Wings of Gratitude

The announcement came over the speakers at four forty on a Tuesday, and Rana Allbright heard maybe half of it.

"Flight 2271 to Denver has been... due to operational circumstances... passengers are advised..."

Operational circumstances. That was new. Usually they at least pretended to have a reason.

She stood up from the row of vinyl seats, which was a mistake, because the seat had been slowly cooking her back for the last hour and standing up meant feeling the sweat. Skyreach Oasis was a privately run airport out in the desert, all shiny floors and weak air conditioning and a long indoor market that sold jerky and crystals and, for some reason, novelty socks. Outside, the heat came off the tarmac in visible waves.

Rana was twenty-three, a software developer, and currently stuck in the middle of nowhere with a dead layover and a cancelled flight. Her laptop bag weighed about as much as her regrets.

"Next flight to Denver is tomorrow morning," the gate agent said, before Rana even asked. The agent looked like she'd said it forty times already today. "There's a shuttle to a hotel in town, but it's full. The next shuttle is at nine."

"Nine tonight?"

"Nine tonight."

Rana thanked her and walked away and pulled out her phone. There was one person she could text. There was really only ever one person.

**Rana:** flight got cancelled. Stranded at skyreach oasis. Any chance you're within a hundred miles of the middle of nowhere

She stared at the screen. Then she added:

**Rana:** I know it's a lot to ask. I owe you already. I'd pay gas, obviously. And food. Whatever you want.

Galen Sandman. Twenty-eight, or at least he said twenty-eight, and he had the kind of face that made you believe it and then made you wonder about it later. He'd saved her company two years ago. Not in a vague, "he was supportive" way. In a real way. She'd been the junior dev at her friend's startup when somebody breached their whole system, and Rana had been the one who found it on a foggy morning two years ago, and she'd panicked so hard she'd called the only person she knew who seemed to know everything about everything. Galen had talked her through containment, then shown up with coffee and a laptop and sat next to her until dawn, calm as a lake, and by the time the client called at nine there was a story to tell them that did not end in lawsuits.

She'd never really figured out how to stop owing him after that. He kept doing things. Small things. Ride things. Fix things. Show-up-when-your-car-dies things.

The phone buzzed.

**Galen:** on my way. Don't take any shuttles.

**Rana:** are you sure?? it's like an hour+

**Galen:** less. Stay by the doors. I'm coming in hot.

She typed *what does that mean* and then didn't send it, because she had learned that asking Galen follow-up questions about his phrasing was generally a mistake.

She found a seat near the arrivals doors where the AC actually worked, and she waited, and she thought about the owing thing, which was a thing she thought about a lot. Galen never mentioned it. That was the problem. If he ever asked for anything, ever, she'd have to say yes, and they both knew it, and he never asked, which meant the debt just sat there growing interest.

"Excuse me, miss." A security guard, tan uniform, sweat mustache. "You can't sit at the arrivals doors. Traffic flow."

"There's no traffic!"

"Flow," he said, like that settled it, and moved on to harass a woman with three duffel bags.

Rana got up and stood instead, which apparently was legal.

It was around five when the first scream happened.

She didn't see it start. She heard it, a woman near the east windows, and then a ripple of it, the way a crowd goes from one voice to everyone at once. Rana turned and looked out the glass wall at the runway, and what she saw did not make sense for a second.

Something enormous came down out of the glare. Wings, first. Wings like a barn roof, catching the light, and then a body under them, dark scaled bronze, taloned, landing on the service road with a crack she felt through the floor. Dust went up in a sheet. A luggage cart somewhere honked, which was a very human response to a very unhuman problem.

The creature folded its wings and stood there. It had to be forty feet nose to tail. It turned its head toward the terminal.

People were running. Alarms went off somewhere. Two security golf carts peeled out toward it, and a man with a rifle that looked way too serious for an airport came jogging from the other direction, shouting into a radio.

And Rana, twenty-three years old and not stupid, stood there thinking one thought, which was: *i know that landing.*

She'd seen it once before. Smaller version. Two years ago, on a foggy morning outside the office park, she'd watched Galen come down out of the sky after a night flight, and land in an empty lot with casual ease, and shake himself back into a human shape, and say "don't scream, please, I hate when people scream."

The body was different. Bigger. But the angle of descent, the little wing-flare at the end, the way it folded its wings left over right. That was him.

"Oh no," she said out loud. "Oh no, no, no!"

The guards were getting out of the golf carts. The rifle guy had his rifle pointed. The creature, Galen, had lifted one enormous clawed foreleg in what she strongly suspected was supposed to be a wave and was instead being interpreted as a threat.

Rana ran.

She went through the doors, past the traffic-flow guard yelling at her, down the ramp onto the hot tarmac, straight across the open ground between the guards and the dragon, arms up over her head.

"STOP! HE'S FRIENDLY! HE'S WITH ME!"

Nobody stopped. The rifle guy shifted his aim, and she cut sideways so she was between the barrel and the dragon, which in hindsight was the single dumbest thing she has ever done, and she has done some things.

"Miss, get out of the way!" the rifle guy shouted.

"He's a friend. He's here for me. He's my ride." She was aware of how that sounded. She was aware of everything about how that sounded. "Look, he did the wave. That's a friendly wave."

"That is a forty-foot dragon."

"He's actually closer to fifty, I think, but that's not the point."

Behind her, the dragon lowered its head. Its eye was the size of a car door, gold slit pupil, and it fixed on her, and the voice that came out of it did not come out of the mouth so much as it arrived inside her skull, warm and familiar and deeply tired.

*Hello, Rana. I appear to have caused a problem.*

"You THINK?" she said, out loud, to a dragon, in front of armed men. She turned back around. "Okay. Okay. Nobody shoot. Sir. Rifle guy. He's a licensed courier. Sort of. There's paperwork. There's a guild. He does transport, magical transport, it's a whole thing, it's registered, I'm pretty sure it's registered..."

The rifle guy looked at the dragon. The dragon looked at the rifle guy. Somewhere behind them the golf cart guards were both on the phone with people who were presumably higher up the security food chain, talking very fast.

"Registered," the rifle guy repeated.

"With a guild," Rana said. "Sandman. He's... his name is Galen Sandman. He's a liaison. Guild courier. It's on his card."

"You have a card?"

"He has a card. Somewhere. In whatever pocket a dragon has."

The dragon made a sound that from anything else would have been a cough, but from something that big was more like a landslide clearing its throat. *The card is in my other form. If the gentleman with the rifle would permit me, I can change and produce identification.*

"Don't change," the rifle guy barked. "Not yet. Nobody changes anything."

"Sir, he's the nicest person I know," Rana said. "Person. Being. He carried a whole rescue dog out of a flood once. He brings me soup when I'm sick. He's not going to eat anyone, I promise you, the worst thing he's ever done to anybody is be late."

*That was once,* said the voice in her head, with dignity. *And it was fog.*

"He says it was fog," Rana reported.

The rifle guy's radio crackled. A voice on it said something about corporate liaison and approvals and somebody named Devraj needing to come see this in person. The rifle guy's shoulders came down maybe half an inch.

Then the heat got involved.

It was already a hundred and six outside. The tarmac shimmered. And whatever heat management a forty-foot bronze dragon does just by existing, the guards' golf carts both started beeping, and one of the terminal's exterior floodlights popped, and a woman's shoes began, audibly, to squeak.

The radio voice said, very clearly, "Get the dragon and whoever that is into shade until we sort this out. There's a maintenance shed past the west fence. Move."

"There," Rana said, pointing. "The shed. We'll go to the shed. Everyone stays calm."

Galen folded his wings down flat against his sides, which the guards all flinched at, and then he turned, carefully, talons clicking on the asphalt, and began to walk toward the west fence. Rana walked beside his front leg, which was roughly the size of her apartment, feeling the heat come off him in waves and thinking, distantly, that this was somehow going to be her fault by the end of it.

It usually was, with Galen. In the nicest possible way.

The shed was big. Big enough for a dragon, barely. Galen had to fold himself in like a lawn chair going back in the box, wings pressed tight, tail curled around three barrels of what the label said was coolant. Rana stood in the doorway and watched the whole thing and tried not to laugh, because laughing felt dangerous right now.

The door clicked shut behind her and the sound outside went muffled. Somewhere out there, men with radios were having a very bad Tuesday.

*Well,* Galen said, into her head. *This is a fine mess.*

"You don't say."

*I should have called ahead. I should have flown in from the east, away from the windows. I should have, frankly, not been fifty feet long at five in the afternoon at a civilian airport.*

"Yeah. All of those. Also, hi. Thanks for coming. Also, what the hell?"

*In order: hello, you are welcome, and I panicked slightly when I saw the crowd at the windows and forgot to be small about it.*

Rana leaned against the door and looked at him. Bronze scales everywhere, filling