Burn(86)

She trailed off. They were both staring at her hard now, their eyes wide.

“I’m not her,” she said again, “but I’m a version of her. A version who didn’t die. Just like you are to me.”

Darlene let out a long sigh. She looked at Gareth. “You see why I asked you to come?”

He lowered his head. “Yeah. Yeah, I do.”

“So what are we going to do about it?” Darlene asked.

He didn’t answer. A long silence fell.

“Right now,” Kazimir finally said, stepping in from the living room where he’d obviously been eavesdropping, “we are going to plan for the end of the world.”

“By midnight,” Agent Dernovich said, “soldiers and tanks will be coming down these roads. We’re not even sure if they’ll be in time.” He glanced at Kazimir. “After the Seattle attack, we’re not even one hundred percent sure this is where the dragon is coming next.”

“It is,” Kazimir said. “She is waking up to herself, and she will know she is incomplete. She will come for the Spur, and if she gets it, this whole world is lost.”

Sarah shook her head. “I still don’t see how it can actually be hers if Malcolm only just chopped off her finger—?”

“Recurrence,” Kazimir said. “Everything always happening, again and again. Maybe this Spur literally belongs to a world before, and the finger of the woman we saw will be the Spur in a world to come. All I can tell you, it is close enough. She will be after it.” He grinned, weakly. “We have seen its power, have we not? What it can do to even a satellite?”

Agent Dernovich coughed. “What do you mean by that?”

“She blew up a Russian satellite,” Sarah said. “Which pretty much starts a war that will end all wars, but between men and men, not men and dragons.”

“Which it turns out is what she wanted all along.”

“I’m sorry,” Agent Dernovich said, “you’re saying, this person who turned into a dragon, she had a weapon that could destroy a satellite?”

Kazimir waved the Spur. “It is much more impressive when it lights up.”

“And this satellite was enough to make her declare war on the entire world?”

“As a pretext,” said Kazimir, “but yes.”

Agent Dernovich stroked his chin. He glanced over at his daughter, asleep beneath a blanket on Darlene’s couch. Or at least seeming so. He wouldn’t put it past her to have been listening for the past several hours.

“What is it, Agent?” Darlene asked.

“We launched a satellite last month,” he said. “We know the Russians are planning on launching their first later this year. We had to beat them to it. No one knows this. It’s Top Secret.”

Kazimir looked deeply thoughtful, concentrating so hard you could almost see him think. “My dear Agent Dernovich,” he said at last. “I think we might now have a plan that could actually work.”





Twenty-Six


SHE FLEW ABOVE the clouds after destroying the city, out of sight of any eyes that might follow her. She needed time to think.

Maybe she could conquer the world on her own. Maybe they’d come to her with an offer of surrender. They’d seen her might. Perhaps she could tell them about the dragon brood currently waiting to hatch. Maybe they’d roll right over and she’d never have to breathe another flicker of fire.

Unbidden, she thought of the woman in the skirt again. Of the way she fell. The way she screamed.

The way the dragon formerly known as Agent Woolf had caught her and set her free. Well, not free exactly as she was running into almost certain death, but moving from certain to almost certain was still an act of unexpected mercy, wasn’t it? Possibly the most a dragon could give to a human.

She still couldn’t find the thought in herself that had triggered the saving, though. The woman obviously looked a bit like she had done all those years, and for all those lifetimes before, trapped in the body of the enemy, memories that now came rolling back to her from generation upon generation.

No, she must not forget herself. Humanity had been forced upon her like a cattle brand. She was not human. She had simply worn their skin. For a time.

For a long, long time.

She flew through the winter sky. She couldn’t even smell planes in the distance, not military nor passenger. They had clearly emptied the air when they realized what else was flying up here.

She guided herself by smell, knew exactly where her brood lay, ready to hatch. She could smell other things, too, could in fact smell nearly everything, it was almost overwhelming. The soup of humans and their bodies and their industries, masking but not entirely drowning the scents of the lands and the forests and the animals within them and the contents of those animals’ stomachs and the blood that pulsed in their veins and the pheromones they gave off for one another and the sap in the trees they ran by and the needles on those trees and the chipmunks that hibernated there and—

She shook her head. All right. There would be a period of adjustment. She was obviously getting all of herself back now. Who knew what power she might end up with? She could feel it thrumming in her, almost as if even this great body wouldn’t be enough to contain her. How had that human-sized one ever done so?

She aimed a direct course for her brood.