Burn

by Patrick Ness

  “And agile . . .” The dragon spun, perhaps a little ostentatiously, before aiming quick white-hot blasts at three of the thicker trees in the field. They were more or less vaporized in equally quick puffs of white smoke.

  “He’s showing off,” Sarah said.

  “He’s going to attract attention,” Jason said, and the words were almost prophecy, for who should come driving down the road behind them but Deputy Kelby himself.

  “Nuts,” Jason muttered under his breath as the police car pulled to a stop next to them.

  “Shouldn’t you two be at your chores?” the deputy said through his window, kept open despite the cold so he had a place to spit his chewing tobacco.

  “We’re on our way home from school,” Sarah said.

  He smiled at her, his teeth smeared with black dregs of tobacco slime. He spat it “accidentally” too close to their feet. “You’re on your way home from school what now?”

  “We’re on our way home from school, sir,” Sarah said.

  “Heard your daddy hired a claw. A Russki, no less.”

  Sarah and Jason turned to see the dragon now tearing up burnt stumps with its back legs and tossing them almost jauntily into a pile. “That’s some good detective work, Deputy,” Jason said.

  Kelby’s face hardened fast as a snakebite. “You giving me lip, boy?”

  Sarah stepped in, trying to head off trouble. “Nothing against the law in hiring a dragon, and they aren’t involved in governments—”

  “Nothing against the law,” said Deputy Kelby, “about marrying outside your own kind.” He spit again. “Don’t mean people gotta like it.” He looked back out to the dragon. “Don’t mean people gotta put up with it.”

  “Well, yeah, actually,” Jason said, “it kind of does.”

  “Jason,” Sarah hissed.

  “What did you say to me?” Deputy Kelby was all eyes on Jason now.

  “If there’s no law against it,” Jason said, “then that actually does mean people have to put up with it. That’s how laws work.”

  Deputy Kelby took a moment, then he put on his Deputy hat with a deliberateness that spoke of no good whatsoever. “Was it law,” he said, “when your country bombed mine at Pearl Harbor?”

  “This is my country,” Jason said. “This one, right here, where we’re standing.”

  “Was it law,” Kelby said, getting out of his car, one hand on his gun, the other on the billy club in his belt, “that killed my daddy in Guadalcanal?”

  “Was it law that dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?” Jason said, his gaze level with the deputy’s.

  “Jason,” Sarah said again, sickened at how quickly this situation had gone south. It was getting worse, too. Kelby unbuckled the billy club.

  “Human girl,” a voice rumbled from the sky. The dragon was suddenly overhead, flying so close Deputy Kelby ducked. It turned a curve, then landed in the road, resting one long, hooked foreclaw on the hood of the deputy’s car, for seemingly no good reason whatsoever.

  “Your father wants you home,” the dragon said, turning his good eye to take in all three of them.

  “Get your filthy claw off my vehicle,” Deputy Kelby snapped, now unlatching the leather strap of his gun.

  “I merely bring a message,” the dragon said.

  “I ain’t seen you round these parts,” Kelby said. “And I don’t like making the acquaintances of new dragons.”

  “How interesting. The sentiment also applies to dragons about officers.”

  Kelby drew his gun, but kept it pointed at the road.

  “I said get your claw off my vehicle.”

  The dragon seemed to smile again. How does he do that? Sarah wondered. There was the slight curl of a lip, obviously, but when a dragon smiled, it made you really realize how much of a smile was in the eyes. Or eye, in this case.

  An eye it turned to Jason and Sarah. “Good mammals know when to return home,” the dragon said, as it lifted its claw, leaving not so much as a scratch in the deputy’s paint. Sarah didn’t need a second hint. She pushed Jason down the road in front of her, passing the dragon, who returned his attention to Deputy Kelby.

  “A Russian dragon,” the deputy said. “In my town. With the way the world is today. You a Communist, claw?”

  “I am a dragon,” the dragon said simply.

  “You a threat to my country?”

  “I do not know. Are you a threat to mine?” the dragon said, and again, even though Sarah couldn’t see his face now that she and Jason were heading fast to their respective farms, she could have sworn the dragon was still smiling.

  Once she was sure Jason was as good as back at his own farm, Sarah cut through a line of trucks to make it to her own. Spectators from local farms, checking to see if the rumor was true that Gareth Dewhurst, of all people, had hired a blue. It was. The dragon was already back from whatever business it had exchanged with Deputy Kelby; she could see it in the field, burning trees and digging up stumps.

  “Your daddy lost his mind?” one of them, Mr. McKeegan, said, but in a friendly way.

  “Does that seem likely to you, Mr. McKeegan?”

  “No,” Mr. McKeegan chuckled. “I don’t suppose it does.”

  “This is going to cause trouble,” another one, Mr. Svoboda, said. He wasn’t friendly at all.

  “That seems possible,” Sarah said politely, looking back to where Deputy Kelby was pulling in at the end of their long drive. A general groan went up among the farmers, each of whom started heading back to their trucks. Kelby was not a popular man.

  Sarah was already in her bedroom by the time Deputy Kelby finally made it to the house. “What can I do for you, Deputy?” she heard her father say outside, loud and annoyed as he came from the barn, his voice not happy at all.

  She didn’t try to eavesdrop. No time. Kelby was a jerk, but he was right, there were chores to do, always, every moment on a farm. She’d have to face her father if he finished before she did. She changed out of her old school clothes into dungarees and rubber boots that made her look like a temperamental boy, but it wasn’t like she had many options.

  She went out the back of the house, grabbing the buckets she needed for the hogs and the chickens, filling them with feed from the granary, then heading over to the pens. The hogs were waiting for her. Three of them, all sows, Eleanor, Bess, and Mamie. They snuffled as she approached, greeting her in that way of hogs that sounded absolutely nothing like “oink.”

  “Here you go, girls,” Sarah said, emptying feed into the trough. None of them were pregnant now. They’d sold the last batch of piglets to the butcher in the summer and were wondering how they were going to pay Mr. Svoboda to bring his boar around in a few months to get them pregnant again. Maybe that’s why he’d been so cross. She scratched each of them between the ears as they ate, which she knew they liked. “They’re just pigs,” her father always said. “Pigs who recognize me,” she never quite replied.

  Chickens next. They didn’t recognize anyone, not even each other. She tried to love them, but honestly, she’d met smarter celery. “Get back,” she shouted, shooing them from the pen door. She eyed the rooster, who always thought she was a threat that needed attacking. She hadn’t bothered naming him, but the chickens were all Martha. All of them, collectively. The Marthas. It was just easier.

  “That stupid man,” she heard her father say as he came around the house. She knew he’d seen her because that’s not what he would have said if he thought she couldn’t hear him. “Did he bother you?”

  She kept scattering chicken feed. If she stopped, even for one second, the rooster would start kicking her boots. “He tried.”

  “You stay away from him.”

  She gasped at the injustice. “How am I supposed to walk home? Over the mountains?”

  “None of your sass.”

  “That’s what he said to Jason.”

  Her father’s temper changed. “He go after Jason?”

  “It was going to be bad, too, u
ntil you told the dragon to come fetch me.”

  “Fetch you?” Her father looked surprised. “I didn’t tell it anything.”

  Sarah stopped scattering feed. “Then why . . . ?”

  They both looked out toward the far fields. The dragon was currently pulling a large boulder into the air, then flinging it with almost contemptuous ease into the larger forest. They actually felt the thud when it hit the ground.

  “He probably shouldn’t be doing that,” her father muttered, and she noticed the dragon was back to a he. “The dragon said I’d sent him?”

  “Yes, sir.” She gently booted away the rooster attacking her heels. “It’s a good thing, too. We were fixing to get into real trouble.”

  “Huh,” her father said, his all-purpose sound that could mean anything from “Imagine that” to “You’re mistaken and I’m too embarrassed to correct you.” Here, Sarah thought, it just meant her father was presented with something he didn’t understand. She didn’t understand it either. Why would a dragon care about her?

  “Maybe he just hates sheriffs and wanted to cause trouble?” she suggested.

  “That’s probably it,” her father said, but as he walked back toward the fields where the dragon was working, she didn’t think he sounded convinced.

  She waited until her father was asleep before she snuck out. She already knew which creaky stairs to avoid and how to close the back door so it wouldn’t slam. Farm girls got responsibility young, which meant they had to learn how to break the rules that much earlier.

  The dragon had told her father nothing that afternoon, refused to even acknowledge that he’d spoken to the deputy, which seemed ridiculous since Kelby had railed on about it to her father for the entire time it took her to feed the hogs.

  “He can’t do anything,” her father said at dinner. “I haven’t broken the law.”

  “We should be careful, though,” Sarah had said. “Don’t give him any reason.”

  “If you think Deputy Kelby needs a reason, then there’s more about the world I need to teach you.”

  That had made Sarah think of her mother, who had also felt the need to teach Sarah a lot about a world where things might not be easy for her. Sarah felt that any world that needed this many lessons must have something deeply wrong with it.

  As for the dragon, he—for it seemed they were firmly in he territory now—had simply pretended her father wasn’t asking any questions at all. “I am finished for the day,” he’d rumbled as the sun set, curling up again in the still woodsy part of the field.

  The woodsy part Sarah was heading to right now.

  It had been a worryingly dry winter, though still bitterly cold. Another clear night, too, when they were usually deep into a fourth month of gray by this time of year. But there were the stars. There was the moon. There was her crystal breath, white in the dark.

  She had known no other home than this farm. Nothing on it scared or surprised her. The path she took was so sure under her feet she wouldn’t have been able to describe it as anything like a decision. This was her home, her movement across it as much as the ground itself.

  The great anomaly of the dragon wasn’t hard to track.

  The first field he had been working still smoldered slightly, very faint in the moonlight. The smell was better evidence. Ash, certainly, but also a kind of odorous heat, charcoal, and beyond all that the faint chemical tang of the fire dragons generated in the organ just above their lungs. A tang so specific and unhuman that a little voice in Sarah’s head began to murmur her father’s belief they had no soul. How could such a creature even really exist? How could they not just be a magical fantasy? If they hadn’t always been there, no one would have believed in them. That didn’t stop every teenager she knew from wanting to be one, though, engaging in endless debates about the merits of the five types (red, blue, green, white, and desert), which continental Waste was the best, and what it would be like to fly. Sarah knew her choices, but would never have admitted them to anyone.

  The dragon was curled around a small grove of trees in the far end of the field, seemingly asleep. She had no idea how to tell if a dragon was awake or not. For that matter, she had no idea if approaching a sleeping one was the height of stupidity. Had it eaten today? What had it eaten? It was near the forest. Had it found a deer or a beaver? Would it be very, very hungry if she turned up in the dark of night?

  But no, that was foolishness. Childishness, even, something Sarah Dewhurst would never believe of herself. She simply had to speak to it, hungry or not, and there was no way she could do that with her father not safely asleep, back in his own bed.

  “Hello,” she called quietly. The dragon’s head was turned back in the trees, so all she could really see was one great wing, covering himself as he slept. His great body rose and fell in breaths much slower than her own.

  “Look,” she said, “I don’t know if you can hear me but . . .”

  But what? What did she want to say to him?

  “Thank you.”

  Maybe it was as simple as that. Kelby was known for administering beatings, and he no doubt felt he could have given one to Jason or even Sarah without much fear of reprisal or punishment. Then again, perhaps he wouldn’t have beaten her. Her father was a white man, and his word would carry more in court than Hisao Inagawa’s. Such was the broken world in which her father was judged for hiring a dragon.

  “Thank you,” she said again.

  Did the dragon’s breathing change? It was hard to tell. She was getting colder, too. She turned to go, vaguely disappointed both in the dragon and herself. She’d wanted to ask it why. Was it just hatred of officers? Did he do it just to deprive Kelby of joy? Maybe.

  But still.

  She found herself stopping. She found herself turning. She found herself saying, simply, “My name is Sarah,” breaking the rule her father had set down so firmly.

  Still no response. She turned and left again, but hadn’t gotten more than three steps before she heard, low, in the dark and the night, “I know your name, Sarah Dewhurst.”

  She turned back immediately. The dragon uncurled slowly from the trees, his great neck swinging around to her. She was suddenly more afraid than she’d expected to be.

  “Kazimir,” the dragon said.

  “What?”

  “My name.”

  “Cashmere?”

  “Kaz-i-mir,” the dragon enunciated. “It means ‘Famed For Destruction.’”

  “Kazimir,” Sarah repeated, then asked, “how did you know mine?”

  But as with her father, Kazimir simply acted as if the universe had never spoken such a question. He re-curled his neck into the trees and, for all intents and purposes, fell back to sleep.

  After a moment, still shivering, Sarah walked back to the only house she had ever known.

  The dragon was not asleep, however. He had positioned his head so he could watch the girl pick her way deftly along the path back to the farmhouse. He didn’t stop watching her until his one keen eye—so much sharper in darkness than a pitiful human one—saw her reenter the house.

  She was brave, much braver than most humans, to come out here on her own, at night, to speak to a dragon she did not know. He could already see the yearning in her, the reach so many humans had when they wished for more, a reach that was almost a magic on its own, if they only knew it.

  Good, she would need all that in the days to come. There was so very, very much she didn’t know. But she would learn, thought Kazimir. Yes, she would learn.

  And oh, what a glory that might yet be.

  Four

  “A RED,” SAID Agent Woolf, and Agent Dernovich could already feel his heartburn flaring.

  “We’re in western Canada, Agent Woolf,” he said, a grump in his voice. “What sort of dragon would you expect it to be?”

  She ignored him. She did that a lot, especially when dragons were the topic of conversation, and with Agent Woolf, there weren’t many other topics. He watched as she bent over the un
even puddle of hardened steel that had, at some point this morning, been a fully operating car.

  “We can’t dally, Woolf. Even you must realize how this changes things.”

  “You can tell by the smell, mainly.” She blinked at him with eyes that always felt like they were pinning him down to an opinion he was forced to make up on the spot. “The reds alone leave a trace of sulfur behind.”

  “Tell me something useful,” Agent Dernovich said, “or don’t tell me anything at all.”

  The FBI were allowed in Canada—the Cold War demanded cooperation, and Americans were always happy to take a mile when Canadians offered an inch—but Agents Woolf and Dernovich almost certainly weren’t allowed here. Their mole on the local police force could only promise to keep the site secret for an hour, maybe two, before their Canadian counterparts—the Special Branch of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police—showed up.

  Canada had an international reputation for politeness. The RCMP Special Branch did not.

  Then Agent Woolf did say something that made this stolen hour worth all the future trouble it might cause. “This isn’t dragon blood.”

  She was down the road from the wreckage—if “wreckage” was even the right word for such complete obliteration—kneeling directly onto the cold tarmac. The knees of Agent Woolf’s cheap, Bureau-issued stockings were always full of runs and tears because she always raised her bureau-issued skirt above them to kneel, which, to Dernovich, made absolutely no sense—the fabric of the skirt could probably stop your lazier bullets—but which he’d given up trying to explain as anything other than the typical behavior of Agent Veronica Woolf.

  That name, first of all. Veronica Woolf sounded like a femme fatale in a detective movie. Or the girl from college you could never introduce to your mother. It didn’t even sound real, much less accurate for the dowdy, distracted, frequently-with-mustard-stuck-in-her-hair agent he’d been partnered with for the last eight months.

  Female agents weren’t common, but they weren’t such unique ducks either. Paul Dernovich had even worked with one who’d done a sterling job gathering intelligence in Cuba. But Woolf was one of the bureau’s dragon specialists, who were already weirdos to begin with. They almost never went out into the field, and Dernovich thought Woolf was a pretty good example why.