by Patrick Ness
“And you won’t tell anyone what you saw here?”
“I won’t. I promise.”
“How do I know you’ll keep your word, Sheriff?” Malcolm pressed the wrist again.
“You can put us under surveillance!” Kelby cried out.
“You already are,” Malcolm lied.
Kelby looked horrified at that. For the first time, Malcolm realized, he also looked properly afraid. He wondered if it would drive the man to murder. Or if it already had.
“If you breathe one word of this,” Malcolm continued, “just one, I’ll see you locked up.” He pressed on the wrist again. “Or perhaps worse, if you catch me on a bad day.”
Sheriff Kelby bit back his cry of pain. “Why didn’t you say all that when I walked in?” he grunted out.
“Because I could tell a man like you only responds to force.”
Kelby seemed to accept that. After a moment, Malcolm resheathed the blades and slowly took his weight off. Kelby held his wrist close to his chest and scooted back toward the door. He glanced at Darlene. “You’re telling me these people are in on it, too?” he asked Malcolm.
“You said yourself it started from her farm.”
Kelby reached the door and used it to pull himself up, never turning his back on the group. He looked like he wanted to say many, many things, but ultimately decided to leave without saying any. He slammed the door behind him. Hisao got up from the floor and started heading that way.
“Where are you going?” Jason asked.
Still holding the napkin to his nose, Hisao sighed. “He won’t be able to start his car with a broken wrist. I’ll at least help him get out of here.” He left, too.
“That’s a kind man,” Darlene said, also rising.
“Yeah,” Jason scoffed, “helping the sheriff who just broke his nose.”
“You think Kelby’s going to keep quiet?” Darlene asked him. “Even if every word this person with the knives said is true”—she glared at Malcolm—“we still have to live on these farms. Kelby will still be sheriff. You think he isn’t going to make us pay for all this?”
“I’m sorry,” Malcolm said. “It was either that or kill him.”
“No, no,” Darlene said, sounding annoyed at herself. “You did the right thing. So did Hisao. But sometimes doing the right thing comes with a price tag.” She sat back down at the table. “What a day.” She glanced at Malcolm again. “Was any of that true? Are you all spies? Because that makes as much sense as anything.”
“It is completely true,” Kazimir said.
“It’s not true at all,” Sarah said, and she and Kazimir glared at each other.
“I was trained,” Malcolm said.
“Obviously,” Darlene said.
“By a religious cult that worships dragons.”
She just blinked at him. “I preferred spies. Let’s go back to that.”
The assassin approached Sarah sheepishly a few moments later, as Mr. Inagawa came back in the door. Her mother handed him his shotgun.
“You were right,” the boy said to Sarah.
“About what?”
“About not killing the sheriff. About making amends in this world.” He reached into his coat and took out the Spur of the Goddess, which still looked like an ordinary dragon claw. He handed it to Kazimir, who took it with surprise. “I’ll come back for this,” Malcolm said.
“You know I cannot work it,” Kazimir said. “You also know that she is the only one who can.”
“That’s probably true.”
Kazimir sounded agitated. “After what I have seen this evening, you seem like you would be a very skilled ally in what we face.”
“That may be true, too,” Malcolm said, buttoning up his coat. “But it may also be true that it takes a dragon to fight a dragon.”
Kazimir said nothing to that.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” Malcolm said.
“You’re leaving?” Sarah said.
“I have people to . . .” She saw him search for the word. “Save, if I can.”
“Save from what?” Darlene asked as he walked toward the door.
“Save from me.”
They all watched him go, Hisao stepping aside to let him pass. Kazimir looked at the claw, considering it, as the door shut again.
“I wonder,” Kazimir said to Sarah’s mother, “if you might have any paper.”
Darlene looked confused, but finally just shrugged her shoulders and went to find some.
It was Jason who finally broke the ensuing silence.
“Isn’t anyone going to explain the dragon?”
“I guess I’m staying here tonight,” Sarah said to Jason outside later. Darlene was finishing bandaging Hisao’s nose, and Kazimir had taken the paper Darlene found for who knew what reason.
“Okay,” Jason said. “Sounds good.” He kept staring at her. “You really do look just like her.”
“I am her. In a way.”
“Uh-huh.”
Sarah didn’t know what to do, exactly. She yearned to hug him again, to be in close and smell that Jason smell, to have him wrap his arms around her like he’d done just a few nights ago, to have it be her and him in a secret moment that the world knew nothing about.
But he was a little awkward here, standoffish, like he wasn’t sure what she wanted. She took a step toward him. He took an uncomfortable step back.
“Jason, I—”
“I don’t really know you,” he said, looking worried. “This is weirder than anything that could ever really happen, and this is the second time you’ve acted like you know me super-well but . . .”
“But what?”
He shrugged, still looking worried. “We weren’t that good of friends, really, me and Sarah. I mean, we weren’t enemies, but it’s not like we hung around down at the soda shop or anything.” He looked away. “You always kind of avoided me at school.”
“I did?” she said.
“Yeah, there are hardly any kids there who aren’t white, and I always got the impression you thought things were easier for you if we kept separate. Even though we lived down the same road.”
“Oh, my,” she said, feeling stupid for the grandmotherly phrase. “That’s not at all how it was for us in my world. It was the opposite. We stuck together. We were friends. We were . . .” She blushed a little in the dark.
“We were more?” Jason said, and there was so much surprise in his voice that she laughed out loud.
“No one really knew,” she told him. “That would have got us in trouble in this town. And did. But, yes.” She looked into the shadow where his eyes were.
“Huh,” he said, his face nearly frozen. She saw him swallow. “I mean, I guess something might have developed—”
“I’m not saying—”
“I did think about it.”
“You did?”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t I? Pretty girl and so forth. But . . .” He looked away again, then shook his head. “I’m sorry, this is too weird. Just . . .” He started backing away toward Hisao’s truck. “I’m sure I wish you well and all but . . . Too weird.”
He got inside the truck and stared straight ahead, not looking at her. She hugged her arms around herself, until Hisao and Darlene came out, too. Hisao—his eyes already on the way to blackening—nodded at her unhappily as he got in beside Jason. They drove off without Jason ever looking at her.
Except at the very last moment, the very last second.
He looked back.
And they drove away.
Twenty
THE DRAGON THAT had once been Veronica Woolf slept. Her dreams were dragon dreams.
“Try not to look, baby,” Grace’s father said. She sat in the passenger seat of their car, seatbelt around her, Little House in the Big Woods in her hand. It was difficult to disobey her father’s instructions—she was so small in a seat meant for adults she could barely see over the window ledge—but she still took quick peeks when he was looking the other way.
The Pinedale houses hadn’t burned so much as blown up. Whatever had attacked them had hit with a heat so hot everything just evaporated, a word Grace had overheard her father use when he was on the phone talking to the general and she absolutely was not supposed to be listening at all.
She saw Mrs. Bailey as they passed the wreck of her home, her arm at a horrible angle that made Grace look away. Everywhere out there had awful things to see, no matter where she turned. Maybe her father was right. She sat back in her seat, holding her book to her chest.
“What was it?” she asked him now.
“I’m not sure, pumpkin,” he’d said, but she kept looking at him because she’d heard the phone call, heard how certain he’d sounded. She saw him realizing this, too. “It was . . . something that shouldn’t be here.”
“Scenario 8,” she said.
He raised his eyebrows in a bemused way.
“How many scenarios are there?” she asked.
“Ninety-four,” he said. “And that’s where this conversation has to end, sweetheart.”
She was her father’s daughter. Even before her mother had left, Grace knew what “Top Secret” meant and that, though he obviously kept nearly everything from her, she was not to tell any of her schoolmates that her father even had secrets.
He respected her enough to trust her. She respected him enough to keep his trust. It made her feel mature, older than her eight years. Older than the very young eight years she felt sitting in the passenger seat in the middle of a town that was no longer there. In his gentle way now—Agent Dernovich was a lovely man, all his colleagues agreed, and a terrific parent in difficult circumstances—her father refused to tell her any more, so she went over what she’d heard him say in the bunker, broken fragments that maybe told a story.
“That’s what I said, general. . . .
“Visual confirmation, at least a hundred feet . . .
“It means we were right, and if we’re right about one scenario . . .
“I agree. Unfortunately, both bases are on the other side of the mountain it seemed to be using as a roost . . .
“You heard what?”
He had sat up at that sentence and listened for a long time, then he’d glanced at Grace. “I can be there by morning. Grace’s grandma is on that side of the mountains anyway.”
That was how they came to be in the car so soon after the monster had flown back into the clouds.
“I hate leaving,” her father said now. “So many people need help.”
“Then why are we?”
He looked at her, touched her cheek tenderly. “Fire engines and ambulances will be here very soon. As will the men your daddy works with. They can handle it.”
“And there’s something on the other side of the mountains you need to see first.”
He looked surprised at her memory, then smiled. “You know, they let women in the bureau. You’d be amazing, when you’re old enough.”
She smiled back, warmth flushing her face. A platoon of fire trucks with sirens blazing sped past them in the opposite direction, though there wasn’t much good they could do for the corpse of Pinedale.
“Where on earth did you pick up a phrase like that?” her father said, and Grace realized she’d spoken aloud.
She held out Little House. “I’ve been reading books a little older than this one.” Then quickly added, “Not that I don’t love it! But the school doesn’t have a very big library and I’ve read all my age year and Miss Archer lets me take out books sometimes meant for older kids.”
“I may have to have a talk with Miss Archer,” her father said, looking into the night.
“No, Daddy, please!” Grace was suddenly passionate. “I love her so much! She’s only doing it to make me smarter!”
“You’re already pretty smart, pumpkin.” But he was smiling again. “Some eight-year-olds might read a phrase like ‘corpse of Pinedale.’ You’re the only one I know who’d actually say it out loud.”
She flushed again, and it was in this rush of good feeling that she asked the question that had tripped in her mind since the shape had flown over her house the first time.
“Was it a dragon, Daddy?”
He didn’t answer at first, which was almost answer enough. “It sure looked like one, didn’t it?” he finally said.
“Where did it come from?” she asked. “Out of the mountain?”
It wasn’t a foolish question. She knew about volcanoes. She knew Mount Rainier would blow up one day, maybe soon, maybe in ten thousand years, maybe after one of the other volcanoes in the Cascades—Adams, perhaps, or St. Helens—did the same. Volcanoes were explosions of fire and lava. So was the thing that had killed the town.
“No, honey,” her father said. “We don’t think it did.”
“We?”
They passed an Oldsmobile heading their way, one that looked an awful lot like the one her father was driving. Her father looked in its windows to see if he knew the person behind the wheel.
“We think maybe there are other worlds,” her father said. “We don’t know for sure. It’s only a theory.” He saw her not get this word. “A story, kind of. A way of describing something you don’t have proof for yet.”
“There are worlds full of dragons?”
“Maybe.”
“You said Scenario 8.”
“That’s a phrase I never want to hear you say out loud again,” he said, strongly but not angrily. “That’s a phrase even a girl as clever as you should not have heard or remembered, and it could be dangerous for you to say anywhere at any time. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, Daddy.”
“Good girl.”
“But it means you must have thought of dragons.”
He laughed to himself, she hoped at her persistence. “There have been . . . hints. Things we found that weren’t quite evidence. Sounds on unusual frequencies. It was a theory. One of ninety-four.”
“What were the other ninety-three?”
“I’ve already said far too much and you know it. Get some sleep. We’ll be at Grandma’s tomorrow. You’ll like that.”
Her clear-eyed father who heard sounds on unusual frequencies had one terrible blind spot: how much Grace liked his own mother. Grace liked her the exact amount that her grandma liked Grace, the living reminder of “that woman” who had hurt her son so. It was a home of doilies and heavy perfumes and the air was filled with unsaid things.
Grace looked out the window. The forest was white in the snowfall, but still seemed to hold more secrets than she had ever thought possible.
That was when she started to shake.
“Don’t worry, honey,” Agent Dernovich said, gripping all of his daughter’s little body in his arms, on his lap. “This is called shock. It’s perfectly normal.”
He had pulled over to the side of the road the instant she had said, “Daddy?” with alarm. He had kept the motor running, kept the heater on, and taken her into his arms, holding her as she trembled.
“What’s shock?” she said, through chattering teeth.
“Something humans do when they see something too big to really understand.”
“There was a dragon, Daddy.”
“I know.”
“It tried to kill us.”
“I know.”
“It killed people in town.”
“I know that, too.”
He held her while she cried. She never saw how angry his face was. Not at holding her, of course, she was his moon and stars. No, his anger was for the thing that did not belong here. The thing that had killed probably two hundred people in a little under ten minutes. The thing that had made his perfect, beautiful, strange, brainy daughter shak
e in his arms.
He had met Grace’s mother when she was a secretary and he a junior agent. He’d been ordered to Havana—in fact, with a female agent he had long admired for her savvy and resourcefulness—but when he went to the Washington, D.C., office for his final briefing, well, that had turned out to be the day the Canadian spy scandal erupted. The Soviets had an entire network infiltrated into the Canadian Service. This was not a good thing. His Havana trip was canceled, and he had been stuck for the next three days mopping up the mess, aided by a brand new secretary who had started that morning.
If the scandal hadn’t broken that day, he’d never have known her other than the few seconds he saw her in passing as he went out of his Havana briefing. Were all relationships like this? So predicated on absolute chance? He had moved Linda from the East Coast where she’d grown up all the way over to the “other” Washington. Not even a city like Seattle, a tiny field office in his hometown in the East where remote stations had been established in the search for a theorized Soviet satellite that could launch anytime in the ensuing decade.
She had been unhappy. She had met the electrician. She had left with him, and this had given Agent Dernovich mixed feelings. He hated her for breaking Grace’s heart, but he could never, ever regret being left with this girl who made his heart pop every time she asked one of her million questions. That he might never have had her but for the weirdest, slightest vagaries of fate, that she might never have existed at all, made her all the more precious.
So there were indeed huge security risks on the table, and that Scenario 8 had come true—his own scenario, postulated after his team had discovered a potential multiverse—was very bad and needed immediate addressing (though he knew there were other scenarios that were much, much worse) and he needed to get to the other side of the mountain.
Despite that, he held his daughter in the car until she cried herself to sleep.
Then he drove through the night, over the Chinook Pass, to Fort Lewis Army Base, which abutted McChord Air Force Base, and into the furious, questioning eyes of a General who wanted to know, please, just what the hell they were going to do.
Grace awoke on a chair wrapped in what she recognized immediately as an army blanket. It was green and scratchy, just like the ones her father had stashed in the bunker. She sat up a little. Her book sat on a side table near her, along with something that smelled like—
