Burn

by Patrick Ness

  A sudden knocking at the door made them all jump again. Darlene went toward it, fear in her eyes. “If it’s the sheriff . . .”

  But it was Hisao and Jason, who Sarah felt another sudden ache for on seeing him again. There was no time for that, though. They’d stopped in the feed store after dropping off Malcolm, and had immediately been asked their opinions on that morning’s paper. It was too soon to have photographs, but the headline and story were clear. An entire town just on the other side of the mountains had burnt to the ground.

  “Police are saying it was volcanic,” Hisao said. “A vent that opened up. But . . .”

  “It was her,” Kazimir said, deeply unhappy. “She was taking her first taste.”

  Twenty-Two

  THE PAIN INCREASED as she flew, for she didn’t stop, feeling somehow that she might outfly it, an ache in her head like something crawling out from the inside. She managed for a little while, but eventually she had to stop on another mountain peak to rest. The pain was intense enough to make her throw up a bile so acidic the rocks sizzled.

  Surely dragons didn’t get morning sickness?

  Instinct told her (how? she wasn’t quite sure, she just knew as certainly as she might know she was hungry) that her time was very near. There would be pain and then a clutch of eggs and then . . .

  Well, she smiled to herself, then this world would be on its way to a proper hierarchy—

  She vomited again. And again. Once more, and the pain ceased altogether. Her dragon eye caught the tiniest of sparkles in the mess. The morning sun was brilliant on the mountaintop, and something very small reflected back at her. She hooked the very tip of one claw to lift it.

  It was a gold filling.

  Just one? She’d eaten many people yesterday—

  Then she realized. It was her own. From back when she was Veronica Woolf. The only foreign body left in or on her when she . . . became who she was always meant to be. Her clothes had torn off immediately, she’d no longer needed her glasses, and the small studs she wore as earrings had long since vanished to who knew where.

  This was the very last part of her that had been human, and her dragon body, her proper body, was finally rejecting it.

  She dug a hole and buried the filling. The start of a hoard. She was a dragon, after all.

  Grace did not like Sheriff Kelby. She knew she should have felt sorry for him because of the cast on his arm, and her father would probably say you had to give people lots of room to be who they are if that’s what you expect in return.

  But she did not like him. Not one little bit.

  “Describe for me again what you saw, please,” her father said, smiling patiently.

  The sheriff made a weird gurgle of anger. “I told you. A great big thing flew over the Dewhurst farm then disappeared up the mountains. But that’s not why I called the general—”

  “I know why you called the general—”

  “There were three people, three strangers at Darlene’s farm. Two I didn’t recognize and one who was the spitting image of her daughter.”

  Her father glanced up from his notes. “Why do you say ‘spitting image’?”

  “Well, her daughter died two years ago, didn’t she?”

  “And you’re sure about that?”

  Sheriff Kelby’s face went hard. It was probably never really soft, Grace thought. She hoped this man didn’t have children.

  “I know when people in my town die, Agent,” he said, with an anger that hadn’t let up since they arrived.

  General Kraft had caught her father before he’d left the building. They really were going to go to her grandmother’s this time, as the rest of this mission was no place for a little girl, her father had told her, if in kinder words. But the sheriff of the town he was going to anyway had just called about some unusual strangers. Her father was to drive there immediately, and he was a man who followed orders. He’d looked at Grace, given her a taut-lipped smile, and back into the Oldsmobile they went. She’d at least had time to eat her waffles.

  “How many times do you want me to tell you the same thing, agent?” the sheriff asked.

  “I’m sure you have the same procedure, Sheriff,” her father answered, calmly. “You have someone repeat their story often enough, you get new details.”

  “Or they make a mistake. Which is what we do with suspects. What am I suspected of?”

  “You have to admit, these are pretty wild things you’re suggesting.”

  Grace didn’t blink at that. She knew sometimes her dad had to tell little lies to get bigger truths out of other people, even if just to catch them off guard or make them really sure they were telling the truth. They had seen pretty wild things themselves. Her father just wanted to make sure the sheriff really had, too.

  “The general didn’t seem to think so,” Sheriff Kelby said sourly.

  “Did he not?”

  “No.” The sheriff had a crafty look now. “I tell him things that would make my own grandmother think I was soused, and he just says, ‘Go on.’ Like that. ‘Go on.’ As if some flying monster and a teenage assassin were normal parts of his morning.”

  “Teenage assassin?” her father said, and she saw Sheriff Kelby realize he’d let something slip. Having him repeat his story over and over again had worked.

  Sheriff Kelby gave him a look. “Which I’m sure your general told you.”

  Her father smiled. “He did not.”

  The sheriff shifted uncomfortably. “Well, that was the one thing he was skeptical about. Not the flying monster, mind you, but the teenage assassin.”

  “That’s an interesting phrase.”

  “He’s a teenager, and he’s an assassin. What else do you want me to call him? He’s one of yours.” Her father didn’t answer, just kept the small smile in place. Kelby’s own face fell. “He’s not one of yours.”

  “We don’t train teenagers to kill, Sheriff,” her father answered. “Whatever other horrors you may hear about us.”

  “Who was he, then?”

  “One would have thought you’d be the person to find that out, Sheriff. They’re in your town, after all.”

  “Well, I would have, but . . .”

  “You had your fall.”

  Grace knew the look on her daddy’s face. It was the one when he caught her in a mistruth and was waiting for her to fess up to it. He never got really angry if you fessed up immediately. She found herself wanting to tell the sheriff that.

  The sheriff rolled his eyes. “Fine. He did this to me. I got a few good licks in, but he had no trouble at all taking down a full-grown sheriff. He broke my arm and was threatening to kill me with these blades he kept hidden in his sleeves.”

  “Blades?”

  The sheriff lifted his chin and showed two bandages on his neck. “They said they were some of your people and that I should leave well enough alone.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “Would you?”

  Her father looked unsurprised. “No, I don’t suppose I would.”

  “Was he a liar, Daddy?” Grace asked when they were back in the car.

  “That’s too strong a word, Gracie. You shouldn’t call people liars. Say ‘economical with the truth’ or ‘teller of tales.’”

  “Was he a teller of tales?”

  Her father thought for a moment as he pulled from the main paved road onto a gravel one that seemed to head into woods. “I suspect he might be most of the time, but this time . . .”

  “We saw a dragon, too.”

  “Yes, we did.”

  “We didn’t see the sassinam, though.”

  “Assassin. No, we didn’t.”

  “What’s an assassin?”

  “Someone not very nice at all, sweetheart.”

  She could see how serious he was when he said it, so she stayed quiet and let him think. She didn’t ask if they were going to her grandmother’s, thinking that if she didn’t bring it up, he might just keep bringing her along. There was a dragon somewhere,
after all. Wouldn’t he want her by his side where she would be safest?

  He’d said he needed to talk to the strangers out at the farm the sheriff had mentioned, so she assumed that was where they were going. The roads were empty, though. Forested, like Pinedale was, with farms in clearings. There was still snow everywhere, so she was surprised to see a young man walking by the side of the road going the other way, holding out his thumb.

  “Daddy, that boy needs a ride,” she said, as they passed him.

  “We’re not going the right direction, Grace,” her father said, barely listening.

  “He looked . . .” She glanced back at the boy now rapidly disappearing up the road. His clothes were a little odd, like from a slightly different period in history. And the way he walked had a . . . she brought up the word “thoughtfulness” and was proud of it, not just for its length but for its accuracy. “He looked different, Daddy.”

  “Different how?” Her father’s attention suddenly snapped to the rearview mirror.

  “He walked with thoughtfulness.”

  He stopped the car so suddenly, she felt a little afraid. “What do you mean by that?”

  She felt even more afraid of his urgency. “He walked like he was older than he was.”

  Her father looked in the rearview mirror again, then swung the car around in a U-turn, but when they got back to where the boy had been waiting, he was nowhere to be seen. “Your eyes, sweetie,” her dad said. “I should have them insured, they see so much.”

  Malcolm didn’t believe what he’d seen, mainly because he had been watching the little girl who’d kept her eyes on him much longer than seemed normal for a casual glance. She’d watched him as the car approached, watched him as they passed by, watched him as his stomach turned flips when he saw who was driving.

  As soon as the car was out of sight, he made for the woods. He hid behind a tree, just like he’d done on the very first day of this journey, what seemed like lifetimes ago, on the day the dragon the Mitera Thea had somehow convinced to help had dropped him, literally, from the sky to start this journey and returned to kill the two men who were threatening him. Two men who maybe had families, maybe little girls. The journey had started in death, and it had just kept going.

  Those two men hadn’t deserved it. Neither did the Mountie. Or Sarah’s father or the sheriff who’d arrived or the Jason in the other world.

  Neither did the man Malcolm had seen behind the wheel of the car he now heard rocketing back up the road behind him, no doubt to look for him. He had watched that man die. Had watched as the woman that man thought was his partner shot him down.

  “I’m lost,” he whispered out loud. “I’m lost and I don’t know where to go.”

  It was a prayer, but he had no one to pray it to. He prayed to no one that the man and the little girl wouldn’t meet the fate of the first two men. He prayed he would find who he was looking for so he could return, and he prayed that on his return, he would find a way to defeat the Mitera Thea herself. So that there would be no more killing.

  He would never wash the stain of it from him, and he didn’t want to. There was no atonement left for him.

  But there might be for others.

  He waited until the man gave up and drove away again. Then he hurried on his journey.

  Her stomach rumbled, though she didn’t feel hungry, despite the vomiting. In the crater of this other mountain—one she could smell was more turbulent than the first, this one would blow in the years to come—she groaned, and the rumbling moved deeper down.

  The clutch of eggs was ready.

  How? She knew she was close, but she had only become pregnant the day before. Still, they were ready, she was ready, they only needed a place for laying.

  Well, what better place than a turbulent volcano?

  She dug, even as the contractions hit her. She dug under the snow and ice, into the rock, making a cave-like hollow. They couldn’t be exposed. The weather wouldn’t harm them—there was very little in existence hardier than a dragon’s egg—but humans might. Even here, this high, she wouldn’t risk it.

  The contractions grew painful, then overwhelming. She felt as if she left her body for a time, and when she returned, a dozen steaming eggs, each taller than a man, lay in the cave she’d made.

  She collapsed into the snow, spent. She laughed ruefully to herself: The world below was safe for a while because the destroyer that had arrived to claim it needed a little rest.

  It was as she was drifting off to sleep that she finally put it all together. The super-accelerated healing, the pregnancy and super-accelerated birth, the refusal of her monumental body to countenance one little sliver of her remaining humanity. Even her missing finger, now a missing claw. She’d always suspected it, all those years as a human, those fiery images in her head, her ability to lead others in the Believer cause, to restore them to the days when they stole prophecies and sacred artifacts, though they seemed to have no idea what to do with those things until she showed them. All part of her abilities that finally led even dragons to do her bidding.

  She’d accepted it as only natural that she’d arrived in a world that couldn’t contain her in human form. Though that didn’t explain why the blue dragon was down there walking on two legs.

  No. This was the realization, and when she thought it, she felt the truth of it ring through her, surge like the earlier energy had.

  She was more than dragon. She was the first dragon. She was the Creator of them all.

  She was their Goddess. And they had contained her in human shape to control her power.

  “Not anymore,” she said, an anger bubbling deep within her. “Not anymore.”

  Tomorrow would be an eventful day for this world, when the Goddess awoke.

  Twenty-Three

  “IT IS ODD she has not come,” Kazimir said, as night fell on the Dewhurst farm.

  “Hard to see that as a bad thing,” Sarah said. They were out in the cold, looking over the snowy fields. “We have no plan and she destroys entire towns.”

  “We will stop her,” Kazimir said.

  “I don’t know why you think that.”

  His eye still scanned the fading landscape, no snow falling, just an increasingly bitter cold. Sarah wondered if this winter would ever actually end. “You were prophesied to do so,” he finally said. “She believed it so much, she sent an assassin after you.”

  “I’m just a girl.”

  “It is tragic how well you have been taught to say that with sadness rather than triumph.”

  “I would have thought all bets were off when we came to a whole other world. Things are different here.”

  “Not so very different,” Kazimir said.

  “You’re a human, my mom is alive, I’m not, and Jason barely knows me.”

  “Yes. Fair points all, but we are still the same, Sarah Dewhurst. In our inmost selves, we are still the same, and we will still accomplish this.”

  She had no response to that, so instead, she asked, “What are these runes you’ve been writing? Where do they disappear to?”

  He pursed his lips, thoughtfully. “May I confess something to you?”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “Please don’t let it be terrible.”

  “It may be. But it may not. It may just be what always was and all that ever shall be.”

  “Because that doesn’t sound terrible at all.” She didn’t continue with the sarcasm, though, as she saw the worried look on his face.

  “You want to know what I was writing and where the runes go. The first answer is simple. I was recording the story of what has happened, how we got where we are, and so forth. We are scholars, blues. We always have been.”

  He took a thoughtful breath. “As to where they go, that is harder. I do not like what I think is the answer. I assumed I was writing about the fulfilment of a prophecy, but as I wrote with the ancient claw of a Goddess who had only seemed to lose her finger just before coming to this world, I began to dread that it wasn’t f
ulfilment I was documenting.” He looked in her eyes now. “I fear I may have been writing the prophecy itself.”

  “What?”

  “The one that talked about a girl in the other world. The one that led to all that war and loss.” Sarah was so astonished to see tears in his eye that she couldn’t respond. “I fear I may have caused this. Will cause it. Have always caused it.”

  “How is that even possible?” she found herself whispering.

  “All the different worlds,” he said. “All the different possibilities. I told you we believe everything happens again and again. It’s called recurrence. Dragons know that what affects one world can seep into the next. We know that very well, Sarah Dewhurst. And so I ask myself, did a Kazimir in another world write a prophecy for ours? Did I write one for another? For this one, perhaps? Have I always done this, in every world?”

  “But the time frame is so different—”

  “The runes go into the accumulated knowledge of all blues. Does that reflect across worlds? Across times? Did what I write, will what I’ve written, be interpreted and reinterpreted over the millennia until it becomes as vague and dangerous as any prophecy, bringing me to a place where I will write it again after it has happened? Or is there now a clearer version in another world where this story has yet to unfold, waiting to do so because I have ‘foreseen’ it?”

  “Kazimir—”

  “Dragon magic is about the realization of unrealizable possibility. That’s why it’s magic. It subsumes reality, subsumes what is real, while all the time worlds spring up again and again, playing out infinite choices in infinite varieties. Am I the thread in that variety that has caused this to happen?”

  His tears had never fallen, perhaps that they’d even reached his eye counted among dragons as weeping. He held up a hand, cutting off the planned comfort he saw on her face.

  “The truth is,” he said, “I do not know for sure and almost certainly never will.”

  “Then all you can do is your best. Always. That’s it.”

  He still faced away from her, but then he cocked his head. “Someone is coming.”

  “I don’t hear anything.” Then she did. His ears were unnervingly sharp. A car—not the sheriff’s, not the Inagawas’s—was coming up the road. An Oldsmobile. They watched it pull around a bend and slow as it saw them. A man in a fedora was behind the wheel, a solemn little girl in the passenger seat.