When the surgeon showed me my pearl, the pearl that was to be mine, I thought it was a joke. The dragon pearl was a pinkish, milky drop the size of my pinkie nail, made of some jelly-like substance somewhere between liquid and solid. It was contained in a clear glass vial color-coded with a strip of blue tape. It was the condensed sum of the Phoenix Empire’s greatest achievements of biotechnical innovation, and it looked like nothing so much as a skin tag, sliced off and preserved as a flesh memento. I couldn’t help myself. I laughed.

“Size isn’t everything,” the surgeon said, almost correctly interpreting the laugh. She gave the vial a shake, causing the pearl to swim up briefly in its nutrient bath, then handed it to a technician to uncap. Needle-nose tweezers descended and emerged, the pearl glistening under cold, sterile light. “Hold still.” 

As if I could do anything else, with my head clamped and immobile. My hands flexed, gripping for armrests that weren’t there, as the tweezers slid in through the borehole in my skull and buried the pearl in the folds of my brain. 

How to describe the sensation? It’s hard for me to say. If I had to, I might say it’s like the feeling of cold on your teeth, while at the same time burning your tongue and inside cheeks and the roof of your mouth. And setting your sinuses on fire with horseradish. And peeling the scab off a barely healed wound. And edging right up against a mind-blowing orgasm but never getting all the way. And needing to pee, really, really badly.

I’m not doing a very good job of describing it, am I? I said as much.

Afterwards, the skull flap was replaced, and I was wheeled off to recover in my own private suite, an indecent luxury on a military station where every square inch of space was pressed into service, but I was a fledgling dragon, and I was granted amenities even a colonel wouldn’t receive. For the next thirty days I counted ceiling tiles as the surgical incisions healed and the pearl rewrote my brain. The sensation didn’t fade; if anything, it settled in, like an auntie making herself comfortable in her favorite chair. It bothered me at first, but over time, I grew used to it. Over time, I grew used to a lot of things.

I was one week shy of eight years old when we evacuated Saintswhorl. No one was surprised. The empire’s expansion into that sector had been rough from the start; Bendarian resistance in the system had been more robust than estimates suggested, and every foothold the empire established had to wrestle for survival against a civilization hostile to its incursion. Three of the system’s outposts had already fallen. Our evac bags had been packed for the last month.

I can imagine now what it must have looked like then, the shuttles scooping up our outpost’s population one load at a time, flocks of ceramic gulls stripping a planetary carcass. We were crammed onto an imperial refugee ship thick with the damp heat of too many bodies pressed into too small a space and still waiting for a final load of passengers when someone gasped. Seated on my father’s lap, I twisted to look out the nearest window. At first, I saw only the blackness of space, scratched with stars. Except some of them weren’t stars, but reflective points picked out a stealthed hull. And once I saw those, I saw the hard streaks of light that defined the bounds of the zodiarchon’s chassis and the fishnet grid of its solar-sail ears splayed out on either side of its head in two long arced curves. A fourth-generation zodiarchon. A hare. It was hurtling right at us.

The next thing I knew, mother had grabbed the four of us to keep us from being swept away in the sudden chaos that erupted throughout the cabin as everyone tried to flee—though of course, there was nowhere to flee to. The Bendarians had taken to deploying zodiarchon against all imperial vessels, not just military ships, but that information had still been distanced through the screen of newscasts. It was something else altogether to have that knowledge crystallize into visceral reality. Earthlight cut along its chassis like lines of fire. The zodiarchon wasn’t braking, wasn’t slowing; it meant to use its mass to punch right through, rather than waste ammunition. Father started to pray. Mother’s grip on us was tight enough to hurt, though she didn’t make a sound.

And then the dragon appeared.

It must have been lying in wait, powered down to invisibility against the background heat of the universe to lure the hare into open maneuvers. It crashed into the hare’s side, shearing the enemy zodiarchon off course. Thrusters burned as the hare kicked around, attention diverted to this more immediate threat, but where its feet landed, the dragon was not. Its body was a firelight line of silver and gold as it wove in and out, darting and ripping with the ruthless speed of a needle tearing through fabric. It was beautiful, and terrible at the same time, the silken ribbon of an executioner’s garrote. 

All zodiarchon are designed to be engines of destruction, and destroy the dragon did. The hare’s death-throes were a soundless EM pulse-flare of agony that instantly fried the ship’s electronics. The dragon circled its fallen foe, scanning to verify that no sign of life remained, and then it was gone.

It was another hour and change before port authority was able to scrape together enough shuttles to scoop the refugees out and pack us aboard whatever vessels were available to take us. Only when we were aboard a new ship and on our way out of contested space did mother’s grip loosen. She pressed her face against each of ours in turn, her tears turning the side of my neck cold.

The next grafts after the pearl are the spines: the combined endo- and exoneural scaffoldings, made of countless hair-fine filaments of neuromesh that would interface between my body and all subsequent grafts. The endoneural scaffolding burrowed beneath the skin and wrapped around every nerve, organ, and muscle in my body. The exoneural extended from my shoulder blades and down the length of my spine in two stiff arcs splayed up and out like the empress’s phoenix rampant crest. Wings was another name for them. They didn’t flap, but if I flexed my back muscles, they would quiver and heave with breath.

It felt awkward walking the halls of the station, and not just because of the neuromesh, which brushed both sides of the corridors and forced anyone I passed to squeeze against the wall to avoid getting hit. The upper echelons of military command were staffed by those with the money and brains to reach the top one percent of military trials scores. I had none of that. Neither did I have the sort of family connections that would make me too invaluable not to bring into the fold. I was the third child of a refugee family who’d tested solidly in the middle of all the aptitude tests. My only claim to being here was because of what I was to become, and I felt the difference in our qualities with every breath I took.

The awkwardness felt especially heightened at mealtimes, when all the fledglings gathered together in the mess hall, alongside the more commonplace cadets. We always sat together. Our unorthodox placement outside the usual chain of command shielded us from the political jockeying that seethed through the rest of the academy, but we weren’t immune to prejudice. Though no one ever remarked upon us where we could hear, I was acutely aware of the gleaming bulk of my body, the lamella of metal still thin and incomplete but stark enough to mark us apart from others.

So: half a dozen of us would-be dragons at the table, jostling for space and flinching when our spines brushed against each other. In the beginning we didn’t speak much. The influx of neural static and hypersensitivities fed into us by the neuromesh left us overwhelmed. It took all our energies to focus simply on eating.

Then one day, a boy pulled out a photo of a swaddled, pink-cheeked newborn. “My nephew. My sister’s son. We thought she couldn’t—I never thought I’d be an uncle…”

The next week, someone brought a letter her mother had written her. She read it aloud, her voice soft and clear in a way that knifed under the din of the mess hall. The week after that, someone passed around homemade sugared plums his aunt had sent, the tart sweetness a stinging in our back teeth. Another girl promised to ask for autographs from a star wickerball player, who happened to be her childhood best friend.

Eventually, I came to understand. We had been chosen not for any particular physical or intellectual prowess. The grafts could, would, and did supplement everything we lacked, augmenting our capabilities to be second only to those held by the empress herself. What the empire wanted from us, what couldn’t be artificially instilled, was loyalty—not because we were considered more trustworthy than others, but because we came from families and communities that were inextricably part of ourselves, integral ties that underpinned our entire existences. We had parents, siblings, cousins, friends, others who could be held against us as hostage for the price of our unwavering allegiance. We had those we loved and could not lose.

Ganxing Station was meant to be temporary, a halfway point for the displaced on their way to final, more permanent settlement. By the time we arrived, it was clogged with refugees, as station bureaucracy struggled against the sheer numbers of those displaced into their corridors. My family was assigned a temporary berth, formed of one-half of a two-person unit cut in two, where we lived for the next nine years.

Everyday life was a struggle. The residents of Ganxing Station weren’t cruel, but they were hard. They had to be. There was too little to go around, and too many people who needed it, for charity to take root. That’s not to say there was no kindness. After father was injured doing maintenance on the outer hull and couldn’t work anymore, our unit neighbors traded us some basic rations in return for our luxury allotment, at an exchange rate that was unfair to them; and when my youngest sister came down with the red cough, our sector chief found some repair work that could be done in exchange for getting her the medicine she needed. But nothing ever came without having to be extracted, bartered for, rationed out, passed through a chain of hands before it made its way into ours. Nothing ever came free.

The day I turned sixteen, I walked into Central Administration and told the imperial superintendent that I wanted to be a dragon. The man blinked. He’d been flicking distractedly across his screen with a stylus, but he set it down now and gave me his full attention for the first time. “A dragon,” he repeated, not quite in disbelief, but close enough that it might as well have been. “Are you sure? If you’re looking for a position in the military structure, there are plenty of other positions that are always looking for recruits, even without advanced qualifications. The infantry, or civic support, maybe…”

“Thank you, but no. I want to be a dragon.”

What I didn’t add was that anything less than a zodiarchon’s remuneration wouldn’t keep my youngest sister in medicine to deal with the lingering effects of the red cough, or keep mother from wearing herself out in a never-ending chain of underpaid, bone-grinding jobs now that father wasn’t able to work. It wouldn’t be enough to take us away from Ganxing Station at last. The administrator looked at me closely for a moment, then nodded, and picked up his stylus again; so really, I didn’t need to.

Of course, it wasn’t as simple as that. After submitting the application, I still had to undergo a battery of exams meant to winnow out anyone without the high emotional and psychological stability necessary to successfully complete transformation. And then after the aptitude tests came eighteen-hour interrogations beneath harsh fluorescence, the questioners blank-faced and impenetrable as they worked their way down checklists of have your parents ever mentioned the poetry of Gucheng and what color banners did your neighbors hang during the Festival of Fire Flowers. I felt no desire to lie; I didn’t doubt they’d already investigated my background thoroughly, and anyways I couldn’t have guessed what sort of answers the empire might have wanted to hear. Carp, us prospects were called, and at times I felt like a carp, squirming and thrashing in the tank of hopefuls, waiting to leap beyond my means. The odds of becoming a dragon were one in a thousand; and out of the thousand collective applicants across three separate refugee stations, I was the only one chosen.

I told my family the last day of what should have been the new year on Saintswhorl but here was just one more mark on the calendar. I broke the news during dinner, not meeting anyone’s eyes as I made the announcement. Then I put on the table the bag I’d bought with my signing bonus. Inside were oranges and date cakes: things we’d always eaten during Saintswhorl’s new year celebrations. We hadn’t had date cakes since we’d come to Ganxing Station.

My mother peeled the oranges, and my father cut the cakes into quarters, sharing them around. My family ate, crying as they did so. We all knew by now that nothing came free, and I had bought it for them with everything I had to give.

After the spines have stabilized, the rest of the grafts are added on, one at a time. A dragon is a world in miniature, an entire ecosystem that must sustain the human being wired into its skull for decades to come. Maybe even centuries. So I was given embedded controls, talon grafts, and sensory alterations, but I was also given chemical pumps, metabolic dissociation, and base-state resurrective backups—all the tools necessary to keep my body functioning across centuries and my mind stable.

With each new graft, the bulk of my physical form increased. It became increasingly difficult for me to squeeze through those narrow corridors of the military installation. Eventually I stopped trying altogether. Instead, I kept to the carrel, the section of the installation reserved for fledgling dragons. By then it was a relief not to have to do an awkward, sidling dance around others in the halls.

I spent my days talking to the other dragons. Us dragons were connected by our own encrypted network that linked all of us together, fledglings and elders alike. There was a lot of time for conversation. Strictly speaking our elders were forbidden from sharing information about ongoing campaigns, but you try telling your lightdrive-equipped, battleship-sized war machines they can’t gossip.

It was during one of these conversations that one of our elders mentioned they were being deployed to Saintswhorl. Ten years in Bendarian hands was long enough, the empire had decided. A wave of wry acknowledgement rippled through the network, but what caught my attention was the answering sigh from one of the elders: —Here we go again.

Again. 

School history lessons on Ganxing Station had paid special attention to territories the empire had lost—unsurprisingly, a topic of interest, given the station’s population. When lessons touched on Saintswhorl, we learned that the Phoenix Empire had only ever held it once, for a relatively peaceful seven years, right up until the Bendarians had decided they wanted the planet and its three moons for themselves. That was the only time the empire had deployed dragons to Saintswhorl. If someone was going to Saintswhorl again, they had to have been there in the same window as when my family had been evacuating. Perhaps they’d even been the very dragon that had saved our ship.

By unspoken understanding, we didn’t talk about our personal lives over the network. In the mess hall, amongst our own brood, it was fine, but not over imperial comms systems monitored by the empress herself. 

And yet I felt the need to say something. By the time I settled on what I wanted to say though, the dragons slated for Saintswhorl had long since departed. So when I finally sent a neutral Thank you, lightspeed delay meant it was weeks later before I received the response, equally noncommittal: —You’re welcome.

A history lesson:

The first known zodiarchon was developed for terrestrial combat, humanity having yet to expand beyond Earth at that point. These zodiarchon were small by modern standards and crudely built: little more than a featureless, smooth-domed chassis perched atop four articulated digitigrade legs, the pendulous weight of its body counterbalanced by a prehensile tail that stretched a paltry half-dozen meters. The civilization that discovered them, long after the originating civilization had fallen, called them rats, though their creators had almost certainly named them something grander and more intimidating. The one rat we saw on display was pockmarked with sockets, but any peripherals had broken off or been lost in the intervening centuries. 

We were in the Imperial Museum of Military History, which had been closed down that day just for us. The docent was a retired general whose voice carried at a pitch habituated first to parade grounds, then to museum tours. 

Like awkward, metal-laced ducklings, we trailed him through the halls, winding a path through exhibits. As humanity expanded and fell into new theaters of combat, zodiarchon design evolved. The next zodiarchon were developed in the Second Space Age as oxen that added powerful thrusters capable of kicking them out of a planet’s gravity well so they could function as planetary defense. The third generation added talons and fangs designed specifically for combat against other zodiarchon, marking the widespread adoption of zodiarchon as standard in a field of combat. With humanity’s spread to neighboring solar systems came the fourth generation, with lightdrives, increased maneuverability capabilities, and solar sails that meant they no longer had to return to base to recharge. 

Which brought us to the fifth generation. Dragons. I read the plaques, studied the ancient metal husks, and wondered how long it would be before mine was mounted up next to theirs.

The curious thing though was that zodiarchon had always been discovered past the perimeters of the civilization that had created them. Enough radiometric dating and comparison to other technologies from the associated eras confirmed it. The rat had been unearthed on a continent it didn’t have any business being on, the ox had been a crumpled heap in the asteroid belt when humans had only just started colonizing the inner planets, and the tiger had been found one system over. And the rabbit? That had been curled up on a rocky moon deep in Bendarian space, and when the Phoenix Empire had begun pushing out from its current bounds, it had been there, lying in wait to be discovered. It was as if zodiarchon had always existed just beyond the grasp of those who’d made them.

“Children must always aspire to surpass their parents,” the docent said, which struck me as cruel. One of the first procedures all fledglings undergo is sterilization.

Toward the end of the lecture he mentioned, as an aside, how he gave this same lecture frequently to tour groups, most recently just yesterday in fact, to a high school tour group. But I already knew that. Just the night before, my second-youngest brother had called to gush about his school’s field trip, with that blend of excitement and incomprehension that was typical of him. By then my family had moved dirtside, on a planet a few lightdrive hops removed from Ganxing Station. They didn’t know where I was stationed, and military censors forbade me from saying. It was coincidence only that put them on the very planet that my military base orbited.

At the end of the call, my brother had asked, almost shyly, what it was like, being inside a zodiarchon. I told him I didn’t know and managed to keep my face expressionless as I said it. Not that anyone could have read my emotions unaugmented, as caged in metal as my face was by then.

The Festival of Fire Lanterns is a weeklong celebration of vows that start with promises between friends and culminates with all of the empire’s subjects swearing fealty to the empress herself, and the longevity of her reign. 

On the second day of the festival, the day for promises between family, us fledglings were presented with dress uniforms, freshly printed and modified for our altered forms. The personnel carrier we rode in, too, had been modified, its insides gutted of seating to give us room to spread out comfortably, which we did, letting our spines touch and overlap. By this time we’d grown used to the neuromesh inputs. We comforted each other the whole flight. 

The empress’s palace was a flowering golden orchid unfurled across the velvet nap of space, the sort of frail, impossible structure that could only exist in orbit without planetary gravity to collapse it under its own weight. It was the central node that only direct descendants of the Phoenix-0 lineage used to extend their reach and control to the farthest edges of the empire. The throne room at the palace’s heart was a weightless space, with no spin to create artificial gravity. That was where the empress sat, waiting, in her throne at the heart of it all. An attendant brought us to the threshold and told us to wait. 

One at a time, we approached. When it came my turn, I demagged my boots and pushed off. A stanchion jutted out from the throne for people to stop their forward drift. Conscious of the empress watching my every move, I grabbed it and wrestled myself around into an orientation where I could bow.

—Lift your head. Let’s have a look at you.

I obeyed. The empress’s eyes were gold, and gold again to the rims, drowned in nanites that read everything from my hormone fluctuations to the level of integration of my grafts with my organic parts. Even without her saying it, I knew instinctually that I wasn’t to look away. She settled back on her throne, robes drifting around her in gauzy clouds, and waved a regal hand at me.

—You may begin.

Everyone who signs on to imperial service swears an oath to the empress, typically via proxy. Very few are required to do so in person. I bent my head again and let the words flow out of me, one long scrawl of duty and promise.

By my blood I put myself in service of the empire; to maintain its shining eternity from the heart of the throne to the farthest edges of the black beyond. I swear to protect it from those who would do it harm, to uphold its integrity and keep its faith. I am a sword forged in service. The empire is my family; the empress is my mother and father, my sister and lover, my one and all…

When I finished reciting the oath she gestured. —Rise. 

I unfolded.

—Who commands you?

That was easy. “You, empress.”

—Who do you belong to?

“The empire.”

—For whom do you fight?

“For—” For you was what I should say, but instead what came out of my mouth was, “For my family.”

Her eyes narrowed. A bead of sweat swelled on the back of my neck and clung, without gravity to strip it away. For the most part this oathswearing was little more than a formality, but there was always a chance that the empress could decide to reject me. To say no, never mind, she didn’t want this one. I would be stripped of my grafts and cast aside. I would be sent back home with nothing.

A small smile touched her lips.

—Go on, then. Fight.

Chassis controls are some of the last grafts to be installed, but they command a disproportionate majority of resources and scrutiny. After all, what good is a dragon that can’t fight?

Our brood had numbered almost two dozen at the start, but as the grafts took their ruthless toll, the number winnowed down. It was a bare half-dozen of us that were flown out to the dark side of Erinye’s second-largest moon. 

Our shuttles came in under a hemisphere-spanning shield into a graveyard of dragons. Coiled monoliths of metal made their own tombstones, the regolith around them churned into frozen froth. Dragons are designed to incinerate their internals when the pilot flatlines in order to avoid being captured and dissected by enemy intelligence. A dead dragon is a husk of inert metal, filled with ash. Sometimes, though, the self-destruct mechanism fails. When that happens, and the dragon is retrieved in time, its corpse is repurposed for training. 

Support staff erected a portable bunker off to one side, out of the way of the dragons’ staging area. Home for the next six months.

Our training took place via shadow-sync only, but it was enough for us to fly the zodiarchon out and fight. Mostly we flew the dragons, but sometimes we flew hares and tigers as well—those of the older generations that were still effective enough to be worth fielding in battle, especially by hostiles who didn’t have the same technological prowess or resources of the empire.     

So: in the shadow of Erinye, we fought. There were safeguards installed to ensure that we couldn’t do any real damage to each other or our surroundings, so we were free to unleash every weapon in a dragon’s arsenal. We rent each other to shreds, cratered the light side of the moon, EM-pulsed each other into seizures, and boiled the ice off half of Erinye’s rings. The pearl in my brain burned and burned and burned. Then, once the timer ran out, we landed back beneath the shield, climbed out, and filed back into the bunker for debrief.

We never spoke about the dragons when we were outside of them. Call it superstition, call it ritualistic thinking, call it whatever you want. If light ever shone on this side of the moon, those dragons would cast long shadows over us all. We could still talk to each other with our mouths and breathe the same recycled oxygen for now, but the time was creeping up on us when, soon enough, we wouldn’t. Halfway to dragon, not fully human anymore, we were a quantum uncertainty collapsing towards an inevitable state. 

I’d been in the carrels for seven months when I received a package. Augmented olfaction registered the combination of scents seeping from the box as home before I slit open the tape.

My parents were the masters of jigsawing way more into a container than should be possible due to basic laws of physics. I unpacked a banquet’s worth of vacuum-sealed pineapple jerky, dried squid, spicy bean cakes, and pickled cabbages, mustard greens, and radishes. There were half a dozen bottles of the ointment I’d always used to treat my eczema. There was a full bag of fresh date cakes.

I could imagine the effort my parents had gone through to assemble this care package; the lines of squid, salted and cured, hung up to dry; the complaints they must have fielded from their neighbors for doing so. It was an overwhelming abundance that spoke somewhat of guilt, but mostly of love and concern. Nothing says I love you like your parents urging you to have a second helping of everything in the vicinity.

The problem was me. At this point, I was so soaked in grafts and augments that typical physiological functions no longer really existed. My digestive system had been reconfigured, adapting it to the point that I could no longer eat regular food. As for the eczema, my immune system had been one of the first systems tweaked. The box must have cost an indecent sum to ship, but it was months out of date. 

The next time my parents called, I told them their package had been confiscated. Too many vectors of potential biological contamination. Don’t waste the money, I said. Buy my youngest brother a pair of decent shoes for his wickerball practice instead and tell him it’s a birthday present from me. 

In the end, I had someone take the ointment to the medical bay and the food to the mess hall for me, all except the date cakes. Those I kept. My new digestive system could only handle a morsel at a time, but over the course of months I ate every last one.

The assembly station was thirty-six hours past the system’s inner ring, tucked into a pocket of space no one else would ever have any reasonable cause to visit. When we were two hours out, the shuttle pilot came online and told me that if I looked outside, I’d be able to see the chassis, but I didn’t bother. I’d been feeling it for the last half-day, a coiled twist of gravitic distortion that plucked at my senses like zither strings. 

The shuttle’s approach looped it through the talons of one forelimb and then climbed a decelerated arc up the neck to where a construction hab clung between the dragon’s horns in a white-skinned blister of positive pressure. A brood of assembly drones crawled over the dragon’s ceramsteel skin, welding scales into place, but for the most part, frame construction was complete. 

Now it was time for the personal touch.

The overseer was waiting at the mouth of the airlock, accompanied by an assistant. The assistant must’ve been new; his eyes widened when the shuttle hatch undogged, and a small oh slipped out of his parted lips at the sight of me. I felt my face warm, which surprised me. I didn’t think I had enough emotional stress response left to blush.

The overseer led the way along the corridor’s curvature and down an access hatch into the skull cavity, where the pilot’s seat was located. She called it a seat, anyways, though officially it was referred to as the cockpit or capsule. To me, it looked like a coffin, and one tailor-made for me, to boot. Three weeks ago, the techs had plugged me into life support, then sunk me into an alginate bath to make the full-body mold that would be the basis of the cockpit, and here was the result: a place for me to be injected into the chassis’s brain, just as the pearl had been injected into mine.

The overseer helped me climb in as the assistant fussed in the back, pulling neuromesh spines out and plugging them in. Each connection registered as a deep jolt in my brain, a psychical itch being scratched. The assistant called out a series of numbers from her readout. The overseer nodded, then looked at me. “Are you good?”

The molding held my head so I couldn’t nod; intubation kept me from speaking. I blinked twice to confirm.

She swung the hatch shut, locking me in darkness.

For the next forty-eight hours, I would remain sealed in the cockpit while techs fine-tuned its senses to mine. If I passed, the next trial would be five days long, then ten. Then a month. Three months. Six.

I reached out through the network, feeling the anxious thrum of my brood as they were locked in, one by one. And beyond them, faint with distance, the ringing chorus of our elders as they sang encouragement and understanding down the threads of our connections. They knew what us fledglings were going through; they’d been through it themselves.

A lone note slipped under the chorus, a single bass thread of presence. The veteran of Saintswhorl. I was being watched, and watched over. The silent weight of its regard spoke more than words.          

I kept waiting for myself to start panicking. Every now and then, a voice piped up in my ear, telling me to lift the third talon on my right forelimb, or move the tip of my tail forty-five degrees counterclockwise. Then silence again. I lost track of time, floating in the liminal dark. When the hatch unsealed again, it caught me by surprise.

The overseer wasn’t smiling, but what did I know. Based on the little I’d interacted with her, I might have extrapolated that she’d never smiled before in her life. I thought she looked pleased enough, though. “Well done,” she said, holding out a hand to help me out. The lights inside the skull cavity had been tuned down to their lowest setting, but they made my eyes ache all the same. The touch of open air hurt, and I felt an instinct to dive right back into the comforting darkness of the cockpit.

It never ceases to amaze me, the things we grow accustomed to. 

The day before I left to be fitted into my chassis for good, a military ship brought me to the planetside starport, where I was met by an autocar that would bring me to my family’s house. But when I got in, I told it to drive away instead—out of the city, down ever-narrower and winding roads, until it left paved road behind entirely.

The autocar crunched along gravel for a while more, and then I told it to stop. I got out. I was standing on the edge of a cliff. Below me, the city spread out in a glittering skirt. There was no one else around me, no other sign of human civilization except the autocar that eventually switched itself into sleep mode after being idle for too long. 

Messages pinged me. I ignored them all.

Somewhere down there, my family was waiting for me. My parents and brothers and sisters. My eldest sister’s child, a rosy-cheeked girl of two whom I’d only ever seen in holos. She was the first of a new generation, but she wouldn’t carry that torch alone for long: My brother had married recently, and my youngest sister was already pregnant. There would be more grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and on and on, an unbroken chain of family to carry on the binds of blood.

I sat there for hours, as the sun set, watching the sulfur of starship flames scratch across the sky, until the neuro pumps kicked in to chemically massage the muscle cramps out of my calves. I sat there until I was pinged with the notification that my time was up and I needed to return to base. Then I stood, levering myself against the weight of my neuromesh spines, and climbed into the autocar.     

It took me years to understand why I’d done that, why I never went home. Every time I think of that night, I feel a pang imagining their hopefulness, slowly curdling into disappointment and then quiet defeat as they were forced to accept I wasn’t going to come. I should have imprinted their faces in my memory, one last time. But more than that, I should have let them see what I had given myself to be made into. I should have made sure they understood. Not out of bitterness or a sense of martyrdom, but because you must know, you must always know, the cost of what it is that’s being paid for what you get.     

Back then though, all I felt was a strange churning in my abdomen that made me ask for an additional diagnostics check on my homeostatic grafts once I was back at the military base. The last thing anyone wants is abdominal pangs for centuries.

But there was nothing wrong; every system was running smoothly. Every step of the process in those final days unrolled without a hitch, and then almost before I could process it, I was in the cockpit, body fitted snugly into molded gel, as every last trailing end of my neuromesh spines was cold-welded into place. When the last connection was made, the overseer floated around in front of me, halting her drift with a hand on the open hatch of the pilot’s seat.

“Once this closes,” she said, “it won’t open again. That’ll be it.”

I blinked twice.

“You can still back out, if you want. We won’t hold it against you. It’s not too late.”

Except that it was. It had been too late the moment the dragon pearl slipped into the folds of my brain, or even before that, when I’d stepped into the station administrator’s office. It had been too late the moment we’d boarded the refugee ship that took us away from Saintswhorl.

The hatch closed down on me. I let myself be sealed away for good.

We fulfilled the purpose of our existence. We fought. 

A fundamental law of dynastic expansion is that an empire in motion stays in motion. There was always a resource-rich moon to secure, a potential habitable planet to defend against hostiles, or an insurrection to put down. It wasn’t just the Bendarians the Phoenix Empire had to contend with, though they were the most direct aggressors. But there were also the Free Cities, the O.E.C., the Titan Commonwealth, and the Kosmimperya. In my third decade as a dragon, the empress’s grandson schismed the imperial network when he tried to break away and had to be taught a swift, ruthless lesson. There was always work to do. There was always conquest to complete.

Years went by. Decades. 

But even dynasties aren’t forever. And in the hundred and twenty-first year of the rule of the third Phoenix Empress, when I sent in a query for my next assignment, I received a response that I’d never seen before: Rest. Relax.

For the first time in half a century, the empire had run out of places to go.

It still took a few more years before dragons were granted access to civilian lines of communication, and only because we started crashing military lines in protest. As soon as I could, I reached out to my family. The packets I sent to my parents returned undelivered, as did the ones to my second sister, and my brothers. Only the comms packet to my elder sister went through. She had moved to a core planet by then, and it took months before I was able to hunt her down. When I connected at last, I felt a sense of shock so acute it spiked my cortisol levels. My sister was old.

Inside a dragon, it’s seductively easy to forget the passage of time. The last time I’d seen my sister had been on a family call a few months before I was sealed away, after she’d been accepted to her first-choice university. That was how I’d continued to see her for all this time, flush with the promise of a life to come.

Well, that life had come and been lived. She had children, and grandchildren: a parade of adults and round-cheeked toddlers with serious, unblinking eyes that pierced me across weeks and light years of separation. I could see a shadow of her in their cheekbones and the arch of their lips, a dominant genetic quirk that tricked me, if they turned their heads or smiled in just the right way, into thinking that I knew them. 

I made the effort. It had been too long since I’d had to talk, truly talk, with anyone, and the halting responses I received, never quite meshing with what I’d said, left me feeling even more unmoored. In the awkward pauses of conversation, I could always hear my sister urging in her soft, old-woman voice from just off screen for her grandchildren to tell me about themselves. But really, what was there to say? Her children had grown up hearing stories about me and the sacrifice I’d made for their sakes, but I was not a part of their lives. I was an intruder from a past of want that they’d never known. I was a stranger to them, just as they were strangers to me.

The last message they sent me was when my sister died. The notice of her passing was impersonal and aloof, the forwarding of a public obituary and nothing more. 

It was the same with all the other dragons. The long silences, the cut lines. We’d made the empire safe for the sake of those we loved, and they didn’t even know who we were anymore. To me they were family, but to my family, I was a myth.

Decades passed.

Now we come to the end. Now we come to the eve of my departure.

Departure? you might ask. To where? And I’ll answer, Somewhere else.

The exodus has been happening for a while now. Some of us fled the moment we no longer had anyone left to fight. Those dragons knew, even before we were given permission to contact our families again, that there was nothing left for them here. They went outwards, past the borders of all human exploration, imperial or otherwise. The rest of us have been following suit, one trickle at a time. Following the example of the zodiarchon who came before us. 

That time in the museum, I hadn’t been able to understand why zodiarchon had always been found outside the territories of the civilizations that had spawned them, but now, I think, I do. Children must aspire to surpass their parents, the docent had said, and I suppose you have. While I’ve been executing the empire’s campaigns and tearing hares and tigers and yes, other dragons, apart, you’ve been living and loving, all on your own. You don’t need me any longer. You’ve outgrown me, and so it’s time for me to move on as well. 

But you’re still my family, however weak that blood is now through the thinning agent of time. So I’m leaving this for you: this encrypted packet of all my stories and past, every scrap of information and understanding I’ve accumulated over the centuries. A dragon pearl of your own, if you will.

I’ve timed it so that it won’t send until I’m well out of human space. Once I’m gone, you’re free to do with it what you will. Puzzle over it for decades, delete it unread, use it as an incentive for your own children to excel in their academic studies. If you do well enough, you’ll be able to unlock a dragon’s prophecies. That’s up to you. Your future is in your own hands now. 

The history of humankind is one of expansion, contraction, and expansion. We ascend in spirals of complexity, each new iteration staged on the ashes of the one that preceded it, one incremental step at a time. Progress isn’t a straight line. It’s not a line at all. It’s a cluster of haphazard ignitions that somehow provide enough thrust to kick us out of the gravity of our existing orbits and towards something new.

But enough rambling. It’s time to go. 

I’ll take myself out to the stars. I’ll join my brethren in the unknown reaches. And when humanity expands beyond its current bounds, when you quest for the unknown and find us already there, ready to be reborn, remade into something new, you’ll know: You were not the first. And we will not be the last.

(Editors’ Note: Emily Y. Teng is interviewed by Caroline M. Yoachim in this issue.)

© 2026 Emily Y. Teng