Burn(9)

“Yes, sir.” She gently booted away the rooster attacking her heels. “It’s a good thing, too. We were fixing to get into real trouble.”

“Huh,” her father said, his all-purpose sound that could mean anything from “Imagine that” to “You’re mistaken and I’m too embarrassed to correct you.” Here, Sarah thought, it just meant her father was presented with something he didn’t understand. She didn’t understand it either. Why would a dragon care about her?

“Maybe he just hates sheriffs and wanted to cause trouble?” she suggested.

“That’s probably it,” her father said, but as he walked back toward the fields where the dragon was working, she didn’t think he sounded convinced.

She waited until her father was asleep before she snuck out. She already knew which creaky stairs to avoid and how to close the back door so it wouldn’t slam. Farm girls got responsibility young, which meant they had to learn how to break the rules that much earlier.

The dragon had told her father nothing that afternoon, refused to even acknowledge that he’d spoken to the deputy, which seemed ridiculous since Kelby had railed on about it to her father for the entire time it took her to feed the hogs.

“He can’t do anything,” her father said at dinner. “I haven’t broken the law.”

“We should be careful, though,” Sarah had said. “Don’t give him any reason.”

“If you think Deputy Kelby needs a reason, then there’s more about the world I need to teach you.”

That had made Sarah think of her mother, who had also felt the need to teach Sarah a lot about a world where things might not be easy for her. Sarah felt that any world that needed this many lessons must have something deeply wrong with it.

As for the dragon, he—for it seemed they were firmly in he territory now—had simply pretended her father wasn’t asking any questions at all. “I am finished for the day,” he’d rumbled as the sun set, curling up again in the still woodsy part of the field.

The woodsy part Sarah was heading to right now.

It had been a worryingly dry winter, though still bitterly cold. Another clear night, too, when they were usually deep into a fourth month of gray by this time of year. But there were the stars. There was the moon. There was her crystal breath, white in the dark.

She had known no other home than this farm. Nothing on it scared or surprised her. The path she took was so sure under her feet she wouldn’t have been able to describe it as anything like a decision. This was her home, her movement across it as much as the ground itself.

The great anomaly of the dragon wasn’t hard to track.

The first field he had been working still smoldered slightly, very faint in the moonlight. The smell was better evidence. Ash, certainly, but also a kind of odorous heat, charcoal, and beyond all that the faint chemical tang of the fire dragons generated in the organ just above their lungs. A tang so specific and unhuman that a little voice in Sarah’s head began to murmur her father’s belief they had no soul. How could such a creature even really exist? How could they not just be a magical fantasy? If they hadn’t always been there, no one would have believed in them. That didn’t stop every teenager she knew from wanting to be one, though, engaging in endless debates about the merits of the five types (red, blue, green, white, and desert), which continental Waste was the best, and what it would be like to fly. Sarah knew her choices, but would never have admitted them to anyone.

The dragon was curled around a small grove of trees in the far end of the field, seemingly asleep. She had no idea how to tell if a dragon was awake or not. For that matter, she had no idea if approaching a sleeping one was the height of stupidity. Had it eaten today? What had it eaten? It was near the forest. Had it found a deer or a beaver? Would it be very, very hungry if she turned up in the dark of night?

But no, that was foolishness. Childishness, even, something Sarah Dewhurst would never believe of herself. She simply had to speak to it, hungry or not, and there was no way she could do that with her father not safely asleep, back in his own bed.

“Hello,” she called quietly. The dragon’s head was turned back in the trees, so all she could really see was one great wing, covering himself as he slept. His great body rose and fell in breaths much slower than her own.

“Look,” she said, “I don’t know if you can hear me but . . .”

But what? What did she want to say to him?

“Thank you.”

Maybe it was as simple as that. Kelby was known for administering beatings, and he no doubt felt he could have given one to Jason or even Sarah without much fear of reprisal or punishment. Then again, perhaps he wouldn’t have beaten her. Her father was a white man, and his word would carry more in court than Hisao Inagawa’s. Such was the broken world in which her father was judged for hiring a dragon.

“Thank you,” she said again.

Did the dragon’s breathing change? It was hard to tell. She was getting colder, too. She turned to go, vaguely disappointed both in the dragon and herself. She’d wanted to ask it why. Was it just hatred of officers? Did he do it just to deprive Kelby of joy? Maybe.

But still.

She found herself stopping. She found herself turning. She found herself saying, simply, “My name is Sarah,” breaking the rule her father had set down so firmly.