Chapter 16
The earth was sinking in on itself, lava and rage swirling into a pit of pits. The smoke was so thick it felt like swimming,
like I was sloshing across a new firmament built from ash. Stalactites of comets of trash hurtled in every direction. I witnessed
men crumble and splatter. I witnessed a pile of them enveloped and blackened. That little boy? There was no chance in hell
and this was hell.
My lungs felt like bags of compacted ash.
What little air my chest could take wheezed through a pinhole in my throat so I moved slowly and I tried not to weep as it dawned on me what I was doing.
I told myself that I was going to be able to come back.
The dragon had sounded so assured and official, his voice like a name tag, like an email signature.
I’d be able to go back and speak with the dragon’s manager about everything that had gone awry and even claim compensation for myself and my partner—not my boyfriend, my partner, my perfectly nonspecific ungendered partner, my co-filing dependent—when could I go back and get him?
How might we apply for a time traveling green card?
Maybe our love story would get written up in some wretched newspaper column.
If those are all the things I told myself, then why was I weeping?
The dragon was up on his haunches, working away. Muscle contractions started at the bottom of his abdomen and tremored upward,
his neck shuddering and heaving. He didn’t really spit fire so much as he gagged on it. Elsewhere, fiery human arms reached
for me, mouthlessly. The last of the soldiers had been eviscerated. Instinctively I touched the hilt of my sword, afraid the
dragon would mistake me for one of them, but he didn’t. He smelled me. He saw me and smiled. It was like I had stepped into
his office for a scheduled appointment. He swam through the earth toward me. He shook droplets of magma from his leathery
hide.
“The man of the many hours. I’ve told them all about you,” said the dragon.
“Who?” I asked.
“The people I work for. My handlers. They’re as amazed as I was, but willing to do a favor for you. You’ll go right back to
twenty twenty-sixxxxx. The pathway is all set up. You’re lucky it’s still in the entropic zone so there’s no harm done, nothing
matters.”
“Well . . . I think some things matter,” I said. “What do you do now, you just eat me?”
“Yes.” The dragon hissed long and serpentine. Sparks flew from his teeth. His breath didn’t smell of charcoal or venom, but like chemicals, like paint thinner, bug spray, and bleach. I took a deep whiff of it and felt, for a second, pleasure.
“So a dragon is just going to appear in London in 2026 and spit me out?” I asked.
The dragon laughed his abominable laugh. The bellows echoed off the rocks and I realized we weren’t inside a cavern like last
time. We were deep inside the earth but like a massive open well. There was open sky above us and through breaks in the smoke
when the wind picked up, I could even see stars. It was strangely quiet.
“Well, it won’t be London, for one thing,” said the dragon. “You’ll still be here, just seven hundred and twenty-five years
in what you would consider the future. You’ll need to pay your own fare back to London, if that’s where you want to go. My
people said they would not be compensating you for that. And I will not be there. You go alone.” His mouth was held in a vicious
smile. “When I swallow you, enzymes from my stomach react with your hormones, triggering the same conditions you experienced
when you first time traveled here. This happens slowly, so you may experience some mild discomfort, but by the time you reach
my intestines, your body will have combusted fully back to your time period.”
I raised an eyebrow. I didn’t know how I had imagined this working, but it wasn’t like this. “I saw a man the other night,”
I said. “He was wearing some kind of equipment and he went inside your mouth before you flew away.”
The dragon seemed surprised by this. “Oh, him. He was a flight passenger. That’s something different.”
“But I can’t do that? I have to be digested?”
“There’s no digestion taking place, George—I don’t think I’ve fully digested anything in at least three hundred years. My stomach enzymes interact with your human stress hormones, causing the combustion. It’s a process that occurs solely within your body, like an allergic reaction.”
Suddenly I felt dizzy and weak. I took off some of the heavy armor I was wearing and sat down on a rock just in chain mail.
I leaned forward and rested my head on the hilt of my sword. “Sorry,” I said. “I need to think this over for a minute.”
“I don’t have minutes, George. Now that I’ve finished my expulsions, the process begins. I can’t pause it.” He hocked a loogie
of magma.
“It just doesn’t sound very safe. I thought you’d like, carry me in your mouth or something and we’d fly into the future together.
That’s what I saw you do with that guy. That seemed easy enough.”
The dragon laughed again. I worried about Simon up on the ledge and what he might hear. I needed to do this now if I was going
to do it.
“I fly at half the speed of light,” said the dragon. “The inorganic material that makes up my diet are the only things able
to withstand the pressure of that kind of time travel. The stomach enzymes are a nice alternative to what you would otherwise
need specialist equipment for. The man you saw was wearing an airlocked pressure suit with a liquid cooling system and a thermo-polycarbonate
glass helmet.”
“Well why can’t I have that?”
“It’s not available.” The dragon smiled.
He moved his massive head closer toward me.
He rested it in his hands as if he were a bored teenager on a bed, but I could tell he was choosing his next words carefully.
“What you need to understand, George, is that there are a lot of moving components to maintain this . . . ecosystem. We’re going out of our way to do you this favor.
I’m honored you want to fly with me, but I promise the digestion option is just as painless. ”
“You just killed hundreds of people—that’s what gives me pause. How can you act like this is business as usual?”
“George . . .” The dragon rubbed his eyes and sighed. Long streams of smoke poured out his nose. “I know you’ve already made
up your mind.” He said no more and laid himself even farther across the ground, flattening his chin to the earth. Slowly,
he opened his mouth. His jaw unhinged like a snake’s to reveal a vast inner cathedral. His tongue unfurled like a set of stairs.
He closed his eyes, and down the barrel of his throat, a hallway of muscles relaxed and expanded and I stood at the gateway.
Surprising myself, I reached out and touched one of the dragon’s teeth. The totem pole of white enamel was surprisingly cool
after all the magma purging. Again I smelled that inorganic stench. The mouth smelled like new carpet, a new car, new shoes,
permanent marker. It was intoxicating in all the best ways and it felt—easier than it had been to feel in the past year—like
home.
“George?” said a new voice.
Behind me. Skidding on rocks. A halting of breath. Then a great fall and a landing, a horrible crash.
“Simon!” I let go of the tooth, I turned around. Simon had fallen from a ledge and landed hard on the ground, barely avoiding
a stream of lava. He winced and cried, bending forward over a leg that was broken at an angle unnatural enough to cause it
to suddenly bleed. Blood flooded the ground.
And then something happened. Simon looked up at me broken and terrified.
“It said your name! The dragon said your name!” he screamed.
And this horror created what I can only describe as a rip or a kind of smear, like the world around Simon had boiled itself to an evaporated state and formed this millisecond injection of pure undiluted stress that I think would have killed him if it hadn’t done what it did instead.
Simon vanished.
He didn’t get up and run away. He wasn’t incinerated by the dragon or swallowed by it, he simply vanished into thin air. I
saw him there, lying crumbled on the ground with tears of a thousand types of pain, and then I didn’t. His body, his blood,
his presence, everything about him, completely disappeared. The ground was clean.
The most unyielding silence filled the bottom of the well. Everyone had died. Everyone was gone. Only myself and the dragon,
this whale of the sky, remained, and even his breath was silent, his nostrils like the exhaust pipes of an idling car. I broke
into screams.
“What did you just do?” I demanded. “What did you do?!”
“I didn’t do anything!” The dragon was humanlike in his reaction, eyes wide, mouth askew. He even skurried backward like a
fool caught in a bind, shaking his head, insistent denial. “Who was that? How did he do that?”
“He just disappeared!” I felt sick. The unreality of what I had just seen didn’t register in the right place in my brain,
fueling nothing but words of sharp exclamation. “Where did he go? His leg was broken, he was bleeding, he needs help, where
the hell did you send him?”
“I didn’t send him anywhere. That right there was spontaneous combustion.
Remarkable. Who was he?” The dragon seemed genuinely surprised.
“I smelled a dash of a pheromone, something lovely and nostalgic. There was a delicious amount of fear in there too.” The dragon crawled over to where Simon had laid seconds ago and sniffed.
“Completely gone, not a trace, but what a delicious smell that was. Pure combustion. In all my five hundred and fifty-five years I’ve never seen it with my own eyes before. ”
“He’s my boyfriend,” I said, no doubt about it now. “Now send me to wherever he went. Eat me, eat me now.”
The dragon turned his head and smiled at me, narrowing his eyes. The corners of his mouth practically touched the corners