Lost Change

Chapter 105

I lifted my head up from the bowl of sand as the door to the simple hospital room began to slide open. I felt numb inside and did not want another interruption. Minna didn't need one, either.

Trenil had gotten the shuttle pilot to rush us all back to his city, and he had brought everyone straight to a hospital. The doctors had immediately started treating the injured guards. Trenil had seemed to understand that my instincts would not tolerate a bunch of strangers moving around Minna while she was still unconscious... so he had avoided the issue entirely by slipping me a sunburst berry covered in the stupid tranquilizer while we were all still on the shuttle.

I had been so tired and hungry that I had eaten the whole thing before I had realized it, and I had only managed to come out of the doped up state after the doctors had finished operating on Minna. A vet had checked me out while I was sedated and had put a bandage over the nasty gash along my tail, but they didn't seem to think I was in any danger from poison. Ivy had stayed with me while the vet looked me over, then kept me company until the sedatives wore off.

The hospital apparently worked with bond companions often enough to understand Minna would want to see me when she woke up, so Trenil had been able to slip a heat lamp and a simple bowl of sand set up in her room for me. I had curled up beneath the heat lamp and stared at Minna from that corner of the room.

Minna's leg was in a cast and her head was covered in bandages. She hadn't woken up yet, but the doctors said she should soon. That she just needed some more rest. Strange machines beeped and hummed near her, and I could barely hear the soft sound of her breathing beneath those noises.

I had nothing to do but watch my sleeping friend. To stare at her broken leg. The bruises on her head.

The scratches and scars on her arms.

This all happened to her because she is with you.

If you stay with her, she will end up dying.

The words of Minna's father haunted me as the long minutes passed into hours.

I looked blankly at the door and waited for it to finish opening. Maybe it would be a doctor with some more news.

Minna's father limped into the room, wearing a brace over one of his legs, and the door closed behind him. He looked at his sleeping daughter, then at the machines near her.

I felt a sinking feeling as I remembered what I had promised him. I had hated her so much when we had met, but now... leaving Minna was the worst thing I could think of...

No. I looked back at the wounded Kymari on the bed. The second worst.

Minna's father turned to look at me, and the sinking feeling turned to a crushing one.

I wasn't sure what he would do if I tried to go back on what I had promised, but I was sure it wouldn't be pretty. And... he was right. Minna was in the hospital now because of me. Because I was in her life. If I wasn't in her life... she would be on some other world. A happy shuttle pilot following her dreams, safe and sound.

But instead she was seriously wounded. Unconscious. In a hospital.

It wouldn't be right to keep endangering her.

The tracker would have to go. Any attempt at running from Minna would fail if she could track me. Without it I could vanish into another park, or maybe even the wilderness between cities, and the Kymari wouldn't find me. And even if somehow they did, they would have no way of knowing I was the same 'fire lizard', even if it would be awfully coincidental to find a second silver dragonet out on its own. I didn't have any way to get the tracker out, but I suspected her father would.