The door swung shut. Its click did not register through the buzzing that had enveloped Rav's body and head. Alone in the dark room, he felt the floor beneath his knees.

His fingers found their way through the bars. They did not brush the silky wing they should have found. He tried again, and again, until something firm and velvety met his fingertips. It was cold. It was not breathing. The cage slid from his grip and rattled to the ground. Rav pulled his knees up to his chest and started to sob.

She was gone.

He had just killed the world's last Skydragon.

The horror of it forced open a yawning pit in his stomach. He wanted to throw up. He rocked back and forth instead as the sobs entrenched themselves, deeper and deeper, until they were tearing up the very base of his being. Raking him with thorns that sank in and did not let go.

There were so many times he could have released her. The cage had not even been locked. He could have snuck in while Indra fetched the captain after the key broke, or after they left, when the door opened again. He could have slipped the cage latch when Indra sent him in alone today. And in all the time he'd spent moping in his hammock after supper, he could have gotten the dragonette out, returned her to the island, and gone back to bed without anyone noticing. He even still had Indra's wire in his pocket.

Nothing had stopped him but an order from a captain he didn't even want to listen to. Was that really it? Nothing but an order?

That just made it worse.

The ship rocked him gently as the tears kept coming. For the lost mother and the missing siblings and the baby who had lived alone until she met him on the island. For the small moments they had spent together when she was still alive and well. For the brightness of her eyes and her manner then, now snuffed out. Forever.

When he had cried himself out, the tears subsided into a wretched calm. It soothed his aching throat and the knot in his stomach, then swallowed his whole body, bit by bit. Nothing but an order. Had he really thought he could protect anything without disobeying orders? He had never been worthy of looking after the dragonette in the first place.

Rav shut his eyes and let everything disappear into the soft fabric of his pillow. The image of an open notebook appeared, filled with his writing. He stuffed it away. A tidy box of glass bottles replaced it.

He was no better than the captain.

He rolled over and blocked the image of the box, too. Up sprang the reproachful look of the dragonette as he raided her home.

The ship rocked again.

Wasn't the sky around the island normally calm? Rav pulled his pillow over his head. The sky itself must be livid at the death of its most beautiful species. Maybe if Dreamcatcher was punched from the air, it would pay for this. A gust of wind whistled along the outside of the hull. The ship's rigging creaked, then thrummed like a stringed instrument. Thunder rumbled in the distance.

No. Not thunder. Please not thunder.

Suddenly wide awake, Rav leaped to his feet. Already he could hear the patter of footsteps up on deck. A gust wrenched the ship, and Dreamcatcher's nose swung in a wide arc, her front mooring rope torn loose. Rav winced for the tree it had been tied to. He wrestled the lid off the nearest crate. Nobody had come for ropes yet. That meant nobody was tying things down. Rav snatched an armload and stumbled from his room.

The ship shook with the wind now battering it from every side. The slam of the hatch indicated his crewmates' return; moments later, Manish was in the galley with quick hands and a padded crate for their remaining food supplies. Indra's toolbox snapped shut in the engine room. Sanjay ran past from the bow and disappeared into the navigation room, his footsteps drowned out by the mounting howl of the wind.

There was a great jolt as the second mooring rope snapped. The ship heaved backwards and began to pinwheel. Rav had flashbacks of whirling in the thunderhead just moments before the steering wheel's rattle vibrated the walls. Dreamcatcher righted herself into the wind. The captain was at the wheel. Rav joined Sanjay in the navigation room and tied down the last of the furniture as the winds began to scream. The ship heaved up and down as though riding on water, not air. Her engines throbbed to life.

The pitch of the ship threw Rav sideways like a rag doll.

"Go somewhere safe!" shouted Sanjay over the din. Even twice Rav's weight, he had to brace himself against the table to stay steady. Rav gripped the wall-railings out to the doorway and found himself face-to-face with the hallway. At the far end was the captain's cabin.

He had another chance.

Before he could think, he was sprinting down the hallway. The ship hurtled sideways. Rav reeled into a wall and clung to its railing. The cabin door was shut. He rattled its handle. How could he open it in this? He fumbled for the wire in his pocket, but before he could pull it out, something shimmered around the door. Rav fell back with a shriek and scuttled crab-like down the hallway. He froze in the middle of it.

A silvery outline less material than mist slipped through the floor by the cabin. It coiled there, drawing the last of its tail up from the lower hull where the creaking always paused now. Its head lifted taller than he was, but it had the dragonette's eyes.

Then it was gone, into the cabin.

Rav sat in the hallway, mid-getaway. His arms wouldn't move. Was he hallucinating now? That had been an adult Skydragon. Those were gone. The thing he'd just seen, it couldn't be there. It couldn't be real... but the door now swung limply, open a crack.

The door.

Rav pulled himself up on the railing and forced himself step by step down the hallway. He pushed the door tentatively. The only light inside was the bright slashes of lightning. Rav fumbled across to the desk. His hand found the latch of the porthole over it and yanked it wide open. 

Rain knifed in. The ship was pointed into the wind, and the cabin was right in the prow. The notebooks the captain had shifted earlier sent up spray as huge drops smacked their covers. Inside those were all his sketches of his island finds, all his notes about them, and all the plants he had collected, pressed between the pages. The bucket with the live bubble-root wobbled on a shelf by the window. Rav lifted the plant out and released it through the window. Then he yanked the bucket handle and stepped back.

The bucket tipped like a slow-motion waterfall as the ship rocked sideways. It fell, towards all the samples the captain would only assume the storm ruined. Water swamped the notebooks. Still full enough to give it weight, the bucket careened into the boxes of delicate glass bottles. The captain's new insect collection slid off the desk's end and dissolved into spilled alcohol and razor-edged glass.

What else was there? Rav scanned the room. His eyes landed on the rolled-up paper in the corner. The captain had tried to set that with the notebooks. Rav unrolled it. Lightning illuminated the wind patterns, pressure contours, and compass directions that swathed the page. Off to its side, he could just make out the paint-splatter of an archipelago. One island was flagged with a star. In the page's center, a cartoonishly large X underscored an outline of the floating island.

A map? Mapping the probable location of the island without stars or land to compare to took some serious knowledge of the sky.

Too good for his liking. Water had streamed from the table into a puddle on the floor not far from where the map had stood. Rav returned it to its corner and tipped it with a finger. It landed with a wet splat. The paper buckled, unrolling slowly as if in pain. Inked lines bled and blurred.

Rav's whole body tingled with both savage pleasure and mind-numbing fear at what he was doing. He leaped in his skin as something touched his shoulder. It was a flag on the wall, pulled loose by the wind. He wrenched it down and threw it on the map for good measure. The wet fabric pressed the paper further into despair.

When he was sure every piece of the captain's new collection would be unsalvageable, Rav slipped out of the cabin and went to his room. He tripped on the cage just inside the door. Oh gods. He still had to hide the dragonette's body. He had to make the captain believe it was gone.

Rav grabbed the cage and made his way to the ship's bathroom. Wind howled up through the floor at its far end, icy and wet, making the lantern on the wall gutter wildly. The perforated metal rattled. That would do. Rav dropped to his knees and crawled across to the quivering panel. One of its bolts was already gone, probably courtesy of this ship that liked shedding bolts as much as it liked tearing rudders and snarling lines. Two more bolts were loose enough to turn with his fingers. Rav undid them and threw them in the bathroom corner.

With only one bolt left to hold it, the metal floor panel bumped in the wind like the lid on a pot of boiling water. Rav wedged the cage between the toilet and the washbasin. He popped the latch and lifted out the dragonette. In her final moments, she had curled into a tight ball, with her head hidden and her wings wrapped around her. Rav cradled the cold, stiff body. His throat hurt so much, it was becoming difficult to breathe. He drew his shirt around the dragonette and stumbled back to his cabin. The door clicked shut behind him, leaving him in darkness.

Had he really done it?

Suddenly terrified that Indra or the captain lurked in the darkness, Rav hid the dragonette in the still-open rope crate before he lit the lantern. The room was exactly as he had left it. The contents of its bolted crates thumped and crinkled. His hammock swayed. He was alone.

It was over.

Adrenaline drained away like water from a cracked bowl. He had fixed one thing, but the most important piece was still irreparably broken. Rav scooped up the dragonette again. There was an old newspaper laid as padding in one of the crates, unneeded now that the food it had padded was gone. Rav disassembled it and wrapped the dragonette's body, one sheet at a time. When that was done, he gave her a long, final hug and returned her to her favourite place at the bottom of his bag. All the clothing he owned went on top. He still didn't trust the captain not to go through that, so he laid the bag in the empty food crate with the rest of his belongings and latched it shut. Now it just looked like he had stashed them here to keep them in place during the storm. 

He was going to get the dragonette to land in her territory and give her a proper burial. He owed her that much.