The Sea Is Ours by Jaymee Goh Page A

catlike, and then abruptly, deciding I was neither food nor threat, it turned. I saw its body tense for a split second before it sank to the ground, its neck stretched out and level with its torso. I watched in fascination as it slithered into the underbrush, both snake and lizard, and it wasn’t until its tail tip vanished into the forest that I slumped back on my rear. I gasped out my panic and terror, and what they left behind was a nearly frantic exhaustion and a whirlwind of thoughts.
    There had always been stories of large crocodilians and monitor lizards in the mountains, but dragons were another thing. People hunted them the way that they did thunderbirds in North America and bunyip in Australia, and while there was always the odd footprint or scale to set off a new fervor, there had been nothing like this.
    The Trường SÆ¡n Range was vast, however, and I wondered if recent mining on the Laotian side of the border had brought it out of hiding, or if it was merely that there were so few of them that a sighting was impossibly rare.
    I thought of population densities, about how close I had come to getting my throat ripped out, and about what it would take to bring a dragon back to Saigon, and suddenly, as suddenly as a dragon coming out of the evergreen trees, I started to laugh.
    For the first time in a long time, I wasn’t thinking about An. That was when I could see the beginning of the next part of my life, and it was all about dragons.
    ~*~
    By the time I got back to camp, it was already dusk, and Linh had most of the equipment secured. She would need my help to take care of the rest, but instead of coming to harry me to work, she handed me a bowl of warm egg soup instead. There were a few species of wild fowl that were tame enough we thought that they had simply gone feral, and we’d been thieving from their nests off and on for the last few months.
    I drank the soup quickly, feeling the warmth sink through me and the richness of the egg yolk giving me strength. Linh sat next to me on the log we’d pulled up next to our camp fire, sipping delicately at her portion. She’d always been thinner than me, but our months on the Trường SÆ¡n Range had made her gaunt. Tuan, her husband, would tsk and make her caramelized pork belly and every other dish she loved to fatten her up again, and she wouldn’t have to cook at all until she was back in the mountains with her stubborn sister.
    â€œWe’re sending the lantern up tomorrow night,” she said, a note of warning in her voice. It said that she didn’t want to fight, but she would if she had to.
    â€œLet me change your mind,” I said, and before she could protest, I started to talk.
    ~*~
    We went back to the pond the next day, but though we looked, we saw no sign of the dragon or the hatchlings. Then, no matter how much we wished otherwise, we needed to pack up, because the morning had brought with it the first splatters of the monsoon rains. We were going to be really late rather than somewhat late, and packing up camp and securing our living freight took most of the next day.
    We waited for dark, and we pulled out the sky lantern. It was a lovely thing made from white oiled paper on a frame of treated wood. When it was lit, the hot air caused the balloon to rise, and when it reached its apex, the fuel reserve would cause the lantern to hang in the sky, burning brightly so that the rangers watching for us at Hải Vân Pass would see. Unlike the antique paper lanterns of the past, this lantern would burn until nearly all of the fuel was gone, and then begin a quick, nearly vertical descent. The cool air extinguished the flame as it fell, and soon the only remnant of our message would be a few charred sticks of wood.
    The white lantern floated up in the indigo sky and burst into brilliant chemical flames, hovering high above like an amber eye.
    â€œI’m glad we’re going home,” Linh said