by Patrick Ness
“That pulse?”
“That pulse. A Goddess can never truly be killed. Her magic is all over the world now. Dragon magic.”
“Which means?”
He looked concerned. “It means this world may have some adjusting to do.”
Sheriff Kelby got to his feet in his office. He hadn’t evacuated with everyone else and was still fuming that he hadn’t been allowed to take part in the army maneuvers against the monster. In his own town! He was brooding over ways to make that agent pay for the slight when a kind of pulse had come through the wall, throwing him off his feet, banging his head against his desk, and knocking him out cold.
He was awake now. He assumed at first it had been the shockwave from another bomb, closer this time, but if that were true, how could he still be breathing?
He shifted his arm, which still hurt in his cast.
He felt weird. He felt . . .
Strong.
“Better not be radiation,” he said, putting his free hand to the back of his head, feeling the wound there from the desk, still wet.
He drew back his hand to look at the blood.
His eyes widened when he saw it was black.
“But I feel strong,” Kazimir said. “Stronger than I have felt since I got here. The magic rises. Who knows where it will stop? Perhaps I will be able to change shapes at will.”
“That’s a terrifying thought.”
“An exciting one.” He turned and smirked as he backed away toward the approaching general. “Especially if you are the ambassador.”
While Kazimir walked toward the general’s temporary tent—Agent Dernovich and daughter by his side—Sarah found Jason with Malcolm, looking at the wreckage of the truck.
“How’s your dad taking it?” she asked him.
“Pretty well,” Jason said, “what with me being alive and the dragon being dead and all.” He smiled in that shy way she’d known so well from the Jason in her world. “Still think he’s kinda mad, though. The plow was the most valuable thing we owned and it melted in the belly of a dragon.”
“He’ll get over it,” she said. “Everyone likes a hero for a son.”
Jason nodded toward Malcolm. “He’s the hero. His idea. He’s the one who insisted we drive through that warzone with explosions all over the place. We could have died.”
She saw that his hands were shaking a little. She reached over and took one. He let her hold it.
“But you didn’t,” she said.
He smiled that shy smile again. Malcolm approached them. “The general’s taken Kazimir into his tent,” he said to Sarah. “I think now’s the time.”
“Are you sure?” she asked him.
“Absolutely,” he said.
Kazimir barely engaged with the general’s questions, listening and answering with only part of his mind. He talked about the Goddess, how she had created dragons, how they had all come to be in his world, but sorry, the Spur of the Goddess had been destroyed in the battle so there would be no more going back and forth. This was a lie, but not one that required his full attention.
With the rest of his brain, he considered the future, now that there was one. The Goddess would find a way to return, if not completely as herself, then as the vast wave of magic he still felt rippling through this world. There might even be dragons born today, and not from her brood. If not now, then probably soon, and it was another reason for him to stay that he had not told Sarah, nor quite yet the general, who would be heavily discomfited.
Because that was the great secret. The greatest of them all. The Goddess hatched dragons, of course, as the Creator across worlds, but that was only the smallest part of the dragon population, a dozen here, a dozen there, over millennia. It was not, however, where most dragons had come from, still came from.
Most dragons started as human.
And so did the Goddess herself.
She’d been the first to find an accidental hole in the world, one that she reached into with a hand and pulled out of with the Spur. She was a woman so impressive, so powerful, this untamed magic had not killed her. It had changed her instead. She became the Goddess in an explosion that tore the skins from certain men and women across many worlds, those too fiery, too prickly with yearning, too much—good and bad—for the normal world. A whole society was born, one that, in its arrogance, immediately set about erasing all knowledge of its origins. The Goddess even made herself forget she was human become myth.
Because this was the other secret. There was no dragon magic. There was only human magic. All they wished for, all they yearned for, all their unfulfilled reach that shone out of them like the sun. It burned from them every day, boiling just out of sight between worlds. The simple fact was, if there were not humans around to create it, the unreality of dragons would cease to be.
All annihilation was mutual in the end.
“I still feel if I’d had any of this information earlier,” the general was saying, somewhere distant to Kazimir’s thoughts, “Seattle could have been saved.”
“How many people died when you bombed a mountain you promised not to, General?” Kazimir replied, still barely paying attention.
The blues were guardians of this secret human/dragon knowledge, and they had gone to great lengths across many worlds to ensure the survival of both species. Which was really only one species and its personified (dragonified?) aspirations. Every human would be a dragon if they could. Why else were there people like the Believers? Kazimir himself was proof. He was born human, but had an exceedingly powerful drive that would have driven him mad had he not accidentally found his way to the Russian Wastes two hundred years ago. They had granted him his true form and begun to teach him the ways of dragons, thinking him the best vessel to counteract the prophecies to come.
In that, they had been wrong. He had not been enough to stop the destruction of the last world. It angered him, all this loss. Dragons regretted very little, but he knew he would never shed this failure.
On the other hand, as he had tried to explain to Sarah, perhaps this was the version that saved the most. Or perhaps in the next world, the next Kazimir would find a way to save absolutely everyone. As he’d said, he would never know for sure, and that was hard, especially for a scholar.
Either way, he felt it in his dragon bones, his dragon blood: the explosion of magic that had created dragons in all the other worlds was finally about to happen in this one.
“And that will be something to see,” he said.
The general looked irritated. “Are you even listening to me, dragon?”
“Forgotten my name so quickly?” Kazimir replied, with a smile that clearly irritated the general even more. Kazimir glanced over at Dernovich and his daughter. The man had kept his promise, had been an ally in both the parameters of this interview and the interview itself, stopping the general from being too rude or too threatening. A good man, with a good daughter.
Allies, he thought. I have allies here. And a friend, a human friend, in the really quite special Sarah Dewhurst.
It was a pity they were going to lose Malcolm, who Kazimir found quite handsome. For a human. This world would need good men and women in the days to come.
Kazimir made a decision.
“Let me tell you about your future, General.”
Epilogue
THEY WALKED OUT behind the barn, away from the farmhouse, away from the hustle and bustle of the soldiers. Malcolm had agreed to an interview later. Kazimir was in his. Sarah had gladly agreed to be next. No one expected or could have known what they were about to do.
Sarah and Malcolm—and Jason, who’d come along out of curiosity—walked past Bess, Mamie, and Eleanor, oinking happily as they saw Sarah. The three humans went behind the barn, and Malcolm took the Spur out of his pocket.
“They’re going to be really mad when they find out it wasn’t actually destroyed, just stolen,” Jason said.
“Do you trust a weapon this powerful with someone who’d nuke a mountaintop?�
� Malcolm said. “I don’t even trust myself with it.”
“You realize what you’re going back to,” Sarah said. “A world where you might see more than a mountaintop nuked. They might already be dropping bombs there.”
“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “I have to find him.”
“It’s been days,” Sarah said. “He could be anywhere.”
“Wherever he is, I left him in a pile of trouble. I have to get him out of it.” He met her eyes, as he so rarely had in this world. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry for everything that led to this. I’m sorry for coming to kill you.”
“You failed, though,” Sarah said, with a slight smile, “so that turned out okay.”
“Everything I was ever taught was a lie.” He looked at the Spur in his hand. “But it still led to the right place.”
He was surprised when he felt a sudden pressure of arms around him. Sarah was hugging him. He slowly put one hand on her back to return it. He would probably never see her again. This unknown girl who had played the largest part in shaping his life and who he had only actually known for the briefest few days.
She let him go. “I’ll ask you one last time,” Sarah said. “Are you sure?”
“I have to,” Malcolm said. “I love him.”
“Love him?” Jason said, looking confused. “Like a brother?”
Sarah stepped away, bringing Jason with her. Malcolm took a deep breath. There was magic in this world now. Too much. It would cause trouble. But it also was enough to make the Spur of the Goddess work again.
He touched it into the ground and said the words. An aura started to glow.
He would find Nelson, one way or another. If Nelson was in jail, he would break him out. If he was on the run, Malcolm would get him to safety. He would offer his love, offer an apology and amends, offer, at the very least, to take him away from a world at war. But he would find him. And he would offer him his hand. He could only hope Nelson would take it.
The aura opened, smaller this time, less out of control. It was all he needed. Malcolm took one last look at Sarah and Jason, who were holding hands again. He nodded to them, then—grabbing the Spur as he went—he stepped out of this world and into the next, intent on finding his love.
About the Author
Photo by Helen Giles
PATRICK NESS is the author of ten previous novels and a short story collection. He’s best known for his books for young adults, including A Monster Calls, Release, the New York Times bestselling novel The Rest of Us Just Live Here, the Chaos Walking trilogy (soon to be a major motion picture starring Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley), and More Than This. He won the Carnegie Medal—the highest award for children’s books in the United Kingdom—twice in a row, for Monsters of Men and the #1 New York Times bestselling novel A Monster Calls. A Monster Calls was also the first book ever to simultaneously win the Carnegie Medal and the Kate Greenaway Medal for illustration. It was released as a motion picture with a screenplay by Patrick himself. Born in Virginia, Patrick lived in England for twenty years before recently relocating to Los Angeles.
www.patrickness.com
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Books by Patrick Ness
The Rest of Us Just Live Here
Release
And The Ocean Was Our Sky
Burn
More Than This
The Crane Wife
A Monster Calls
Monsters of Men
The Ask and the Answer
The Knife of Never Letting Go
Topics About Which I Know Nothing
The Crash of Hennington
Class: The Stone House
Class: Joyride
Class: What She Does Next Will Astound You
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Copyright
HarperTeen is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
BURN. Copyright © 2020 by Patrick Ness. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Cover art and typography © 2020 by Jim Tierney
Cover design by Erin Fitzsimmons
Burn Up
Lyrics by Siouxsie Sioux
© Copyright 1998 BMG Rights Management (UK) Limited, a BMG Company
& Domino Publishing Company Limited.
All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured.
Used by Permission of Hal Leonard Europe Limited.
* * *
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020934046
Digital Edition JUNE 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-286951-7
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-286949-4
* * *
2021222324PC/LSCH10987654321
FIRST U.S. EDITION, 2020
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