Burn

by Patrick Ness

  “What is it, Agent?” Darlene asked.

  “We launched a satellite last month,” he said. “We know the Russians are planning on launching their first later this year. We had to beat them to it. No one knows this. It’s Top Secret.”

  Kazimir looked deeply thoughtful, concentrating so hard you could almost see him think. “My dear Agent Dernovich,” he said at last. “I think we might now have a plan that could actually work.”

  Twenty-Six

  SHE FLEW ABOVE the clouds after destroying the city, out of sight of any eyes that might follow her. She needed time to think.

  Maybe she could conquer the world on her own. Maybe they’d come to her with an offer of surrender. They’d seen her might. Perhaps she could tell them about the dragon brood currently waiting to hatch. Maybe they’d roll right over and she’d never have to breathe another flicker of fire.

  Unbidden, she thought of the woman in the skirt again. Of the way she fell. The way she screamed.

  The way the dragon formerly known as Agent Woolf had caught her and set her free. Well, not free exactly as she was running into almost certain death, but moving from certain to almost certain was still an act of unexpected mercy, wasn’t it? Possibly the most a dragon could give to a human.

  She still couldn’t find the thought in herself that had triggered the saving, though. The woman obviously looked a bit like she had done all those years, and for all those lifetimes before, trapped in the body of the enemy, memories that now came rolling back to her from generation upon generation.

  No, she must not forget herself. Humanity had been forced upon her like a cattle brand. She was not human. She had simply worn their skin. For a time.

  For a long, long time.

  She flew through the winter sky. She couldn’t even smell planes in the distance, not military nor passenger. They had clearly emptied the air when they realized what else was flying up here.

  She guided herself by smell, knew exactly where her brood lay, ready to hatch. She could smell other things, too, could in fact smell nearly everything, it was almost overwhelming. The soup of humans and their bodies and their industries, masking but not entirely drowning the scents of the lands and the forests and the animals within them and the contents of those animals’ stomachs and the blood that pulsed in their veins and the pheromones they gave off for one another and the sap in the trees they ran by and the needles on those trees and the chipmunks that hibernated there and—

  She shook her head. All right. There would be a period of adjustment. She was obviously getting all of herself back now. Who knew what power she might end up with? She could feel it thrumming in her, almost as if even this great body wouldn’t be enough to contain her. How had that human-sized one ever done so?

  She aimed a direct course for her brood.

  They were even closer to hatching than she expected. Her instinct had told her days, but now she was thinking one day, maybe less. She could feel herself running hot with magic. Of course it would translate to her offspring.

  Very well. She had destroyed one city, all on her own. With her brood, she would do the same again—she could smell Vancouver farther north and Portland to the south—and then she would move on to somewhere truly major. Los Angeles, maybe, so spread out she would need her children.

  She would do it until they surrendered. Then she would take their surrender and throw it in their faces as she destroyed New York, London, Paris, Moscow, destroyed so thoroughly they would lose their names, their history, anyone who ever remembered them.

  Their world had already fallen. They just didn’t know it yet.

  There was one last thing to get. She’d felt it as she destroyed Seattle. That on top of all her strength—

  There was yet more.

  When she was complete.

  She was incomplete. Missing a claw, one that, in the recurring way dragon magic worked, had somehow followed her into this world.

  For her to conquer, for her brood to thrive, for all the broods after that to proliferate, she instinctively knew she would have to be whole, knew it with the same clarity she knew she was a Goddess.

  She had been foolish to fly straight to safety when she’d entered this world, but she had been disoriented, her body changing with an excruciating violence, her mind suddenly teeming with everything she had been forced to forget. A crime had been committed upon her, and it was no wonder there was a process to go through to uncreate it.

  She knew where it was, though. Could smell it even from this distance. It was nearly inert here, but once it was part of her again, dragon magic would start flowing into this world properly.

  She would rest. She would, if they kept up at this rate, maybe even see her babies born. Perhaps she would take them all down to reclaim what was hers. Yes, maybe that was actually the next step. They had seen what one dragon could do. They would cower before her and her children.

  She hoped this world slept well tonight. It was the last good night they would ever have.

  She woke the next morning with a start. At first, she was sure the eggs were hatching, but there they all sat, incipient but not quite there just yet.

  There was a new scent in the air.

  She took to her wings and flew.

  Twenty-Seven

  KAZIMIR PULLED THE Spur of the Goddess across his hand. A thickness of black blood filled his palm. The Spur started to glow, still only a little but more than before. Kazimir said the Goddess was awakening to herself, bringing more dragon magic into the world every moment. It was the only plan they had. If she hadn’t come to them by dawn, they would try to give her an invitation she couldn’t resist.

  “It’s weird your blood didn’t change,” Sarah said to him now.

  “Yes,” he said. “I have enough magic to save that much of myself, but it would be a problem in this world if I ailed, would it not? A doctor here might have strong opinions.” He smiled at her. “Then again, if this does not work, ailing will be the least of my worries.”

  Sarah looked across the fields of her farm and the Inagawas’s. The sun was just coming up, the clouds thinning enough for them to actually see it behind Mount Rainier, which had also put in an appearance. But she wasn’t looking at the mountain.

  She was looking at the army, not two hundred yards away.

  The tanks had started arriving at midnight, on the back of flatbed trucks. Troop trucks followed, and in the space of a few predawn hours, several thousand soldiers were bivouacked around her home.

  They all held weapons. Rifles and pistols, but also bazookas and Gatling guns and flamethrowers (“Ridiculous,” Kazimir had said), all to back up the tanks. Agent Dernovich had said missile-carrying planes would be on their way, too.

  “What kind of missiles?” Gareth Dewhurst had asked.

  Agent Dernovich had not answered.

  “They will bomb us with nuclear weapons if this does not work, you know,” Kazimir said, holding the still-glowing Spur up to the breeze.

  “At least they evacuated the town,” Sarah said.

  “It was for show. If this plan fails, they will bomb this entire county into oblivion, just to be sure.”

  She gave him a look. “How do you know that?”

  “Do you honestly think the agent would keep his daughter at his side if he thought there was safety elsewhere?”

  “Is the dragon coming, Daddy?” Grace asked.

  Her father lowered his binoculars. “Not yet, sweetie.”

  “But she will.”

  “I think she will, yes.”

  They were behind the front line, well back at the Dewhurst farm, watching out from the hayloft doors on the second floor of the barn. Darlene and Gareth were there, too, and Hisao Inagawa, though not Jason, as Hisao had forced his son to evacuate with the others, an evacuation that, yes, Agent Dernovich knew was just for show. General Kraft had made his orders quite clear if the plan of the strange-eyed dragon boy and the girl from another world failed. Who knew? Maybe the tanks and the
troops would do the job on their own.

  They probably wouldn’t.

  He stroked his daughter’s hair. The bombs they would drop weren’t the bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as terrible as they were. In the nearly twelve years since then, nuclear weapons had grown exponentially more powerful. What they dropped on this county would evaporate everything within twenty miles, burn everything to death sixty miles beyond that, and poison everyone with a fast-killing cancer in at least a two-hundred-mile radius. And still they didn’t know for sure if it was enough to kill the dragon.

  If this went wrong, there was genuinely no way to save his precious Grace. He would not have that happen to her alone and frightened. She would be in his arms, knowing at least someone was trying to protect her.

  He would just have to do everything in his power to ensure it didn’t go wrong.

  “Will she come here to the barn?” Grace said, and he noticed how they all had slipped into the she of Kazimir and the girl.

  “She’ll be stopped by what they’ve got planned. If she’s not, that’s what the army is for. Trust me, sweetheart, everyone here is very motivated to stop that dragon.”

  “Or Russian contraption,” Gareth Dewhurst grumbled. “I still can’t believe it’s an actual dragon.”

  “You wouldn’t believe God Himself if He came to our front door handing out loaves and fishes,” Darlene grumbled back.

  “What would God Himself be doing in Frome?” Hisao added. “I wouldn’t believe Him either.”

  Agent Dernovich could see how close the Dewhursts were standing together, how Gareth’s left arm draped across Darlene, how she leaned ever closer to his side.

  “Is everything going to be okay?” Grace asked. He saw she had tucked her book into her little waistband. Somewhere along the way, it had become the security blanket he’d made her give up when she was five. If they got out of this, she could carry that book for the rest of her life, for all he minded now.

  He lifted his binoculars again. “Absolutely, sweetheart.”

  He hoped he was right. With all his being, he hoped he was right.

  Malcolm raced down the middle of the road on foot, between the logjam of oncoming traffic on either side. Cars honked at one another, at him, at their sheer frustration at not moving. A woman leaned her head out of her passenger window. “Where you going, kid?” she shouted as he ran past. “We gotta evacuate!”

  He ignored her, as he had the previous five people who’d shouted, as he’d ignored the police officer who’d actually tried to block his way. Malcolm was sorry for it, but that police officer was currently nursing a broken elbow for his efforts.

  What had happened in Seattle was unthinkable. It was the greatest fear in his own world, the outcome both sides had spent their entire histories trying to avoid, and she had done it in an afternoon. One dragon, an entire city, maybe a million dead, and that would be only the beginning. He had to get back.

  Which had proved exceedingly difficult. There was no longer a freeway south, because several major bridges of it had been taken out by a dragon. This left the other roads packed with cars fleeing the area around the city. Hardly anyone had wanted to go toward it, and he’d had a devil of a time getting around it, finally stealing a running car from a lady who only that morning had bought him breakfast out of the kindness of her heart.

  Again, he was sorry, he was sorry for so very, very much, but he had to get back. If he did, maybe he could help set things right, maybe he could start making up for everything he had done.

  “The Russians are coming!” a man yelled out his window.

  “They really aren’t,” Malcolm said, under his breath.

  He wasn’t going to get there, not on foot. He’d had to abandon the car he’d stolen miles out of town as both lanes of every road he found were crowded with people fleeing. He stopped in the middle of the tarmac, eyeing the cars around him. He’d have to steal one again, drive it on the embankment or over fields or something. A frightened family looked out the windows of a station wagon on one side of him; another frightened family looked out of a prewar Ford on the other.

  Could he strand an entire family?

  “I’m sorry,” he said, turning to the family in the station wagon.

  “Assassin guy?” he heard.

  He spun around. Three cars down on the left, Jason Inagawa leaned out the driver’s side window of his dad’s truck, waving frantically. Malcolm ran toward him.

  “What are you doing here?” Jason asked as he arrived.

  “I need your truck,” Malcolm said.

  “Well, hop in,” Jason said, unlocking the passenger door.

  “No,” Malcolm said, still standing on the driver’s side. “It’s too dangerous. I have to go alone.”

  “And stick me on the roadside? I don’t think so.”

  “I’m sorry but—”

  “Do you know the backroads well enough to get further than half a mile?”

  Malcolm hesitated. Perhaps there was Providence after all, even if it didn’t come from the Mitera Thea.

  He ran around, got in the truck, and said, “We have to hurry.”

  Jason started the tortuous process of getting out of the gridlock and up onto the embankment. “Why so fast?” he asked, spinning the wheel.

  “She’s coming,” Malcolm said. “I can feel it.”

  Malcolm looked out the back window, as if he could see her.

  He paused.

  “What do you have in the back of your truck?”

  “Kazimir,” Sarah said, her wide eyes looking at the Spur in his hand.

  It was glowing brighter. And brighter.

  “She’s coming,” Kazimir said.

  She flew toward the scent of dragon blood. She had smelled it before, smelled the weakness in it, the blue was truly inferior, but this time there was a scent of something else, something in the air like a living razor. The clouds were still thick heading north, away from her brood, but the twin smells rang like a clarion bell.

  She knew what it was. She knew everything now. It had all come back to her.

  Dragon blood and dragon magic.

  She would greet them with fire. She would greet them with death. And when she had the Spur, there was nothing—not one single thing in this wretched dragon-free world—that could stop her.

  She pumped her wings faster. The clouds broke open.

  “Now,” Kazimir said, quietly, as the distant dragon appeared.

  “Now?” Sarah asked.

  He looked at her, incredulous at being questioned at this of all moments, and she ran to the side of the field, toward the fence that marked the beginning of the Inagawas’ land. They weren’t stupid; they were pretty sure the dragon would come in flaming, but Kazimir thought he could stop her before that.

  Only thought, though, so Sarah was to run the instant they spotted her and hope she went for Kazimir first. And not the girl prophesied to defeat her, Sarah thought, leaping over the low wooden fence and hiding. This plan makes perfect sense.

  Here came the dragon.

  “Here she comes,” Agent Dernovich said, still looking through his binoculars.

  “Holy God,” Hisao whispered.

  “Where’s Sarah?” Gareth asked.

  “She’s moved as planned,” Agent Dernovich said.

  “For all the good it will do her,” Darlene muttered, but she put her arm through her ex-husband’s. He held it tightly back.

  Agent Dernovich felt a little tug at his own elbow. Grace, eyes on the dragon flying toward the field, had reached up, asking to take his hand. He gave it to her with gratitude, using the other to hold his binoculars.

  There was nothing they could do but watch.

  She saw him, the dragon now dressed as a man, alone in a field. She smelled the girl from the other world, hiding behind a fence off to one side. She saw the tanks and troops arrayed behind them, and she laughed to herself, actually laughed.

  This would be so easy. So very, very easy.

>   The ground flew past as she lowered herself toward it, slowing but staying in the air. She got close enough to see his face.

  “Goddess!” she heard him yell. “I wish to speak with you!”

  She opened her mouth and buried him in flame.

  Sarah screamed as the fire geysered down from the great dragon’s mouth. In all her life, she had only seen dragons flame for farmwork. That was impressive enough: the disintegration of fields, the casual way Kazimir himself would vaporize stumps and debris.

  It was nothing like this.

  She could feel her face burning even from this distance and had to turn away. The air seemed to boil. She struggled to breathe, falling facedown into the snow, which was already turning to steam around her. The flannel of her shirt grew so hot she thought it would burst into flames.

  She was sure she was dying.

  “Oh, dear God,” Darlene said, her hand to her mouth. “That poor boy.”

  “We should have run,” Hisao said. “Why didn’t we run?”

  “Because there’s nowhere to run to,” Grace said, calmly, too calmly. Agent Dernovich put an arm around her, pulling her close.

  “Let this play out,” he said, having to look away from the binoculars because the dragonfire was so bright.

  “Play out?” Gareth shouted. “That thing just killed that—”

  “Wait,” Darlene said, grasping his arm.

  “Are you finished?” Kazimir asked, as the smoke cleared.

  The dragon formerly known as Agent Veronica Woolf was so surprised she dropped to the ground in front of him.

  He was now standing in a crater of bare earth, all grass and snow burnt away, the soil beneath blackened into charcoal. All his clothes had been annihilated from his body, but he stood there quite whole, if completely naked, the hair on his head barely ruffled. His eye scarf was gone, but the stitching still held his eye shut.

  “I am dragon,” he said to her. “Dragonfire does not harm dragon.”

  “You wear their shape,” she said. “Dragonfire may not harm you, but claws and teeth surely will.”