The Moon Dragon

Chapter Five

They did tests, after that.

There was a human-sized hatch that opened in the left wall of her cell, entering into an antechamber that was attached to the bigger room outside. It must have been attached to another room as well, because she was fairly certain there wasn't a cow in the main room the last time she looked.

A few hours after she had woken up, she heard low, woeful moo-ing coming from behind the door, and, escorted out by one of the scientists with a cattle prod, was a cow. The hatch slid back shut behind it, the animal looking up at her with big wet eyes. A cow, looking up at her. Now that was a weird thought.

It just stood there and she just stood there, both in this little glass room in the weirdest staring contest ever. Sylvia had no idea what to do.

"It's been sixteen hours since her last gastrostomy meal, correct?" She heard one of the scientists say. "She would definitely be hungry by now."

And she was hungry. She was hungrier than she had ever been. But that didn't seem like the biggest of her worries right now.

"Food group likelihood remains seventy-three-percent-chance carnivore, twenty-four-percent-chance omnivore, and three-percent-chance herbivore, based on her physical mobility, natural weapons and dental structure."

Carnivore? Like.... Meat-eating, hunting animals? Is that what they expected her to do with the cow? Heck no. She wasn't that hungry.

She sat down in the other end of the cell and ignored it.

The cow mooed. It smelled like grass and fear.

After a long few minutes, the scientists murmured together once again and the hatch slid open. The cow took the first escape opportunity it could, turning tail, its retreating hooves clip-clopping loud on the ceramic floor. The cow was soon replaced with a thick slab of raw meat.

She may not have been hungry enough to kill the cow, but this was different. She sniffed at it. It smelt like...meat. The human in her hated even considering it, but she was starving, and to the dragon in her, it seemed delicious. She picked it up gingerly with her front teeth, and in less than a moment, it was gone.

Sylvia went over to the bowl mounted into the wall and drank until the taste of blood was washed away.

Back in the right corner of the cell- the place furthest from the glass wall and the hatch, what was starting to become her corner,- Sylvia shut her eyes and half-listened to the scientists' discussion. Something about 'conscious lack of aggressive behavior versus a lack of killer-instinct.' Sylvia picked at the metal band around her back ankle futility for a few moments before giving up and trying to sleep. Maybe when she woke up, she'd be back at her house and all of this would have been a bad dream.

She didn't know how much later it was that the scientists started doing something interesting again, just that she hadn't slept. She opened her eyes to see a large mirror being mounted on the outside of the glass. Weird...

Although she had no idea what the scientists were trying to do, she took the opportunity to step closer to the mirror and finally take a look at what she looked like as a dragon. She stretched her big wings, filling the room, examining the crest of silvery fur down her spine, seeing the blue-ish tint to her scales when the light hit them. Her claws scored lines on the floor. She bared her teeth and saw fangs.

The scientists were gasping. "She jumped immediately to stage three of the MSR test! " one said. "That shows incredible levels of intelligence!"

So identifying that she was seeing herself in the mirror made her intelligent? Wow.

She went back to her corner and lay down with her back to the glass and dreamt of home.

x+x+x

It was impossible to gauge the passage of time in the laboratory.

The lights in her cell were never turned off, so it felt impossible to sleep. There were no clocks that she could see from the inside of her cell, and no windows to see the sky. For some reason, that hurt the most.

More often than they interacted with her, the scientists would be discussing who-knows-what, then they would split off and spend hours and hours at their desks, studying whatever thing they were looking at for hours on end. Despite how glad Sylvia was that the scientists were leaving her alone, being bored like this was almost just as bad.

When they were studying herself, they didn't try to come into the cell with her, or stick her with more needles or anything, for which she was glad. However, the things that they were studying at their desks; a scale, her blood, more things in vials labeled 'volatile specimens' meant they had gotten all the samples they needed while she was still asleep. It wasn't a comforting thought.

Over a while, Sylvia managed to scour every single inch of her cell, pacing back and forth. She searched through everywhere, from the small, slatted drain in the center of the floor, to the fourteen individual lights in the ceiling, to the metal sink that filled up on its own, to the hatch-like door on the other side of the wall. Everything else was pristine while surface with no hope of escape.

She watched the scientists, sometimes. Their technical jargon and the complicated information on their computer screens meant very little to her, but she worked out that they were very focused on her blood for some reason. She heard the words 'Star Matter' and 'extraction' and stopped listening after that.

Sylvia had no idea how long it had been since she was first kidnapped, but it felt like a long time. Surely long enough for someone to notice she was missing. What did everyone at home think happened to her? Were her parents worried? Was Atlan thinking about her? Was Grace missing her? Were any of them looking for her? Would she ever see any of them again?

x+x+x

She was starting to wonder if maybe the scientists had cut open her skull and taken out her brain to study it on their silver tables.

If she squinted hard enough, it seemed like she could see it, bobbing in a jar or reflected in the computer screens.

If they took her brain then maybe they would have everything they wanted, and they would let her walk out that distant sliding door.

How much longer were they going to sit there and clickity-clack at their computers?

It already felt like she had been there for a small eternity.

Days were fickle things, she never noticed them go until the scientists bid each other and her a warm goodnight and walked out that sliding door, the lights clunking shut as they went.

How dare they get to leave when she didn't?

It was unfair.

Thoughts of home and vague horrors of needles and gloved hands mixed and mingled in her mind, then dissipated like clouds when she tried to grab at them. Behind the clouds that floated away was the moon, always the moon. Full, huge, and filling the whole sky and glowing like it was its own source of light, bathing little insignificant her in a cascade of just how small she truly was staring into its face.

No matter how hard she ran, or how hard she flew, straining her limbs and exhausting herself with every beat of her wings, she could never manage to get any closer. It was always out of reach, a beacon with no location, a lighthouse with no shoreline.

It was taunting her.

It knew she couldn't reach, and it didn't care. The Man in the Moon smiled kindly down at her, watching her quietly drown in the sky.

Each time, again and again, when her lungs finally gave out, she crashed back to earth like a bird with a broken wing, impacing with the ground as she woke up back to white floors, white walls, white lights, and no windows to see the moon.