by Patrick Ness
“And kill us,” Malcolm said.
“I am a dragon, too,” Kazimir said. “I know our ways. I may know how to fight her.”
“Fighting her is one thing,” Malcolm said. “Winning is another.”
“And have you any plans, assassin?” Kazimir nearly shouted at him. “You knew her as your beloved Mitera Thea!”
Malcolm shook his head, sadly. “She was always just human to me.”
“Your species always tell stories of men who you describe as dragons underneath their own skin.” Kazimir gestured to his own body as evidence.
“Maybe she wanted it so much,” Malcolm stared. “Maybe she Believed so strongly that—”
“It doesn’t matter,” Sarah said, bitterly. “She’s a dragon now. And I’m not fighting a dragon.”
“You are,” Kazimir said. “It was foretold.”
“Was it foretold that I would go talk to my mother first?”
And she left.
Kazimir watched her go, his arms crossed, wondering at all that had yet to happen. The assassin came up to his shoulder, also watching her leave.
“You’re considering something,” Malcolm said. “A possibility you don’t like and didn’t want to share with us.”
“It is preposterous,” Kazimir returned. “It simply cannot be.”
Malcolm held out the claw for Kazimir to see. “Torn from the Goddess herself,” Malcolm said. “Supposedly.”
“Not supposedly,” Kazimir said, then asked, “When the red dragon came through, when she was still a woman, I saw her bloodied hand?”
“Yes,” Malcolm said. “In the fight, the last one before we all came over here. . . .” He hesitated.
“Yes?” Kazimir said.
“I’m sorry,” Malcolm said. “Your nakedness is distracting.”
Kazimir rolled his eye. “Humans are ridiculous—”
“In the fight we just had,” Malcolm tried again, louder this time. “I used my blades on her. I cut off her forefinger.”
Kazimir led Malcolm’s eyes to the claw again.
The claw from the forefinger of the Goddess herself.
“Oh,” Malcolm said. “Shit.”
Sixteen
SHE ACHED. THE snow in the crater of the mountain was soothing, but it didn’t stop the pain in her forearm, the one Malcolm had broken, or where he had sliced off her finger, or all the other places that hurt from the fight and from . . .
The change.
It was an understatement to say she had not expected that.
The pain had been extraordinary, like she was being skinned alive, which perhaps she had been. She felt as if she had exploded from the inside, stretched beyond what was possible for her meager human body.
That was what had made it so confusing. Even in the intensity of the pain—which had lasted what felt like a lifetime even though it had clearly passed in an instant—she had also felt . . . liberation.
All her life she had been driven by a devotion matched only by its accompanying rage. She wanted to destroy men for dragons, knowing all the while it meant her own destruction. A self-hate so grand it was almost theology on its own. Even so, she’d hoped for her survival somehow. She knew what the Spur was capable of—there was no greater scholar of it in the world than she—she knew it offered an escape, but to another world entirely. Which was a difficult pill to swallow. She would save one world for her beloveds and be exiled to another without them, no credit for her heroism, only the fact of it, which no one would ever know. Unless she could convince the dragons in this new world, make herself indispensable to them, show them what one committed Believer could accomplish. They would know the truth of it, she felt. They would have to.
There had been another option, an unlikely one, which embarrassed her to think of now . . .
But then something wonderful had happened.
She was now dragon. She was now an enormous, red, fire-breathing dragon. She inhaled to try it and made herself cough and cough, the aches ringing out like bells through her enormous body.
She inhaled again, more slowly this time, feeling the fire organ in her chest engage—she knew how to do this, as instinctively as she had known how to fly—and breathed out a blast so strong and hot, it not only melted the top of the glacier but the rocks below, the orange glow of molten lava reflecting back up to her in a brief shine, before the perilously low temperatures froze even the steam, causing a flurry of snow around her.
See her strength. See her incredible dragon strength.
She was not cold. Dragons carried their own heating system, did they not? She could wait up here until the break healed, which she also seemed to know instinctively would not take long. A dragon with a broken foreleg was not a dragon. Their evolution would have made the healing of bones top priority.
So she would wait. And then she would conquer.
She did not know how yet—and that the only other dragon she smelled was that puny little blue who had interfered (and how her nose was like a second brain all of a sudden! How marvelous! How impossibly blind she had always been!) was a matter of some small concern. She would have to seek them out, wherever they might be hiding. She would have to . . .
She sniffed again. And again.
Well, now. That was unexpected.
There were no other dragons to lead to war over the humans here.
But then again, now that she thought of it, that meant there were no other dragons to share power with after the war was finished.
Fate took away, but fate also gave.
She inhaled another deep breath, not for fire, but to gather herself and her wobbly wings. She flew straight up from the mountaintop, into the clouds, pushing through into open air.
The sun was setting, nearly gone in the far western horizon. To her east lay the night, stars already a-twinkle. Far to the southwest, she saw—and distantly heard—an airplane. It seemed commercial rather than military. Any passenger looking this direction might spot her dark redness against the white of the clouds and wonder what they were hallucinating.
She laughed to herself, then scanned the sky above.
It was empty. Nothing blinked. No satellite flew overhead.
That might not mean anything, of course. It might be in its orbit on the other side of the planet, it might have failed at launch, or that launch might be tomorrow or next month or next year. The point was, she had no satellite yet with which to start a war.
So war would have to come from somewhere else.
She smiled to herself, turning back to the mountain to rest some more and consider what had happened to her.
She had, against all odds and after many years, accomplished the impossible: nuclear blasts would kill a dragon, but only if hit directly. They were immune to the radiation that fell out afterwards. So let men bomb one another into oblivion in a war she had worked so hard to start. With the planet rid of humans, dragons could fly free again, fly free as they obviously should, the top of all creation.
In all these accomplishments, though, there had been the embarrassing other option. Oh, how she had dreamt, deep in her heart of hearts, never spoken aloud to another soul, how she might be the sole survivor. She would go to the bosom of dragons as the bombs were falling and she would tell them what she had done. They would listen to her this time, these beasts she worshipped but who ignored her devotion. They would protect her, shield her, because they would finally see her for what she always knew she was. She was more than just a Believer (and hadn’t she been right? Just look at her now. Look at her.) and they would know it, too, the human who had given them this unparalleled gift.
Who had given them not just her faith, not just her life, but the whole world.
They would smile on her. They would grant her her dearest wish. They could do it. There were stories of it happening. Stories over the millennia (but none very recent) of humans who had done great service to dragons and dragons who had done the greatest of dragon magic in return.
They would chang
e her.
“When it turned out,” she said now, aloud, reveling in the depth of her voice, its timbre, its power. “When it turned out,” she said again, even louder, “all I needed to do was cross to a world that would recognize me for what I was all along.”
She laughed. And laughed again. And melted more rocks.
Then the laughing faltered.
The prophecy had told of a girl who would save the world, that girl, the one she’d sent Malcolm after.
Well, that was clearly wrong, yes? It sure seemed so, now that the other world would almost certainly be at war before the week was out. Perhaps the prophecy meant that the girl would go back and save it. Yes, that must be it. Who even cared if she did? This world had turned Agent Woolf into a dragon.
But then . . .
What if the prophecy hadn’t meant her old world at all?
What if the prophecy had meant this world? The girl would save this one.
Save it from her.
But how? She was a puny girl, and this dragon, this one right here, on this mountaintop, she was the mightiest of the mighty. The mightiest thing—if her nose was right—on this whole planet.
What an unexpected bonus indeed. And what a nasty surprise for nasty little girls.
She had seen Malcolm as she flew past, and he would be in for a surprise, as well. He would accept her as his proper Mother Goddess now, or he could easily be disposed of. There had been a third with them, too. A boy who . . .
She sniffed. She sniffed again, deeper. She went right to the rim of the crater and sniffed again.
No.
No, it couldn’t be.
The passage through had turned her from human to dragon . . .
And him from dragon to human.
Oh, how delicious. How perfectly, ridiculously delicious. What a wonderful place this world must be, to recognize your true nature so easily, so beautifully.
Well, wait until her foreleg healed. Wait until she was full strength.
Then they would see. They would all see.
They might ask, what could one dragon do to a world?
But that was the great secret, one revealed to her now, this instant, as sure as she’d known how to breathe fire.
She wouldn’t be one dragon for long.
She rubbed her stomach. In her new dragon state, she could feel them in there. A litter. A proper dragon litter.
Which was impossible. And highly alarming. Agent Woolf had been very much a virgin. She hated humans far too much to touch any one of them in that way.
So, how then?
Destiny, was all she could think. This world had given her every tool to dominate it with this shape, so why not also the means to proliferate? How they must beg for something to worship here.
Very well, then, she would just have to start the new age for them, wouldn’t she?
The thumping of her dragon heart told her, made her know, that she could.
The dragon that had been Agent Woolf settled in to make her plans.
Seventeen
SARAH COULDN’T SETTLE on whether to run or walk, so she ended up doing both. She would hurry along the road to the farm, desperate to see her mother, then it would all become too much, and she would slow down. Then she’d think again how her mother—her mother—was actually within reach and off she’d go.
She was having a difficult day, it had to be said.
She came around the last bend of the drive and looked at the white-painted house and the too-tall barn. Only the bicycle, dropped hastily on the front lawn, its wheel still spinning, showed any clue that someone lived here. She couldn’t see her father’s truck. Then she remembered what her mother had said about being “a woman alone.” Was he dead here, too? Was that the exchange she was going to have to make?
She heard oinking. She looked around the side of the house to the sty, in the same place as in her own world. There they were, her three perfect sows. They recognized her, too, as she approached, all three standing their forelegs on the low fence. She put her hands out and they fought to nuzzle them.
Her pigs. Her three not little but quite large pigs.
“Hello, ladies,” she said, with a gasping sob. There had been so much going on, she hadn’t known how much the loss of them hurt until suddenly here they were, grunting and nuzzling and acting like it was she who had risen from the dead and not them.
When it seemed she had. In this world, where her mother hadn’t fallen to cancer, something else had come along, some reckoning that clearly stretched across universes to make sure the Dewhurst family was brought low, and had taken this world’s Sarah and seemingly her father with it.
“How did I die here?” she whispered to the pigs. Bess, the greediest, was already over to the trough, nudging it the way she did when Sarah was late with feed. The pigs didn’t care. She was here, they were happy to see her, and looking to get a free meal out of it.
“You’re not her,” she heard. She turned.
“I don’t think I am,” Sarah said to her mother. Mamie and Eleanor still reached for her with their snouts. She couldn’t help but scratch them. “Or if I am, I’m not all the way.”
Her mother looked suspicious, a look Sarah didn’t like seeing. Darlene Dewhurst had been slighted plenty by the town, by the people in it, both overtly and covertly, things Sarah knew all too well herself. Darlene’s face had shown anger, and hurt, and fortitude, and humor, and acceptance, and fear, and strength.
But it had never been suspicious. Suspicion corroded, she’d always said. It would grow and take the things you loved with it. What had happened in this universe to make her suspicious?
The death of a daughter and husband might do it.
“The pigs sure like you,” her mother said. “You holding food?”
“No, ma’am. I think they just recognize me.”
Her mother shook her head, angrily. “I will not put up with cruelty—”
Sarah raised her hands in a kind of surrender. “I don’t mean to be. This is hard for me, too, seeing you here.” She began to cry again. “It’s been two years in my world.”
“Your world?”
Sarah shrugged. “That’s what they said. A world right next to this one. Almost the same, but not quite. And somehow . . . We jumped over.”
“We? The other two who were with you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Her mother looked around. “Where are they now?”
Where were they now? Sarah had gone off with such purpose, she hadn’t looked to see whether either of them was following her. Distantly, she knew that if she was ever going to get back, she’d probably need them, but putting space between her and them right now also didn’t feel like the worst idea. How else could a girl gather her thoughts?
“Oh,” her mother said, “there they are.”
Sarah saw them both hesitating at the end of the drive. Malcolm looking sheepish and sad, Kazimir still naked as the day he was born, staring intently at Sarah, but neither of them coming closer.
“Stay there!” Sarah said, then she turned to her mother. “Can I talk to you?”
“I said, no—”
“My pigs were poisoned.” Sarah put her hands back to the still-waiting snouts. “Back in the other world. Whatever and wherever it was. Mamie, Bess, and Eleanor.” She glanced back at her mother. “Dad poisoned them. Because . . . Well it’s a long story but I think he knew it was wrong.”
“Your father knew a lot of things were wrong.” Her mother immediately corrected herself. “Not your father.”
“I suppose there’s no such things as dragons either?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. They’re only from white people stories. Black folk have more important things to do than worry about dragons.”
“Dragons like the giant red one you saw flying less than ten minutes ago?”
Her mother bit her lower lip. “I don’t know what I saw.”
“You saw a dragon.”
“I said I don’t know what it
was.” Then she frowned more. “But I did see something.”
“It’s dangerous.”
“Well, that may be the first thing you’ve said I believe, missy.”
Sarah’s heart jumped a bit. She hadn’t heard her mother call her “missy” in too long. It didn’t matter that she only said it when she thought Sarah was getting sassy; it was like being hit right in the chest. She felt her eyes well up again.
Her mother sighed at the sight of the tears. “You do look so much like her.”
“I’m not her,” Sarah said, “but I’m almost her.” She was really crying now. “I’ve missed you.”
Darlene Dewhurst still looked stern, but she used a thumb to wipe excess tears from her own eyes. “This isn’t right. Whatever this is, it isn’t right.” She cocked her head. “Is that blood on your dress?”
“It’s . . . How do I even explain? There was a boy. And there were guns. And then I saw Daddy. . . .” She couldn’t quite say it, but forced it out. “A woman shot him. Right on that road out there. And then I was here. And so were you. And I don’t know how to get back, if I even can.”
Her mother sighed again. “Okay, listen, girl, whoever you may be—”
She stopped at the sound of a truck. It was rounding the corner of the drive, and as Malcolm and Kazimir—who had, somewhat surprisingly, waited where Sarah had told them to—stood to one side, she recognized it. Hisao Inagawa was behind the wheel, looking shocked at Malcolm and Kazimir as he passed, then his eyes widening so big at Sarah she could see them through the windshield. He stared at her as he got out, before looking over to Sarah’s mother. “You all right, Darlene?”
“I’m debating that right now, Hisao,” her mother said, “but I don’t feel under threat if that’s what you mean.”
“Sarah?” Sarah heard.
She had been staring so hard at Mr. Inagawa that she didn’t even realize Jason was getting out of the truck next to him. An unbloody Jason, an unshot one. One who wasn’t lying (dead, she knew it, she couldn’t think the word, but she knew it, dead) in her lap.
“Oh, thank God,” she whispered, her heart leaping. She ran to him, wrapped her arms around him, holding him close and hard. It felt like nothing but him, down to the boniness of his skinny shoulders.
