Their child was sleeping peacefully against the scale of a dragon, but the young couple were still silently staring at the sky without talking.

Jose was hanging around, for no good reason he guessed, but the things his old ears had heard during the last few hours felt like they were engraved on his mind. He hadn't even protested when Anne had silently shoved money into his hands before running after the dragon who was disguised as a copper haired woman.

He looked down and realized that he was still clutching the tightly rolled currency and shook his head in silent argument with himself. The kid shouldn't be feeling guilty about escaping from the streets just because others were still on them. She also shouldn't be carrying cash… unless she still couldn't get her own cards.

He made up his mind to find her and ask more details, but he knew that it was just a distraction from the overwhelming reality of the dragon. Another detail rattled loose from the many things the frustrated dragon had said. Apparently powering up another dragon's scale wasn't easy.

The young singer at the place down by the water, she'd told him to take the scale to that kid if it needed to be recharged again. Certainly the kid sang well enough to be a bard out of legends, enchanting people with nothing but music, but Jose couldn't quite believe that he was actually a dragon. He didn't radiate danger in his movements the way the stranger had, despite the harmless encounters they'd shared, or the way the copper haired beauty did.

And also, Jose was pretty sure the young man was working at a fast food place about a mile from the bar he sang in. Somehow it was easier to believe in dragon scales embedded with magical patterns that controlled their temperature, that could be recharged by another dragon singing the right song into them, than it was to believe that young dragons worked as fry cooks. That just… made them seem too much like ordinary people for comfort.

A childish temptation to go there and order something to see if it tasted magical whispered in the back of his mind.

--

"Wait, he's the Emperor?" Anne questioned doubtfully. "Really?"

"Yes," Tanwen affirmed that they'd heard correctly.

"That's horrible," Anne informed her with wide eyes.

"Because he's not human?" Tanwen asked a bit sharply.

"No, because they keep people in camps like the Nazis did, and during the epidemic they've done horrible things like welding apartments with sick people living in them shut, and just letting them all die! And he's the ruler who did all this stuff? He's horrible!" She turned to Chris and insisted, "You can't help him!"

"It's not that simple," Chris protested helplessly.

"Sounds quite reasonable to me," Tanwen huffed. "At least if you assume that you're trying to keep even more humans alive. The elders aren't wrong about one thing, there are too many of you, and humans are destructive to their habitats."

"People are dying horribly!" Anne argued.

"Death is always horrible," Chris replied reasonably. "Fewer deaths are better."

"Fewer? More deaths would be better for the world I think," Tanwen argued.

Both Chris and Anne looked at her with incredulous expressions, and Mac spoke up suddenly, "Didn't Amaru say that his son woke up about the same time Chris did? I'm sure the president is still the one controlling the country. The rulers there have always claimed to have had dragons on their side, and even in their ancestry, and he's probably just using the appearance of the dragon emperor to bolster his position."

"That's just as bad," Anne complained. "He shouldn't be supporting someone who would do such horrible things!"

"Who cares if humans kill each other?" Tanwen asked cooly. "Why should we interfere? Wouldn't it be more wrong to interfere directly. To raise you like cattle and cull the aggressive ones?"

Anne stared at Tanwen with her mouth open, while Chris was afraid to admit that he had often interfered directly, participated in wars, and nursed the ill. He was afraid that he'd been breaking some guiding law that he hadn't learned properly.

"A ruler should rule," Mac said softly. When Chris turned to raise an eyebrow at the old man, he added, "An odd sentiment from someone raised in a country ruled by committees? But if you take the position, you should take the responsibility."

Tanwen commented with interest, "I have read about this country that stacks up more laws with every year, even if they conflict with existing ones, and runs on a ridiculously complex system of precedence. It changes its leadership as often as a university club would, does it not?"

"Sort of," Chris agreed.

"I just feel like if there's an emperor, he should be able to stop the president from doing horrible things…" Anne complained weakly. She looked back and forth between the two dragons and edged closer to Mac.

Chris looked at his phone and then asked without expecting an answer, "I wonder if he knows that as far as the rest of the world is concerned, he's taking responsibility for everything the government there does?"

Tanwen tilted her head and gazed at the younger dragon curiously. "All of the humans? Or the planet?"

"What?" Chris asked.

"Yes, humans. Maybe. I mean… who knows how many people aren't actually human?" Anne responded nervously, with a sideways glance at Mac and then Chris. "The rest of the world means everybody who isn't there. The people."

"Many people will judge him," Chris added.

Tanwen nodded soberly. "Yes," she agreed. "I too hold him responsible for the actions of his tribe. It is true. I think I understand what you mean, I just don't think that it is a bad thing if more humans die."

Mac and Anne both took a step backwards, while Chris had to stop himself from doing the same thing. The instinctive protest that rose to his lips died before being spoken. It was an inhumane sentiment, but she wasn't human, and neither was he. He glanced at Anne and Mac, at his friends.

"They are people, not just humans," he argued.

"Yes. I like them too. But even though I'm young, if not as young as you, I can see the strain that they put upon the world," Tanwen replied reasonably.

"How can you say that you like them but still hope that they will die off?" Anne protested.

Tanwen shrugged. "Do you like cats? But in many places humans systematically kill cats to prevent overpopulation."

Chris wanted to protest that it wasn't the same, but he was afraid that maybe it was the same. He still had memories from his early life as a snake, and how he had been hunted. Amaru had also said that every species had a few of the wise, as though to dragons humans really were no different than deer or cats.

If you couldn't draw a line for who counted as people by their species, then where did that leave you? And yet, he didn't think that killing and eating other species was wrong, because it was what almost every species did to survive. Some waited patiently for the nutrients of the dead to reach them, as plants did, but everything cycled life from one entity to another in one fashion or another.

"Where does the life that runs across the world in strings come from?" Chris asked suddenly.

Tanwen blinked at him. "I do not know."