Burn

by Patrick Ness

  “You were a teenage dragon?” She moved to get up, but had to stay down.

  “I remain a dragon,” he said, more seriously. “It would be wise not to forget that, no matter how I am shaped.” He put a hand on her arm, helping her up with what seemed like effortless strength. “As for my age, we are different from you.” He said it as if that sentence would explain everything.

  She was on her feet, a bit wobbly still, but at least standing. She glanced at his body, then glanced away very quickly. “How are you . . . like this?”

  “Unclothed? Dragons do not wear—”

  “Human, I mean.”

  He frowned, slightly. “Yes. I am somewhat surprised as well.”

  “What happened?” She looked around again. “This looks a lot like home—”

  “But it is not.”

  “Where’s my dad?” she demanded, as that came back to her again in another wave. “That woman shot him—”

  “He is not here,” Kazimir said, and it was Kazimir, that certainty resounded a second time. But how? “Or rather,” the boy who was also the dragon Kazimir continued, “he is probably here in one way, but not the way that you imagine.”

  He still had his hand on her arm. She shook it off, violently. “Quit touching me. Where is he then?”

  Kazimir stepped away from her, his eye glinting a blue in the way that human eyes never did. He took in a long breath through his nose, smelling the air. “It smells different.” He breathed again. “It smells greener.”

  “Than what?”

  “Than the last world.”

  “Than the what now?”

  “Something that has been theorized.” He grinned, and if she hadn’t believed he was a dragon before, that grin would have eliminated all doubt. It was transfixing; it hinted at secret knowledge that would turn your stomach to jelly. “But not witnessed firsthand in living memory. The prophecy—”

  She pulled herself up to her full height, anger blitzing away all the dizziness. “If you don’t give me a straight answer, I swear, I will beat you. I’m a farm girl. I’m stronger than you think.”

  He looked back toward the center of the road, where so much violence and screaming had recently been, where there was scorching from the flames he had sent through the aura. “Very well. I do not know it all, but I know some. The Spur of the Goddess is deep, deep magic, a channel for the untamed power I told you about. Separated from the Goddess herself in hopes that keeping her incomplete would limit her power. It disappeared, was almost forgotten by humans and dragons. Until today. But it is many things. One of those things is a key.”

  “A key to what?”

  “Other worlds.”

  “This is another world?” Though again, it was easier to believe than she would have thought. The truth of it felt real. “But it looks so much like . . .”

  “There are an infinite number of universes,” Kazimir said. “They exist side by side, made by every choice taken within each, branching off into different possibilities. Four years ago, a mathematician named Erwin Schrödinger suggested the theory to a conference in Ireland.” He got a firm set to his lips. “But dragons have known about it for much longer.”

  “If we’re in a different universe,” Sarah said, “how do we get back? My dad was shot—”

  “But not your dad here.”

  “I don’t know what point you’re—”

  “Look how close this universe is to the last one. Do you not think the humans in it will be similar as well?”

  Sarah blinked. “You mean . . . There’s another me here?”

  “Yes.” Kazimir frowned. “But not another me.”

  “I’m not understanding this, and I don’t care. How do I get back?”

  “The Spur of the Goddess brought us here.” He looked again to the center of the road. “It can take us back. But—and you really must hear me, Sarah Dewhurst—we cannot go back.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because the destruction of that satellite was the first step.”

  “First step to what?”

  “War, of course.” He said it in the same patronizing way he’d been speaking from the start, but she could also hear his own solidity in it. He believed this to be true, but he also regretted it. “If not the one I had long thought.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked, though even as she did, she knew what he said was obviously true. The Russians would think the Americans destroyed the satellite, that they had secret weapons which could. Things would escalate. It wouldn’t even involve dragons. Humans would destroy one another.

  “Oh, my God,” she said, realizing. “That was your plan all along.”

  “My plan? Absolutely not, Sarah Dewhurst. I merely saw the wrong thing coming and failed to stop it.” He looked angrily at the world again, at the snowflakes starting to fall. “And I have no clear idea how to rectify that failure.”

  There was a gasp of air, almost like a wind through a particularly leafy tree. The boy with the claw, the boy who had destroyed the satellite, who had come to this little corner of nowhere to assassinate her, was now sitting in the middle of the road.

  “It was a lie,” he said, looking up at them. “It was all a lie.”

  “So it seems,” Kazimir said, only the slightest surprise arching his eyebrows.

  The boy—Malcolm, Sarah remembered now—held the claw in his hand, but there was no aura around it. It just looked like a claw. Nothing more.

  “Everything she said,” Malcolm continued. “Everything I was taught.”

  “Not everything,” Kazimir said, approaching him. “There would have been some truth or it would not have been believable.”

  He held out his hand. Malcolm lifted the claw, questioningly, not to give it to Kazimir, but almost as if wondering what it was. “I felt its power before,” he said. “Even when it was buried deep in my bag, I could feel it.” He looked at Kazimir. “I don’t feel it now.”

  Kazimir reached for it. Malcolm pulled it back, but it was half-hearted. After the smallest of hesitations, he handed it over, a question on his face. Kazimir took the claw and—there was no other word for it—growled. He spun it in his hand, feeling with it, stabbing at the air. He then touched it to the drying blood on his chin. There was a brief shimmer of the aura around the claw, but it was gone in an instant. “It is the same . . .”

  “But it’s also not the same,” Malcolm said. “You feel it, too. Or is that because you’re human now, Great One?”

  “And how do you know so surely who I am?” Kazimir growled again. “Don’t let this shape fool you. I am still dragon.”

  “Can you breathe fire?” Sarah asked. “Can you fly?”

  Kazimir just spun the claw again.

  “Take us back,” Sarah said, feeling the panic all over, the image of her dad falling, the craziness of the world-that-just-was. “You’ve got the claw thing, take us back.”

  “Again, Sarah Dewhurst, that is not a world to be going back to.”

  “And again, I don’t care what you think. Take me back. Now.”

  Kazimir flipped the claw in his hand one more time. “I cannot.” He tossed the claw casually back to Malcolm. “It seems here, for me and for all of us, it is now just a dragon claw.”

  “What are you saying?” Sarah asked.

  “I am saying,” Kazimir said, frowning finally, “that it has always worked because of the magic of dragons. Our blood. Blood stronger than what flows through me in my current shape.”

  “Well, we’ll just find a real dragon then,” Sarah snapped.

  There was a tearing sound in front of them, horrible to hear. None of them were sure what they were seeing at first. The woman—who Sarah knew as the one who’d shot her father, who Malcolm knew as Mitera Thea—was somehow running straight at them as the aura opened again. Her arm seemed broken, her other hand bleeding terribly, but she was running, swallowing her pain, and now jumping—

  And while a woman jumped into the aura—

  A red dra
gon the size of a battleship flew out.

  They threw themselves to the ground, the great belly of the dragon passing over them by mere inches, and not even that in the case of Kazimir, who was knocked back into the ditch where Sarah had first seen him.

  She watched the dragon pass with awe and horror. She had seen red farm dragons, bigger than Kazimir, certainly, but nothing as big as this. This was an eagle to Kazimir’s hummingbird. A creature large enough to destroy whole towns, whole cities, should it choose. It was favoring its foreleg—where the woman had had a broken arm—and its flight was uneven, but it was still powerful enough for the downdraft to press Sarah into the ground. The dragon rose, heading east, toward the forest and clouds and the mountain range that Sarah assumed still existed beyond.

  “She didn’t kill us,” Malcolm said, getting up.

  “Yes,” Kazimir called back, dragging himself out of the ditch. “Why not?”

  “She was injured,” Malcolm said. “Maybe—”

  “What on earth was that?”

  A voice, behind them. They whirled around. The aura where the dragon had flown was gone. It was now just a road again. A woman with a bicycle she had clearly just been riding was staring at them, mouth open.

  “And who are you?” the woman demanded, her frightened eyes alighting first on Malcolm, then on the approaching and still naked Kazimir, before settling on Sarah.

  If the sight of a plane-sized dragon wasn’t enough to make her drop her bicycle, the sight of Sarah was. The woman put a hand over her mouth, her eyes widening. Then a second hand, as if to stop what she was seeing. “This is a trick,” the woman said, her voice taut behind her hands. “This is all some sort of filthy, dirty trick.”

  Sarah felt the world swooning around her again, like it had when she recognized Kazimir, but this time she actually fainted, in the way that people so rarely do.

  Because the woman looking back at her as she fell to the ground was her mother.

  Fifteen

  “I DON’T KNOW who you people are,” a distant voice said, “or what trick you’re trying to play, but that is not my daughter.”

  “In an important way,” said another voice, one she thought she recognized, “you are correct.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? And why aren’t you wearing any clothes?”

  “Does anyone have something I can cushion her head with?” said another voice.

  The voice of the boy who’d come to kill her.

  “Mom?” Sarah said, sitting up too fast. Her vision swam, and she had to close her eyes to avoid fainting again. When she opened them, she was sitting on the road—a road no car had passed in the entire time they’d been waiting—and Malcolm was sitting over her, helping her up. She flinched away from him, scooting back.

  “Mom?” she said again, looking around for the woman, finding her, finding that face. The one she hadn’t seen since—

  “You’re alive,” Sarah said.

  “What do you mean, I’m alive?” the woman said. “Of course, I’m alive, and don’t you dare call me Mom.”

  Sarah could barely breathe. Of all the impossible things that had happened today, this was the most. “You died,” she found herself saying.

  “How do you think you can talk this way?” The woman backed away, furious and frightened. “How can you say these things to a woman alone in the world?”

  “We are not from around here,” Kazimir said.

  “You died.” The woman pointed at Sarah. “You did.”

  “What?” Sarah said.

  “And I don’t know what, what cruelty this is . . .” She stepped back even farther. “And what was that thing? That thing that flew through the air just now?”

  “A dragon,” Sarah said, as if she couldn’t understand the woman’s confusion. Which she couldn’t.

  Kazimir lowered his voice, speaking directly to Sarah. “They do not have dragons here.”

  “What? You can’t just not have dragons. It’d be like not having pigs.”

  “Oh, I can smell pigs,” Kazimir said. “But the only dragon I have scented since our arrival is the one that flew past us. Before she arrived, nothing. Not a whiff or a trace in the air.”

  “That’s just around here, though,” Sarah said. “The world is huge.”

  “Not huge enough that dragon scent wouldn’t be forever in the air.”

  “This is crazy,” the woman said, picking up her bicycle again. “I want nothing to do with this.”

  “Mom, wait, please—” Sarah started.

  “I am not your mother.”

  Sarah was crying now. First, her father. Well, not first her father, first was Jason, but who knew how far back the firsts began. The dragon telling her an assassin was coming? Her mother and the cancer that ate her alive? A town full of people whose skin didn’t match her own? Where did it all begin? Where on earth could it all end?

  “My daughter is the one who died.” The woman was clearly growing angrier now. “How dare you do this? How dare you corrupt her memory? Shame on you. Shame on whoever put you up to this.” She turned to Kazimir. “And put some clothes on!”

  “Why?” Kazimir asked. “I carry my own heat source.”

  The woman got on her bicycle. “No, please, wait!” Sarah called after her. The woman didn’t stop. Sarah started running. The woman just pedaled faster, but for a moment, Sarah caught up. The woman looked at her once more, her eyes widening, but then she rode firmly ahead.

  Sarah only slowed her step because she’d seen that the woman was crying, too.

  “We will have to stop her, you know,” Kazimir said.

  Sarah spun around. “You leave her alone. You leave her completely alone.”

  “I do not mean her.”

  “He means the Mitera Thea,” Malcolm said.

  “The dragon?” Sarah said. “That huge dragon that could burn us to dust in a second?”

  “And stomp you to bloody gore,” Kazimir said. “And tear you to small, shredded pieces. Really, so very many ways you little humans can be killed by dragons and yet for so very, very long have not been.”

  “This isn’t exactly refuting my point.”

  “She’ll try and wreck this world, too,” Malcolm said, again quietly, nothing at all like the confident, certain boy who had waltzed onto her farm, intending to kill her and destroying a satellite.

  “She will not try,” Kazimir said. “She will succeed.”

  “She’s one dragon,” Sarah said. “A big one, sure, but other dragons will—”

  “There are no other dragons in this world!” Kazimir yelled, the first time she’d ever heard him raise his voice. She realized, beneath all the bravado, all the condescension, he was afraid, like he had been when he was facing Malcolm and that claw. “I could smell another dragon if it were hiding in a cave on the other side of the planet. I am telling you, there are no dragons here.”

  “That wasn’t in the prophecy,” Malcolm said, looking lost.

  “There is much that was not in the prophecy,” said Kazimir.

  “How can there be no dragons?” Sarah asked, at a loss herself. “That makes no sense.”

  “The people here would say the same of a world with dragons in it,” Kazimir said. He looked around again, not seeming to notice the snow falling on his bare skin. “This world has no dragon magic in it at all except for what’s in me and in her.” He frowned. “It is like a world without music.”

  “That’s why you turned human?” Sarah asked. “Because it didn’t understand your shape?”

  “Yes.”

  “But that can’t be true, because a giant flaming dragon just flew over our heads!”

  “She was human in the other world,” Malcolm said, “but we didn’t change into dragons.”

  Kazimir looked even more unhappy. “I do not have an explanation,” he said, but in a way that sounded like he didn’t have an explanation he was willing to share just yet. “Regardless, she will know all that we know before long. That she is the on
ly flying dragon in this world. That we still have the Spur. If she thinks we can still use it, she will come for us. If she discovers what is far more likely to be the truth—”

  “That here,” Malcolm said, “her blood is the only thing that can power it?”

  “Then we are in even more danger.” Kazimir held the palms of his hands together, not quite in prayer but in some sort of consideration. “The prophecy—”

  “Ugh!” Sarah shouted. “I don’t want to hear one more word about your prophecy.”

  “The prophecy is that you would stop her from destroying the world.”

  “Well, that didn’t work, did it?”

  “The prophecy did not say which world.”

  Sarah put her hands to her forehead. “This is too much. I want you to stop this. I want you to make this all go away.”

  For the first time since she knew him, as either dragon or as the young man standing in front of her, Kazimir looked almost compassionate. “The only thing that may take us back is the Spur, which we have but we cannot operate.”

  “So we make your dragon use it. Or get her blood or something.”

  “Indeed. We will also stop her from likely destroying this planet.”

  “Well, if we’re saving planets,” Sarah said, sarcastically, “why not ours, too? We force her to take us back and make her confess what she’s done.”

  “She won’t,” Malcolm said. “She’d kill you before you could finish your breath trying.”

  “Don’t you want to help the boy who was with you?” Sarah said, rounding on him. “He’s still there, isn’t he?”

  Malcolm looked at her, guilt on his face. “I do. Very much. I believe I loved him.”

  Sarah was confused. “Like . . . a brother?”

  “No,” Kazimir said, “not like a brother.”

  “He’s there alone,” Malcolm said. “I did that to him.”

  “It is of no use to stand here and nurse our wounds,” Kazimir said. “You have both lost people. That is regrettable, but there is not one thing we can do to change that, except find that dragon.”

  “She flew to the top of Mount Rainier for all we know,” Sarah said. “Are we going there?”

  “If we must,” Kazimir said. “But I think she will find us.”