Generally, he just wanted it to end.

Mostly, he remembered it hurting a lot. Being captured by lizard men had not been on his to-do list for the day or even the century. Being interrogated by the same, even less so. But the man who remained known as “Beau” was determined not to tell ’em so. It’d only please them. Besides, he had a strong suspicion that the moment he told them what they wanted to know, the sooner he’d be let out the airlock without a spacesuit ­– space-lizards were renowned for having an “odd” sense of humour.

‘Beauregard Brummel – you persist in maintaining that is your real name? Do you think I was spawned yesterday?’

And that was another problem. The interrogator. Straight-up lizard men were one thing. This one looked as if she had a distant cousin of human some way back in her family tree. And that was part of the trouble – her eyes – they still looked human, vaguely.

‘Where do you come from?’

“Beau” kept his mouth shut.

‘You need something to loosen your tongue? I have a wide selection of “persuaders” in my holding luggage. Though it will take several days for it to arrive – I go where the work is, you know.’ She around and sat back down behind the control panel. ‘So when they told me that there’s a human been captured who won’t talk, it got my interest.’

The lizard-woman (lizard lady?) pushed a button and a mirrored screen descended from the ceiling. ‘My … colleagues are not very good at this sort of thing. You have been twice beaten within an inch of your existence, and yet still you refuse to talk. This intrigues me. “What sort of man is this?” I ask myself. “What does he know, that he does not talk?” ’

He could see his bruised reflection looking back at him from the mirrored screen. Self, it seemed to be saying to him, why do you do this to yourself? And another thing: How do you get yourself into these scrapes?

‘Come now,’ she said softly, ‘a mind is a terrible thing to lose.’

He looked up sharply at this. He couldn’t help it. She was smiling at him oddly.

‘You see, my colleagues – they don’t really understand humans. They don’t have the imagination. I do. Perhaps there is someone you’re protecting. Perhaps there are people you’d rather we didn’t know about back home – wherever home is.’ She paused to let this sink in. ‘Why not tell me the least of your worries, the military details only, and we can have a pleasant chat and they’ll give you a last smoke and a relatively painless farewell out the airlock. Or you can be shot, if you prefer.’

‘Shot’s good. I hadn’t got anything else planned. Do I get a blindfold?’

The lizard lady bared her teeth at him. ‘You will not get out of here so easily! I want to know who you’re working for! You fly in here on an unmarked fighter. Clearly, you are a spy or a clandestine agent of some kind. Clearly, you stand up to pain of a certain sort more than would be expected by my less subtle colleagues. And just as clearly, you know something. And I want to know what it is. And I promise you, I will make sure that you are kept alive to tell it to me. There’s no getting out of this one.’

‘Can I ask you a question?’ he said.

The lizard lady’s nostrils had puffed out on her curiously flattened nose. As she got her breathing under control, she looked at him with narrowed eyes. ‘If you wish.’

‘Just between us,’ he said carefully. ‘No microphones. Nothing recorded.

‘If it will get you to talk.’ She leaned in towards a microphone on the console, muttered a few words, and pushed a button. The background humming that had been ringing in his ears stopped.

He shifted slightly, and out of the corner of his vision, he could see that the tape deck where his interrogation had been being recorded had stopped.

‘See, the thing is, you say a lot. But I don’t think I believe you. So I want to ask: Who was it to you?’

She frowned at him. ‘Who was what?’

‘The human in your family.’

There was a low hiss. ‘What did you say?’

‘The—’

‘How dare you! You filthy, insulting little worm.’

He was still looking at the stilled tape deck. When he looked back, the lizard lady wasn’t in her seat. She was right in front of him, glaring into his eyes. ‘Say that again. If you dare. I may just forget that you’re supposed to live. After all, the guards could have broken a bone somewhere crucial in the previous interrogations. You humans are so fragile that way. Go ahead,’ she said, as if daring him to go on, ‘make my day.’

‘You don’t have to remain here you know.’

A hand gave his jaw a ringing slap.

‘There are places that would take you in.’

This time the slap fell on the other side of his face. He felt like a bell that was about to crack right down the middle.

‘There are places that can help you become fully human.’

He closed his eyes on instinct, waiting for what would probably be the end. Especially if she had a pistol on her.

The seconds stretched out. They seemed to go on and on forever, ticking away into the blackness.

He risked opening his eyes.

Oh, great. He’d made a grown lizard cry. The still all-too-human eyes were filling up with tears. Lips that weren’t quite fully lizard were shaking. Her hands were clenched into fists, as if she might either attack him, or attack herself.

He realised he was probably cutting his own throat with every word, but something moved him to try. And he wasn’t quite sure what: ‘They understand morphic fields better these days. There’s hope.’

‘Hope for someone like me?’ She gave him a bitterly amused smile. ‘Turn me human so they can hang me, is that it?’

‘I somehow doubt you’ve done half of what you try to make people believe you have.’

A deceptively strong, scaly hand gripped his neck. ‘Who told you that?’

‘You did,’ he said. Well, more sort of croaked. It was getting a bit hard to breathe.

‘I told you nothing.’

‘Your eyes …’ he murmured as his vision started to swim. ‘Your eyes told—’

He passed out. The last thing he remembered thinking was, guess I pushed it too far. Oh, well, at least he wouldn’t betray anyone.

*

He woke up feeling cold. There were no lights around. Just the stars ahead. Oh, well, time for the Long Journey Home. Always wondered what lay on the other side.

Guess he’d been wrong about her. Guess she was too far gone. The lizard had taken over, and he’d provoked her to the point where the lizard brain, the lizard mind, took over. Taken over so much that in cold rage she’d – well, he thought, at least dying hadn’t been so bad. Should he still hurt so much, though? He thought that death put a stop to all that …

Something sharp poked the back of his neck. It proved to be a glinting claw-like lizard fingernail. ‘Well,’ said a voice behind him, ‘I still don’t know how you knew, but if you meant it, I’d make with those controls if I were you. I drugged every dish in the canteen and committed quite a few acts of sabotage to get you here, so when they come around again they aren’t exactly going to be pleased to see either of us.’

He tried to turn around, but a hand gripped his shoulder and clawed fingers dug in hard. ‘Don’t. I don’t want anyone to remember what I looked like. And of course, if you don’t trust me, you’re quite free to use that ejector button once we’re out in space.’

She paused, letting that sink in.

‘I wouldn’t mind. It’d almost be a relief, really. It’d sort of be worth it just not to be like this anymore – I used to dream when I was … a little girl that when you died you got to be the person you always thought you should be inside … But if you were just stringing me along about the human thing, I’d prefer to end it that way, if you don’t mind.’

Now it was his turn to feel like crying. ‘I wasn’t,’ he croaked roughly. He’d be willing to bet there were claw-shaped bruise marks on his neck.

‘Then set the engines to silent glide and get us the frozen stars away out of here … By the way, what do I really call you – don’t tell me your name really is Beauregard?’

As he got the fighter to lift off shakily – he was a bit, aha, beaten up after ten days in lizard custody –they glided out the docking hatch into the cold starry night.

‘You don’t have to tell me,’ she said. ‘That is, if you don’t know if you can trust me. I’d understand.’

The catch in her voice was what decided it. Anyone could fake such a thing. But there are intonations and harmonics in … in a human voice that tell you certain things. And those aren’t easy to fake. At all.

He told her.

For a moment tension hung in the air. She could shoot him through his pilot’s chair, if she got the power setting right – or drug him – and fly the space-plane back into the hangar, and use what she’d learned for leverage. Maybe she could even find a way to break him and find out what the lizards would dearly like to know.

The silence hung in the air for a long moment.

Eventually, she said, ‘I don’t really have a name of my own. The name I bore back there doesn’t really count. I don’t want it. I never want to hear it again. No one who loved me ever chose that name. Oblivion can have it.’ She paused again, and he could feel it in the air, the tear-filled heaviness. ‘So, I am … nameless.’

He was accelerating fast now, bringing the plane up to speeds that would be considered crazy if you didn’t know what you were doing and weren’t anxious to get away from a lizard battle station with really, really heavy big guns potentially aiming after you.

He kept flying like that for quite a while, longer than he’d ever dared attempt before. But desperate times called for desperate measures. Maybe there was a tracking device on board. Maybe she’d disabled or destroyed it if there was. Maybe, maybe, maybe …

Eventually, what seemed like hours and hours later, passed in the silence of the black night of space drifting by (even if there was a tracker on board, he was pretty sure the way he was flying would have scrambled or fried it, so in a manner of speaking, the yolk would be on them), eventually, he said: ‘Would you like a name?’

He felt as much as heard the intake of breath, and for a moment wanted to kick himself – which wasn’t really practical in a pilot’s chair – part human still or not, the lizard must still have a certain strength in her, and that could be unpredictable. A cold-blooded rage could see them both spiralling off into burning star easily enough.

‘Who are you to ask me such a thing?’

He thought about it for a long moment, then took the plunge. ‘Just someone who cares what happens to you.’

The silence went on for a very long time this time. Time became impossible to judge. He half wondered whether they’d entered some sort of warp space while he was distracted by talking to her.

In the distance ahead there was the orange-gold glow of sunrise that made the planet ahead look red and white and swirly.

‘You truly mean that, don’t you?’ her voice managed disbelievingly. ‘How can you care for such a one as me? You don’t know anything about me.’

‘I know you probably haven’t ever really hurt anyone. I’ll bet it’s kept you awake nights before now, worrying how to cover it up that you haven’t.’

‘Who tells you these things? How can you know?!’

‘I told you. Your eyes told me.’

‘But I am a lizard. A reptile. A … a snake, as you would say.’

‘Maybe outside. But inside, you’re as transparent as the sky ahead: You’re still mostly human. Human enough. There have been monsters who’ve been human on the outside, but cold-blooded monsters right the way down. You shouldn’t have looked in my eyes like that if you didn’t want anyone to see it. Somewhere in there, there’s a soul yearning to breathe free, and a warm heart that doesn’t want to bleed cold. I … know a place that can help.’

He concentrated on steering, but he could feel her gaze about where his neck would be.

‘Are you going to get into trouble for this?’

‘It doesn’t matter …’ he tried to mumble.

‘Yes, it does,’ she said, decidedly firmly. ‘Are you going to get in trouble?’

‘Some.’

‘How much is “some”?’

‘It’s not important.’

‘If you want to help me, you will tell me – or so help me you’ll push that ejector button.’

He sighed. ‘Lose my commission, probably. Court-martial. Might serve a little time in the brig once all the dust settles.’

Her voice was a lot thicker when she spoke again. ‘Why are you doing all this?’

The plane started to warm a little as they got nearer to a friendly sun. ‘How honest do you want me to be?’

‘How honest can you be?’ she shot back.

‘… If you want the truth – I’d sooner be tortured to death than leave someone like you where you were. That’s the only way I can manage to say it. Whatever happens to me.’

They entered the planet’s atmosphere. Soon clouds, white and fluffy, drifted by. They were nearly home.

‘Yes,’ she said very quietly.

‘Sorry?’

‘Yes, I would like you to give me a name. A human name. Please.’

‘You’d trust me to do that? Just pick a name for you? Just like that?’

There was the feeling of an amused smile floating through the air of the space-plane’s cockpit. ‘I didn’t say I wouldn’t exercise a veto. But yes, as you put it, just like that …’

This really wasn’t the time to have to think about something like this. He could fly in his sleep, but he wasn’t exactly in good shape, and he might as well be in his sleep if he wasn’t careful.

‘Are you ready?’ he said, as the land appeared beneath them through the clouds.

‘As I’ll ever be: do your worst,’ she challenged him.

‘In that case, I’ll call you Mercy, because that’s what you showed me.’

‘I—’

‘Let me finish: I’ll call you Grace, because all is not lost.’

‘But—’

He held up a finger. She let him speak.

‘And I’ll call you Hope,’ he said. ‘Because you’ve got your whole life ahead of you.’

‘… Mercy Grace Hope? That’s three names. I’ll get confused.’

‘Hey, you try living up to “Beauregard” sometime …’

A hand clutched his shoulder again, causing him to swerve out of the way of a high-flying bird. After he steadied himself again, she said, ‘Thank you for the names, Beau. I’ll try to live up to them.’ Her voice, if possible, sounded so heavy that it practically gurgled.

‘And if I have anything to say about it –’ she continued, ‘once I’m human – I won’t let them court-martial you. I don’t know if they still do that sort of thing, but I remember when I was small finding a … human storybook. It had pictures in it, and such beautiful stories. They took it away from me when they found it … at the orphanage … and they thought they were being … kind by not telling anyone about it. But I remember … I remember hoping that a knight would come rescue me someday. That there was a hero out there for me … and a friend …’

“Beau” decided then and there that he’d never admit he heard the sobbing sounds behind him The hand clutching his shoulder was threatening to leave bruises there too, even through his flying jacket.

Eventually, breathing heavily and liquidly, Mercy Grace Hope said near his ear: ‘Thank you for making that dream come true …’

Beau never did know how he landed the plane afterward, because although he was pretty sure she never told anyone either, he would have bet he was crying all the way home.

You know what they say: No one is ever truly lost who has the heart to find a way home.

As the plane touched down on solid ground he felt the sigh of relief through the hand still gripping his shoulder – and after they’d coasted to a stop and he’d helped her out of the plane, she threw her arms around him and gave him a hug that threatened at one and the same time to break his ribs and for entirely different reasons to take his breath away.

And that was how Captain “Beau” arrived home with his life, his plane, an unexpected world-guest, and the most tear-soaked flight scarf in all creation. Which was exactly how they found them, half an hour later, still standing there just like that. The pilot and the girl who would be human.

He was released from the service after that, although without a blemish on his record, for all that.

And Mercy found that miracles are possible, and that dreams really can come true.

And they both lived happily ever after.

It had been a long way home, but it had been worth it, in …

… THE END.