They plummeted down, into darkness.

  Now Emily did throw up, bits of last night’s chicken karaage and beer splattering against the glowing doors in a wet, multicolored hailstorm. Miss Yama gave a dainty meow in protest, but Michiko was seemingly unsurprised and unmoved.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Michiko grunted, taking a brief swig of her sake bottle. “Happened to me too the first time, and I didn’t have a hangover. There’s an autoclean function on here somewhere,” she continued, holding up the pink dragon wand with a thoughtful grimace.

  The elevator slowed, and then jerked forward in a different direction, staggering Emily against the elevator wall. Emily could now see brief flashes of light on either side of them, as though they were moving very fast underground.

  After what seemed like an eternity, but was in fact probably less than half a minute, the elevator shuddered to a halt. The doors opened and Michiko strode out, apparently no worse for the wear, Miss Yama bounding ahead with excited meows. Emily stumbled behind them, took several gasping breaths, and wiped her mouth on her sleeve. Behind her, the doors of the elevator hissed shut. Am I hallucinating? Emily thought. Dreaming? Still asleep in a karaoke bar? If she was, it felt pretty damn real.

  They were in some kind of long, metallic hallway. With each echoing step, a new overhead light turned on, suffusing the next section of the corridor in glowing pink. The air felt different here: not so stale, and with a scent of the sea, and as they continued on in silence Emily could feel the occasional cool rush of a breeze across her flushed face.

  One moment they were in the hallway, filled with pink light, and the next they were on the precipice of a very large space, darkness rising up all around them. Emily could hear as much as feel the magnitude of the space, the dripping of water a great way overhead echoing across slabs of distant stone and metal. She imagined she could hear the beating of faraway waves. There was the tap tap of Miss Yama’s dainty feet disappearing before them, growing farther away until it was lost.

  “It’s here somewhere,” Emily heard Michiko say. “No… ah, there we go.”

  Soft light bloomed around them. Emily gasped.

  In any other circumstance, Emily would have been agoraphobically awestruck by the overwhelming scale of the cave alone. It was like she had fallen into the hollowed-out core of an ancient dwarven city, to the terrifying depths of monsters and legends. How could such a space exist, let alone beneath the outer suburbs of Tokyo? But here, right in front of them, rising up like a small skyscraper, was something far more shattering to Emily’s grip on reality.

  The Pink Dragon.

  In Space Dragons canon, Pink Dragon was the smallest of the five Dragons, the nimble scout mech whose survivability was based on having a plethora of tricks up its robotic sleeves. That was how it had survived the final attack on Nebulon’s fleet at the end of season four, darting out of harm’s way while Green Dragon soaked up damage and White Dragon hopelessly took on three Harpies at once.

  Emily took an unsteady step, grasping the cold metal railing of the walkway and craning her neck upward. This was the smallest Dragon? The show hadn’t done it any sort of justice. It felt at least a hundred meters tall, but Emily’s sense of proportion was all off in here. Two hundred meters? Three? The walkway upon which they stood was only up to the bipedal mech’s thigh, the bottom of its huge legs descending into the wet darkness below. Overhead was the Pink Dragon’s right arm, the silver talons of its hand each the size of a small car. Dear God.

  Emily knew she was hyperventilating. She took a step back, afraid she might pass out and tumble into the oily darkness below. She tried to focus on Michiko, who was casually leaning against the railing, cigarette dangling from her mouth, watching Emily’s reaction with subdued curiosity. She took out the cigarette, momentarily replacing it with a long drink from her sake bottle.

  “But—how…? Why…?” Emily gasped, gazing upward again.

  Michiko came up beside her. “What, didn’t you ever watch the show?” Michiko whispered, smiling. She glanced overhead at the Pink Dragon’s talons, a strange mixture of emotions flickering across her face, and then began to walk across the metal walkway, away from Emily, her voice echoing behind her as she spoke. Emily followed, clutching the railing as she went.

  “The last of the Mercury Riders gifted the Dragons to Earth. I guess they took pity on Earth, seeing as how we didn’t have any space combat mechs of our own, and they figured they wouldn’t be needing them after Queen Nebulon’s father wiped out their planet.”

  They reached a small, decidedly non-futuristic metallic elevator, in which Miss Yama was already waiting. Michiko closed the metal grating after Emily joined them, and pushed a button on the elevator’s two-button console. The elevator rattled as they began to rise alongside Pink Dragon.

  “The Mercury pilots happened to land in Japan, just outside Tokyo,” Michiko continued, staring at the massive mech as they rose. “They found this cavern. Used the last of their constructor bots to make it suitable.” She paused to take a drag from her cigarette. It was almost out.

  “Next, they needed five young minds for the neural linkages. Young for the neuroplasticity, but not too young, of course. Picked us up while we were on a school trip. I think mostly because of Shinji… they were always impressed with him.” Michiko’s voice grew distant, and she shook her head, as if dispelling some unpleasant dream, and turned her attention back to Emily. “As for the show, that was Shinji’s dad’s idea.”

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  The elevator jerked to a stop with a bang. Emily realized that they were at the Pink Dragon’s head, where the pilot hatch was located. Up this close, it was difficult to appreciate the mech’s individual features: the huge eyes, the massive mouth, the flaring dragon nostrils. Each had a unique weapon system, Emily remembered. Michiko leaned against the raised platform’s railing as Miss Yama bounded toward the pilot hatch. She took one last smoke, and then flicked the cigarette into the darkness behind them. Emily followed the ember’s long fall with a fresh lurch of vertigo.

  “I suppose the thinking was, if we suddenly revealed that there were extra-planetary empires waging war against each other, it might cause a global crisis. At minimum, the government would have seized control of the dragons. The Mercury Riders told us that would be catastrophic. As long as we were alive, the dragons would accept no other pilot, but you can imagine how well that would have gone over with the government, having a bunch of teenagers piloting giant mechs. Plus, we barely knew how to control things at first.”

  Michiko shook her head, as if she were still exasperated by the old memories. “As for the show, Shinji’s dad got his buddy Karo Haranabe to direct it. They were the only two adults who knew what was actually going on. We had micro-cameras put in the Dragons. Filmed the school bits at school, like a normal show. They thought they’d make a generational hit, with legions of diehard fans. They’d make each season slightly more realistic than the last, and then come out with the big reveal at season ten or something. By then, people would be more accepting of the whole idea. At least, that was the plan.” Michiko rolled her eyes at Emily. “Don’t look at me like that, it wasn’t my idea. I was just fourteen at the time. Saying it out loud makes me realize all over again how stupid it was.”

  Michiko brought the sake bottle to her lips, but realized with a frown that it was empty. She gave it a casual toss over her shoulder, as though it wasn’t the first sake bottle she had disposed of at this height. Emily counted five seconds before she heard a splash far below.

  “Anyway, it doesn't matter now. Queen Nebulon is already on her way. She should be arriving in less than twenty hours. It took her thirty years to rebuild and then crush all other resistance. This time she’s bound to finish the job for good.”

  Emily swallowed. She took an unsteady step forward, her hand not leaving the railing. Another. Ten more, and then she was at Miss Yama’s side, in front of the Pink Dragon’s pilot hatch. She placed her hand on the cold, pink metal. It felt real. It was real. She turned back to Michiko, her breath catching.

  “Why didn’t you tell anyone? Or train anyone else?”

  Michiko gave Emily a dull glare.

  “Do you know what it’s like, having your four best friends die beside you? Hearing their screams as particle cannons ripped apart their dragons? Being the only one who survived?” Michiko swallowed, her face strained with suppressed emotion. “I ran in the end, Emily. I didn’t want to die. I was a coward. They didn’t show that in the finale, did they?”

  Michiko took a rattling breath, her arms folded tightly across her chest. “I was too ashamed to tell anyone. Shinji’s dad tried, though. He nearly tore down the house trying to find Shinji’s access point, and when that didn’t work he took the raw Space Dragons footage to the government. He didn’t make it far. He was finally locked up in a mental institution the third time he trespassed at parliament. I guess I learned my lesson after that.”

  Michko met Emily’s eyes. “Anyway, everyone thought the show was stupid. The show my friends died making. We’ll see how they all like it when Nebulon’s goblin shock troopers are burning down every capital from Beijing to Moscow. If you ask me, the world deserves it. Maybe Nebulon will do a better job of it than we have.”

  “So you’re saying the world is going to end in less than a day… and you’re going to do nothing about it?” Emily asked, her face pale.

  “Oh, I’ll do something about it. I plan to get very, very drunk,” Michiko said glumly. “Speaking of which, we should be heading back. All out of cigarettes and sake.” She strode back into the metallic elevator.

  Emily ran her fingertips over the access hatch to Pink Dragon’s cockpit. This can’t be happening. But it is.

  “What about the other Dragons?” Emily asked, not moving.

  “Oh, they’re all here,” Michiko replied, waving her hand into the massive, brooding darkness behind them.

  Emily’s face turned to disbelief. “The other dragons are here? I thought they were destroyed!”

  Michiko scoffed. “No, not destroyed. The dragons are able to repair themselves, even after having most of their face blown off. Unlike an eighteen-year-old human.” Emily noticed Michiko’s hand twitch, as if searching for a bottle that wasn’t there. “After the last battle, after… what happened, the dragons came back here on autopilot. It probably took a few years for their nanobots to repair themselves. I wouldn’t know, I never checked.”

  Emily gazed out into the darkness. The other dragons were just sitting there? Blue Dragon, with its sleek razor wings? Red Dragon, with its massive plasma cannons? Impossible. Except that nothing was impossible, not anymore.

  Emily did not join Michiko in the elevator.

  “You can’t do nothing,” Emily said flatly. “You know you can’t.”

  “I know that I can leave you up here, if you don’t get in this elevator. Yama! Come!” Michiko said, but Miss Yama didn’t move. Instead, the cat sat down beside the pilot hatch, tail swishing, staring at Michiko with an accusatory glare.

  There was silence. Far away—beneath them, above them, Emily couldn’t tell—was the dull sound of the distant ocean. Emily’s skin prickled from the cool waft of a breeze.

  Sighing with deep resignation, Michiko stepped out of the elevator. It seemed like her legs were made of lead, the way she moved, one step and then another, inching toward Pink Dragon, until finally she was beside Emily. She swallowed. Emily could see beads of sweat standing out on her forehead. Tentatively, she reached out, and touched a single finger to the metal of the pilot hatch.

  A ripple of pink color expanded outward from the point of contact of Michiko’s finger against the dragon’s metal; above them, around them, the rosy glow became brighter. Emily stepped back, glanced at the Pink Dragon’s head, gasped, and shielded her face: its eyes had been empty of color a moment ago, but they were now a blinding pink.

  Michiko withdrew her hand, and the glow faded. It felt like an eruption of thunder should have accompanied the flash, but the only sound was Emily's thundering heartbeat and Miss Yama's excited meowing.

  “I haven’t done that in thirty years,” Michiko whispered. She was silently crying, Emily saw, rivulets of tears running down her cheeks, falling from her chin, though the metal grating, into the darkness below.

  She turned to Emily, her trembling hand falling slowly to her side. “Even if I wanted to. Even if I could find the courage. You need five pilots. You can't act alone.” She took a shaky breath. “There were never more than a handful of true fans. Only you are left now.”

  Emily felt her hands go clammy. It felt like her heart was going to burst out of her chest.

  She gave Michiko a shaky smile. “Five pilots, you say?”