Pana: Flight from the Past

Unexpected Ripples

She woke up with a sharp gasp. Sweat coated her entire body, causing her to shiver. Her fingers tingled. Her hair swung down in front of her eyes, tickling her nose.

It had been so long since Varé had touched her friend.

Pana had been there, really been there, right next to her. They had even laid their head on her shoulder. It had all been real. Everything had seemed okay despite nothing being okay. For precious seconds she had forgotten that she was here to bring Pana back home, or, if that was impossible, to kill them. One wasn't supposed to cuddle with their enemy, no matter how one felt about them.

She glanced over at Kai, but the short-haired woman was sound asleep next to her. Good, she hadn't wanted to disturb her. There was no way she could keep up a conversation with another person then and there.

Silently, she got out of bed, put on her clothes, and walked out of the room they were staying in. She wandered down the hall and out onto the deck. Everywhere people were slowly beginning to wake up again. It seemed they had all suddenly fallen unconscious right about when Varé had. Odd. No one seemed to be paying her much attention as she wandered out onto the deck – they were all too busy trying to figure out what had happened and why they had fallen asleep away from their beds. She breathed in the fresh air, letting it flow through her and clear her head. Steeling herself, she glanced around the deck.

The dragon was lying next to Pana, its tail curled around their body. They may have been tall, but they still looked so fragile tucked up like that, just as they had looked curled up against her. Pana began to stand up. Once on their feet, they immediately hugged the giant reptile.

Varé smiled. Then she cursed. Then she walked back inside.

***

"Let me get this straight: there are things out there that can destroy the world, literally physically destroy the world, and you were told where they are and how to stop them in one of those weird visions we all just had?"

Reconstructed from pure memory, the map of all the weapon locations sat on a table between them in the captain's room. Though the points may not have lined up exactly with the ones from the vision, Pana knew that they were as close as they needed to be. They could be found.

"Yes."

Bob didn't seem at ease with the answer. Nor did anyone else for that matter. Waveskimmer murmured from the doorway – he couldn't quite fit in the room – and Tallie rubbed the back of her neck.

There was a pause. It must be a lot for them all to take in. Pana had woken up from the visions exhausted and reeling from what they had seen. They weren't even sure if they could be relied on to complete the task. Salston had given Pana and Waveskimmer the stone in the hopes that they would be able to bring the world together, and now they knew that part of that task included finding and destroying these mysterious superweapons. But what if they couldn't do it? Pana had run away from their own home, had run from Nnaka, Sab and Ezra, had encouraged the people of Ryotho to run from their home of generations, had run from Varé and Kai at the waterfall, and had left the port so that they could put even more distance between themself and their pursuers. They wished that they could say the places they left were better because of their short presence in them, but there was no way of knowing if that was true because, at the end of the day, they did leave.