Burn

by Patrick Ness

  “Between a dragon and a dark place,” he said.

  “What do we do?” she asked again, though knowing neither of them had any answers. “Maybe we should just get out of here and let Kazimir handle things.”

  “Kazimir?” her father asked. “That’s his name?”

  She nodded.

  “Well, first of all, I’m not being run off my own farm. Second, if they want to find us, they seem to know how. I’d rather be here.” He put an arm around her. “And who knows, maybe your dragon will turn out to be the hero after all.”

  “He isn’t my dragon,” she said. “I don’t think he’s anyone’s.”

  He breathed out through his nose in that way of his. “That, my daughter, might be the whole problem.”

  Twelve

  NELSON WENT SILENT again as they drove out of Montana in the middle of the night and across the panhandle of Idaho. Malcolm hadn’t forced the issue, not even when he stopped for food and gas, not even when Nelson had to help Malcolm push the truck out of a snow bank after they crossed the border into Washington. He wouldn’t meet Malcolm’s eye. He wouldn’t answer Malcolm’s questions. He’d just do what Malcolm asked (never commanded, always asked) without hesitation or a word.

  It was as if Nelson had died.

  “I’m sorry,” Malcolm said. Over and over. “I’m so sorry.”

  And he was. He still believed in his mission, even more so when the Mitera Thea herself had shown up in the motel room, dressed in a way he’d never seen before, but it was her, speaking commands, telling him what to do.

  Answering his prayers. Again.

  He was a Believer. He believed in her.

  But.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again, as they approached the southern pass through the Cascade Mountains—a ten-hour drive that had taken over twenty in this weather—which would lead them toward Tacoma and then the little town of Frome where . . .

  Where he would do his work.

  The pass turned out to be nearly snowed over. If they’d arrived a day later, they wouldn’t have been able to cross it at all. Another blessing, he thought. They’d put on the tire chains Nelson (and every Canadian) kept permanently in their cars, and Malcolm drove the truck up the increasingly steep and snow-covered road.

  “I’ll make sure you’re free after this,” Malcolm said, meaning it, but wondering if he could keep the promise. “I’ll make sure your name is forgotten. Or that everyone knows none of this was of your doing.”

  Nelson whispered something.

  “What did you say?” Malcolm said, too fast, too eager to hear from him after all the silence.

  “I said, it doesn’t matter,” Nelson whispered, just a little louder. “It’s too late. There’s no going back.”

  “Don’t say that. Please, don’t say that.”

  Nelson turned to look at him, his face so lost, so hopeless, Malcolm had to stifle the sob again. “You think they’re just going to let me go?” Nelson said. “You think your Pope woman is going to protect a Guatemalan queer wanted for the murder of two federal officers?” He turned back to look out at the endless snow. “You really are a believer.”

  Malcolm said nothing until they reached the summit. And then, he could only say, “I’m sorry” one more time.

  “You’re planning to kill someone else, aren’t you?” Nelson asked, some hours later. The sun was rising, somewhere behind miles of clouds, not that it mattered when the landscape glowed white at every corner. They were being held up by an overturned semi-truck coming down the western half of the pass, surrounded on all sides by trees that looked like creatures waiting to pounce.

  Surprised as he was by Nelson’s question, Malcolm didn’t answer, hoping he didn’t have to.

  “Those knives in your sleeves,” Nelson said. “The easy way you cut that Mountie. Who are you going to kill?”

  “Blades,” Malcolm said quietly. “They’re blades, not knives, and I hope I won’t have to kill anyone.”

  “That’s a lie.”

  “It’s not. I don’t hope to kill anyone.”

  “But you expect to.” Nelson’s gaze was steady. “You can talk about hope all you want, but you expect to, once we get wherever we’re going.”

  Malcolm looked back out into the snow. There seemed to be some movement much farther down the zigzag road, brake lights coming off, then coming on again a moment later.

  “I do expect to,” Malcolm said.

  “Who?”

  Malcolm didn’t answer.

  “Who? You could at least tell me that. At least tell me why my life is over.”

  “It’s meant to save your life. It’s meant to save all our lives.”

  “And you believe that, too.”

  Malcolm let his foot off the brake. Nelson’s truck slowly rolled down the opening left by the car in front. “Something has to happen. Something that can’t be interrupted.”

  “And you’re going to make sure it happens.”

  “I am.”

  “By killing someone.”

  “If I must.”

  “Oh, you must, all right. I’ve seen what you ‘Believe.’ So who is it?”

  Again, Malcolm didn’t answer. He didn’t know the girl’s name. The Mitera Thea felt it was easier if he never learned it. It would make the killing somehow less personal, which was an absurd, obscene idea, but one that had stuck.

  He didn’t feel he could say this to Nelson, though.

  “This is madness,” Nelson said. “How can any of this make sense to you?”

  “It’s been foretold.”

  “By who?”

  “Dragons. For thousands of years.”

  Nelson said nothing at that. The car ahead of them moved again, and Malcolm followed, down the long hill, the mountains around them hidden entirely by the mist and snow.

  “You really believe that?” Nelson asked, after a moment.

  “I do.”

  “And you believe that if you don’t do this—”

  “Everyone will die. Everyone.”

  “How?”

  “What?”

  “How will everyone die? Exactly?”

  Malcolm turned to him, though taking his eyes off the road even for a moment was hazardous. “In fire.”

  “I’ve seen men who were dragons, you know,” Nelson said, after another half hour of silence. “Under their skin.”

  “That metaphor is a little blasphemous,” Malcolm said, uncomfortable.

  “I don’t care. Everyone’s got a little dragon in them, that’s what my grandfather says. We all want to be dragons so much that’s probably what created them.”

  “No, there was—a Goddess—”

  “He also said some people are more dragon than others. Some people, you just give them a scratch, and underneath, they’re pure dragon.”

  He glared at Malcolm as if he were “some people.” Malcolm concentrated on the road. “We can talk about something else—”

  “Your beliefs have killed two cops and destroyed my life. I have a right to insult them.”

  “There’s a greater plan.”

  “You’ve read it? You’ve approved every word? Know your entire role in it?”

  Malcolm drove on. The roads were ever clearer. The sun itself might even show (the moon definitely would, it was foretold).

  “You haven’t, have you?” Nelson asked, not even taunting, just asking.

  “Faith is belief without proof,” Malcolm said. “It’s a leap, an act of bravery. If I had proof, I would have no reason to Believe. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve reaped the benefit of that faith.”

  “You really believe this Thea person watches over you?”

  “She sent a dragon,” he said, remembering the woods on his first day. “No human has been able to do that with a red for fifty years or more.” He also remembered the kindness of the lady at the drugstore when he was injured. He remembered finding Nelson (his heart panged) just in time to get away from the agents that hunted him. And
of course, the Mitera Thea herself in the motel room at the moment all was lost.

  He had been saved. He had—despite his own words—what he considered ample proof.

  He had no doubts.

  He had few doubts.

  “I have no doubts,” he said.

  Nelson looked back out the window as they picked up speed, heading southwest now, toward the end. “My parents didn’t have any doubts either,” Nelson said.

  As they passed through Tacoma, then through a much smaller town with an unpronounceable name, Malcolm reflected how little walking he’d ended up having to do. His bag—with the item still in it, the item without which all was lost—sat in the space behind the truck seat, almost as if it had been planned this way.

  She must have known. He had enough days allotted to walk the whole journey, but he’d found Nelson and the truck and then been informed he was running out of time, that the day had been moved forward.

  She must have known. Must have seen it all, arranged it all.

  She hadn’t said what he should do with Nelson or how long to keep him as a companion. She had only said to take him, so presumably she must know of a purpose Nelson would serve.

  At the end.

  I’ll protect him, he vowed to himself, though again wondering how much power he would have to keep that promise.

  He shook his head. There was the mission to think about. There was the world to save. If he didn’t succeed, Nelson wouldn’t be saved either.

  He must focus. He must re-focus.

  He had a job ahead of him.

  They found the town easily, the farm as well. He had been told where to go, told where the blue dragon would be working, where the girl and her father were living.

  If the dragon is still there, Mitera Thea had told him, for the hundredth time, over so many years and months and weeks of training, as it will be, for the father will not be able to send him away like we ask, no matter how much we offer. Then the day will come, the hour, the moment. And you will act.

  “Who are these people?” Nelson asked, after they parked on a side road, watching the farm as the skies cleared and the farm’s two inhabitants—three, Malcolm corrected himself—the farm’s three inhabitants went about their daily business, as if nothing were going to be different from any other snowy day. They had watched for hours; Malcolm prepared to follow the girl to school if need be, but she had made no appearance on the main road. He had fed Nelson on the rations from his bag, and they’d warmed themselves in the extra clothes he had remaining. He didn’t want to move unless he had to. He had waited all day. Dusk was coming. The moment was growing so very near.

  “They’re no one, really,” Malcolm answered. “An accident of geography. It might have been anyone. It had to be someone. It was them.”

  “What was? What’s going to happen here? Why can’t you just tell me?”

  Why couldn’t he? He had been forbidden discussion of the mission—for so many, many obvious reasons—with anyone outside their Cell, and even within, only Malcolm and the Mitera Thea knew all the ins and outs. Most of the Cell thought he was on an evangelical mission, trying to recruit more Believers to the cause. All young Believers did at some point, so it wasn’t beyond possibility.

  But if Nelson was a part of it now? The hour was drawing close. What could possibly be the harm? He took a deep breath and began to explain.

  “Tonight, the Russians will launch a satellite—”

  There was a loud thump on the driver’s side window. Both Malcolm and Nelson jumped. Malcolm turned to look. A teenage boy of Asian descent thumped it again and angrily said, “Who the hell are you?”

  Without even thinking about it, Malcolm slid the blade from his sleeve to his hand.

  Thirteen

  “IT IS TODAY,” Kazimir said.

  “Yes,” Sarah answered. “You’ve told me. Do you mind? I’m trying to feed the chickens.”

  Not a single one of the idiotic birds would leave the coop if the dragon was near. Well, maybe it wasn’t idiotic, now that she thought about it.

  “I do not know exactly when he will come for you.”

  “Or what he’s going to do. Or what I’m supposed to do. Or my dad—”

  She hesitated there. She hadn’t told Kazimir about her father or the letters or even his plans for the day. He’d told Sarah she wouldn’t go to school but they should both go about their farm duties like normal, in case the people who wrote the letters were watching. Then he would wait in the house with his shotgun. For what? No one seemed to know exactly, not even the dragon.

  “You’d have stopped me, anyway, I’ll bet,” she said. “If I’d tried to run.”

  “You would not have run,” Kazimir said.

  “I might have.”

  “It was foretold that you would not.”

  “Because you would have stopped me.”

  “You begin to understand the madness of prophecy.” He suddenly raised his head, looking firmly out toward the road hidden by the barn, his ear cocked. “I think,” he said, starting to beat his wings to climb into the air, “it has begun.”

  “Don’t,” Nelson said. “Please, don’t.”

  Malcolm looked at him, but kept the blade in his hand and rolled down the driver’s side window.

  “You were here this morning,” the boy said. “I saw you parked. Who are you?”

  “We’re lost,” Malcolm said, brightly. “Could you please direct us to—”

  “If you hurt her,” the boy said. “If you so much as touch a hair on her head—”

  “I don’t know what you mean—”

  The boy pulled around the bag he carried over one shoulder and took out what Malcolm could not know was the gun of the late, unlamented Deputy Kelby.

  Agent Woolf—for she still thought of herself that way, it was snappier than “the Mitera Thea” all the time—nearly broke her steering wheel in frustration. The sky had cleared, the roads had been plowed, and still some idiot driving a truck full of what seemed to be toilet tissue had overturned, blocking nearly the entire freeway.

  The sun was getting close to setting.

  It would happen. It would happen soon.

  And she was going to miss it.

  She honked her horn again, but as everyone who honked a horn knew, it did no good other than as a channel for her anger. Which, she supposed, was some small good after all. Her anger, when properly riled, was quite a thing to behold.

  Dernovich was dead. She was sorry for that, genuinely. He acted stupider than he was. She had diverted his attention numerous times—the drugstore for one, the campsite in a manner that allowed the boys to escape—but he had doggedly kept up his pursuit. Which was why she had shadowed him so closely. What better way to keep close enough on Malcolm’s trail to see when he needed assistance, while also feeding his strongest pursuers just enough information to stay one step ahead? She had no doubt Dernovich would have eventually found Malcolm on his own, and the information he had unknowingly provided in return had proved most fruitful.

  But the mission had to continue. It must.

  She honked again and uttered an expletive. Then she took a long, long breath, uttering a low chant as she exhaled, clearing her mind, clearing her thoughts. She’d always felt a duality within her. It gave her strength.

  Instead of honking again, she turned the wheel sharply to the right. There wasn’t enough room, so she bumped the car in front of her, reversed, bumped it again, and broke free just as the owner of the bumped car was getting out with a shocked look.

  She drove down the shoulder of the freeway, skidding some on the ice, but increasing her speed toward a policeman waving his arms, trying to stop her. There was barely enough room. She thought she might have knocked the policeman down as she roared past.

  But she didn’t look back.

  Sarah ran up the long drive from the farmhouse to the road.

  “What’s going on?” she heard her father shout from the front steps. “Sarah? You’re not to leav
e!”

  But she couldn’t stop.

  She’d come around and seen the dragon flying toward the parked car.

  She’d seen Jason standing beside it.

  She’d seen Jason holding the gun.

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” Malcolm said, getting out of the car, slowly. “But I will if I have to.”

  “He’s not kidding!” Nelson shouted. “Get out of here! Call the police!”

  “Don’t call the police,” Malcolm said, still calm, taking a step toward Jason, who took a step back. “The police would only make things worse.”

  “Stop talking,” Jason said. He held the gun, but he looked very nervous. “I’ve shot people before.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “You should,” said a voice from the sky. The dragon landed in the road in front of them. “You are the assassin,” he said to Malcolm, simply.

  “Yes,” Malcolm answered. “And you, oh, Great One”—he moved his arm so that the item he’d hidden in his other sleeve dropped into his free hand—“are exactly what is needed.”

  Gareth Dewhurst, still holding his shotgun, stopped himself from running after his daughter. The dragon was on the road now. Whatever important thing everyone had been waiting for was now clearly happening. His daughter was running right toward it.

  He took off for the barn where he’d parked his truck.

  After tying the steel blade of his plow to the front.

  “Jason, don’t!” Sarah shouted as she neared them: Kazimir, Jason, what looked like a teenage boy getting out of a truck, and was there another in the passenger seat? Surely, these couldn’t be assassins?

  Kazimir’s neck was arched, his wings out, like a cat that had been threatened and was showing how big it could get. For Kazimir, this was very, very big.

  “These are the guys, Sarah!” Jason yelled. “Stay back!”

  The boy who had got out of the truck turned to face her. He had a look that suggested he’d known her for a long, long time.

  Kazimir put out a wing, abruptly stopping her progress. “No closer,” he said. “He is more dangerous than you could possibly imagine.”

  “He’s a boy.”

  “He is a boy with power.”