Page 18 of Meet Me in the Stars

I went to bed early, leaving the siblings to say their goodbyes and have their fun, after reminding Teddy he didn’t want to be hung over come morning. I slept in a guest room not daring to unseal the bedroom I shared with Lotus. The last six months had whooshed by me and my dragon. There were so many new kids to meet and meetings to attend about dragons in outer space. I hadn’t the time to go through our old stuff and process whatever might come up. I didn’t even have time to pay Glitter Bomb a visit before leaving Earthside. I wasn’t about to break that seal and risk sending my dragon back to sleep the night before the biggest trip of all of our lives.

***

When I first saw the Medwin 2 a month ago it looked nothing like I expected a rocket ship to look. Later I learned that was because the Medwin 2 wasn’t a rocket ship at all. It was a spacecraft that existed somewhere between luxury cruise and battleship. Only it was meant to launch itself above the atmosphere of Earthside for space exploration. It was equipped for parties and wars. I wasn’t very much interested in either of those these days. What good was dancing when my dance partner hadn’t been around in decades? Though, Castor, the engineer and pilot of the Medwin 2, tried to sell me on the dance floor during the early days when I wasn’t sure I wanted anything to do with the mission. I still suspected Medwin and Clarence put Castor up to it, because he was the only omega on the mission, and they figured that might make him my soft spot. I didn’t agree because of anything Castor said. I’d never tell anyone else, but if Teddy didn’t look so damn excited about getting to go to outer space, I probably would’ve ignored the scrolls and put them off as a prank. But if one of the egg brats wanted to go into space, that’s what we’d do.

The morning of our exit, it didn’t look much different, and my dragon was still a little disappointed the damn thing didn’t look like a rocket ship. I wasn’t sure what made him obsessed with rockets, but hopefully he’d forget about that soon. Teddy and I left the house while the others were still out cold. There was no reason to wake them up at four in the morning. We said our goodbyes the night before and we were coming back. Probably not for two or three years, but we’d be back and Castor was eighty-five percent sure we’d have contact with Earthside for most of the trip through the Medwin 2’s built-in communication devices. Mostly, I didn’t want Sequin or Daliah giving us those doubtful looks and dampening Teddy’s excitement.

We were the first of the crew to arrive besides Castor, who spent the night sleeping on the ship. It was his baby and I, for one, was glad he thought of it that way. If he babied the ship, it would probably stay in good enough shape to get there and back. He sat with Clarence and Medwin in a conference room on the Starscale Search compound. Luckily, Castor made us give him everything we intended to bring with us two weeks ago. He checked all the items for safety hazards before boxing them up and putting them in our rooms. Since outer space was deemed too dangerous for any of us to spend much time alone, we’d all have roommates. Since Castor was the only omega on the mission and it was his ship, the rest of us agreed, he got the first pick of roommates. For whatever reason, whether because I was the oldest or the widower, he chose me. I didn’t mind. Mostly, because it gave Teddy an easy out to room with his friend, Sunny, without feeling bad about it. The last bedroom was taken up by the doctor and the co-pilot, Izora and Casimir, respectively. When I asked Castor why he chose not to room with his cousin, he shrugged off the question. Later Casimir told me that they worried they’d spend too much time together between work and off hours if they shared a room. Too much time around any relative in an enclosed space could lead to drama and hurt feelings. The Medwin 2 wasn’t a small space cruiser but there wasn’t room for either of those things aboard the ship.

“Everything good, Cast?” Teddy asked, sinking into the chair next to him as one of the Starscale Search assistants put coffees down for the four of us. I nodded my thanks as Castor launched into all the checks he ran before leaving the ship. I was glad it was a long list, but I zoned him out to think about Lotus. I found myself doing that more and more as time went on. If I found myself in a boring moment, I relived a memory of her. I tried not to do it too often each day, fearing I’d eventually run out of memories, because we’d never make another one together.

Eventually, we were all there and Medwin came in to give a speech about how grateful and proud of us he was. I tuned most of that out too. I wasn’t here in service to my flight. I was here because Teddy wanted to see outer space and Lotus may have been reincarnated on some invisible planet. Flight loyalty had nothing to do with it.

Medwin and Clarence hugged us all goodbye as we followed Castor through the maze that led to the Medwin 2. Today wasn’t about settling into the ship. It was all about the lift off. There was even a special chamber we all had to stay inside of while Castor and Casimir got us off the ground and out of the atmosphere. They said that would take a couple of hours. So, as soon as I was fastened into one of the seats designed by Castor, I gave into my dragon and he put us both to sleep. I woke up for dinner after we cleared whatever height Castor approved of and then stumbled off to our shared sleeping chambers to pass out. None of them believed me that I planned to sleep the whole trip, but that’s exactly what I did. Teddy would wake me up if he needed me. Besides, there was plenty on the ship to keep him and Sunny occupied.

PART THREE

Chapter Eight

Elio StarScale

1 Year, 3 Months, 2 Weeks, and 4 Days Later

The orange star shaped scale over my heart vibrated jolting me awake.

“Huh?” my elder brother, Marsin, grunted.

I pushed myself upright. He was still at the computer command station watching for the ship that might never appear on the radar. I’d done everything within my power to bring to life the plan laid out in the Other World. Now we could only wait. Fred Moonscale had received at least one of the intended scrolls. At first, the magic pinged often as the map was projected again and again, but now more than a year had passed without any contact from the scrolls. Maybe he wasn’t coming. Maybe I’d let everyone down. If I did, my uncle would never let me live it down.

Uncle Hush was the leader of our world and some considered him the leader of all three Starscale planets. Though, his brothers, who ruled their own worlds, disagreed with that. Marsin and I were pretty sure our uncle only let us try because of his soft spot for our mother. That and he didn’t believe we could pull off the magic necessary to contact what all the older dragons called the old world. We had more than five hundred times over. Uncle Hush was flabbergasted that even one scroll made its way there. I’d never admit it, but I was too. How did one even go about contacting a man he met briefly during what the other party probably considered a fever dream, if he remembered it at all. Marsin and I slept for weeks after porting those scrolls through space to coordinates only remembered in the oldest of the paper books. It took a lot out of us, but Marsin was determined to help me on my mission. Mostly, because no one in our history had ever done such a thing. Also, no one ever made soul contract with a dead person and a living one at the same time while being dead. That’s when I carved out the future I wanted for this life. My star scale sat on the shelf and I was gone. Everyone who knew the person I was before thought I was gone for good, because I took so long to come back. But who wanted to be a beta over and over? Who wanted to live without finding someone to love forever? Not me, apparently, but somehow in the Other World, this last time I found who and what I was looking for. I don’t remember it clearly, but I have proof. Lots and lots of proof. If there’s one thing the Starscales are good at, it’s keeping records for proof later on.

The radar squealed and I sprinted across the room to look over Marsin’s shoulder. His messy, shoulder length hair was in my way, so I smoothed it down as my eyes settled on the vessel beeping across our radar.

“They’re flying right over us!” Marsin grunted. “Fucking idiots! We’re right here! Are you blind?”

“Maybe they’re looking for a place to land!”

My heart leapt into my throat and sank back down as my dragon stood up inside me. I shifted in my seat as he jiggled me around, making the star-shaped scale on my chest vibrate again. The orange oaf was the one who remembered everything. Dragons were good like that. Hopefully, if I lived long enough this time some of his memory keeping abilities might rub off on me.

“They’re circling back around!” I pointed at the screen.

“Thanks, Captain Right in Front of Our Noses,” Marsin grunted.

“Turn on the lighthouse!” I said, fighting off the urge to whack him on the back of the head like we might’ve done as kids. He was only older than me by about three minutes and that was only because he had huge feet that he bonked through his eggshell with.

“I’m doing it!” he grunted at me.

The ship circled a few more times, sinking lower with each oval, egg shape it drew around the landing field. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. My star scale was pounding now. Marsin glanced at me, his eyes locked to the tell-tale sign that our mission was successful. I touched my shoulder and winced. The claiming gland there was sore now and starting to fill up. The one of the other side was flat and dormant. They weren’t back together yet. My dragon roared inside my chest, missing his old Other World lover, but this wasn’t the time to think of that. While Marsin informed the landing field crew of the incoming ship, I scurried into the bathroom and scrubbed my face clean. I hadn’t shaved in days, leaving my beard scruffy, but there was no time to fix that now. I stripped out of my sweatpants and into a pair of denim pants with plenty of pockets. I considered grabbing a shirt, but there wasn’t a fabric in our galaxy that would hide the pulsating scale sitting over my heart. My dragon roared again, threatening to force his way out of me, if I didn’t get a move on. Only once he stepped off that ship, my mission really started. If he didn’t remember what happened, he might not believe a word that came out of my mouth. He was a Moonscale, not a Starscale. They didn’t keep records the special way we did. Either way, putting it off wouldn’t help any of us.

Chapter Nine

Fred

The trip took a few months longer than Castor originally estimated it would. Not that I noticed until they woke me up. I kept my promise to sleep the whole trip. I woke up to Teddy shaking my shoulder and shoving a pepperoni roll into my mouth.

“Huh?” I huffed through the bread.

“Eat up!” he grinned from ear to ear. “Castor is looking for a place to land!”

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