singers, the worm-things that taught him how to listen to the stone. He remembered the Sky-Serpent, a comet that had whispered secrets of iron and gold into his dreams. Most of all, he remembered the Great Burning —not his fire, but the fire of a falling star that had turned a jungle into a glass desert a thousand years before his first molt.
They did not understand that a dragon does not count his scales. A dragon is his scales, his fire, his territory, his hoard. And Kur's hoard was the memory of a song he'd never sung.
Vines that had been dormant for decades suddenly twitched. Roots heaved. The fence that had sung with lightning groaned as a thick, black tendril of old ivy coiled around its post and squeezed . With a shriek of tortured metal, the fence toppled.
Kur didn't know the word "anarchist" or "eco-terrorist." He only knew that the two-legged ones who brought his meat were suddenly screaming, and that new two-legged ones in green masks were smashing the feeders and releasing the caged lizards. They moved fast, their hands covered in symbols that looked like a broken tooth.
They will try to put me back in the box. They will try to cut the Green. They will try to silence the Song. But I am Kur. I am the scale and the claw and the memory of the First Fire. And the Great Green is not a place. It is a dragon that has been sleeping for ten thousand years.
He opened his eyes in a cage of lightless glass.
Kur wasn't born in the Great Green. He was pulled from it, a scrap of shed scale and a wisp of forgotten fire, shaped by a dreamer's hand into something that remembered sunlight.
The PLAZA humans were fleeing now. The gray-bearded Vonn lay on the ground, clutching his arm. Elara was trying to drag him away. She saw Kur standing in the shattered doorway of his cage. Her eyes went wide.
This place. This Green. This ruin. Mine.
The Great Green answered.
The PLAZA had come.
One of them, a thin creature with wild eyes, stopped in front of Kur's cell. He pressed a device to the glass. The lock hissed. The door swung open.
Kur turned his head. He looked at the Habitat—the sterile white walls, the fake logs, the water bowl that never ran dry. He looked at Elara, who had fed him and never once tried to bite his tail. He felt a flicker. Not fondness. Something older. A recognition of a fellow creature trying to survive.