pouch under his armpit. “Pleased to meet you, ma’am. Ah, about that phone
. . . ?”
“I do not think you will find one here,” Karin told him, not quite
comprehending what a “phone” was.
“I kind of figured that,” he said. “Where are we, anyway?”
“I am not quite sure,” she admitted. “I think it is the western shore of
the main island in the Bubble World.”
“Bubble World?” he asked blankly.
“The World between the Worlds. I do not pretend to understand it, but our
wizards say that it is connected at one end to our World and at the other
end to the World from whence came the Sparrow.”
“Sparrow? Excuse me, ma’am, but I’m just plain confused.”
“Of course! You must be from the other World, the Sparrow’s World.” She
smiled. “This must all be very strange to you, I know.”
“Yes, ma’am!” he said fervently. “It certainly is that.”
“Well, come back to my camp then and we can talk. Oh, and stop calling me
ma’am. I am neither a witch, a wizard nor an elder and I am called Karin.”
He looked at her in a way Karin found rather pleasant. “No ma’am-I mean,
Karin-you are definitely not an old witch!”
This, Major Mick Gilligan told himself firmly, has gotta be a
hallucination. He was probably lying in a hospital bed somewhere drugged
out of his skull after being fished out of the Bering Sea. He wondered if
his nurse looked anything like Karin.
Still, he thought, hallucination or not, I’ve gotta play it like it’s
real. So far it hadn’t been too bad. Stuck on a deserted island with a
beautiful girl, even a beautiful girl who thought she was William Tell.
No, that wasn’t half bad for a hallucination.
“My camp is just over there,” Karin said, pointing toward an especially
thick clump of trees.
“Where’s your vehicle?” Gilligan asked.
“No vehicle, only Stigi and myself,” Karin told him as they stepped into
the camp.
“But we’ve been following . . .” Gilligan began.
Then he saw the dragon.
Stigi was only average size for a cavalry mount-which is to say he was
eighty feet long and his wings would probably span as much when fully
extended.
An eighty-foot wingspan on an airplane wouldn’t have impressed Gilligan
particularly. Eighty feet of bat wings on a scaled, fanged monster who
looked ready to breathe fire at any second was very impressive.
Gilligan’s jaw dropped and he licked his lips. “That’s, that’s a . . .”
“That is Stigi,” Karin supplied, strolling over to the monster and patting
its scaly shoulder just in front of its left wing.
The dragon raised its head about ten feet off the ground and regarded
Gilligan with a football-sized golden eye.
“Does it fly?”
“Of course he flies,” Karin said. “How else would we get here?”
“Hoo boy,” said Major Mick Gilligan. “Oh boy.”
Karin’s camp was well off the beach, in a fold in the ground well-shaded
by trees. The dragon took up a good half the space, but there was still
room for a small fire and a simple canopy made with something like a
shelter half.
“This is pretty cozy,” Gilligan said as he looked around.
“I am a scout,” Karin explained. “There is always the possibility of being
caught away from my base and having to forage. So,” she shrugged, “we are
prepared.”
“There aren’t many places we can land away from our bases,” Mick told her.
“If something goes wrong we have to bail out.”
“Bail out?”
“Use our ejection seats.”
“Ejection seats?”
He looked over at the dragon. “Yeah, I guess you don’t have much call for
those.”
“Now,” Karin said, settling herself on a log by the fire, “what happened
to you, Major?”
“It’s Mick, as long as we’re on a first-name basis.”
Karin frowned prettily. “I thought you said your name was Major.”
“No, that’s my rank. My first name’s Michael, but everyone calls me Mick.”
“Ah,” Karin said. “When Stigi and I are in the air we are called Patrol
Two.”
“That’s like a call sign. I was Eagle One on my last mission.”
“What happened to you?”
Gilligan sighed. “Kind of a long story. Basically we were getting some