by Patrick Ness
“I don’t see any future,” Sarah said, truly fed up. She found herself thinking of Jason, how much she wanted him to be here now, hearing this. Not that he’d know any better, but he’d be a nice . . . touchstone. That’s a word her mother used. Touchstone. She used it about her father. A rock you could count on. A rock you could launch from and feel confident you wouldn’t fall.
“Nevertheless,” the dragon said, “the future is coming. A killer is coming. For you. I will try to stop him.”
She looked up at this. “Try? Doesn’t the prophecy say if you succeed or not?”
“It says both yes and no.”
“That’s just great.”
“Indeed, it says both yes and no about the ultimate outcome as well. We are in the hands of Goddesses and madmen, Sarah Dewhurst.”
“You know,” she said, “I’m beginning to wonder why I even got out of bed.”
Gareth Dewhurst watched his daughter stomp angrily away from the dragon.
He made his decision.
Ten
NELSON HAD SAID almost nothing for nearly four hours.
They were now in Montana. They had left the body of the Mountie where he died, in the red spray across the snow, then Malcolm had corralled Nelson into the passenger seat and had taken the wheel of the truck himself. They’d crossed the border, empty now that its single guard was gone, and driven into the mountains of the United States of America.
They were on a road that led to a town called Kalispell. Nelson had only pointed when Malcolm asked him directions. Every once in a while, Malcolm would catch Nelson looking at the blood that still stained Malcolm’s pant legs. Nelson would look away again hurriedly and refuse to answer any of Malcolm’s entreaties.
Malcolm felt an ache in himself, an ache that missed the closeness of Nelson, even though he was right there; the smell of him, the weight and warmth of his body and his hands. So near still, but across an impossible barrier now. He swallowed away a tightening in his throat as they drove through the increasing snow. If they could get to Kalispell, maybe he would have a chance to explain. Maybe he could share his mission with Nelson. Maybe he could—
“I want you to get out,” Nelson said, so quietly Malcolm had to ask him to repeat it. “I want you,” he repeated, his voice rising, “to get the hell out of my truck!”
Malcolm didn’t stop driving. It would have been difficult anyway, a long, slow process of braking and waiting, so he just kept on, while Nelson began to weep.
“He would have killed us,” Malcolm said, quietly.
“You don’t know that,” Nelson said, his voice thick with tears.
“He would have killed me.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
Malcolm didn’t say that the Mountie would have killed him because he would have fought until the Mountie was forced to. Perhaps this wasn’t the same thing.
But if he didn’t complete his mission, the Mountie and Nelson and everyone and everything they ever knew was dead anyway. The Mitera Thea couldn’t state that enough. The mission was the only way for there to be peace, she said, no matter what anyone else might tell him.
Perhaps that wouldn’t make any sense either.
“You heard what he said to us,” Malcolm said. “You heard his disgust.”
“It was only right,” Nelson said, his voice despairing.
Now Malcolm looked at him. “No. No, it wasn’t.”
“We’re fruits. We’re disgusting.”
“We are not disgusting.”
“How can you say that?”
“Believers have a much more relaxed view of human sexuality than almost everyone,” Agent Woolf said.
“I really don’t need to hear any more of that kind of talk—”
“It doesn’t matter what you want to hear, Agent Dernovich. If you close your mind to something that may bring this case to a conclusion, then you don’t deserve to be on it.”
Agent Dernovich gaped at her. Not just at her words—“sexuality” being the least of them—or her tone, which was calm but firm, but at the utter confidence with which she spoke them. She knew she was right, and she was never going to apologize to him for his own wrongness.
He tried to keep his voice under control. “We are standing at a murder scene, Agent Woolf. Of a fellow officer—”
“Yes, and the murderer is driving away, with another boy who could be his lover—”
“Or captive, Agent Woolf. Or accomplice.”
“He would never have an accomplice.”
“I don’t understand what possible point is made by bringing perversion into this—”
“Because if he has feelings for this other boy, it might give us a way to capture him.”
He wanted to strangle her. Not literally. Maybe literally. Her damnable calm, for one, in a snowstorm that still hadn’t managed to cover all the blood that had flowed out of Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman John C. Callahan, married father of four children. Then there was also her rightness. Again. Without force or aggression, she simply described the obvious next plan of action. He had no idea how she had made the leap to their boy being that way but . . .
If she was right.
They were surrounded by a horde of angry Mounties, understandably furious at the loss of their colleague. They wanted answers, specifically how the hell this had happened to an eighteen-year veteran at the hands of a teenager. So cleanly, so brutally efficient. But most especially, they wanted to know exactly to what degree these two Americans were responsible for it.
The RCMP Superintendent, who hadn’t even said hello when they arrived and who was demanding every five minutes to know what the U.S. was doing to find the murderer, approached them again. “We’ve got an ID on the license plate Sergeant Callahan radioed in,” he said, though he certainly didn’t make it sound like a prelude to good news, which it wasn’t, given that it was Sergeant Callahan’s last ever official act.
“What did you find?” Agent Dernovich asked him.
“And why would I keep you informed about a Canadian police matter when you don’t see fit to—?”
“Superintendent—”
“There are enormous issues at stake, Superintendent,” Woolf broke in.
“More than the death of my officer?” the superintendent fumed. “More than some crazy Believer assassin you tell me we’ve got running around?”
“I’m afraid so,” Woolf said, her calm catching the superintendent’s attention the same way it had so often caught Dernovich’s.
“Perhaps you’d care to share those issues with me, Agent,” the superintendent said, addressing only her.
“Above my pay grade, but I can tell you we are authorized to stop him with extreme prejudice.”
We are? Dernovich only just kept himself from saying out loud. Whether that was true or not—and boy, was he going to find out—it was working on the superintendent, who finally seemed to think he was getting some proper support.
“Plate came back to a family in Vancouver,” he told them.
“Long way from here,” Dernovich said, trying to add something to the conversation. The superintendent ignored him.
“Parents say their son”—and here he read from his notes—“Nelson Arriaga, seventeen, took it when he left home last week.”
“Why did he leave home?” Woolf asked.
The superintendent read again. “Parents say he was, quote, ‘an abomination against God.’”
Woolf’s eyebrows raised. She looked over at Dernovich, who asked, “What do they mean by that?”
“Fruitcake. Found him with another boy. Threw him out.” The superintendent looked at them seriously. “Do you think that might be something we can use?”
The superintendent clearly thought it was, so Dernovich said, “Yes, yes, we do,” before Woolf could beat him to it.
“Believers take a different view of what humans do together than most people,” Malcolm said.
“Obviously,” Nelson said, the bitterness apparent
, even through the tears.
“I don’t mean that. We’re not killers.”
“Could’ve fooled me.”
“I’m . . . on a mission.”
“One that involves killing policemen?”
Malcolm hesitated, then said, “If need be.”
Nelson looked back out his window at the snow and empty road. “Get out of my truck,” he said again, but the anger had gone.
“The world. . . . It’s on a knife edge, Nelson. Something’s coming that will send it one way or another, and if it’s not sent the right way . . . All of this, the snow, this truck, you, me. All of that vanishes. Ends. We all die.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Believe me, I wish it weren’t true.”
“How are you different from my parents, then? Huh? They said the world was ending, too.” His voice dropped. “They said I was part of it.”
“How am I different?” Malcolm put his hand gently on Nelson’s thigh, not as a prelude to anything physical, just as a comfort. “I would have thought that was clear.”
“You killed that man.”
“I wish I didn’t have to.”
“You didn’t—”
“Nelson—”
Nelson pushed his hand away. “You ruined it. For a minute there . . .” He looked miserably out the window again. “You ruined it.”
Malcolm didn’t reply. It seemed he had ruined it. The sob in his throat threatened again, and he swallowed it down, like he had been trained to. He would drive to Kalispell, and then he would leave Nelson to his truck, wishing him the best.
Though it was the truck the police were undoubtedly now looking for, he thought, and Nelson had no training to avoid being captured. Malcolm looked back over to the boy he’d so recently been close to, whose body he had explored and been explored in return. Now probably doomed, all because he’d helped Malcolm.
He really had ruined everything.
“What’s the name of the town again?” Dernovich asked as he drove. They’d left almost immediately, Woolf putting off the RCMP with mutterings about “top secret missions,” again in language Dernovich would have very much liked to use out loud himself.
“Kalispell,” Woolf said. “About sixty miles from here.”
“They’ve got half a day’s head start.”
“Yes, but in a snowstorm.”
“A snowstorm that affects us, too, Agent.”
She sighed, clearly impatient. When had the power shifted between them? When had she gone from his subordinate to someone who could sigh so contemptuously without fear of reprisal? Maybe it had always been like that and he was too stupid to have noticed.
“It matters not,” she said, actually using those words, like a Henry James novel, not that Agent Dernovich had ever read one. “We know where he’s going. The other boy will be useful if we can find him, but the road still ends at the same place.”
“Frome, Washington.”
“Frome, Washington,” she confirmed.
“And you’re sure about that?”
“It’s not just the prophecy,” she said, taking out that infernal notebook. “I had a hunch and got all the intel Cutler had on this satellite the Russians are launching. They’ve moved up the date. It could be tomorrow or the day after, at the latest.”
“What?” he said, genuinely surprised. “What the hell does that have to do with the price of fish?”
“It’s a spy satellite, Agent Dernovich.”
“Yes, of course it is, but again I say, so what?”
“In all the tension between the U.S. and Russia, we never considered that the dragons aren’t going to like being spied on, either.”
“So the dragons get the Believer Pope they’ve always ignored to suddenly send an assassin from Canada to a nothing town in Washington? Make a connection that works, Woolf, or quit wasting my time.”
“It’s going to launch from a remote station in Siberia.”
“Is there anything in Siberia that couldn’t be called remote?”
She ignored that. “Intel has gathered info from its sources in the country and have plotted possible first orbits of the satellite. Guess where almost all of them cross more or less first in the Continental U.S.?”
“Frome, Washington?”
She nodded.
“Why? What the hell’s there?”
“For the Soviets? Nothing. Just an entry point on its way to D.C. For the Believers, though.” She ran her finger over the dragon runes in her notebook again, looking somewhat uncertain for the first time. “As best as I can translate . . .”
“Yes?”
“They say it’s the tipping point.”
“So I’m lost either way?” Nelson said, looking surprisingly small on the motel room bed.
They’d had no choice. The roads were getting more and more impassable in the snow; they hadn’t enough fuel to stay in the truck without freezing to death; and there was no campground left open in the entire state, it seemed. They had taken the cheapest motel room possible and just had to hope the police wouldn’t find them in the storm.
“I can protect you,” Malcolm said, “if you come with me. But the police will be looking for your truck and for you.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“I’ll tell them that. After my mission.” He did not add, If I survive.
Nelson put his head in his hands, running two anguished fists through his hair. “This is hell. This is actual hell.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Well, that makes everything better.”
“Does it?”
Nelson looked up at him. “Who even are you?”
“I’m Malcolm.”
“Is that your real name?”
“I don’t have a real name. Malcolm is as real as it can be.”
“That makes no sense. They had to call you something.”
“The Mitera Thea never needed to. She always knew who I was.”
“Isn’t she, like, your Pope or something?”
“Mitera Thea? She is the source of it all.”
“All what?”
“Knowledge. Power. The future and the past. Hers were the first words I heard in the morning and the last at night. She’d leave me recordings when she had to travel. I still pray to her. And sometimes she comes to my aid. As, I hope, now.”
Nelson looked at him, his eyes red and sad. “You’re talking about someone sending a dragon, aren’t you?”
“If that’s what it needs to be.”
“Coming here?”
Malcolm was unsure of this, but he had been praying. Mitera Thea worked in mysterious ways. “Maybe,” he said.
“You actually expect a dragon to come here and help you?”
“Help us.”
“Why?”
“Because I asked.”
Nelson was incredulous. “And that’s enough, is it?”
Malcolm could barely stand the still-stinging sadness in Nelson’s eyes. “We believe they’re angels. Heaven on earth.” But even as he said it, he knew that didn’t quite cover it. Anyone could believe that without dedicating their life to the Belief, without living in a Cell, without offering up unquestioning commitment to a mission that would require man’s laws to be broken and for Malcolm’s own life to almost certainly end.
What could explain it? That he’d known nothing else? But that was like saying he’d known nothing else but life on earth. There was nothing else. He had been cared for. He had been nurtured and protected. Now, he would do the same in return. It was hardly even a sacrifice.
Believer was an ironic name. Like he’d said to Nelson, it was an unnecessary word when what you believed in moved among you. It merely distinguished them from all the unbelievers who had to take on a kind of bizarre anti-faith not to believe. He pitied the rest of the world.
He also pitied Nelson, but in a different way. There again was the sob threatening to break free. He had not expected this. Had not expected to feel so fast, so deeply.
/> “Will the dragon burn us?” Nelson asked, slumping down into himself. “Will it burn this all away?”
Nelson sounded like that was exactly what he wanted, and Malcolm’s heart broke afresh.
“We can’t possibly be this lucky,” Agent Dernovich said.
“Why not?” Agent Woolf said, as they idled the Oldsmobile in the motel parking lot.
Where they were blocking in the rusted brown truck they’d been seeking.
“Why not indeed?” Agent Dernovich said, taking out his gun.
“It might burn things,” Malcolm said, gently, “but it would spare me. And you.”
“I don’t want to be spared.”
“I want you to be spared.”
Nelson began to cry again. Malcolm waited a moment, then moved to the bed next to him. This time, Nelson didn’t pull away. He allowed Malcolm to put an arm around him, and then another, allowed himself to be brought into an embrace. Once again, Malcolm’s nose was filled with the smell of him, and oh, how his heart reached for that smell, longed for it, as if it was an answer to a question Malcolm never knew he had been asking. He breathed in Nelson.
Oh, Mitera Thea, he prayed, save him. If not me, him. I beg you.
Nelson suddenly looked up. “Do you hear something outside?”
“You don’t want to wait for backup?” Agent Woolf said, as they stood outside the motel room door, directed there by an alarmed manager who Dernovich had sent scampering.
“Backup from where, exactly?” he said. “The Canadians are an hour away in heavy snow and, need I remind you, we’re in Montana now. They have no jurisdiction here.”
“We had no jurisdiction in—”
“Backup from the Billings office is even farther than that. We need to stop this. Right here, right now.”
She considered for a moment, then nodded at him and took her place on the other side of the doorframe. His blood was jumping, but finally with something other than bafflement and missed opportunities. This was the stuff he knew how to do. Apprehension, interrogation, extreme prejudice, if necessary (though it still galled him she was the one who got to say it out loud to the superintendent). Her expertise was what got her put on this job, but he had expertise, too.
As the little murdering shitbag who had made a new widow today was about to find out.