Burn

by Patrick Ness

  “You are?” Agent Dernovich asked, surprised.

  “Then you can imagine how very much more immortal the dragon Goddess would be.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “Again, I personally did nothing. This was thousands of years before I was even born, and most dragons regard this story as—”

  “Myth, yes, you’ve said,” Agent Dernovich urged. “I’m rushing you, Kazimir, because whatever was done once, can be done again. What did the dragons do? And can we repeat it?”

  Kazimir looked wary. “As I told Sarah, what the dragons did—or what our legends tell us—was to trap her. In a human body. We took a spur from her so that she would remain forever incomplete, then we confined her to life as one of you.”

  “How?” Agent Dernovich asked.

  Kazimir gave a little shrug. “The problem with myths, Agent, is that they tend to be light on science. The only explanation that has survived is . . . magic.”

  “Magic,” Agent Dernovich said, flatly.

  “Yes.”

  “Magic isn’t going to be helpful here,” Agent Dernovich said. “Our universe is conspicuously lacking in it.”

  “Not anymore,” Darlene said. “We’ve got a great big dragon flying around now. I’d say that was magic.”

  “Not a word of this can be real,” the Other Malcolm said. “This is some ugly, horrible joke.”

  “It isn’t,” Malcolm said. “How could I look so much like you? Not similar, identical.”

  “A twin, maybe. Something my mother—”

  “Even if that were true,” Malcolm said, starting to unbutton his shirt, “are these a part of your world?”

  He exposed his chest, the tattoos that covered every inch. The Other Malcolm’s eyes opened very wide. He stepped forward slowly, looking. “They’re dragons.”

  “Which is what attacked the town you read about in your newspaper.”

  The Other Malcolm scoffed. “Yeah, right. Tattoos don’t prove anything. There are tattooed men in the circus—”

  Malcolm grabbed a fistful of the Other Malcolm’s shirt, pulled him suddenly close, and kissed him on the lips. The Other Malcolm, clearly surprised, resisted only for a second, before making a grunt of further shock as Malcolm let the kiss end. The Other Malcolm put a hand up to his lips. “You . . . My God, you taste exactly like me. How do I even know that?”

  “I am you. And you are me. From different worlds a sliver apart.”

  The Other Malcolm kept his fingers on his lips. “You’re the first man I’ve ever kissed.” He frowned. “That’s kinky.”

  “Do you want to love? Answer me that. Because I didn’t know until I met Nelson.”

  The Other Malcolm lowered his hand. “I’ve always wanted to love.” He looked down. “I never thought I was allowed.”

  “Then at least let me tell you you are. That you can. That you will.”

  The Other Malcolm looked around, not seemingly because he was checking for anything but just to keep his gaze away from the intensity of Malcolm’s. He even turned a full circle, and when he came back round, Malcolm saw that his eyes were wet.

  “My name is Hugh,” he said.

  “It’s nice to meet you, Hugh.”

  “You can’t imagine how lonely I’ve been.”

  “Yes. I actually can.”

  Hugh blinked a few times, until his eyes cleared. “Where did you say this Nelson was?”

  “She is right,” Kazimir said. “There was not magic in this world—hence my appearance—but there is now. I can feel it. And it is growing.”

  “She’ll create more dragons?” Agent Dernovich.

  “She will lay eggs, yes. She will have young.”

  “How?” Sarah said.

  “She is a Creator. It is what they do.”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” Darlene said. “You’re saying she’s been a human for thousands of years, but she only found a way to get revenge now?”

  “That is where the myth gets tricky,” Kazimir answered. “They trapped her in the body of a human, and then the myth says, they made her forget who she was.”

  “But gods leak,” Agent Dernovich said. “You said you could never convince a Goddess. You could probably never truly take one’s memory either.”

  “No,” Kazimir said. “Nor can you properly kill one. Her human form dies and the loose magic is born in another, again and again. This is what our theologians believe. Blue theologians, for we seem to be the only ones who care.”

  “You’re a theologian?” Agent Dernovich asked.

  “When you are made of magic, Agent, it is not a surprising choice.”

  “So what happened to the dragon-woman?” Darlene asked.

  Kazimir looked sheepish.

  “You lost her,” Agent Dernovich said. “You lost track of her.”

  “Decades passed. Millennia did. We found our peace with humans. No Goddess came to destroy us. We forgot she ever existed. And then the Believers came.”

  “The Believers?”

  “A religion.”

  “A cult,” Sarah said.

  “Nomenclature,” Kazimir said, “but who do you think founded it? A woman. Two hundred years ago. Their leaders are always women, a strong one, followed by a weaker one, followed by a stronger one.”

  “Your Goddess,” Darlene guessed. “She’d lead them till she died, then take over again when she got old enough.”

  “Yes. She did not fully remember who she was, as that was part of the prison, but the Goddess was, as you say, leaking. She was driven to dragon worship with such intensity an entire belief rose up around her. Then something must have broken through for her, if not complete self-awareness, then a vision, a plan, one she may have pursued without knowing entirely why. Because fifty-five years ago, we discovered that the Believers—two Mitera Theas ago and beyond all possibility, knew about a prophecy, one we had kept deeply secret, stating that an end was coming, fomented by the Goddess herself, but stopped . . .” he looked at Sarah “. . . by a human girl.”

  “Fifty-five years ago,” Sarah said.

  “Yes,” Kazimir said.

  “What’s so special about fifty-five years ago?” Agent Dernovich asked.

  “That’s when dragons stopped talking to people,” Sarah said.

  “She will want to talk to us,” Kazimir said. “She could be back any time. It will be worse once she realizes.”

  “Realizes what?”

  Kazimir grew frustrated. “Realizes who she is. When she knows her full power, believe me, we will all know.” He held up the Spur. “When especially she knows what is lacking to access that full power.”

  Another silence. Agent Dernovich looked worried for the briefest of moments, then smiled at his daughter. “Well, this is exciting, isn’t it?” he said to her.

  “Way more exciting than Grandma’s,” the little girl said.

  “Yesiree, it is that,” her father said. Then he turned back to face Sarah and Kazimir, and said, “Would it help if I got you an army?”

  Twenty-Four

  THE DRAGON WOKE.

  And knew who she was.

  She left her clutch of eggs on the mountaintop. It was morning; she didn’t know how long she’d slept, but it didn’t matter.

  It mattered less than anything had ever mattered.

  They trapped me, she thought. For thousands of years, they robbed me of who I was.

  Because they were afraid.

  As she flew up through the thinning winter clouds, she had only one thought in her mind.

  They will pay.

  She flew north and west, her nose guiding her toward the highest concentration of human smell. Once she was away from the mountains and the forests began to thin, she saw how they infested the land. Long strips of road for their belching cars, vast empty swathes of pitifully weak houses, even down to the great water that dipped into the landscape, where boats spilled oil into the world.

  Rage filled her, familiar but now given a rein she could never have
imagined. She had been one of them. She had been forced to live as one of them. For century upon century. Her own creation had done this, she remembered now, but she would not make the same mistakes twice. Her new brood would wake to a world where humans were already on the run. The broods after that might wake to a planet where humans had never been.

  Look at them here. Humans were vermin, a disease.

  She hated them with her whole raging, fiery heart.

  It was time they learned their place.

  She considered the first large town she flew over, a stinking cesspit with factories and refineries all along the waterfront. But even from this height, the smell was almost choking. She flew on, north, over the strip of concrete she remembered in her old world, one she had driven in a car like the thousands down there, trapped, earthbound, propelled by a fire she never fully understood, until now, until this very morning. The thrill of her new knowledge, the fury of it, rose in her gut again and she couldn’t stop herself from swooping down to freeway level, just over the roofs of the cars, taking a deep breath and—

  Oh, the release. The fire—no, fire was wrong, fire had always been wrong, this was more than just flame, this was annihilation, erasure.

  Half a dozen cars in front of her disintegrated. Others drove right off the road, smashing into trees and one another at the sight of the destruction, at the sight of her. She blazed the lanes traveling in the same direction as her, then veered into oncoming traffic, already colliding and breaking into itself as they watched her bear down on them, as they watched their end uncurl from the mouth of this impossible beast. She could hear their screams. She could smell the roasting of their skin, the boiling of their fat.

  She was their rightful end, coming from the sky.

  Seattle approached. As a human, she had visited New York once. She had been overwhelmed by the skyscrapers there, buildings so tall, you had to lean back to even see the top, buildings that gave you vertigo just standing next to them. Seattle had, as yet, no similar heights, which made her angrier still. She’d have liked to knock one over. Ah, well, a conflagration would have to do. She aimed her head to the sky and soared straight up.

  From high above, the city was more or less a north/south strip, a massive lake one side, the saltwater Sound on the other. It rose and fell over a number of sharp hills, all thoughts of it bent to the water.

  There would be less room to flee.

  A buzz sounded on the edge of her hearing. She spotted two small planes, heading toward her. Silvery husks with rounded noses. She remembered some of the information she’d gathered in her undercover role in the government. The planes were F-86s. The fastest ones the military had.

  So they knew she was here.

  Good.

  She whirled about. She flew slower than an airplane—so she assumed, but that was a hypothesis worth testing one day soon—but maneuverability was no contest. She flew down in the simplest of loops, and by the time she’d turned once more, she was on an intercept path with the planes from below.

  She inhaled a long breath, but then changed her mind, simply slamming into the planes with her anger. She was winded, but both aircraft crumpled into pieces with a thrilling ease. She watched those pieces fall, fall, fall, a mile out of the sky.

  She finished her loop high above the city and let herself fall, too, wings outspread, breath intaken, the buildings growing closer and closer, so close she could see people on the streets screaming, hear a siren starting to wail, the terror beginning to spread.

  “I AM YOUR END!” she said, as she let go her breath.

  The first building exploded, her fire blasting out the entire ground floor and bringing down the eight floors above it in an almost slow-motion tumble. She breathed in again, held it, felt the temperature rise and rise, before blowing it on an even taller building. The entire front half nearly evaporated before the rest of it toppled backward like it had been shot with a gun.

  The people were running, screaming now, going in all directions. She spread her wings and flew this way and that, killing swathes of them by altering her mouth so the spray of fire became exactly as wide as the street. Up they went. Their pointless little lives over in one breath.

  She flew over two police cars, parked, with officers outside, their guns aimed at her, bullets flying. She felt them as so much sand on the wind.

  They had no idea how to face a dragon. No idea at all.

  “I AM FIRE!” she roared over them, her voice, her words, causing more screams and people to stop and stare up at her in wonder. “I CANNOT BE CONSUMED!”

  She flew down into the crowd, grabbing two clawfuls of humans with her back feet, flying high into the air, and flinging them away.

  One was a woman in a long skirt. A skirt like she herself used to wear when she was Agent Woolf. She watched the woman fall, her arms flailing as if that could stop her plummet, and the look on her face, her eyes up at the thing that had grabbed her, had dropped her to her death, the look, the eyes—

  She found herself flying down, racing to catch the woman. She let the others fall and die, but this one she snatched out of the air before she hit the pavement. The woman was not this world’s version of Veronica Woolf, but she was close enough. A woman like she herself had been. She landed, the woman looking back at her in terror, in a kind of, what was the word? Submission. The woman was entirely at the dragon’s mercy. As it should be. As it always should be.

  And yet.

  She set the woman down, releasing her. The woman staggered back, stumbling, clearly injured in the grab and the fall, but still trying to get away.

  “You’ll have to be stronger than that,” the dragon said. The woman froze, just for an instant, long enough for the dragon who had formerly been Agent Woolf to say, “You’ll have to be much stronger than that.”

  The woman ran, fast as she could, limping but running through it, disappearing around a corner and not looking back. The dragon, the Goddess, stood on the pavement for a moment, watching the space where the woman had disappeared.

  Why had she saved her? When the woman would almost certainly die in the waste the dragon was planning to lay to the rest of the city? It was not as if she mattered, one flea among millions.

  “Not even when I have been a flea myself,” she said out loud.

  She had saved that woman nonetheless.

  She shook her head, shook the troubling thoughts from it. She roared. It echoed through the buildings, above the screams of the humans, above the sirens that wailed now, above the distant roar of more military planes converging on her. She roared again. And again.

  She took to the air and destroyed a city.

  A few hours later, she stood on the rubble of a burning hill. Nothing was left of this particular neighborhood: no house, no human, no trace of life at all, not even a tree or flower. On the hills beyond her, every tall building burned, and not lightly, but in infernos so strong they seemed to make mini-tornados of smoke that dotted the skyline.

  Smoke rose from the water, too, where she had knocked a dozen more military planes, but there would be no help coming as every dock also burned. She had likewise destroyed the bridges into and out of town, so the humans who were still alive had resorted to trying to swim in the frigid waters. She could watch them drown from here.

  She hadn’t seen the woman again. She could only assume she had died along with so many others. So very many others.

  She had conquered. One single dragon had taken down a major American city in the matter of a morning. She was barely even fatigued, though a rest would be welcome, now that she thought of it.

  And when her babies were born . . .

  She would give them back the world that had been taken from her.

  She wondered again what had happened to the woman in the skirt.

  No. She must not forget what today was. Today was the first real strike against this world. That little town had only been a flexing of the muscles, a stretch before the real activity.

  She had l
eveled a city. She would level more.

  Their reality would now change to accommodate her.

  For what else was a Goddess for?

  Twenty-Five

  “YES, SIR,” AGENT Dernovich said into the phone. “I understand, sir.”

  Unlike Gareth Dewhurst in the last world, Darlene had a television set. There was not a lot to see in detail, no camera crew had made it into Seattle, but the shots from far away—from Bellevue across Lake Washington, from some of the islands in Puget Sound—were more than enough.

  “There seems to be almost nothing left of the City of Seattle,” the national news anchorman said, unable to keep a startled horror out of his voice. “Half a million people live there, and I’m told half a million again add to the population on a workday like today. We have no word yet on survivors, though the little we’ve seen suggests casualties will be catastrophic—”

  “There it is again!” his fellow news anchor interrupted, as the silhouette of the dragon rose above the dozens of smoke funnels peppered over the former city. Both anchors fell silent. The dragon spread its wings, showing all its unambiguous glory, before it disappeared into the clouds and was gone.

  “I stress to you, these are, uh, live pictures,” the first anchorman stumbled. “We still have no information about what exactly has happened or what this . . . creature—”

  “Could be an aircraft,” the other anchorman said. “Something Soviet. This could be an act of war.”

  “There’s no doubt it’s that,” the first anchorman said, still staring at the footage, even though by now it was just burning rubble. “But that didn’t look like an aircraft to me, Ted. I don’t think it did to anyone watching.”

  “Remarkable,” Kazimir said.

  “What is?” Sarah asked.

  “He is seeing what is really there. Not what he expects to be there, like the other man. A rare talent among humans.”

  “I understand, sir,” Agent Dernovich said into the phone. “All I’m saying is that I have very strong reason to believe that the . . . object will be coming my way very soon, and it would be in the strongest national security interest to have more to meet it than just me and my pistol.”