Burn(82)

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 leveled 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.”