Dragon's Isolation - Miranda Martin Page 0,26

my chest. I tighten my arm around Amara pulling her closer. She murmurs in her sleep but doesn’t wake up.

How?

Now, for the first time, I feel something is wrong. Forgetting my son?

My thoughts spin out of control. I forgot my son? Anger wars with terror leaving my arms trembling as I struggle to remain in control of my own mind. Forgetting everything else I can justify. It’s fine, I don’t need to remember the names of random humans or others.

Forget Amara? Forget Malcolm?

I would have thought it impossible. How could a male forget his own child?

Cold stretches through my limbs paralyzing me. It leaves no room for doubt. I’ve contracted the virus.

I’m sick and if we don’t find a cure, I could lose everything.

7

AMARA

I wake up stiff and sore. As I stretch, Shidan shifts and gives me room.

“Mmm, morning,” I murmur, barely opening my eyes.

“Yes, my treasure,” he says softly.

I roll my shoulders then my head as I sit up. Multiple bones crack and crackle as I move.

“God, I hate sleeping in the desert,” I say.

“Do you?” he asks.

The utter curiosity in his voice and on his face makes my stomach drop. He knows this. It’s not like we have secrets between us. He’s forgetting more.

“Yeah,” I say, smiling and trying to cover over the fear making my chest hurt and my stomach feel like a hard ball of ice. “We should get going.”

“You need to eat,” he says, rising up and going to the pack.

The small fire has burned down to ash and to be sure I’m not hungry. Watching the man I love lose his mind isn’t appetite inducing. He ignores me though, pulling out some of the carefully wrapped foods.

“I’ll eat as we go,” I say.

He’s losing it fast if he got this much worse overnight. I don’t know how long we have but it’s obviously not enough. We need to find a cure now. Addison told me in private she’s worried that the damage to their brains could be permanent. That if it goes too far the infected Zmaj might never recover, never get their memories back.

“Are you sure?” he asks, looking over his shoulder

“Yes,” I say, walking over and gathering up the things that lie scattered outside the pack.

I don’t want to waste a minute. Not on eating, not on packing, nothing. If it wasn’t on the edge of suicidal to travel without supplies I’d leave it all behind to get moving now.

He won’t be swayed from his insistence on feeding me though. He unwraps the meat, moving in what looks like slow freaking motion, and pulls out three pieces. He hands two to me and pops one in his mouth.

Finally he replaces the wrapping and by the time I’ve packed everything else that was removed from the pack he’s put the meat back in. I’ve also finished my first piece of meat and put the second into my mouth by this time.

He slings the pack over his shoulder and then scoops me up. I indicate the direction we need to go, and he nods as if he knew it already, but I know he’s covering. I can see it in his eyes. I know him too well. He can’t hide the fact that he’s lost out here.

“Run, my love,” I whisper in his ear. “Please run.”

He doesn’t answer with words but with actions. I don’t know if he’s afraid or responding to my own unspoken fear, but he runs and runs fast. It’s almost as if we’re flying across the desert. Each leap he takes we go for a dozen yards, and he barely touches down before he’s leaping forward again.

We make great time across the desert. The suns aren’t fully above the horizon when the wreck of the generation ship appears and dominates the horizon.

Seeing the wreck again stirs old emotions I haven’t looked at in years. The sheer size of the thing is crazy. It’s bigger than any building in the City. It’s bigger than any dozen buildings together in the City.

It makes me feel small and brings back all the old memories. That life, who I was, none of that is me any longer. I was angry. Fighting everything and everyone. It’s who I was when we crashed here, but all of that was before. Before Shidan and before Malcolm.

The structure of the ship is like a massive skyscraper rising up like a gray-black finger trying to scrape the suns above it. I don’t know and can’t imagine how many people