The Moon Dragon

Chapter Four

Beep.... beep.... beep.... beep....

Sylvia groaned, fumbling for the off button on her alarm. Her arm wasn't responding to her brain in the way she expected, and the lack of bedsheet-induced resistance to her movement was weird. What was going on?

Her eyelids felt so heavy and her brain felt like it was swimming through a swamp just to wake up, but she blinked and the brightly-lit interior of the room around her drifted into focus. This wasn't her bedroom, she realized as her stomach dropped in fear.. What....?

It took a moment for her mind to catch up and remember what had happened. School, Grace, Atlan! Wait, no something had happened. She remembered running, a thousand emotions warring in her brain, joined by pain, the feeling of things breaking beneath her talons-

Oh. She had turned into a dragon again! Then she flew, and it was the greatest feeling in the world....

That's right, something else has happened. The helicopter. Falling, hitting the ground. Then people, the needle, then darkness.

Oh no. What had happened then? Where was she?

Sitting up from where she was lying on the ground, Sylvia scanned the room around her, but as her brain took in what she was seeing, she felt a spike of terror rush through her whole body.

The room's empty interior consisted of bright, medical-white walls on the back and side of the room, the front wall simply being missing, leading onto a larger, darker room cluttered with desks, paper and two dozen blinking computer monitors showing displays of scientific information that Sylvia couldn't even try to understand. The beeping wasn't her alarm, instead coming from one monitor that she could see closest to her, displaying a long, scrolling set of data and what looked like one of those heart-rate lines from monitors in hospitals.

The repeating jagged line was growing faster as the beeping sped up too, and Sylvia's fear spiked again as she realized that it was her heart-rate on the screen. She was being monitored.

Suddenly, she felt like there were eyes on her everywhere, even as she was alone in this strange, sterile place. The white LED lights in the ceiling felt like stage lights as she squinted to see the dark space beyond her side of the room. Beyond the desks and the monitors and the empty benches was a door, glass, metal-framed, sliding. It didn't seem locked.

This was weird. There was no-one around, no one to keep her there. She had no idea what kind of place this was, and even though she was growing a sinking suspicion as to why she was here, she could just leave. It seemed too easy.

Slowly, suspicious of everything around her, Sylvia got to her feet and began walking towards the door. She hadn't even made it five steps before her nose hit something in her way- hard.

Ow, what....?

She recoiled, blinking at the smudge produced on the thick, clear glass wall between her and freedom.

She felt her heart leap into her throat as she realized that not only was she trapped, she was on display.

She blinked again, eyes shifting into focus as she finally studied her reflection in the glass.

Beep.....beep.. beep beepbeepbeepbeepbeep-!  Went the heart monitor.

Instead of a round face, blue eyes and short hair- brown, silver, or otherwise, the face looking back at her was long and reptilian, slitted pupils in illuminated sapphire irises lines with rows and rows of shiny silver scales.

She was still a dragon. And she had no idea how to turn back.

The heart monitor was the only noise beyond her laboured breathing, ringing loud through the office. Her keen ears pricked up as she caught another noise, a light groan.