At first he moved cautiously, leery of the boats that were powered like the carts that traveled the roads, but after a while he ignored them. The child had warned him of rumors about heavy patrols along the coast, but they seemed to have eyes only for their own kind.

His hunt beneath the waves took so long that he wondered if it might not have been faster to fly south in search of the last heart he had carved himself. It was normal for creatures to grow smaller and more sparsely in the cooler oceans, but they were fewer and scrawnier than he expected. Despite his hunger, he was careful to take only a few of each.

He had still not eaten his fill by the time the sun neared the rim of the horizon, but he had restored much, and it would be sufficient for another turn of the moon. He had much to teach, and much to learn. He had misjudged the mankind, and the consequences of that were obviously not simple.

The seafolk gathered around him again when he released his compressed form and rose. They chattered joyfully as he launched himself into the air, and he circled them several times before turning toward the mountains, to their great delight.

--

Anne lay in a strange bed, slowly reducing a box of tissues to sodden scraps, while telling a stranger who might be crazier than she was, about how her life had crumbled around a single mistake.

She looked at the clean, dry, tissue in her hand, and marveled at its softness. The bed that cradled her aching body felt just as soft and clean, even though the man in the chair beside her had muttered about dust while settling her into it the first time. Her nose was still dripping steadily, but it was no longer running like a faucet, and she was no longer painfully thirsty.

She was still hungry, because the man who had jokingly claimed to be a dragon, told her quite firmly that she needed to work up to food. His name was Chris, his hair shimmered like gold, and water rippled across his skin when she looked at him, but she couldn't trust him. She couldn't trust anyone.

She told him everything anyway. She didn't expect him to believe her, because no one had believed her, not even her own mother. But she told him about Juan, about the enemy who had taken everything.

--

Chris listened to Anne talk about the man, because of course it was a man, that she now regarded as her enemy, and thought that maybe it was too bad he didn't plan on eating anyone.

Juan Torres had presented himself as successful, romantic, and looking for a wife. Anne had been young and gullible. Chris was not at all surprised to hear that the man had stolen her college trust fund, but the way he'd done it had been nasty, vicious, and unfortunately quite successful.

They had lived together for a year, after a whirlwind courtship, ostensibly to prevent Anne from regretting rushing into marriage with a man she didn't know that well. Her family and friends had been very supportive of the relationship, and Juan had been very open and trusting with her, giving her access to his accounts and even taking her to Spain and introducing her to his grandparents there.

Unfortunately, Anne had trustingly reciprocated, and given Juan access to everything she had. By the time she noticed that money had been disappearing from her trust fund every month, most of it was gone. She had confronted him, and he had denied knowing anything about it, and assured her that he would help her report it and have the withdrawals traced.

She had woken up with policemen in her apartment, feeling horribly sick, and surrounded by drug paraphernalia. She had been arrested. Tests had revealed the drugs in her system. No one listened when she told them that she'd never used drugs in her life.

She had a history of psychiatric evaluations regarding hallucinations, her account had a recent history of large cash withdrawals, and her ex fiance sadly testified to her addiction. Her family and friends testified to her history of odd behavior. Juan moved to another city immediately after she was convicted, claiming to be heartbroken by her accusations, and unable to remain where they had lived together.

Her mother was the one who told her about it, and then told her that she never wanted to see her again. When Anne was finally released, she'd tried to go home anyway, but her parents had threatened to call the police if she didn't leave. No one would hire her with her new criminal record and no permanent address, and all of her accounts were empty.

Her story was heartbreaking, but it didn't really matter to Chris. There were always humans who preyed upon other humans. What mattered was that Anne really did know everything that he needed to know in order to borrow Juan's identity, which surprised him a little. Most people had to look at their cards to give out their own licence numbers, and had trouble remembering their own passwords, let alone those of others.

He spent the first part of the afternoon browsing Juan's social media. The man had changed his old banking and email passwords to something Anne couldn't guess, but had changed his social accounts to an old one that he'd used on a gaming account before. Chris didn't post anything but he did gather a lot of useful information, including access to a new email account that turned out to be using an old password.

He set up another email account using the same name, but a new password on another site. He also set up a new online checking account and credit line in Juan's name, which was shockingly easy, because the man had a very good credit rating. He made one small alteration to Juan's information on those accounts, he replaced the middle initial C. that stood for Carlos with Christopher. It was too convenient a coincidence to pass up.

When Chris finished, he filled out forms for replacement identification and vaccination records as though Juan had lost his wallet. He used the new credit line to pay the fees. He offered to do the same for Anne, but she told him that she hadn't lost her wallet, she'd buried it, although she didn't tell him where.

She seemed feverish but stable, so he made her a soup before he left, and went to buy the rest of the medicine that she should take before the stores closed. He didn't fill out the pass, since he could claim that he hadn't understood that it wasn't already complete, and it was good for a week. He also stopped by the bar and got the address of the fast-food shop, talked to Mac for a moment, and left feeling much more cheerful about life.

He didn't head for the mountain until after he'd checked on Anne and eaten an entire bag of raw potatoes. He'd almost eaten a dog that had threatened him on his way home, but Amaru had said that he shouldn't eat the heart of anything, not even a fish, until some kind of echo had cleared from his pattern.

Chris hoped that Amaru would be willing to come to Mac's apartment to teach him. He didn't want to leave Anne alone for long until her fever finally broke. It was part of why he'd admitted that he was a dragon, confirming her guess that he wasn't human. Even if he and Amaru maintained human forms, their conversations in the language of dragons wouldn't sound much like a human foreign language.

--

He hurried toward the mountain, with one eye on the sky. Another thing to ask the child about. The vessels that streaked through the air at speeds that he couldn't match seemed to be blind, since none reacted to his presence in the sky below them.

He had noticed a few of them leaving the city during the morning, and had assumed that they mimicked the hours of sea going vessels, for much the same reasons, to take advantage of the weather patterns that followed dawn and dusk across the Earth. But there were many more of them both coming and going at this hour.

"Airplanes," he muttered the word the child had given in the tongue of the tribe that had built at the foot of the mountain.

The largest carts were called 'Trucks' and the small ones were usually 'Cars'. He still wanted to catch a car that ran with lightning in its belly and take it apart. The ones that ran on fires that burned were also interesting, but a wheel that turned on the rising heat was actually quite possible if you had thought of it in the first place.

He couldn't imagine how the lightning was harnessed into a flow that would turn wheels though. All of the cables that carried it had metals in their cores, but he couldn't figure out how one would first catch, and then force lighting to flow in the direction that they wanted it to go, let alone store it in the belly of a car.