Lost Change

Chapter 85

Life with Minna had turned out to be nice.

I leaned up and nibbled at the shiny chain dangling from the Kymari's ear. She giggled and brought her hand up to pet at my back, and I abandoned the earring to nuzzle at her hand. "Silly. We're almost home, it's just a little bit further."

I gave an impatient sounding series of chirps, then stretched out on Minna's shoulder with a sigh. She laughed at me again and brought her hand back to her side, and I went back to watching the scenery go by as Minna continued walking towards home.

It had been nearly three months since I had made the decision to live with her. Just another week until that milestone, actually. Today wasn't one of our normal patrol days – we only had three of those, with two days for Minna to spend training and two days off – but Minna still liked to put on her armor and spend some time walking around the city. It helped her exercise and get in shape, and I think she liked watching me get excited over the various sights throughout the city. The walk home was a bit more boring than on the days we searched ships for sicora, since I wasn't as eager to get home and relax and was instead just retracing our steps past things I had already seen, but it was still nice.

Searching for sicora was actually fairly easy. Almost boring, even. I knew that Ivy and the other dragonets went up into orbit to inspect cargo ships, and that they tended to run into the creatures fairly often... but I got the impression the Kymari didn't really trust Minna too much just yet. Instead of the cargo ships, we got to check out passenger ships. Officially, since there was only one fire lizard inspecting passenger ships, and since the passengers on the ships were impatient to get off the ship after being cooped up for the trip, the ships were given the go ahead to land at the spaceport and start unloading without requiring an inspection first. Most passenger ships didn't get inspected anyways, and nobody wanted to deal with a bunch of grumpy passengers suddenly learning they couldn't leave until we had cleared everything.

Unofficially, passenger ships just didn't attract sicora or crawlers to anywhere near the degree that cargo ships did. The wretched creatures liked having quiet areas they could lurk in, and passenger ships tended to have a lot of activity throughout the entire vessel that encouraged crawlers to go elsewhere. I tended to find ktari a bit more often than the other dragonets did – apparently the passenger ships didn't like to fumigate that often, since it left unpleasant odors for the passengers to put up with – but the others had me beat when it came to sicora. I was lucky if I found a crawler every other week, and to date I had only found one other adult sicora.

That had ended up as a complete disaster. Minna had noticed I was on edge when I picked up the scent, but she had misread my reactions as the ones caused by a crawler. It had caught her completely by surprise when my instincts took completely over at the sight of the sicora lurking in the air vent, and she hadn't been able to pull me back in time. I had ended up setting fire to one of the passenger compartments, and the ship had needed to be grounded while they replaced the scorched seating and cleaned out the fire suppressant that had sprayed everywhere. The crew had not been happy with us after that.

We did kill the sicora, though. So I wasn't too bothered by their complaining, given that they were still alive because of me.

But in the grand scheme of things, most of what we did just felt like busy work. The Kymari had enough older, fully-trained bond handlers to handle the cargo ships that actually had problems with sicora. My ability to put up with other Kymari while I was working was unique... but not necessarily essential. And Minna was still very young for a Kymari, and still very new to work as a guard, so they didn't trust her with anything too important just yet. They had given us four guards, two 'permanent' ones that were very old and experienced – almost Elders, from the looks of it, named Morton and Kilpin – and two 'trainee' guards that swapped out every other week, who I stopped bothering to remember the names of. Ivy had confirmed it was unusual to have that many guards and told me all the other bond companions only had two guards with them on patrols. So it felt like we had been given stuff to do and given babysitters to make sure we could do it, but not that we were really relied on too much.