“It’s rubbish,” I said, out of my mind. “It’s... a tire?” I noticed the pattern of the treads in a thick slab of rubber that curled and smoked in the air. Over there was a broken bicycle. And a toasted, cracked computer monitor. There were metal buttons, nails, plugs, iron and copper and steel. And a kettle, a fan, a storefront sign, chair legs, screws, scaffolding, LED panels, bells, pill bottles, food packaging, little plastic baggies, plastic bottles, plastic forks, plastic shoes, plastic watches, plastic phone cases, plastic remotes, plastic pools of goo that dribbled red, purple, translucent, fluorescent, silver, and gold.
“This is all just someone’s rubbish,” I said. “It’s like the dragon was throwing up garbage. It’s rubbish from—from the future or somewhere and it—hey, where are you going?” I looked up. PrinceEdward and the surviving soldier were mounting their terrorized horses. I ran over to them, dragging my sword, which was coated in melted rubbish.
“I’m not built for this,” said the prince. “Dragons and sorcerers and lakes of fire are all good ploys for politics, metaphors, whatever—but this—this is something else. Yes, I would deem this a legitimate inconvenience.” He gave his horse a reassuring pat.
“So you’re just going to leave us? After all that?” I said.
“I’ll ride to Scarborough and inform my men.”
“Can we go with you?”
“No. But I’ll ensure a battalion is raised immediately and sent here, I’ll also write to the king. You’ll be in safe hands, trust me, I’ll put in a good word with the regiment. You’ll be treated with the highest regard.”
“Wait, stop—I don’t want to stay here,” I said. I tried to step in front of the horse but it kept moving forward. “Don’t just leave us. Take us with you.”
“And have two more witnesses drumming up hysteria? No. This thing, this whole misadventure, needs real sorting of a kind I’m not equipped to provide. But believe me, it will be dealt with before my father rides south again. And if it’s not, well then...” His voice trailed off. His face was white and gray. The horse sped up, looking straight ahead. The other soldier followed, leaving Simon and me on the banks of the smoky bog on our own.
The dragon was a giant dragon. The dragon was spewing molten piles of what appeared to be rubbish not from this world—or maybe from this world, but from a world I thought I had given up.It was in the fire. It was in the lava. I thought about mummification. I thought about bog people—about bodies buried in peat and acidic mud, preserved for thousands of years. I remembered a trip to the British Museum as a child, my face pressing against a display at kid-height, breath steaming the glass between me and the dark-orange skin of a man curled up, mouth torn like a nightmare, eyes missing but watching me. That same millennium-spanning gaze watched me now as I dug through branded litter. Coca-Cola, obviously. Apple, Estée Lauder, Tesco, Shell, Pepsi, Intel, Sony, and a host of others I didn’t recognize, their functions more or less the same, in plenty of different languages. Arabic, Spanish, Korean, Chinese. Some languages I couldn’t recognize at all. I was losing my mind as I dug, and the only thing that kept me from coming completely undone was Simon’s almost nonchalant mentality. He was shocked by the dragon and the magma, sure, but only shocked in the way you would be after seeing a tsunami or a train derailment—something horrific but ultimately grounded in reality, something you wouldn’t struggle to recount to someone who wasn’t there. He just didn’t get how it felt for me.
“So these are things from where you came from?” he asked. Something in his voice sounded hollow and staid. Even though Simon believed who I was and where I had come from, the future didn’t factor into our daily lives—and now that it very clearly did, there was no way of negotiating the gulf of perspective between us.
“They are, but they look different,” I said, trying to distance myself from the distance between us. “This looks like a microwave, which is something that cooks things without fire, but I don’t recognize the brand—the company that made it—andthe style is weird.” We watched it sink into the boiling slurry. The ground was still hot and angry and we stepped back. Our clothes were drenched with sweat. The edge of the hardening lava touched up against a blackberry bush, instantly catching it on fire. The flow was finally slowing down and stopping its expansion. The crater was settling. The ring of the surrounding woodland was like a silent, staring stranger, the edge of reality. And where was the dragon in all of this? Had it flown away? Had it vanished off into the future? Was it coming back?
“Why did you want to go to Scarborough with them?” said Simon.
“Don’t you?” I said. “It makes the most sense. We spent a whole week with them, I thought they’d still need us. The least they could do is give us a place to stay or something.”
“Our house is still fine, we’re miles away.”
“I know, but who knows what will happen when that thing comes back. I thought they’d help us get away from this at least.”
“And abandon our home? You think we’ve earned their favor and now we’re good to go? We’ll just pack up and move to Scarborough? Become members of court?”
I looked at him mystified. “I don’t know, Simon. But I know there’s a dragon now.”
“We knew there was a dragon before. I knew, even the king knew.”
“Right, but now wereallyknow. And I know for sure that Scarborough exists in the future more or less how it exists now, so I know we’ll be safer there than staying here and doing nothing, and it seems more beneficial to stay with a prince than not. If a prince ever got killed by a dragon—ifanyoneever got killed by a dragon—I think I would have learned about it in school.”
“My uncle was killed by a dragon. You knew that.” Simon looked at me the same way he had when he very first encountered me on the road to Greenwich. A look of complete foreignness. Disbelief at my speech, at my disregard.
I exhaled. “Yes,” I said. “You’re right.” Ash blew between us and the two separate worlds we inhabited. Spurred by Simon’s unexpected snippiness, something hesitated inside me before dropping out all at once: “But we also knew there was an abandoned baby in the middle of a forest last winter and we did nothing about it. The world’s full of surprises.”
“What?” Simon’s eyes darkened. “That has nothing to do with any of this.”
“It has everything to do with this—we could have done something, but we didn’t.” Emotion burned the back of my throat. The words were too far gone to take any of them back so I kept talking. “We left a baby to die. I was too shocked to realize that’s what it was, but it was. We could have done something. Well now I’m doing something.”
“We couldn’t have done a thing.” Simon came back with fighting words. “It was winter, we barely had any food. We could have died ourselves and it’s a miracle we made that journey alive, don’t you dare put that on me, George. You don’t get to play your little routine and pretend you didn’t know any better, or you didn’t understand what was going on. You chose to move along, just like you’re choosing to move along now and run away to Scarborough. You’re just as guilty as you think I should be, but I’m not, because that was about survival.”
“Going to Scarborough would be about survival,” I said.
“It’s not,” said Simon, “and you know that. Going there would be giving up. Which is something I know comes naturally to you.”
Hot, angry tears stung my eyes. We had never spoken to each other like this before. A sick part of me almost enjoyed getting to see this new part of Simon and I felt a wicked expansion of my heart. I didn’t know what else to say or do besides shake my head and hear Prince Edward’s words repeat in my mind:You need to find someone who has his own mind, not just yours. He couldn’t have been any further from the truth. Clearly Simon had one.
We trudged back home through the ashen wasteland. The direction of the wind had saved our neighboring hill and woodland from complete decimation and slowly the greenery came back, the air freshened up, the sky became blue again. Once we looped around the hill, down the slope, our house was the same as it ever was: the mossy rock walls, the slow evaporation of steam from the thatched roof and how it caught the morning sunlight, our animals in their pens, which were all fine—if they sensed some new, fire-breathing beast at the top of their food chain, they didn’t let on. The only noticeable intrusion was the space Edward and his men had occupied in the meadows, where the long grass had been trampled down. Their tent was still there, abandoned. Who knew who would return to occupy it again, and how soon.
Simon and I spent time apart over the next quiet days of recovery—apart only because of the distance I had thrown between us so quickly, so blindly.
