Burn(52)

“I am the age I ever was.” He stooped beside her, somewhat bemusedly checking to see if she was all right, but checking nonetheless.

“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 Schr?dinger 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.