As the days went by, Ekhazyrnkh integrated into the crew. Cir mind became a whirlwind of names and faces.

The humans all looked so strange. Ekhazyrnkh was used to distinguishing between individuals by scale and spine patterns and by scent. But the humans had no scales or spines, and the movies Ekhazyrnkh had seen where humans so rarely referenced the scent of something proved accurate: compared to dragons, humans really couldn’t smell at all. Those movies proved useful now— and wouldn’t that prove something to Razan when ce got home, rie had never approved of Ekhazyrnkh’s love of the things— because now Ekhazyrnkh knew how to distinguish humans.

It was mostly in the hair, ce concluded. Humans loved to personalize the stuff. Cut it, grow it, braid it, make art with it. But they didn’t change it nearly as much as they changed their clothes— clothes were a much less reliable form of identification than most of cir favorite movies indicated. But hair. Hair was a much more accurate indicator. Not perfect, because sometimes humans had the same color and style, but far better than clothing.

Captain Lilah wore her straight, night-dark hair in a long tassel that was easy to twist into a knot and put a helmet over. Zach’s hair was a faded blue and so short he almost didn’t have any. Isabel’s hair hung in dozens of beaded braids. Klaus and Julie both had yellow curls, though Julie’s were much longer. Devon had bits of sparkly stuff in aer pink-streaked hair for some reason.

“It’s fairy hair,” ae said when Ekhazyrnkh asked aer about it. Ae ran aer fingers through it, fluffing it like feathers and making the strands sparkle like sunlight on snow. “I got it done before we left Earth— they tie these bits of tinsel to your hair, so it lasts for months if they pick a good strand.”

Ekhazyrnkh leaned down to look. “Tinsel?” The word brought to mind thick sparkly ropes wrapped around trees.

“Yep!” Devon said brightly. “I have extra, if you….” Ae trailed off, staring at Ekhazyrnkh’s spines.

Ce straightened and laughed. “I’m not sure it would go so well on my spines as it does on your hair, but thank you.”

“Can I ask,” Devon started, then stopped, scrunching up aer face.

Ekhazyrnkh waited. Devon didn’t continue, so ce prompted, “Ask…?”

“Do you ever do things with your spines?” Devon pointed at one of the pink streaks in aer own hair. “Like dye or polish or anything? They’re made out of keratin, right, like hair is?”

That was two different questions, one in two parts, with at least three answers. Ekhazyrnkh closed cir eyes for a moment and counted to five silently, sorting out cir answers. Then, ce said, “Some dragons do color their scales, spines, and horns. I only did so once, I don’t like the feel of it. Some also add things on, like ribbons and rings, mainly for celebrations and events like Comic-Con. And yes, they are made of keratin.”

“You’ve been to Comic-Con?” Devon sounded astonished.

Ekhazyrnkh nodded, recalling the memory. “My— siblings, they wanted me to be Kazul, a dragon king from an old book, so they could be the princess Cimorene and the witch Morwen.” Ce chuckled. “You should have seen the effort they put into painting my scales green.”

“That sounds wonderful,” Devon said wistfully. “My sister never wanted to go to cons with me, but I went with some friends once as the crew from Star Trek. I was Data.”

“I’ve heard of that show,” Ekhazyrnkh said thoughtfully. “They do a great deal of exploration, don’t they?”

Devon paused and folded aer arms. “You’ve never seen Star Trek?”

“No…” Ce preferred humans’ animated movies and shows. It was far easier to tell the characters apart.

“I have it on holo, we can watch it later! It’s a space classic.”

There was a crackling noise overhead, and the announcement system came to life. Ekhazyrnkh winced as the metallic voice said, “Haze, to the bridge, please. Haze.”

Devon made a face at the speaker. “Hey, Haze, want me to come with?”

“No, thank you.” Ekhazyrnkh inclined cir head in farewell. “I can manage well enough alone, don’t worry for me.” Tail twitching, Ekhazyrnkh oriented cirself and marched down the corridor.

Lilah was waiting at the bridge when Haze— it was certainly easier to think of him that way, though she was determined to keep using his proper name aloud— came in. Though Kit, the tallest and broadest on the crew despite his diminutive nickname, had lent Haze clothing, the dragon had gone back to his own as soon as they’d been washed. It only made sense. They actually fit him properly, and didn’t restrict his wings.

Though Lilah had learned the basics of diplomacy, and practiced with different human and elven cultures before she’d been sent off-planet the first time, she’d never had any contact with arctic dragons before. The dragons she had met during her classes were desert dragons with sandy scales and fine, thin spines, little aquatic dragons with lithe bodies and big eyes, and a couple large marine dragons with wide tails and gill-slits in their necks. They were all different, but all distinctly draconic, with significant overlaps in the way they structured their societies and viewed the world despite their vastly different environments. None of them had been particularly forthcoming about anything, except to confirm the bits humans and elves already knew, like the custom of introducing oneself with one’s full name, or the bowing.

Arctic dragons, though… Lilah had rather expected they, being warmblooded creatures like birds or dinosaurs, would be in the habit of bundling up in their icy home. Maybe they’d be more solitary, like polar bears, or friendly and social like penguins. But so far, Haze seemed politely distant, like any other dragon she’d known. And… well, maybe the comparative warmth of the ship was why he wore what could only be called a halter top and shorts.

“You called, Captain?”

“Yes.” Lilah resisted the urge to fidget. She’d been on several missions in the past fifteen or so years, kept her cool when speaking with officials and nobles from other galaxies. But sometimes, she didn’t feel like a professional at all, only like the girl she’d been on her first offworld mission so long ago. “I’ve just been… wondering.”

Haze stiffened instantly. She caught a brief flick of his tail before it stilled. “About… what?”

Lilah tilted her head to one side and gave him the lopsided grin that she’d found quite useful for disarming and relaxing most people she interacted with, especially human men. “Oh, relax, I was only thinking… How would you like to see what Tempest can do?”

Haze eyed her warily and came closer. “What do you mean?”

Lilah’s smile didn’t falter. “Well… thing is, I’m a bit of a show-off, you can ask anyone on the crew. And Tempest, she belonged to my old captain before me, so I’ve been flying her for a long time. And it’s not very often I get to show off to someone new, everyone here has seen everything Tempest can do already, and I've never shown off her flying to someone with their own wings before.” She gestured for Haze to join her in front of the camera display. “So if you’re interested in seeing what humans call flight, go ahead and take the copilot’s chair.”

It worked. Haze’s claws made a soft, almost metallic tapping sound as he approached and gingerly seated himself in the copilot’s chair made for a human. At least it was made to be comfortable for larger humans, so he didn’t have too much trouble fitting. Still, he looked like an adult in a chair built for a fourteen-year-old.

Lilah took her seat again and pushed off the floor with one foot, rolling the chair to the center of the console. She motioned at the display of screens. “Spaceships have had external cameras for a few decades now. It’s safer to monitor our path via cameras; we used to build them with the bridge at the front of the ship with a big window, but we had too many incidents where the window got smashed…” She’d learned about those back in school. “So they changed the design.”

Haze rolled his chair forward, peering at the screens. Most of them showed star-speckled darkness, though one, off to port, showed an asteroid field. “And… what if the cameras get smashed?”

“There’s a smaller console at the front with a window,” Lilah said, rubbing the back of her neck sheepishly. “It has to be manually turned on from this one. Tempest’s has never been used, but all ships in official use have to have them. They’re like an emergency brake. But with this, at least the cameras dying doesn’t mean the people in the command center will.”

The dragon reached up to run his claws through his spines. “Good point. And… what does this do?” He indicated a joystick with one claw.

“Lasers,” Lilah said happily.

Haze jerked around to look at her, tail flicking out.

Lilah laughed. “No, really. They’re regulation. We mostly use them for asteroids, we can set the lasers to auto-blast anything below a certain heat threshhold in FTL mode. Very useful. Heat sensors keep us from hitting other ships, if they wander into our lanes by accident, which doesn’t happen much.”

“Lanes?”

“Yeah, there are paths you’re supposed to follow in space, it’s a lot like flying an airplane…” Lilah trailed off. “You wouldn’t ever have been in one of those, would you have?”

“No.”

“They’re normal practice, you start on those before you graduate to spaceships.” Lilah slid her chair a bit left and pointed to a simple set of handlebars. “The steering is pretty similar. Want to try? She’s on autocorrect so you won’t be able to set her off course, but it could be fun.”

She moved over, then watched closely as Haze slid his chair over, then reached for the wheel. “How do I know where I’m going?”

Lilah pointed at the camera screens. “You watch those. You’d see more of a difference if there were a planet in sight, right now you won’t see anything except for stars and maybe some asteroids on the scanners.”

Haze gave the wheel a tentative tug. The ship lurched to the right, then shifted left again and steadied. Lilah knew Tempest, and felt the movement even though the ship’s artificial gravity hadn’t changed— it was still pulling down, if the value of “down” was directly toward the generator located in the ship’s hold beneath her feet. The chair didn’t even slide.

“A little bit gentler,” she suggested.

“Nothing happened.”

“It did. You’d be able to tell if you had more visual cues on the screens.”

Haze made a guttural sound deep in his throat, a considering sort of sound, Lilah thought. “I see. Or perhaps the problem is that I don’t.”

“Was that a joke?”

Haze turned and gave her a head-tilted look paired with a little shrug that seemed to convey a raised eyebrow and a sort of I don’t know, was it? impression.

Lilah raised an eyebrow right back, then immediately reprimanded herself. They’d be reaching Epsilon Eridani within a couple weeks, she didn’t have time to play around. Sam hadn’t found anything yet, and wasn’t sure he would considering how secretive dragons could be, so Lilah had to take matters into her own hands if she wanted to know.

Which, she did. Not only to satisfy her own curiosity, but because, as her boss had pointed out when she’d made her report, this mystery surrounding Haze was more than likely something important. He could have been kidnapped for some mysterious draconic reason, and thrown out for some equally mysterious reason. He could have snuck aboard a ship as a stowaway— Sam thought this was the most plausible, though Lilah wasn’t sure. Or there could be something else. No one knew who Ekhazyrnkh Zrryl was, dragons didn’t make it into most governmental databases. They didn’t want to be, and as part of the agreement two hundred years ago that let humans and elves take charge of interplanetary trade, among other things, dragons were never obligated to interact with humanoid society.

So why—

“Captain Lilah?” Haze interrupted her thoughts. “What does that mean?”

She jerked her head up and fixed on the screen with its flashing red light. She grinned. “It means we get to use the lasers. Move over.”