Violently, I broke free from his embrace and stood up. Embarrassed with myself, I turned my back to him, ran a hand through my hair, shifted my weight, and checked the sword holstered at my side. Then something dawned on me, a new idea. Confidently, I turned back around to face Simon with the lamb, both looking up at me bewildered. I motioned in the direction of the crater. It took every muscle in my throat, every falsity in my mind to sound brave, to sound noble, to not sound like the convenient excuse I knew I had tricked my heart into thinking it wasn’t. “That kid,” I said. “I have to save that little boy. I have to go.”
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 couldI 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, butlike 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 thinkI’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, isthat 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.
