Page 17 of The Dragon's Pet
When he returned he carefully locked the door of his room, and then opened her cage, allowing her to come out. She didn’t move from where she was sitting. The blankets were the only form of modesty she had, and she was not going to give them up easily.
“What do you want?” She asked the question with more than a touch of attitude, lifting her chin in a cocky pose that was supposed to tell him that she didn’t care what he did to her.
His response made her mouth drop open.
Vyktor stood over her at the cage door, looking all the taller as his golden eyes gazed down at her. “I want you to tell me what life as a human is like.”
“If you assholes stopped burning everything, you’d find out quickly enough,” she said when she had recovered from the shock of a question unrelated to his ongoing erotic mastery of her.
“It is regrettable that so much violence has taken place…”
“So stop it already!”
“That is difficult, given the extreme hostility we have been met with.”
“You lizards came here and started attacking us first,” Aria pointed out.
“No.”
“What? Don’t lie to me, I know exactly what happened. We all do. We saw the portal open. We lost a man in there! And then you all came flooding out…”
Vyktor’s brows dipped for a moment. “Do you really think it was that simple? Do you think we were all milling on the other side waiting for humans to let us in so we could destroy your world? Are humans truly so self-centered that they believe all of life revolves specifically around them?”
Aria got the distinct feeling that she was missing something, though she didn’t know what. He seemed almost insulted by her accusations of dragon aggression, which meant that he was either dangerously deluded or he knew something she didn’t.
“Humans respond to aggression with aggression,” she said. “We didn’t start this war. Well, not on purpose.”
“When the portal was opened, it caught us by surprise,” Vyktor explained with a tone Aria could only describe as patient. He was talking to her as if she was perhaps too dense to understand what seemed to him to be very obvious. “It caused a great deal of damage in the process. The human side of the rift is located in the middle of a desert. On the dragon side, a great chasm suddenly opened in the middle of one of our largest colonies. It took many lives.”
“Oh,” Aria said, feeling compelled to apologize, but thinking that it would not come across as sincere. “I didn’t know that, I am sorry.”
“You mentioned losing a man,” Vyktor continued. “He came tearing through the city and crashed into one of our greatest monuments. He survived the immediate impact, but fell ill hours later and passed within a day. There was nothing we could do for him, though we tried.”
“I didn’t know that,” Aria repeated herself, hating how weak the words were.
“No,” Vyktor said. “You did not, because from the beginning, the human response has been to fly your creations of aggression wherever you please, ignoring the sovereign territory of others, and once there, shoot first and never stop to question anything. So when you begin to hate us, remember, pet. We did not come to you. It was a human action which joined our worlds. It was a human action which led to the first death in this war.”
“It wasn’t my idea to turn the stupid station on,” Aria said, feeling a little defensive.
“No, but it was your idea to try to kill me in the air yesterday. It was you who came screaming toward me in your flimsy little contraption with your exploding missiles.”
She cringed a little inwardly. He’d saved her even though she’d done everything she could to kill him. But he’d had a reason to do that. He’d wanted a human to take and to train. She had been an easy target thanks to the Tornado’s malfunction.
“You would do well to look ashamed,” he growled at her. “When we looked at your planet and tried to understand what had happened, we soon discovered that although you humansresemble our flightless form in many ways, you are utterly different. You have a history, a long history of destroying the worlds of others. The forests and oceans were two worlds apart from people and they have both been decimated. We looked at what you had done to your world, and we knew what would happen to ours. General Eldor came here to destroy humanity. I came with him in the hopes of tempering his blood lust.”
When he put it that way, Aria began to understand the reason for the ferocity the dragons had shown. If they believed they were fighting an unrelenting force, it made sense that they had attacked so vigorously.
“Not everybody supports that kind of behavior,” she argued. “The pilot who flew into the portal was ordered to do so. He didn’t have a choice, no more than I had when I shot missiles at you.”
“He volunteered,” Vyktor said. “We discovered that much while we were trying to save his life. He was eager to explore a new world, so he said. Little did he realize that, much like every ‘new’ world you have ever found, it is much older than you think and it belonged to something else first.”
Aria was starting to feel guilty. Not for her own actions, but for the actions of her species present and past. Then she remembered that feeling guilty for things everyone else had done was stupid and shook her head at him.
“So you’re not totally unjustified,” she said. “But…”
“There are no buts. Is it fair that this falls so heavily on your shoulders? That you should be made an example for the sins of your kind? Perhaps not. But fate is not known for its fairness,pet. And many have suffered a great deal more than you ever will in my care.”
Somehow he was making her feel spoiled for objecting to being caged and treated as a pet. And somehow it was almost working.
