Burn(54)

“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?”